Hearing Their Stories Through Polyphonic Soundtracks: Women and Music in Contemporary Chinese Film

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Zhichun Lin, B.A., M.A.

Graduate Program in Music

The Ohio State University

2013

Dissertation Committee:

Professor Arved Ashby, Advisor Professor Danielle Fosler-Lussier Professor Kirk Denton Professor Alexander Leibman

Copyright by

Zhichun Lin

2013

Abstract

My dissertation examines the relationship between women and music in contemporary

Chinese film—the early post-Mao melodrama and the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Generation film since the 1980s. Through separate interrogations of 1) the relationship between women’s voices and music, 2) the relationship between pre-existing music—a special and idiosyncratic musical application in film—and women’s presentations and representations, and 3) the relationship between popular music and women in urban life, I argue that music in Chinese film provides a complex historical-cultural perspective on the experiences of women, portraying both individual emotion and broad social change.

Music also offers a unique channel for interpreting and understanding women, one that both uses and surpasses such old images as the silenced victim, the invisible figure, and the fantasized “other.” When women’s voices and emotions are restrained either by the old patriarchal social system or by an ideological authority, as in early post-Mao, Fourth, and Fifth Generation films, the music conveys content that is otherwise suppressed and understanding the musical signifiers gives us access to it. The use in Chinese film of pre- existing music, such as opera and folk music, both draws on and subverts already-defined stereotypes and offers a means to convey aspects of character in a diverse and compelling way. However, in Sixth Generation film—the urban cinema that focuses on populations rather than individuals in the city—popular music does not advocate for women

ii exclusively because its identity is a collection of public emotion rather than personal memory. Instead, popular music places women into a larger social context and connects people. Finally, I conclude that the relationship between music and women in Chinese film has evolved through changes in women’s social role and status in the history of

Chinese society.

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Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to my loving parents, my husband, and my dearest

grandparents who are always in my heart.

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Acknowledgments

During the past six years, I have received so many people’s help. Without them, it would have been impossible for me to finish my dissertation and get the doctoral degree.

I am fortunate to have three exceptional faculty members on my dissertation committee. I would like to acknowledge the deepest debt to my advisor, Professor Arved

Ashby who is extremely kind, patient, and insightful. I really appreciate the countless hours you have spent on fostering my growth as an academic. I will always remember your inspirations in my studies, your encouragement when I was frustrated, your congratulations when I succeeded, and your humor in class and in our meetings. You set up a model of scholarship for me in teaching and research. I also want to thank Professor

Danielle Fosler-Lussier and Professor Kirk Denton for joining my committee and giving me such wonderful directions for my study as well my grant applications. To each of you, your enthusiasm for my research and constant support of my work have enhanced my development as a scholar. The knowledge you have shared with me will continue to influence my career.

I also want to thank other faculty in the Department of Musicology at The Ohio

State University. Professor Charles M. Atkinson, my first-year advisor, thank you for all your encouragement when I felt nervous about my future study. Professor

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Graeme Boone, thank you for challenging my thoughts when I first came to study in the

United States. Your rich knowledge and enormous questions make me deeply realize the huge differences in the ways of thinking between China and the West. Professor Lois

Rosow, thank you very much for giving me the important financial support that has helped me focus on my studies, gain valuable teaching experiences, and go to conferences.

I am sincerely grateful to Professor Rocki Strader at The Ohio State University

Library Tech Center. Thank you so much for offering me the Graduate Associate position during the most important three years of my dissertation writing. Without your help, I cannot imagine how I could finish my dissertation under the huge financial pressure. I also want to thank other staff members at the University Libraries Tech Center. Thank you for allowing me to read the new books that are helpful for my dissertation writing before they were catalogued. These books have provided me great sources for my study.

I also want to thank Professor Robynn J. Stilwell from Georgetown University. I will never forget the great feedback and helps you have given me on my conference presentations, my grant applications, and my dissertation writing.

During my dissertation writing, I also have had the great help and encouragement from my friends. I want to thank Molly Reinhoudt and Maureen Pritchard for helping me to revise and proofread my dissertation. I also want to thank Zheng Yingxue, Yang Jia and Yin Yanfei for many valuable discussions about my dissertation topic.

Finally, I am so fortunate to have such great parents and husband. I want to thank you for enduring so many years of shortened visits and countless complaints over the

vi phone and internet. Words cannot express my endless grateful feelings. Thank you all for keeping on reminding me “no difficulty and failure are a big deal and cannot be overcome.” Yes, it is true. I have overcome them all so far and will continue to confront them bravely in the future. Thank you.

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Vita

June 2001 ...... Chengdu Shude High School, China June 2005 ...... B.A. Media Studies, Communication University of China June 2007 ...... M.A. Musicology, The Ohio State University 2007 to 2010 ...... Graduate Associate, School of Music, The Ohio State University 2010 to present ...... Graduate Associate, University Libraries Tech Center, The Ohio State University

Publication

Lin, Zhichun. (2012) “The Heard and Unheard Sounds of Women: A Comparison of Female Silence and Theme Music in the Two Versions of Letter from an Unknown Woman,” Music and Moving Image 5, no.3, University of Illinois Press: 11-27.

Fields of Study

Major Field: Music

Specialization: Film Music, Gender and Music

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgements ...... v

Vita ...... viii

List of Figures ...... xi

Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 2 Women’s Silence, Voiceover, and Their Musical “Voices” ...... 52

Women’s Silence and Voiceover in Western and Chinese Film ...... 54

Case Study: Two Versions of Letter from an Unknown Woman ...... 65

Conclusion ...... 122

Chapter 3 Preexisting Music and Women ...... 125

Preexisting Music in Western Film...... 126

Preexisting Music in Chinese Film ...... 129

Case Study: Farewell My Concubine ...... 134

Conclusion ...... 199

Chapter 4 Women, People’s Relations and Popular Music in Urban Cinema...... 203

Popular Music in Chinese Urban Cinema: Definition and Characteristics...... 205

Women and Liuxing gequ in Chinese Urban Cinema ...... 214

Case Study: Cry Woman—A Strange Relation Between Pop Music and Women ....222

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The Diegetic Liuxing gequ in Chinese Independent Urban Cinema ...... 230

Case Study: Pickpocket—Between Anempathy and Satire ...... 233

The Non-Diegetic Liuxing gequ in Chinese New Urban Cinema ...... 253

Case Study: Spring Subway—People’s Relations in MTV Style ...... 254

Women, Public and Rock Music in Chinese Urban Cinema ...... 273

Case Study: Dirt—A Woman’s Rock Experience ...... 278

Conclusion ...... 290

Chapter 5 Conclusion ...... 292

References ...... 297

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List of Figures

Figure 1.1 The Legend of Tianyun Mountain. Under political pressure, Song Wei

painfully decides to break up with her lover Luo Qun ...... 2

Figure 1.2 Raise the Red Lantern. Without any happiness, the fifth wife looks blankly

onher wedding day ...... 3

Figure 1.3 Lost in Beijing and Go! Go! Lala. Despite of different social status, Du lala

and Liu Pingguo face similar challenges in the city ...... 4

Figure 1.4 Anonymous, The Portrait of The Empress Xiaoxianchun...... 9

Figure 1.5 Raise the Red Lantern. Gong Li’s face becomes the iconic representation of

Chinese Fifth Generation Film...... 13

Figure 1.6 Zhang Xuan, The Ladies Are Spinning Sweing Silk and Zhou Fang, The

Ladieswith Flowers ...... 24

Figure 1.7 Zhang Xuan, The Lady Guoguo Is Spring Outing ...... 27

Figure 1.8 The Front and Back of the qin ...... 29

Figure 1.9 Wang Zhenpeng, Bo Ya Performs the qin ...... 29

Figure 1.10 Zhou Fang, The Qin Performing Lady ...... 31

Figure 1.11 Anonymous, The Portrait of Tang Court Music ...... 33

Figure 2.1 Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) by Max Ophuls...... 67

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Figure 2.2 Letter from an Unknown Woman (2004) by Xu Jinglei...... 67

Figure 2.3 Letter from an Unknown Woman (1949). Lisa is lying on the bed in the

hospital. She refuses to reveal Stefan as her child’s father ...... 81

Figure 2.4 Letter from an Unknown Woman (2004). The Chinese “Unknown Woman”

leaves quitely after learning of her unexpected pregnancy ...... 83

Figure 2.5 Lin Hai, The Pipa Narrates. The Piano version ...... 93

Figure 2.6 Dunhuang Fresco. The Goddess Feitian (middle) plays the reverse pipa ...... 97

Figure 2.7 Meikai, The Portrait of The Pipa Xing ...... 99

Figure 2.8 Franz Liszt, Concert Study in Flat (Un Sospiro). Bars 3-5 (melody only).

Anticipation-resolution pattern...... 109

Figure 2.9 Daniele Amfitheatrof, Letter from an Unknown Woman. Repeated anticipation

motif answered by the brass only (no expected resolution section) ...... 110

Figure 3.1 Ye shenchen. The Kunqu Opera version and the Peking Opera version ...... 151

Figure 3.2 Farewell My Concubine. The three scenes where the boys practice the Song of

Gaixia (Xiao Douzi is clearly feature in the first two, but not in the third) ...... 162

Figure 3.3 Farewell My Concubine. Dieyi performs the Kun Opera Peony Pavilion in

man’s clothing to the Japanese military ...... 177

Figure 3.4 Farewell My Concubine. The “farewell” between Yu Ji and the Chu King

onstage indicates the farewell between Dieyi and Xiaolou because of Ju Xian’s

involvement...... 181

Figure 3.5 Farewell My Concubine. With the same music, Ju Xian’s sweet dream

becomes Dieyi’s nightmare...... 191

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Figure 4.1 Cry Woman. The middle-aged lady is singing “Sweetness” onstage while the

audience is cheering ...... 204

Figure 4.2 Cry Woman. Guixiang is practicing the lament while Youming is calculating

their possible profits of their “crying business” ...... 224

Figure 4.3 Cry Woman. Guixiang is performing her lament by singing pop songs. Other

people don’t pay attention to her, but to the mah-jongg game ...... 225

Figure 4.4 Cry Woman. Guixiang with hot pink cloth is singing and dancing in front of

the dog’s funeral march ...... 229

Figure 4.5 Pickpocket. Xiaowu is isolated from his old friend as well as the mainstream

...... 242

Figure 4.6 Pickpocket. Xiaowu watches Xiaoyong on TV ...... 243

Figure 4.7 Pickpocket. The zoom-in shot of Xiaoyong’s interview on TV ...... 243

Figure 4.8 Pickpocket. The “Crying Heart”from TV in the restaurant ...... 245

Figure 4.9 Pickpocket. The “Crying Heart”from TV at Xiaoyong’s home ...... 245

Figure 4.10 Pickpocket. Meimei and Xiaowu watch but not sing “Crying Heart” at

Karaoke room...... 247

Figure 4.11 Pickpocket. The unknown people on street sing “Crying Heart” surrounded

by the public ...... 248

Figure 4.12 Pickpocket. Xiaowu and Meimei happily sing “Crying Heart” in Karaoke

room ...... 250

Figure 4.13 Pickpocket. Xiaowu and Meimei’s love “Crying Heart” is interrupted by the

unpleasant visitor ...... 251

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Figure 4.14 Spring Subway. Jianbin and Xiaohui are nervous before jumping ...... 257

Figure 4.15 Spring Subway. Jianbin and Xiaohui jump out of the screen ...... 258

Figure 4.16 Spring Subway. The fast running subway scene immediately follows Jianbin

and Xiaohui’s jumping scene ...... 258

Figure 4.17 Zhang Yadong, Spring Subway. The Accompaniment Part ...... 259

Figure 4.18 Zhang Yadong, Spring Subway. The Main Theme Played by Erhu ...... 260

Figure 4.19 Spring Subway. Jianbin and Xiaohui look at different places that indicate

their problematic relationship ...... 263

Figure 4.20 Spring Subway. Tian’ai walks to Damin’s front and confronts him directly

...... 267

Figure 4.21 Spring Subway. The close shot/reverse shots display Damin’s awkwardness

and Tian’ai’s anger ...... 268

Figure 4.22 Spring Subway. Tian’ai takes out the photo and asks Damin. Damin looks

embarrassed...... 270

Figure 4.23 Spring Subway. Damin tells Tian’ai silently that he is deaf. Tian’ai is

shocked and feels guilty ...... 271

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Chapter One: Introduction

Anyone who has watched Chinese films produced within the last thirty years might take away particular impressions of the female characters and their experiences.

Below I present examples from The Legend of Tianyun Mountain (Xie Jin, 1980),

Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, 1994), Lost in Beijing (Li Yu, 2007), and Go!

Go! Lala (Xu Jinglei, 2010), which reflect the most common ways in which women are portrayed in Chinese film from this period.

In Legend of Tianyun Mountain, the female protagonist Song Wei narrates her bittersweet life stories: she grows up in the People’s Republic of China, dreaming of a better life with more freedom and happiness in the new country. However, she encounters a painful separation from her loved one Luo Qun because of his

“ideological mistakes” in those politically turbulent years. Under the pressure of ideological authority, Song Wei is forced to write a goodbye letter with tears to Luo

Qun. At the moment, the lush orchestral music, along with the female protagonists’ voiceovers, dramatizes their sentiments as they echo in audiences’ minds. (see Figure

1.1.)

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Figure 1.1. The Legend of Tianyun Mountain. Under the pressure of the political authority, Song Wei painfully makes her decision of breaking up with her lover Luo Qun, who is charged as a rightist.

At the end of Raise the Red Lantern, a young woman, wearing a beautiful wedding dress, is about to become the fifth wife of Master Chen. However, this is an arranged marriage. This young woman, like thousands of other women who live in the old feudalistic Chinese society, is sold by her parents in exchange for money.

Unsmiling and speechless, she waits for her uncertain future. The loud wedding music, played by the suona (Chinese trumpet), mixes with the exploding firecrackers outside the house and acoustically highlights the would-be happiness of marriage. We do not know what will happen to her. Yet most women with similar experiences have no happy ending. They fight for their lives; yet they are still incapable of escaping from misery. (see Figure 1.2.)

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Figure 1.2. Raise the Red Lantern. The woman stars blank and speechless on her pre-arranged wedding day.

The female characters Liu Pingguo in Lost in Beijing and Du Lala in Go! Go!

Lala can be categorized as two different types of women who live in contemporary

China. The first type, such as Liu Pingguo, is in the bottom echelons of society. They are struggling to survive every day in the big city, a place where they dream of settling down one day. But the goddess of fortune barely smiles on them. The second type, such as Du Lala, has better luck in their lives and work. Yet they still have many things for which they fight—careers, true love, marriage, and relationships with their families. The two types of female characters, represented by Liu Pingguo and Du Lala, are frequently seen in contemporary Chinese urban cinema. Unlike in the previous two scenes above, contemporary popular music takes a prominent position in these soundtracks, but there is no particular music composed exclusively for these female characters. (see Figure 1.3.)

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Figure 1.3. Lost in Beijing. The female migrant worker, Liu Pingguo (left), and Go! Go! Lala. The successful career woman, Du Lala (right). Despite their different social status, both of them face the same challenges in the city.

The four examples described above, without a doubt, do not cover all of the stories that Chinese women had experienced on screen. Nevertheless, the four scenes generally summarize the visual presentations of women in contemporary Chinese film.

In these films, the women are from different social statuses, careers, regions, and epochs and are placed into the rebuilt or allegorical history by Chinese filmmakers to explore, call attention to, and question past and current social and cultural issues.

What they have encountered within film narrative reflects, as Chris Berry summarizes, two interrelated histories—the history of Chinese film in terms of style, theme, character, mise en scene, and narrative structure and the history of contemporary

China as a social and cultural formation.1

Chinese women’s images and experiences on screen have been debated among

1 Chris Berry, Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution After the Cultural Revolution (New York: Routledge, 1993), 2. 4

audiences, critics, and academic researchers. Many scholars have already examined various aspects of women in Chinese film; however, little attention has been paid to music. Understanding the relationship between women and music can provide us with an alternative perspective on their representation in film, one that may interact more attentively and specifically with their gendered representation than a narrowly visual perspective. Heather Laing points out that “similar notions of power and control often lie at the heart of both gender and musical/social dynamics,” thus, music and sound can provide an excellent context for observing and understanding women of any society in films.2 When analyzing different women’s images in films, we need to attend to their musical aspects in addition to the interpretation of women through conventional methods, such as visual, narrative, and verbal perspectives.

The invisible but extremely influential power that music naturally possesses can also provide various novel means by which to explain the association with women in film. According to Caryl Flinn, some male scholars, such as Sigmund Freud and

Claude Levi-Strauss, “place music, [like women], in strict opposition to knowledge, science, rationality, and other ‘manly’ endeavors in writing and think music becomes

‘the object-static, meaningless, enigmatic and feminine.’”3 However, as Fline points out, many feminist scholars reinterpret this so-called failure of music, claiming, “its inability to conduct the listener to fixed references, its irrationality and emotionalism, and its very invisibility challenges some of the dominant representation’s most cherished axioms such as its impulse toward rationalism and the epistemological

2 Heather Laing, The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (New York: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd, 2007), 9. 3 Caryl Flinn, “The ‘Problem of Femininity in Theories of Film Music,’” Screen 27, no. 6 (Nov.-Dec. 1986): 58. 5

privilege awarded vision.”4 Helene Cixous claims music and the voice can help create better representations of women because they have the capacity to “resonate, operate within a libidinal economy that operates outside patriarchal constraints.”5

Julia Kristeva considers music to be an important feature of what she calls poetic language, which she thinks can “unsettle patriarchal symbolic structures and modes of subject formation.”6 These feminist scholars’ arguments, against the male critics mentioned above, celebrate music’s unconventional representational power as a potentially subversive force. Because of its relatively abstract qualities, as Flinn’s summary of Kristeva’s argument explains, music “permits a greater play of signification, a greater flexibility of meaning, and a greater mobility of subject positioning” and embraces the idea of feminine expression to proclaim itself an integral component that helps present and represent women in films.7

On the subject of music in Chinese film, several questions arise: What is the relationship between music and women? Does the music magnify the visual or narrative analysis or provide an alternative explanation? What role does music play in forming the images and experiences of Chinese women on screen? How do we observe, analyze, interpret, and understand women through music in contemporary

Chinese film? These are interesting and important questions that have not yet been examined in scholarship. Therefore, this dissertation presents a new approach to the study of women in Chinese contemporary film by focusing on music’s particular role in shaping their images and reflecting their experiences. By examining how music

4 Ibid., 61. 5 Ibid., 61. 6 Ibid., 62. 7 Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 59. 6

functions in relation to female characters from different sociopolitical contexts in

Chinese film, I argue that music provides a complex historical-cultural perspective on women’s experiences, portraying both individual emotions and broad social change.

Music also offers a unique channel for interpreting and understanding women, one that both uses and surpasses such old images as the silenced victim, the invisible figure, and the fantasized “other.” By analyzing the way that music constructs, represents, and connects to women, we can see how its use in contemporary Chinese films provides a complex historical-cultural perspective on both women’s personal and shared experiences in Chinese society. Furthermore, the use of music presents and represents women as multi-dimensional subjectivities through time and space in films.

Women in Chinese History and Film

Learning about women seems inseparable from understanding the society in which they live. In the early nineteenth century, when the French missionary Evariste

Regis Huc traveled to China, he was shocked by the role of Chinese women in society.

In his book The Chinese Empire, forming a sequel to recollections of a journey through Tartary and Tibet, Evariste pointed out that

Chinese women bear the most miserable, painful, and discriminated life. Since they’re born, they are considered as the humiliation of their family. Even though they are not killed immediately, they will be treated as animals, not human…. The traditional slavery system of Chinese women has public and private levels—exemplified by traditional conception, legalization, and behavior regulation—these become the factors of determining the social status of Chinese women.8

8 Evariste Regis Huc, The Chinese Empire: Forming a Sequel to the Work Entitled “Recollection of a Journey Through Tartary and Thibet,” 2vols., second edition (New York: 1855), 248-51. Cited in John A. Roberts, China through Western Eyes: The Nineteenth Century, trans. Chongyue Jiang and Linhai Liu (Beijing: Shi Shi Publishing Press, 1999), 7

Evariste’s description perhaps could be considered as one of the earliest observations of Chinese women presented to the Western public. The nineteenth-century Western society experienced the transformation from feudalism to capitalism as a result of the

Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution; by contrast, China was still largely dominated by a feudalistic economic and political system, despite the fact that commerce had been part of society since the Song Dynasty. Thus, it is understandable that Westerners viewed the culture of China and the role of women within it, in particular, as barbarous when compared to their own advanced civilization during that time.

The Western study of Chinese women began in the nineteenth century. According to Emma J. Teng, the earliest writing on Chinese women mainly came from Western missionaries and ethnologists in the late nineteenth century. Most of their accounts relied on three kinds of sources: first, eyewitness or anecdotal accounts; second, biographies of prominent women; and third, the description of the ideals of

“womanhood” derived from readings of the Confucian Classics.9 These accounts emphasized the victimization and weakness of women in China, which was used as a measurement of how low social development in the country was at that time.10

Therefore, reports of Chinese women’s subordination were, as Teng summarizes,

“used to validate Western ideas about China’s perceived cultural backwardness, which in turn justified the imperialist agenda.”11 However, victimization was not the

104. 9 Jinhua Emma Teng, “The Construction of the ‘Traditional Chinese Woman’ in the Western Academy: A Critical Review,” Signs (Autumn 1996): 120. 10 This idea is influenced by theorists such as Herbert Spencer, J. J. Bachofen, and Friedrich Engels, mentioned in Teng’s article, 121. 11 Ibid. 8

only description of Chinese women in the West. Another approach came from the orientalist fascination with the exoticism and refinement of elite Chinese women.

