CHINESE CINEMA: THE SECOND GENERATION

This is the second in a six-part series looking at the history of Chinese cinema. Each post will focus on one of the "six generations" which compromise the chronological basis for most histories of Chinese filmmaking - here is the first part.

DON'T MENTION THE WAR



In 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria in Northern China. The same year, the Kuomintang government implemented new censorship measures to assert government control over the ideological content of Chinese films.

Article 2 of the Film Inspection Law banned the screening of films that were deemed to "impugn the dignity of the Chinese race", "damage the culture of virtue and public order", "advocate superstitions" or otherwise violate KMT ideology.

Throughout the 'Nanjing Decade' (1928-37) Chiang Kai-shek sought to appease the Japanese forces, and filmmakers who tried to rouse audiences against the Japanese could find themselves at the sharp end of government censors.

Yet, by suppressing "superstitious" films, the KMT helped those who were trying to move Chinese cinema in a realist direction, away from kung fu films, ghost stories and recreations of traditional opera. This contributed to the first "golden age" of social realist cinema in China - the so-called New Cinema Movement of the 1930s - which is chronicled in Laikwan Pang's 'Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-Wing Cinema Movement, 1932-1937'.

In September 1931, the newly-founded Chinese Left-Wing Dramatists' Association drew up a list of their major goals, including ones that pertained to film - what Pang calls "the first left-wing collective strategic involvement in cinema":

"Besides writing film scripts for, and sending our members to different film companies, we should also prepare funding to produce our own films. At the moment, in order to escape government censorship, our scripts should continue to reveal (rather than criticise directly) social problems... We should also organise a Film Research Group, bringing in progressive performers and technicians in order to establish a solid ground for the forthcoming Chinese left-wing cinema movement."

Ever since the right-wing of the KMT had tried to exterminate the Communists in Shanghai in 1927, the CPC had retreated from urban centres into the countryside, remote from the rapidly changing heartlands of Chinese film. Recent scholarship therefore suggests that the connections between the left-wing cinema movement and the CPC were more tenuous than was previously supposed.

One of the factors behind the movement was the crisis that befell Chinese cinema at the beginning of the start of the 1930s - the late 1920s had seen a rapid growth in the number of studios and move theatres, because it was seen as a commercial growth centre and a safe bet for investors.

But the occupation of Manchuria and political unrest damaged the Chinese economy and dampened audience demand. Given the high start-up costs in the industry, struggling producers felt they had no choice but to adapt to changing public tastes, and to seek out new audiences.

In the illustrious output of the New Cinema Movement, these two imperatives were combined - social realist films catered to the more sober concerns of moviegoers, whilst bold technical and aesthetic innovations were pursued in order to elevate the status of cinema as a "serious" artform in its own right.

As was mentioned in the previous post, traditional aesthetic assumptions shaped the reception of film as a medium in China. In particular, early films were criticised for seeming to combine the worst in Chinese opera and painting: classical Chinese paintings were viewed on scrolls, a section at a time, to give the impression that the viewer was moving through a continuous landscape. In this sense, China had "moving" pictures before the advent of film (a subject explored in more detail here).

FREEING THE FLOW

But films based on traditional Chinese stories and plays were inevitably discrete, lapsing forward through time between acts and scenes. Early Chinese film critics tended to judge them as if they were paintings, and disapproved of the lack of continuity.

The left-wing filmmakers who wanted to use cinema to highlight pressing social issues - organised crime in the cities, governmental and warlord corruption, poverty, gender inequality - saw in the groundbreaking work of Soviet cinema the means to address cultural conservatism in film criticism and to get inside the heads of the masses and move them to act together: montage.

Two key groups were formed in the early 1930s - the Film Critics Group and the CPC-organised Film Group. The latter was a short-lived grouping of the remnants of the CPC's urban agents and cultural insiders - Pang argues it was "more a reaction to, or a product of, the left-wing film movement, than it was its cause" -  that operated underground, aiming to infiltrate cinema with Party propaganda.

By contrast, the Film Critics Group intended to create a public forum for debating cinematic theory and technique. It was active into the 1940s, importing Soviet films such as the works of Eisenstein, and translating theoretical works including Film Technique and Film Acting by V. I. Pudovkin.

Here is a picture of its author.

