Summary:
Spring Silkworms depicts the plight of Chinese silkworm farmers against the backdrop of imperialist incursion and a weakened rural economy. Living in a village in Zhejiang province, Old Tongbao and his family go into debt acquiring a large quantity of mulberry leaves to ensure the healthy growth of their silkworms. When they finally succeed in having the best cocoon harvest in the village, cheap Japanese synthetic silks flood the Chinese market, drastically driving down silk prices and throwing Old Tongbao’s family further into debt.
Analysis:
In a 1933 symposium on the silent film adaptation of Mao Dun’s celebrated short story ‘Spring Silkworms’ (Chuncan, 1932), a group of filmmakers, scriptwriters, dramatists and film critics associated with the 1930s leftist movement in Shanghai gathered to review the film and discuss its contributions to Chinese cinema. The director Cheng Bugao (1898–1966) used the term ‘literature-film’ (wenxue dianying) to refer to his work, and evoked the considerable responsibility of promoting the New Art Film (Xin wenyi dianying) in relation to New Literature (Xin wenxue).1 The relation between literature and film is further foregrounded by Xia Yan (1900– 1995), whose script for the adaptation initiates the practice of the ‘cinematic literary script’ (dianying wenxue juben), making Spring Silkworms (henceforth Silkworms) the first Chinese film to be adapted from a work of fiction and shot according to a complete shooting script. Although this seminal role is often alluded to in subsequent Chinese film history, the absence of close critical engagement with the film after the 1933 symposium remains conspicuous and problematic for understanding its formal contributions. In fact, a deeper examination of the initial reception reveals much more ambivalent attitudes toward Silkworms, despite the celebratory language that nominally proclaimed a victory for leftist participation in Shanghai’s filmmaking industry.
Central to the debates were questions of medium specificity (literature vs. film), performance and the dramatic text, as well as the relation between the film’s perceived realism and its appropriation of the ‘educational’ (jiaoyu dianying) and ‘documentary’ (jilu dianying) film genres. The ideological and rhetorical unity of cinematic ‘achievement’ notwithstanding, the symposium participants’ detailed comments on the film are overwhelmingly critical and express markedly divergent evaluations of the successes and failures of Silkworms. This lack of consensus among the Silkworms’ core group of supporters offers an important historical context for our contemporary evaluation of the film, and raises a number of interesting questions: Why did the symposium participants react so differently to the film when they were not only in agreement about the ideological significance of the original literary work, but also in their shared political agenda of transforming the film medium from mere entertainment to one that can ‘educate’ and ‘move’ the masses? Why, if all of them acknowledged the adaptation as having faithfully reproduced the powerful realism of the original short story, did they complain of its ‘dull’ quality and lack of emotional affect? How did a film that so unequivocally carried out its representational and didactic aims, in accordance with the aspirations of the left-wing film critics and practitioners, come under scrutiny in what ultimately amounted to a narrative of disappointment and failure?2
This essay will engage with the above questions by investigating Silkworms’ treatment of the very issues that divided the symposium group – namely, the negotiation between different media, assumptions of a ubiquitous dramatic text that transcends and therefore must be captured by these mediums, and the representational logic that informs the film’s documentary and pedagogical aspirations. In taking this approach, the intertitles and other verbal representations in the film will be taken as a site where issues of medium specificity, dramatic performance and representational modes converge and elucidate the sources of the reviewers’ discontent. Despite being largely overlooked (the intertitles were never directly mentioned by any of the symposium participants, and only twice, indirectly, for their use of animation [katong]), their elaborate design and unique presentation not only destabilise the textual/ visual dichotomy attributed to the mediums of fiction and film, but work to supply orality to the latter, which, in and of itself, is silent. In sum, the intertitles enact processes of remediation and intermediality between literature and film, in which both mediums become more than themselves and, as a result, unsettled the coherence of the leftist cinematic vision.
