Abstract
This essay analyzes how the 1930s Chinese “Soft Film” movement emerged and developed in film historiography, and finds it is a discursive formation by the Leftists to create an ideological enemy that serves to define its own group’s identity through a struggle against an “other”. It challenges the naming of “Soft Film” through examining documents beyond the official archive. Unearthing the film writings of Liu Na’ou as the movement’s leading figure is a good entry point into excavating the history of the people and films associated with the label “Soft Film”. Reconstructing this “reactionary cinema” will reveal previously unknown cultural connections with classical and avant-garde Western film theories, and more importantly renovate the established Chinese film canon of the 1930s.
Highlights
Na’ou as the movement’s leading figure is a good entry point into excavating the history of the people and films associated with the label “Soft Film”
Struggles in Chinese Film historiography Since the 1950s, scholars of early Chinese film history have lamented the difficulty in writing an accurate and comprehensive account of the pre-1949 Chinese film industry. This is attributed to the limited access to existing material and the absence of a systematic record.i The 1963 Maoist account in The History of the Development of Chinese Cinema by Cheng Jihua et al was the first comprehensive study on Chinese film history and has since become the authoritative text for Republican era Chinese film. ii Immediately following the era of reform and opening up in the 1980s, there was a revival in the Leftist film history that further entrenched the book’s historical account in the official discourse
Despite the major headway made by scholars, one key issue that has yet to be fully explicated is the Leftist or Left Wing writers discursive construction of the main film ideological enemy in the 1930s, the so-called “Soft Film” movement
Summary
Some PRC scholars holding a revisionist historical view have appropriately pointed out that Liu’s sophisticated ideas on film as art far exceed Huang Jiamo's original “ice-cream for the eyes” definition This poses a challenge to the very notion of "Soft Film" as a movement with only one key component. The growing scholarly attention on the leading critic Liu Na’ou’s film writings has already opened up an exciting new perspective into the 1930s film It both challenges the simplistic reading of the term “Soft Film” as “ice-cream for the eyes” and an artistic front for feudalistic and imperialist forces. Prior studies which had mostly focused on industry development and milestone films made no mention of either the Leftists and “Soft Film” camps, nor the theoretical debates that took place between them. vi As the book was written under an intense political environment when Party politics dominated all aspects of life, this book places primary emphasis on the Leftist’s role in bringing about the wave of socially conscious and patriotic films
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