Many court paintings from the Qing Dynasty have displayed glamorous noble women by highlighting their luxuriant dresses and accessories. (See Figure 1.4.) Both approaches, therefore, have become closely associated with women in traditional

Chinese culture [and with China], both of which were represented—as Teng says—“at [their] worst and at [their] best.”12

Figure 1.4. Anonymous. The Portrait of The Empress Xiaoxianchun, 1736. Many people believe that it was painted by Giuseppe Castiglione (Italian, 1688-1766), handscroll, ink, and color on silk. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

Influenced by early missionaries, the image of Chinese women as victims was retained for a long time. Teng points out that, trapped as “part of a universally

12 Ibid., 122. 9

subordinated womanhood, they [Chinese women] were also seen to suffer a particular oppression caused by the extreme nature of Chinese patriarchy.”13 Thus,

Teng states that the focus on Chinese women as victims is, according to many

Western scholars, the “marginalization of Third World women in Western feminist discourse”—a discourse that constructs Chinese women as a special class of Third

World women who are repressed even more than women in Western society.14 The status of Chinese women provides a very useful test for Western feminist theory because they, as Teng states, “can be seen as providing a ‘feminine’ mirror image to the ‘masculine’ west.”15 This tendency toward feminizing China as the “other” reveals a kind of romantic orientalism that was often embraced by structuralists or semioticians for the exploration of various feminist theories.16

Until the 1990s, these differences or diversities became a concern in women’s studies as scholars called attention to the dominance of white-middle-class feminists in the academy. As a result, research on Chinese women in China subverted the stereotypes of them as purely oppressed and unempowered. Scholars such as Rubie

Watson are opposed the idea of “women’s subordination derived from an unchanging kinship order” in late 1980s and argued that “gender subordination in China is fundamentally a historical problem.”17 They particularly emphasized that historical change should be counted as a major factor in analyzing women’s situations in regard to the economy, politics, and society in China. Teng suggests that such an argument

13 Ibid., 125. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 139. 16 Ibid., 139. 17 Rubie Watson, “Afterword: Marriage and Gender Inequality,” in Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society, edited by Rubie Watson and Patricia B. Ebrey (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 363. 10

challenges Eurocentric assumptions about the backwardness of Chinese society and the victimization of women, as well as assumptions about the nature of Chinese culture.18

Therefore, examining Chinese women within their cultural context could be taken as an important reference for the study of women in Chinese film. Many Western feminist scholars consider women as “the symbolic bearers of the collectivity’s identity and honor, both personally and collectively,”19 and as the figure of “mother” who are usually the keepers of the “hearth” in domesticity. 20 These ideas are often linked with the study of women in non-Western films. Many scholars have drawn on the idea of “women representing China” in their film studies, yet the positions of

Chinese women on screen are, as Berry demonstrates, often associated with public space.21 In other words, women in Chinese films are presented less often as a conventional “mother” figure of the country. Instead, their connection with the country is complicated by social and national developments. Jerome Silbergeld states that historical dimensions account for the reasons why “sexual, female narratives [are] appropriated as a wedge for the reassertion of Chinese nationalism” and that “the appropriation of female imagery and female situations [exemplified by those famous women who are ‘sacrificed’—usually as a political bride for the country—e.g.,

Mingfei, Xishi, Diaochan, and the princesses Wang Zhaojun and Wencheng] for

18 Jinhua Emma Teng, “The Construction of the ‘Traditional Chinese Woman’ in the Western Academy: A Critical Review,” Signs (autumn, 1996): 133. 19 Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), 45. 20 See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 21 Chris Berry, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 110. 11

political ends has been common.”22 Similarly, as Silbergeld points out, in the

Chinese rhetorical tradition images of women were frequently borrowed by male poet-politicians who were frustrated in their careers, “adding to the sense of ‘female’ powerlessness and by implication to the depths of male frustration.”23

Such historical connections thus can explain the inseparable relationship between women and the nation in Chinese films. According to Cui Shuqin, gender and nation usually serve as “narrative subjects and visual tropes”24 and shows “how a visual form, cinema, and a gender category, woman, participate in the representation of the nation.”25 She points out that the image of women in Chinese film has been objectified as a symbol of the country’s situation from period to period.26 This has been particularly true of Fifth Generation films, which have drawn so much attention around the world, whose female characters’ images on screen thus become a central concern. That these women—for example, Cuiqiao in Yellow Earth (1984), Jiu’er in

Red Sorghum (1988), Ju Dou in Ju Dou (1990), Song Lian in Raise the Red Lantern

(1991), Qiu Ju in The Story of Qiuju (1992), and Ju Xian in Farewell My Concubine

(1993), mostly played Gong Li—are so widely visible on screen has led to significant discussion among critics.

Scholars project these characters’ images and experiences onto the nation’s history and traditions and debate their connections.27 For instance, Cui argues that the

22 Jerome Silbergeld, China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2000), 134. 23 Ibid., 135. 24 Shuqin Cui, Women Through Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema (Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 2003), xi. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 See Wang Yuejin, 1991; Esther Yau, 1991; Lydia Liu, 1994; Rey Chow, 1995; Cui Shuqin, 2003 12

emphasis in these films on images of the female characters’ bodies indicates that they are being presented on screen as a gendered other and an Orientalist sexual commodity for the international gaze.28 In Rey Chow’s analysis, on the other hand,

Gong Li’s characters could be symbolically interpreted as signifying China’s suffering and struggle in the global marketplace. Yet in Chris Berry’s examination, Gong

Li-as-China in Fifth Generation films symbolizes a popular nation defined against its rulers and envisioned by the young educated elite in the 1980s.29 (See Figure 1.5.)

Figure 1.5. Raise the Red Lantern. Gong Li’s face has become the iconic representation of Fifth Generation Film.

With so many discussions of women as representations of something else, it may lead to the conclusion that there is no other way in which to view women in Chinese film. The female leads in these films have so often been used and appropriated, sexualized, primitivized, exoticized, and sacrificed that it seems at first glance, as

Silbergeld points out, to purposefully display “the traditional injustice metered out to

28 Ibid. 29 Berry, China on Screen, 110. 13

females in China.”30 Yet these films’ real concern “lies only with China’s national predicament, and they really are not about female liberation.”31 Li Xiaojiang observes that women’s liberation in the People’s Republic, unlike their Western counterparts,

“has never been a self-motivated movement but part of national revolution.”32 As

Lydia Liu notes, Chinese women are always subsumed under the nationalist agenda, where their liberation means “little more than equal opportunity to participate in public labor.”33 Thus the image of Chinese women on screen, according to Cui

Shuqin, is designed and created for national interests and foregrounds them as a symbol while effacing their self-identity.34

Although there are many negative examples of Chinese women on screen, they are still presented in diverse ways. Scholars have begun to question popular Western film theories that propose that Chinese women on screen can only portray the purely passive victim or symbolize the nation. Instead, as Wang Yuejin suggests, it is precisely that China’s traditional feminization of men merely constructs an alternate form of the contradiction:

What happens is that men usurp women’s proper space so that women are pushed aside, marginalized, expelled, suspended, bracketed, and exiled into the realm of the imaginary to become icons and absences…. Thus men not so much speak for women as stand in their place to speak, thereby replacing women’s linguistic space, usurping their world of consciousness, and denying women of their right to speak.35

30 Silbergeld, China into Film, 133. 31 Ibid. 32 In Li Xiaojiang, Zhu Hong, and Dong Xiuyu, eds., Xingbie yu zhongguo (Gender and China), (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1994): 6-7. 33 Lydia H. Liu, “The Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature: Negotiating Feminisms across East/West Boundaries,” Genders 12 (1991): 24. 34 Ibid., xii-xiii. 35 Yuejin Wang, “Red Sorghum: Mixing Memory and Desire,” in Perspectives on Chinese 14

In Wang’s analysis of Red Sorghum, where he asserts that the “film is fundamentally a liberation of repressed collective desire through the very denial of distinction between male and female desire,”36 challenges the culturally vague application of

Western cinema and feminist theories to China, such as Laura Mulvey’s “gaze” theorems borrowed from Lacanian psychoanalysis.37 In addition, Silbergeld argues that Chinese women on screen do gaze back:

They defy their oppressors, they challenge the audience to identify where it stands ideologically toward them and their fate, and they fall in the line of battle just as do the men because they had the courage to place themselves there. They die as many heroes die, because they had something worth dying for, because their cause was unfulfilled, and so that others might be inspired to follow their resistance to injustice.38 At the same time, female characters in women’s cinema film are another major concern in relation to reclaiming the image of Chinese women on screen. Although women’s issues do not appear in isolation, observing and understanding female subjectivity and sensibility in films that focus on women may lead us to a different perspective on the subject. In recent years, transnational feminism has helped scholars, as Wang Lingzhen claims, to “step outside the restriction of the nation-state and critically resituate gender and cinema in a transnational feminist configuration that enables the examination of relationships of power and knowledge among and within cultures and nation-states.”39 In her newly edited book, Chinese Women’s Cinema:

Cinema, edited by Chris Berry (British Film Institute, 1991), 83-84. 36 Ibid., 97. 37 Jerome summarizes and discusses Wang’s ideas in China into Film, 143. 38 Ibid., 144. 39 Lingzhen Wang, “Introduction: Transnational Feminist Reconfiguration of Film Discourse and Women’s Cinema,” in Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Context, ed. Lingzhen Wang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 14. 15

Transnational Contexts, Wang emphasizes the importance and necessity of applying transnational feminism to analyze women in film to “resituate established feminist film theory in the global and neocolonial context, not just by revealing the universal and ahistorical model assumed in Western feminist film theory, but also by linking the model to colonial and neocolonial histories that facilitated and disseminated that theory.”40 As Wang points out, transnational feminism can help to “explore the historical effects of the modern nation-state and nationalism, which first-world feminism usually dismisses.”41 In her book, seventeen scholars observe and analyze women in Chinese women’s cinema from the perspectives of female authorship, gendered voice, visual subject, female writing, diaspora, and transnational practice.

Centering on female subjectivity and female awareness, Chinese women’s cinema provides an opportunity to depart from the idea of women as a representation of country and to reorient gender configuration and articulate different meanings in history.

Generalizing women’s image in Chinese history as well as in film is dangerous. It is important to reiterate, as Rubie S. Watson emphasized, that Chinese women were

“never ‘just women,’ nor were they simply the victims of an oppressive order, although they were greatly constrained by that order.”42 They actively engaged in

Chinese history. While performing the traditional roles assigned to them, they also resisted the patriarchal system in various ways. As Silbergeld argues, there is no single way of viewing what Chinese women “are or should be [on screen], from

40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 16. 42 Rubie S. Watson, “Chinese Bridal Laments: The Claims of a Dutiful Daughter,” in Harmony and Counterpoint: Ritual Music in Chinese Context, edited by Bell Young, Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, and Rubie S. Watson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 114. 16

victim to warrior, representing herself or representing something else.”43 They can signify so much, by being appropriated or analogized in many ways, while still retaining a central significance in their own right—which resulted from China’s age-old but seemingly ageless rhetorical tradition of women in art and literature.44

Therefore, the image of Chinese women on screen keeps changing and being enriched by past traditions as well as the ongoing historical development in Chinese society, allowing their multiple dimensions to be displayed to us.

In addition to the diverse scholarly approaches to this subject, music can be another key to understanding the role of women in Chinese film. Vladimir

Jankélévitch writes that “music can do anything,” and it is, for sure, capable of serving as a tool to utilize in analyses of women in film.45 Yet how music and women connect to one another in film cannot be purely explained away by psychological theories nor as random choices made by filmmakers and composers. When examining this relationship closely, we discover that music and women have been linked long before the beginning of the film industry. Therefore, in order to understand how music is associated with women in Chinese film, it is necessary to look outside cinema itself and to approach this connection from a broader historical context, which reflects its inheritance from earlier models of representation. I will first look at current scholarship on the subject of women and music in history and film in Western society.

Then I will compare it to its counterpart in the Chinese cultural context. By looking at the historical relationship between Chinese women and music, the roles in which

43 Silbergeld, China into Film, 186. 44 Ibid. 45 Vladimir Jankelevitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 17

women undertook musical activities, and their presentations and representations in musical works, i.e., the history of Chinese women’s musical configurations, I argue that women’s various but distinctive relations to music are—performative, expressive, and emotional—are revealed within different social statuses in society and that such relationships are widely visible in Chinese film.

Music and Women in the West: History and Film

Many scholars have demonstrated that the relationship between music and women has proved problematic in Western patriarchal society. Charles Segal traced this back to ancient Greek mythology and crystalized the female voice into two models—the Siren and the Muse. The former exercises danger and seduction (through singing) that could destroy men, while the latter “embodies the beauty of song and its power to immortalize the deeds of men.”46 Since ancient Greece, women have been associated with pollution, corruption, decay, and disorder.47 Both the Siren and the

Muse display the terrifyingly strong power that female vocality is granted, which is viewed as dangerous as well as ambivalent in the male-dominated society of early

Greece.48 Thus the two models are actually the result of men’s fear of female sexuality and a resultant desire to exercise control. While Segal does not link the power of the Siren and the Muse to music, Heather Laing points out that the specificity of the two models’ mythological origins “emphasizes their construction

46 Charles Segal, “The Gorgon and the Nightingale: The Voice of Female Lament and Pindar’s Twelfth Pythian Ode,” in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, edited by Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1994), 17. 47 Christiane Sourvinous-Inwood, “A Trauma in Flux: Death in the Eighth Century and After,” in The Greek Renaissance of the Eighth Century B. C.: Tradition and Innovation, series 4, vol. 30, edited by Robin Hagg (Skrifter Utgivna av Svenska Institutet I Athen, 1983), 38. 48 Segal, “The Gorgon and the Nightingale,” 17. 18

according to the idea of the indivisibility of vocality and musicality from such behavior, which distinguishes them in both the style and purpose of their self-expression from such comparable non-musical figures as the ‘virgin’ and the

‘whole.’”49 In other words, the invisible influence of music is definitely taken into account in forming the power of the two models of female voice.

This view of the danger of female musicality continued to threaten men in

Western patriarchal society where it received strict evaluation. According to Linda

Phyllis Austern, a socially acceptable woman during the Renaissance had to be fully aware of the “proper” use of music. Her musicality should be physically hidden from men because she embodies the most powerful sensual partnership with music. While playing before men, her performance may be too physically exciting, seducing the man into corrupt thoughts and conduct.50 These social perceptions of the danger and aberration of active female sexuality through musicality continued in the nineteenth century. Sarah Webster Goodwin points out that the female singers, who have historically been associated with courtesans, generally were viewed as sexually accessible by virtue not only of their gender, but also because they belonged to a lower social class and/or were foreigners.51 Their singing activities could draw an unseemly amount of attention to their bodies and potentially involve, as Reina Lewis suggests, “a passionate experience of the sublime [that] threatened the boundaries of the proper femininity essential for their reputation”—it was, in other words, too

49 Heather Laing, The Gendered Score, 10-11. 50 Heather Laing summarized Linda Phyllis Austern’s idea from “‘Sing Againe Syren’: The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature,” Renaissance Quaterly 42 (1989): 420-48. 51 Sarah Webster Goodwin, “Wordsworth and Romantic Voice: The Poet’s Song and the Prostitute’s Cry,” in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, edited by Lesile C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1994), 68. 19

dangerous an activity for a respectable and “feminine” woman.52

At the same time, women’s representation in Western music has been proved problematic as well. As early as the sixteenth century, according to Leo Treitler, there has been a gendering of musical semiotics. For masculine, he suggests, music was coded according to qualities such as “clarity, system, understandability, strength, vigor, power, reason, [and] manliness.” Femininity, on the other hand, was perceived as “softness, roundedness, elegance, charm, [and] grace,”53 the features identified by

Linda Phyllis Austern as ornamentation, elaboration, improvisation, variation, and chromaticism.54 On one hand, this codification demonstrates, as Austern argues, a respectable and socially acceptable state of femininity through an appropriately controlled style of music. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the musical semiotics for femininity are epitomized, according to Susan McClary, in the “powerful female operatic character”—the “madwoman.”55 In the seventeenth century, as she finds,

Western society encouraged men to restrain their feelings while expecting women to indulge in emotional expression.56 As a result, she suggests that the extravagant sensuality and anguish exhibited in opera of the period were considered as

“effeminate.” Such “feminine sensuality and suffering” were constructed for “the pleasure of the patriarchal gaze and ear.”57 Given this, female characters in opera,

52 Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996), 179. 53 Leo Treitler, “Gender and Other Dualities of Music History,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, edited by Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley and London: California University Press, 1993), 27. 54 Linda Phyllis Austen, “Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminacie: Music and the Idea of Feminine in Early England,” Music and Letters 74, no. 3 (1993): 351-54. 55 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minnesota and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 86. 56 McClary, Feminine Endings, 50. 57 Ibid. 20

women who were abandoned in particular—either driven by grief or by madness—were given extensive musical soliloquies exposing their overtly emotional or sexual power without mediation, which was dangerous to masculine codes of rational clarity.

In the nineteenth century, society connected madness to femininity through music even more frequently under the push of “science” and arts. Elaine Showalter finds that in psychiatry, people were obsessed with proving that all women were highly susceptible to mental breakdown precisely because of their sexuality. 58 The madness displayed in bourgeois artworks, such as literature, painting, and music, is almost represented as female. Especially in music, repressed female operatic characters, who are rarely allowed to speak their experiences, are granted the chance to express themselves through their musical voices. This presentation of voice marks the authenticity of women’s emotions and gives their spoken words greater depth. Yet women’s excessive emotional outpourings through music must be, as Susan McClary points out, strictly controlled under a “masculine” musical framing—i.e., the representation of the patriarchal system—to reduce the horrific social implications caused by their excessive expressivity.59 The safest way to resolve this danger,

McClary suggests, is to silence these women both narratively and musically—which is usually achieved by their characters’ actual death.60

With the establishment of such a historical link between women and music in mind, it is not difficult to find a relationship between women and music in Western

58 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (London: Virago, 1987), 221-50. 59 McClary, Feminine Endings, 85-86. 60 Ibid. 21

film. Seduction, danger, indulgence, dementia, irrationality, madness, instability, and exoticism—the terms with which women were usually described and connected to/through music in the Western historical tradition—have become some of the main references to women in film. Heather Laing, in her book Gendered Score: Music in

1940s Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, has thoroughly interrogated the relationship between music and gender, arguing that patriarchal society’s fear of the female musical-emotional-sexual “voice” can be still detected in 1940s cinema.61 The scores for these films, as Laing demonstrates, indicate a palpable inheritance of nineteenth-century style composition by either imitating its style or directly quoting preexisting works. In so doing, film music brings all the associated prejudices against and fears of female self-possession with it, the emotional/sexual independence and agency that were previously invoked to consign women to subordinate roles in society.62 Music thus becomes an important role for us to understand the construction of women in film.

First, according to these cultural prejudices, non-diegetic music becomes primarily associated with women’s repressed emotional expression. However, female musical-emotional representation is, with a very particular female subjectivity, located in the close interaction of meanings conveyed between women’s words and their non-diegetic music. Thus, whatever they say or feel must be evaluated alongside the accompanying music, which could cause their points of view to be inexpressible or socially “acceptable.” Second, diegetic music can give female characters, especially the female listener, a representation for her emotions. Yet their music is

61 Heather Laing, The Gendered Score, 172. 62 Ibid. 22

often played by male musicians. In this way, the music as well as the emotion a character is experiencing is something she has been “given,” which still degrades her self-expression. Third, female musicians on film could still be, to some degree, Sirens or “the pathetic victims of their own creativity whose only chance for salvation is to prioritize love over music.”63

It is certain that the relationship between music and women is culturally connected, the relationship in Western history and film discussed above may not be directly applied to non-Western cases. Many societies and cultures around the world believe women to be musical in special ways, ways that can be quite distinctive from their Western counterparts. Ellen Koskoff's Women and Music in Cross-Cultural

Perspective discusses the links between women’s sexuality and their musical behaviors in particular social-cultural contexts, including learning the “right” sexual movements and body position, heightening femaleness and increasing sexual attractiveness through musical performance, anatomical analogies between women’s bodies and musical instruments, self-identification according to musical performance, and the important role that musical performance plays in inter-gender communication.64 The image of women is thus culturally constructed rather than universal; as Spivak declares, “the task for transnational feminist cultural studies is to negotiate between the national, the global, and the historical….”65 The study of women and music needs to direct greater attention to local and historical specificity and the relationships in film must be also discussed in terms of the particular

63 Laing discusses these three ideas in Gendered Score. 64 Ellen Koskoff, Women and Music in Cross- Cultural Perspective (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 11. 65 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Making of Americans, the Teaching of English, and the Future of Cultural Studies,” New Literary History, 21 (Autumn, 1990): 792. 23

sociocultural framework in which the film is situated.

Women and Music in China: History and Culture

The relationship between women and music in Chinese society is also complex, interwoven with conflicts between uniformity and individuality, morality and emotion, restraint and talent, and repression and resistance over time. In ancient Confucian

China, women had less freedom than their male peers. The nature of women was perceived, by the intellectual male, as sexually excessive (yin 淫), evil (xie 邪), jealous (du 妒), and fierce (han 悍).66 As Confucianism teaches the connection between “Self-cultivation, Family Harmony, State Governing, and world Peace

(xiushen, qijia, zhiguo, pingtianxia 修身, 齐家, 治国, 平天下)”67 and family harmony becomes the key factor for a country’s stability. Since women primarily influence the domestic space, their inherent “badness” is usually considered the main source of family “chaos,” it can be blamed for a husband’s failure in career, separation of the family, and possibly even the fall of a country—as expressed in the old Chinese saying, “women are the cause of all trouble” (hong yan huo shui 红颜祸

水) .68

In fear of female sexuality, Chinese Confucian society particularly emphasized women’s education in morality so that they would become socially acceptable women, which means playing submissive roles such as daughter, wife, and mother during their

66 Jianxin Fang and Jijun Xu, “Women’s History in the Volume of the Song Dynasty,” The History of Chinese Women Series, edited by Gaohua Chen and Yaosu Tong (Hangzhou: Hang Zhou Publishing Press, 2011), 436. 67 This idea is taken from Li Ji-Da Xue. 68 Demonstrations of this can be found in the statements of many famous intellectuals, such as Li Changlin in Le Shan Lu, Fan Shidao in the Record of Fan shidao in the History of the Song Dynasty, Zhen Dexiu in Da Xue Yan Yi of Si Ku Quan Shu, Zhou Dunyi in Tong Shu of Si Bu Bei Yao, etc. 24

different life periods. The Book of Rites, from the War-State period (5–3 B.C.), stated that “women should take obedience as their responsibility” (Furen yi shuncong weiwu, 妇人以顺从为务). Since the Song dynasty, Confucianism reestablished its exclusively orthodox status in Chinese society. It emphasized the following “proper” virtues of self-control for women: in personality, women must be gentle (rou 柔) and obedient (shun 顺); in appearance, women’s clothes should be “clean, frugal, and never be distinctive among people;”69 in behavior, women should be less talkative and less emotional.70 Such guidelines in women’s education were maintained in the following dynasties. (see Figure 1.6.)

Figure 1.6. Zhang Xuan, The Ladies are Spinning Sewing Silk (the upper), Boston Museum of Arts, Boston. Zhou Fang, The Ladies with Flowers (the lower). Liao Ning Museum, Liaoning Province. Both of the paintings focus on portraying the beauty and elegance of women, regardless of their social status, by highlighting their exquisite decorations and colorful dresses.

69 Cai Yuan, Mu Qin in Yuan Shi Shi Juan, 96. 70 These three points can be found in Jianxin Fang and Jijun Xu, “Women’s History in the Volume of Song,” 446-49. 25

In order to strengthen the control over women’s mental as well as physical behaviors, female moral education (nv de女德) became essentially the most important training for women. In the East Han Dynasty (25–220 A.D.), the female historian Ban

Zhao wrote Nv Jie (Women’s Disciplines 女诫)—the first book written exclusively for women’s moral education under orthodox Confucianism, which disciplined women’s talent, clothing, behavior, and thinking. Her book was then used for women’s education in following dynasties. At the same time, many publications describing the ideal “socially acceptable woman” (e.g., Guiin lienv Zhuan, The

Record of the Past and Current Good Women 古今烈女传) were also required reading for women—from the elite (e.g., empress) to commoner women alike. These texts were sought to regulate women’s daily life behaviors for the purpose of “ruling the country by successfully regulating family (women).”71

Although Chinese women were largely repressed in ancient Chinese society, they were not absolutely powerless or treated with only disdain. Rigorous oppression and restraint on women in Confucian society was mainly implemented in the lower class.

Elite women enjoyed more freedom and power than common women (see Figure 1.7.).

At the same time, social development in ancient China also led to changes in women’s situations. The fast growth of the commercial economy created a chain reaction that weakened legislation and the mainstream moral system that was in place since the Tang (716-907 A.D.) and the Song dynasties (960-1279 A.D.). Strict regulation on women was also partially loosened. According to Chen Baoliang, new ideas about Chinese women were mainly reflected in three changed perspectives:

71 The Record of Emperor Tai Zu, vol. 31. 26

society started to recognize women’s opinions, began to correct the gender bias in family relations, and started to acknowledge women’s abilities in managing the family

(which is contrary to the previous opinions that suggested that women should be the gentle rou and obedient shun only).72 Women’s position was promoted in the family, resulting in improved relations between husband and wife and mothers started to have more power in the domestic space. At the same time, women’s social lives were no longer limited to domesticity. Instead, women, beginning in the Song period, operated small businesses and participated more in social and cultural activities, such as attending operas in public theatres, women’s gatherings, ritual activities, and holiday travels.

Figure 1.7. Zhang Xuan, The Lady Guoguo Is Spring Outing. The noble lady Guoguo, surrounded by her servants, on a spring outing. Liaoning Museum, Liaoning Province.

Because of such complexity in women’s situations in ancient Chinese society, the concepts of women’s education in music, along with other arts education, such as literature, painting, and calligraphy, are highly controversial in the pre-modern period.

