Using Love of Labour, an early comedy film, as a case study, Zhang Zhen focuses on the gradual replacement of the huge influence of traditional Chinese theatre on cinema by cinematic means of expression and plot treatment in the 1920s. I personally believe that any family ethical drama has a tendency to inwardly orientate its plot, such as psychological motivation, but this inward shift is better explained by class and gender perceptions of the time. At the same time, how did the early filmmakers change their narrative techniques in order to cope with the inward shift in the plot of these family ethics films, which eventually led to the shift from the first traditional drama-influenced films that sought to pursue the externalities of drama to the internalities of plot, i.e. how the films of the Republican era shifted from dramatization to cinematization and became truly modern films. Labour’s Love is the product of this period of transformation, blending theatricality and cinematography, and is thus the best text to examine this change.
The influence of Western American Hollywood films on early Chinese film audiences and producers cannot be underestimated. In this regard, he cites Miriam Hansen’s view that early Hollywood predicted audiences through a ‘particular textual strategy that regulated the variability of experience’. Hansen’s argument that early Hollywood used a ‘particular textual strategy to anticipate audiences and regulate the variability of experience’ can, I feel, be simplified to refer to early Hollywood’s genre film strategy. It seems to me that throughout the essay, the author seems to want to draw on cinema and film audiences to explore the culture and literature of the 1920s-1930s, the era in which early Chinese cinema was budding and developing. Because of his literary background and his Taiwanese identity, it would give him a more nationalistic sense of understanding the era from a Chinese perspective. This influence persists even now, and many Chinese films are still attacked as ‘uninspired’, but like the article, Chinese cinema has its own cultural component.
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Yutao Xie
Your response demonstrates a good awareness and understanding of the context and the example of Laborers Love. You explained how modernity is developed in the cinematic language of the 20th century and the hybridity in early Chinese cinema. I appreciate your research upon different perspectives of this historical development, and perhaps linking it with contemporary examples will provide further insights on your point on the cultural components of Chinese cinema that has persisted or changed.