The 1933 silent film was produced by the Shanghai-based Star (Mingxing) Film Company, the earliest indigenous Chinese film company established in 1920. It was also the first film company to start collaborating with Shanghai-based leftist intellectuals in 1932, the year of the first Japanese bombing of Shanghai. The symposium on Silkworms took place some time between a pre-release screening, held at National Grand Theatre (Zhongyang daxiyuan) on 1 September, and the official opening night at Starlight Theatre (Xinguang daxiyuan) on 8 October. Aside from Xia Yan and Cheng Bugao, also in attendance were eight other active film writers and practitioners, such as Zheng Boqi (1895–1979), Yang Hansheng (1902–1993), A Ying (1900–1977), and others. The discussion was transcribed and published on 8 October, in a supplement to the Morning Post (Chen Bao) called ‘Daily Film’ (Meiri dianying), which was edited by Yao Sufeng (1906–1974), another participant in the symposium. The publication of the symposium transcript on the same day as the film release was obviously strategic, in terms of both advertising the film and dictating its popular reception. Although the publicity proved effective – Silkworms opened to a full house on 8 October, the film closed after just five days in the theatres, suggesting its failure at the box office.
During the symposium discussion, the terms ‘literature-film’ (wenxue dianying), ‘educational film’ (jiaoyu dianying), and ‘documentary film’ (jilu dianying) were evoked repeatedly in analysing Silkworms’ merits and demerits. A brief introduction appended to the published transcript applauds the transformative impact of the film, specifically in its repudiation of theatrical (xiju de) exaggeration and its use of realism, consistent with Mao Dun’s original work.3 However, the comments in the transcript are far less congratulatory. In fact, Xia Yan’s preservation of the elaborate procedures of silk farming in the film script, and the film’s faithful reproduction of these procedures on screen became a point of critique for many symposium participants. Yang Hansheng, a politically active leftist filmmaker and author, takes issue with the heavy use of technical language for silkworm farming in the intertitles and the lengthiness of their corresponding shots. In response, Xia Yan, using the pseudonym Cai Shusheng to avoid censorship by the Kuomintang government, defends this approach by referring to Mao Dun’s use of technical language and emphasising the need to employ ‘documentary’ filming methods in order to ‘educate’ the audience and retain the authenticity found in the original text. In this exchange, Xia implies that the social reality of a village industry in crisis necessitated the lengthy documentation of the labour of silkworm farming. By attributing this need to the original short story, Xia does not simply justify the use of technical language but, more importantly, establishes a link between the documentary mode of filmmaking and the discourse of national struggle. A comparison of the original short story and the script reveals that the marriage between national discourse and the pedagogical function of the documentary mode was the scriptwriter’s own implement, officiated by the prelude he created for the film.
The prelude in the script sets up an opening scene in an elementary school classroom where instruction on the history of China’s silk industry is taking place. A series of intertitles mimicking textbook lessons describe the recent decline of the domestic silk industry under imperialist economic incursion. The tranquil classroom quickly dissolves into a montage of newspaper headlines, economic charts, mounds of man-made silk on the docks of Huangpu River, rioting workers, foreign merchant- and warships, and other such visual cues for a silk industry in crisis. The overtly pedagogical tone of Xia’s prelude is unmistakable. This pedagogy is not only occasioned by the socio-economic crisis of the Chinese silk industry, but also by the considerable distance between the environments of urban commerce (as depicted in the montage in the prelude) and rural production (the main subject matter of the original text and the film). In an article on Silkworms that challenges the viability of visually oriented arguments prevalent in adaptation studies, Yiman Wang argues that ‘By mapping cinema spectatorship (where the audience is interpellated by a filmmaker’s imagery and story) onto classroom experience (where the students are educated on China’s declining silk industry by a teacher), the prelude converts the cinema into a social classroom and the elementary school students into prototypical film viewers’ (original emphasis).4 Wang’s observation on cinema spectatorship is important here; what I would add to her insight is that the ‘social classroom’ in this instance is Shanghai, and the ‘prototypical film viewers’ the city’s urban moviegoers. This specific demographic is crucial for understanding Xia’s evocation of the documentary and educational mode because the basis for the film’s instructional address is an ethnographic account of the rural silkworm farming industry, which is unfamiliar to an urban audience.
Interestingly, the prelude sequence was almost completely removed from the film after the pre-release screening; all that remains in the final-cut version on opening night was the blackboard motif used in dialogic intertitles and the shot of Mao Dun’s print edition of ‘Spring Silkworms’, which opens the film. This is likely due to complaints by the symposium participants, who considered the prelude too lengthy. Thus, any evidence of Xia Yan’s overtly pedagogical framing and ethnographic rationale was effectively removed from the final film-text.