Pudovkin was one of the pioneers of using montage in Bolshevik cinema to stir his audience and instill proletarian virtues in them. He once wrote: "The foundation of film art is editing." As in China, this technique had emerged in response to a more prosaic concern - namely, the shortage of film available in Russia.

Yet it facilitated extraordinary bursts of imagination and creativity. Here is how Jonathan Jones describes Pudovkin's method in his obituary:

"Pudovkin theorised that actors on screen do not really act; it's their context that moves us - something established, through montage, by their relationship to exterior objects... 'The Mother' (1926) is full of shots of the Russian landscape. At first these seem almost random; only in the final march on the prison does the full power of the imagery hit home. As the mother and comrades march towards the prison [to free her son, imprisoned for anti-Tsarist activities], it's spring and the snow is starting to melt. Cut to an immense frozen river, its surface cracking, splitting. This is a piece of Marxist poetry. The river is history, flowing unstoppably, breaking out of the carapace of ice under which it has been trapped through the long tsarist winter. It's awesome, scary."

Here is that final scene from 'The Mother' (the full film is available here):

In 1928, Pudovkin co-authored, with Eisenstein, 'A Statement on Sound'. As a theoretical response to the inauguration of "talkies" in Hollywood, it strikes a cautiously optimistic note; sound is a positive development, as long as it is used to heighten, rather than cut against, the montage.

Sound, "exactly corresponding with the movement on the screen", interrupts the flow of the montage because the camera must linger:

"To use sound in this way will destroy the culture of montage, for every adhesion of sound to a visual montage piece increases its inertia as a montage piece, and increases the independence of its meaning...operating in the first place not on the montage pieces, but on their juxtaposition."

However, if it is used in a contrapuntal way, in "distinct nonsychronisation with the visual images", then it promises to solve the problem of subtitles acting as a drag on the flow of images.

For all their theoretical sophistication, these Russian filmmakers were technologically behind developments in Hollywood - but the Chinese were even further behind. Pang writes:

"Only after the commercial movie industry had become stable and had succeeded in attracting a larger number of spectators did other interested parties discover the power of cinema and begin to experiment with the medium. In Europe and the Soviet Union, this change took place in the 1910s and 1920s, and many artists and intellectuals began to participate in the making of and the theorisation about cinema; in China, the left-wing progressive cinematic movement did not take place until the 1930s."

Twin Sisters (1933)

Still, the 1930s isn't regarded as the first "golden age" of Chinese cinema for nothing. When Japan bombed Shanghai in 1932 (destroying, amongst other things, seven movie theatres and eight studios), the tone of the New Cinema Movement became increasingly critical of the KMT's weakness, though they still had to attack proxies to circumvent the censors.

An example of this is Zheng Zhengqiu's Twin Sisters (1933), which is ostensibly a critique of injustice under warlord rule, not KMT rule, but would have rung true with its disillusioned audience. Even so, according to Pang, Zheng fell on the liberal/moderate end of the reformist cinema scale: his films end with "reconciliation, not confrontation."

In response to the leftists, the modernist writer Liu Na'ou published an article in April 1933 called 'Questions about the depth of expression in Chinese cinema', which triggered a highly-publicised "Hard-cinema" vs. "Soft-cinema" debate. Liu criticised early leftist films for being overly functional and utilitarian, for saturating the characters and story with political messages. He argued, by analogy, that film was a soft element, and hence better suited to "soft" subjects, principally arts and entertainment.

But the industry's bias for sentimentality only served to provoke the left into new ways of marketing their message; of making it accessible, moving and entertaining at the same time.

In 1934 two seminal pictures in Chinese film history were released: The Goddess and New Woman. Both films featured Ruan Lingyu in their lead role, and she quickly became the most internationally famous Chinese film actress.

Here is The Goddess in its entirety. Ruan gives an mesmerising performance as an urban single mother forced into prostitution and sucked into the mafia underworld - it's a wonderful example of how much of an inner life can be communicated through silent film.

INTERVAL: THE SOLITARY ISLAND STORY

After Chiang Kai-shek officially declared war against Japan - the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-45) - filmmakers had greater freedom to use their medium to issue stirring patriotic appeals; not merely exposing Japanese oppression, but inciting audiences to rise against it, and heroising those who did.

