Intellect

Authors:  Guo-Juin Hong 
DOI: 10.1386/jcc.3.3.215/1

Keywords
Shanghai cinema, 1930s China, colonial modernity, melodrama, cinematic space

Abstract
When modernity arrives in China, does it come to be situated in certain locations, and is its presence spatialized in specific ways? How is the spatialization of modernity cinematized and, conversely, how is that cinematic modernity spatialized? This article focuses on the ways in which the cinema produces space in the context of 1930s Shanghai leftist films and illustrates how various competing elements and their spatial meanings are organized, paying close attention to cinema's spatial manifestation of modernity and coloniality. By examining how Shanghai 1930s leftist cinema intervenes and wrestles with an urban-rural, or, better, west-east, course of influence from the colonial and the imperialist forces, I show a corresponding rural-urban movement in the group of urban melodramas analyzed. Finally, I propose a notion of the spatial Now that characterizes the construction of the filmic diegesis that reaches beyond its screen space.