Monthly Archives: December 2011

Charlie Chaplin is often remembered as the greatest comedian in the world, but I always have the impression that he did not smile much in his films. In my memory, we watched an excerpt from Modern Times in one of our middle school classes, and it made us burst into laughter several times because of his exaggerated performances. At that time, I only laughed for his silly encounters, and it was not until the adulthood when I revisited his films again that I realized that the uncomical social reality was in fact deeply rooted in his humor. Although there are various methods to make people laugh, the superior one is not to mock the ugliness of the society, but to speak for the least powerful groups.

In the 1930s when Chaplin’s films were imported to China one of the early film critique says, “Charlie Chaplin’s films are well received by all walks of life…his body gestures are creative and audiences are touched by his performance…he can make people laugh in tears.” [1] Charlie tended to portray the characters of the weak in society, and transformed the miserable experiences into comical effects. That is why he is not only respected for bringing us laughter, but also for evoking our conscience towards social reality. Hu Ke, a contemporary film critic, argued that the popularity of Chaplin’s films in the 1930s influenced the rising of a new genre in China, namely, the comedy with uncomical social backgrounds. One example he mentioned was a film about a poor couple, who did not know each other originally but were accidentally married after going through the rituals arranged by the matchmaker.[2] It showed the absurdity of the daily life and also aroused the deep sympathy for the people living in margins of society.

Recently in Chinese college students’ online forums, one comedian, called Joe Wong, has been discussed a lot, because he uses imperfect English to perform talk shows in the United States. I am not sure whether he is well received among American audiences, but he once gave a performance in White House to express his humor, “I used to have a used car…and…with lots of stickers that are not possible to peel off.(laughter in the audience) And one of them said, ‘If you don’t speak English, go home!’ (laughter in the audience) I did not know this about two years. ” From his speech I find his humor comes from the hard experiences as an immigrant in a new land where he can not even speak sufficiently. What makes his jokes even more striking is that he actually successfully makes a living by talking to people in English. One of the characteristics of the humor shared by both Chaplin and Wong is that their profoundness comes from their concerns about the society, and they never separate themselves from the unprivileged people.

[2] Hu Ke, The Influence of Charlie Chaplin’s Film Comedy Upon the Ideas of Early Chinese Films, Rewriting Film History. Page 109.

Many Chinese young people born in the 1980s might have these memories: as part of the compulsory political education, our elementary schools organized free film-screening events in movie theaters after class. Many movies simplified the morality according to the ideology the party embraces by describing communist heroes fighting against Japanese intruders in the 1930s, loyal cadres serving the people while ignoring their deteriorating health, and youngsters dying just to save public properties from fire. These films reassured the dominant value by arousing the sympathy from the audience and the whole social institutions enforced its agenda in China.

One of these films called “Red Cherry” has left me with strong impression since I watched it in the 1990s. The story settings are during World War II in occupied Moscow, where a Chinese young girl in a concentration camp is later sent to detention under a fascist officer who enjoys tattooing on human skins. Much of the movie portrays her experience as the victim but with the intense emotion of hope. The climax comes after the liberation of these detainees and she burns herself to remove the tattoo of a symbol of fascism on her back as she regards it as a persistent shame. The film evoked my sympathy partly because of the melodramatic elements that are stereotyped in the sensational settings, scenes of suffering, and victimization of women. The director did not use scenes of brutal wars, bloody fights, and dead bodies to assure the empathy from the audiences, but rather he exploits the inner world with these melodramatic elements. There were striking scenes in which the heroine, surrounded by German officers, was naked on a table to show the so called artistic tattoo on her body, and through her eyes we could see her emotions changing from fear to despair. On one hand, the sympathy from the audience and the hatred of the villains, stimulated by the sensational scenes, are moral practices that serve educational purposes for the youngsters who have watched the ideological films. On the other hand, the accumulated emotions can be manipulated to create the standard morals that are politically correct.

