- [UNTITLED]
- Contributors
- Introduction: Chinese Cinemas and the Art of Extrapolation
- D. W. Griffith and the Rise of Chinese Cinema in Early 1920s Shanghai
- Ombres Chinoises: Split Screens and Parallel Lives in Love and Duty
- Fei Mu, Mei Lanfang, and the Polemics of Screening China
- A National Cinema for a Puppet State: The Manchurian Motion Picture Association
- A Genealogy of Cinephilia in the Maoist Period
- Cold War Politics and Hong Kong Mandarin Cinema
- Conceiving Cross-Border Communities: Mobile Women in Recent Hong Kong Cinema
- Taiwan New Cinema: Small Nation with Soft Power
- Chinese Cinema With Hollywood Characteristics, or How <i>The Karate Kid</i> Became a Chinese Film
- World as Picture and Ruination: On Jia Zhangke’s Still Life as World Cinema
- The Opera Film in Chinese Cinema: Cultural Nationalism and Cinematic Form
- A Small History of <i>Wenyi</i>
- Art, Politics, and Internationalism: Korean War Films in Chinese Cinema
- Edification Through Affection: The Cultural Revolution Films, 1974–1976
- Reforming Vengeance: kung fu and the racial melancholia of chinese masculinity
- Desire and Distribution: Queer/Chinese/Cinema
- Thirdspace Between Flows and Places: Chinese Independent Documentary and Social Theories of Space and Locality
- From Anticorruption to Officialdom: The Transformation of Chinese Dynasty TV Drama
- New Media: Large Screens in China
- Online Small-Screen Cinema: The Cinema of Attractions and the Emancipated Spectator
- Acting Real: Cinema, Stage, and the Modernity of Performance in Chinese Silent Film
- Edward Yang and Taiwan’s Age of Auteurs
- A Marriage of Convenience: Musical Moments in Chinese Movies
- Policing Film in Early Twentieth-Century China, 1905–1923
- Between Will and Negotiation: Film Policy in the First Three Years of the People’s Republic of China
- Fetish Power Unbound: A Small History of “Woman” in Chinese Cinema
- Ethnographic Representation Across Genres The Culture Trope in Contemporary Mainland Media
- Conjuring the Masses: The Spectral/Spectacular Crowd in Chinese Film
- The Idea of Asia(nism) and Trans-Asian Productions
- Film and Contemporary Chinese Art: Mediums and Remediation
- Crossing the Same River Twice: Documentary Reenactment and the Founding of PRC Documentary Cinema
- Remade in China: Cinema with “Chinese Elements” in the Dapian Age
- Along the Riverrun: Cinematic Encounters in Tsai Ming-Liang’s The River
- Afterword (<span xml:lang="chi">尾聲</span>)
- Filmographies
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter examines the critical discourse on acting in early Chinese cinema, and particularly the ways in which the contrast of film acting with stage acting exemplified broader rhetorics of realism, modernity, and scientism in semicolonial China following the May Fourth Movement. An emphasis on realism and mimesis in cinema rather than the formalism and semiosis of traditional Chinese art forms was part of a broader contemporary interest in the idea of objective representation. At the same time, the close-up in particular was thought to demand a new style of “interior performance” in which character emotions were felt by the actor and conveyed through the eyes and face with the purpose of “moving” modern audiences with authenticity. Nonetheless, claims for the unique realism of the film medium must be viewed in light of the growing dominance of realism in all the arts, including theater.
Keywords: realism, formalism, mimesis, semiosis, theater, scientism, objectivity, acting, performance
Jason McGrath is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, where he also serves on the graduate faculty of Moving Image Studies. He is the author of Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age, and his essays on Chinese film have appeared in journals such as Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and The Opera Quarterly as well anthologies including Chinese Films in Focus, The Urban Generation, The Chinese Cinema Book, and China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century. His current projects include an anthology of translated Chinese writings on film and a book manuscript entitled “Inscribing the Real: Realism and Convention in Chinese Film from the Silent Era to the Digital Age.”
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- [UNTITLED]
- Contributors
- Introduction: Chinese Cinemas and the Art of Extrapolation
- D. W. Griffith and the Rise of Chinese Cinema in Early 1920s Shanghai
- Ombres Chinoises: Split Screens and Parallel Lives in Love and Duty
- Fei Mu, Mei Lanfang, and the Polemics of Screening China
- A National Cinema for a Puppet State: The Manchurian Motion Picture Association
- A Genealogy of Cinephilia in the Maoist Period
- Cold War Politics and Hong Kong Mandarin Cinema
- Conceiving Cross-Border Communities: Mobile Women in Recent Hong Kong Cinema
- Taiwan New Cinema: Small Nation with Soft Power
- Chinese Cinema With Hollywood Characteristics, or How <i>The Karate Kid</i> Became a Chinese Film
- World as Picture and Ruination: On Jia Zhangke’s Still Life as World Cinema
- The Opera Film in Chinese Cinema: Cultural Nationalism and Cinematic Form
- A Small History of <i>Wenyi</i>
- Art, Politics, and Internationalism: Korean War Films in Chinese Cinema
- Edification Through Affection: The Cultural Revolution Films, 1974–1976
- Reforming Vengeance: kung fu and the racial melancholia of chinese masculinity
- Desire and Distribution: Queer/Chinese/Cinema
- Thirdspace Between Flows and Places: Chinese Independent Documentary and Social Theories of Space and Locality
- From Anticorruption to Officialdom: The Transformation of Chinese Dynasty TV Drama
- New Media: Large Screens in China
- Online Small-Screen Cinema: The Cinema of Attractions and the Emancipated Spectator
- Acting Real: Cinema, Stage, and the Modernity of Performance in Chinese Silent Film
- Edward Yang and Taiwan’s Age of Auteurs
- A Marriage of Convenience: Musical Moments in Chinese Movies
- Policing Film in Early Twentieth-Century China, 1905–1923
- Between Will and Negotiation: Film Policy in the First Three Years of the People’s Republic of China
- Fetish Power Unbound: A Small History of “Woman” in Chinese Cinema
- Ethnographic Representation Across Genres The Culture Trope in Contemporary Mainland Media
- Conjuring the Masses: The Spectral/Spectacular Crowd in Chinese Film
- The Idea of Asia(nism) and Trans-Asian Productions
- Film and Contemporary Chinese Art: Mediums and Remediation
- Crossing the Same River Twice: Documentary Reenactment and the Founding of PRC Documentary Cinema
- Remade in China: Cinema with “Chinese Elements” in the Dapian Age
- Along the Riverrun: Cinematic Encounters in Tsai Ming-Liang’s The River
- Afterword (<span xml:lang="chi">尾聲</span>)
- Filmographies
- Index
