Commentary Essay

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watch the film called " two stages sisters"( there are four parts for the movie, watch them all) and read the article below. Find the argument in the article, and find support in the film and book. After that illustrate you agree with this argument or not, if no, find support in the book or in the film. Words: 350-500

SAMPLE 1: the critic’s argument first

Film Title (year) addresses the issue of … Scholar (name of the chapter, not the editor) argues that “…” (page number). I agree or disagree with this argument because … In the film, I see … (details) and interpret … (your analysis). This scene (example) shows … (back to the issue/argument stated earlier).

SAMPLE 2: your argument first

Film Title (year) addresses the issue of … In the film, I see … (details) and interpret … (your analysis). My argument is supported by Scholar (name of the chapter, not the editor), who observes that “…” (page number). A sentence or two to bring this quote to your discussion and argument and conclude.

* You only need to quote from 1 reading and address 1 issue/argument. Try to grade yourself using this scale: out of 10 points for each commentary, 3 for identification of an argument and logical transition, 3 points for film discussion focused on details, and 4 for writing (grammar, expression, coherence, style)

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University of Hawai'i Press Chapter Title: Two Stage Sisters: The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic Chapter Author(s): Gina Marchetti Book Title: Transnational Chinese Cinemas Book Subtitle: Identity, Nationhood, Gender Book Editor(s): Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu Published by: University of Hawai'i Press. (1997) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wqxw6.7 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of Hawai'i Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Transnational Chinese Cinemas This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Chapter 2 · Two Stage Sisters The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic · Gina Marchetti On the eve of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1964, Xie Jin brought to the screen a story about the changing lives of women in twentieth-century China set against the backdrop of the Shaoxing opera world. Although rooted in the intimate story of two actresses and the vicissitudes of their relationship, Xie gave the film, Two Stage Sisters (Wutai jiemei), an epic scope by showing these women’s lives buffeted by tremendous social and political upheavals.1 The film covers the years from 1935 to 1950, the expanses of the Zhejiang countryside as well as Shanghai under Japanese, Guomindang, and Communist rule. Chunhua (Xie Fang), a young widow about to be sold by her in-laws, escapes and becomes an apprentice in a traveling Shaoxing folk opera troupe. Yuehong (Cao Yindi), who plays the male roles in the all-female opera company, befriends Chunhua. After the death of Yuehong’s father, Chunhua and Yuehong find themselves sold to a Shanghai opera theater to replace the fading star, Shang Shuihua (Shangguan Yunzhu). Eventually, Yuehong falls in love with their manipulative stage manager, Tang (Li Wei), and the sisters quarrel and separate. Inspired by the radical woman journalist, Jiang Bo (Gao Yuansheng), Chunhua continues her career, giving a political flavor to her performances. After an attempt to blind and ruin Chunhua by using Yuehong’s testimony to trick her in court, Tang goes off to Taiwan to escape the revolution. Although unable to harm her stage sister in court, Yuehong has been publicly humiliated. Abandoned by Tang, she disappears into the countryside. After Shanghai’s liberation by the Communists, however, Chunhua manages to track down Yuehong, and the two reconcile. Two Stage Sisters uses the theatrical world of Shaoxing as a metaphor for political and social change. The film also represents a search for a Chinese cinema aesthetic based on these traditions as well as on Hollywood and socialist realist forms. This analysis will explore the intermingling of these aesthetic currents and the ways in which art and politics intertwine in Two Stage Sisters. By placing the film within the context of the 59 This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms political and cultural movements that spawned it, the drama of the development of Chinese cinema aesthetics since 1949 can be understood more clearly. · The Place of Two Stage Sisters in Xie Jin’s Career Xie Jin’s own background made him particularly well-qualified to direct this tale of Shaoxing opera and Shanghai’s theatrical world. Xie was born in Shaoxing (Zhejiang province) in 1923. At the age of eight, he and his family moved to Shanghai. From an early age, Xie was fascinated by the theater and cinema. While growing up in the 1930s, he had the opportunity to see the work of directors like Cai Chusheng, Sun Yu, and Yuan Muzhi, the cream of Shanghai film’s “golden era.” Also, he began a life-long enthusiasm for the Shaoxing opera of the region. During the Japanese occupation, Xie moved to Sichuan province in the interior and studied theater at the Jiangen Drama Academy. There, he worked with noted theatrical personalities like Huang Zuolin and Zhang Junxiang. In Shanghai and Sichuan, Xie encountered both Chinese folk traditions and Western dramatic and cinematographic forms. This blending of these two traditions came to characterize his mature work. When Zhang Junxiang accepted work at the Datong film studio in Shanghai in 1948, Xie went along as his assistant director. After 1949, Xie continued on in Shanghai, codirecting A Wave of Unrest (Yichang fengbo; also translated as An Incident) with Lin Nong in 1954. His first solo effort was Spring Days in Water Village (Shuixiang de chuntian; also translated as Spring Over the Irrigated Land) in 1955. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Xie’s style matured in an aesthetic crucible that ground together Hollywood classicism, Soviet socialist realism, Shanghai dramatic traditions, and indigenous Chinese folk opera forms. Many of Xie’s films focus on the lives of women, workers, artists, or students. Woman Basketball Player No. 5 (Nülan wuhao, 1957) explores the problems that a young female athlete faces in coming to grips with her ambitions in the field of sports. The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzijun, 1961) deals with the heroism of women who go from peasant life to guerrilla warfare in the 1930s. Two Stage Sisters explores the lives of women working on the Chinese stage. In all these films, women’s lives represent both hardship and oppression as well as the potential for revolutionary change. In fact, throughout most of his career, Xie Jin has been at the forefront of the exploration of different representations of women within socialist cinema. With the condemnation of Xie’s comedy, Big Li, Little Li, and Old Li (Da 60 Gina Marchetti This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Li, Xiao Li, he Lao Li, 1962), and Two Stage Sisters (1964) soon after, followed by the complete shutdown of the Shanghai studios, Xie’s output dwindled to next to nothing during the Cultural Revolution. During that period, however, Xie did work on two films based on model operas—The Port (Haigang, 1972; also translated as On the Docks) and Panshiwan (1975).2 Since 1976, Xie has made several films, including Youth (Qingchun, 1977), Ah, Cradle (A! Yaolan, 1979), The Legend of Tianyun