Everyday audiences around the world know little about silent Chinese cinema, and even less about traditions unrelated to the socialist project. A new DVD of Romance of the Western Chamber seeks to change that.
I'm not 100% certain about this, but I'll say it anyway: the 1927 silent film Romance of the Western Chamber may be the oldest Chinese film out on DVD anywhere in the world. It's certainly the oldest available in the U.S. (it eclipses the 1931 Ruan Lingyu film The Peach Girl, which was recently released by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival). Meanwhile, most of the DVDs released by Bo Ying in mainland China are of the "left-wing" tradition, and thus are 1930s Shanghai films.
I preface my review of the DVD with this statement because the release marks an important turning point in the gradual rediscovery of Chinese film history by everyday filmgoers unable to see films at specialized film archives. There are several reasons for its importance. First, the DVD for Romance of the Western Chamber is released by a commercial distributor, Cinema Epoch, which means that unlike The Peach Girl and the 1934 classic The Goddess (also released by the SFSFF), it will be available on Amazon and other mainstream retailers. Thus, it will be the first silent Chinese film released widely to American audiences.
However, even for those who have previously obtained silent films like The Big Road and New Women from Chinese importers or Yesasia.com, Romance of the Western Chamber will still be a revelation because it's not part of the recent revival of 1930s Shanghai cinema, which tended to celebrate left-wing cinema as the beginnings of Chinese-language filmmaking (which not at all surprising given that the revival began in the P.R.C.). Instead, Romance of the Western Chamber, directed by Hou Yao, is from an earlier period, a time when Shanghai cinema exuded sensuality rather than pedagogy and self-consciously "social" messages. Prior to getting this DVD, I'd never seen films from that age, but had only read about them in history books like Zhang Zhen's fantastic Amorous History of the Silver Screen. Cinema Epoch's release exemplifies DVD's potential as a traveling film archive, making amateur historians out of everyday consumers.
The idea of archiving and historicity is unexpectedly foregrounded by the DVD's peculiar style of subtitling. The print used for the transfer has French intertitles, suggesting that there was originally a French audience for the film, challenging the notion that Chinese cinema was insular until the 1970s. The weirdest thing, however, is that traditional Chinese characters are visible in-between the lines of French, meaning that the print was later re-struck and altered for a Chinese audience. Finally, the DVD itself has removable, yellow English subtitles. The three languages together trace the cross-cultural movement of the film, becoming a palimpsest of its global consumption.
That said, the Romance of the Western Chamber is more than simply a historical relic; it's actually a terrific film, if a little awkwardly paced and narrated by classical standards. Based on the famous play, the film is about scholars, lovers, and heroes -- the stuff of Chinese folk tales and genre films, rather than the content of social realism films like Street Angel and The Goddess. As incredible and beloved as those films are, their lasting effect on Chinese cinema probably was not as palpable as that of films like Romance of the Western Chamber, which transformed into opera films like The Love Eterne and wuxia films like the Wong Fei-hong series in the 1950s and later the 1990s. This is a cinema of fanciful costumes, elaborate sets, visual effects, and action set-pieces. Romance of the Western Chamber shows Chinese cinema at its beginnings, experimenting with style and narration in ways that would later develop into one of the most mature cinemas in the world. In fact, Hou Yao's film, with its fast edits and impressionistic fight scenes, could be called avant-garde in its form, although strictly "traditional" in its narrative; this dichotomy would come to characterize Chinese cinemas (especially those of Hong Kong) in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
The DVD production itself is a mixed bag, but that's hardly the point. The picture quality is passable given the age of the film, although it definitely doesn't seem like a first-generation transfer. The new music score by Toshiyuki Hiraoka is probably nothing like the actual musical accompaniment played in Shanghai during the silent age, which tended to be a sonic collage of Chinese instrumental music and familiar Western classical themes. Toshiyuki Hiraoka's music is more modernist in its melody. Still, this more ethereal musical accompaniment is completely consistent with the effect of the film, in that it emphasizes the ethereal, the sensuous, and the dream-like. A more "romantic" score might not play as "accurately" today, for it would lose its 1920s association with cosmopolitanism and come off as nostalgic and traditional, which the film definitely was not when it first debuted.
In the coming months, Cinema Epoch will be unleashing a series of more canonical Chinese classics: Crossroads, Song at Midnight, Spring in a Small Town, Queen of Sports, The Big Road, Daybreak, Twin Sisters, and a personal favorite, Street Angel. As far as I can tell, these releases will be their long-awaited English-subtitled debuts, so film historians -- amateur and professional alike -- will have easy access to Chinese cinema's original golden age.