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| ISBN-13: | 9781783080540 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2013 |
| Series: | Anthem Film and Culture |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 202 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
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World Cinema and the Visual Arts
By David Gallagher
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2012 David Gallagher editorial matter and selectionAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84331-386-1
CHAPTER 1
PROJECTING A MORE HABITABLE GLOBE: HOLLYWOOD'S YELLOW PERIL AND ITS REFRACTION ONTO 1930s SHANGHAI NATIONAL CINEMA
Lily Wong
University of California, Santa Barbara
Word of California's exclusion of overseas Chinese found its way to China's ports through the circulation of cultural production at the end of the nineteenth century. Representations of US hostility and Chinese hardship played a crucial role in provoking a Chinese urban public already enraged by images of an unjust world under Euro-American imperialism, and by a Qing state powerless in the face of such perceived injustice. For many, the aggression of American capitalism was increasingly linked to the weakness of the Qing court. Burgeoning was a frustrated public pushing for hopes of a more equal global exchange. Thus while the Qing court and the US were negotiating a renewal of the Chinese Exclusion Treaty in 1905, American goods were boycotted on the streets of Shanghai by an agitated urban public demanding just treatment of their overseas expatriates turned compatriots. Though failing to make much of an impact on US policies, the boycott more or less succeeded in forming an alliance between a Chinese urban public and the Chinese diasporas, a cross-Pacific coalition tightened, if only temporarily, by desires for a fairer global imaginary.
While debates over Chinese exclusion in mainstream American discourse at the time often revolved around the problem of Chinese labour, what was at stake for the demonstrators in Shanghai, however, was the dignity of their national image and its place in peril within a modernising world built on unequal global exchange. Produced out of this anxiety, as Yong Chen argues, was a 'populist nationalism' which grew out of this gap in between perceptions of Qing weakness and foreign aggression. That is, a newfound 'nationalistic sentiment' was provoked through the cross-imagination and overlapping perceptions of the Chinese plight across the Pacific. This emerging nationalism broadcasted the urgency to push forth what revolutionaries of the time claimed as 'popular sovereignty': a transnational imagination of sovereignty that was separate from foreign imperialist and Qing imperial powers.
This transnational provocation of popular nationalism, scholars have suggested, played a critical role in gathering reactionary sentiment necessary for the overthrow of the Qing Empire by revolution just six years later in 1911. The transnational Chinese boycott thus became a popular mode of 'civilised protest', which re-emerged throughout the following decades, as seen in, for instance, the anti-Japanese boycott in 1908 and the May Fourth Movement in 1919. As Yong Chen maintains, Chinese American store owners in San Francisco burned Japanese-made cosmetics and embroideries in stock in order to show support of the anti-Japanese protests in China at the time. In Chicago, storeowners also imposed heavy fines on those who violated the boycott.
At the heart of this persisting nationalistic sentiment were continuous cross- Pacific discussions of 'Chinese womanhood' – the mobility, purity and place of Chinese women as modern citizens of the global community was of critical concern. Transnational imaginations of 'Chinese women' played a vital role in China's positioning in the global community. This was made particularly clear by the US's Page Act 1875 under which Chinese female immigrants were equated with prostitutes. As a result, Chinese women were excluded from entering and, by extension, their families were prevented from settling, in the US. Thus, out of the tensions over human labour between the US and China, emerged contested imaginations of one particular group of affective labourers – Chinese prostitutes. While the US's conflation of Chinese women with prostitution continued the persecution of Chinese immigrants into the twentieth century, in Shanghai these depictions of prostitutes as 'yellow peril' further provoked political fervour, with cultural production, specifically film, quickly becoming an ideological battleground through which these competing political, social and cultural tensions were played out across the Pacific.
As Miriam Hansen argues, early American cinema offered something like the first global vernacular to the world market, and this vernacular played a key role in mediating competing cultural discourses on modernity and modernisation. To Hansen, 'cinema was not only part and promoter of technological, industrial-capitalist modernity; it was also the single most inclusive, public horizon in which both the liberating impulses and the pathologies of modernity were reflected, rejected, or disavowed, transmuted or negotiated, and it made this new mass public visible to itself and to society'. Hollywood, producing more than eighty per cent of the films shown in China up till the 1930s, thus offered a reflexive horizon for Shanghai left-wing intellectuals to mediate and challenge the experiences of global modernity that Hollywood projected.