Mountain (Tianyunshan chuanqi, 1980), The Herdsman (Muma ren, 1982), Qiu Jin (1983), Garlands at the Foot of the Mountain (Gaoshan xia de huahuan, 1984), Hibiscus Town (Furong zhen, 1986), and The Last Aristocrats (Zuihou de guizu, 1989). These films made after the Cultural Revolution show a marked change in Xie’s oeuvre. Diverging from his earlier films that deal with and ostensibly support socialist revolution, the later works seem to be more nationalistic than revolutionary in character. Several explicitly criticize past party policies.3 · The Theatrical World of Two Stage Sisters Two Stage Sisters is one of the few films made at that time in the People’s Republic of China (prc) to be based on an original screenplay rather than a script adapted from a well-known and accepted literary or dramatic work. However, the film still remains deeply indebted to the literary and theatrical world of modern China. In fact, the entire film revolves around the theater and uses the stage to underscore the changes in its protagonists’ lives as well as the dramatic political changes that occurred between 1935 and 1950. The first third of Two Stage Sisters deals with the itinerant opera theater of Zhejiang province. Shaoxing opera differs considerably from the Beijingstyle opera better known outside of China. Although Beijing opera has set a certain standard of performance that has influenced regional styles considerably, other non-Mandarin-language opera styles have existed and continue to flourish in most regions of China. According to Colin Mackerras’ account of Chinese opera, Shaoxing opera originated in the later days of the Qing dynasty and is, therefore, a rather recent addition to the history of Chinese regional theater.4 Arising out of folk music traditions in the countryside, Shaoxing eventually became popular in urban areas, where it began to be performed in permanent theaters as well as tea houses and open-air market pavilions. The prevalence of all-female troupes makes Shaoxing stand out among other Chinese regional opera forms. Records show that in 1923 an all-female company performed in Shanghai. Eventually, schools were started in the The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 61 countryside for actresses, and many troupes either added women to their companies or performed with exclusively female casts. Because of its elegant costumes, complex gestures, and often intricate plot lines, many may be under the mistaken impression that Chinese opera is an art form exclusively for aristocrats, intellectuals, and the wealthy. Although performed at court and patronized by powerful landlords and businessmen, Chinese opera has always remained a folk form enjoyed by a broad range of people in Chinese society. In fact, the opening sequence of Two Stage Sisters delineates the differences between the glittering fantasy of the stage performance and the poverty of both the players and their audience. Performed in marketplaces and financed by the passing of a hat, opera could be listened to and enjoyed by everyone regardless of social station or gender. The volume and exaggerated articulation of the singing, the use of stylized gestures in pantomimes, and the elaborate costumes attracted the attention of passersby, who may have had no intention of watching the opera but who were drawn in by the commotion. If nothing else, Chinese opera is loud, and its extensive use of percussion instruments like the ban (clapper) not only emphasizes important actions for dramatic effect but also reminds an audience preoccupied with gambling, bartering, snoozing, or chitchat that something important is happening on stage. Thus, as Chunhua’s escape from her in-laws causes a tremendous ruckus in an already cacophonous marketplace, Yuehong, playing the young gentleman, and Xiao Xing, another actress playing a comic servant, as indicated by the white band of makeup across her nose, barely bat an eye and continue singing. Although many urban intellectuals were attracted to and wrote for the opera stage and although a select few opera performers such as the noted female impersonator of Beijing opera, Mei Lanfang, achieved super-stardom, most opera singers and musicians were of peasant stock and as poor as their audiences. Most of these itinerant performers, much like the theater artists of the Elizabethan stage, were treated like thieves and prostitutes and considered the lowest rung of society. Despite this stigma, however, desperate women, trying to escape the harshness of the feudal peasant family in an overpopulated countryside bled dry by greedy landlords, continuously fueled the Shaoxing opera ranks. In many ways, the life story of the Shaoxing actress Fan Ruijuan parallels that of the fictitious Chunhua in Two Stage Sisters. Fan’s account of her life on the Shaoxing stage reflects the same sense of desperation and determination evident in the film. As Fan Ruijuan states in her memoir, hers was not an uncommon life: 62 Gina Marchetti This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms I was only 11 when I joined a Shaoxing opera theater in 1935. At that time, more than 20,000 of the 400,000 people living in Chengxian County, my native place in Zhejiang Province and the birthplace of Shaoxing Opera, had left their homes to become opera singers. Life was hard. My family was living on bran cakes, sweet potatoes and clover, which were all we could afford on father’s meager income as an odd job man. To me, opera singing seemed to be the only alternative to the miserable life of a childbride.5 Ironically, for Fan as well as for Chunhua in Two Stage Sisters, joining the Shaoxing opera meant jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Early opera training for these young girls consisted of beatings, starvation, humiliation, and long hours of hard labor. Virtually enslaved to the troupe’s manager, opera performers often worked for room and board alone in order to pay for their training. Underfed and often lice-ridden or tubercular, they were forced to travel miles on foot through winter storms and still perform flawlessly the moment the troupe arrived at its destination. Aside from being indentured to a theatrical manager, opera performers were also looked upon as sexually available to customers. Throughout the history of Chinese opera, stories abound about young boys taken into opera companies to play female roles and act as homosexual prostitutes. Traveling female performers also were known to serve as prostitutes. When the opera troupe in Two Stage Sisters performs an all-night engagement, expectations extend beyond the singing of opera tunes. Lord Ni, a wealthy land owner, hopes to enjoy more than an evening of opera from Yuehong and Chunhua as an unspoken part of his agreement. This incident not only underscores opera performers’ lack of power over their lives, but it also brings out the ironic contrast between the fantasies performed on stage and the actual lives of the Shaoxing actresses. Yuehong as the young gentleman scholar and Chunhua as the innocent ingénue sing operas about romantic love. Yet, this type of romance was completely beyond the expectations of young women born into a brutally patriarchal society of arranged marriages, child brides, concubines, prostitution, and child slavery. Many operas feature dynamic female generals, swordswomen, and female fairy spirits with martial talents supported by a will to exercise them. In contrast, the lives of the actresses in Shaoxing opera only testify to the powerlessness of women in the Chinese countryside. In one scene, for