© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
Walking into and out of the spectacle: China's earliest film scene
This paper studies China's urban visual culture in the last decade of the nineteenth century to explore how cinema was first introduced to China and how it interacted with the existing mass visual entertainments. This paper focuses primarily on the theme of "movement," which directly and indirectly illustrates the new experiences and significations "moving images" brought along. The paper first discusses the emergence of a new public garden culture that combined traditional Chinese gardens and Western modern fairgrounds to form a new cultural space and it analyzes the experiences of film viewing in these new spaces. By focusing on the specificity of these viewing sites, the paper provides a glimpse of China's earliest film scene. The paper also demonstrates that cinema, in the first few years after it arrived China, was not an independent cultural form but was largely a part of a elite visual culture associated with the importation of modernity.
Early cinema has attracted much scholarly attention in recent years for two reasons in particular. First, the new forms of representation introduced by cinema engendered an exciting period of experimentation, one which indirectly illuminates our understanding of the recent emergence of new media. Second, early moviegoing has been considered a cultural activity that reflects the quintessential verve and vertigo of modern urban life. However, the study of early Chinese cinema finds itself at odds with these two academic drives, largely because of the lack of extant film texts and related cultural information. None of the Chinese films made in the first seventeen years survives in its complete form – the earliest Chinese-made film available to us is Laogong zhi aiqing/Labourer's Love (Zhang Shichuan, 1922), which does not represent the earliest attempts by Chinese filmmakers to handle the new medium.1 Historical information related to moviegoing as a cultural activity is also scarce. The combination of these two lacunae has made detailed study of the first decade of Chinese cinema almost impossible.
However, in making a comprehensive study of China's cultural modernity it is not possible to leave this earliest film scene unexamined. Even in the West the number of extant early films is small – as Simon Popple and Joe Kember comment: ‘Without a wide range of contextual knowledge, the small fraction of early films that still survive are of limited value’.2 The main scholarly concern of the second approach to early cinema studies is more the relevant cultural contexts and concepts than the films themselves. While there are other scholars discussing the production of the first films in China,3 this essay is concerned with questions of film reception: when cinema was first introduced to China, how did the new images interact with the spaces designated for screening movies, and how was this new form of spectatorship connected to the overall modern visual culture on the one hand and the social class of the viewers on the other? I am particularly interested in the concept and experience of ‘movement’, which I believe provides a pertinent perspective from which to study the relationships between space, vision and subjectivity, also revealing the tensions and dialogues between traditional and modern cultural environments in which the first screenings of movies acquired their cultural meanings.
Records of the earliest years of Chinese cinema are most akin to an oral history. Chinese film scholars have tried in vain to unearth documents that reveal how cinema first came to China. Almost all the information we have about the earliest phase of Chinese cinema comes from personal memories. There were no magazines or newspapers specifically about cinema until the 1920s,4 and I have found little information about the first two decades of Chinese cinema in major cultural magazines or writings before the 1920s.5 I have to admit that, in spite of my wishful thinking as a film historian, cinema was just not that popular with the Chinese masses in the first two decades of its appearance.6 Cinema culture in China did not fully develop until the 1920s, which explains why most studies of early Chinese cinema focus on this period. As I will demonstrate, cinema in its formative years in China was featured as one of the many modern visual entertainments available to the leisured classes, and its attraction was based as much on its connection with other new visual entertainments as on its unique representation system, which film theorists currently tend to emphasize.
Most of the documentation about the earliest Chinese cinema activities appeared in newspaper advertisements. On 18 January 1896, Hong Kong's Huazi ribao (Chinese Letters Daily) included an advertisement for ‘several hundred fantastic stories from the West’ to be shown in the colony's Old Victoria Hotel.7 An advertisement printed in Shenbao (Shanghai Daily) on 10 August 1896 publicized a foreign yingxi (shadow-play, the earliest word for film in Chinese) that was to be screened in the teahouse Youyicun (Another Village) of Shanghai's Xu Yuan (Xu Garden) the following day. According to the advertisement, the films were screened in conjunction with a variety of other activities taking place in the garden, including magic, fireworks and lantern riddles. However, neither of the advertisements provided any other information about the films. As these are the earliest extant film advertisements known, most scholars assume the two events to be the first film screenings in Hong Kong and China, respectively. The records kept by Lumière of its first world tours give no indication of any stops in China,8 and we cannot be completely sure who made the films that were advertised or who brought them to China. However, there are records of an American named James Ricalton, who exhibited a programme of Edison films in Shanghai in 1897 and is believed to have been the first to make films in China.9
According to the research of film historians – such as Yu Muyun on Hong Kong cinema, Ye Longyan on Taiwan cinema, Li Suyuan and Hu Jubin on films shown in Beijing and Shanghai and Li Qingyue on those in Ningxia – the earliest film screenings in Chinese cities were staged in a variety of places, including a Cantonese opera theatre,10 a government guest house,11 a public garden12 and a palace.13 Early movie screenings were a highly mobile affair; apart from simple equipment such as a projector and screen, all that was needed was an empty space and some chairs. The various spaces chosen for the screenings tell us more about the specific exhibitors and audiences involved than about the essence of film screening as a unique cultural–social activity. The diversity of spaces used for the first screenings shows, unsurprisingly, there was no inherent way for cinema to be received in China. Cinema was not a homogenized cultural activity until more than a decade later, when specific venues were designed and built for film screening: Ping'an dianying gongci (the Arcade Theatre) was built on East Chang'an Road in Beijing in 1907,14 Bizhao dianying yuan (Bizhao Theatre) opened on Graham Street in Hong Kong in the same year,15 and one year later Hongkou daxiyuan (Hongkew Theatre) was built in Shanghai.16 All three theatres were backed by foreign investment and were modelled after western movie theatres, but for the first decade film screenings in China all took place in temporary spaces, which were mostly arranged contingently and whose design held little direct relationship with film screening. It would be a mistake, however, to argue that the viewing sites did not relate to film screening in any discursive way, since space and the activities carried out in that space are always mutually conditioned. Examining why certain sites were chosen to screen movies and how the viewing activities transformed those sites yields interesting insights into the practices of, and the cultural values given to, early cinema. In what follows I focus specifically on the public garden, one of the most popular sites in urban China at the turn of the twentieth century, to investigate how the space, with its own cultural specificities, influenced and was influenced by cinema. The cinematic activities were in dialogue with other activities in the new garden culture, and the mutual influences among cultural forms were largely anchored in their visual elements.