It must be remembered that the mercurial political dynamics of this whole period make entirely clean-cut chronological categories redundant - for example, the patriotic Children of Troubled Times was released in 1935, and first featured the song that would become the national anthem of the PRC - 'March of the Volunteers':

When the KMT government retreated to the inland city of Chongqing, much of the film industry went with it. Only Shanghai remained, surrounded on all sides by the Japanese forces - hence this period is referred to as the "Solitary Island" period in Chinese film.

No history of second-generation Chinese cinema would be complete without Yuan Muzhi's Street Angel (1937), which falls on the other end of the spectrum from the more moderate morality plays of directors such as Zheng (Yuan actually joined the CPC in 1940, though his sympathies are abundantly clear throughout the film).

Stylistically, we can observe from the credits sequence alone the progress Chinese film has made over the previous decade: a cacophony of effervescent neon lighting, rapid cuts of the summits of tall city buildings, and even slumbering lions (reminiscent of the famous Odessa steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin).

Symbolising the polarisation of social classes, the camera pans vertically downwards from the top of a skyscraper to the street-level, and then seems to continue, to subterranean depths - we are dealing with the social world of the urban underclass, whom one of the tragic characters describes at the end as "ants". 

We can see a kaleidoscope of international modernist influences at play in the jaunty angles of the crowds, the symbolic cut-aways (e.g. to explosions in a battlefield when a breeze through a window disrupts a domestic scene), and hallmarks of German Expressionism in the rapid dissolves and high-contrast lighting.

"It has even been described as a Chinese forerunner of Italian neo-realism. A canonised leftist film, it combines Hollywood and Soviet film techniques with traditional Chinese narrative arts."

It is a tragicomic tale of people denied medical care and legal justice because of their financial circumstances - and who ultimately find that they cannot defeat the system.

"Are you dejected? No! - we have to straight up." That is the response of Ruan Lingyu's long-suffering toymaker to her barrage of misfortune in Sun Yu's Little Toys (1933).

Ruan plays a widow who moved to the city to avoid skirmishes between rival warlords, but she ends up losing her children too, and faces impoverishment because her traditional craft production can't compete with the flashier foreign imports. Yet, as indicated, it has a more defiantly upbeat ending than Street Angel - the audience discovers her son survived, and is doing well, and Ruan's character does not abandon hope.

And yet it was this sort of against-the-odds optimism that made the Communists deeply suspicious of Sun's output - they considered it a gloss on problems that had societal roots. Films like Little Toys were thus condemned as romantic poetry that failed to directly criticise the KMT.

Unfortunately, Ruan's life story did not have a happy ending either: after being hounded by the press for a string of failed relationships, she committed suicide aged only 24. Thousands of her fans lined the streets for her funeral and she became immortalised as an icon of youth. (In 1992 she was portrayed by Maggie Cheung in a film about her life, Centre Stage, which is available here.)

One of the most important films of the late 1940s is The Spring River Flows East (1947), an epic 190mins two-part melodrama made by the renowned director Cai Chusheng and the documentarian Zheng Junli.



Cai Chusheng (1906-68)

Here we find a married couple torn apart by the Sino-Japanese war, following widely diverging trajectories. The film is notably critical of those who collaborated with the Japanese and try to avoid facing justice in peacetime (as represented by the collaborationist factory manager who escapes imprisonment through having political connections) - therefore, whilst not directly attacking the KMT, the film leaves its themes open to this wider interpretation.

The last second generation director I want to draw attenton to is Fei Mu.


Fei Mu (1906-51)


One of the last films to be released before the founding of the PRC, Fei's Spring in a Small Town (1948) came first in 2005 in a vote by Hong Kong critics for the 100 greatest Chinese films.

Coming after the New Cinema and 'Solitary Island' periods, the film typical of a short-lived batch of so-called "heart films." It is focussed squarely on intimate personal relationships, with civil war politics relegated to the background. An unhappily married couple who have lost a fortune during the war wander around their delapidated family compound, avoiding each other. Spring is coming, but the husband is chilled by his wife's cold demeanour around him. A visitor arrives, a schoolfriend of the husband who turns out to have had a romance with the wife before the war, before she settled down.

It is differentiated from the earlier leftist films by form as much as content: gone are the swift-cut montages, replaced by lingering tracking shots - including a wonderful shot that passes through a hole in the courtyard wall to find the solitary husband; characters stare in different directions out of frame, but the viewer rarely gets to know what they are seeing. These are the hallmarks of neo-realism.