example, the local policeman sent by Lord Ni, after Yuehong refused the lord’s advances, drags off and pillories a defiant Chunhua, still wearing the The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 63 opera costume associated with a female warrior role. Chunhua resists, but to no avail. Romance and martial victory for women on stage contrast sharply with oppression, humiliation, and total impotence off stage. The theatrical world Yuehong and Chunhua enter in the Shanghai of 1941 is, in many ways, as harsh and demanding as the one left behind in the countryside. However, they also enter an urban environment very different from rural life. Shanghai was a thriving port filled with Western concessions not allowed in other parts of China during the late Qing and early Republican periods. It had a reputation as a wide-open port and city of intrigue, which continued through the Japanese occupation and civil war periods depicted in Two Stage Sisters. Shanghai was a center of progressive ideas and innovative theatrical forms, as well as a haven for those drawn to its seamier side of money, power, and corruption. Notorious for harboring revolutionists, the Shanghai theater district was home to many actorsturned-activists from the turn of the century. When a demonstration in Beijing on May 4, 1919, led to China’s refusal to sign the Treaty of Versailles because it favored Japanese interests in Asia, the Shanghai intellectual community also helped to usher in a new movement begun with the demonstration and called the May 4th or New Culture Movement. Trying to bring China into the modern world, artists, politicians, literary and theatrical figures, young scholars, and students in all disciplines looked to both Western culture and a new sense of Chinese nationalism for inspiration. Although many artists involved with the May 4th Movement tried to survive in Shanghai under the Japanese occupation, most involved in radical politics fled either to the Communist Party strongholds around Yan’an or the Guomindang-controlled areas in the south. Traditional opera and the world of light entertainment, however, managed business as usual under the Japanese. After World War II, Shanghai once again fell under the control of the Guomindang. In Two Stage Sisters, the bitter political struggles that ensued between the Communists and the Nationalists are metaphorically represented by the turmoil within the theatrical world. Jiang Bo, who represents the spirit of May 4th and its hope for the emancipation of women, and Chunhua go to battle with the Guomindang-backed theatrical producer Tang over their right to produce socially conscious operas and compete with Tang’s more commercial productions. In 1946, Jiang Bo takes Chunhua to an exhibition commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of Lu Xun. A principal motive force behind the May 4th Movement, Lu Xun stands as a symbol of the interconnection between revolutionary politics and the arts. Born in Shaoxing, Lu Xun was 64 Gina Marchetti This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms associated throughout his life with the literary and theatrical world of Shanghai and Zhejiang province. Always a champion of the rights of women, Lu Xun wrote essays on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and against enforced chastity for women and the sexual double standard, as well as several essays commemorating the deaths of young female student activists. Lu Xun also dealt with poverty and women’s issues in his fiction. His terse prose and use of keenly observed detail became the model for a type of critical realism still favored by many writers today. His novella, The New Year’s Sacrifice (Zhufu), for example, deals with the plight of a poor widow in China known simply as “Xiang Lin’s Wife.” When Chunhua sees an etching of this character, a superimposition of her face with the print shows Chunhua’s identification with Lu Xun’s creation. On stage, in an opera based on the novella, Chunhua appears as the doomed peasant widow, singing an aria in torn rags with whitened hair. This brief excerpt from the opera acts as a shorthand reference to the quantum changes going on within the Chinese theater at that time and, by extension, Chinese society. Western influences have been absorbed and come full circle, so that the plight of a downtrodden peasant widow can become fit subject matter for an art form that had entertained the imperial courts and the landed gentry. The opera world had changed significantly. At this point, the onstage world of Two Stage Sisters parallels rather than contrasts with the backstage drama of the film. Instead of a world of light comedy and romance, The New Year’s Sacrifice points to the possibility of a socially and politically committed theater. This theater takes the plight of the average woman in China as a metaphor for the oppressive aspect of the society generally. After the revolution, Chunhua resumes her life as an itinerant opera performer—with a difference. Now, she performs revolutionary opera and travels from village to village as a theatrical cadre to educate the peasantry about revolution. She performs a type of opera stylistically closer to traditional Shaoxing than the socially committed New Year’s Sacrifice, but with a clear political message. In Hangzhou, where Chunhua had been pilloried, the troupe stages an opera version of The White-Haired Girl (Baimao nü). Written in Yan’an in 1943, this play became the standard for all sorts of revolutionary drama to follow after 1949. Originally a play, The White-Haired Girl has been produced as an opera, filmed, danced as a ballet, and has inspired revolutionary graphic art. The White-Haired Girl tells the story of Xi’er, a young peasant woman brutalized by feudal landlords and their minions. After all sorts of violations and humiliations, she takes refuge in a cave, living like a wild animal. The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 65 Because of this adversity, her hair turns completely white, and she acquires a reputation for fierceness. The local population considers her mad. When the Red Army liberates the area, she is reunited with her fiancé and joins the revolution. As Raphael Bassan has pointed out, The White-Haired Girl (here referring to the earliest film version of the play) contains all the elements necessary to insure it a lasting place of influence on all revolutionary film and theater to follow in the prc: It serves as a model, particularly at the level of the presentation of the conflicts of the people in opposition to the landlords, for all revolutionary realism to come. All is, in fact, judiciously coded: the unfailing will of the heroine, the courage and abnegation of the disinherited, the always 100% negative profile of the oppressors, and, finally, the idealistic portrait of the Communist soldiers (who are also party cadres), new guides of the Chinese nation.6 The spirit of Yan’an drama as well as the theater that followed the revolution can be traced to Mao’s personal interest in art and cultural affairs. In his famous “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” Mao took time out from the arduous tasks of fighting the war against the Japanese and dealing with the daily difficulties of running the Yan’an soviet to discuss the importance of China’s “cultural army” in the country’s battle against both foreign enemies and domestic oppressors. He calls for committed artists to draw on a variety of forms, including traditional ones, to both appeal to and educate the Chinese masses: We should