Documenting the first film screening activity in China, Zhen Zhang writes, ‘On 11 August 1896, the first projection by some French showmen took place in the Xu Yuan teahouse in Shanghai’.17 Zhang's account is slightly misleading, as Xu Yuan was not a teahouse but a public garden, and the actual film screening was shown in the Another Village teahouse inside Xu Garden. I need to emphasize the difference between the garden and the teahouse because Zhang's analysis, one of the very few English-language works to explore China's earliest film scene, was largely based on the space of the teahouse, through which she contrasts the exterior theatrical space with the interior cinematic space. While the teahouse is definitely an important space in the development of Chinese cinema, neither Chinese nor western scholars have thus far offered any close analysis of the relationship between cinema and the public garden, which hosted many of the earliest film screenings in China (although often in their teahouses). Zhang's sole emphasis on the interior space of the teahouse prevents us from analysing the larger space of the garden, in which cinema interacted with the other cultural activities held there.
Gardens in Imperial China had always been private and reserved for the elite, while ordinary people visited folk fairs held in the grounds of Buddhist or Daoist temples or other places of worship. As Mingzheng Shi argues, ‘the concept of the public park, where common people can go for relaxation and recreation, is purely western and modern’.18 The first public garden in China was built in 1868 in the British–American Concession in Shanghai, when the colonial administration transformed a piece of barren land into a public park modelled after those in western countries.19 However, these gardens were built for the leisure of the Concession's foreign residents; the Chinese were not allowed to enter.20 Shen Yuan (Shanghai Garden), established in 1882, was the first public garden opened to the Chinese, but unlike a western public park it was owned privately and run for profit.21 The Shanghai Garden was an instant success, and the number of such public parks mushroomed in the following years to include Zhang Yuan (Zhang Garden), Yu Yuan (Yu Karden), Bansong Yuan (Garden in the Middle of the Song River) and the aforementioned Xu Garden, where the first film screening in China allegedly took place. These gardens were modern fairgrounds, but unlike New York's Coney Island, which attracted the working and middle classes,22 the Chinese grounds were more upmarket and fashionable, frequented by courtesans, businessmen and the literati. Beyond the garden's historical affiliations with the elite, there was also a racial component to the parks' social status. Since the first ‘public’ gardens in China were created specifically for foreigners, when locals started to join in modern public garden life, the gardens maintained an elitist aura that is absent in public gardens of the USA, for example.23 These Chinese gardens were the site of many leisure activities, ranging from the traditional, such as attending flower exhibitions, watching operas, dining and gambling, to modern visually oriented entertainments such as slide shows, dog or horse racing, or watching hot-air balloons. Zhang Garden, for example, hosted the first electric light show in China on 6 October 1886.24 Some of the earliest commercial photography studios in Shanghai also operated in these gardens, including Xu Garden's Yuelairong, which opened in 1888.25 These public gardens continued as Shanghai's most fashionable haunts until the 1910s, when a number of indoor entertainment complexes were built in the downtown area to accommodate the latest entertainments, including movies, within a single high-rise building.26 The public gardens, in vogue for just two decades, gradually lost their cultural edge in the early 1920s, and soon became leisure sites for the masses.27
Visiting exquisite gardens had traditionally been a popular pastime of the Chinese literati, who held wine parties, wrote poems, played music and appreciated ‘nature’ in the form of man-made miniature mountains and rivers; in other words, gardens were where the Chinese practised culture.28 The garden could become an exclusive symbol of ideal traditional Chinese aesthetics partly because gardens were privately owned and built, so that only the most affluent, such as Imperial family members or high officials, could shape and participate in this culture. Allowing public access to the garden was revolutionary and made possible by the arrival of foreign powers and consumer culture. Zhang Garden, for example, was privately owned by a British businessman, whose sudden colonial wealth had allowed him in 1872 to turn a large piece of farmland into a private garden featuring both Chinese and western architecture. After several changes of hands, it was finally purchased by the entrepreneur Zhang Shuhe and opened to the public.29 While gardens in general still signified an upper-class lifestyle and elite culture, visitors to these new public gardens experienced modern entertainment with its sensory, and particularly visual, impact. Various public gatherings, political and cultural, also took place in these gardens,30 and of course traditional operas were also performed there. Mei Lanfang's very first performance in Shanghai took place not in a theatre but at a private function in Zhang Garden, and the great success of this show marked the beginning of Mei's successful international career.31 If the traditional Chinese garden contained the essence of traditional culture, these new public gardens served a similar purpose, but incorporated not only an accumulation of past tradition but also people's fascination with the modern, which was available for their instant gratification.