Although it is not very explicit in this film, we can still have a taste of its ideological potential as propaganda by examining the facts that the director of Red Cherry is the grandson of a military general during 1911 Xinhai Revolution, and the story is based on the true experience of the daughter of Zhu De, one of the founding fathers of P.R. China. These facts further assured and justified the leadership of the higher officials through the establishment of their difficulties in earlier times and their legacies. In addition, the production of the film follows a pattern of production within the propaganda system. Usually movies for moral or ideological education are produced according to the scheme from official departments, and often they respond to a particular social discourse generated by the state. For example, Red Cherry was made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the victory over the fascist war, and there was a film called “The Founding of a Republic” to memorialize the 60th anniversary of the founding of the nation, and a film “Beginning of the Great Revival” came out just before the 80th birthday of the China Communist Party. Although these facts do not directly correspond to the topic of melodramatic feelings of this essay, my emphasis here is to describe a more comprehensive picture of the ideological space that contains both the social institutions such as the propaganda machine in general, and the melodramatic sentiments within the films.

It is interesting to find both Lotz and Arnheim more or less directly answered the question in their articles. Arnheim’s piece written in 1935 claimed that the pervasiveness of the Television makes people retreat from the physical public life. He was quite pessimistic towards the situation and warned that “doing things at the same time and doing them together is not quite the same.” In the network-era described in Lotz’s article, the norms regarding the question changed into the argument that Television effectively serves as a cultural forum where shared contents for discussion are provided. One of the most significant characteristics identified by Lotz in post network-era is the fragmentation of viewers as multi-channel enables a broad range of niche and audiences can also view on-demand for specific shows. Theories of network-era seem to also share a concern that the fragmented audiences might be a threat to public cultural forum. However at the same time, in the post network-era, Lotz argues “Television operates as subcultural forum when it reproduces a similar experience as the electronic public sphere, but among more narrow groups that share particular cultural affinities or tastes”. It appears to be that the understandings and expectations of public life/public sphere/cultural forum also experience the changes with the shifts of the technology of the Television. Is that the fact that people expect less from each other in terms of physical interactions in the process? or in the words of Bourdieu and Putnam’s social capital, does a fragmented society mean a declining public participation?

Before Juul started to provide his definition of games in the beginning of his article, he pointed out the language issue. In English the word “game” contains the meaning of sports such as the soccer. And I remember how surprised I was in middle school when I found the translation of “Olympic Games” were actually games, because in Chinese sports and games have quite distinct meanings. In Chinese you might say “play a game” but you will not say “play soccer”, and even though in conversations, you put “play” in front of some sports, the emphasis of the meaning changes to hobbies instead of competitiveness of games. I thought Juul would proceed to analyze the differences of the understanding of games in other cultures, but he attempted to provide a universal definition of games in his article. He also pointed several games in the borderline and some do not belong to games. He must have done lots of work on testing his definition on many games to validate his theory, but I still wonder if the definition is universal? What differences are there in the definition across cultures? and does the definition change with new technology enabling new forms of games? The soccer in ancient China is not even a sport and actually its main purpose is the performance to the emperor and his families. Even though it fits Juul’s definition that it has the rules, I still doubt how easily it is equaled to modern games.

Last year I took a course on the topic of British modernity and the professor mentioned an interesting point that the culture of games and sports has played a central role in the rising of the British emperor. Team games generate the spirit of cooperation, and the addiction to games is the sign of modern concept of privateness of life. The competitiveness of games fits perfectly with the essence of capitalism and confrontational political and legal system. I do not agree there is no game culture in China but some differences of attitudes to games are noticeable in history. Ma Jiang is a widely practiced game and in some cities you can see people just play along the road. Many kids are not allowed to play it because it is little bit of gambling and it is addictive. The so-called game in many ancient literary works is like singing a song or writing a poem, and I think the culture of studying rather than encouraging kids to play games in spare time is still quite strong in contemporary China.

In Bleak House by Charles Dickens, the word “fog” is frequently used to represent both the smoky environment of London and the corruption of the British legal system. When I read the first chapter that contains the description of the fog, what came to my mind was Chong Qing, known as the “City of Fog” in western part of China. In many Chinese literary works, the society of the city in 1940s was portrayed as dark and morally corrupted. The similarity of the metaphorical use of fog in two cultures makes me ask what the reason for the tactic is.