On the one hand, music education for women in ancient Confucian society can be

72 Liangbao Chen, “Women in Ming Dynasty,” in The History of Chinese Women (Hangzhou, Hangzhou Publishing Press, 2011), 42-43. 27

considered part of the training for becoming “socially acceptable women.” Yet such education, as many of the Confucian apologists insist, is “not compatible with ideals of the patriarchal system”73 and is considered as a supplement to women’s moral education to please the families of their potential husbands.74 In the book Jiafa

(Family Rules), Sima Guang, the great minister of the Northern Song dynasty

(960–1127 A.D.), claimed that the primary goal of a woman’s education was to improve her self-discipline. According to Sima Guang, skills such as fancy embroidery and flute songs are not suitable for women’s education.75 Furthermore, once married, a woman should stop developing her talents in the arts and focus on becoming an ideal wife and mother. Even if they are talented in the arts, they can only display this in the domestic space. Despite these limitations, artistically talented women in the upper classes and celebrated female professional musicians were extremely popular and were frequently admired in poetry by the male literati, which praised their great gifts and exquisite skills in music performance.

An example of such controversy toward women’s relationship with music can be found in their education on the qin. Unlike other musical instruments, the qin, a seven-stringed zither, is considered part of the high culture of the intelligentsia. The exclusive aesthetics for the qin, including its performance tuning, playing techniques, and environment, is predominantly enjoyed by male literati (see Figures 1.8. and 1.9.).

73 Ibid. 74 Hua Peng, Rujia nvxing guan yanjiu (The Research of Confucian Ideas of Women) (Beijing, China Academy of Social Sciences Publishing Press, 2010), 249. 75 See Sima Guang, Jiafa, vol.5, in Si ku quanshu (Complete Library of the Four Branches Literature). 28

Figure 1.8. The front and the back of the qin.

Figure 1.9. Wang Zhenpeng, Bo Ya Performs Qin. The Palace Museum, Beijing. Bo Ya is performing the qin while his friend Zhong Ziqi is listening. There are also three servants carrying fine incense burner to signify elegance.

Because of its high culture status, it even has requirements around who can perform and listen to it. In its early history, the qin was not exclusively associated with men.

Yet when Confucianism was established as the absolute authority in ancient Chinese society, women were often discouraged from performing the qin because of their

29

perceived vulgarity.76 According to Xie Xiyi’s Ancient and Present Record of Qin in Song Dynasty, there have been eighty-five excellent qin performers in the last 2725 years and only three of them have been women.77 Despite this, the performance of the qin is one of the requirements for being a respectable lady in the elite class. In his

Xianqin ouji (Essays in Leisure Time 闲情偶记), Li Yu claims that fine ladies in scholarly circles should possess at least one of the four following skills: qin (music), qi (the go), shu (calligraphy and poetry), or hua (painting). In addition to these women in scholarly circles, noble ladies in court, such as empresses, princesses, and female officials, nv yue—female music professionals who served in court, local administration, or elite families—and nuns were also allowed to play the qin.

Goddesses are often portrayed in Chinese classic painting playing the qin. Therefore, the connection between the qin and women in ancient Chinese Confucian society varies according to social class, region, and historical period (see Figure 1.10.).

76 Mingmei Ye, “Nv qinren: guixiu, gongting funv, mingji, nvni, nvshen” (The Female Qin Performer), in Zhongguo guqin guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwenji, 2010 (International Conference Essays on the Research of Chinese Qin, 2010), edited by Zhejiang Museum (Hangzhou: Xiling Press, 2010), 28. 77 Cited in The Collection of Qin Music, edited by Beijing Qin Research Association, vol. 5 (1980), 208. 30

Figure 1.10. Zhou Fang, The Qin Performing Lady. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO. Served by two maids, a noble woman is performing the qin with the accompany of the other two noble women.

Even with these limitations around qin performance, women are the main subject in the Chinese musical and theatrical tradition. As discussed previously, dramatic,

“demented woman” roles in Western opera are usually played by divas. Such examples include Monteverdi’s nymph, Donizetti’s Lucia, Luigi Cherubini’s Medea, and Strauss’s Salome. The characterization of women in the Chinese musical tradition, on the other hand, is rather positive. One can barely find an example of the

“madwoman” in Chinese musical or theatrical arts. Instead, women’s beauty, virtues, and passion are usually the main represented characteristics. Descriptions of the female form and their beautiful clothes are often seen in male literati’s poems and songs, which indicates, according to Liu Liang, an extreme male fantasy of female sexuality.78 Yet the portrait of women in ancient Chinese music is not confined to their beauty and there were many narrative songs in Han yuefu praising women’s loyalty, braveness, courage, wisdom, and rationality.79 This demonstrates that images

78 Liang Liu, Wantang yuefu yanjiu (The Research of Yuefu in Late Tang Dynasty), (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Publishing, 2010), 110. 79 Siyang Tian, Han yuefu nvxing ticai shenmei lun (The Research of Female Subjectivity in 31

of women in Chinese traditional music were multi-dimensional rather than being stereotypically described as either dangerously sexual or emotionally weak.

In addition, music is an ideal medium for women’s expression because, regardless of social status, they were verbally and emotionally restrained by the patriarchal system. Thus music grants them a “private moment” of musical-emotional self-expression that would have normally been considered inappropriate for public display. According to Hua Wei, female opera writers in the Ming and Qing dynasties usually delivered their ideas, emotions, and experiences through their works. They also frequently, and from a very particular female subjectivity, described their personal longing for power, fame, and sexual freedom through their male characters or by creating a dream scene. In such an illusionistic world, they could temporarily escape regulations of patriarchal society, free their thoughts, and reduce their own anxiety of “being an unacceptable woman.”80 Compared to their male peers, the emotional expression reflected in the works of female opera compsoers, as Hua argues, display a much more delicate, complex, varied, and even challenging attitude toward the patriarchal system.81

Self-expression through music is also seen from female musical entertainers, who were generally viewed as one and the same with prostitutes in ancient Chinese society.

Although there were professional female musicians who were exclusively performers,

Han yuefu), (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2009), 39-55. 80 Wei Hua, “Mingqing funv xiqu zhong de qingyu shuxie” (The Writing of Desire and Emotion in Women’s theatrical Works in the Ming and Qing Dynasties), in The Unheard Sounds: Women and Culture in China, 1600-1950, edited by Jiurong Luo and Miaofen Lv (Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiu yuan jindai yanjiusuo Publishing Press, 2003), 51. 81 Ibid. 32

it was more common for a woman to be both a musician and a prostitute.82 As a special group of women, female musical entertainers were prevalent in every period of ancient Chinese society, but particularly in the Song dynasty when commercial development was high. They usually performed in court, local government, at military camps, for wealthy families, and in brothels for entertainment, celebration, and as objects of men’s sexual desire (see Figure 1.11.).

Figure 1.11. Anonymous, The Portrait of Tang Court Music, handscroll, ink, and color on silk, National Palace Museum, Taipei. A group of female entertainers in court are performing on different types of instruments.

From a very young age, these women received strict training in singing, dancing, as well as literature and poetry. Some of these women were rewarded for their talents

82 Ibid., 180. 33

with great fortunes and reputations while others could only sell their bodies and remained in the lower echelons of society. Regardless of their abilities, their social status determined their lives. After being “consumed” by men, these female musical entertainers inevitably began to lose their beauty with age and faced a miserable fate, as they were abandoned by mainstream society. Therefore, being trapped as they were in such a miserable position, these entertainers’ life experiences and feelings were frequently conveyed in their sophisticated literary and musical works. According to

Xieqiang, one quarter of the ci—a sung poem accompanied by musical instruments—in the Complete Collection of Song Ci were written by female musical entertainers, most of which discuss mourning lost love and longing for freedom and true love. The sorrowful topics of their ci had enormous impact on the female literati and musicians of later generations, whose works were also filled with pessimism.83

Given this, it can be concluded that there is a long tradition of women’s musical expression, which usually present their inner emotions and self-experience and are usually sentimental rather than bright and happy.

Distinguished from the binary bad “Siren” and good “Muse” in the Western musical tradition, the relationship between women and music in the Chinese cultural context is more complex. The differences in the social statuses of elite and “common” women determined views toward to their relationship with music. Regardless of social status, music provided a safe place for women to speak the “unspeakable” within the strict Confucian gender system. By presenting and being presented through music, the image of the Chinese woman was not monolithic, but included a variety of

83 Qiang Xie, Songdai nv ciren qunti yanjiu (The Research of Female Ci Poets in Song Dynasty) (Hunan: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 2010), 285. 34

characterizations that were negotiated through different subjectivities, motivations, and social forces.

The historical connection between women and music in China mentioned above provides a foundation on which to observe and interpret their relationships on film.

The use of music cannot, therefore, be considered in isolation and must be viewed as part of a continuing history in its own right. This dissertation, based on the inseparable triangular relationship between gender, music, and society, will examine the image of women in contemporary Chinese film through music, sound, and voice.

By examining films through a filter of the musical conventions and conceptions of different historical periods, it is possible to see the extent to which the woman-music relationship continued to inform their role in twentieth-century China.

As discussed previously, the relationship between music and women in film may represent an extension of their historical role in society. Earlier historical “models” and ideas indicate the codes and assumptions that may be at work both in the film’s general association of women with music and in its representation of their involvement with musical activities, however, these preexisting historical connections may change over time. This is especially true in the twentieth century, during which

China has experienced several immense social transformations, both within the country and as a result of globalization. The social changes the country has seen in the last one hundred years might even exceed all those the country experienced in pre-modern times. It is, therefore, not surprising that the relationship between women and music in Chinese film may change. The new connections between women and music, perhaps involving the composition of entirely new works, presume a transformed social system and improved gender relations. The earlier historical 35

“models” and ideas about women’s relationship with music, then, must be reconsidered. At the same time, the subversive force that music naturally possesses can also provide a chance for surpassing its conventional associations with women, and reestablish their connection in a way that does not necessarily follow the old

“models” but explores new approaches. Therefore, interrogating influences from

Chinese historical and cultural traditions while allowing for the possibility of new evidence, in the great potential music has, allows for a discussion of the ongoing tangled relationship between women and music in contemporary Chinese film.

Contemporary Chinese Film: Terms and Meaning

The term Chinese Film/Cinema always proves problematic for scholars. There have been many terms describing “Chinese film,” such as Chinese national cinema,

Chinese nation-state cinema, and Chinese-language cinema, but the problem lies in the word “Chinese.” Due to the complexities of the word “Chinese,” in regard to geographic territory, race, history, culture, linguistics, and politics in the twentieth century, the term Chinese film could be interpreted in a variety of ways. Therefore, I have chosen to focus specifically on “contemporary Chinese film,” which includes filmic works produced in mainland China, from three perspectives. Culturally speaking, the word “Chinese,” used here, refers to the han culture of mainland China, which was most visible and influential throughout history. Territorially, the geographic spaces of the films discussed are located in both the cities and rural areas of mainland China. None of the films is set in the territories of Taiwan, Hong Kong, or other overseas locations. In addition, the films under discussion were all produced from the early 1980s to the present. Films from this period reflect an unprecedented diversity, which was influenced by dramatic changes in the economy, society, and 36

political ideology in mainland China during this time. These films, which display a variety of sociopolitical contexts, do not reconstruct an authentic history, but aim to mirror, question, or hint at the social, cultural, and political situations of mainland

China in both contemporary and past time periods. Styles, themes, settings, sound design, and mise en scène differ substantially from one period to the next and were influenced by two sociopolitical contexts—that presented within the film and that in which the film was made. Therefore, an examination of the women-music relationship in these films must take these sociopolitical contexts into account to best gain insights into the status of women over time.

The Revival of Humanism–Chinese Film from the early 1980s to the mid-1980s

The third plenary meeting of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), during the eleventh congress in December 1978, ushered in a “new era” under the leadership of

Deng Xiaoping. Since then, mainland China started to experience a dramatic period of economic reform, modernization, and liberalization. Within this social atmosphere of relative freedom, mainland Chinese film was quickly revived and experienced a boom in the early 1980s. As Zhang Yingjin points out, a number of new institutions, including state-run studios, the China Imports and Exports Company, and the China

Film Coproduction Corporation, were established to meet the increased market demand at home and abroad. Meanwhile, film education and research increased. For example, in 1982, the Beijing Film Academy saw its first class graduate since the

Cultural Revolution, some of which became key members of the Fifth Generation filmmakers, such as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, and Tian and Zhuangzhuang. The

China Film Art Research Center (also known as the China Film Archive), along with its new academic journal, Contemporary Cinema, was inaugurated in 1984. 37

Additionally, several film awards, such as the Hundred Flowers Awards and the

Golden Rooster Awards, were resumed, and new ones were created to encourage film production.84 With the promotion of the Chinese government, the film market rapidly grew in the first half of the 1980s. Film was, as a result, extremely popular both in cities and the vast rural areas, which pushed annual attendance to an all-time high by

1985.85

This new era also provided some additional freedom in regard to the themes and genres of Chinese film productions. Humanism, for example, became the central theme Chinese filmmakers started to explore. Revived after decades of political repression that emphasized propaganda and political ideology, cinema in the new era returned to displaying real human emotion and people’s everyday experiences.

Filmmakers explored previously taboo or sensitive subjects such as political persecution, family dilemmas, love, marriage, and female sexuality, which resulted in the genre of melodrama, the best examples of which are Xie Jin’s political melodramas The Legend of Tianyun Mountain (Tianyunshan chuanqi, 1980), The

Herdsman (Muma ren, 1982), and Hibiscus Town (Furong zhen, 1986). Along with the strong features of the Chinese melodramatic tradition, as Ma Ning summarized,

Xie Jin’s filmic melodramas “[bind] history with fiction or legend, the personal with political in a narrative pattern characterized by a bipolar structure that is typically

Chinese.” 86 Many younger generations later criticized Xie Jin’s works as not

84 Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 227. 85 Ibid., 225. Zhang builds on Chris Berry’s research, which examined the low percentage of household television ownership and the nature of available television programs in 1980s to be one of the major factors that contributed to the popularity of film in China at that time. 86 Ning Ma, “Spatiality and Subjectivity in Xie Jin’s Film Melodrama of the New Period,” in New Chinese Cinemas: Form, Identities, Politics, edited by Nick Brown, Paul G. Pickowicz, 38

representing sustainable cultural and political critiques and as not being representative of cultural transformation in post-Mao China because all of his films eventually achieved a mythic status by showing compromised solutions to social conflicts.87 Yet there is no doubt that his films, as compared to his contemporaries who are accused of being part of the Gang of Four that desired to bring catastrophe to

China and its people, are “courageous enough to push the censorship limits by skillfully integrating a political message into a melodramatic representation”88 and stand as a distinctive example of the changing political economy of Chinese filmmaking and of the emergent subjectivity of Chinese filmmakers in the new era.

While still working within the theme of humanism, a younger generation of

Chinese filmmakers chose a different path to present it. Following the call to

“throwing away the drama crutch,” heard in film circles in 1979, the so-called Fourth

Generation of Chinese filmmakers actively engaged in new cinematic practices that were inspired from the French New Wave, Italian neo-realism, and Andre Bazin’s theory of the long take. Among them, a group of female directors focused on presenting female subjectivity and female experience from a gendered perspective.

When they confronted issue of love, marriage, desire, and career, they, as Zhang

Yingjin points out, “tended to focus on the psychological processes of their female characters more than the social significance of the issues examined.”89 Women’s films in this period, such as Hu Mei’s Army Nurse (Never lou, 1984), Zhang

Vivan Sobchack, and Esther Yau, (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 15. 87 Zhang Yingjin quotes Zhu Dake’s criticism on Xie Jin’s films, which appeared in Zhongguo dianying lilun wenxuan, 1920-1989 (Chinese film theory: an anthology), 2 vols., edited by Yijun Luo, Jinsheng Li, and Hong Xu (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 1992), 493-95. Chinese National Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 230. 88 Ibid., 229. 89 Ibid., 233. 39

Nuanxin’s Sacrificed Youth (Qingchun ji, 1985), and Huang Shuqin’s Woman Demon

Human (Ren gui qing, 1987), all are focused from the female protagonists’ point of view and use their first-person voiceover to tell their own stories, highlighting female consciousness and female sexuality in search of identity.

Avant-Garde, Commercialism, and Spectacle—Chinese Film from mid-1980s to mid-1990s

Relieved from decades of political repression, a cultural fever swept over

China and engaged intellectuals and professionals in critical reflection on modern

Chinese history and culture, which was widely visible in literature, arts, and media beginning in the early 1980s.90 Artists began by reflecting on the Cultural Revolution and exposed the catastrophic impact it had on individuals. In the film industry, by finally “escaping” the past requirement for political propaganda and moral didacticism, Fourth Generation filmmakers, as discussed above, presented a retrospective on history with the goal of pursing humanism in their works through new technical and stylistic innovations. Zhang Yingjin points out that by moving away from the previous preference for individual narratives and a “resubmission” to power, filmmakers started to confront the larger issues of modernization

(industrialization) versus ignorance (agrarian values).91 However, the cultural and historical introspection and critique reflected in their works were trapped in the dilemma，according to Zhang, of “wavering between their declared intention and their ambivalent message, between their rational advocacy for enlightenment and progress and their emotional attachment to cultural China, between their revulsion for

90 Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 225. 91 Ibid., 239. 40

repressive patriarchy and their apprehension about industrialization and commercialization.”92

As cultural critique progressed in the mid-1980s, this younger generation—the

Fifth Generation filmmakers—moved in a radical direction, as compared to their predecessors. 93 The younger generation also returned to history—the imagined history—in their works, yet they finally accomplished “the dual acts of rebellion from and resubmission to power.”94 Most of the Chinese Fifth Generation filmmakers grew up and lived in rural areas or unstable environments before the 1980s. They all experienced the chaotic period of the Cultural Revolution, after which they received a chance for higher education. They were eager to apply all they learned about film technique and theory and to display what they experienced in their own lives. As artists who lived in two different periods, they realized it was their responsibility to reflect on what happened and to question why it happened in China. Since most of them have lived and worked in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, they chose to focus on rural China as their stories’ settings, a temporal-space with which they were most familiar. Their films usually associate the rural landscape with traditional culture, ethnic spectacle, historical reflection, communism, and depth of emotion.

As seen in Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984), Zhang Junzhao’s One and Eight (Yige he bage, 1984), Huang Jiaxin’s Black Cannon Incident (Heipao shijian, 1985), and Wu Ziniu’s Evening Bell (Wangzhong, 1988), these filmmakers

92 Ibid. 93 Zhang points out that new experiments in Fifth Generation films are also shared with works in the Fourth Generation. Ibid., 238. 94 Zhang summarized Dai Jinhua’s statement. Ibid., 237. 41

revolutionized both style and theme in their works. They favored filmic styles that allowed for experimentation with non-dramatic structure (i.e., images take prominence over narrative), natural lighting, minimal plot, scant dialogue and music, ambiguous imagery, and enigmatic characters. In addition, instead of arousing traumatic memories of the Cultural Revolution, Fifth Generation filmmakers focused on themes from the pre-1949 period to rewrite revolutionary history and demystify what was central to socialist representation. Unlike previous films, where troubles, problems, and conflicts were eventually reconciled by the political power, Fifth

Generation filmmakers questioned the worship of Chairman Mao and the CCP’s claim that peasants responded the most to the call for revolution. Unlike earlier Chinese films that explicitly told everything to the audience, works by Fifth Generation filmmakers in the second half of the 1980s invited the audience to engage in the perception of what the films display through their utilization of documentary audio-visual techniques within fictional plots and minimal but highly metaphorical narratives with multiple meanings referencing current events.

However, such “high in art but low in box-office” avant-garde style films have to confront the reality of the drastic changes in Chinese society. From an economic perspective, as reform increased, the new Chinese film industry further disadvantaged the state studios that were based on the former centralized planned economy. New reform measures, instigated by the emergent market economy, pressured these studios to reevaluate their films’ potential box-office success before production.95 From a political perspective, after the Tiananmen Square Movement in 1989, the Chinese government augmented ideological pressure and strengthened censorship in

95 Ibid., 238-239. 42

filmmaking, on the one hand, and on the other, they allowed foreign investments and private film companies to produce ideologically acceptable and commercial films. As a result, influenced both by the economy and politics, most filmmakers adjusted their ideological as well as stylistic positions in their works. These new types of films, including Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang, 1988), Ju Dou (1989), Raise the Red Lantern (Dahong denglo gaogao gua, 1991), and The Story of Qiuju (Qiuju da guansi, 1992); Chen Kaige’s Life on a String (Bianzou bianchang, 1991) and Farewell

My Concubine (Bawang bie ji, 1993); and Wu Tianming’s The King of Masks

(Bianlian, 1995), turned to “spectacle”—cinema that showcased exotic landscapes, architectures, and Chinese arts and, more importantly, displayed female sexuality and gender oppression—that immediately got international attention. The image of

Chinese women, therefore, officially caught global eyes and became a metaphor for the Oriental “other” in national allegories.

Urbanism—Chinese Film from the early 1990s to the Present

Since the early 1990s, in the post-Fifth Generation era, the landscape of film culture in mainland China has been rapidly reshaped. While state-supported studios faced were faced with the reality of financial restrictions as well as ideological censorship after the Tiananmen Square movement in 1989, alternative “minor cinema[s]” has emerged both within and outside of studio walls.96 Produced by a group of young college graduates, this group of new directors is referred to as the

Sixth Generation of Chinese filmmakers.

Most of the Sixth Generation filmmakers grew up in the city, a relatively open

96 Zhen Zhang, The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 1. 43

and multicultural environment. Therefore, while the Fifth generation focused on the past history of China in rural locations, the Sixth Generation turned their attention to the current situation of China by shooting in the city. Thus, their films are called

Urban Cinema and they are referred to as the Urban Generation. According to Zhang

Zhen, contemporary urban cinema is “precisely anchored in the unprecedented large-scale urbanization and globalization of China on the threshold of a new century.”97 Although urbanization started in China with the rise of Shanghai in the early 20th century, long time national chaos, including wars, national disasters, or ideological imperatives, constantly hampered or restrained progress for over half a century. It was not until the post-Mao reform period in 1980s that the visible impact of urbanization could be seen in cities where the majority of the state sectors—industrial, political, and cultural—are located. Transformations in society, the intensity of these changes, socioeconomic unevenness, psychological anxiety, and moral confusion caused by the upheaval have become the major concerns of these

Sixth Generation filmmakers. Thus, even if the locations they portray are major cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, which enjoy the highest reputations in regard to economic and cultural development in China today, they do not focus their attention on the city’s glamorous neon lighting and highly modernized side. Instead, their works, as Zhang Yingjin points out, are exemplified by “an urban milieu, modern sensitivity, a narcissistic tendency, initiation tales, documentary effects, uncertain situations, individualistic perception, and a precarious mood.”98 In other words, the

97 Ibid., 2. 98 Jingjin Zhang, “Rebel Without a Cause? China’s New Urban Generation and Postsocialist Filmmaking,” in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, edited by Zhen Zhang (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 53. 44

Sixth Generation film seeks a more “truthful” or “realistic” voice than past generations’ glamorization of ethnicity, sexuality, and history.

Generally speaking, the Sixth Generation can be divided into two categories in terms of style, mise en scene, characters, and narrative—independent urban cinema and new urban cinema. Yet both categories of these films depict down-to-earth people

(especially young people) and their lives in urban China. Independent Urban Cinema was first identified as being “outside the system,” meaning that earlier filmmakers of this generation identified themselves as institutionally and financially independent.