To reiterate the significance of China's second generation filmmakers, here is a quote from Alison W. Conner's article, 'Movie Justice: The Legal System in Pre-1949 China':

"These early films are of special interest because, unlike almost all post-1949 mainland Chinese movies, they were produced by commercial, not government-controlled, studios. Despite increased censorship and regulation after 1931, China's first and second generation of movie producers and screenwriters remained remarkably free... [National film censorship] committee members often defied Nationalist party directives and almost all movies were produced by commercial studios... Factional struggles within the government also reduced the effectiveness of their control."

Or, to quote from another essay:

"By the end of the 1940s, film was no longer seen as pure visual entertainment, nor as mere moral preaching; it was an art form in which the artists and the audience alike confronted and negotiated pressing social issues and imagined various solutions, be they revolutionary or conservative. It is this relatively free space of imagination and contestation that would be increasingly narrowed and eventually erased in the subsequent decades."

Only a few years later, Spring in a Small Town was banned by the new regime - the Communists had very different ideas about what purposes cinema should serve.

CHINESE CINEMA: THE FIRST GENERATION

This is the first in a series of six posts tracing the history of Chinese cinema. Each post will focus on one of the "six generations" which comprise the chronological basis for most histories of Chinese filmmaking.

EDISON'S ELECTRIC SHADOWS

The details about exactly how and when the first films were shown in China is unclear (many records of this embryonic phase have been lost or destroyed in the intervening years). But it could not have been later than August 11, 1896, when a set of short films were screened at the Xu Garden in Shanghai.

One theory is that the Lumiere Brothers brought film to China; another is that the experimental films of Thomas Edison were the first to be shown.

Perhaps Chinese spectators' first glimpse of the new medium was something like Edison's 1898 short below, of a parade by overseas Chinese in San Francisco.

As in the West, some early Chinese screenings got off to a less than auspicious start. According to the online journal The Chinese Mirror:

"In 1904, for a celebration of the Empress Dowager Ci Xi's 70th birthday, a British envoy in Beijing contributed a film projector and several films to be shown at the festivities.  Unfortunately, during the performance a generator supplying power to the equipment malfunctioned and exploded.  The superstitious Empress Dowager took this as an omen, and issued a decree that motion pictures should never again be allowed in the palace.  This decree was short-lived, however, as an advertisement in Shenbao two years later trumpeted the arrival of several new films for exhibition in the Summer Palace from "9 each evening till midnight, closed Sundays."  Even the Empress Dowager herself seems to have reconsidered, as records show that in 1906 she presented a local official she favored with a film projector and several films for his enjoyment."

But the first Chinese-made motion picture was not completed until 1905 - a recording of the popular Beijing opera The Battle of Dingjunshan. All recordings of it were lost in a fire, and the image below is the only still that remains.

The first Chinese feature-length (semi-) fiction movie was not made until 1921 - a docudrama entitled Yan Ruisheng, based on a real-life murder case that scandalised Shanghai's high society.

Besides technical constraints, one of the reasons for the initial slow start was political. In the years preceding the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the Empress Dowager belatedly accepted the need for certain limited reforms of education, the economy and governance, aimed at strengthening the imperial state against foreign "barbarians."

This required Western technology and practices, and also careful management of the process of opening by the state to preserve the "essence" of traditional Chinese culture. It meant that new technologies should be introduced gradually, and only once the rulers felt it was safe to do so.

In practice, the weakness of late imperial authorities was such that all they really did was slow down the penetration of particular technologies. But Chinese critics, artists and intellectuals still faced the challenge of persuading elites and masses alike that cinema was Western in "form" yet Chinese in "essence."

The film historian Jubin Hu has described the response in Projecting a Nation: Chinese National Cinema Before 1949. He notes the importance of the first Chinese term used to describe motion pictures - "Western shadowplay" (xiyang yingxie) or "electric shadows", which framed the new medium as nothing more than a slight modification of popular traditional Chinese shadow-play theatre (piyingxi). In this way, cinema was imagined as less a Western invention of a new art-form, but merely a Western technical adaptation of a longstanding Chinese art-form. Foreigners rented tea-houses to screen movies during variety shows.

