Zheng Dongtian, Professor，Beijing Film Academy
“Shanghai has only businessmen, but no noblemen,” wrote Shanghai-born and, although her words did not refer to movies, tangentally they reveal some of the mystery that has made Shanghai the cradle of China’s movie industry.
(note: rewrite of first two grafs)
Because of Chinese people’s views on movies at the time, China's first movie was not filmed in Shanghai. (editor’s note: please provide an explanation for this.)When movies first were mentioned in the Chinese press, they were called "electric light shadow plays," meaning plays or dramas recorded with light. It was in the autumn of 1905 at a photo studio about one kilometer from the Forbidden City in Beijing, that Peking Opera performerTan Xinpeiplayed a few episodes from the opera Conquering Jun Mountain in front of a hand-cranked film camera. Everybody from the nobleman in the Imperial Court to the ordinary person in the streetknew this 60-year-old performer. However, he himself was probably not aware that the "electric light shadow play" that he spent 30 minutes performing in front of a camera made him the first movie star in the Chinese history.
Theories abound as to why the film business did not have the opportunity to growin Beijing, one of which is quite intriguing.At Empress Cixi's 70th year birthday celebration held in the Imperial Court, the British Minister brought a film projector over as a gift. To everybody's surprise, just as the movie was beginning, the electricity generator suddenly exploded in flames.. Taking this as an ominous sign, herMajesty burst out in anger, and forbade any films in the Imperial Court after the accident.
Without an Imperial Court, Shanghai became a perfect paradise for adventurers. With China's most fertile "land of rice and fish" backing on to this the nation's largest ocean port, Shanghai offered its residents a relatively abundant life, andbroad, flexible perspectives preparing them for an earlier awareness and acceptance of new things and ideas. This awareness and acceptance provided more opportunities to salespersons from abroad. In the history of "importation" of modern civilization, Shanghai and its nearby smaller cities have functioned as a testing ground for almost all the modern concepts and goods (?) shipped into China from overseas.
According to historical records, the first film showing in Shanghai took place in August 1896 in a private garden on Tiantong Road, less than a year after the Lumiere brothers' film was first shown in Paris. Shortly afterwards, business people from the American, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese movie industries visited Shanghai, one after another. In 1898, the Thomas Edison Company in the United States sent a cameraman to Shanghai to shoot a documentary titled Shanghai Police, which marked the beginning of film shooting in China. In 1908, A(name please). Romas, a Spanish businessman, built the first cinema in China on a roller-skating rink located at the busy intersection of Haining Road and Zhapu Road in Shanghai's Hongkou district. Assembled with tinplates, this 250-seat facility was named the Hongkou Moveable Cinema House. One year later, American businessman Benjamin Brasky established Asia Films in Shanghai; this was the first film production studio ever set up in China. The metropolitan atmosphere of Shanghai not only drew adventurers from overseas to make the city their choice for marketing their movies, but it also attracted a great number of Chinese businessmen, artists and technicians to move to the city to start China's own film industry. Four years later in 1912, Zheng Zhengqiu, Zhang Shichuan and some other young people formed a company, Xinmin (New People), to produce for Asia Films. Their first movie, The Difficult Couple (also named The Wedding Night), an hour-long drama, is now recognized as China's first feature film.
In the same year that Romas opened his cinema, a baby girl named Hu Ruihua was born in Shanghai's Tilanqiao, an area not far from Hongkou. This timely coincidence seemed to indicate that her life-long indissoluble connection with films was predetermined by destiny. Hu spent her childhood moving between north and south China with her father, who worked in the railway industry. When she returned to Shanghai at the age of 16, the first thing she did was to apply to the Chinese Film School which offered training programs in acting. Perhaps dreaming of becoming a flying angel of art, she changed her name on the application to Hu Die, meaning “butterfly” in Chinese. Although she and her fellow students only took classes every evening for a period of a half year, they were among the first actors and actresses to receive professional training before playing roles for the big screen. Seventeen film schools of this kind operated during the 1920s, either simultaneously or successively, in Shanghai. Nine years after her graduation from the film school, Hu Die was voted "Queen of Film" by the audience in a 1933 contest sponsored by the Ming Xing Ribao (Daily Star).
From the 1920s to 1940s, about half of Chinese films were produced in Shanghai. In 1927, according to available statistics, there were 175 film companies, large or small, operating in China, of which 141 were based in Shanghai. During the ten year period from 1921 to 1931 alone, studios in Shanghai produced more than 650 films. Apart fromhaving become the most advanced economy in China, with its high level industrial and technical foundations essential for film making and its massive scale of operations, Shanghai also projected its vibrant city culture in most films made during these periods, which was a crucial reason behind this film boom.This culture was about the multiple social forms existing in this prosperous urban area through a blending of capitalism, feudalism and colonialism, as well as being about the rhythmic lives of millions of Shanghai’s citizens at different levels.