Most of them started their career in the 1990s when economic reform removed the type of state sponsorship that the previous generations had enjoyed. Many of these filmmakers decided to work “underground,” shooting films without acquiring official permits and shipping the final products overseas for distribution. On one hand, limited investment restrained the quantities and qualities of equipment, technique, and characters. On the other, the roughness and naturalness created by using hand-held cameras reflected the unstable lives of ordinary people, which perfectly matched the realism the directors wanted to display. As Dai Jinhua states, independent urban cinema’s insistence on personal perspective and commitment to a new vision of ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ characterize early Sixth Generation filmmakers.99

These directors refuse to be spokespeople for society. Instead, they shifted their attention from the mainstream to the lives of ordinary “nobodies”—peripheral people—on the margins of grand cities. In films such as Zhang Yuan’s Mama and

Beijing Bastards (Beijing zazong, 1993), Jia Zhangke’s The Pickpocket (Xiaowu,

99 Jinhua Dai, Xieta liaowang: zhongguo dianying wenhua, 1978-1998 (Looking from a Slanted Tower: Chinese Film Culture, 1978-1998) (Taiwan: Yuanliu Press, 1999)382. 45

1998) and Platform (Zhantai, 2000), and Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle (Shiqi sui de danche, 2001), troubles during adolescence, life’s confusion and struggle, indifference and mental emptiness became the main topics of these films. The filmmakers recorded and narrated their stories as objective observers without moral judgment. Unlike Fifth Generation directors, who usually used metaphor to indicate what they wanted to express, Sixth Generation directors adopted a direct approach to display reality. Without serious consideration and treatment, many of these

“nobodies” in their films fight back against crucial situations with an indifferent, unrestrained, and even cynical attitude that cannot be considered to be symbolic of national struggle, but rather as an individual’s or group’s reaction.

New Urban Cinema appeared in the late 1990s and had a strikingly distinct style from earlier independent urban cinema. With promotion from the state system and the guarantee of foreign investments, new urban cinema has gradually caught the attention of the public and the film market. A Beautiful New World (1999) by Ruijiu

Shi; Love in the Internet Age (1999) by Jin Chen; Spicy Love Soup (1997) and Shower

(1999) by Zhang Yang; Spring Subway (2002), The Longest Night in Shanghai (2007), and Eternal for Love (TV version 1998 and Film version 2011) by Zhang Yibai; and the New Year Movie (He sui pian) series by Feng Xiaogang are the representative works in this genre. As Zhang Yingjin points out, these young directors of new urban cinema “do not have the Fifth Generation’s heavy burden of historical consciousness, nor do they share their immediate predecessors’ taste in alienation and narcissisms.”100 Contrary to the style of social realism urban cinema, new urban cinema, according to Ni Zhen, has several distinctive features of its own. First, these

100 Jingjin Zhang, “Rebel Without a Cause?” 66. 46

films discard tragic sentiments and the bitterness of youth, as their predecessors favored, and instead promote an optimistic picture of personal desire, a happy life, and a return to social morality. Second, these films emphasize narrative and plot and promise a happy ending. Third, these films prefer conventional camera work, bright colors, and a smooth flow of images in the style of TV commercials. Fourth, the films are no longer representative of “author film,” but show a return to

“producer-centered” management in terms of the commercial needs of the film studios.101 In other words, new urban cinema displays a novel picture of urban living, as Ni Zhen summarizes, “reflecting and discovering the beauty of modern city life.”102

Alternating between bright colors, glossy images, famous stars, bittersweet sentiments, and mostly happy endings and gloomy colors, dark images, unprofessional actors, depression, and cruel reality, contemporary Chinese urban cinema displays the colorful as well as the sinister sides of urban life. With no uniform program in this generation of filmmakers, in terms of theme, settings, and mise en scene, Chinese urban cinema precisely reflects the complex outcomes of large-scale urbanization and globalization in China at the turn of the new millennium.

The intensive social transformation in the last decade of the twentieth century has brought Chinese society and its people unprecedented experiences—enduring the extreme pains caused by these changes while still expecting and striving for a new and better life.

By clarifying the contexts and contents of the films on which my dissertation

101 Zhen Ni, “Shouwang xinshengdai” (Expectations for the New Generation), Dianying yishu (The Film Arts), 4 (1999): 72. Some of the translations of Ni’s ideas are also taken from Zhang Zhen, The Urban Generation, 66. 102 Ibid. 47

will focus, I believe I have shown that contemporary Chinese film provides a rich base that demands in-depth investigation of the relationship between music and women. Unlike films produced in Republican China and Maoist China, which mostly reflected their own contemporary ideals, Chinese film made in the last three decades allows for the individualized placement of women into different sociopolitical contexts to track their connections to music in different historical, social, and cultural moments. In addition, with such dramatic changes in styles, themes, settings, mise en scene, and soundtracks, examining music and women in contemporary Chinese films also allows for the interrogation of different views, constructions, and interpretations through the perspective of the changing society in post-Mao China.

Dissertation Outline

The following chapters move through the issues exemplifying the associations that contemporary Chinese filmmakers have made between women and music.

Chapter Two begins with a survey of the basic connection between women’s voices and music. Like their Western counterparts, Chinese women are viewed as keeping their voices silent just when their inner emotions are about to erupt. As I discussed earlier in this chapter, female characters’ vocal silence in film may be interpreted as repression from society that seeks to regulate women’s behavior in regard to what is deemed socially acceptable. In these situations, it is, then, non-diegetic music that speaks for the “unspeakable” for them. Indeed, when Chinese women’s voices and emotions are restrained either by the old patriarchal social system or by the ideological authority, as mainly shown in Fourth and Fifth Generation films, music may grant female characters victory in musical territory. Music conveys the content that is otherwise suppressed and understanding these musical signifiers gives us 48

access to this content. At the same time, female characters’ own voiceovers are often employed to tell audiences the truth, yet their applications are, according to scholars such as Kaja Silverman, Mary Ann Doane, and Linda Degh, extremely limited within the control of a patriarchal social system.103 Chapter Two will interrogate female character’s vocal silence, voiceover, and their non-diegetic musical “voices” in contemporary Chinese film in the specific historical and social context to which they relate. The chapter will also draw detailed comparisons between the Chinese and

Hollywood versions of Letter from an Unknown Woman to exemplify the distinctive interpretations of women’s voices and non-diegetic music rooted in these two different societies and cultures.

After discussing the basic connection between women and music in terms of voices, emotions, and non-diegetic soundtracks, Chapter Three explores the potential of music itself and its impact on women in Chinese film. Presented as a “special” type of film score, preexisting music, unlike an original score, carries its underlying meanings to the new work. In addition, this preexisting music is capable of functioning in a way that an original score cannot. It is precisely such pre-loaded content that grants women special power to present and to be represented in film.

After discussing the general applications of preexisting music in cinema, Chapter

Three will focus on the role it plays in associations with women in contemporary

Chinese film. Taking the epic film Farewell My Concubine as a case study, I will analyze the idiosyncratic functions of the most often heard preexisting music—opera.

While observing the cultural contexts shared by women and music, I will show how music enhances women’s sexual charisma and helps them emerge victorious in

103 I will discuss their ideas about female voiceover in detail in the next chapter. 49

musical-emotional territory. I will also show how preexisting music both draws on and subverts already-defined stereotypes and generally offers a means to convey aspects of women in a diverse and compelling way.

As the previous two chapters focus on the “classic” score, Chapter Four discusses

“non-traditional” soundtracks for women in contemporary Chinese film. Since the early 1980s, China has become increasingly urbanized and globalized and its society has experienced unprecedented transformation. Chinese film and Chinese music have changed along with society; as has the relationship between women and music. While earlier Chinese films focused primarily on the past, the Sixth Generation films—the urban cinema that focuses on people rather than individuals in the city—turn their eyes to contemporary society. In order to lend the films a contemporary feel, urban cinema largely employs popular music that is widely recognized in daily life. Since it is a musical collection of public emotion, regardless of age, time, region, race, and gender, popular music no longer supports women exclusively, but places them into a larger social context. Consequently, the shadows of the historical connections between music and women are barely visible in contemporary Chinese urban cinema. Instead, they embrace a newly defined relationship between not only music and women, but also between music and people in general. Chapter Four includes four film case studies that utilize popular music—both pop and rock— to show urban cinema’s new connection to women and society. On the one hand, women’s performances of popular music display a flexible and ambiguous relationship to the music. On the other, popular music aims to connect an entire social group, rather than any one particular individual. Though popular music can either appear diegetically, with different people in different narrative places, or non-diegetically, with a collage of images cut and 50

edited from diverse temporal-spatial narratives, it provides an insight into the relationship among people in the city, highlighting musical associations that reflect the affect the contemporary social transformations have had on ordinary people, both women and men.

In conclusion, this dissertation is focused on particular Chinese sociocultural contexts, close analysis of specific films, and a cross-cultural perspective that involves comparing media representations of China and the West. These bases allow me to examine the relationship between music and women in contemporary Chinese film from multiple points of view, constructing generalities and specifics across the end of the 20th century.

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Chapter Two: Women’s Silence, Voiceovers, and Their Musical “Voices”

There is one iconic scene displaying women’s voices shared by many Chinese films across the twentieth century. I here choose five films to describe:

Case one: in the film Goddess (Shen nv, 1934), the female protagonist who killed her kidnapper is brought to court. Despite the fact that her action is one of self-defense, she cannot avoid the tragic destiny of being sentenced to jail. In the court scene, she awaits her sentence, speechless and desperate.

Case two: in the film Spring in a Small Town (Xiao cheng zhi chun, 1948), after

Yuwen, drunk, fails to seduce Zhichen—her ex-lover as well as the best friend of her current husband Liyan—she paces in her room filled with great shame and regret.

Without speaking a word, Yuwen desperately throws herself down on the bed.

Case three: in the film Amy Nurse (Nv er lou, 1985), the female protagonist, Xiaoyu, is wrapping a white bandage around the male protagonist, Ding Zhu’s wounded chest. A close-up shot focuses on Xiaoyu, who could not help leaning her body on Ding Zhu’s shoulder. Such intense shots amplify the desire and passion between Xiaoyu and Ding

Zhu. Yet at such erotic moment, Xiaoyu’s voice keeps silence, never letting her longing become audible.

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Case four: in the trial scene of the film Farewell My Concubine (Ba wang bie ji,

1994) the female protagonist, Ju Xian, hears her husband, Xiaolou, forced to confess “I don’t love her anymore! I have no relationship with her anymore!” Without becoming mad and out of control emotionally, she silences her voice till her death.

Case five: in the film Letter from an Unknown Woman (Yi gem o sheng nv ren de lai xin, 2004), when the “unknown woman” realizes that the writer doesn’t recognize her at all after their passionate one-night stand and several days’ romance together, she does not cry and not become desperate. Rather, she silently leaves without speaking a single word.

As Mary Ann Doane points out, in women’s film “the muteness which is constantly attributed to the woman is in some ways paradigmatic for the genre.”1 Her statement raises an important question about the implied and gendered connection of the character’s diegetic silence. Yet in Chinese films, the female character’s diegetic silence has been prevalently presented in all genres, not just in one. The five film cases listed above span almost a century, telling different stories about different Chinese women. Yet they share one feature about these women’s voices: in each case, their voice is mute at the definitive moment in their lives. Meanwhile, either their voiceovers or film music in non-diegetic space accompanies their diegetic silence. Therefore, several questions can be asked: Why do they keep silent? Does their silence have the same meaning? How do their voiceovers and the film music outside the narrative work with their diegetic silence?

1 Mary Ann Doane. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. (First published 1987 Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1998): 66.

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The issue of a character’s silence in film theories was at first linked to the field of psychology and psychoanalysis. According to Carol A. Kidron, silence is understood as the failure of speech and the absence of voice. It is interpreted as “signaling psychopathologized processes of avoidance and repression, socially suspect process of personal secrecy, or collective process of political subjugation.”2 She points out that silence is a dysfunctional absence in need of therapeutic redemption through the restoration of voice. Her interpretation of a person’s silence fits in to Michel Chion’s two categories of characters’ silence (or muteness) in films—muteness and mutism.

According to Chion, muteness is “a physical condition that prevents the subject from speaking (such as lesion, or a destroyed nerve center or phonic organ)” and mutism is

“the refusal to speak, for so-called psychological reasons, with no physical damage to nerves or organs.”3 He suggests that the mute character’s presence can be the key to the drama and s/he is often placed in the position of “knowing the truth.”

Feminist film theories further develop Chion’s idea of characters’ silence and apply it to the interpretation of women’s silence in films. These theories have focused on the issue of the incomplete representation of women on screen. In Acoustic Mirror, Kaja

Silverman examines the representations of women as being unable to communicate not only via the image of their bodies as a fetishized object of the male gaze but also through

2 Carol A. Kidron. “Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in the Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and Their Descendants in Israel.” Current Anthropology. vol, 50, no.1 (Februrary, 2009): 6-7.

3 Michel Chion. The Voice in Cinema. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999): 96.

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the construction of their voices. 4 She argues that in traditional narrative-style film, women’s voices are usually held back, that is to say that their voices are silenced within the diegesis by the erasure of their subjectivity. Only through help from the male characters via various techniques, can these female characters’ “sound” be interpreted.

Going beyond psychoanalytic interpretations, social and cultural studies are additionally devoted to the interpretation of female diegetic silence on the silver screen.

Heather Laing has summarized three primary levels of silence seen in representations of women in film. The first level is when the woman is “physically unable to speak whatever happens.” The second level is the silence that “renders the woman silent for psychological reasons but allows her to be induced to speak” by some special means such as persuasion, hypnosis, or medicine. The third level is the most interesting and complicated one, which is “selective mutism,” which shows “a woman who is fully able to speak—and has something to say—but who consciously chooses to remain silent on a crucial issue.”5

Laing discusses the third level of silence to explain the importance of a woman’s choice, in particular. She argues that despite the fact that she is forced to remain silent by undesirable social pressures or emotional circumstances, her silence can show a great power and control that is marked as “a state of simultaneous constraint and incredible

4 Kaja Silverman. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998)

5 Heather Laing. The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman's Film. (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007): 28.

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strength and self-discipline…. It signifies apparently glorious and transcendent moments of self-sacrifice….”6 Thus the third level of woman’s silence can be considered akin to

Thomas Elsaesser’s idea of “silence made eloquent,” which provides “a highly evocative description of female expressivity in film. Making the woman’s silence so painfully and audibly eloquent ultimately serves more than anything else to highlight the reality, and fullest possible social and personal meaning of her silence.”7

In applying Laing’s interpretation of women’s silence to Chinese film, the third level,

“selective mutism,” seems to best explain these women’s silence. Women in Chinese film often find themselves torn between their obligation to satisfy the social expectations for morality and their yearnings to follow their personal thoughts, emotions, and desires. The narrative structure is “split into a double discourse—a public discourse portraying women as social models and a private discourse exploring women’s inner world.”8 Within public discourse, female characters in film often remain silent. We hardly hear their own voices at those crucial moments when their emotions are about to erupt. To make up for this verbal emptiness, sound design for private discourse in Chinese films is usually devoted to female rather than male characters.

6 Ibid.

7 Heather Laing. The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman's Film (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007): 30.

8 Cui, Shuqi. Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003): 200.

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Without freedom of expression, two common ways of presenting women’s inner emotions in contemporary Chinese films are the female voiceover and music. They can either be used separately or together to display female expressivity and subjectivity.

Based on historical background, social change, and the directors’ intentions in the post-

Cultural Revolution period, women’s silence in Chinese film can be very generally divided into three categories.

The first category is women’s silence by cultural repression. While the Confucian social system has a long and rich historical tradition in Chinese society, it has also fundamentally affected women’s verbal, physical, and spiritual actions. For a very long time, Chinese women have been both physically and emotionally restrained when going out into public. They are trapped within a window or door from which they can only observe the outside world. More importantly, this cultural prohibition also stops them from displaying their real feelings in public. Because of such cultural oppression, a woman’s personal desires cannot be fulfilled and satisfied. The Chinese films from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, which particularly focus on women’s repression in remote areas before the founding of the People’s Republic of China, largely apply women’s diegetic silence in the stories to criticize the gender discrimination in Chinese Confucian tradition. Female characters such as Cuiqiao in Yellow Earth (Huang tu di, 1985), the five girls in The Wedding Maidens (Chu jia nv, 1990), Songlian in Raise the Red Lantern (Da hong deng long gao gao gua, 1991), and Taohua in Peach Blossom (Tao hua man tian hong, 1995) are economically dependent, culturally restrained, and socially repressed by the patriarchal system, represented by the elders in the films. Their voices are not only 57

held back within the narrative, but also lack subjective voiceover in the non-diegetic space. In other words, no verbal channel delivers their inner emotional world.

In order to interpret the complete mutism of these women, film music is usually devoted to taking the place of their voices. As Jean-François Lyotard and Gilbert

Larochelle point out, language “is not essential for communication, if by communication one implies understanding or empathy.”9 The non-verbal melodramatic code—music— can also “speak” for the character. Music’s function as the “spokesperson” for women in films has largely resulted from the confinement of women’s emotional expression within film narrative. Music can grant women a channel of expression in an implicit but audible way, to dig out what they are incapable of presenting through images and speech. In doing so, women’s self-presentation through music does not violate the tradition of “no freedom of speech” in the Chinese patriarchal system. At the same time, music allows women to state their real thoughts and comments but would be considered “improper” in their verbal presentation. Therefore, by displaying their thoughts and feelings through the soundtrack, music can break the biased impression of the “silenced victim” of women and create a diverse way to present and represent the dynamics of female expressivity and subjectivity on the screen.

The second category of women’s silence in Chinese films is caused by political/ideological forces. It can be frequently seen in the films of the post Cultural

9 J.-F.Lyotard and G. Larochelle. “That which resists, after all.” Philosophy Today 36, 4 (1992): 407-408.

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Revolution period, especially the early post-Mao melodramas and the Fourth Generation film (e.g., the “Wounds” films). In comparison to the women in the films of the first category, discussed above, there has been a kind of women’s liberation from cultural repression since the People’s Republic of China. Yet women are still trapped in a zone of restraint, even if they have relatively more freedom in their life choices. As I discussed in the section on the background of Maoist-period China in chapter one, the socialist system empowered Chinese women by promoting and legalizing their political, social, and economic roles on the one hand, but required their self-sacrifice and identification with a

“de-feminized” model on the other. The highly ideological demands by the Chinese

Communist Party (CCP), similar to the arranged marriages by elders before the PRC, still controlled Chinese women’s personal experiences, both physically and spiritually, and banned them from freedom of expression. Because of their sentimentality, many post-

Mao melodramas focus on women’s experiences in the Cultural Revolution and use flashback storytelling or first-person voiceovers by women to deal with the historical trauma of the immediate past. Many female characters in Chinese films produced in the

1980s, such as Song Wei in The Lengend of Tianyun Mountain (Tian yun shan chuan qi,

1981), Qiao Xiaoyu in Army Nurse (Nv er lou, 1985), and Li Chun in Sacrifice of Youth

(Qing chun ji, 1985) are part of the new generation of intellectual women whose personal desires are constantly under surveillance or even inhibition, subject to CCP ideological power. They are subject to arranged lives, careers, and marriages by the Party and buried their true loves and ideals inside themselves.

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However, comparing women in the first category of films, whose voices are completely unheard in decisive moments, to the female characters in the second category, it can be seen that they have started to have their own voices through the musical representation that helps female characters’ expressivity and voiceover. As Mary Ann

Doane points out, the voiceover can display “what is inaccessible to the image, what exceeds the visible: the ‘inner life’ of the character and it is the privileged mark of interiority, turning the body ‘inside-out.’”10 Such quality seems to be naturally imbedded in films to fill female characters’ diegetic silence. Being the most powerful self- presentation of women’s subjectivity, the self-reflective form transformed to the model of female self-narration was extremely popular in Chinese films in the early post-Mao period. In feminist film theory, there have been numerous discussions about the position, the subjectivity, and the limitation of the female voiceover on screen. In Western films,

“women’s films,” adaptations, and occasional noirs in particular, the conventional feminist theories have pointed out that female voiceovers are usually refined to a certain domestic or personal ghetto—these female narrators are mostly positioned in a first- person role. Sarah Kozloff has summarized two major reasons for this phenomenon: one reason is that, as first-person narrators, these female characters narrate only “their own life stories or their own memories… their area of knowledge is generally constricted to what they have personally experienced”—in other words, their storytelling may not actually be reality because of their subjective “selection” of memories or experiences

10 Mary Ann Doane. “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space.” Yale French Studies, No.60, Cinema/Sound (1980): 41.

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based on “what is presumed to be of interest to primarily female viewers.” 11 Another reason is that, according to Linda Degh, Western society has already positioned women

“within the family circle… while men seek the big audience, the publicity.” Therefore, it is not surprising that the “voice of the image-maker,”12 whose voice has a lower register, should traditionally be male, while female narrators are most likely restrained in the first- person position.13

Although I partly agree with the interpretation of female voiceover in the films above,

I do think this principle should be applied under careful consideration of different historical and cultural contexts. In a Chinese context, by breaking the restraint of self- repression that has existed for thousands of years, the female first-person narrator in films can only show Chinese women themselves precisely the way they experience things, what they think, and how they feel. In doing so, Chinese women’s voices outside the narrative can escape from the cruel repression of the old patriarchal or highly idealized society that exists inside the narrative. It shows that as Chinese women have transformed their social identity from the “housewife only” to the “working woman,” step-by-step since the early twentieth century, their own voices have gradually become audible on screen. Thus even if the voices of the female characters in Chinese films are restrained

11 Sarah Kozloff. Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989): 100.

12 For example, the filmmaker, contrary to the “heterodiegetic narrator”.

13 Sarah Kozloff. Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989): 100.

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outside the narrative, the female first-person voiceover starts to be largely applied in

Chinese films beginning in the early post-Mao epoch, which indicates women’s increased freedom of expression and the gradual awareness of female subjectivity.

More importantly, in the post-CR period, Chinese films have never limited female voiceover to only one character’s first-person role. Instead, two mainly new ways of using female voiceover have been seen in films in the last thirty years. Firstly, there have been many Chinese films using multi-female first-person voiceovers in the post-CR period. One of the earliest examples of such new experimentation in female voiceover was the “Wounded film” The Legend of Tianyun Mountain (1981). In The Legend of

Tianyun Mountin, the three female characters separately tell their experiences with the male protagonist, Luo Qun, in their first-person voiceovers—Song Wei recalls her love story with Luo Qun and their forced separation because of political pressure during the anti-Rightism movement; Feng Qinlan narrates her brave marriage and hard life with Luo

Qun during the Cultural Revolution period; and Zhou Yuzhen expresses their current difficulties of being ignored during the rehabilitation right after the Cultural Revolution.

With the three female characters’ subjective voiceovers, Luo Qun’s past suffering has vividly been displayed to us from different epochs as well as different perspectives. Such multi-female first-person voiceovers are free from accusations of being “incapable of seeing the whole truth,” and build up multiple perspectives of reality.

Secondly, the female protagonists’ first-person voiceovers appear simultaneously with those by male protagonists in Chinese films. Such double voiceovers by both genders are commonly seen in the new city films from the mid-1990s to the present, such 62

as The Spicy Love Soup (Ai qing ma la tang, 1997), Spring Subway (Kai wang chun tian de di tie, 2002), About Love (Lian ai di tu, 2005), and Eternal Moment (Jiang ai qing jin xing dao di, 2011). These films focus on discussing gender relationships in contemporary

Chinese cities, and women and men are placed in a relatively equal position. Each side has its own first-person voiceover to reveal their thoughts and emotions about themselves, each other, and the city, so that we hear the story from several perspectives. These types of double-voiceovers in both genders ends the previous limitation of the one-sided narration style and creates a duality of male-and-female subjectivities displayed equally and interacted with in the film. The model implicitly symbolizes the change of women’s social position in modern Chinese society in the city.

Additionally, there are several other new uses of female voiceover in Chinese films in the post-CR period. For instance, the film Blush (1995) uses a female third-person narrator who is not a character on screen to tell the story, thus providing a completely objective point of view; Weekend Lover (1995) applies the female protagonist’s voice as narrator and she not only tells the story she experienced herself, but also the side of the story that she could not have personally seen; and A Time to Remember (Hong se lian ren,

1998) mingles female and male characters’ first-person voiceovers together as witnesses to the dramatic changes in China’s history early in the twentieth century. At the present time, the female voiceover is no longer only concerned with domestic events or gender relations, but has expanded to a public space equally shared with the male voiceovers in the film. Although these new experiments in the use of female voiceover are still applied

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in a limited way, it clearly signals that it is no longer only restricted to traditional functions or interpretations, but has been expanded to include a much broader view.