take over the rich legacy and the good traditions in literature and art that have been handed down from past ages in China and foreign countries, but the aim must still be serve the masses of the people. Nor do we refuse to utilize the literary and artistic forms of the past, but in our hands these old forms, remolded and infused with new content, also become something revolutionary in the service of the people.7 Not surprisingly, Mao’s talks at Yan’an led to the type of revolutionary drama exemplified by The White-Haired Girl. Firmly rooted in traditional theater and folklore, the play presents a clear moral universe with peasants replacing noble lords and generals as heroes and heroines. Its mythic elements, magical transformations, and stock character types place it squarely within folk theater traditions. Later, Yan’an theater became the basis for Mao’s “revolutionary romanticism” as well as the Cultural Revolution’s model operas. In Two Stage Sisters, Chunhua’s performance of The White-Haired Girl bears as much resemblance to The New Year’s Sacrifice as it does to traditional 66 Gina Marchetti This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fig. 3. Chunhua (back) and Yuehong (front) in Two Stage Sisters (Wutai jiemei), directed by Xie Jin, PRC, 1965. British Film Institute. Shaoxing opera. Within the film, The White-Haired Girl functions as a synthesis of the old and the new, China and the West, spoken and opera forms, and as the culmination of all the other, often contradictory, aesthetic currents to which the film refers. Although it relies on the stylization of traditional opera for its effect, it also deals with contemporary life, with actual change, and with current political and social concerns. Performing in the public square of Hangzhou, Chunhua comes full circle. Her performance melds a May 4th, urban critical realism with the fantastical nature of folk opera. Taken as a whole, Two Stage Sisters transcends the insular world of Shaoxing opera to make some far-reaching statements about the nature of oppression and the power of change in twentieth-century China. Shaoxing The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 67 serves as a metaphor. Events of historical, social, political, and cultural import (from the feudal countryside through Shanghai enterprise to revolutionary promise) occur in the theater that functions as a microcosm of Chinese society at large. Chunhua, Yuehong, and Jiang Bo stand in as “every woman,” extraordinary because of their notoriety, but only a step away from the peasantry. The structural parallels are obvious but effective. The personal dramas of the stage sisters parallel the fictional worlds of the plays they perform, which, in turn, parallel the political changes occurring in Chinese society. Perhaps the most important parallel to consider, however, is the connection between the aesthetic of the film itself and the aesthetic development of the fictional theatrical world it chronicles. Two Stage Sisters is itself very much like Chinese opera. Its episodic narrative structure, for example, relies on often disjointed, autonomous sequences to give it a sweeping scope and an ability to deal with all aspects of society. Moreover, like opera, the film relies on music to both frame and underscore important dramatic moments and to place these moments within a broader social and narrative context. For example, the film opens with a sweeping crane shot that takes in the expanses of the Zhejiang countryside before settling on the opera being performed in the marketplace. A female chorus accompanies the crane shot. The same chorus also accompanies similar crane shots later in the film as well as several montage sequences that interrupt and comment on the narrative flow. Similarly, traditional opera narrative may be interrupted by arias or by physical-action sequences choreographed to instrumental music. As in traditional opera, an orchestra punctuates moments of intense drama with percussion or full orchestral musical phrases. For example, the music swells when Chunhua and Yuehong face each other after Chunhua’s acceptance into the opera troupe and at other similarly dramatic moments. In addition, the gestures, speech, and movement of the characters in Two Stage Sisters often take on the highly stylized air of traditional opera. Opera training, for example, involves hours of exercises devoted to making eye movements more expressive by following a candle flame in a darkened room. Many of the eye movements within the film draw on this aspect of opera tradition (e.g., Chunhua’s passionate glances at Yuehong when the latter begins to drift away from her in Shanghai and Yuehong’s startled and terrified glance at Tang after he slaps her across the face before their appearance in court). The similarity of the characters in Two Stage Sisters to some traditional opera heroines must also be noted. In many ways, Chunhua appears as a modern recreation of the wudan or daomadan, martial heroines like Mu Gui68 Gina Marchetti This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ying, the famous female general.8 Like the female warrior characters she performs on stage, Chunhua is aggressive, physically powerful, morally upright, and inevitably victorious. In fact, the representation of the revolutionary heroine in the preponderance of films made in the prc owes a great debt to traditional opera characterizations. Similarly, the villains take on characteristics of wicked generals, evil-spirited demons, or monks from their stage counterparts. However, although Two Stage Sisters’ aesthetics may be rooted in traditional opera in many important respects, the film also gathers stylistic momentum from the other developments in theater to which the film’s plot alludes. In many ways, Two Stage Sisters owes a great deal to the same May 4th impulses that gave rise to Lu Xun’s mature style, represented in the film by The New Year’s Sacrifice. Like Lu Xun’s novella, Two Stage Sisters uses central female characters to concretize all sorts of social ills. In addition, Two Stage Sisters makes full use of the naturalistic detail characteristic of May 4th literature. Seemingly insignificant images take on dramatic weight (e.g., laundry washed in the river after sunset, drops of blood in a bowl of water or on a white sleeve, the straw hats an abandoned woman must make to survive in the countryside). Although epic in scope like traditional opera, Two Stage Sisters also has the chamber quality of a literature influenced by Ibsen and Western critical realism. Jiang Bo cooks rice that boils over as she discusses sexism, class differences, and the theater with Chunhua. A montage sequence shows the daily routine of the traveling troupe from calisthenics for martial roles to memorizing lines while walking from town to town. This attention to what may appear to be nearly irrelevant detail creates a sense of the particularity of the social fabric, a concrete feeling for the historical period, as it does in the best of critical realism globally. Just as the narrative of Two Stage Sisters culminates with the performance of The White-Haired Girl and the reunion of Chunhua and Yuehong, the aesthetic strivings of the film itself find their culmination in the performance of this play. Mao’s vision of a “revolutionary romanticism” is wedded to critical realism. Indeed, it is tempting to look at Two Stage Sisters as an example of revolutionary romanticism. The film’s plot, for example, follows the trials of a young peasant woman, who, instead of ending her life as an obscure