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An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: The Actress As Vernacular Embodiment in Early Chinese Film Culture

An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: The Actress As Vernacular Embodiment in Early Chinese... Copyright © 2001 by Camera Obscura Camera Obscura 48, Volume 16, Number 3 Published by Duke University Press 229 Camera Obscura nese cinema as a mass-mediated yet culturally inflected modern experience. Moreover, by inserting and foregrounding woman’s place, especially that of the first generation of female stars, in the emerging public sphere represented by the cinema, I reconsider the relationship between cinema and the vernacular movement as well as the interaction of verbal and visual culture within the broader scenario of the democratization of writing and iconography. I argue that the figure of the actress in particular embodies the vernacular experience of modernity in early twentiethcentury China. “Amorous” Historiography and Early Film Culture History, for Walter Benjamin, does not unfold in a “homogeneous, empty time.” Likewise, historical thinking that attempts to seize in an illuminating flash the image of nonlinear time and heterogeneous experience, involves “not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. . . . Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad.”1 The year of 1931 in early Chinese film history is for me one of those monadic http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Camera Obscura Duke University Press

An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: The Actress As Vernacular Embodiment in Early Chinese Film Culture

Camera Obscura , Volume 16 (3 48) – Jan 1, 2001

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References (59)

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2001 by Camera Obscura
ISSN
1529-1510
eISSN
1529-1510
DOI
10.1215/02705346-16-3_48-229
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Copyright © 2001 by Camera Obscura Camera Obscura 48, Volume 16, Number 3 Published by Duke University Press 229 Camera Obscura nese cinema as a mass-mediated yet culturally inflected modern experience. Moreover, by inserting and foregrounding woman’s place, especially that of the first generation of female stars, in the emerging public sphere represented by the cinema, I reconsider the relationship between cinema and the vernacular movement as well as the interaction of verbal and visual culture within the broader scenario of the democratization of writing and iconography. I argue that the figure of the actress in particular embodies the vernacular experience of modernity in early twentiethcentury China. “Amorous” Historiography and Early Film Culture History, for Walter Benjamin, does not unfold in a “homogeneous, empty time.” Likewise, historical thinking that attempts to seize in an illuminating flash the image of nonlinear time and heterogeneous experience, involves “not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. . . . Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad.”1 The year of 1931 in early Chinese film history is for me one of those monadic

Journal

Camera ObscuraDuke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2001

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