This piece from Leo Ou-fan Lee‘s Shanghai Modern illustrated and specified the term ‘aesthetic localization’ for me to understand by telling the story of how film, an imported medium of entertainment, was integrated into the lives of Shanghai people at that time and how the locals embraced and indigenized it.
During the 1930s, Shanghai was highly modernizing and industrializing. People pursued high-density architecture as public event spaces, and most of them advocated cinema. Leo said, ‘More theatres were built up and amusement halls were deconstructed though the native film industry has not prospered’. It represented how crazy they were to chase after this foreign amusement medium.
This text is more like a narrative to record the process of the development of the Chinese native film industry as a beginner. In the part named ‘popular taste’, the author described how the public at the time could maintain their aesthetics and learn from the merit of foreign films. The Chinese native film did not entirely replicate the American culture like the fashionable femininity contributed by the ‘high capitalism’. Rather than the false consciousness, male gaze, Chinese film plots were more formulaic which could be traced to traditional novels and poetry. Thus, the requirement of domestic actresses focused on inner cultivation like education level, instead of the preoccupation with figure and appearance.
GuDian, Ella 3036103066
Nice summary on the main ideas from Lee’s text on the context of early Chinese cinema. Your reflections and comparison between the Chinese and American film medium is insightful and comprehensive in explaining the characterizing differences despite Hollywood’s influence on the Chinese audience.