beggar like the peasant widow in The New Year’s Sacrifice, almost magically transforms herself into a revolutionary heroine. With a few exceptions, Two Stage Sisters deals with crystal-clear conflicts, between masters and servants, lords and peasants, powerful men and helpless women, in which traditional power relations are overturned. As in all revolutionary romanticism, the revolution becomes the most important motive The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 69 force for change. Its coming resolves virtually all of the narrative conflicts. Just as Xi’er joins up with her lover and the Red Army in The White-Haired Girl, Yuehong, transformed by her suffering at the hands of Tang, joins up with Chunhua and the revolutionary opera troupe at the end of Two Stage Sisters. Individual concerns find public resolution in the political arena. Two Stage Sisters seems to conveniently contain the seeds of its own aesthetic unraveling within its plot. On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that this discussion does not do justice to the aesthetic complexity of the film. Although profoundly indebted to traditional opera, the May 4th Movement, and Mao’s revolutionary romanticism, Two Stage Sisters takes up aesthetic concerns that transcend Chinese drama. Like most Chinese films of its era, Two Stage Sisters walks a tightrope between indigenous dramatic forms and foreign influences, between revolutionary romanticism and what Godard has called “Hollywood Mosfilm.” During his sojourn in China, Jay Leyda found himself quite taken aback by the Chinese film industry’s indebtedness to Hollywood: The influence of Hollywood, and in one of its worse aspects, was a shock. First, it contradicted everything that I heard and read here about the poisons and falsehoods of Hollywood being discarded by a revolutionary, bold, new Chinese cinema. The Soviet cinema had been occasionally tempted in the same way, but never so unblushingly as here. And I was shocked to find here a part of the past revived that was long since judged as a sham and embarrassment, while a new important Chinese film [Song of Youth (Qingchun zhige; dir. Cui Wei and Chen Huaikai, 1959)] turned away deliberately from the progress being made in world cinema, even so near as Moscow and Warsaw.9 The influence of Hollywood on Two Stage Sisters cannot be denied. In fact, if the character of Jiang Bo and the revolution were erased from the script, the film could quite easily be mistaken for a Hollywood backstage melodrama. It has all the classic elements of that genre, for example, the hard struggle to the top of the theatrical profession, the bitterness of the aging actress’ lot, the inevitability of decline, sour romances, misguided ambitions, competition, romantic needs vying with the dream of theatrical success, the hardships of exploitation by unsympathetic bosses. In addition to this indebtedness to Hollywood and despite Leyda’s comment that Chinese film tends to ignore Soviet cinema, Two Stage Sisters also owes much to Soviet socialist realism. In fact, a careful examination of the film underscores the similarities as well as the fundamental differences between classical Hollywood realism and Soviet socialist realism. With some exceptions, for example, Two Stage Sisters strives for that 70 Gina Marchetti This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms transparency and clarity so prized by both Hollywood and socialist realism. The film creates a self-contained world. It is lit, photographed, composed, edited, and scripted in a self-effacing, Hollywood style. Characters are not as psychologically complex as their Hollywood counterparts, but they are more than one-dimensional. The narrative is linear, if episodic. The familiar codes of narrative and aesthetic form allow disbelief willingly to be suspended. Despite their similarities, Hollywood classical realism and socialist realism differ fundamentally. Like other films of its era, Two Stage Sisters perhaps owes a greater debt to Moscow than Leyda would be willing to admit. Characterization in Two Stage Sisters, for example, follows many of the conventions traditionally associated with socialist realism. Each character represents a certain class position and the contradictions associated with a specific historical period. Lord Ni and Tang, for example, represent a position of power through ownership, and they exploit the women peasants and workers in the film. Although individually quite distinct, these characters function as “types,” exemplary of the ruling order in both rural and urban prerevolutionary China. Typification by gender and class does not rubber stamp a character. It does, however, allow for possible points of identification. Each character embodies a particular idea and has a certain abstract potential. Chunhua, for example, functions as an icon beyond the narrative, an abstraction of a “typical” woman’s awakening into class and social consciousness. She represents both a psychologically credible Hollywood-styled character and an abstract idea, that is, a type in the socialist realist mold. With history foregrounded as a narrative force in socialist realism, other classical realist narrative techniques also change. In the socialist realist text, a tension surfaces between polemics and plot; plot structure becomes subordinated to the rhetorical necessity of making a political point. Narrative structure seems to be transformed by this injection of history and the necessity for generalization and abstraction operative in socialist realism. For example, although Two Stage Sisters’ narrative is, for the most part, linear, it certainly does not follow the Aristotelian dramatic unity so dear to most types of classical realist fictions. In order to broaden the geographic, temporal, and social scope of the issues dealt with in the film, the episodic narrative presents incidents often only tangentially related to the development of the principal plot line. The device of the itinerant theatrical troupe provides an excellent vehicle for this. Both before and after the revolution, the troupe drifts along the river in the countryside, encountering peasants and wealthy landowners. Characters appear, are used to make a point, disappear, occasionally reappear to make another point, or simply vanish. The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 71 In addition, the film structures events into a series of dialectical relationships. Chunhua’s and Yuehong’s lives not only parallel one another, for example, but have a profound effect on one another. They each represent distinct choices and attributes that contradict one another at an abstract level. By seeing their lives juxtaposed, the viewer can synthesize certain ideas about the treatment of women, the limitations on their lives, and their struggles. In the cases of Chunhua and Yuehong, two approaches are explored. Thus, Chunhua’s choice to work against the system is understandable only in relation to Yuehong’s decision to live within it. When the two clash in the courtroom, the whole system explodes, and the revolution arrives in the streets of Shanghai in the following scene, a direct result of the dialectical conflict within the narrative. · The Brecht Connection: Chinese Opera and Epic Theater After looking at Two Stage Sisters’ roots in Chinese theater, Hollywood melodrama, and socialist realism, the aesthetic sum of all this seems to be something rather different from the aggregate of its parts. Xie Jin has taken from a genre at the edges of Hollywood classicism—the