Here is a clip from Zhang Yimou's To Live (1994) that features the protagonist acting out a shadow-play show at 04:25:

As a result of this sort of cultural positioning, the first Chinese movies were simply recordings of already-popular Chinese art-forms, like Beijing opera, and so movies appeared to be a curiosity (and cheaper than going to see a real opera), but not anything portending a step-change in "serious" art. Filmmaking suffered from a lack of investment, and it was held in low regard. Writes Jubin: "Film screenings were inserted between fireworks and conjuring, both traditionally seen as trivial, low culture entertainment... They saw film as a plaything."

That began to change when China became a republic.

THE PEOPLE VS. THE GENERALISSIMO

In the 1920s a new impetus was given to making "national cinema" (guopian), which now meant cinema that the Nationalist government of the Kuomintag considered conducive to the forging of a modern, strong and efficient nation-state.

The emphasis shifted in favour of more rapid importation of Western technologies and techniques. China's ability to develop a thriving national cinema industry became an important indicator of the nation's general fitness to catch-up to the West and reclaim its former standing in the world. Jubin has described how, for most of the 1920s, the government's goal was a Chinese-owned and Chinese-operated film industry making films that would contribute to a renewed sense of national identity, rather than explicitly pro-KMT film censorship that might alienate audiences and retard the industry's growth:

"The major concern of advocates of a Chinese national cinema was the Chinese nation, rather than Chinese cinema per se... The emphasis was therefore placed on the national ideology of this cinema, rather than on national culture as form."

The simple fact was that Chinese audiences loved watching foreign films (even, apparently, ones with blatantly racist overtones). If China was to develop an indigenous movie-making industry, it would need to make movies that could compete with foreign imports by catering to Chinese audiences' taste for Hollywood romances, dramas and comedies. This implied an overdue recognition of the newness of national cinema in China on the part of artists and critics - Jubin quotes Paul Clark:

"Film is the most foreign art form introduced into China in the Westernising cultural upsurge known as the May Fourth movement at the beginning of the twentieth-century. Film (along with modern-style spoken drama) was totally new, with no precursors in traditional Chinese literary and artistic activities."

Chinese cinema of this period was driven by commercial imperatives, and popular genres varied from adaptations of so-called "butterfly literature" (conservative, pro-family dramas) to more sensual and erotic pictures taking their cue from the Chinese writer Mao Dun's advocacy of "love for the sake of love." Melodramas with artificially-imposed happy endings (guangming de weiba) proved popular. There were also "ghost" thrillers, costume dramas, some slapstick comedies, and action films that were early incarnations of the martial arts for which Chinese cinema would become famous (many such films can be viewed here).

One of the earliest such films to use martial arts effects is Poor Daddy (1929) by the Kung Fu pioneer Ren Pengnian.

Here is a clip from the film - a fight when a man catches a burglar in his house.

The Orphan (1929)

Another early action film was The Orphan (1929), which you can view here. Films like The Orphan set the mould for "women warriors" (nuxia) like Pearl Chang in later Kung Fu movies. As the commentary on the Classical Iconoclast blog suggests, the film is also a historical curiosity, since many silent pictures of the time lack English subtitles:

"The English titles show that the film makers wanted to reach a wider audience, outside China itself. The "Orator" is John Chow who also "storied" the text. That's a historical archive, too, a very rare example of China Coast English, which was a curious hybrid of Victorian formality filtered through Missionary school, but "Chinese" too, because it follows Chinese grammar which doesn't use as many non essentials as English. When Chun Mei rues her fate, her words could come straight out of a Bible tract. People really did use to talk like that."

Even among the commercial fare it would be unfair to ignore the more idealistic filmmakers who used allegory and allusion to give voice to a social conscience. On the subject of national cinema, Yingjin Zhang writes:

"Not only can one locate in Zheng Zhengqiu's films of the 1920s an allegorical structure whereby family dramas were eventually made to play out on the overarching theme of "national salvation", but one can also discern in Zhang Shichuan's "escapist" films of romance (derogatorily referred to as "Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies") and swordsmanship (gongfu) in the same period a fundamental concern with the fate of the nation."

Zhang Shichuan

The partnership of Zheng Zhengqiu's determination to change society and Zhang Shichuan's ambition to make a lot of money is crucial in the story of early Chinese cinema.



Zheng Zhengqiu



Zhang, a hard-headed businessman, decided to invest in setting up a film production company after getting tired of waiting for his stock exchange trading license to be approved. Zheng was a filmmaker with an earnest view of his own profession's responsiblity toward society, closely modelled on the ideology of the founder of the republic, Dr. Sun Yat-sen: "To strive for the development of Chinese cinema, we must unite those film companies who cherish the same ideals and struggle together."