Although many of the new parks were created from existing private gardens, the revolutionary Shanghai Garden, as multifunctional commercial amusement park, was a completely new concept. To hold more visitors in a limited space, the gardens had to be redesigned and reconceptualized accordingly. While the modern amusement park followed a pattern similar to that of the traditional Chinese garden in compartmentalizing space to accommodate the predesigned scenery, the layout of the new parks had to be designed more efficiently while still conveying a sense of leisure. For example, in transforming the Zhang Garden from a classical private garden to a public one, the owner Zhang Shuhe built the Arcadia Hall, a multi-storey tower that could allegedly hold over one thousand people.32 The new park had to create the sense of freedom not of physical movement but of imagination.
To further illustrate this argument, I return to the aesthetics of the traditional Chinese garden, which is often described as a three-dimensional painting. As art historian Yang Hongxun states:
The art of garden building is similar to painting on canvas or paper in that it frequently employs such principles of compositional arrangement as spacing, distance, light and shade, and coloring. The difference is that while painting is done with inks and pigments on a flat surface, gardens are built on a three-dimensional plan in space.33Just as the experience of reading traditional Chinese paintings is conditioned by the movements of the viewers' eyes, movement in space is also essential to the aesthetics of traditional Chinese gardens. A core aesthetic principle of the Chinese garden is the orchestration of constantly changing images created by the walking subject. As R. Stewart Johnston states, ‘As in the Chinese painting, the principal element of the garden was the strong spatial structure formed by the patterns of movement’.34 In a traditional garden the walking routes are carefully planned and controlled, so that strollers are guided along a specific path and directed to stop at different points to take in the view. Although walking in a traditional garden was not a realization of true freedom of movement, it had still been a defining experience, whereas in the new public parks physical movement was almost entirely replaced by imaginary movement, with certain exceptions such as bicycling. As if to catch up with the accelerated speed of capitalist life, the new garden experience had to pick up the pace, but it achieved this by replacing bodily movement with various forms of visual entertainment, including motion pictures. Walking only functioned as a connection between one spot and another; visitors were encouraged to station themselves within the confines of an auditorium, instead of walking around the park, to experience this new sense of ‘freedom’.
The changing garden experience in China can be compared with two other modern activities, train travel and shopping, to illustrate how the new visual culture was part of a new concept of ‘movement’. Many have argued that nineteenth-century industrialization entreated the subject to map the external world in radical new ways. The most frequently cited example of this is the railway, which provided a novel visual experience composed of fleeting images and panoramic perceptions made possible only by the invention of machines.35 This aesthetic of moving vision was not entirely foreign to the premodern Chinese, who, as I have demonstrated, developed their traditional garden aesthetics around the visual experiences created by the dynamics between walking and standing still. The major structural difference between the running images provided by the railway and those in a classical Chinese garden is the position of the subject. While in the Chinese garden it is the movement of the walking subject that produces the visual experience, in the train the viewing subject is seated in a carriage and motionless. In other words, the traditional garden stroller can pause, retreat, walk at different speeds, and watch the adjacent views relatively freely, unlike the train passenger or the new garden visitor, who is stationed in a confined space, with no control over the views.
The culture of shopping also creates a new moving visual experience, in ways both opposite and similar to that created by the railway. Instead of being entrapped by a moving object, the shoppers walk around static displayed goods, which are positioned and decorated in such a way as to guide the consumers' movements and carry their fantasies. Anne Friedberg argues that the shopping culture which developed in Europe in the nineteenth century provided the female shoppers, or flâneuses, with a new sense of freedom through physical and psychological movement.36 This new mobility of the flâneuse can be compared with that of the visitor to the new Chinese garden. The female consumer is actually trapped between freedom and immobility, as although she is given the privilege of movement, freedom of movement is a fiction; she moves according to the logic of consumer society, and through her movement she herself is transformed into an object of the gaze, subtly woven into the capitalist system. Similarly, the new garden visitor's movement is highly structured by the new consumer culture and conditioned by the stasis of the new entertainment forms. Both the shopper and the garden visitor move in order to be surrounded by visual stimulations, structurally not dissimilar to the train passenger. Dialectically, in contrast to the immobility conditioned by the various enclosures, it is imaginary motion that charges the new subject – whether train passenger, shopper or garden visitor. If, traditionally, Chinese people visited gardens for the visual experience taken in during movement, the entertainments of the new gardens allowed a distorted continuation of this legacy by giving the perception of freedom through visual experience.
Of the many western entertainments incorporated in these new amusement parks, the motion picture is emblematic of the new form of mobility. The new railway vision is often compared with the experience of watching movies, as a sense of movement is achieved by sitting still. In nineteenth-century consumer culture, the careful arrangement of goods on display allowed the stasis of the objects to create a new range of imaginary mobilities. The underlying mechanisms, according to Friedberg, foretold the emerging cinematic experience.37 Cinema, in other words, is emblematic of modernity's visual dimension largely due to its seizure of an immobile subject via its moving images.
Both walking in the traditional gardens and the moviegoing experience in the new amusement parks produce the imaginary effects of travelling, but their underlying mechanisms and the responses generated are very different. The old and the new parks both embark on a representational tactic of visualizing ‘other spaces’ within a confined environment. The traditional Chinese garden – owned and patronized by the rich – worked to claim and rebuild nature. The motion pictures shown in the modern amusement park similarly brought images of imported ‘modernity’ to entertain large numbers of the general public. Yet the forms and mechanisms of representation are different. In the traditional garden, the miniature version of nature is clearly not the same as the original, but rather involves an artistic process of modification; in contrast, the projected movies are mechanically reproduced images that are faithful to reality and supposedly involve no human manipulation. Therefore, while the movements in the traditional garden are real and those in the movie house are imaginary, the opposite is true of their representations: the nature reexperienced in the traditional garden is fantastic, yet the images projected in movies are ‘realistic’. The cinematic apparatus helps bring the object of desire directly before us without transforming it or taking it from its original context, whilst our actual physical movements have to be restrained and replaced by those of machines that capture and re-present the images to us.
