UCLA Asia Institute: Journey to the West
Bruce Calvert
Journey to the West
By Brian Hu
Everyday audiences around the world know little about silent Chinese cinema,
and even less about traditions unrelated to the socialist project. A new DVD
of Romance of the Western Chamber seeks to change that.
I'm not 100% certain about this, but I'll say it anyway: the 1927 silent
film Romance of the Western Chamber may be the oldest Chinese film out on
DVD anywhere in the world. It's certainly the oldest available in the U.S.
(it eclipses the 1931 Ruan Lingyu film The Peach Girl, which was recently
released by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival). Meanwhile, most of the
DVDs released by Bo Ying in mainland China are of the "left-wing" tradition,
and thus are 1930s Shanghai films.
I preface my review of the DVD with this statement because the release marks
an important turning point in the gradual rediscovery of Chinese film
history by everyday filmgoers unable to see films at specialized film
archives. There are several reasons for its importance. First, the DVD for
Romance of the Western Chamber is released by a commercial distributor,
Cinema Epoch, which means that unlike The Peach Girl and the 1934 classic
The Goddess (also released by the SFSFF), it will be available on Amazon and
other mainstream retailers. Thus, it will be the first silent Chinese film
released widely to American audiences.
However, even for those who have previously obtained silent films like The
Big Road and New Women from Chinese importers or Yesasia.com, Romance of the
Western Chamber will still be a revelation because it's not part of the
recent revival of 1930s Shanghai cinema, which tended to celebrate left-wing
cinema as the beginnings of Chinese-language filmmaking (which not at all
surprising given that the revival began in the P.R.C.). Instead, Romance of
the Western Chamber, directed by Hou Yao, is from an earlier period, a time
when Shanghai cinema exuded sensuality rather than pedagogy and
self-consciously "social" messages. Prior to getting this DVD, I'd never
seen films from that age, but had only read about them in history books like
Zhang Zhen's fantastic Amorous History of the Silver Screen. Cinema Epoch's
release exemplifies DVD's potential as a traveling film archive, making
amateur historians out of everyday consumers.
The idea of archiving and historicity is unexpectedly foregrounded by the
DVD's peculiar style of subtitling. The print used for the transfer has
French intertitles, suggesting that there was originally a French audience
for the film, challenging the notion that Chinese cinema was insular until
the 1970s. The weirdest thing, however, is that traditional Chinese
characters are visible in-between the lines of French, meaning that the
print was later re-struck and altered for a Chinese audience. Finally, the
DVD itself has removable, yellow English subtitles. The three languages
together trace the cross-cultural movement of the film, becoming a
palimpsest of its global consumption.
That said, the Romance of the Western Chamber is more than simply a
historical relic; it's actually a terrific film, if a little awkwardly paced
and narrated by classical standards. Based on the famous play, the film is
about scholars, lovers, and heroes -- the stuff of Chinese folk tales and
genre films, rather than the content of social realism films like Street
Angel and The Goddess. As incredible and beloved as those films are, their
lasting effect on Chinese cinema probably was not as palpable as that of
films like Romance of the Western Chamber, which transformed into opera
films like The Love Eterne and wuxia films like the Wong Fei-hong series in
the 1950s and later the 1990s. This is a cinema of fanciful costumes,
elaborate sets, visual effects, and action set-pieces. Romance of the
Western Chamber shows Chinese cinema at its beginnings, experimenting with
style and narration in ways that would later develop into one of the most
mature cinemas in the world. In fact, Hou Yao's film, with its fast edits
and impressionistic fight scenes, could be called avant-garde in its form,
although strictly "traditional" in its narrative; this dichotomy would come
to characterize Chinese cinemas (especially those of Hong Kong) in the
1970s, 80s, and 90s.
The DVD production itself is a mixed bag, but that's hardly the point. The
picture quality is passable given the age of the film, although it
definitely doesn't seem like a first-generation transfer. The new music
score by Toshiyuki Hiraoka is probably nothing like the actual musical
accompaniment played in Shanghai during the silent age, which tended to be a
sonic collage of Chinese instrumental music and familiar Western classical
themes. Toshiyuki Hiraoka's music is more modernist in its melody. Still,
this more ethereal musical accompaniment is completely consistent with the
effect of the film, in that it emphasizes the ethereal, the sensuous, and
the dream-like. A more "romantic" score might not play as "accurately"
today, for it would lose its 1920s association with cosmopolitanism and come
off as nostalgic and traditional, which the film definitely was not when it
first debuted.
In the coming months, Cinema Epoch will be unleashing a series of more
canonical Chinese classics: Crossroads, Song at Midnight, Spring in a Small
Town, Queen of Sports, The Big Road, Daybreak, Twin Sisters, and a personal
favorite, Street Angel. As far as I can tell, these releases will be their
long-awaited English-subtitled debuts, so film historians -- amateur and
professional alike -- will have easy access to Chinese cinema's original
golden age.
Date Posted: 4/13/2007
--
Bruce Calvert
--
Visit the Silent Film Still Archive
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com
quote...@yahoo.com
> Brian Hu wrote:
> The idea of archiving and historicity is unexpectedly foregrounded by the
> DVD's peculiar style of subtitling. The print used for the transfer has
> French intertitles, suggesting that there was originally a French audience
> for the film, challenging the notion that Chinese cinema was insular until
> the 1970s. The weirdest thing, however, is that traditional Chinese
> characters are visible in-between the lines of French, meaning that the
> print was later re-struck and altered for a Chinese audience.
I'm no expert but I wonder if the French titles were made not for
distribution in France but for distribution to Westerners in France's
nearby Asian colonies.
dmkb
Generally, Chinese films didn't do much business in the foreign
settlements, but
there were attempts to penetrate the market - this is one reason why the
Peach
Girl print has bi-lingual (Chinese/English) intertitles, in hopes to
capture some
crossover audience (presumably British or American) in 1930s Shanghai.
dmkb