As Shuqin Cui suggests in Women through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema, film, perceived as foreign and new in China, functioned as a particularly vital site of social reform. She maintains:
Widespread social disorder and the dominance of foreign films directly exposed Chinese audiences to the hegemony of foreign power. This dual spectacle, national and visual, showed progressive filmmakers the power of cinema, the visual medium, to expose social problems and construct national discourses.
Cinema served as both the proof of foreign encroachment (or more specifically Hollywood's dominance of market and representation) and also the means to propagate Chinese nationalism. It is perhaps less of a surprise, then, that the golden age of Hollywood, commonly said to be from the late 1920s to 1950s, also marked the transformation of Shanghai's early film production from a mainly commercialised entertainment industry into an increasingly politicised enterprise. As Zhang Zhen stresses, in An Amorous History of the Silver Screen, film at the time was 'a complex translation machine and motor for change, generated as a mass mediated social and aesthetic experience ... modern science and technology – along with new ideas about class, gender and the body – collided with traditional culture in some ways but were domesticated and productively absorbed in other ways'. In particular, the translating and re-narrating power of cinema that Zhang Zhen alludes to can be seen through refracted representations of 'Chinese prostitutes' across the Pacific. While Hollywood imagined Chinese women as prostitutes with questionable morals, such denigrating representations arguably provoked political fervour in the Shanghai film industry concerned with the perils of 'Chinese women'. Prostitutes, in Shanghai's left-wing cinema, were thus portrayed as virtuous whores oppressed by both patriarchal traditions and foreign encroachment, specifically by the ruthlessness of global capitalism. Thus, while Hollywood's projections of Chinese women as problematic prostitutes illuminate the integrity of the main, often Caucasian characters' visibility within a global imaginary, Shanghai's left-wing film industry represented Chinese prostitutes as 'virtuous whores' who readily answer to escalating calls for personal and, by extension, nationalistic reform. That is, the Chinese prostitute's body, both physical and ideological, becomes a microcosm of the nation – both the US and China – at large and it is through the appropriation of the prostitute's body that these tensions, promoted between the Hollywood and Shanghai industries, manifest themselves.
This chapter, then, zeroes in on this exchange of representation between the two film industries, and looks closely at the relationship between two particular actresses at the core of such representations – the Chinese American actress Anna May Wong, and China's 1930s icon Ruan Lingyu. I trace the two actresses' negotiation between portrayals of the 'Chinese prostitute' on screen and the larger social discourse of 'modern Chinese women' integrated and excluded by both the Hollywood and Shanghai film industries. I ask: what does it mean when desires to perform competing notions of 'modernity' in the face of an imagined global community, are projected on this so-called 'modern Chinese woman' scripted to be simultaneously desired and disdained by her various audiences? Juxtaposing my readings of Anna May Wong with Ruan Lingyu, I show how the actresses, or rather their travelling images, affectively produce perhaps what Walter Benjamin calls a 'productive apparatus' – their 'degenerate' performances functioning as generative sites that produce as they unsettle contending discourses of 'global modernity' as its symbolic economies morph, mediate, and are even disrupted when projected across the Pacific.
By the 1930s, Anna May Wong was already quite visible on the Hollywood screen. She was able to play supporting roles in major films such as Peter Pan (1924), Thief of Bagdad (1924) and Piccadilly (1929), and even took on lead roles in movies such as Toll of the Sea (1922). Despite her cinematic visibility, the roles given to her were, many have argued, limited to particular orientalist imaginations of Chinese women – with her scripted as either the innocently available lotus blossom or the morally loose dragon lady. From pregnant woman-in-waiting to Mongolian slave, from murderous prostitute to daughter of villainous gangsters, her roles ranged from the easily degraded to the degrading woman of the Orient. As the first Chinese American actress known worldwide, Wong became the focus of studies investigating US racial stereotyping, and the limits and/or possibilities of resistance through performance. Here, instead of reading her within the boundaries of US politics, I place her within a trans-pacific framework. In so doing, I see the 'nation-state' (be it the US or China) as interdependent with, rather than mere producer of, global exchange. Thus, reading Anna May Wong's image through this trans- pacific framework, I investigate not racialisation or resistance, per se, but trans-pacific productions of modernity and discourses of development and nation-building involved with it.
