| 摘要 | This dissertation traces the history of film culture in the city of Shanghai during its eight-year occupation by Japan, 1937–1945. Organized around several of the primary sites of that culture—the journalistic film discourse, the city's cinemas, its star system, and the products exhibited on its film screens—the dissertation illuminates this disputed period of Asian film history by shifting the focus of critical attention away from the standard questions of Japanese imperialist ideology inherent in occupation film production. That production is instead examined from the perspective of its intended Chinese audience, with a particular focus on the urban milieu. Since audience identification in the cinema is typically channeled through the figure of the film star, the project centers upon Shanghai's cinematic star system and upon the fan press, one of the primary instruments by which it was maintained. at the core of the study are representations of two prominent figures from the city's star firmament during the time of occupation, Li Xianglan and Chen Yunshang. Within the pages of the fan magazine, Li's association with professionalism and with the Japanese imperialist project of pan-Asianism is contrasted with Chen's trajectory from the public world of stardom to the private space of marriage and domesticity. Interviews with both actresses reveal the continuing influence of these representations fifty years later. These interviews, along with interviews with other wartime stars, critics and fans, supplement the core archival research into fan and other popular periodicals. Throughout, the sources touch upon the well-rehearsed issues of politics and nation, issues which in the postwar era have come to define this period. Yet they also focus attention on discursive struggles around some less familiar themes in occupation Shanghai: gender, class, and modernity, each refracted through a notion of service to some larger community or idea. The dissertation explores the connections between these themes to argue that the city's cinema and its journalism, though based in the seemingly remote worlds of fantasy and image, in fact reveal the major social, cultural, and political contours of Shanghai's occupation history. |