An obvious question emerges: if the group’s primary critique of the film was focused on its over-fidelity to the short story – a charge which Xia Yan concedes – then why delete the only portion of the film that marks a significant departure from the original text? In one of his responses to the other participants, Xia Yan admits, ‘Bugao was too faithful to my script, and I was too faithful to the novel. As a result, this film might be too “literary” [tai wenxue]. Furthermore, to those who are not particularly interested in literature, I’m afraid it is of less educational value’. 5 This is only a partial concession, since the subtext of Xia’s comment implies that the merits of his adaptation is understandably lost among an audience with little interest in literature – namely, leftist literature – referring, no doubt, to an uncritical, popular mass that prefers entertainment films. Thus, the practical conflict between a pedagogical cultural form that still holds mass popular appeal is left unresolved.
The issue of medium specificity also deeply troubled the reviewers of Silkworms. Zheng Boqi, assuming the pseudonym Xi Naifang (a transliteration of ‘cinephile’), argues that the film rendition of the literary work should emphasise performance and not adhere to the original because ‘every type of art has its own specific properties’. 6 For Zheng, performance is one of the essential properties specific to the film medium, and thus requires a departure from literature in the process of cinematic adaptation. Shen Xiling (1904–1940), another leftist filmmaker, echoes Zheng’s iterations about performance and dramatic effect. Shen laments a lack of ‘dramatic elements’ (ju de chengfen) and suggests that the film’s sense of dullness results from its misplacement of climactic tension onto the bodies of silkworms rather than the human actors.
These reactions are revealing in terms of the respondents’ belief in the fundamental difference between the mediums of literature and film, and can be explained by much of the camera work used in the film. As far as Cheng Bugao and Xia Yan’s faithful adaption goes, we have seen how the ‘sketch’-like quality of Mao Dun’s short story translated to the filmmakers’ use of the documentary mode. This required painstakingly detailed filming of silkworm cultivation, in which the actors enact intricate procedures in front of the camera. Many of these sequences were captured with medium to medium-long shots, and leave little room for close-ups of the actors’ expressions and body language. Instead, nearly the entire middle portion of the film documents silkworm cultivation, only depicting obstructed human bodies and the hands that labour over the silkworms. It is precisely because of these filming and editing choices, motivated by the filmmakers’ aim to faithfully reproduce and represent the harsh conditions and laborious processes of growing silkworms in the documentary mode, that dramatic human performance was relegated to the back seat.
However, whereas the human actors do not come across as the centrepieces of dramatic performance in Silkworms, the intertitles of the film, through their elaborate design, layout, and even animation, consistently contribute to the dramatisation of the plot. The meticulous presentation of the intertitles delegates them into two categories: dialogic intertitles that represent the characters’ speech, and descriptive intertitles that function as narration. The former use a classroom blackboard motif to present the spoken lines. The latter, often used to signal or set up scene changes, use patterned geometrical shapes in the background, which are reminiscent of avant-garde woodblock prints popularised and promoted by leftist intellectuals during the same era. All the intertitles feature enlarged key terms, skewed or arched textual alignment, and other forms of visual embellishment. These typographical strategies, in both the descriptive and dialogic intertitles in the film, constitute a kind of visual theatricality that enhances the emotive qualities of the characters and the storyline.
The film goes further than stylising textual/ visual stills, and uses animation in many intertitles to enliven the text themselves. For instance, a dialogue between the main character Old Tongbao and his daughter-in-law, A Si’s Wife, is rendered as follows in the film script:
[INTERTITLE] A Si’s Wife: ‘If we hurry to buy mulberry leaves now, what do we do if, like last year, we end up with too much?’
[CLOSE-UP] Old Tongbao heard the words ‘last year’ and became stern in the face.7
Here, the intertitle containing A Si’s Wife’s speech is arranged in five lines, of uneven indentation. After several seconds of display, the words ‘last year’, which sit in the second line, suddenly separate from the rest of the text and advance forward, while the rest recedes into the background. The words ‘last year’, now taking up two-thirds of the screen, remain on display for a few more seconds before the camera cuts to a close-up of Old Tongbao’s angry face.