melodrama. The place of the melodrama within the tradition of classical Hollywood realism must be taken into account in order to better understand the textual operation of Two Stage Sisters. Recent criticism has pointed out that melodramas often strain the formal foundations of classical Hollywood realism to their limits.10 If Two Stage Sisters resembles classical Hollywood cinema or Soviet socialist realism, it remains at the edge of those forms. It must be placed at the boundary between classical realist conventions and something quite different. There seems to be something within the formal structure of Two Stage Sisters, coupled with the film’s revolutionary politics, that places it very close to Brecht’s notion of epic theater. Although Xie Jin would be the first to deny any conscious similarity between his work and Brecht’s, a closer look at both the film and Brecht’s writings reveals some interesting aesthetic parallels.11 Despite the notoriety of his debates with Lukács on the applicability/ inappropriateness of taking up the nineteenth-century realist novel as a model for socialist art, Brecht, while arguing against that form of realism, never placed his own aesthetic ideas outside of a broader realist tradition. Anti-illusionist and anti-Aristotelian rather than antirealist, Brecht sought to break down the illusion of transparency created by bourgeois theater as well as the emotional identification and catharsis invited by Aristotelian drama. Instead, Brecht tried to distance the spectator from the drama by break72 Gina Marchetti This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ing the illusion of an invisible fourth wall. This was done by distancing the spectator from the actors on stage by making the audience constantly aware of the fact that the players were simply presenting a role constructed for them. In this way, Brecht hoped to create a critical distance between the play and the spectator, so that the playgoer would be inspired to think about the social and political issues under discussion rather than become overly involved with the characters as “real people” with individual problems. Similar principles of distanciation can be seen at work in Two Stage Sisters. For example, the film revolves around the performance of other fictions, that is, operas, that constantly alert the viewer to the fact that the film, too, is a constructed fiction. Moreover, Two Stage Sisters’ structure resembles opera; for example, it has disjointed episodes, major leaps in time and place, choral interludes, and many other elements that foreground its structuring principles and place it far outside Aristotelian traditions. Both the orchestra and the camera intrude self-consciously on the drama, acting as storytellers, commenting and reflecting on the characters’ placements within the historical moment. Also, just as Sirk and Fassbinder create compositions that frame characters within doorways and windows to place them figuratively outside the drama, Xie uses the same techniques for political analysis. This distance allows the viewer room for reflection on issues outside of any emotional involvement with the characters as individuals. For example, after a scene that features a political discussion in Jiang Bo’s apartment, a storm develops outside. Chunhua and Jiang Bo go to the rooftop apartment’s doorway. The camera frames them inside and dollies back. With this shot, the camera figuratively places the characters’ lives in perspective. The narrative comes to a temporary halt, allowing the viewer to reflect on the position of these characters within history, within the developing political struggle. Political changes break like a storm, and the implicit metaphor takes the viewer away from the drama for a moment. As Brecht hopes “the spectator stands outside, studies” in epic theater, Xie Jin’s camera allows the viewer this same critical distance in Two Stage Sisters.12 The similarity between Two Stage Sisters and Brecht’s notion of epic theater goes beyond mere coincidence. However, although Two Stage Sisters postdated epic theater and achieves several of its hoped-for effects, it would be taking the argument too far to say that Brechtian aesthetics directly influenced Xie Jin. Rather, the common roots and purposes of Brecht and Xie must be kept in mind. Brecht and Xie both owe a considerable aesthetic debt to traditional Chinese opera. Although originally a folk form, Chinese opera developed a high The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 73 degree of stylistic sophistication within its long history. Outside of traditions of Western realism, Chinese opera formed its own aesthetic standards, with its own perspective on the relationship between art and actuality. Brecht particularly admired Chinese opera’s aesthetic self-consciousness and delight in conventionality. In an essay titled “Mei Lanfang, Stanislavsky, Brecht—A Study in Contrasts,” Huang Zuolin notes that Brecht was particularly taken with the famous opera star Mei Lanfang’s acting technique and with the Chinese opera’s attitude toward performance in general. In fact, Huang traces Brecht’s notion of “quotation” acting to traditional Chinese storytelling techniques: In the course of his work, Brecht actually adopted a number of techniques from the traditional Chinese theater. One of these is his method of ‘quotation.’ He makes an actor ‘quote’ the character played, like a traditional Chinese storyteller who steps in and out of the role at will, sometimes into the part, sometimes making comments in the first person. This shifting of position facilitates the unfolding of the story, the delineation of character, and the elucidation of the author’s intention.13 In his essay, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” Brecht states: Above all, the Chinese artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him. He expresses his awareness of being watched. This immediately removes one of the European stage’s characteristic illusions. The audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place. A whole elaborate European stage technique, which helps to conceal the fact that the scenes are so arranged that the audience can view them in the easiest way, is thereby made unnecessary. The actors openly choose those positions which will best show them off to the audience, just as if they were acrobats. . . . The artist’s object is to appear strange and even surprising to the audience. He achieves this by looking strangely at himself and his work.14 Similarly, in Two Stage Sisters, as the narrative bandies back and forth between onstage and offstage life, characterization takes on a quality of quotation. In addition, the visual presentation of the self to be looked at by others operates as an “alienation effect.” To cite one example, when Chunhua and Yuehong first arrive in Shanghai, they see Shuihua for the first time backstage as she puts on her makeup. The camera’s position allows the viewer to see Shuihua looking at her reflection in the mirror as well as the dumbfounded faces of Chunhua and Yuehong. Whether the two young actresses 74 Gina Marchetti This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms are open-mouthed because of the older actress’ age or because they are simply star struck is never elucidated. In this shot, however, the film viewer confronts a character, aware of being watched within the narrative, preparing to be watched within another fictional drama, that is, the opera to be performed on stage. Chunhua and Yuehong seem aware of their own similar positions as actresses