The new image-movement structure of modern visual culture has been widely criticized in recent scholarship. The kind of movement produced by cinematic machines and the new modern visual culture forbade any touching or personal examination of the object. As Paul Virilio argues, everything ‘I see’ should in principle be within my reach, which marks ‘I can’. Yet with the mediation of so many optical devices in the modern world, the bulk of what we see is no longer within our reach, which prevents us from getting closer to the ‘productive unconscious of sight’, something the surrealists once dreamed of in relation to photography and cinema. We the modern viewers are also condemned to a state of visual dyslexia, unable to comprehend the visual information we receive every day.38 Jonathan Crary argues that modern visual culture individuates and immobilizes the viewing subjects,39 while Don Slater criticizes the excessive and overwhelming stimuli of the spectacle, which eventually confirms the vulnerability of the viewer.40 Many visual-studies scholars argue that modern mechanically reproduced movements deprive viewers of a direct tactile relationship with the object, and that the movements generated produce an insurmountable distance between the object and the subject, which might end up confirming the radical ‘otherness’ of the represented to the viewer. Yet are there other dimensions of the new visual culture that might cultivate a more engaged viewing? Vision, whether or not it is connected to the sense of touch, is our primary means of reaching and confronting others, and we could engage with vision in such a way as to recognize the fluidity of the self-other boundary and therefore to constantly interrogate the subject-object relation in the visual structure.41 Although cinema introduces an irreducible distance between the representation and the viewer, there might be other possibilities of movement breaking boundaries conceptually and physically. While I have demonstrated the transformation of the actual physical movements in traditional Chinese gardens into the imaginary/fictional movement provided by the new parks, I do not wish to label the modern garden visitor as essentially vulnerable and immobile. One way to question this theorization of the ‘pacified modern viewer’ is to examine whether the viewing context allows the viewing subject other kinds of movement with which to engage with representations and other people in the same space. The concept of public experience is important here, as many visual studies scholars, from Virilio to Crary and Slater, focus on the viewer's ‘private’ experience of modern visual culture. I believe that the new modern viewing subject is as much active as passive, as much collective as individuated. The ways in which the subject interacts with others can tell us more about the specificity of the historical viewers, discouraging us from universalizing them as passive and empty subjects.
Early cinema should not be characterized as an independent or isolated visual experience in China, particularly in light of its garden environment. The new public garden was a venue simultaneously incorporating many different visual entertainments. This plurality of activities taking place within and around the screening sites renders the relationship between subject and spectacle more complex, and reveals the limitations of focusing solely on the teahouse to study early film reception in China. This ‘publicness’ can be analysed by focusing on two aspects of the new garden culture: the connections between different forms of visual experience in the garden, and the mutual transformation of the viewer and the viewed.
Very few records of early cinema reception in China are available to us, but those that are offer a glimpse of how Chinese people first responded to moving images. One report, printed in Qubao (Fun News) in 1898, documented a screening of fourteen short films in Xu Garden.42 We do not know exactly which films the author had seen, but judging by the titles of the films most of them were actualities or short comic scenes. Beyond the titles, the author wrote only that the ‘characters were so real that they would walk out of the screen when summoned’ (huzhi yuchu). Another report, found in Youxibao (Newspaper of Leisure) in 1897, in which a first-time moviegoer more elaborately described a film show he had seen in Qi yuan (Strange Garden), detailed his feelings of shock and amusement after watching these actuality films.43 This is widely considered to be the first documentation of the earliest film viewing in China. The author begins his essay thus:
There was an electric light shadow-play from the USA, with magical effects beyond anyone's expectations. Yesterday evening was breezy. After the rain, some friends and I went to the Strange Garden to watch the show. When all the viewers had been seated, the lights were turned off. All of a sudden we saw an image of two western women dancing ...44This introduction can be compared with another Shenbao piece from 1896, which reported another attraction in the same Strange Garden: a huge painting from the USA depicting its Civil War. The author describes his visit in a similar tone:
Two days before the mid-autumn festival, it was rainy, but not too cold and not too hot. In the afternoon, I received an invitation from the host of the Strange Garden, and I then walked to the garden with some friends. The attendant brought us into the [indoor] space. We walked past a small hallway, and it was dark. Suddenly there was a tiny beam of light, and we saw a staircase. We walked up and entered a bright environment, and there we saw two armies fighting ...45
Coincidentally, both authors went to the Strange Garden for a visual show on a rainy day in early autumn (albeit one year apart). Both the authors describe the trip leading them to the space before they begin to detail the actual images. One can think of this as a literary convention, in that these two reports are both modelled on traditional travel writing, but this convention becomes particularly interesting when one considers that both writers highlight the indoor space and the threshold of darkness before the images appeared, as both the trip and the darkness described had the effect of isolating the images from the writers' everyday reality. Although we do not know which films the 1897 Youxibao viewer watched, fortunately we do have a Dianshizhai lithographic representation of the American painting that the 1896 Shenbao reporter saw (figure 1).46
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Although the caption states clearly that it is a painting, the lithograph does not show the frame. The painting is so big that it engulfs all the viewers (standing inside the railing at the lower left-hand corner), so that it is not the representation but the ‘reality’ of the war itself that the viewers experience. I note that the painting was an American work, presumably painted in the realist style that most epic paintings adopted at the time. However, the lithographer did not, or could not, re-create its realist style – the painting reproduced here was drawn in the Chinese lithographic style of the time, resulting in the reception space and pictorial space being rendered in the same way, further reinforcing the impression that the representation and its reception were within the same sense of reality. In fact, the caption not only describes the frozen moment of the pictorial representation but also provides some hint of narrative:
The bombs hit some [of the soldiers] whose blood and flesh were all over the place. Some soldiers were shot and they lay ossified on the ground. Some just saw a wall and hid behind it, while some ran away because they knew they were losing the battle (You zhongpao er xueru fenfeizhe, you shoudan er jianbo yudizhe, you fangweiqiang erjinzhe, you yinbeinü ertaozhe).This passage suggests a series of causal relationships and the progression of time: the soldiers took refuge behind the wall because they had happened to bump into it; some escaped because they were losing and afraid. These interpretations are supplied by the creator of the lithograph. The viewers in the reception space are also rendered as if they are actively responding to the sight. This spectacle is presented in this Dianshizhai pictorial more as an ongoing reality or a stage performance than as a still picture, perhaps echoing the motion picture that was introduced around the same time.