 

Thus, the commercial and the communal converged on the need for greater market concentration in what was an extremely fragmented industry composed of small "grab-and-run" one-production studios. One was motivated by profit, the other by national identity and prestige, but the end was the same.

Together, they co-founded the Minxing Film Company (Star Studios) in 1922. It was one of the first well-resourced, professional Chinese film outfits. Here is a picture of its first offices.

And here is the entrance to the Minxing studios.

One of their crucial insights was that Chinese cinema needed its own pool of talent to recruit from, independent of the stage and variety troupes that until then had supplied Chinese films with their casts. So Minxing opened its own film school to train new talent, and they encouraged continuity in allocating specific actors to specific directors, in order to build working relationships that would pay dividends in the finished product. They also set up their own magazine to promote awareness of their Chinese-made, internationally-competitive films, the "Morning Star." For their concerted effort to raise standards in the industry, the Minxing co-founders were known as the "tiger generals."

Warner Bros.-inspired logo of Shaw
Brothers Studio, estd. 1930

Two other significant film companies were established soon afterwards - Tianyi, founded by the Shaw Brothers in 1925, and Lianhua in 1929. But by the end of the decade, Chinese cinema was still overwhelmingly dominated by foreign imports. According to the Shanghai Historical Film Materials: 

"The film market in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s was monopolised by British and American films... The Americans and British had their distribution companies in all big cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, and Guangzhou... China produced 89 feature films in 1933, while the figure of imported films in that year reached 421. Among those imported films, 309 were American."

Chinese film companies had to compete with an integrated network of modern movie theatres such as Empire and Odeon. They responded by trying to modernise and consolidate - in 1927 there were around 180 Chinese-owned film production companies (150 of which were located in Shanghai, "China's Hollywood") and by 1930 this had been reduced to about a dozen significant companies. However, this restructuring was also the result of many smaller companies going bankrupt after the market bubble in martial-arts costume dramas burst in the late '20s. Film companies taking the long view established theatre chains across the South East Asian Chinese diaspora (foreign-owned theatres on the mainland showed foreign-made films).

But they were beset from all sides by social and political instability. In 1925-6 the film industry was temporarily throttled by a General Strike that reached into Shanghai and Hong Kong. Recovering from the instability was one of the reasons Chinese film still lagged behind the West technologically.


The Hero Gan Fengchi (1928)



For instance, in adopting sound some time after the first Western "talkies" appeared. The perceived financial risk was too great; Lianhua's star director Cai Shusheng was not alone in this: "I still don't trust sound machines. Therefore, I would rather make silent films (in peace) than take the risk of making sound films." When Minxing began making "talkies", the wax recording instruments they had to rely on were so poor that Zheng Shichuan started taking large doses of opium in between scenes calm his nerves.



If that wasn't bad enough, at the beginning of the 1930s China's film industry became a target of Chiang Kai-shek's "New Life Movement", aimed at purifying the nation with an ethos of military discipline. Essentially, the Generalissimo was against almost everything that Chinese moviegoers enjoyed going to watch. In his Brief History of Hong Kong Cinema, Paul Fonoroff writes: "In an effort to stamp out superstition and moral decadence, the KMT banned what had become the bread-and-butter of the Shanghai film industry: ghost stories and martial arts films."

More specifically, Yingjin tells us that the KMT set up a National Film Censorship Commitee in 1931:





"The Nationalist government sought to incorporate film-making in its nation-building project. Specifically, it promoted the following as crucial elements of a modern nation: Mandarin as a unified national language (it tried to curtail if not terminate the production of Cantonese-dialect films in southern China), a rational mind (it banned films with explicit religious and superstitious themes), a healthy body (it promoted the athletic look in a new generation of film stars), and Confucian ethics (it frequently ordered the pornographic and sexy sequences to be cut before the films could be released)."

In place of ghosts, swords and sex went a return to Chinese tradition - the KMT wanted more films based on Beijing operas in order to build a shared cultural identity around history. The focus of the Nationalists had thus shifted from technique to content.

Quite apart from the New Life Movement, dramatic events off-screen after 1932 would turn the 'second generation' of Chinese filmmakers away from melodramas and towards "national salvation" - though not of the sort the KMT wanted.