| 摘要 | This dissertation focuses on how these two leftist
cinemas represent and participate in China's ongoing
processes of modernization. For both cinemas, modernity
is flanked by nationalism and colonialism. My central
argument is that, "for a nation in crisis,
modernity entails reorganization of competing
temporalities and spatialities in the realm of cinematic
representation". By 'temporality'
and 'spatiality' I mean the cinematic
construction of time and space and their materialization
in various cinematic processes. While Shanghai's colonial
modernity is best seen as the simultaneous multiplicity
of competing temporalities, Taiwan's postcolonial
modernity manifests itself most vividly in the
coexistence of multiple modernities from different
colonial pasts. My comparison of these two distinct
cinematic areas and periods demonstrates how the cinema
is constituted by coloniality and how modernity is
imagined and constructed through distinctly cinematic
processes, including framings, narrative structures and
strategies, and generic themes and devices.
Rather than adopting a linear, chronological course, I
opt for an organizational principle that attend more
closely to both the theoretical and historiographical
complexities involved, and the shuttling back and forth
between the temporal New and the spatial Now in each
cinema. These conceptual foci then serve to link two
pairs of chapters pertaining to 1930s Shanghai and New
Taiwanese Cinema, respectively. In the temporal section,
I show how the "forward" narrative
movement best characterizes 1930s Shanghai Cinema while
narrative retrospection is a key feature of New Taiwanese
Cinema's "backward" historiographical
movement. In the spatial section, on the other hand,
issues of "homelessness" connect
Shanghai's urban cinema films with contemporary Taiwanese
cinema's representation of Taipei. The national subject
as the refugee in the colonial Shanghai finds its
counterpart in figures who are "homeless at
home" in the postcolonial Taipei. The concluding
section suggests how my dissertation project helps to
deepen our understanding of Chinese cinemas across
different temporal and spatial planes.
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