As Wong's performance of 'questionable' Chinese women travelled internationally, it produced a wide range of responses. Commenting on her performance in Toll of the Sea, the New York Times exclaimed: 'Miss Wong stirs in the spectator all the sympathy her part calls for, and she never repels one by an excess of theatrical 'feeling'. ... Completely unconscious of the camera, with able pantomimic accuracy ... she should be seen again and often on the screen.' English journalist P. L. Mannock, acclaimed her to be a 'glamour sensation' in London-based magazine, Picturegoer. Mon Ciné, a popular French magazine at the time, put Wong on the front cover of their July 1924 issue and included a detailed article reviewing Wong's career. In spite of the praise of the Euro-American press, Wong's increasingly eroticised personas in such films as Thief of Bagdad and Piccadilly provoked strong critique from urban Chinese intellectuals. Shanghai's Dianying Zazhi (Movie Magazine), for instance, criticised Wong as 'not satisfy[ing] Chinese peoples' hopes'. Dianying Huabao (The Screen Pictorial), another Shanghai magazine, argued that she failed to 'respect her identity', and urged her to earn the respect of her countrymen. Anna-May Wong herself, along with the wider Chinese American community in California in particular, also vocally expressed their frustrations with Hollywood's depictions either through published articles or self-funded minor film productions. Thus, competing with Hollywood's marketing of Wong's public persona, is arguably the trans-pacifically produced – between the Chinese and Chinese Diasporas – nationalistic rhetoric developing since the 1905 boycott.
Wong's enactment of a 'Chinese prostitute' in Shanghai Express (1932), in particular, heightened this cross-pacific contention over representations of 'Chinese women' and, by extension, of the 'modern Chinese nation'. Set in China during a time of civil unrest, Shanghai Express portrays the adventures of a group of first class passengers travelling on the Shanghai Express – a train from Beijing to Shanghai. In the film China is painted as an exotic place which by nature proves incompatible with modern development. Before the train even starts, the foreign passengers bet on how late the train will be when it eventually arrives at Shanghai station. As one American passenger asserts, 'we are in China now ... where time and life have no value'. At the heart of the narrative is thus the tension caused by this perceived incongruity of time – specifically that between the universal modern time the train is engineered to follow, and the timelessness of China which can affect even modern technology, or in this case, the train to derail from its temporal track. As framed in Figure 1 for instance, Chinese people and livestock wander on the railroad tracks, literally blocking the train from progressing forward.
China is thus portrayed as a place inherently incompatible with modern progress, revealing the chronopolitics of modernity through which non- Western worlds, in this case China, are measured to be always lagging behind in a teleological logic of modern development.
Not only is China depicted as a place temporally out of step with modern progress, it is framed as a site where 'modernity' is easily led astray. This can also be detected through the varied depictions of the film's two heroines. As the tale's main heroine Shanghai Lily (a British escort played by German actress Marlene Dietrich) explains her 'fallen' situation to her former lover Dr Harvey, she states that 'five years in China is a long time', as if implying that it was precisely her prolonged stay in China that turned her into a wandering prostitute. Opposite Shanghai Lily is the Chinese prostitute Hui Fei (played by Anna May Wong). Unlike Shanghai Lily's degraded status, Hui Fei's is apparently in no need of explanation and, thus, granted none in the narrative. Though the film scripts the two women as travel companions and as both women of infamous profession, it goes to great lengths to differentiate them and, by extension, their respective respectability and desirability.
