无声电影《新女性》笔记
- 导演；蔡楚生(1906-1968)，Cai Chusheng, film director
- The silent film was produced and released in 1935 as one of the works of left-wing cinema in China. As one of the cultural media in “modern” China, cinema is a powerful way to shape people’s perception of reality, no less available and accessible to the public than the novel. This film work is a classic in the literature of Chinese feminist movement that gained momentum through the spread of the communist revolution led by the CCP.
- The tradition of women’s liberation 妇女解放运动, in the sense of how people understand it in America, began before the founding of the CCP in 1921 and even before the May Fourth movement 1919. It made itself felt as a political force when the Taiping Rebellion (late Qing period 1860-70s) demanded that bound-feet be discontinued, known as fang-zu 放足, thanks to China’s contact with the West (Christian missionaries, the Opium Wars, study abroad). The Republic Era (1912-49), especially the May Fourth, further articulated Chinese feminism, rendering problematic institutions such as child-bride system, arranged marriage, concubinage, female chastity and martyrdom, as we have seen in Ba Jin’s novel Family. By 1949 when the CCP seized the power over China, more was done for the “New Woman”: marriage law for one man and one woman, women’s right to work.
- Things to pay attention to about the story. The title 新女性 can mean more than the female lead like Wei Ming 韦明 who seems to spearhead the movement for women’s rights: free love, financial independence, gender equality, rights to work and education. Newness is equally visible in other female characters. A Ying 李阿英, the music teacher who is interested in workers union and social revolution. Mrs. Wang 王太太, who uses her role as a traditional housewife as entitlement for more money and assets from her husband. The landlady 老妪who traffics women in stress into prostitution. Shanghai as the biggest cosmopolitan center in China changes the lives of women in many ways. In this sense, the story is a work of social realism about womanhood in transition, just like how the traditional family is undergoing drastic changes in Family, Regret for the Past, Black Li and White Li, or A Kiss.
- As far as Cai Chusheng the director goes, the art of cinematography is not very different from the logic (social thought and ideology) of Marxism. As a leftwinger, Cai warns progressive women in big cities against a bourgeois feminism that Wei Ming personifies: individualism, self-autonomy, free love which are to Cai false liberation that “frees” women from the family only to subjugate them to the exploitation of the capitalist market. (Wei Ming is a social zero after her job is terminated by the school, so that Professor Wang can buy her body.) The film ends with Wei Ming dying in the hospital after her assassination by the press that makes her out as a slut. On the other hand, as the camera crosscuts to the street, the viewer sees A Ying and other factory workers on strike to protest those who own the means of production. The take-away of the film is that communist revolution represents the future for all women when their fate is wrapped up with the liberation of all.