According to Zhen Zhang, the 1922 short film “Laborer’s Love” indicated the transformation of early Chinese cinema from attraction cinema to complex narrative cinema, during which the mode of film production and the venue of projection changed dramatically, while the audience for cinema began to increase. It is the tea house that all these transformations revolve around and extend cinema to national entertainment. Most importantly, perhaps teahouses and restaurants, and especially teahouses themselves, occupy the emotional structure of the Chinese people; in my opinion, they were first, and foremost places of consumption and social entertainment, and the fact that films

Continue reading[Reading Response: Zhen Zhang]

In this article, it captures the film industry in the 1930s Shanghai, where is the earliest Chinese film production and movie theaters were first developed. At that time, watching films is considered as a new lifestyle of leisure. With the popularity of movie magazines, it enhances the publicity of movies. The guidebook is published, which gives tips such as buying snacks to avoid high price in cinema. In the second half of article, the author mainly compares the Hollywood movies with Chinese movies. For the movies in China, it does not emphasis the sexuality. This shows that in Chinese tradition,

Continue readingReading response: Lee, Leo Ou-fan

Lee contrasts the 20th-century Chinese movie industry with western cinemas. According to Lee, Chinese movies tend to keep a distance between the story and the audience through long takes and deep focuses, allowing them to admire the film as a fabricated story, whereas the Hollywood-styled movies use many editing techniques to keep audiences engaged. Lee also criticized other aspects of Chinese cinema, such as the tendency to focus on romance and life stories. In my opinion, Lee’s views were very subjective and might be a bit outdated. Traditional drama was the primary entertainment method before the intervention of cameras, and

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In general, the introduction of foreign films and the development of local films in the 1930s renewed the modern urban culture in China. Although Chinese filmmaking was far behind Hollywood films in 1930s due to equipment limitations, it did not fully embrace foreign influences in the content. The depiction of modern women, for example, still retains tradition in its bold display of glamour. Another example is that ‘Labor’s Love’ was shown in a teahouse, a place that represented mass culture. Although the film still followed the old story formula, it expressed Zheng’s desire to criticize and reform the feudal view

Continue readingReading Response: Leo Ou-Fan and Zhang Zhen