China at play

This dissertation introduces the notion of "play" to the studies of modern China and national cinema as both a theoretical intervention and a historical excavation of a complex ludic tradition in the first half of the twentieth century. I propose a play-comedy continuum defined by the "operational aesthetic" (to use Neil Harris' term), an aesthetic of the industrial age that equates beauty with information and technique and reflects the public fascination with the way things work. Once historicized in the context of Republican China, the play-comedy continuum forms a dialectic constellation with unchecked sentimentalism and national sympathy. It informs a range of popular cultural phenomena that temporarily suspend the supremacy of virtue, Confucian or revolutionary, and promote instead virtuosity, replacing the moralistic pathos of renunciation and unmasking with the cognitive pleasures of fascination and revelation. In light of this play-comedy continuum, I situate the Republican film comedies in the rich ludic traditions of early world cinema, late-imperial theater and literature, and most immediately the playful vernacular modernism of Shanghai's urban culture. Various types of film comedies with mixed genre attributes--slapstick, martial arts, romantic, screwball and social satire, etc.--are discussed in relation to the perennial issues in both film studies and the study of modern China, such as optical play, national/ethnic spectatorship, adaptation, costume play, city film, left-wing cinema, and performance, gendered or otherwise. The intertextual instances invoked in these discussions are trans-cultural, cross-time, and inter-medial by nature, ranging from global and regional (East Asian) image exchange, journalism, show business, illustration art, manuals and guidebooks to literature and theatre. In doing so, I also explore the methodological possibilities opened up by the concept of "play," which pervades theater and cinema, technology and art, popular culture and the avant-garde.