aging within the theater. Perhaps the viewer becomes aware, at this dramatically charged moment, of yet another element, that is, the fact that all three are portrayed by screen actresses who may face similar career problems. (Since this film was not released to the general public until after the Cultural Revolution, this effect may have been further heightened by the fact that the actress who portrays Shuihua, Shangguan Yunzhu, had died during that period. Her death was subsequently blamed on the stress she underwent during the Cultural Revolution.) This moment allows the viewer to think critically about women’s lives, class struggle, and the nature of oppression. The spectator can reflect on the drama as Shuihua reflects on her aging image in the mirror. Two Stage Sisters’ allusions to other dramatic works, its narrative ellipses, its stylistic self-consciousness must be regarded as very sophisticated aesthetically by Western standards. The film has certain affinities with Western modernism and international developments in Marxist aesthetics. Beneath this complexity, however, there is also an innocence, a moral directness, an ingenuous hope for a brighter future. Coming from traditional theater and its folk aesthetic, Two Stage Sisters has a “naive” quality, and this quality finally brings the film close to Brecht’s dream of a drama that is both didactic and popular, critical and supportive of revolutionary change. Alan Lovell has astutely observed: “Increasingly, Brecht described the quality he was searching for in his art as ‘Naïveté.’ ”15 Perhaps Two Stage Sisters comes close to Brecht’s longing for “naïveté,” since it draws on the folk art roots of Chinese opera to shape a modern aesthetic, to reform a relationship between art and the people obscured within modern, industrialized, commercial culture. · Two Stage Sisters and the Cultural Revolution After tracing the aesthetic roots of Two Stage Sisters from folk opera through Lu Xun to Brecht and Mao himself, it seems unlikely that anyone could come up with another Chinese film indebted to as many strains of Marxist aesthetics so vividly described through narrative devices and cinematographic techniques. However, Two Stage Sisters was not released to the public until after the Cultural Revolution had ended, and the film was The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 75 viciously attacked politically while it was still in production. In order to understand the reasons for the suppression of Two Stage Sisters, the film must be placed within the context of the political events going on at the time of its production. In 1958, Mao Zedong launched China on an exceedingly ambitious project of reform called The Great Leap Forward. Designed to quicken the transformation of China into a model socialist society by increasing the size and power of both rural and urban communes, the program rather quickly collapsed the following year. In 1959, Mao stepped down as chairman of the People’s Republic in favor of Liu Shaoqi, although Mao remained head of the Communist Party.16 Paul G. Pickowicz has noted that the end of the Great Leap Forward and Mao’s temporary loss of power had some significant effects on the Chinese film industry.17 Even though there was a decrease in production, greater emphasis was placed on quality filmmaking and carefully crafted stories. As Pickowicz points out, the publication in 1961 of an essay by Xia Yan titled “Raise Our Country’s Film Art to a New Level” ushered in the new era for the Chinese cinema. One of the best known of the “left-wing” filmmakers during the golden age of the Shanghai studios in the 1930s, Xia Yan had risen in the party ranks after 1949 to become vice-minister of culture. In this 1961 essay, implicitly critical of the Great Leap Forward, Xia calls for greater autonomy for artists and for more diversity within the cinema. Xia’s directives had a definite impact. The period between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution was characterized by a tremendous diversity in both form and subject matter within the cinema. Production ranged from domestic comedies like Li Shuangshuang (dir. Lu Ren, 1962) to dramas about life in prerevolutionary China like The Lin Family Shop (Linjia puzi; dir. Shui Hua, 1959). Stories about intellectuals and their romantic as well as political exploits like Xie Tieli’s Early Spring (Zaochun eryue; a.k.a. Second Lunar Month, Threshold of Spring, 1964) were produced alongside films about revolutionary activities like Xie Jin’s The Red Detachment of Women (1961). This period came to a rather abrupt end, however, with the reassertion of Mao’s power in the mid-1960s. The Cultural Revolution saw the mobilization of youth in the guise of the Red Guard, further radicalization of peasants and workers, dismantling of huge chunks of the bureaucratic superstructure, and purge of many party cadres. Interestingly, many of the Cultural Revolution’s most heated battles were fought in the aesthetic realm, and the Shanghai film industry became one of the prime targets. In fact, during much of the Cultural Revolution, feature-film production ceased. Because of his calls for reform after the Great 76 Gina Marchetti This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Leap Forward, Xia Yan stood out for censure. As Xie Jin has pointed out, Two Stage Sisters fared particularly badly because of Xia Yan’s association with the project: “Wutai jiemei” [Two Stage Sisters] and “Zaochun eryue” [Xie Tieli’s Early Spring] were attacked above all because of Xia Yan who had made corrections and suggestions on the screenplay. By attacking the films, they wanted to attack him. For “Wutai jiemei,” Xia Yan not only helped me a lot in writing the screenplay, but it was he himself who encouraged me to make the film. And that was one of the ‘crimes’ of which he was accused during the Cultural Revolution.18 Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and head of the “Gang of Four” in power during the Cultural Revolution, had a particular dislike for Xia Yan that extended back to her days as an actress in Shanghai. Beyond the personality clashes, Jiang Qing also had very clear and firm ideas about what a Chinese revolutionary drama should look like. The controversy became divided along geographic lines, which paralleled political camps. Revolutionary art outside the boundaries of the aesthetics developed in the Yan’an soviet during World War II lost all validity and was thought of as somehow “impure.” If Two Stage Sisters is looked at not as a harmonious mixture of Yan’an and Shanghai influences but as a battleground between two notions of what a politically progressive art should look like, then perhaps the bitterness of the film’s condemnation can be better understood. Although indebted to Yan’an’s The White-Haired Girl and Mao’s “revolutionary romanticism,” Two Stage Sisters’ aesthetic heart remains in Shanghai, and this aesthetic debt assured its condemnation. Even in works like Two Stage Sisters that so fervently support the party and the revolution, the Cultural Revolution’s proponents could unearth a bourgeois, Western sensibility. In literary and dramatic works, characterization became a politically charged issue. A notion of the “middle” character developed. In Two Stage Sisters, for example, Yuehong stands out. Neither heroic nor villainous, she aids her own oppressor because of avarice and sheer stupidity. She is, however, sympathetic. She is a victim and a “sinner” who is eventually “redeemed” by the love of her stage sister. The morally