In fact, the ‘realist effect’ is also emphasized in the two aforementioned writings on the Strange Garden. The Youxibao writer wonders if he has actually entered the scenes he is seeing (guanzhe zhici jiyi shenruqizhong), and the Shenbao writer exclaims that it was so heartrending for him to witness the brutality that he almost had to stop looking several times (shangxin canmu jiburenguan). This overwhelming effect on the viewing subjects might explain why both writers highlighted the dark passages that came before as a rhetorical device that stressed the separation between spectacle and reality. The light that came from the darkness described in the two writings is not the same as the ‘Enlightenment’ that visual theorists relate to modern visual apparatus; it is more like the light of a spectre, introducing an alternative reality to the viewer. The writers' emphasis on the line between the two spaces is thus a self-protective mechanism.
If both the essays and the lithograph could be seen as the viewers' subjective reflections on the visual experience, the film and the painting featured in the Strange Garden share a ‘spectacular’ and ‘alternative’ status, although one comprises moving images while the other is a still image. In both cases, while the spectacular dimension of the visual representation is highlighted, the authors emphasize their own movement into the spectacle. This creates two effects. First, the images are cut off from reality, as if the spectacular dimension had a minimal effect on the writers' actual lives. Second, their movement into the spectacle implies their autonomy and control, as if they consciously experienced it as a leisure activity. In both cases, the destructive effect of the spectacles on the viewers seems to be less than is typically assumed by western theorists of visual culture.
In fact, this complex relationship between the representation and the viewer's everyday life makes it problematic to apply current theories of early cinema (based on the western culture) to non-western experiences. While people in the West reexperienced their own everyday life in these actuality films, the Chinese might have received western-made images in profoundly different ways. According to the ‘cinema of attractions’ theory,47 what captured an American audience watching a view of an American street in film was not the images as such but the cinematic apparatus. However, most Chinese viewers were not familiar with the foreign images they saw onscreen. The 1897 Youxibao reporter describes the moving images he saw in the Strange Garden thus:
The electric lights are like tall candles. The cars moving along the street combine to become a swimming dragon. So many people walk around it looks as if cloth is being woven.... Viewers were so elated that their eyebrows rose and their faces rapidly changed colour.48
Both Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer argue that cinema creates an alienating effect by reconfiguring familiar sights into unfamiliar patterns and forcing viewers to give these sights new meanings,49 but the Chinese viewer quoted above did not reexperience a familiar incident or process; instead he was exposed to images he had never seen, and what impressed him, contrary to the ‘cinema of attractions’ theory, was as much the representational process as the referent itself. As mentioned above, the ritual of passing through a dark passage had the effect of separating cinema from everyday life. Viewers had been prepared to confront the fantastic images, and the passage helped them to rationalize the alternative reality presented in the theatrical space. Cinema, therefore, was a space of foreignness and the images had a different, probably less real and less shocking, effect on Chinese viewers than they had on western viewers.
The viewers' interpretations of the image is therefore particularly important, in that it demonstrates their ability to come to terms with these spectacles, instead of just being passively immersed in them. The 1897 Youshibao article, for example, shows how the author conceptualizes this viewing experience. He concludes his article thus:
Suddenly the lights came back on, all phenomena vanished (hu dengguang yiming, wanshi jumie) ... Between Heaven and Earth, things change constantly. Life is a mirage; isn't it the same as these moving shadows?50
If the darkness of the theatre represents the threshold to an alternative reality, the brightening of the room reintroduces the viewers to their familiar environment. This anonymous spectator chooses to rely on the traditional Buddhist/folk concept of wanshi jumie to interpret a novel, and somehow alienating, experience imported from the West, so that he can retreat safely to a familiar system of thinking, and therefore into a protected subject position, which the film had perhaps disturbed. One interesting contradiction revealed here is that, while the writer tries to separate the filmic reality from his own with the threshold of darkness, he ultimately uses the concept of wanshi jumie to link reality and representation, exclaiming that these changing images are in fact reflections of a deeper reality. Yet I would argue that this painstaking attempt to link the two realities actually highlights the boundary between them, as they cannot be connected without recourse to the traditional Chinese notion of ultimate cosmic order. As was the case in many other countries, modernity descended on China along with a new visual discourse, but the viewer should not be seen as a passive and involuntary receptacle for such images. In this case, the writer both highlights and rejects the connection between the film and his reality, and reaches the implicit conclusion that, after all, there is no need to take the overwhelming effects of the image too seriously.