The third category of women’s silence in Chinese films is not created by any repression, but by their self-awareness. It is a result of Chinese women directors’ gradual awakening of female subjectivity after 1995. I will discuss it in detail in the following case study in this chapter.

To summarize the introductory part of this chapter, I argue that the meanings of women’s diegetic silence, their voiceovers, and their musical “voices” in Chinese films are certainly a reflection of the Chinese historical and cultural backgrounds in which they are actually situated—the backgrounds I refer here to both the in which period the film is produced and the time in which the story is set. By focusing on the two timeframes, one can understand a film’s sound design comprehensively. Therefore, this chapter will discuss a variety of women’s issues by comparing two films based on the same story as they have been understood, written, and produced by Chinese and other (Western) filmmakers. The case study is an analysis of two film versions of Letter from an

Unknown Woman. This chapter does not aim to discuss why the two films are different, but to compare how they are distinguished from each other in terms of women’s presentations and representations via sound design (female silence, female voiceover, and music). By putting more weight on the Chinese version of Letter from an Unknown

Woman, this chapter will offer a new interpretation of women’s voiceover, diegetic silence within the particular historical framework of China, and will discuss in detail the culturally musical rendering of women on the silver screen. 64

Two Versions of Letter from an Unknown Woman

“Wenn ich dich liebe, was geht es dich an?...

Was ich auch leide, ist nicht dein Verschulden,

Und wenn ich sterbe, so geht’s dich nichts an.”

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Letter from an Unknown Woman is a novella by the Austrian novelist Stefan

Zweig. It is the story of a man who reads a letter written by a woman on her deathbed.

Both the reader of the letter and readers of the novella get a glimpse of this woman’s life: a young girl yearns for her talented neighbor, who is unfortunately a self-absorbed, frivolous dilettante and a writer. After their predestined meeting, which leads to a passionate one-night stand, the man leaves the woman with an unexpected pregnancy.

The woman suffers because of this abandonment and raises their child, who later dies of disease. When they meet again several years later, the woman has a second one-night stand with the writer, who does not recognize her. On her deathbed, she writes a long letter to tell the man everything, explaining that she continued to love him until her death.

The story is famous for its deep observation and precise description of a woman’s interior world, including the emotions of love, yearning, purity, loyalty, integrity, despair, and peace.

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Two films have been adapted from Zweig's original text. The first one is the

Hollywood version Letter from an Unknown Woman directed by Max Ophuls in 1948.14

(See Figure 2.1) The second one is a Chinese version (with the same title) made by the female director Jinglei Xu in 2004.15 (See Figure 2.2) Both versions tell generally the same story. However, the characters, plot details, and the mise en scene differ greatly because of the different cultural contexts.16

14 Letter from an Unknown Woman, dir. by Max Ophuls (1948; PD Entertainment, DVD 2007).

15一个陌生女人的来信(Letter from an Unknown Woman), dir. by Jinglei Xu (2004; Bao Li Hua Yi Media Ltd., DVD 2005). The director Jinglei Xu also plays the role of the “unknown woman” in this film.

16 In this chapter, I only focus on the effect of cultural and historical differences (Western and Chinese cultures in particular) in general, which leads to differences in the two versions of the film. However, there are also some other important determinants, such as differences in government interference; cultural policies; time of production; etc. For example, the directors’ gender difference may have had an impact. In Ophuls’ version, Lisa gets married after she has Stefan’s child. It is quite different from Xu’s version, as well as the original novella, which keeps the woman a single mother throughout her life. This change could be a sign of a patriarchal or male perspective. (The author of the novella, Stefan Zweig, was famous for his exceptional observation of women’s inner emotional world. Therefore, in this novella, Zweig is writing from a female point of view.) Having a child out of wedlock was not the behavior of a good woman. In order to avoid portraying Lisa as a bad woman acting outside the social norms expected of women in the U.S. in the 1940s, Ophuls places Lisa in the “good woman” category through marriage.

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Figure 2.1. Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). The “unknown woman” named Lisa in Ophuls’s version.

Firgue 2.2. Letter from an Unknown Woman (2004). The Chinese “unknown woman” in Xu’s version.

The two versions of Letter from an Unknown Woman build their dramas in different societies with different backgrounds. Ophuls’s version tells a story that happened in

Germany in the late nineteenth century, a relatively peaceful epoch in German history.

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Xu’s version, on the other hand, sets the story in China between 1930 and 1948, the turbulent epoch of the Second Sino-Japanese War and Civil War in China. A lonely and weak girl, the protagonist becomes a single mother during this chaotic time. The difficulties of this historical period highlight the complicated situation for the woman and provide the dramatic foundation for this tragic story.

The careers of the male protagonists in the two versions also differ. In Ophuls’s version, the male lead, Stefan Brand, is a pianist. (This circumstance is one of my major concerns, as I will discuss.) Xu’s version follows the description in the original novella in which the man is a writer. Beside the fact that Xu is being faithful to the original text, the man cannot be a musician like Stefan in Ophuls’s version. The reason is cultural.

Historically, in Chinese society, a musician was at the bottom of the social ladder, a position shared by prostitutes and craftsmen. Conversely, being a talented writer, an intellectual, was praiseworthy and highly respected during the 1930s and 1940s because not many Chinese had a chance to attain higher education.

Furthermore, Xu’s version of Letter from an Unknown Woman particularly highlights the man’s Westernized identity. The camera has many close-up shots of his books, written in non-Chinese languages and printed and covered exquisitely using Western technologies. His room is also heavily decorated in a Western style: sofa, electric lamp, sculpture, gramophone, etc. These exotic elements dramatically distinguish the man from other people in the woman’s childhood. These foreign elements strongly attract her to him in the first place.

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However, Xu’s version of Letter from an Unknown Woman boldly disrupts the dominant image of women in Chinese films who are passive, vulnerable, and silenced victims in films. In Xu’s version, the female protagonist (the “unknown woman”) does not give voice to her love for the writer until she is on her deathbed. Yet sharply in contrast to its Western counterpart—Ophuls’s 1948 version, which amplifies the tragedy of the female character’s life—Xu’s version highlights a “revolutionarily” strong female subjectivity from a positive perspective in her film adaptation of the original novella. The radical portrayal of the Chinese “unknown woman’s” psychological as well as physical actions leads many feminists to find Xu’s rendition of Zweig’s story “painful to watch, as she reproduces without any irony the logical extreme of the traditional value that a woman must live through her man as his selfless slave and still call it love.”17 Several scholars have discussed this “extreme” film from different perspectives—E. Ann Kaplan, for example, compares it to the Chinese film Army Nurse, a similar story by Hu Mei in the 1980s, to discuss their differences of rendering female subjectivity, and concludes that Xu’s film embodies the desires of her new Chinese generation.18 Jason McGrath claims Xu’s film “represents the newfound freedom of the individual in China” and that it

17 Jingyuan Zhang. “To Become an Auteur: The Cinematic Maneuverings of Xu Jinglei.” Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. Ed. by Lingzhen Wang. (New York: Columbia University, 2011): 302.

18 E. Ann Kaplan. “Affect, Memory and Trauma Past Tense: Hu Mei’s Army Nurse (1985) and Xu Jinglei’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (2004).” Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. Ed. by Lingzhen Wang. (New York: Columbia University, 2011): 154-170.

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“propagates a neoliberal model of an entirely apolitical existence.” 19 But he also describes the Chinese “unknown woman” as anticipating masochistic performances in other films and that her love is “a fundamentally pathological one.” Jinhua Li interprets

Xu’s film as the reimagination of gender politics in China and reinscription of Chinese feminism by examining its adaptation from the original novella.20

However, none of these scholars offer a detailed observation from the perspective of the film’s sound (heard and unheard voice and music). Does the sound magnify the same point, or provide an alternative way of interpreting Xu’s version of the “unknown woman?” What role does sound play in forming an image of women? How do we understand the Chinese “unknown woman” from the sound? These are interesting and important questions that have not been discussed in the existing scholarship. Therefore, this chapter will discuss the sound design in Xu’s version of Letter from an Unknown

Woman, focusing on women’s diegetic silence and theme music to examine how we interpret and understand the “unknown woman” within the sound design. I will also compare Xu’s version to Ophuls’s version of the same film to explore their differences in terms of their musical discourses on women.

Interpretation I: A Passively Silent Victim

19 Jason McGrath. “Communists Have More Fun! The Dialectics of Fulfillment in Cinema of the People’s Republic of China.” World Picture, 3. (summer, 2009): 6.

20 Jinhua Li. “Chinese Feminisms and Adaptation-as-Translation Readings of Letter from an Unknown Woman.” Comparative Literature and Culture, volume 9, issue 4 (December, 2007).

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By applying Mohanty’s assessment of the “Third World woman” in conventional

Western feminism that was presented in chapter one, an explicit difference between the female protagonists in Ophuls’s and Xu’s versions of Letter from an Unknown Woman has been set up. The “unknown woman” in Xu’s version is, on first appearance, a classical type of “Third World woman” that is described in feminist scholarship as an ignorant, poor, uneducated, and silent victim; whereas Lisa, her counterpart in Ophuls’s version, is constructed as an educated and modern woman who can express what she wants, can control her own body and sexuality, and has the freedom to make her own decisions.

First of all, the social positions of the women in these two versions of Letter from an

Unknown Woman differ greatly. In Ophuls’s version, the woman has a real name—Lisa

Berndl. She used to be a store model. After having the pianist Stefan’s child, she marries a military official and becomes a virtuous wife and mother in upper-class society. Her social status changed from low to high, despite her painful past. She tells her husband everything about her affair and child but still receives forgiveness and understanding from him, at least until he finds out she still loves Stefan. When she dies, her husband is so angry and grieved that in the end he challenges Stefan to a duel.

In Xu’s version, we do not know the woman’s name (we only know her possible family name is “Jiang”). She used to be a student at a teacher’s college—a well-respected intellectual career is waiting for her. However, after having the writer’s child, her life is completely destroyed. Having a child before marriage is considered a shameful activity

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for a young girl in Chinese patriarchal society; she must keep the affair secret and has no one to tell or to ask for help. In order to survive, she becomes a glamorous and popular upper-class courtesan who feels lonely and pathetic despite her outward appearance of success. When she dies, no one is with her and no one cares about her. Eventually, in marked contrast with Ophuls’s version, her social position falls from virtuous teacher to disrespected prostitute.

These huge differences in social status are reflected in the different ways they express emotion. In Ophuls’s version, Lisa does not hide her love for Stefan. She blushes when she sees Stefan for the first time. In order to prepare herself for him, she dresses up with beautiful clothes; she learns dancing and social etiquette to impress him; she even offers to help do the pianist’s housework. She secretly sneaks into Stefan’s room and reads books about famous musicians. When Lisa comes back to Vienna, she waits at

Stefan’s home every night until he sees her. When they first date, after expressing some initial reluctance, Lisa talks openly and freely about herself. She immediately shows her goodwill toward Stefan when he asks her not to vanish. Later, when they meet for the first time after many years, Lisa is in a panic and cannot control her emotions. She tells her husband that she cannot resist the pianist and finally runs to the pianist’s home to meet him.21 All of the actions that Lisa takes are active and voluntary. She bravely puts herself forward in order to express her love and desire for Stefan.

21 Because she is extremely frustrated that Stefan still does not recognize her, Lisa stops herself from having a second one-night stand with Stefan.

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In Xu’s version, on the other hand, the cultural context changes and so does the manner of emotional expression. In her society a Chinese woman cannot reveal herself freely in conversation or by her actions. When she falls in love with the writer, she expresses nothing; instead, she secretly gazes at her love interest. Unlike Lisa who takes the initiative, the Chinese “unknown woman” does not change anything for the writer; she hesitates to help him with his housework and accidently goes into his room. The first time she randomly meets him after she grows up and is “discovered” by him, he saves her and only then do they have their first conversation. After many years of separation she is reintroduced to him; she pretends to be calm and keeps her true emotions buried. He invites her to have their second one-night stand, and she accepts. She barely speaks to him during their encounter. Except for speaking honestly to the writer when they are together for the first time and later to her son, all other speech conceals what she actually thinks inside. While Lisa expresses her feelings and shares her pain with her husband, the woman in Xu’s version keeps all her pain to herself. For her whole life, the “unknown woman” is passively pushed toward him; she takes no action. Therefore, while the

“unknown woman” Lisa in Ophuls’s version can initiate her passionate pursuit of the male protagonist Stefan by actively learning social manners, studying music, refusing a marriage proposal, and doing everything she can to prepare herself for him, Xu’s

“unknown woman” can only “resign herself to her situation, and acquire a narcissistic self-relief and happiness by imagining enduring the pain of depression as the great virtue of self-sacrifice.”22

22 Zhao, Bin. “From Novel to Film: Speaking of the ‘Unknown Woman.’” Journal of 73

Interpretation II: A Passively Silent Victim?

However, if we examine director Xu Jinglei’s new interpretation of the original novella as well as her motivation for utilizing the particular historical background in which the female protagonist is living, we find another interpretation of her protagonist’s fall in social status, as well as her silence. Jason McGrath states that Xu’s purpose in making this film was to “portray a simple love affair between two people, to focus on the emotional relationship between the man and the woman and what happened between them. Everything else is just background.”23 He points out that Xu’s focus on personal relationships shows the film’s “lack of any broader symbolic social order anchoring personal identity in favor of an exclusive imaginary relation with a singular love object inexorably leads… to self-destruction, or at least the self-inflicted perpetual misery of amour fou.”24 Although it is true that the film pays the most attention to the characters, and weakens its link to society, McGrath ignores the fact that there is an implicit connection between the Chinese “unknown woman” and her related social order in the film—it is the social order described in the film that creates the identity of the Chinese

“unknown woman.”

Beijing Film Academy, (2005): 63.

23 Xu Jinglei: “In Front of and Behind the Camera” (interview), Kinema (spring 2006), http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/jingl061.htm. Accessed on 07-16-2012.

24 Jason McGrath, “Communists Have More Fun! The Dialectics of Fulfillment in Cinema of the People’s Republic of China.” World Picture, 3. (summer, 2009): 10.

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Xu claims that she chose the first part of the 20th century in Chinese society as the historical period for this film, a period of radical social and cultural change, to create a realistic representation of a single mother, as well as a glamorous upper class courtesan.25

As Su Zheng explains, there was one word in the first half of the century widely used to express concepts, ideas, and fields of knowledge. It was the “new”: “new wave,” “new tide,” “new youth,” and “new culture.” The ideal of women during that time, as a representative subject matter in Chinese modern history, also unavoidably gained a

“new” label.26 In Amy D. Dooling’s analysis, the initial model for “the new Chinese woman” was the prototypical enlightened “new woman” heroine who appeared in late

Qing period feminist fiction. These “new women” functioned merely as “a mimetic representation of reconfigured gender roles.”27 However, by the early Republic era, this figure of the new Chinese woman no longer existed only in literary works. Under the influence of the women’s suffrage movement and vigorous modernization efforts, women had greater access to higher education.

Although such gains in opportunity were largely limited to the ranks of middle- and upper-class women in urban cities, the new woman had become an emerging social

25 Huijun Zhang and Yufeng Ma, eds., “所有的进步都是在承担责任的过程中得到的 影片: 影片一个陌生女人的来信导演创作谈” (“A Film in Which all of the Progress Occurs in the Process of Taking Responsibility: An Interview with the Director of Letter from an Unknown Woman”). Journal of Beijing Film Academy 3 (2005): 52.

26 Su Zheng. “Female Heroes and Moonish Lovers: Women’s Paradoxical Identities in Modern Chinese Songs.” Journal of Women’s History, 8 (Winter 1997): 93.

27 Amy D. Dooling, Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 65.

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category, known as the phenomenon of the “Xin Nv Xing” (新女性), or the “New

Woman.” The figure of the “New Woman” had a visible and audible impact on the social, political, and cultural landscape of 1920s and 1930s China. Chinese women in this category boldly broke the Confucian ethical and familial framework in order to achieve their own economic, spiritual, and sexual emancipation. By throwing away patriarchal ideas of female subordination, such as the “Three Obediences and Four Virtues,” they strove to overcome their traditional roles as daughter, wife, and mother who are subjective to men, and struggled to advance their own way of attaining modern gender

“equality.” 28 Writing is one of the major ways that the group of “New Woman” demands their own voice in society. Dooling, in particular, examines the narrative practices of the

“New Woman” writers, who reflected a new sense of urgency around the act of female self-representation. Dooling explains:

[They] implicitly insisted on the importance of articulating their own

analyses and solutions to contemporary gender inequities. As self-

reflexive textual forms, fictionalized letters and diaries repeatedly enact

28 This idea is from the Confucian ideology of the Classics which has become the national moral standard in Chinese society since the Han dynasty in 206 BC. It particularly regularizes ancient Chinese women’s physical and emotional actions. The “Three Obediences” explain that a Chinese woman must: 1) obey her father as a daughter, 2) obey her husband as a wife, and 3) obey her sons in widowhood. The “Four Virtues” are: 1) morality, 2) proper speech, 3) modest manner, and 4) diligent work. These rules were the spiritual fetters of wifely submission imposed on Chinese women for thousands of years. Although Chinese society has accepted more women’s rights and gradually abandoned the “Three Obediences and Four Virtues” idea since the beginning of the twentieth century, the ideals still have some impact even today.

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the process of the modern woman’s self-examination and self-

interpretation, and in so doing posit a crucial link between authorship

(authorial control over meaning) and the project of female (self)

emancipation. 29

With an understanding of the role of the “New Woman,” we can reinterpret the female protagonist in Xu’s Letter from an Unknown Woman. Xu’s protagonist is living in this period in which women are making a transition from the old ways to the new. Her life, from childhood to single motherhood, is a reflection of the transition from an “old” girl to a “new” woman. Her conservative verbal and physical actions in childhood are swept away by the ideas of the New Woman. What happens in the rest of her life is a demonstration of her individuality, as well as the price paid for living the life of a New

Woman in 1930s Chinese society. Her transition begins when she returns to Beijing and enrolls as a college student, which causes her to symbolically divorce herself from the patriarchal moral system, represented by her relationship with her family. (She loses the bond to her family forever). After having the first one-night stand with the writer, she completely breaks the moral code of the “good girl” in the Confucian prescription for femaleness. She has become a “new woman” who is physically, spiritually and sexually emancipated.

Although in chapter one, I discussed the many problems and limitations of the identity of the “New Woman” and the self-representation of their writings, these

29 Amy D. Dooling, Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth Century China. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 67.

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disadvantages have been largely weakened in Xu’s version of Letter from an Unknown

Woman. Instead, the film has been deeply marked by the director’s reinterpretation, as a new type of “New Woman” in the millennium. In one interview, Xu strongly disagreed with the tag line on the film poster: “a man’s one night, a woman’s lifetime.” This line suggests a shallow first impression based on a superficial observation. Xu argues that her main point about the fate of the writer and the “unknown woman” should be: “A man’s one night, a woman’s one night, a man and a woman’s lifetime.” Because the two characters’ life experiences are equal and interact with each other at different phases, Xu sees the “unknown woman” as active in her life while the writer is passive in accepting the reality. He is ignorant of a big life mystery until the film’s end, when he finds out the truth about the “unknown woman.”

“I find him very sympathetic because he is not a bad guy,” Xu says. “[It’s] unlike the feeling [I had] when I first read the novella. At my very young age I thought the writer [was] an extremely indifferent, irresponsible, and self-centered man; now I can imagine myself in his position and would be completely shocked by reading this letter. I would seriously doubt myself and my life over the past years during which [I] had been living an unconscious lie.”30

30 Huijun Zhang and Yufeng Ma, eds., “所有的进步都是在承担责任的过程中得到的 影片: 影片一个陌生女人的来信导演创作谈” (“A Film in Which all of the Progress Occurs in the Process of Taking Responsibility: An Interview with the Director of Letter from an Unknown Woman”). Journal of Beijing Film Academy 3 (2005): 52.

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In Xu’s view, her version of the “unknown woman” is a complete human being.

Since encountering the writer (except for leaving Beijing with her mother for six years), she takes every step of her life through her own active decisions: coming back to Beijing for college, meeting the writer again, having their first one-night stand, being pregnant and then raising their child alone, becoming a courtesan, having their second one night stand, and finally writing the letter of truth to the writer in the last moment of her life.

Although tragic in affect, she has stayed true to herself through her life.31 Different from the “New Woman” characters in the film New Woman (Xin nv xing, 1935), showing their dilemma of being a modern Chinese woman yet still being trapped by social repression at that time, the “New Woman” in Xu’s version of Letter from an Unknown Woman is fully aware of herself, the writer, and society, and completely controls her life on her own.

Unlike the female protagonist in Goddess (Shen nv, 1934) who is forced to be a repressed prostitute in order to raise her son and who suffers discrimination from others, the

“unknown woman” in Xu’s film decides to become a high-class prostitute not in order to survive, but to make sure her son can have a better life and education. She is not ashamed of her identity and gets no bias or judgments from others. Therefore, being a prostitute in the Chinese Republic era is no longer presented only as the image of the other in Chinese films, but is fully granted self-awareness of female subjectivity.

On the other hand, when we turn back to look at Lisa, the “unknown woman” in

Ophuls’s version, even though she acts on her emotions at first, she gives up her self- awareness and self-insistence when she chooses marriage to another man. On the surface,

31 Ibid.

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marriage rescues her from being thrown out of the social/moral system and being labeled a “bad woman” for having a one-night stand and becoming a single mother. However, in her own mind Lisa has completely subordinated herself to mainstream society and has lost her subjectivity.

In the film’s sound design, the influence of the “New Woman” in Xu’s version of

Letter from an Unknown Woman is shown in two separate vocal categories: the female first-person voiceover and female diegetic silence. Both the “heard” and “unheard” sounds create a strong female subjectivity within the film’s particular Chinese historical period. To begin with, the first-person voiceover narration of Xu’s version of Letter from an Unknown Woman perfectly fits the fashion of the “New Woman’s” self-reflexive textual forms so popular in the 1930s. Xu establishes self-interpretation and self- realization as the sole property of the “unknown woman,” not anyone else, and we only see, hear, and understand the reality from the “unknown woman’s” point of view. Her voiceover is in control of the film’s discourse throughout. Behaving remarkably differently from Lisa’s voiceover in Ophuls’s version, which displays a fragile female subjectivity as she constantly attempts to insert herself into Stefan’s life, the voiceover of the Chinese “unknown woman” in Xu’s version, along with her visual presentation, fully and firmly displays her pride and self-awareness. A point of comparison of the voiceovers in the two films can be found in the scene when both female protagonists see off their lovers after one night of passion and then discover their pregnancy.

In Ophuls’s version, as the “unknown woman” faces Stefan’s goodbye, he says, “I will be back in two weeks, two weeks,” Lisa leaves with frustration. With the strings’ 80

sudden cry in the soundtrack, shadowing the coming tragedy, her voiceover begins: “Two weeks... Stefan how little you knew yourself. That train has taken you out of my life.”

When bearing Stefan’s child, she painfully lies in the hospital and refuses to reveal the name of her child’s father. Her voiceover appears again at the same time and she states her intent of keeping the secret, “I want to be one woman that you know who wants you for nothing.” Yet when the visuals turn back to the present time and Stefan is reading her letter, Lisa’s voiceover narrates, “My deep regret is that you have never seen your son.”

(see Figure 2.3.)

Figure 2.3. Lisa is painfully lying on the bed in the hospital and is refusing to reveal Stefan’s name as her child’s father.