In the beginning of Bleak House, the fog is so pervasive that it covers the whole town and penetrates to every aspect of people’s lives. By stating, “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city” and repeatedly stressing how smoky the city is, Dickens successfully draws the readers’ great curiosity to question what lies behind the weather phenomenon. The words “pollution” and “dirty” may give us some hints that the settings are in the industrializing London in the 19th century and Dickens criticized the unpleasantness of the process of modernization. Then when we read the lines “The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery”, we understand that the source of the fog is Lord High Chancellor, whose darkness is everywhere. Dickens metaphorically used the “fog” and directed us to the conclusion that the bureaucracy and the corruption of the legal system are the roots of the problems.

Fog is a natural phenomenon of Chong Qing because of its geographic location, but it was used as a rhetorical image by many Chinese authors in the 1940s. In Qin Mu’s Fighting in Foggy Chong Qing, it is stated, “Chong Qing, a city of fog, is covered by natural fog and political fog.” The “political fog” refers to the fact that Chong Qing was once set up as the capital city of Kuomintang regime during the War of Anti-Japanese and it was also a period of the last few years of its domination in Mainland China. Xu Chi expressed his observations of the social reality in his memoir “at that time, the fog of Chong Qing was a symbol. It was disturbing and frightening. Houses were set fire in windy weather and people were killed at night. In foggy days ferocious deeds were done. The city was full of the secret police and agencies, and some people disappeared forever in darkness.” The symbolic connection between the fog and Kuomintang’s corrupted rule might be overestimated by authors whose ideology is pro-communist party, but the metaphor used in the Chinese texts resembles many characteristics in Dickens’s Bleak House such as the darkness and the evil of the political system.

I do not intend to argue that the fog is inherently a metaphor of evil, and I agree that in many literary works the fog has been used as a positive symbol, for example, to represent the vague affections between lovers at the beginning stage of relationships. What I am emphasizing here is the importance of the influence of social reality on the choices made by the authors. Characteristics of natural phenomena, such as the pervasiveness of fog, are actually neutral, but how authors use it or interpret it in their works depends on their attitudes towards the social realities where they live.

Some people assume that the silent films are primitive and have low visual quality by modern standards. This misconception might be a result of contemporary conventions formed by modern audiences, who are accustomed to watching films with synchronized sound. I argue that the intense and varied visuality enabled by the silent films in many aspects exceeds contemporary sound films.

Actors in the silent film era have left audiences with even stronger impression because of their creative and expressive performances as compared to their counterparts in sound films. Charlie Chaplin, one of the most famous stars in the world, has brought us happiness and warmth through his visual comedy in the 1920s. In the film of The Gold Rush, when he is acknowledged that the girl he loves will come to visit him on New Year’s Eve, the way he expresses his extreme delight is to jump onto the bed, pick up and throw the pillow. Although in reality people might do the same, what is exaggerated by his performance is the creative scene: the feathers from the pillow fly around the room and fall on to his head, which produces an amusing effect. Similarly creative and expressive scenes can be found in many of his other films, such as the mechanical movements in Modern Times and the fake tree he pretends to be in Shoulder Arms. The exaggeration of performance is particularly important for silent films to transmit the messages to the audience, as there are almost no direct conversations. It is also because of his talented performance that Chaplin has been remembered by audiences of many generations.

It is also worth noting that silent films portray domestic feelings in different ways than dialogues or monologues in sound films. When it comes to the topic of truthfulness, some people readily agree that monologues might be more reliable to represent the true personality. Although I cannot say this view is a complete misconception, I argue that the visuals open up more space for imagination and escape the restrictions of dialogue-centered realism. In The Gold Rush, the Little Fellow is so optimistic and caring that finally he gets his fortune and his love. There is no conversation between characters that depicts his personality, but in the carefully performed hilarious scene in which he turns the boiled boots into a gourmet dinner under the extreme condition of coldness and hunger, every audience member must be touched by his hopefulness. Also, his romance with Georgia is another unforgettable story: He prepared New Year dinner for her but she did not show up, and finally she understood his feelings by discovering his carefully preserved pictures of her under his pillow. These powerful scenes do not have to include dialogues to explain the character’s inner world and have left audiences much room for imagination of the world without sounds. Often it is the absence of the rigid realism that gives audiences the opportunity to explore both the characters’ and their own inner worlds.