If the film viewer was indeed not passive even within the viewing of the spectacle, his or her ability to move around and out of the spectacle more clearly demonstrates the limitations of regarding the modern viewer as immobile. Returning to the screening sites mentioned earlier, the Xu Garden was widely known as a major public garden in Shanghai at the time, but there seems to be little information about the Strange Garden. I have not found it listed as a public garden in any studies of Shanghai's public gardens of the time. The caption on the Dianshizhai lithograph indicates that the Strange Garden was located west of the Muddy Town Bridge on Grand Avenue in the British Concession (ying damalu nichengqiao xi), but does not include any more information about the history of, or activities held in, this Strange Garden. According to the aforementioned 1896 Shenbao report on the American Civil War painting, the Strange Garden was a temporary lodge built expressly to show this painting. A poem of the time describes the Strange Garden as a teahouse adjacent to a famous racetrack, and many visitors came to the Strange Garden to watch horse racing:
Spring horse racing is a tradition.These lines are part of a long poem that depicts a horse race in Shanghai during the last few years of the nineteenth century.52 The poet recounts that the activity attracted the attendance of many new urbanites, including fashionable courtesans and foreign ladies. This Strange Garden, which housed motion pictures, the American Civil War painting and many exciting horse races, is part of an elaborate culture of ‘watching’.53 As shown in this poem, the visitors are watching both the horse racing and each other, particularly the beautiful courtesans (Daiyu and Lanfeng) and foreign ladies, who themselves are highly mobile, riding either in their beautiful carriages or on bicycles.In the West merchants would gamble heavily on the races.
...
The Grand Avenue in the British Concession is wide.
Tens of thousands of people are crowded onto the Muddy Town Bridge.
To avoid the crowds,
one can pay three pence to watch from the little western-style building.
...
With flowers from foreign lands pinned in their hair,
those western ladies dress pleasantly, with veils over their faces.
Bell ringing and both wheels spinning fast,
they pass through the masses on their bicycles.
Drinking tea on the top floor of the Strange Garden,
people dress nicely and sit in the way they feel most comfortable.
If you want to be a fashionable person, you have to watch closely
with a pair of gold-rimmed glasses on your nose.
Daiyu and Langfen walk in beauty and fame.
Their horse-drawn carriages change from day to day.
...
Briefly watching several races among those nice horses,
they whipped their own horses and went to the Zhang Garden.51
This elaborate culture of watching is emphasized by the gold-rimmed glasses mentioned in the poem. In fact, another writer documenting the activities in the Zhang Garden also refers to glasses to describe the author's experience of watching motion pictures:
One night I went [to the Zhang Garden] to watch moving pictures. I am nearsighted and forgot to bring my spectacles. Luckily a friend lent me his telescope so that I could watch the film closely. How happy I am.54The other Zhang Garden attractions described in the essay include the aforementioned Arcadia Hall, snooker, fireworks, female performers, delicious Chinese and western meals, bicycles and Russian acrobats. Once again, the moving picture is part of this elaborate entertainment culture, and it is particularly sited within a new visual culture, signified by imported visual apparatus such as glasses and the telescope. The telescope carried by the writer's friend indicates that visitors went to the garden to watch not just moving pictures but other visual entertainments, like fireworks, female performers and acrobats. The cultural meanings of motion pictures in their formative years in China must be understood within this larger visual culture of the garden, which was more or less connected by the same lenses through which the viewers watched the many spectacles on display.
This garden culture can be compared with early cinema in the West. Many film scholars have reminded us of the active nature of early western audiences, which should be understood as different from the contemporary passive and spellbound film audience absorbed by the narrative. Jean Châteauvert and André Gaudreault have pointed out that the tremendous amount of uncontrolled noise created in the screening environment was one of the most obvious features that distinguished the earliest silent cinema from its second phase, when the sound environment was regulated by the presence of lecturer, music and various filmic mechanisms.55
Miriam Hansen celebrates audience participation in early cinema as active, vocal and resembling participation in the public sphere instead of in consumer culture.56 Hansen is particularly interested in the class and ethnic signification of this type of spectator behaviour, which constantly invites the ‘discipline of silence’ from the mainstream middle class. Whereas Hansen might be said to run the risk of romanticizing the ‘democratic’ potential of the lower classes, whose noise and unruly behaviour challenges the hegemony of the bourgeoisie, the Shanghai's garden culture, where the viewing environment is also highly kinetic, is clearly not a lower-class pastime. As mentioned earlier, the actual mobility of the viewers challenges the typically pessimistic understanding of the vulnerability of the viewing subject encircled by modern spectacles, but such activities are not associated with the lower classes, so we cannot easily idealize these movements as politically subversive. With the lack of relevant documentation, we know nothing of the actual intercourse of Chinese viewers within the audience hall, so we cannot comprehensively reconstruct the ‘public’ nature of the screening space, but this new Shanghai film culture belongs to the upper classes, who came to the public garden to see as well as to be seen. Visitors were proud to be part of the new entertainment culture, and their ability to move in and out of the spectacles should be understood as a manifestation of their pride in their newly acquired modern identity as an upper-middle-class privilege. The association of films and the elite culture through the garden was a short-lived one,57 yet it demonstrates the importance of studying early films as part of the larger visual culture within a specific class environment, instead of simply stressing cinema's connection with modernity through its radical newness.
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An Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of two books: Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-wing Cinema Movement, 1932–37 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) and Globalization and Cultural Control in Asia: Copyright, Piracy, and Cinema (Routledge, 2005)
1 Zhen Zhang does try to rely on this film, however, to examine the ‘primitive mode’ of Chinese cinema, studying it as a ‘last echo of an early cinema’. See her ‘Teahouse, shadowplay, bricolage: Laborer's Love and the question of early Chinese cinema’, in Yingjin Zhang (ed.), Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 27–50. 
2 Simon Popple and Joe Kember, Early Cinema: From Factory Gate to Dream Factory (London: British Film Institute, 2004), p. 33.
