Group 6 - Blog Post #3

 Group 6 | Blog Post #3 | 13 Mar 2022

Author: Sam

Editors: Michael, Ellie, Gefei

Author: Sam

Editors: Michael, Ellie, Gefei

    For this third blog post installment, our group wanted to take a deeper dive into specific Chinese Language silent films shown at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival throughout its showing at the Castro Theater. Since the festival's inception in 1996, hundreds of silent films from around the world have been shown to thousands of silent cinema fanatics and moviegoers alike. Amongst the vast number of pieces that have been screened over nearly three decades, there are a handful of significant silent films that have come not only from China but a great number of other East Asian countries as well. With many of these films being made during the height of the silent film era in the 1930s, these pieces represent an approach to silent film storytelling that is often not represented in the majority of academic film spaces, many of which are overrun by the Western approach and narrative. 

            In looking at the SFSFF’s archive, I found that the earliest example of a Chinese language silent film being highlighted at the festival was in 2004, with the film The Goddess (Shennü). This film follows a young mother who, to support her son, works as a prostitute at night despite the violence and exploitation she faces at the hands of her customers, the main proprietor of which is an individual referred to as “the Boss.” With this money, she can send her son to a private school, where she hopes that he will be able to receive an education and opportunities that she did not have access to at his age. Despite her best efforts, her occupation is revealed to her son’s peers, which ultimately results in her son being expelled from school. Because of this, she decided that it is in her and her son’s best interest to leave town and start over. When she goes back to retrieve the money that she had hidden from “the Boss,” she discovers that he has been stealing her savings, and she ends up killing him in retaliation. When her son’s principal visits him and school, promising to raise him well until she gets out of prison, she asks him to tell her son that she has died instead, granting him the opportunity to start over. Despite being dismissed by film scholars during the time of the Cultural Revolution, the importance of The Goddess in the greater context of Chinese film history has been revived by modern-day film critics and scholars over the past few years. Looking at the turbulent cultural, political, and social circumstances surrounding this film, its director, and even its lead actress, it is easy to see that The Goddess, as both a film and commentary on the lives of those living in 1930’s Shanghai, is not a piece that can be overlooked.

            In my research, I was shocked to find that the next instance in which a Chinese language silent film was shown at the SFSFF would happen 8 years later with the screening of Little Toys (Xiǎo wányì) in 2012. Directed and written by Sun Yu, this film follows a rural village family known for their creation and distribution of toys. Sister Ye, the film’s main character, is repeatedly hit with hardships: she watched her husband die of a heart attack, her son was kidnapped and sold off to a wealthy family, her village was destroyed due to conflict between warlords, and her daughter died defending her country from the Japanese while aiding the Nationalist Army. Many of these events, in conjunction with a pseudo war cry to fight back against the Japanese at the film’s end, push a Nationalist feeling and agenda that came as a direct result of the history of conflict between China and Japan. Director Sun Yu has been credited for introducing several cinematic methods to Chinese film that had never been explored, with many of these approaches coming from his educational background in Western film institutions.

2 years later in 2015, the SFSFF would show Song of the Fisherman, a movie directed in 1934 and shot under the production of the Lianhua Film Company. In doing my research, I found very little information about the film outside of the plot as well as information about the cast and crew, despite Song of the Fisherman being the first Chinese film to win an international film accolade at the Moscow Film Festival in 1935 and its overall consideration as a successful film by the standards of the time.

    2015 was the last year in which I was able to find any record of a Chinese language silent film being shown at the SFSFF. The oldest and perhaps most historically significant of the films shown, The Cave of the Spiderwomen (Pan si dong), follows the story of a monk named Xuanzang and his three disciples as they embark on a journey to find important pieces of holy scripture for Emperor Tsi Tsung, a plotline that was fundamentally based on the Ming Dynasty fable, Journey to the West. Desperate for food, Xuanzang unknowingly traverses into a cave full of cannibalistic Spiderwomen, all working to get him married to their spider queen. The importance of this film comes not necessarily from its material, but the fact that it even still exists. During the Cultural Revolution, films that depicted myths and legends were suppressed or destroyed in an attempt to increase and uplift works concerning contemporary Chinese life.

 

 

    As we continue in our research, we hope to be able to visit the Castro theater and inquire about the venue in-house rather than through digital means. Considering the recent purchase of the theater by individuals with a different vision for the Castro Theater, we would like to dive deeper into what this means for the SFSFF and other film experiences as a whole.