Lisa’s voiceover in this scene displays her paradoxical emotions. On one hand, she blames Stefan for his ignorance and his “forgetfulness” of her, but she still deeply wants

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to connect with Stefan on the other. Her voiceover shows her intention to stand on her subjectivity, yet eventually her actions betray her voice—instead of actually taking off on her own, she marries the man who proposed to her before. Therefore, Lisa’s voiceover is placed in instability and has been amputated from her visual image. By being substituted to the mainstream moral system, her voiceover loses its initial activity of female subjectivity.

In Xu’s version, when the Chinese “unknown woman” discovers that the writer never recognized her, she continues to live as usual without any complaint. Instead, her voiceover speaks the truth: “I suddenly discovered that in your mind, wherever we are, our distance is still so far.” Unlike Lisa, who sought medical attention from the hospital, the Chinese “unknown woman” leaves quietly when she is pregnant. Her voiceover states her intention of standing on her own:

You will never believe a young girl did and will concentrate on you only.

You will never believe you are the baby’s father. Maybe you think I have

other thoughts. You will doubt me. There will be a light, doubt shadow

between us. But I have pride. I will take the responsibility on myself…

(see Figure 2.4.)

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Figure 2.4. After learning of her unexpected pregnancy, the Chinese “unknown woman” leaves with peace and hope.

In the statement above, the Chinese “unknown woman” speaks with great pride and self-awareness. Meanwhile, her actions on the screen are closely tied to her voiceover— she behaves positively, never returning home, but giving birth to her son and raising him alone. Despite being a popular courtesan in order to provide a high-quality life for her son, she never becomes emotionally involved with anyone but the writer. She never believes that the writer can recognize her and voluntarily has the second one-night stand with him as a “stranger.” Therefore, the first-person voiceover of the Chinese “unknown woman” excludes all other voices of the “traditional” mainstream, reinforces the strong female subjectivity shown in the visuals, and provides us an ideal way to observe her inner emotional world in the proper historical and cultural contexts.

Secondly, thanks to Xu’s explanation in the above-cited interview, we can appreciate the ways in which the figure of the Chinese “unknown woman” has shifted her status from passive to active. This profoundly changes our interpretation of her verbal silence. 83

The understanding of this Chinese woman’s missing voice in those crucial moments during her life needs to be treated historically and culturally, so that we may better comprehend the awakening of the Chinese woman’s self-awareness in other films.

By re-reading the film through Xu’s point of view on the female character’s emotional experience as influenced by the particular Chinese social-historical context in which she lived, we can interpret her silence as defying Laing’s painful and self- sacrificing “selective mutism.” In Xu’s Letter from an Unknown Woman, the woman acts passively when dealing with everything related to the writer in her “good” “old” adolescent days. Thus she decides to keep her mouth shut because of the social (family) and cultural (old Chinese tradition) restraints. In the film for example she cannot even look directly at him and say “thank you” after he offers her help. What she does is sacrifice her ability to voice her real emotions in order to secretly and safely enjoy a fantasy of freedom in her mind. Yet after she comes back to Beijing, social and cultural restraints (her family, in this case) fail to prevent her from being a “New Woman.” Many scenes in the film indicate that she refuses to settle down emotionally with other people

(for example, with the military official Huang) and instead keeps spiritual loyalty to the writer throughout her life.

Such types of scenes can easily lead to the Chinese “unknown woman” being interpreted as a stereotypical figure of “masochism.” In Jason McGrath’s analysis of Xu’s version, quoting Gaylyn Studlar’s discussion of Ophuls’s version, he states that

“women’s film” usually displays a “repetition of scenarios of masochism” and the

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“apparent capitulation to ‘romantic love’ demands to be read as a masquerade for a perverse sexual scenario that freezes ‘love’ into a single, compulsively repeated pattern unconsciously replaying a past object relationship.”32 McGrath claims that the Chinese

“unknown woman” also “anticipates the masochistic performance” and that “she seems to be locked in a perpetual repetition of a primordial scene of self-negation with regard to a primary love object, on whom she has willfully set her libidinal coordinates for the rest of her life.”33

Nevertheless, the director Xu Jinglei proposes another way to perceive the Chinese

“unknown woman’s” “masochistic” activities. Xu declares that this woman “understands herself in terms of love, faith, self-dignity…. she would not spend her whole life doing such a thing for the writer if she considered herself to be a pathetic and desperate person.”34 If we consider that Lisa loses her voice at her reunion with Stefan because of her extreme frustration with his failure to recognize her, the Chinese “unknown woman’s” decision to consciously choose between maintaining her silence and revealing her feelings in her adulthood can be interpreted as a sign of her belief in herself. She

32 McGrath quotes Studlar’s sentence in his article “Masochistic Performance and Female Subjectivity in Letter from an Unknown Woman”. Cinema Journal 33, no. 3 (spring 1994): 38, 40.

33 Jason McGrath. “Communists Have More Fun! The Dialectics of Fulfillment in Cinema of the People’s Republic of China”. World Picture 3, (summer, 2009): 9.

34 Huijun Zhang and Yufeng Ma, eds., “所有的进步都是在承担责任的过程中得到的 影片: 影片一个陌生女人的来信导演创作谈” (“A Film in Which all of the Progress Occurs in the Process of Taking Responsibility: An Interview with the Director of Letter from an Unknown Woman”). Journal of Beijing Film Academy 3 (2005): 52.

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excludes any judgments and prejudices from the objective outside and makes the decision not by pain, but by self-awareness. Her decision does not lead to self-destruction or self- infliction, but to self-completeness. Therefore, we have found an alternative to Laing’s understandings of woman’s painful “selective mutism,” which marks “the most extreme points of frustratingly inexplicable character motivation.”35

Theme Music: The Musical Representation of Women in the Two Films

Musically speaking, the female protagonists in the two versions of Letter from an

Unknown Woman are granted moral and emotional victories by music even if they never gain the right to actual power—or to speech or full verbal self-expression in reality. As

Laing explains in reference to Carolyn Abbate and Gretchen A. Wheelock’s ideas about opera, music serves as an example of how “the musical-emotional ‘voice’ of the victimized woman in film melodrama may therefore remain resonant and disturbingly memorable, despite her verbal silence or ultimate subjugation to patriarchal social structures.”36 As one would expect from the cultural differences between the two versions of Letter from an Unknown Woman, music for the female protagonist differs significantly in Xu’s film and Ophuls’s film. Indeed, both versions of Letter from an Unknown Woman use theme music to present their female protagonists to various degrees. Yet how they are presented is firstly decided by who possesses the music. Additionally, their musical

35 Heather Laing. The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman's Film. (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007): 29.

36 Ibid. 19.

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presentations are largely different in the use of instruments, the melodic progression, the cultural contexts associated with characters, as well as the social background in the narrative. When the same story about the same woman is told with different music, a change of construction of the female character is thus established.

Lisa vs. the Chinese “Unknown Woman”: Being Presented vs. Self-Presented

In order to discuss the female characters presented through music in the two versions of Letter from an Unknown Woman, it is necessary to begin with concentrating on the source of the music that is presented. One of the striking differences in the two films is the career of the male protagonists. The man in Xu’s version is a writer while

Stefan in Ophuls’s version is a pianist. Such very basic differences in their careers distinguish their possession of the music.

Un Sospiro at the Piano: A Male Musicianship

As a musician, Stefan represents the power of music. When discussing the relationship between musicians and their audience, Laing said: “The character who actually creates or performs music is perhaps the most active…. The action and reactions—and therefore the emotions—of the listener are contextualized by music that remains under the complete control of another character. The listener is therefore constructed, at least in the moment of listening, in response to the musician and the precise piece of music that they choose to perform.” 37 Stefan initially conveys his

37 Ibid. 67.

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charisma to the “unknown woman” Lisa by playing Franz Liszt’s Concert Study in D Flat

(Un Sospiro), the theme music of the film. Lisa hears his performance before seeing his face. On the one hand, this theme music represents the passionate emotion of Lisa; and on the other it displays the masculine authority of Stefan. In the view of Irene Kahn

Atkins, particularly, when the music is drawn either from the Romantic repertoire or is imitative of that style, the diegetic placement of the music “assumes an importance as a statement about the personality of the…. composer. The style of the work is a reflection of his (her) own emotional life-style, or ideals and aspirations.” 38 Therefore, Stefan’s music can be used by the viewer as a means of moving beyond the isolated occasion of performance to build the whole story from a very particular subjectivity. In this film,

Stefan’s performance of a highly personalized work composed by Liszt—himself a figure of mythical, physical and sexual potency—creates a powerful, charismatic image that positions him as the object of female adoration, in this case Lisa’s. Her adoration can be easily transformed into love or even obsession. Stefan’s potent masculine strength of artistic expression, his musical virtuosity and his “voice” in performance signify much more to the woman than merely a talent or a profession. They make him powerfully fascinating and attractive to Lisa.

Pipa Narrates by Pipa: A Woman Tells Her Story

38 Irene Kahn Atkins. Source Music in Motion Pictures. (Rutherford, Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1983): 89-90.

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In Xu’s version of Letter from an Unknown Woman, there is no musicianship granted to the male protagonist. Only one scene in this film connects music directly with the male protagonist—the writer within the narrative. It is the scene when the writer has just moved in and the girl does not see him but “hears” him outside the door. The camera slowly zooms in to the door of the writer’s house, where the young girl and the audience hears various types of sounds—Western music, Peking Opera, and noisy laughter behind the door. The “unknown woman’s” voiceover, at the same time, is narrating:

You moved in at the second day, but I didn’t see you. I heard the music

and voice from your room. So did the later three days. The music and

laughter are from many people. You are like a sound, as soft as music, and

as happy as laughter.

Just like the sonic first impression that Stefan gives Lisa in Ophuls’s version, the male protagonist in Xu’s version is amde attractive to the young girl through music.39

Without showing any images of the writer’s face before they actually meet each other, the young girl’s impression of the writer visually is books, and of music and laughter through the audio. In the same scene where Lisa and the Chinese young girl hear the music from the male protagonist’s home, the two versions show their different handling of male musicianship subtly. Visually speaking, the camera captures Stefan playing Un

39 Both of the film versions of Letter from an Unknown Woman have displayed the first impression that the male protagonists give to the female protagonists is the visual attraction—Stefan’s fascinating furniture and the writer’s numerous books in Chinese and foreign languages. Then their second impressions giving to Lisa and the Chinese young girl is through audio.

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Sospiro in Ophuls’s version several times, establishing the connection between music and the male protagonist. Yet in Xu’s version, no image, in this scene, is given to the writer at all. The young girl imagines the figure of the writer purely as sound—music and laughter.

It visually denies the connection between music and the writer. Musically speaking, the writer displays differently than Stefan, who plays Un Sospiro by himself and which signifies his charge of music, the writer does not produce music—the music is from other sources. At the same time, he does not, like Stefan playing his piano solo, possess the source of the music exclusively, but shares it with other people. Therefore, both of the male protagonists in the two versions are introduced by music, Ophuls’s version firmly announces Stefan’s control of music completely. The writer in Xu’s version, on the other hand, does not have authority over the music. Although the young girl’s imagination has transformed him into pure sound, the various types of shared music blurs the stability of the writer’s musical identity, and the music never stands exclusively for him.

Without this strong male musicianship, Xu’s version of Letter from the Unknown

Woman thus provides an exclusive channel to the female character possessing musical power. Xu’s version is different from Ophuls’s in that Xu’s “unknown woman” does not speak out as loudly and freely as Lisa does; she is held back either by the Chinese cultural context or by a narcissistic self-esteem. At those crucial moments when the

Chinese “unknown woman” keeps her voice silent, music, either within or outside the narrative takes on the responsibility of speaking for her. Particularly, the theme music for the Chinese “unknown woman” is outstanding throughout the whole film. Unlike

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Ophuls’s version, which does not give any absolute musical authority to Lisa, Xu’s

“unknown woman” exclusively owns the thematic music, entitled Pipa Narrates.

Pipa Narrates is not an original score, in that it was not composed exclusively for

Xu’s version of Letter from the Unknown Woman. The director chose this music from a pipa album, named The Faces of Pipa (Pipa Xiang), composed by Lin Hai. In one interview the composer, Lin, mentioned that the inspiration he had for the music came from a journey he took to the Jiangnan area of China. Being touched by a soft pipa performance in Suzhou pingtan, a musical genre that tells a story through playing the pipa and sanxian (a three-stringed plucked instrument), Lin decided to create an album that displayed the various expressivities of a pipa performance. In this album, Lin employs both Western and Chinese musical elements and techniques, and tries to create a new type of pipa performance utilizing diverse styles. 40 As the most representative piece on this album, Pipa Narrates combines cross-cultural musical styles (sheng) and a superior awareness (shen), describing an image of a performer who elegantly sings a melancholy story by playing pipa.

When talking about this choice of music, Xu mentions that composer Osama

Kubota’s score is also great for her film, but is too “cold” to be the theme music.41 She

40 Interview of Lin Hai. http://www.douban.com/group/topic/2278427/, 2007, accessed 07-08-2012.

41 Huijun Zhang and Yufeng Ma, eds., “Suoyou de jinbu doushizai chengdan zeren de guochengzhong dedaode yingpian: yingpian yige mosheng nvren de laixin daoyan chuangzuotan” (A Film in Which all of the Progress Occurs in the Process of Taking 91

eventually chose Pipa Narrates based on its melody, emotion, instrumentation, and cultural context. Musically speaking, the complete version of Pipa Narrates is played in three sections, each of which shares the same melody but in different instrumentations.

The first section is mainly played by the Chinese instrument the pipa, while piano and other instruments accompany it. The thematic melody is composed of a short overture

(bars 1-2) and three musical phrases, phrases one and two are idential (bars 3-10), and the third phrase contains the development and conclusion (bars 10-18). The pipa plays the melodic line while the piano accompanies in a rhythmically ascending arpeggio pattern

(see Figure 2.5.).

Responsibility: An Interview with the Director of Letter from an Unknown Woman), Journal of Beijing Film Academy 3 (2005): 54.

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Figure 2.5.Lin Hai, Pipa Narrates. The piano version of Pipa Narrates (in the film, pipa plays the melodic line shown in the score)42

42 http://www.gangqinpu.com/html/1623.htm. Accessed on 07-08-2012. 93

In the second section, the melody is the same but the pipa’s and piano’s positions are reversed in the first two musical phrases—the piano becomes the leading instrument and the pipa gives it context. Nevertheless, in the third phrase, the pipa, with a girl singing added in, returns to the leading position, while the piano’s sound gradually diminishes. The third section repeats the first and the pipa leads the melody from the beginning to the end. In Xu’s version of Letter from an Unknown Woman, we do not hear all three sections of Pipa Narrates every time. Instead, they are added step-by-step in terms of the image, emotion, and the narrative.

Culturally speaking, the choice of the pipa for the primary instrument has strong cultural and gender implications. As Kevin Dawe says, “Musical instruments have very different meanings in their cultures of provenance…. such an object has cultural-specific meanings attached to it.”43 Pipa (also called “Chinese lute”) in ancient China did not refer to one particular instrument. According to Liao Fushu, from the Qin dynasty to the

Tang dynasty, the name pipa was “applied to many kinds of plucked string instruments: long-necked, round-shaped, pear-shaped, wooden-sided, (and) skin-sided, with strings added or subtracted.”44 With regard to the debate of whether the pipa was imported from foreign countries or whether it originated in China, the earliest known lute was the qin

43 Kevin Dawe. "The Cultural Study of Musical Instruments." The Cultural Study of Music. Eds. Richard Middleton, Martin Clayton, and Trevor Herbert. 282-283. (New York and London: Routledge, 2003): 282.

44 Liao, Fushu. “中国古代音乐简史” (General History of Ancient Chinese Music), 34.

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pipa from the Qin dynasty, more than two thousand years ago. Later scholars have concluded that all pipa derive from this hybrid instrument.45 Alternatively, it is known that a four-stringed and pear-shaped pipa from Gandhara, a kingdom in present-day

Pakistan,46 and a five-stringed, round-shaped, and long-necked lute from the Middle East were also imported to China in the Han dynasty.47 With the combination and assimilation of indigenous development and foreign importation, this instrument eventually became a must-have for ancient Chinese music ensembles for rites, at court, and in society.

Certain extra-musical considerations affect the performance as well as the appreciation of the pipa instrument. Firstly, pipa music, similar to many other types of

Chinese instrumental music, projects with certain extra-musical associations, which can focus on a poetic image, a story, a mood, or any combination of these. In a Western sense, such extra-musical association can be understood as “programmatic.” Secondly, the classical repertoire of pipa performance is generally divided into two thematic categories—military wu and pacific wen. According to John E. Myer, the wen pieces emphasize smaller gestures and slower music in a peaceful style, while the wu pieces typically involve acrobatics, percussive textures, and a faster tempo in a warlike atmosphere. He also points out that the wen pieces are relatively stable and restrained,

45 John E. Myers. The Way of the Pipa: Structure and Imagery in Chinese Lute Music. (Kent, Ohio, and London, England: The Kent State University Press. 1992): 7.

46 Shigeo Kishibe, “The Origin of the Pipa,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 19 (1940): 269-271.

47 John E. Myers. The Way of the Pipa: Structure and Imagery in Chinese Lute Music. (Kent, Ohio, and London, England: The Kent State University Press. 1992): 8.

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often expressing the beauty of nature; the wu pieces are given more rhythmic freedom and are also played in higher dynamic levels, usually displaying aggressiveness and toughness.48

At the same time, according to Helene La Rue, “musical instruments can be markers of culture, as well as status; they can also imply the status of gender.”49 As the wu pieces in pipa performance usually indicate a more “manly” style, such as The

Warlord Removes His Armor (Jiang jun xie jia) and The Ambuscade (Shi mian mai fu), pipa’s wen pieces are typically connected to women. 50 One of the early literary traditions associates pipa with two famous women of the Han dynasty: Xijun, a princess in the first century B.C. who was the bride in a diplomatic marriage to the Susun (Turks); and

Zhaojun, who was the bride in a diplomatic marriage to the Xiongnu (Tartars).51 Both of them had great beauty, yet both of them played pipa to bemoan their tragic destiny of being far away from home, and to express their nostalgia for their homeland. Many

Chinese traditional paintings, ancient folk songs, and classical poems have made famous

48 Ibid. 32-33.

49 Helene La Rue. “Music, Literature and Etiquette: Musical Instruments and Social Identity from Castiglione to Austen.” Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, edited by Martin Stokes. (Oxford/Providence: Berg Publisher. 1994): 189.

50 Pipa’s wu style music also frequently appears in Chinese films. It is usually used in Martial Arts film and the battle scene onscreen. Examples can be found in Once Upon Time in China (Huang feihong, 1991), New Dragon Inn (1992), Kungfu (2004), etc.

51 John E. Myers. The Way of the Pipa: Structure and Imagery in Chinese Lute Music. (Kent, Ohio, and London, England: The Kent State University Press. 1992): 8. 96

iconic connections between women and the pipa. For example, in the Dunhuang Fresco, the painting illustrates the movement of the goddess Feitian, arcing between heaven and earth, gentle and beautiful, whilst playing the reverse pipa, with flowing ribbons waving in the air (see Figure 2.6.).

Figure 2.6. The Goddess Feitian (middle) plays the reverse pipa, Dunhuang Fresco in the middle Tang dynasty.52

Musically speaking, the pipa became one of the important musical instruments for ancient Chinese geishas to learn in their training. A geisha’s excellent pipa technique allowed her to enhance her feminine charm and thus acquire reputation and wealth. More importantly, the pipa became a unique medium through which young women, especially geishas, could tell their own personal experiences and express their emotions. She often

52 http://www.dhfxsh.com/4416d147b79c-221.html, accessed on 07-09-2012.

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sang a narrative song describing or mirroring her life story by playing a pipa. The best example can be found in the famous Chinese ancient poem Pipa Song (Pipa xing) by the poet Bai Juyi, which describes a young woman touching everyone who listens by singing of her tragic life accompanied by a pipa. Her musical activity serves not only to “re- enforce and define [female] gender identity,”53 but also to demonstrate what Sally Price argues is the conscious desire of many female singers to “present their own songs as

‘reflection[s] of their self-image’ and as explanations of the gaps they perceive between the way they see themselves and the way they are seen by others.”54 (see Figure 2.7.)

53 Ellen KosKoff. Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989): 9.

54 Sally Price. “Sexism and the Construction of Reality: An Afro-American Example” American Ethnologist 10, no.3 (1983): 468.

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Figure 2.7. Meikai, PipaXing. The scene that is described in the poem Pipa Xing—a young woman is playing pipa to tell her own story.55

In Chinese films, pipa performance presented by female characters is also quite common, especially when a film tells a story that happened in ancient China.56 Besides showing women directly playing pipa in scenes, female characters exclusively presented by pipa music are frequently shown in films—Taohua in Peach Blossom (Taohua man tian hong, 1995), Qiuyi in Red Blush (Hong fen, 1995), Ruyi in Temptress Moon (Feng

55 Meikai’s water ink painting Pipa Xing, http://www.sinocul.net/show.aspx?id=2735, 2012, accessed on 07-09-2012.

56 Examples can be found in Du shiniang in Du shiniang (1981), Li ji in Red Cliff (Chi bi, 2008), Yu Ji in White Vengeance (Hong men yan, 2011), etc.

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yue, 1996), Xiaomei in House of Flying Daggers (Shi mian mai fu, 2004), and the prostitutes and female students in The Flowers of War (Jin ling shi san chai, 2011). On the one hand, for women who cannot let their voices loud, pipa performance grants them an alternative way to present themselves and to make their emotions “audible” to audiences. These women may be represented by various styles of music in film, but their representations by pipa music reveal their actual thoughts. One example can be found in the film Shanghai Triad (Yao a yao dao wai po qiao, 1995). The female protagonist, Xiao

Jinbao, is the mistress of the boss of the biggest gang in Shanghai and is an extremely popular singer at a Shanghai dance club. When facing other people, she displays herself as sexually aggressive as well as arrogant by singing provocative songs in diegesis. Yet when she becomes extremely angry at her secret lover because she feels used by him, she removes her public “masked” personality and cries deeply alone in her room. At this time, her presented music is no longer those songs she sings in public, but rather solo pipa music in non-diegesis. The pipa performance in this example not only reinforces the expressivity of her crying, but also tears off her faked musical “mask” and establishes an implicit description of her real feelings.

On the other hand, the particular cultural context of pipa regularly features

Chinese women in a very specific cultural subjectivity, which is quite different from the musical presentation of women in non-Chinese films. It is clear that women, while not having the opportunity to present and represent themselves through vocal speaking, can either sing by themselves or “speak” through performance about their feelings and experiences with the help of the pipa. With the pipa performance, a woman’s repressed

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verbal voice in real life becomes understandable and powerful in musical-emotional terms.

Based on the cultural and gender interpretations of pipa mentioned above, Pipa

Narrates in Xu’s version of Letter from an Unknown Woman has a more direct as well as deeper connection with the film itself than the film’s original score, despite the fact that it was previously composed for another purpose. In this film, the theme music played by the pipa becomes the second “voice” of the woman—second to her voiceover narration.

Compared to Liszt’s passionate Concert Study in D Flat (Un Sospiro) in Ophuls’s version,

Pipa Narrates is peaceful at the melodic level but very sorrowful and passionate under the surface. In a way it signifies the strong sense of self-awareness, self-esteem, and the uncovered emotions deeply rooted in the Chinese female protagonist’s mind.