3 Many of these scholars focus on the relationship between Peking Opera and the first Chinese films, which are a direct recreation of the opera performance. Examples include: Zhen Zhang, ‘Teahouse, shadowplay, bricolage’, pp. 32–5; Jubin Hu, Projecting a Nation: Chinese National Cinema Before 1949 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003), pp. 30–5, 38–9; Mary Farquhar and Chris Berry, ‘Shadow opera: towards a new archaeology of the Chinese cinema’, Post Script, vol. 20, nos 2/3 (2001), p. 25; Yeh Yueh-yu, ‘Historiography and Signification: music in Chinese cinema of the 1930s’, Cinema Journal, vol. 41, no. 3 (2002), p. 83; Zheng Junli, ‘Xiandai Zhongguo dianying shilüe’ (A brief history of Chinese cinema), in Jindai Zhongguo yishu fazhen shi (Modern Chinese Art History) (Shanghai: Liangyou tushu, 1936), reprinted in Zhongguo dianying ziliao guan (China Film Archive) (ed.), Zhongguo wusheng dianying (Chinese Silent Cinema) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1996), pp. 1388–9; Cheng Jihua, Li Shaobai and Xing Zhuwen, Zhongguo dianying fazhen shi (The Development of Chinese Cinema) Volume I (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1981), pp. 13–15; Li Suyuan and Hu Jubin, Zhongguo wusheng dianyingshi (History of Chinese Silent Cinema) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1996), pp. 13–16; Hongshi, ‘Ren Qingtai yu shoupi guochanpian kaoping’ (Evaluations of Ren Qingtai and the first Chinese films), Dianying yishu (Film Art), no. 2 (1992), pp. 82–3.
4 Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: the Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 85.
5 There were only a handful of accounts written in the nineteenth century that reported on actual film viewing activities. I find it interesting that most of the popular magazines I have read, including Youxi zazhi, Yuxing and Funü shibao, discuss a wide range of popular cultural activities of the time but contain no accounts of cinema. Obviously, despite my discussion here, motion pictures were marginal and insignificant in urban China at the turn of the twentieth century, which seems to explain the difficulty of reconstructing this period of China's film history.
6 See two writings in the 1920s commenting on the initial failure of moving pictures to become popular in Shanghai and in Beijing: Guan Ji'an, ‘Yingxi shuru Zhongguo hou de bianqian’ (Changes in moving images after entering China), Xi zazhi (Play), inaugural issue (1922), reprinted in Zhongguo dianying ziliao guan (ed.), Zhongguo wusheng dianying, p. 1313; and Xiao, ‘Beijing dianying shiye zhi fada’ (The development of Beijing's film industry), Dianying zhoukan (Film Magazine), no. 1, (1921), reprinted in Zhongguo dianying ziliao guan (ed.), Zhongguo wusheng dianying, pp. 176–7.
7 Yu Muyun reprints the advertisement in his Xianggang dianying shihua (History of Hong Kong Cinema), vol. I (Hong Kong: Ciwenhua, 1996), p. 6.
8 Jay Leyda, Dianying: Electric Shadows: an Account of Films and Film Audience in China (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1972), pp. 1–3.
9 Ibid., p. 2. The advertisement was printed in Shenbao, 27 July 1897.
10 Yu Muyun, Xianggang dianying shihua, p. 13.
11 Ye Longyan, Rizhi Shiqi Taiwan diaying shi (The History of Taiwanese Movies during the Japanese Colonization) (Taipei: Yushanshe, 1998), p. 43.
12 Li Suyuan and Hu Jubin, Zhongguo wusheng dianying shi, p. 3.
13 Li Qingyue, Ningxia dianying shihua (Historical Account of Ningxia Cinema) (Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 1995), p. 1.
14 Li Suyuan and Hu Jubin, Zhongguo wusheng dianyhing shi, p. 17.
15 Yu Muyun, Xianggang dianying shihua, p. 37.
16 Zhang, ‘Teahouse, shadowplay, bricolage’, p. 32. However, Zhang's documentation is slightly misleading, as Hongkew was not the first theatre in China but only the first in Shanghai. Song Weicai suggests that the teahouse-theatre Panorama was the first movie theatre in China, because it was remodelled in 1912 to accommodate film viewing. This is also incorrect, since the Arcade opened for business in 1907, and its advertisements can be found in major newspapers of the time. Song Weicai, ‘Zhongguo zaoqi dianying shichang lüekao’ (A brief study of China's early film market), Dangdai dianying (Contemporary Cinema), no. 120 (2004), pp. 53–5.
17 Zhang, ‘Teahouse, shadowplay, bricolage’, p. 32.
18 Mingzheng Shi, ‘From Imperial gardens to public parks: the transformation of urban space in early twentieth-century Beijing’, Modern China, vol. 24, no. 3 (1998), p. 225.
19 Cheng Xuke and Wang Tao, Zhongguo yuanlin zhi (Gardens in China) (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2000), p. 3.
22 John Kasson demonstrates how Coney Island reflected a new urban culture fostered by the rise of the American middle class, who desired more expressive and exciting activities. John Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1978). Kathy Peiss furthers Kasson's study and demonstrates that Coney Island was also frequented by the working class, arguing that Coney Island embodied a subtle debate over whether the middle class or the working class dominated the unfolding of the new entertainment culture. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986), pp. 115–38.
23 Wang Tao, ‘Hai qu yeyou, fulu, zhuan shang’, (1878), p. 9, reprinted in Wang Tao (ed.), Yanshi congchao (Taipei: Guangwen shuju, 1976), pp. 616–17.
24 Xiong Yuezhi, ‘Zhang yuan: Wanqing Shanghai yige gonggong kongjian yanjiu’ (Zhang garden: a study of a public sphere in late Qing Shanghai), in Zhong Zhongli (ed.), Zhongguo jindai chengshi qi ye, shehui, kongjian (Modern Chinese Urban Institutions, Society and Space) (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 1998), pp. 342–3.