The same device is used again in a later scene, demonstrating a process in which the animated characters on screen ‘act out’ the description of Old Tongbao hearing the words ‘last year’ in the original short story as well as the film script.
This process is best explained by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s theory of remediation, which elucidates the twin logic of transparency and hypermediacy, whereby a new medium borrows from, and refashions older media.8 In the animated intertitles of Silkworms, the process of remediation of a literary text by the silent film medium undermines the prioritisation of human performance articulated by Zheng Boqi and Shen Xiling. By visually representing the verbal description in the script, the text of the intertitles is made to perform for the audience in capturing the instantaneous moment of Old Tongbao’s change of an emotional state. On the other hand, the silent film achieves the effects of orality and aurality – the selective enlargement of text as representation of an emphatic verbal statement and speech, the representation of an verbal description of the act of listening – that exceed the limitations of its own, silent, medium.
Thus, the intertitles of Spring Silkworms succeed in collapsing the boundary between its reviewers’ perceived medium-specific properties, and function as a site in which issues of fidelity of adaptation, dramatic performance, and the representational mode of ethnographic documentation confront each other and reconcile through the intermediality of literature and film. Unfortunately, the potential of further experimentation with intertitles would soon be superseded by the proliferation of sound films, already underway in 1933. Nevertheless, through the framework of remediation and intermediality, the creative manipulation of intertitles by the filmmakers of Silkworms offer productive analytical grounds for revisiting the discursive incongruities that troubled early film adaptations in China, as well as the 1930s leftist project of promoting cultural forms capable of reconciling the intellectuals’ aspirations for artistic reform with their political agenda.
Myra Sun
Notes
1. Since the compound wenyi means literature and the arts, the Chinese term is also sometimes translated as ‘New Literary Film’. Here, I have opted for ‘New Arts Film’ to retain the broader scope of the movement.
2. For more detail on this narrative of failure, see the discussion of Silkworms’ reception in Laikwan Pang, Building a New China in Cinema: the Chinese Left-wing Cinema Movement, 1932–1937, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002, pp. 46–47.
3. Chen Bo and Yi Ming (eds), Sanshi niandai zhongguo dianying pinglun wenxuan [A select compendium of film comments in the 1930s], 148 Chuncan/Spring Silkworms (1933) Beijing, Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1993, p. 250.
4. Yiman Wang, ‘From Word to Word-Image: Film Translation of a “Sketchy” Chinese Short Story: Spring Silkworm’, Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2005, pp. 41–50.
5. Chen, A Select Compendium, p. 255.
6. Ibid., pp. 251–252.
7. See the film script for ‘Spring Silkworms’ in Xia Yan, Xia Yan quanji [The complete works of Xia Yan], Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenji chubanshe, 2005, Vol. 4, p. 27.
8. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation, Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1999.
Cast and Crew:
[Country: China. Production Company: Mingxing (Star) Film Company. Director: Cheng Bugao. Screen adaptation: Xia Yan (pseud. Cai Shusheng). Original story: Mao Dun. Cinematographer: Wang Shizhen. Music: He Zhaohuang and He Zhaozhang. Cast: Xiao Ying (Old Tongbao), Yan Yuexian (A Si’s Wife), Gong Jianong (A Si), Ai Xia (Lotus), Zheng Xiaoqiu (Duoduo), Gao Jingping (Sixth Treasure), Zhang Minyu (Little Bao).]
Further Reading:
Chris Berry, ‘Chinese Left Cinema in the 1930s: Poisonous Weeds or National Treasures’, Jump Cut, Vol. 34, 1989, pp. 87–94.
Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt (eds), Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, Amsterdam & New York, Rodopi, 2006.
Jubin Hu, Projecting a Nation: Chinese National Cinema Before 1949, Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 2003.
Paul G. Pickowicz, ‘Melodramatic Representation and the “May Fourth” Tradition of Chinese Cinema’, in Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang (eds), From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth Century China, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1993, pp. 295–326 and 425–8.
Vivien Shen, The Origins of Left-wing Cinema in China, 1932–37, New York, Routledge, 2005.
Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 244–97.
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.