The theme music of the two versions of Letter from an Unknown Woman differs dramatically from one another, and thus reflects of the differing representations of the female characters. Un Sospiro is repeated several times in Ophuls’s version in different styles, instrumentations, and emotions. After Stefan performs it within the narrative for the first two times, the rest of its appearances are non-diegetic and played in different orchestrations. Pipa Narrates, on the other hand, only appears four times in the entirety of Xu’s version. Of the four times it plays in the film, Pipa Narrates only appears once in a rearranged piano solo variation. The other three times are played in the original orchestration. Its presentation each time is purposely designed to meet the specific need for the establishment and development of the film’s narration, emotion, and representation. 101

Theme Music in the Films’ Opening

The first time that the theme music appears in Ophuls’s version is in the film’s opening. With a fixed scenic image as the background, the opening film credits are accompanied by an orchestral performance of Un Sospiro. Visually, this beginning is not directly connected to the film story, nor does it become a part of it. Musically, the orchestra plays Un Sospiro in non-diegesis and delivers a variety of emotions beginning with an ascending melodic progression building to a dynamic and emotional crescendo, the theme brought out by the strings, bright and passionate. It is then immediately responded to by the brass in a darker tonal color. In the subsequent section, the color contrast between the strings and the brass continues, almost preparing the audience for the fluctuating emotional exchange that will appear in this story—hope, happiness, bittersweet, pain, struggle, and despair. Rather than being a representation of any one character in Ophuls’s version, the theme music in the opening is displayed as an objective observer in a position that extends beyond the film. By summarizing the different types of emotion that will be presented in the entire film, the opening performance of the theme music does not become subjectively involved with any particular angle or view in the narrative. Instead, it creates a third-person narrator who, though not involved explicitly in the film, tells the story. When the narration actually starts, the theme music stops and

Lisa does not appear visually or musically until Stefan begins to read her letter. Therefore, by denying the connection between Lisa and the theme music, Un Sospiro, at the beginning, Ophuls’s version deprives the female character of musical authority from the start.

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In contrast to the absence of connection between the female character and theme music in Ophuls’s version, the theme music, Pipa Narrates, in Xu’s version of Letter from an Unknown Woman is immediately integrated into the core of the story when the film begins. A series of close-up shots opens Xu’s version, showing the actions of handling, distributing, and sending letters at the post office to the accompaniment of Pipa

Narrates. If they are familiar with the novella, audiences already know that these letters imply the very first “appearance” of the Chinese “unknown woman.” Therefore, her unseen “image” and unheard “voice” are connected visually and musically at the beginning of the film. Then the image is cut to the appearance of the writer coming home.

In Ophuls’s version, we cannot see Stefan’s face, but rather we hear his voice asking about news of those women he has dated, which establishes his personality and relationship with the female characters in this film. Yet the writer in Xu’s version is shown only with his back to the audience. He is seen in a subjective view, constructed by a high angle shot. Since the whole film is built on flashbacks, this opening scene happens after the “unknown woman” has died. The unusual high angle shot then can be considered as the Chinese “unknown woman’s” gaze, peering down on him as she often does in the film, from another dimension (or heaven). At the same time, Pipa Narrates peacefully plays in the first section as the pipa solo with piano accompaniment, along with the images, as a silent “narrator.” Although the Chinese “unknown woman” has had much trouble and pain in her life, we hear neither her musical voice nor her emotions of madness and despair. Instead, as the extension of the Chinese “unknown woman’s” voice,

Pipa Narrates breaks the prejudice that the female first-person narrator can only know

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what she sees, memorizes, and experiences, and reaches beyond the chronological order and becomes a temporarily objective observer controlling the whole narrative. Therefore, both the visuals and the soundtrack set up the tone of the film with a strong identity of femininity along with calmness and rationality.

Theme Music in Their First Meeting

The theme music in Ophuls’s and Xu’s versions plays a crucial role in the first official meeting of the two protagonists. Yet their functions in terms of narration as well as its association with the female characters are not the same. The first time that Lisa and

Stefan meet each other is a moment when the two share their connection visually. In this scene, Lisa does not see Stefan, but hears his piano performance of Un Sospiro through the window. From a visual perspective, another girl comes into the frame, thus sharing the moment when Lisa and Stefan first meet. When Lisa sees Stefan and blushes, the girl immediately exposes Lisa’s secret, which indicates a “non-intimate” relationship between them.

In the soundtrack, it is the first time that Stefan plays Un Sospiro in diegesis—

Lisa is attracted by the music and her fantasy begins. Yet the beautiful performance is suddenly stopped by Stefan’s frustrated abandon, and so is Lisa’s fantasy. When they actually meet, there is no music. The absence of the theme music at this moment works to deny their connection in aural terms and therefore Lisa loses the chance of sharing the music’s authority. The performance, as Laing pointed out, “as an expression of emotion, can only ever exist for her as something ‘given’” and represents “her own current lack of

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musical-emotional representation.”57 Laing also argues that the musical silence when

Lisa subsequently sees Stefan for the first time “evidences both his emotional indifference to her and her own current lack of musical-emotional representation.”58 The theme music in Ophuls’s version creates Lisa’s passion and fantasy through Stefan’s performance. Nevertheless, the music itself is only authorized and possessed by Stefan. It does not belong to Lisa. Therefore, even if, compared to the “unknown woman” in Xu’s version, Lisa enjoys some kind of quasi-freedom and superiority in her cultural context, this music derives its representation of female discourse from masculine ideas of creation and thus Lisa has no music of her own, which ultimately renders her less fully realized in film.

In Xu’s version of Letter from an Unknown Woman, Pipa Narrates precisely appears at the moment when the “unknown woman,” as a young girl, falls in love with the writer at their first encounter. It is the first time that her own music and her voiceover work together to double the power of the love representation. It shows musically how the emotions of “peace” and “passion” both exist at the same moment. In the visual aspect, the girl’s movements are slowed down through the use of an upgraded lens to show details and thereby amplify the moment, the moment that will decide her destiny. Her face is shown in close-up, which leads audiences to observe her emotional expression, yet no particular facial expression is displayed. Whereas Lisa actively starts to prepare

57 Heather Laing. The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman's Film. (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007): 84.

58 Ibid.

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herself for Stefan by cleaning clothes, learning social manners, and studying music after she meets him, the Chinese girl does nothing in particular for the writer. The following images portray everyday activities like playing and working—within the narrative, nothing special appears in her life after she meets the writer—and so the audience cannot see the emotions the writer inspires in the woman. But the aural aspect outside the narrative uncovers the truth. The voiceover shows her real feeling:

I fell in love with you the second we met. I know other women often tell

you this, which makes you not believe it. But please believe that there is

no one else who can love you as much as me, whether in the past, in the

present, or in the future…

At the same time, the theme music, Pipa Narrates, starts to play along with her statement of love in a peaceful tone that is still full of passion. The first section is again played mainly by the pipa, with piano accompaniment, displaying the young girl’s activities. Unlike the silence in the non-diegetic track in Ophul’s version, when Lisa keeps secretly watching Stefan’s activities, Pipa Narrates continues the Chinese

“unknown woman’s” “confession” of love after their first meeting. When the man appears on the screen, we can only see his back from the perspective of the young girl, although Pipa Narrates reaches its first musical phrase in the second section where the piano takes over the melody, but the second phrase returns the pipa’s musical leadership.

During this process, the man appears only in the gaze of the young girl, which relates to the purpose of the arrangements in instrumentation. If we hear the pipa

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performance as representing the woman, the piano’s sound then becomes the aural- musical symbol of the male writer. However, unlike in Ophuls’s version in which the piano music originates from Stefan, in Xu’s version, the piano sound in Pipa Narrates is in a relatively weak position. It does not have its own melody, instead, it just partially repeats what the pipa has already done. Therefore, the piano performance in Pipa

Narrates does not shift the gender identity of this music from feminine to masculine; the piano can play Pipa Narrates, but never officially possesses it. Nevertheless, as opposed to its first appearance in the first section, where there is only the lonely pipa, the second section, where the piano takes on the melody, signifies the official connection between the writer and the “unknown woman.” As the film cuts to an image of the young girl hesitating whether she wants to watch the man, Pipa Narrates adds female singing— there are no lyrics, just soft humming along with the piano. It shows that the voiceover has been transformed into a musical voice and entangles the thematic melody with the piano. In the second phrase, the pipa returns to its leading position. With the push of the bamboo flute’s musical decoration, the pipa leads, ascending to an emotional climax with an image of the girl silently watching the man writing through the window. This melodic climax peacefully celebrates the first time that she boldly looks at him (without his or anyone else’s noticing), and remodels the music into a representation of her subjectivity.

The second section of Pipa Narrates then gradually fades out without disruption.

Unlike its first appearance in the film, which begins the whole story in an objective way, this presentation of Pipa Narrates has been granted specific meaning.

Filled with emotion, it strikingly “sings out” the young girl’s statement of love, and

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stands exclusively for her own subjectivity. In terms of musical authority, the male protagonist can only “borrow” the melody and “share” it, but its ownership is firmly situated within the young girl’s identity. Although Un Sospiro in Ophul’s version is never performed beyond the first 38 bars, Pipa Narrates progresses based on the needs of the narrative and its emotional presentation and, musically, it pushes the development of the story forward.

Theme Music in Their “Farewell” Scene

The theme music of the two versions of Letter from an Unknown Woman is actively engaged with the scene displaying the first separation of the female and male protagonists. It is a turning point in the female character’s life—it is the first time she leaves the man she loves and the last time she sees him as a teenage girl. The two female characters’ lives are beginning to change at this moment, and the theme music participates in both films with different presentations, functionalities, and purposes.

In Ophul’s version, Un Sospiro is no longer played diegetically by Stefan, but has now been moved beyond the narrative and has been transformed into a non-diegetic orchestral performance. The scene begins at the train station when Lisa, her mother, and her stepfather are about to leave for Linz. In contrast to her mother and her stepfather, who are busy preparing for the trip, Lisa, wearing black, stands aside with frustration.

She sneaks away, when they are not looking, and runs home, wanting to see Stefan again.

At this moment, Lisa’s voiceover confirms her intention to both confess and offer herself to Stefan with passion and anxiety:

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Suddenly, I knew I couldn’t leave without you. I didn’t know what I had

in mind…. All I wanted to do is to see you once more, to be there with

you again, to throw myself to you…. I would never leave you again.

Nothing else, nothing else matters!

At this point the strings, in non-diegesis, suddenly burst out in a high-pitched cry and suspend in the air with slow moving and repeated chords. Accompanied by Lisa’s rapid running up the stairs to knock on Stefan’s door, the main thematic melody (bars 3–5 in

Liszt’s original score) of Un Sospiro, played by the orchestra, returns (see Figure 2.8.).

Based on the progression of the notes in the two musical phrases, Laing refers to the rearrangement of bars 3–5 of the melody in this scene as an “anticipation-resolution” pattern, which “becomes relevant in reflecting the idea of emotional anticipation and resolution as the story develops between Lisa and Stefan” (See Figure 2.9.). 59

Figure 2.8. Franz Liszt, Concert Study in D Flat (Un Sospiro). Bars 3–5 (melody only). Anticipation-resolution pattern.60

59 Ibid. 85.

60 Heather Laing. The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman's Film. (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007): 89.

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Figure 2.9. Daniele Amfitheatrof, Letter from an Unknown Woman. Repeated anticipation motif answered by the brass only (no expected resolution section).61

In the “farewell” scene, the strings only play the ascending “anticipation” phrase, but not the descending “resolution” phrase—it is “answered,” to a degree, by the brass in a much lower register (see figure 2.9.). After modulating to a higher key, the musical emotion achieves its climax, building with Lisa’s increasing excitement. Nevertheless, just as her emotional “anticipation,” represented by the strings, is not responded to with the usual “resolution” phrase, but rather with an uncommonly ominous “answer” from the brass, Lisa’s passion and desire could not be quieted with Stefan’s absence from his home. It is an indication of her future relationship with him.

Being unable to find Stefan anywhere in the apartment building, Lisa slowly walks into her old room, where she used to listen secretly to Stefan’s piano playing. Here, her actions are accompanied by the non-diegetic music that appeared in the scene when she ran from the train station, encapsulating her emotional trajectory so far. Yet this time, the music is played in a lower register—she is still anxious, but in a much more nuanced and disappointed way. The “anticipation-resolution” motif, performed by “Stefan’s

61 Ibid.

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piano,” briefly reappears along with the “disappointing” music that represents Lisa’s happy memories of him.

Then Lisa sits down near the front door of Stefan’s home, waiting for him to come back. Unfortunately, she eventually sees him returning home with another woman.

The camera shoots over Lisa’s shoulder from a high angle, letting the audience view the heart-breaking scene from a distance. From this angle, the audience cannot see Lisa’s facial expression, nor truly experience how she actually feels at this crucial moment.

Meanwhile, the silence in non-diegesis ruthlessly deprives her right to an emotional eruption through music. After witnessing Stefan and the other woman going inside the apartment and closing the door, Lisa slowly leaves, with her voiceover: “So there was nothing left for me. I went to Linz.” At the same time, the strings’ descending cry returns, but Un Sospiro never reappears in the scene.

The appearance of Un Sospiro in a non-diegetic space during the “farewell” scene continues to work against Lisa’s possession of musical subjectivity. Claudia Gorbman declares this transference of such a personal musical statement to a non-diegetic track

“insistently links the character’s subjectivity with the spectator’s.”62 Even if Un Sospiro, when played by the orchestra, is transferred to a relatively objective position in non- diegesis, it still does not pass its authority from Stefan to Lisa. Meanwhile, the absence of

62 Claudia Gorbman. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987): 151.

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the usual “resolution” phrase in the main melody of the piece creates an incomplete presentation of Lisa’s emotions, desires, and fantasies. The temporary return of Stefan’s original piano performance of Un Sospiro exists only as a beautiful illusion in Lisa’s memory. As the representation of Lisa’s only happiness in her childhood, Un Sospiro moves from her at her most heart-breaking moment—witnessing Stefan coming home with another woman. The melody abandons her, leaving her emotionally alone, as it also did on their first meeting. Such distance indicates the dysfunctional relationship between

Lisa and Stefan, as well as the problematic connection between Un Sospiro and Lisa. The theme music, along with Stefan, not only has given Lisa the most cheerful time in her adolescence, but also has controlled her, and will continue to do so, like a haunting ghost, through the rest of her life.

The appearance of Pipa Narrates in the “farewell” scene in Xu’s version of Letter from an Unknown Woman is played in a piano solo variation, indicating the differences of its representations, interpretations, and functions from the previous presentations.

Loneliness, both in visual and audio perspectives, is the key for understanding this scene.

When she knows that she will leave Beijing for her new stepfather’s home (which is in

Shandong province), the young girl does not react with any resistance. Instead, she faints, speechless. Without anyone understanding her real thoughts, the young girl’s silent

“resistance” highly contrasts with Lisa crying out that she does not want to leave, and she positions herself in an “audio-lonely” world. Then the image on screen cuts to her house when she comes home from school, discovering that everything in her room is gone. She slowly wanders about the room, and suddenly shouts out: “Mom! Mom!” It is one of the

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very few words she says in this portion of the film—her vocal silence having occupied most of her adolescence on screen. This time she breaks her silence and tries to express her thoughts—she may want to know why everything is gone, or state clearly that she does not want to leave. Unfortunately her mom is not there, and no one responds to her.

Then she sits down on the kang (a heatable brick bed) with frustration. What are her feelings now? Should she leave with her mother or stay with the writer? What will her future be if she never sees the writer again? Should she tell him how she feels or not? We do not know. During this whole time, the non-diegetic soundtrack is completely muted.

Such an emptiness of sound, on the one hand, deepens the sense of loneliness on screen.

On the other hand, it complicates the interpretation of her silence both vocally and emotionally.

The night before she leaves, the young girl cannot sleep. Her (adult) voiceover says:

That was the last night I stayed here. Tomorrow, I would leave for

Shandong by train. On that night, I suddenly realized that my life will stop

if I am not with you around.

Unlike Lisa’s passionate confession of her love for Stefan and her commitment to offer herself to him, the Chinese “unknown woman’s” voiceover still remains calm. She goes to the writer’s house and tries to talk to him, but when she knocks on the door, no one responds. Again, the opportunity for the audience to hear the young girl’s real thoughts is missing because the writer is absent. The film is non-diegetically silent, and we, the

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audience, can never figure out what she would have said to him. Her voice is held back from cold reality just as it was in the previous scene when her mother did not respond to her calls. She keeps waiting, cold and lonely outside the writer’s house, only to witness the writer coming back with another woman. While the girl’s voice is still missing, the images switch back and forth between the close-up shot of the girl’s “about-to-cry” face and the girl’s subjective view of the vague picture of the writer and the other woman in the darkness. The interplay of images gives the young girl an exclusive channel to display and digest her emotional pain. At the same time, by directly standing in the young girl’s view, the audience can experience what the young girl is feeling in the narrative. Such a subjective view, in opposition to the camera’s view over Lisa’s shoulder in this same scene in Ophul’s version that distances the audience from her emotions, this perspective confirms that the audience is seeing, hearing, and feeling a subjective female’s perspective.

Depriving the young girl of the right to speak to the writer, a silence emphasized by the silence in the sonic environment, contrasts strikingly with the other woman’s laughing and her utterance of the writer’s first name, “Liang.” At this moment, no voiceover appears. Only Pipa Narrates is played in the piano’s only solo, whispering and echoing the unspeakable pain of the young girl. Without having grounding, the thematic melody directly comes out in a much more measured and unstable tempo, showing nothing but loneliness, slowness, grief, and uncertainty. The music begins with an image of the young girl, capturing the recognition on her face of the writer and the other woman in the darkness. Without the expected arpeggio accompaniment of the left hand on the

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keyboard, the thematic melody in the right hand goes freely without a regularly rhythmic pattern. The ascending melody in the first musical phrase focuses on the image of the writer and the woman flirting, the descending melody in the second phrase immediately accompanies the responding image of the young girl’s “about to cry” face. As the writer and the woman go inside the room and turn off the light, the music descends.

Without repeating the first two phrases, the piano’s solo variation of Pipa

Narrates directly progresses to the development section when the scene fades into the next as the young girl is taking the train to leave with her mother. The higher register of the melody in the development section not only implies the change of the temporal- spatial dimension in this scene, but also signals the turning point in the young girl’s life.

At the train station, the young girl is wearing a white dress while the old people around her wear darker colored clothes, which isolates her from her environment. Unlike Lisa, who slips out the station and rushes home to meet Stefan in Ophuls’s version, the young girl in Xu’s version just silently follows her mother with her head lowered, while the other people move about nonchalantly and happily. Responding to her obedience on screen, the regular progression of the rhythmic arpeggio in the left hand has been changed into an ascending and descending harmonic progression to follow the wave of the thematic melody. After shots capturing the subjective view of the mountains and rails quickly passing on the fast moving train, the story moves forward six years. At first, we see a rickshaw coming out slowly from the darkness. Then a person, the grown-up girl, comes down from it and gradually comes into the audience’s view. This completes the time transfer visually.

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During the whole process, the young girl, later known as the “unknown woman,” is completely alone emotionally even when surrounded by other people. There is no scene displaying how her life actually was when she was in Shandong. Only her voiceover narrates the statement of loneliness and longing during the last six years, and the piano continues its solo performance. It puts even more weight on the cold atmosphere. It is also the first and only time that the Pipa Narrates theme gives way to a solo piano performance, evidencing the fact that the feminine emotional power temporarily has yielded to masculinity. At the same time, this use of piano keeps the deep bond between the Chinese “unknown woman” and the writer despite the temporary loss of their visual connection. In doing so, it corresponds to the voiceover that states “I have never left you for a second in my heart during the last six years.” The Pipa Narrates variation gradually loses its thematic melody and becomes more harmonically free as the vague image out the train window slowly fades into pure blackness, and then shifts again to one of the fast moving railroad. Such free movement in the themeatic melody, while acoustically transferring the timeline, indicates the emptiness and uncertainty of the female protagonist’s emotional activities during the six years of being far away from the writer. The Pipa Narrates variation gradually fades out when the woman returns to

Beijing. Yet its instability hangs in the air; the audience must wait to find the final reconciliation and completeness in the theme music’s last appearance.

Theme Music in the End of the Film

The theme music appears for the last time in the two versions of Letter from an

Unknown Woman when the male protagonists finish reading the letter from the women. 116

In Ophuls’s version, the music does not stop, describing several states of emotion in the last scene. The strings suddenly break out with a cry as the camera zooms in on Stefan’s shocked and heart-broken face. Then he starts to recall his memories with Lisa—their last meeting, their first meeting, and their joyful date. With the happy memories, the soundtrack also recalls the pleasant music, such as the piece to which they danced. The music is first played by the orchestra, where they danced together, and indicates their sharing of musical memories. Yet this memory ends with Stefan’s piano performance of the same music that Lisa kneeled down to listen to—the music eventually returns to

Stefan’s possession, not Lisa’s.

Then harsh reality breaks off the sweet memory and the heavy brass sounds with a lumbering bellowing that interrupts the dance music—Stefan painfully covers his head with his hands. Losing its excitement and passion, Un Sospiro appears bitter-sweetly, performed by the strings, when Stefan asks his housekeeper: “You remember her?” When the housekeeper writes down her name, “Lisa Berndl,” Stefan keeps whispering her name over and over again, “Lisa, Lisa.” At this moment, Un Sospiro is performed in modulation and variation, and then gradually becomes more cantabile, indicating Stefan’s sweet memory of Lisa returning. Yet again, the beautiful thematic melody is interrupted by the cruel brass and plucking bass strings when Stefan hears the carriage arrive at his apartment. Instead of intending to run away, as was his first thought at the beginning of the film, Stefan eventually decides to accept the duel with Lisa’s husband. A variation m

Un Sospiro is performed in variation by the orchestra, but the harsh music representing reality continues to appear and then eventually takes control the soundtrack. It represents

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the image of Lisa in Stefan’s mind as well as the happy memories he shared with her. Just then, Lisa’s pressing voiceover suddenly appears: “if only you could recognize what was always yours… could have found what was never lost!” Unlike the first sentence of the voiceover of the Chinese “unknown woman” in Xu’s version that clearly states “you never knew me”—indicating a full awareness of the nature of her relationship with the writer from the beginning—Lisa’s voiceover at the end of the film signs her “too late” realization of the real nature of her lifelong relationship with Stefan. Her anxious voiceover breaks off the cantabile nature of Un Sospiro and marks the illusory romance between Lisa and Stefan at this moment.

The orchestral music continues ascending, pushing the passion to the climax when

Stefan goes downstairs for the duel. But the strings are suspended on a long, high note in the air, just as Stefan turns around and looks at the apartment door. Lisa’s image appears there, looking at him like she did when they first met. Un Sospiro does not appear.

Instead, a descending chromatic pattern played by the flutes accompanies her gradually fading image—the absence of Un Sospiro and the unusual sound of the flutes deny the real figure of Lisa as well as its actual connection with her. The harsh brass returns again to awake Stefan to reality. He walks out and takes the carriage to the location of the duel, and the film ends as his carriage gradually leaves. When the audience cannot see the image of Stefan on the screen anymore, Un Sospiro is played by the orchestra and officially takes over the scene one last time. Similar to its first appearance at the beginning of the film, it serves as the storyteller in a third-person’s perspective when all characters have left the screen and the story is finished. Its last appearance, again, does

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not represent any character’s point of view. Instead, the ascending modulation leads the emotion upward and the film concludes at its musical climax.

Turning to the final scene of Xu’s version of Letter from the Unknown Woman, no other music joins in and plays with the theme. The musical silence in non-diegesis is equally shared with the theme. Pipa Narrates does not begin immediately when the writer finishes reading the letter. Whereas Lisa blamed Stefan for not recognizing her in their reunion, and eventually realized that her relationship with him was lifelong, the

Chinese “unknown woman” still remains as peaceful as always. In the end, she restates her love for the writer and calmly ends the letter. The writer, on the other hand, sits on the couch with surprise, blankness, and frustration. His speechlessness contrasts with the voiceover’s tender statement of love and longing, and creates an unresolvable emotional tension. After a few minutes of this choking atmosphere, the theme music plays all three sections in the original orchestration, for the final time. When the voiceover is about to stop, Pipa Narrates extends her voice until the end of the film without any interruption.

In this scene, the Pipa Narrates theme sets up three emotional dimensions. First, it speaks to the writer’s emotional activities. He is standing in the dark and trying to remember the

“unknown woman” by looking out the window. Although we cannot see clearly his facial expression, the sorrowful tune of Pipa Narrates implicitly indicates his shock, loss, melancholy, and perhaps regret. Second, the last long shot slowly pushes forward to the window on the other side, where the “unknown woman” lived during her childhood.