25 Cheng Xuke and Wang Tao, Zhongguo yuanlin zhi, p. 79.
26 Laikwan Pang, ‘Magic and modernity in China’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, vol. 12, no. 2 (2004), pp. 299–327.
27 Luo Suwen, Shanghai chuanqi: wenming shanbian de zeying 1553–1949 (Shanghai Legends: a Profile of Civilization Changes, 1553–1949) (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin chubanshe, 2004), pp. 370–71.
28 See Maggie Keswick, The Chinese Garden: History, Art and Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1986).
29 Xiong Yuezhi, ‘Zhang yuan’, p. 339.
30 Ma Xulun recounts that during the first years of the twentieth century, when he was in his late teens, he often went to Zhang Garden to listen to open lectures delivered by famous intellectuals such as Zhang Binglin and Cai Yuanpei. Ma Xulun, Wo zai liushisui yiqian (Me Before I was Sixty) (Shanghai: Shenhu shudian, 1947), p. 22.
31 Mei Lanfang and Xu Jizhuan, Wutai shenghuo sishi nian (Forty Years of Life on the Stage) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1987), pp. 130–32.
32 Xiong Yuezhi, ‘Zhang yuan’, p. 339.
33 Yang Hongxun, The Classical Gardens of China: History and Design Techniques (New York, NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982), p. 70.
34 R. Stewart Johnston, Scholar Gardens of China: a Study and Analysis of the Spatial Design of the Chinese Private Garden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 49.
35 See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: the Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 111–14.
36 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 36–7.
38 Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN and London: Indiana University Press and British Film Institute, 1994), pp. 7–9.
39 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 74.
40 Don Slater, ‘Photography and modern vision: the spectacle of "natural magic"’, in Chris Jenks (ed.), Visual Culture (New York, NY and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 230.
41 See Stuart Hall, ‘The spectacle of the "other"’, in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 225–78.
42 Anonymous, ‘Xuyaun jiyouxu’ (Narrating the visit to Xu Garden). Qubao (Fun News), 20 May 1898. Reprinted in Cheng Jihua et al., Zhongguo dianying fazhen shi, p. 9.
43 Anonymous, ‘Guan meiguo yingxiji’ (Watching American shadow plays), Youxibao (Newspaper of Leisure), 5 September 1897. Reprinted in Cheng Jihua et al., Zhongguo dianying fazhen shi, pp. 8–9.
45 Anonymous, Shenbao, 20 September 1896. Quoted by Chen Pingyuan and Xia Xiaohong, Tuxiang wangqing, p. 310.
46 Dianshizhai, zhong 6 (Shanghai: Dianshizhai huabao, 1884–1897). Reprinted in Dianshizhai huabao (Dianshizhao Pictorial), vol. 42 (Guangzhou: Guandong renmin chubanshe, 1983), p. 42.
47 According to Tom Gunning and some film historians, cinema before 1906 was dominated by actuality films with exhibitionist aesthetics. These films introduce cinema as visual attraction, and their ways of communication are more presentational instead of representational. See, for example, Tom Gunning's ‘An aesthetic of astonishment: early film and the (in)credulous spectator’, in Linda Williams (ed.), Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), pp. 114–33; and Gunning's ‘"Now you see it, now you don't": the temporality of the cinema of attractions’ Velvet Light Trap, vol. 32 (1993), pp. 3–12.
48 Cheng Jihua et al., Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi, p. 9.
49 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York, NY: Schocken, 1969), pp. 235–7; Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: the Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 48.
50 Cheng Jihua et al., Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi, p. 9.
51 Anonymous, Shanghai chunsai zhuzhici (Spring Folk Poems of Shanghai) (publication details unknown), collected in Chen Wuwo (ed.), Laoshanghai sanshinian jianwenlu (1928) (My Thirty Years of Life in Old Shanghai) (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1997), pp. 101–2. The poem is also collected in Chen Pingyuan and Xia Xiaohong, Tuxiang wanqing, p. 298.
52 Although we do not know exactly when this poem was published, Xia Xiaohong estimates that it was written around 1898, as indicated by the contemporaneous issues mentioned. Xia Xiaohong, ‘Wanqing Shanghai saima yihua’ (Anecdotes of Late Qing Horse Racing in Shanghai), Xungeng (Root Exploration), vol. 5 (2001), p. 100.
53 There seems to have been more than one Strange Garden in Shanghai at the time. Chen Wuwo documented two opium parlours in the International Concessions also named Strange Garden (Chen Wuwo, Laoshanghai sanshinian jianwenlu, pp. 11–12). We can be quite sure this Strange Garden is the same one housing the American Civil War painting in 1896, as both the Shenbao writing and the Dianshizhai caption indicated its location as being near the Muddy Town Bridge of the Grand Avenue in the International Concession. However, I cannot be entirely sure if the Strange Garden described in the 1897 Youxibao featuring the moving picture was the same one, although the Strange Garden described in Shenbao and Dianshizhai was clearly suitable for film screening, and Youxibao's Strange Garden was clearly not one designed specifically for film screening. Since the two Strange Gardens documented by Chen Wuwo are opium parlours, it is extremely unlikely that they showed films.
54 Mei Yinsheng, ‘You Zhang yuan shikuai shuo’ (Ten happiness of visiting the Zhang Garden), collected in Chen Wuwo, Laoshanghai, p. 91.
55 Jean Châteauvert and André Gaudreault, ‘The noises of spectators, or the spectators as additive of the spectacle’, in Richard Abel and Rick Altman (eds), The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 183–91.
56 Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 93–101.
57 Chinese cinema would soon move into a larger mass culture entering the twentieth century, which is a topic beyond the scope of this paper.
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