Dwelling in Media Environment: Film Studios in 1930s Shanghai Event
- Time:
- 16:00
- Date:
- 28 November 2023
- Venue:
- Online
Event details
This paper considers film production in terms of the productivity of life by putting in dialogue the fabrication of fictional worlds and its actual crafting in industrial sites of labour. The parallel between designed environments for labour efficiency and for aesthetic control invites us to rethink environmental aesthetics across factories and film studios.
In early 1930's Shanghai, as technocrats, engineers, and psychologists collaborated in designing optimal working environment, filmmakers worked with actors and technicians to exploit novel possibilities of the film studio. This crossing between industrial and aesthetic environment landed at the film studio which orchestrated lighting, temperature, humidity, colour, and sound to optimise film production as an industrial art. Yet unlike factories with similar environmental control devoted solely to maximise production and minimise labour cost, the film studios’ dual pursuit for aesthetic and profitable products often ran into conflict with each other.
This allows me to consider film studio as a both a reflexive and recursive media architecture, one that enables fictional construct of the worlds to inflect industrial imperatives of labour while reenacting those very imperatives. These tensions posit life as both biopolitical management and experimental articulation, when life was much at stake at the height of government run, proto-fascist “New Life Movement” that intersected with a burgeoning consumption culture and leftist movement at the dawn of the Sino-Japanese War. I consider this duality of the film studios by looking at the production and actual product of films featuring life on and around the film studio.
Speaker
Professor Weihong Bao is the Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in Chinese Studies and Film and Media at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Fiery Films: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), honored by the Modernist Studies Association Best Book Prize in 2016. She has co-edited two special issues Media/Climates (Representations 2022) and Medium/Environment (Critical Inquiry 2023). She is currently completing a book, “Background Matters: Set Design and The Art of Environment." The book examines the co-emergence of environmental thinking and set design from early to mid-twentieth century China, across film, theater, radio drama, and television.