Their difference is shown immediately once they are introduced into the narrative. At the Beijing station, Hui Fei is carried in on a wooden crate, apprehensively looking around and then shown scurrying onto the train. Shanghai Lily, on the other hand, enters the station in an automobile, and then strides proudly onto the platform. Immediately, the two heroines' access to modern mobility and respectability are differentiated in the film. As Anthony Chan observes, 'Shanghai Lily is the intense, modernised, and motorised Western woman. She is the female foil to Hui Fei, who represents China in all its backwardness and traditional decadence, made even more primitive by her reliance on a human-powered vehicle'. To the first class Euro-American passengers on the train, Shanghai Lily is clearly the more desirable of the two; as an American passenger asserts, 'I thought they were rather good looking, at least Shanghai Lily is.' While a Presbyterian minister laments the sinful presence of these two women in a first class compartment, the British Doctor Harvey proclaims: 'I don't know about the Chinese woman, but for the other lady ... she is a friend of mine.' This hierarchy of desirability is again reasserted when the Doctor refuses to recognise Hui Fei when being introduced by Shanghai Lily, stating that he 'reserve[s] the privilege to choos[e] [his] friends'. In response, Shanghai Lily replies, 'she's no friend of mine, I'm only trying to be decent'. Here we again see a scripted distance in the two characters' allowed proximity to modern propriety and even association.
The two heroines' respectability further diverges as the plot progresses. The villain Mr Chen desires first and foremost Shanghai Lily, yet with the protection of Dr Harvey Shanghai Lily is untouched. Frustrated, Mr Chen in turn manages to rape Hui Fei without much difficulty due to her relatively dispensable place in the eyes of the train's first class passengers. Later on when Shanghai Lily is eventually forced to offer herself to Mr Chen in order to save Dr Harvey, Hui Fei mysteriously appears and kills the villain. By killing off the tale's 'yellow menace', Hui Fei saves the integrity of not only Shanghai Lily but also her relationship with the doctor. The tale thus closes with the lovers reunited. Shanghai Lily reforms in order to be forever with her lover. Hui Fei disappears from the tale as the train arrives at Shanghai station, as expected, four hours late. Here, one can draw an analogy between Hui Fei and China, as they both represent the exterior of a respectable modern imaginary, both morally and temporally out of step with their comparable contemporaries. Moreover, Hui Fei's embodiment of a 'timelessly backward oriental woman' highlights, and eventually enables, Shanghai Lily's becoming a 'respectable modern woman'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from World Cinema and the Visual Arts by David Gallagher. Copyright © 2012 David Gallagher editorial matter and selection. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
Preface; Notes on Contributors; List of Figures; Introduction; Chapter 1. Projecting a More Habitable Globe: Hollywood’s Yellow Peril and Its Refraction onto 1930s Shanghai National Cinema - Lily Wong; Chapter 2. Berlin – The City of Sound and Sensation in Fritz Lang’s ‘M’ and E. A. Dupont’s ‘Varieté’ - Isa Murdock-Hinrichs; Chapter 3. Bond’s Body: ‘Diamonds Are Forever’, ‘Casino Royale’ and the Future Anterior - Shelton Waldrep; Chapter 4. Whatever You Say, Say Nothing - Anna Zaluczkowska; Chapter 5. Imperial Gazes, Hollywood Predators: A Cinema of Molestation in Postcolonial Indian Literature - Jerod Ra’Del Hollyfield; Chapter 6. Linguistic Identity in Fruit Chan’s 1997 Trilogy - Howard Y. F. Choy; Chapter 7. The Postnational and the Aesthetics of the Spectral: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s ‘Flight of the Red Balloon’ - Je Cheol Park; Chapter 8. The Art Object as Text in the Practice of Comparative Visuality - Jane Chin Davidson; Chapter 9. Exploring In-humanity: Gertrude Stein’s ‘Tender Buttons’ and Still-Life Painting - Nandini Ramesh Sankar; Chapter 10. Re-defining Art: Manuel Rivas’ ‘Mujer en el baño’ - Ana-María Medina; Chapter 11. Re-envisioning the Haunting Past: Kara Walker’s Art and the Re-appropriation of the Visual Codes of the Antebellum South - Minna Niemi; Bibliography; IndexWhat People are Saying About This
‘Ranging from Berlin to Shanghai and beyond, ‘World Cinema and the Visual Arts’ is a whirlwind tour through an exhilarating landscape of new scholarship, much of it by young scholars. The perspectives are diverse and fresh. As a collection, it counters the Eurocentrism that continues to dominate English-language academia with a truly global perspective.’ —Dr Chris Berry, Professor of Film and Television Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London
‘This is a marvellously refreshing take on a vital topic. As literary scholars increasingly attend to cinema, they will find this volume an excellent model. It is forthright, well written and thorough.’ —Toby Miller, co-author of ‘Global Hollywood 2’