What Noise Does a Psychotic Door Listen To? Information, Intermediality, and Guo Baochang's Peking Opera Film Dream of the Bridal Chamber

Abstract

The Chinese opera film criticism of the late 1950s coincided with the introduction of cybernetics to China. Echoing cybernetics’ emphasis on the homeostasis of an artificial or living machine archived by filtering noise from information in the environment, film critics aimed no less at maintaining the steady states of Chinese culture (epitomized by traditional opera) when taking on the treacherous milieu called modernization (in the form of cinema). The whole problematic of opera films—in which one is forced to choose filtering out formulaic operatic gestures or realistic cinematic mise-en-scène as noise to maintain a self-cohesive cultural system—follows from the mistake of essentializing media specificities as prior to the contingent encounter among different mediums. However, an alternative approach lies in treating noise not as interference that must be eliminated but as surplus information that introduces system errors, triggers phase shifts, and brings about random changes for genuine self-organization, allowing us to confront control with the noise in its own channels. A revamping of cybernetics in this regard opens up new possibilities of understanding opera films through the peculiar prism of Guo Baochang's 2005 opera film Chungui meng 春閨夢 (Dream of the Bridal Chamber). And that prism particularly takes the form of a series of moon gates (yueliang men 月亮門), an architectural trope invoked throughout the film signifying the cybernetic circuit of gateways that at once exerts control over and yet is disturbed and reshaped by the noisy signals arising from the mutual interferences among opera, film, and, ultimately, television.