The Politics of Remediation: Mise-en-scene and the Subjunctive Body in Chinese Opera Film

Abstract

Chinese opera films, which flourished during the early decades of the People's Republic of China, were by no means a clearly demarcated territory. Nor was the label for the emerging genre fixed. Between 1949 and 1963, filmmakers, dramatists, and critics engaged in heated debates on the conception, form, and techniques for the making of opera films. These debates were highlighted in three major forums (1956, 1959, 1962) jointly held by the Chinese Dramatists Association and the Chinese Film Association along with other parties, stimulating further discussions published in the major film and drama journals such as Chinese Cinema (Zhongguo dianying), Film Art (Dianying yishu), The People's Cinema (Dazhong dianying), and The Drama Monthly (Xiju bao).1 The debates regarding the making of opera films in the 1950s and early 1960s strike me as unparalleled. Few moments in the history of Chinese film criticism have been so intensely focused on questions of form and medium. At first sight, the multiple labels given to opera films—“opera art documentary,” “opera art film,” and “indigenous musical”—did not so much highlight the instability of opera film as an emerging genre as they reflected the renewed tensions and affinities between cinema and theater: between realistic settings and symbolic performance, between sound and image, between cinematic and theatrical organization of space and time, and between the centrality of the actor's body and the role of the filmmaker and film editor.