The popular themes of early Shanghai films were not as fresh as the films per se. Most of the stories described the countless ties between city and countryside, such as how the surrounding rural villages slowly converged to become part of the city. When people who were unwilling to endure the poverty and lagging development in villages actually moved to the city, they failed to find the life they had been longing for - a life of freedom and new human relationships. Prior to the inevitable unhappy endings in their movies, artists advocated their anti-feudalistic social ideas either in a tearful or mocking way, and, in a profoundly sympathetic way, depicted the good but weak humanity of average people .From The Difficult Couple (1913) to Twin Sisters (1934), movies and other forms of art and literature at the time almost synchronously represented the value system and emotional orientation of the generation who left the countryside for the cities.
24 Hours in Shanghai presents a vivid picture of the city where excessive luxury and sorrowful grief co-existed. By using the classical dramatic approach, playwright Xia Yan and director Shen Xiling, two film masters of the 1930s, condensed amities and enmities between two families of opposite social classes into a time frame of one day and one night in this silent movie. The day does not start in the morning as it usually does in stories. The director deliberately chose four o'clock in the afternoon to start off the day, because, in Shanghai, this was the hour when workers who labored all day could finally clock out, and wives of factory owners who indulged in nightlife were just getting up. A child laborer is injured by a machine on the factory floor, but his sister, a cotton mill worker, does not have a dime to take him to a hospital. She rushes urgently for help to their elder brother, a produce peddler. The brother goes to his wife, a maid working at the owner's house, to find a solution. However, misfortunes never come alone. A sympathetic neighbor tries to help them. Instead, his efforts sends the elder brother to prison by making him a suspect of having stolen money from the owner's house. One disastrous day passes, and the elder brother, no longer a suspect, is eventually released home. At home, he sees his younger brother dead and his sister dismissed from her job.
As one of the last few important movies in China’s silent filmmaking tradition, the overall quality of 24 Hours in Shanghai represents the artistic and technical achievements of Shanghai filmmakers in the 1930s. There are two noteworthy footnotes to this film. Firstly, audiences got their firstopportunity to view a talented actor, Zhao Dan, who played leading roles in many subsequent movies, such as Street Angel, The Crow and the Sparrow, Life of Wu Xun and Lin Zexu, when Zhao became the most prominent Chinese performing artist in the period spanning the 1930s to 1960s. Secondly, the production year of the movie had to be shifted on the recordfrom 1933 to 1934, because government film censors, outraged at the incisive way in which the film unveiled social injustice -- withheld it for one year. Only after it was re-edited more than ten times, did the film get release approval. In a way, this reflectsthe difficulties and hardships faced by progressive filmmaking at the time.
While the storyline of 24 Hours in Shanghai was arranged in “time” sequence, the stories of the Old and New Shanghai, a sound comedy produced in 1936, occurred within a specified “space.” In old Shanghai, many average residents lived in alley houses which in turn formed a local culture. Pedestgrians walked through aexterior door, to find two or three stories of pigeonhole-like narrow spaces that housed multiple families. All equally short of money,the neighbors occupied the lower rungs of the social ladder as determined by their professions and status. Each family had its own plight and its own unique way of concealing it.. In a mutually supportive environment, where people frequently bumped into one another, a mixture of pleasure, anger, sorrow and joy, unique to lives in those alley houses, took shape. Among the six families depicted in the movie, are a laid-off office worker who pretends to go to work everyday; a dance hostess who goest out in heavy make-up and returns home empty-handed;; a furniture salesman who cannot find customers but who has had to take care of his sick wife and a few kids; a landlady whoworries everyday about not being able to collect rents to support her gambling-addicted son; an elementary school teacher who has not been paid his salary, and a driver whose daily job it is to take women cruising along the streets.
The comedy was one of a series created for the Ming Xing (Star) Film Studio by Hong Shen, a playwright who studied at Harvard and wrote China’s first film script at the age of 20. By the time he was 42, Hong was respected as an “old master” in the film and theatre communities. With his masterful writing of satiric comedy, he depicted, in a profound manner, the existence of those pathetic yet comical “gray characters”. In comparison with many more realistic films available at the time, which were shot in a miserable and depressing way, this comedy is richer in artistic rules and the social conditions it exposed could perhaps invite more retrospective thinking. Cheng Bugao, director of the Old and New Shanghai, was also one of the leading figures in Shanghai’s film scene in the 1930s. Cheng’s masterpieces, Spring Silkworm (1933) and Raging Current (1933), have long been regarded as classics of early Chinese cinema.
From February to April 1982, film historians from ten European countries were lured to Torino, Italy to review 135 Chinese movies produced between 1925 and 1980. Among these films, most of the 1930s and 1940s titles were made in Shanghai. In terms of the number of films screened, this was an unprecedented exhibition of Chinese films held outside China. In those movies, some historians believe that, they spotted a New Realism stylepredating that of Italian movies. In local newspapers, critics and reviewers agreed on the sparsely--adorned beauty of Chinese movies of the 1930s as compared with European and American films of the same period.