ambivalent nature of this character places her somewhere outside the realm of heroics or infamy. In the “middle,” her moral ambivalence leads to textual ambiguity and, in turn, the possibility of counterrevolutionary readings. Likewise, the illusion of psychological complexity that characterizes the “middle character” places Yuehong squarely within a Western tradition of naturalism. Descriptive detail outweighs didactic precision, and, once again, the possibility of a subversive reading appears. The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 77 In retrospect, this reasoning seems strained, to say the least. More importantly, however, no degree of censure should rob Two Stage Sisters of its right to be taken seriously within the history of Marxist aesthetics. In its attempt to locate a peculiarly Chinese socialist aesthetic that can do justice to the representation of women, Two Stage Sisters merits attention. Beyond this, Two Stage Sisters remains at the cusp of aesthetic currents that still rage not only within Chinese cinema but within cinemas committed to social change worldwide. · Notes 1. Most of the research for this essay was done in Paris, France, in the fall of 1982 and spring of 1983 under the auspices of a French Government Grant. I would like to thank Janet Yang of World Entertainment, Inc., for arranging for me to interview Xie Jin while he was in the United States and for translating for us. A shorter version of this paper was presented at the 1985 Society for Cinema Studies conference at New York University. I am grateful to Sheldon Lu, the editor of this volume, for giving me the opportunity to have this essay reprinted with corrections and some minor changes. I would also like to thank Chuck Kleinhans, Julia Lesage, John Hess, and the other members of the editorial board of Jump Cut, where this essay originally appeared. Two Stage Sisters’ Chinese title, Wutai jiemei, is also translated as Stage Sisters, Two Actresses, Sisters of the Stage. For an overview of film in the People’s Republic of China, see Jay Leyda, Dianying–Electric Shadows: An Account of Films and Film Audience in China (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972), or Régis Bergeron, Le cinéma chinois: 1949– 1983 (Paris: L’Harmatton, 1984). Kwok and M.-C. Quiquemelle, “Le cinéma chinois et le réalisme,” Ombres électriques: panorama du cinéma chinois—1925–1983 (Paris: Centre de Documentation sur le Cinéma Chinois, 1982) is also informative. At the time Jump Cut decided to devote two special sections to cinema from the People’s Republic of China in 1986 and 1989, little existed in English on Chineselanguage film. Since this essay was first published, however, there has been a welcome blossoming of scholarly works on Chinese cinema. Thankfully, Xie Jin and his oeuvre have not been ignored. Chris Berry, ed., Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1991), includes a biography and other critical material on Xie Jin. Nick Browne, “Society and Subjectivity: On the Political Economy of Chinese Melodrama,” in New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics, ed. Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 40–56, contains extensive discussion of Xie’s Hibiscus Town. Other useful works include Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Da Huo’er, “An Interview with Xie Jin,” Jump Cut 34 (March 1989): 107–109; John A. Lent, The Asian Film In78 Gina Marchetti This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms dustry (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Ma Ning, “Spatiality and Subjectivity in Xie Jin’s Film Melodrama of the New Period,” in New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics, ed. Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 15–39; George S. Semsel, ed., Chinese Film: The State of the Art in the People’s Republic (New York: Praeger, 1987); and Timothy Tung, “The Work of Xie Jin: A Personal Letter To the Editor,” in Film and Politics in the Third World, ed. John D. H. Downing (New York: Praeger, 1987). The latter volume also contains a translation of the Kwok and Quiquemelle article mentioned above. 2. For information on film during the Cultural Revolution, see Paul Clark, “Filmmaking in China: From the Cultural Revolution to 1981,” China Quarterly 94 (June 1983): 304–322. 3. For more biographical information on Xie Jin, see Marco Muller, “Les tribulations d’un cineaste chinois en Chine,” Cahiers du cinéma 344 (February 1983): 16–21. Same interview in Italian: Marco Muller, “Intervista con Xie Jin,” in Ombre Electriche: Saggi e Richerche sul Cinema Cinese (Milan: Gruppo Editoriale Electra, 1982). Charles Tesson, “Xie Jin: Celui par qui le mélo arrive,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 344 (February 1983): 12–15. 4. Colin Mackerras, The Chinese Theater in Modern Times: From 1840 to the Present Day (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975). 5. Fan Ruijuan, “An Actress’ Life in Old China,” in When They Were Young, ed. Women of China and New World Press (Beijing: New World Press, 1983), 158. 6. Raphael Bassan, “Ombre électrique sur la cite interdite: La longue marche du cinéma chinois,” La revue du cinéma 380 (February 1983): 77. My translation. 7. Mao Zedong, “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” in Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Zedong (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1971), 259. 8. Opera terms are in Mandarin, taken from Dong Chensheng, Paintings of Beijing Opera Characters (Beijing: Zhaohua Publishing House, 1981). For more information on the relationship between Chinese opera and film, see Geremie Barmé, “Persistance de la tradition au ‘royaume des ombres’. Quelques notes visant à contributer à une approche nouvelle du cinéma chinois,” in Le cinéma chinois, ed. Marie-Claire Quiquemelle and Jean-Loup Passek (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985). 9. Leyda, Dianying, 247. 10. For example, see Griselda Pollock, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, and Stephen Heath, “Dossier on Melodrama,” Screen 18, no. 2 (1977): 105–119. 11. Interview with Xie Jin, translation by Janet Yang, San Francisco, April 1985. 12. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 37. 13. Huang Zuolin, “Mei Lanfang, Stanislavsky, Brecht—A Study in Contrasts,” in Peking Opera and Mei Lanfang: A Guide to China’s Traditional Theater and the Art of Its Great Master (Beijing: New World Press, 1981), 16. The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 79 14. Brecht, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” in Brecht on Theatre, 91–92. 15. Alan Lovell, “Epic Theater and Counter Cinema’s Principles,” Jump Cut 27 (July 1982): 66. 16. For more information on the relationship between revolutionary politics and aesthetics in twentieth-century China, see Jonathan D. Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution—1895–1980 (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1981). Chapter 12 includes extensive background information on the period under discussion here. 17. Paul G. Pickowicz, “The Limits of Cultural Thaw: Chinese Cinema in the Early 1960s,” in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, ed. Chris Berry (Ithaca, N.Y.: ChinaJapan Program, Cornell University, 1985), 97–148. 18. Muller, “Les tribulations,” 19. 80 Gina Marchetti This content downloaded from 137.110.57.252 on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:08:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
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