In fact, Europeans actually experiencing Chinese films and seeing realShanghai life depicted for the first time on the silver screen - can be dated back about 70 years. On March 2, 1935, Fishing Light Song, directed by Lai Chusheng in 1934, wonfirst international recognition for Chinese films at the Moscow International Film Festival, attended by 31 nations. The only actor or actress in the Chinese film delegation was Hu Die, mentioned earlier, who arrived in Moscow ten days later after journeying along the lengthy Trans-Siberian railway. As the first Chinese movie star on an official overseas visit, Hu and her producer Zhou Jianyun brought two of her films, Twin Sisters and Lonely Orchid. Over the next five months, they toured the Soviet Union, Germany, France, Britain, Switzerland and Italy. In those six countries, European audiences as well as people involved in filmmaking had the chance to glimpse an unfamiliar nation through these films, and to become acquainted with a different film culture through their contact with this elegant, energetic actress from the Orient.
Twin Sisters, again, tells a story about two families of different social classes. Interestingly, the two lead characters in the movie are twin sisters who were separated at a young age and never had the chance to reunite as they grew up. The younger sister, Erbao, moves to the city with her father, and is given to a wealthy family to be a concubine. More than a decade later, her elder sister, Dabao, migrating to the city from the countryside, as if by fate, becomes a wet nurse of Erbao’s baby. The dramatic conflict between the twin sisters, now mistress and servant, intensifies until an accidental death occurs. Eventually they embrace after realizing their true relationship. Family kinship has always been a key pivot of Chinese culture. Zheng Zhengqiu, the first Chinese film director, was seriously ill while making this movie. However, he managed to expand the pattern of tragedy , which he devoted his entire life to developing, and depicted family morality at its highest level. According to historical records, the movie enjoyed a continuous run of more than 60 days in its first release across over 50 cities in China and Southeast Asian countries where overseas Chinese lived, setting a box office record in China.
Another factor, which should not be neglected, contributed to the unparalleled popularity of Twin Sisters. It had to do with the exceptional performance of Hu Die who played both sisters in the movie. A star loved by audiences, the 24-year-old actress, must have had a tough job to perform, both in terms of make-up design and expressively actingtwo extremely contrasting roles often within the same temporal and spatial environment. When she traveled through Europe a few years later, Hu noticed the involvement of the European audience in the movie; they even applauded during showins. This experience made her more aware of the significance of her own performance. It is worth mentioning that Hu Die and the delegation brought both films to Berlin in 1934. However, their host had only arranged for an official screening of one of them. The delegation asked the Chinese Embassy staff and students from China to preview both movies and make a choice. As a result, German audiences only got to watch The Lonely Orchid but not Twin Sisters. Some 70 years have passed, and this movie, a masterpiece of Chinese production in 1930s, will finally unveil its charms in Munich, Germany, where it has been but never been seen.
By the mid-1930s when China was in a national crisis, the zeitgeist inherent in Shanghai films became even more evident and manifest. Voices of the Anti-Japanese and National Salvation Movement, which stimulated numerous responses across China, echoed as well on the big screen, starting from In a Stormy Time (1934). The movie describes exiled young people from northeastern China’s support of the Anti-Japanese Volunteers. Its solemn and encouraging theme song was later designated as the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China. Many films about urban lives in Shanghai were incorporated either directly or metaphorically in this surging tide. Lian Hua Symphony, released just before the July 7th Incident in 1937, appeared as a collective effort by a group of filmmakers to propagate anti-Japanese sentiments..
Comprised of eight short features, Lian Hua Symphony united as never before key directors and actors of the time, including Sun Yu, Fei Mu, Lai Chusheng, Situ Huimin, Shen Fu, Zhu Shilin, and Zheng Junli. Anyone familiar withfilmmaking in China knows that these people were the few giant pillars supporting almost the entire sky of China’s film industry from that time to the 1950s. This movie is therefore particularly valuable for researchers. Each story of widely differing stylesstands by itself in the movie.. As Sun Yu stated in his comments published at the time, “we can discern the ‘voices of each heart” through those eight shorts. These voices are harmonious, and resonant in one direction, making a perfect symphony.”
In people’s minds, Shanghai is a city associated with daily changes, which makes people simultaneously excited and a little sentimental. That is why we wish to keep the city, as captured on film, forever. For those who lived through those years or those who now can only fantasize about them in their readings, all they need is a glimpse of a lively lane in a busy alley way, a zhongshan, a bitter face or a joke, as recorded in movies.
In her later years, Hu Die lived in Vancouver as an ordinary citizen, who did not want people to disturb her tranquility by talking about the past. One day on a bus, an old lady sitting next to her smiled at her, “I recognize you from the way you looked. I was a fan of yours.” This chance encounter was the beginning of the completion of a memoir about the Chinese films of the 1930s.
In October 2004, four Chinese movies will arrive in Munich to meet the audience there. Their encounter, I believe, will also leave some memorable “ways of looking” in our mind.