From the window, we see the young girl is smiling as she looks outside, which takes the audience back to the beginning of the story. At the same time, Pipa Narrates, after

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progressing through the unsteadiness of its third appearance as a piano solo variation at the time the “unknown woman” was away from the writer, finally returns to the original melody and instrumentation that symbolizes the woman’s peaceful release of emotion.

Finally, as a summary, the theme music completes the film, serving as an objective viewer and narrator, which transforms all of the struggles, pains, anxieties, and uncertainties that came before into an ultimate resolution.

In conclusion, the theme music in both versions of Letter from an Unknown

Woman plays an important role in terms of narrative development, emotional expression, gender relations, and story commentary. Yet their original cultural contexts as well as their musical progressions on the representation of the female characters are quite different from one another. As Un Sospiro is introduced by Stefan’s piano performance in

Ophuls’s version, its initiation is planted firmly in a man’s authority, not a woman’s.

Played in both diegetic and non-diegetic levels, by piano and orchestra, as an original thematic melody and in diverse variations, Un Sospiro and the original score of the film show the great accuracy of the narrative and the emotional presentations on one hand and its extremely unstable identity, because of its various purposes, on the other. Just as the performance of this piece, as Laing points out, “never reaches its own end, the point at which Lisa’s fantasy is initially disrupted in the point at which her story will effectively end.” 63 Therefore, even if Un Sospiro represents Lisa’s passion and her fantasy of romance, it never stands firmly for her and she has never officially and exclusively possessed it.

63 Laing, p 84.

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By contrast, Pipa Narrates in Xu’s version of Letter from an Unknown Woman focuses on presenting the woman throughout. Although it is not an original composition, nor does it work jointly with other music in the film, it is grounded on the authority of a woman from the beginning. By purposefully playing throughout the film at different stages and by presenting the meanings of rationality, passion, uncertainty, loneliness, and peace through a relationship strongly bound to the code of the female protagonist, the

Pipa Narrates theme culturally constructs the Chinese “unknown woman’s” personality.

It symbolically develops her emotional process and musically traces her life experiences.

Compared to the theme music in Ophuls’s version of Letter from an Unknown Woman that operates under masculine control, Pipa Narrates theme in Xu’s version stands firmly for femininity. It functions, aside from being the theme of the whole film, as more than an emotional signifier. Regardless of whether the cultural and social context restricts her or whether the woman is self-aware, because the Chinese protagonist’s voice is missing in the narrative world, her music highlights the deepest levels of her sensibility and reaches out to the audience.

It is likely that other frameworks could explain these differences of the two film versions, but the historical-cultural context offers many satisfying explanations. Ophuls’s version was made in 1948 when women’s social recognition, the women’s movement, and feminist theory had not yet matured. Xu’s version, on the other hand, was produced in the new millennium, when the ideas of women’s independence, self-awareness, and individualism had gradually become the norm in modern Chinese society. In addition, the directors differed in their gender, as well as their points of view on men and women, the

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diverse circumstances of Chinese and Western society, the modes of production and institutional practices, and the expectations and reception by audiences. All these factors can influence the presentation of women and music in these films.

Conclusion

This chapter has reread female diegetic silence, female voiceover, and woman’s musical “voice” in contemporary Chinese films in particular historical-cultural contexts, as well as in specific directors’ personal interpretations, by comparing Xu Jinglei’s Letter from an Unknown Woman to its Western counterpart in great detail. Since the gradual change in Chinese women’s social positions in the twentieth century and the growth of their self-awareness of female subjectivities, the meanings of their diegetic silence and voiceovers in films are no longer attributed to psychological problems or social and cultural pressures only, but are the result of a change in the times—the times where films are made, when stories are located, and where directors are living. Xu’s Letter from an

Unknown Woman highlights how representations of Chinese women in films have gradually supplanted the image of a passively silenced victim with an alternative image of active, self-aware empowered women in the new millennium era. The Chinese

“unknown woman” actively chooses to be silent at crucial moments, not because of repressive traditions, but in order to achieve the completeness of herself. The presentation differs from Lisa’s voiceover in Ophuls’s version, which is extremely fragile, constrained in her very subjective experience of fantasy, and is eventually substituted for mainstream morality. The “unknown woman’s” first-person voiceover in Xu’s version stands firmly

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on its own and clearly states her strong sense of realization about herself, the writer, and society from the very beginning.

At the same time, music, in conjunction with female voiceover, stands in for the women’s presentations and representations when their voices are muted within the narrative. It either objectively tells their story or subjectively expresses their emotional activities from the woman’s point of view. The theme music in Xu’s version exclusively controls the atmosphere of the film. Along with the voiceover, it stands in for every important emotional moment of the woman’s silence. Yet without giving the musical authority to other characters, the Chinese “unknown woman’s” theme, through changes in instrumentation, rhythm, and melodic variation, also represents interactions between her and the writer rather than merely signaling her distinct characteristics or outlook. In addition, unlike the theme music in Ophuls’s version of Letter from an Unknown Woman, which sometimes represents masculinity, the music in Xu’s version specifically marks a strong feminine identity. Although she remains silent, the Chinese “unknown woman” enacts great power through the film’s musical-emotional territory. Sound design in Xu’s film, therefore, plays a crucial role in leading us to understand the construction of woman and its representation in the film.

However, the theme music Pipa Narrates that precisely renders the Chinese

“unknown woman” is not an original score. While the other non-diegetic music in this film was exclusively composed for it, the director, Xu Jinglei, chose a preexisting piece as the theme. Without any direct connection to this film, the preexisting piece, Pipa

Narrates, is able to be more culturally integrated into the presentation of the Chinese 123

“unknown woman” than the original score. To put it in a broader context, Xu’s version of

Letter from an Unknown Woman is merely one of many Chinese films using preexisting music to present female characters. Therefore, we cannot help but ask: why do directors choose previous composed music instead of an original composition? What is the relationship between preexisting music and female characters? How does the preexisting music connect to women in Chinese films? These questions lead to my discussion in the next chapter.

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Chapter Three: Preexisting Music and Women in Chinese Film

The audiences who have watched the Chinese film In the Heat of the Sun

(Yangguang canlan de rizi), directed by Jiang Wen, will never forget its theme music— the cantabile melody from the intermezzo of the Italian opera Cavalleria Rusticana by

Pietro Mascagni. The music beautifully describes the story of “Monkey” Ma Xiaojun, the male protagonist’s bitter-sweet life as a rebellious teenager during the Cultural

Revolution in China. Recurring so intensively in this film, the beautiful intermezzo of

Cavalleria Rusticana represents, in terms of an individual emotional presentation, Ma’s love for and fantasy about his dream girl, Milan; the indication of jealousy, betrayal, and disillusionment in terms of cross-cultural interpretation with the opera; and a strong sentiment of nostalgia for the past in terms of the film’s theme. When talking about the use of the music from Cavalleria Rusticana, the director Jiang Wen says: “Oddly, when I heard this Italian music, it immediately brings my memories back to the past, a time that I almost forgot. The music reminds me so many experiences that I had in the past, and brings me back to the old time…”1 The opera music is performed so marvelously that audiences and critics feel that it has been naturally integrated into In the

1Interview of Jiang Wen, http://vip.book.sina.com.cn/book/chapter_48334_34782.html, 10-12- 2012 125

Heat of the Sun, and remind them of the film every time they (mainly referring to

Chinese audiences) hear the music elsewhere. Does the romanticism of classical Western opera have any connection with a highly ideological epoch in Communist China? Why does the director choose pre-existing music instead of an original score? 2 More importantly, how does Western classical music construct a Chinese young girl cross- culturally?

These questions have brought us to the concern of pre-existing music in films.

When discussing this topic, Robynn Stilwell and Phil Powrie write:

Pre-existing music can be compared to geological strata which the

archaeologist patiently uncovers to reveal the ghostly bodies who trod the

ground before us. So too, analyzing the pre-existing film music is a kind

of archaeology of the undertone, historically and materially bound,

historically and materially bound, that aims to work through the layers of

connotations to reach the affects lying under the concretions of time.

There lie the memories which touch us, those we yearn for, those which

bring us pain; the music gives form and perspective, whether it is high or

low. There lies too the seismic potential of the soundtrack to disrupt the

placid surface, to erupt unpredictably or create subterranean tremors that

resonate throughout a film; and the shock waves ever run deeper than

when an “inappropriate” artifact—whether one-hit wonder, symphonic

2 All of the music in In the Heat of the Sun is preexisting.

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warhorse, or operatic spectacle—turns out to be appropriate in ways we

might never before imagined.3

In the discussion above, Stilwell and Powrie particularly highlight the “seismic potential” that preexisting music possesses in deepening and varying the functionality of soundtracks in films. Numerous studies have already focused on the employment of non- original scores in Western films. In the book Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing

Music in Film, several scholars have discussed the ways that both classical music and popular music are applied in films—they examine how these preexisting musics are used for creating divergence and distance in the way that music can “stand as an image in its own right” at various levels (Gorbman and Cormack), for integrating different aspects of the film (Franke, Davies and Jeongwon), for constructing gender (Knights and Stilwell), for shifting music’s connotation based on historical accretions (Knapp), for creating a new kind of film and musical interaction for audiences (Rodman), for creating new kinds of community (Powrie), and for subverting conventional relationships between sound and image (Warner).4

Preexisting music has established an inseparable relationship with film since its beginnings. In the early silent film period, the live performance of preexisting music was already being used to accompany screenings. Although its initial function was to dampen noise from the audience and film equipment, preexisting music has also displayed its

3 Phil Powrie and Robynn J. Stilwell, ed., Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-Existing Music in Film. (Ashgate Publishing limited, 2006), xix.

4 Ibid.

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potential to provide any appropriate emotional “echo” to enhance the expressive force of a silent film. After the technique of integrating sound into film was greatly advanced, the application of preexisting music has been expanded so widely that many famous film auteurs, such as Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, and Wong Kar-wai, have become fascinated with its idiosyncratic functions. Their “auteur music” suggests certain kinds of freedom from the studio system, and broadens the range of musical idioms.

Instead of being a layer added in post-production by the studio music department, preexisting music can become an integral thread in the fabric of the film.

However, utilizing preexisting music has not always been seen as acceptable.

Many conventional film composers who believed that a score was obliged to embellish the materials on screen, and thus be integrated into the film as a whole, disparaged “non- original” film music for several reasons. Their main concern was with the “problem” of film music’s ability to distract audiences by being too “musical” or too “recognizable,” especially when using the most well-known classical music. Maurice Jaubert claimed that

“We do not go to the cinema to hear music. We require it to deepen and prolong in us the screen’s visual impressions…”5 The composer Max Steiner, who defended the common studio practice of using original music, argued that “existing material runs might be familiar to the audience, it runs the risk of drawing attention to itself, again, as music…”6

Also Ernest Lindgren, in an interview with Randall Larson in CinemaScore, quoted by

5 Maurice Jaubert, Music on the Screen, 101-115.

6 Summarized by Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 36.

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Caryl Flinn, pointed out that “[classical music] interferes. If you know the music, it draws more attention to itself than it should… [And i]f you don’t know the music, it doesn’t support the picture because it wasn’t written for the picture.”7 For classical critics of

Western films or Hollywood films, the principle is “bad cinema music is noticed; good scores are not.”8 Apparently, (famous) preexisting music is too “outstanding” to be part of a soundtrack. Thus it is not acceptable for use in films.

Contrary to the initial disparaging of using preexisting music in Western films, applying preexisting music to Chinese films seems to be a natural occurrence in the industry. Yeh Yueh-Yu has claimed that the Chinese films in 1930s are “believed to be a synthesis of indigenous art and foreign modes of production.”9 Music for Chinese films during that period is not an exception. When sound film was born in China in 1931, the scores incorporated both indigenous Chinese traditional music—such as Chinese opera and folk songs—and Western music—jazz, pop songs, and classical music in particular.

The first Chinese sound film, Songstress Red Peony (Genv hong mudan, 1931), utilized traditional opera songs, and the film was an unprecedented success. The opening of

Crossroads (Shizi jietou, 1937), for example, used Dimitri Shostakovich’s Fifth

Symphony to accompany the documentary-like images of street life in Shanghai.10 Songs

7 Ibid., 37.

8 Ibid., 47.

9 Yueh-yu Yeh, “Historiography and Signification: Music in Chinese Cinema of the 1930s”, Cinema Journal 41, no. 3, (Spring 2002), 78-97.

10 Ibid., 85. 129

of the Fisherman (Yuguang qu, 1934) used Franz Schubert’s hymn Ave Maria as its theme music. Two Suzhou folk songs were rearranged for the film Street Angel (Malu tianshi, 1937).11 Kreisler’s virtuosic La Gitana and three Latin American dance band songs were utilized in Boatman’s Daughter (Chuanjia nv, 1935), and Spring Silkworms

(Chuncan, 1933) uses music from several Parisian and Viennese operettas, jazz, the song

“Old Black Joe” by Stephen Foster, and church hymns.

Although recently some scholars have criticized the “incongruity” of foreign music accompanying Chinese film in the early twentieth century, there are not as many critics oppose the idea of using preexisting music as early Hollywood film composers were. According to Sue Tuohy, music played an important role in the making of metropolitan, modern culture in China in the 1920s and 1930s, and films provided “a context in which [preexisting] musical meanings were recast through dramatic and emotional associations” (emphasis added).12 She argues that the choices of music in the films were “as diverse as—and, in fact, reflected the ambivalence about—the alternatives put forth for Chinese society.”13 Therefore, using various preexisting music in Chinese films in the first part of the twentieth century can be seen as an important attempt to form

11 It also can be heard in The Plunder of Peach and Plum and Boatman’s Daughter. Sue Tuohy, “Metropolitan Sound: Chinese Film Music of the 1930s,” in Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943, ed. by Zhang Yingjin. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 210.

12 Ibid., 200. Nearly all of the major Chinese film studios and companies are in Shanghai, the biggest metropolitan city in China before the Second Sino-Japanese War.

13 Ibid., 200.

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a multicultural identity as reflected in the debates among Chinese filmmakers about

China’s future and the role of the arts in the process of social transformation.14

If the employment of preexisting music in the Republican China era mainly aimed to amplify metropolitan and multicultural styles in films, then preexisting music broadens the functionalities of contemporary Chinese film even further. In particular, the unusual capacity with which preexisting music is empowered can also provide a potentially subversive force in constructing women in films, in addition to the more straightforward interpretation of them in conventional original scores. Compared to original score that has been composed for female characters in films, which may be held in suspicion for giving women too much power and for representing “improper” or socially unacceptable emotions, preexisting music distances female characters from this interpretation by projecting their emotional power into the music’s original context. At the same time, the external meanings that preexisting music contains surpasses the singular spatial-temporal limit of narrative, and relates female characters to a variety of other figures in the narrative, expanding to multi-layers of representation. Removed from any suspicions of

“improper” musical empowerment, women can have more freedom for self-expression.

There are two major ways preexisting music is used to present women in Chinese films. The first is to play the music, either in diegesis or non-diegesis, while the female characters are on screen. Using preexisting music—melody or song—in films aims to emphasize a particular connection between the original context and the new context. The

14 Ibid.

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preexisting music, while still retaining its original meaning, can cross time and space, using its “preexisting” connotations to present female characters in new stories in various ways. For example, An Ran in The Girl in Red (1985) listens to disco music and songs from Sound of Music to show her strong individuality and progressiveness as compared to the conservativeness of other people. In In the Heat of the Sun (1995) Milan's beauty and fantasy are represented by the Cavalleria Rusticana intermezzo, when she appears in the film only as a photograph and not yet as a person. The “unknown woman” in Letter from an Unknown Woman (2004) doesn’t show any of her emotion through her voice within the film narrative, but as used nondiegetically the song Pipa Narrates fully displays what she feels. In these films, preexisting music contrasts with newly composed film scores in that it doesn't stand alone; its placement within a particular narrative environment creates an interweaved meaning between old and new contexts. It becomes an integral part of a new fictional world, whilst simultaneously retaining its status as music. It is the interaction between the preexisting music, female characters, and the narrative.

The second way is to have women perform preexisting music on screen, either instrumental or singing, in Chinese films. Instead of being presented by music, female musicians can directly manipulate music through their bodies to strengthen the power of their emotional presentations. Heather Laing claims that in any musical performance, the performer “may strive to convey the emotions that they find implied within the text of the music.” It “therefore seems fair to assume that the performer will experience these

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feelings at some level in order to be able to communicate them.”15 For example, Qiu Yun in Human, Woman, Demon (1987) performs the Heibei Bangzi opera Zhong Kui Marries off His Sister (Zhongkui jia mei) not only to gain success in her career, but also to “marry herself off” to the male figure she pines for in a theatrical world; Meishan in Raise the

Red Lantern (Da hong deng long gao gao gua, 1991) successfully seduces her husband in the “wives’ battle” by singing Peking Opera works and “silently” guides the fourth wife,

Song Lian, against their enemies; and Dieyi in Farewell My Concubine (Ba wang bie ji,

1994) gracefully sings the Peking Opera the Drunken Beauty to display “her” sorrow of being betrayed by the emperor onstage and his frustration of being abandoned by his opera partner offstage. As demonstrated by these examples, in performance women can find the resonance that preexisting music contains, channel and contain radical emotions into an artistic presentation, double their expressive force on both theatrical and narrative levels, and influence audiences at both diegetic and non-diegetic levels.

To further examine the construction of women in Chinese films via preexisting musical materials, this chapter examines the epic Chinese film Farewell my Concubine as a case study.16 Being such a highly regarded Chinese film, Farewell My Concubine by

Chen Kaige has attracted numerous readings on many issues: ideology and nationalism, cross-cultural production, Chinese history, art history, post-colonialism, and gender

15 Heather Laing, The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 105.

16 Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bieji), dir. By Kaige Chen (Miramax Films, Burbank, CA., DVD, 1999).

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issues—homosexuality and masculinity in particular (Lau, 1995; Zhang, 1999; Cui, 2003,

2012; Yomi, 2003; Chiang, 2011). Nevertheless, the music of this epic film—its marvelous composed soundtrack interweaved with classical Chinese opera repertoire— has been neglected by critics and analysts. This chapter investigates the highly mediated representation of gender and sexuality embodied in the soundtrack of Farewell My

Concubine and explores the use of preexisting music, including opera performance, non- diegetic music, and female vocal singing to see what preexisting music reveals about the women in the film.

Farewell My Concubine: Opera and Film

As a classical self-reflexive form of opera-within-a-film and visual mise-en-scene, the Chinese film Farewell My Concubine borrows the classical Peking Opera work of the same name to describe a love triangle that spans three chaotic periods of Chinese history.

Cheng Dieyi (named Xiao Douzi in his childhood) was sold by his mother to the Peking

Opera troupe in Beijing when he was a child. Since his early training, Dieyi has been forced to perform the dan role (female role) in Peking Opera and this female impersonation has caused him to become obsessed with opera performance yet also to become confused about his sexual identity. To him, nothing but opera matters. Dieyi has an extremely close relationship with his opera brother Duan Xiaolou (named Xiao Shitou in his childhood) and both of them later become super stars by performing the Peking

Opera Farewell My Concubine (Dieyi plays the role of Yu Ji and Xiaolou plays the role of the Chu king). After the two brothers become extremely successful in this opera, 134

Xiaolou marries Ju Xian, who used to be a prostitute. Because of his involvement with Ju

Xian, Xiaolou gradually distances himself from Dieyi and gives up his performing career, which makes Dieyi desperate and hostile toward Xialou's new wife. After enduring the torments of a time of national chaos as well as more than half a century of personal tragedies, Ju Xian hangs herself because of Xiaolou’s betrayal during the Cultural

Revolution and Dieyi commits suicide when he is performing Yu Ji’s suicide scene on stage at the end of the film.

As seen in the film version of Farewell My Concubine, the protagonists, especially the female characters, are victims. Indeed, they are repressed objects in the old patriarchal society and their tragic fates are unavoidable. Yet music in this film provides another way of observing and analyzing the female characters. How does music construct the characters of Yu Ji, Dieyi, and Juxian? How do they connect to each other in various ways through music? In essence, what is the relationship between preexisting music and women in Chinese films? These questions will be examined in detail in this chapter.

Yu Ji in Opera and “Yu Ji” in Film

Using Chinese opera in Chinese films has become a favorite way among Chinese directors. Even the first Chinese film by Fengtai Film Company was based on the Peking opera film Dingjun Mountain. At the same time, there were many dialect films featuring opera stories or performance. Even in the contemporary Chinese films, Chinese opera is still favored by directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and Huang Shuqin. By contrast with the early Chinese films basing themselves on staged operas, the self- 135

reflexive form of opera-within-the-film complicates the film narrative by entangling it in both the opera and the film stories to deepen their presentations.

Before exploring the function of music associated with women in the film

Farewell My Concubine, it is necessary to examine the background of its Peking Opera version. The classical Peking Opera Farewell My Concubine presented in this film is based on a famous historical story that occurred in China two thousand years ago.17

When the great Chu king was defeated and surrounded by his enemy, the Han king, during their last battle for the reign of China, found that all of the Chu king’s soldiers and servants had fled, except for his concubine Yu Ji. Facing the final moment of their lives,

Yu Ji makes her last libation and sword dance to her king, committing suicide by the

King's sword in order to keep her loyalty and chastity.

The Peking Opera Farewell My Concubine has been revised many times since it was first performed onstage and this indicates a significant shift in the modeling of its characters. Although he was eventually defeated at the end of his life, the Chu king has been considered an immortal hero and has been highly praised by the Chinese for centuries because of his great bravery in battles. The version of the Peking Opera which premiered in 1918 had more than twenty acts starting with a battle scene between the Chu king and the Han king and ending with the suicide of the Chu king at the Wu Jiang River.

The majority of this play focused on the Chu king and his great masculine power in battle as well as his reckless personality in the strategy that leads to his failure. The earliest

17 The Encyclopedia of Chinese Peking Opera (China Encyclopedia Press, 2011), 11.

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version of the Peking Opera Farewell My Concubine in the Qing dynasty was titled The

Battle between the Chu and the Han (“Chu Han zheng”), and centered on the character of the Chu king. Indeed, there was little development of the character of Yu Ji.18

The early twentieth century in China was an epoch for dramatic change and transformation, and the revision of the traditional Peking Opera repertory was affected by nationwide social movements. Qi Rushan, one of the important pioneers of Chinese drama innovators, combined the story of the Kunqu opera Thousands of Gold (Qian jin ji) by Shen Cai in Ming dynasty, and the old version of Peking Opera the Battle between the

Chu and the Han, to create a new opera work, whose name was still the old one.19 Later in 1921, the great Peking Opera master Mei Lanfang changed the title from The Battle between the Chu and the Han to Farewell My Concubine and reduced the number of the acts to fifteen; later in 1936 he reduced the number of acts to twelve. Nearly all the cut acts concern the battle scenes of the Chu king. This reduction is an implicit sign of the shift of the central role as well as the theme. After 1949, Mei Lanfang again reduced this play to nine acts, and this has become the best-known version today. In this version, the masculinity of the Chu king is de-emphasized—most of the battle scenes that could show off the Chu king’s bravery and power were cut, and his glorious cover of heroism was removed. The nine remaining acts shift the focus to the defeat of the Chu king as well as his relationship with Yu Ji. The Chu king is described as an overconfident man who does

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid. 11.

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not listen to any advice from his followers, and this results in him being trapped in his enemy’s conspiracy. Eventually, he is defeated by the Han king and becomes anxious because he can no longer control his fate and has been betrayed by his followers.

Yu Ji becomes one of the central roles in Mei Lanfang's revisions, especially dominating the second half of the play. As transformed by the Peiking Opera innovations in the early twentieth century, this character counts as an untraditional female role. Mei

Lanfang created a number of strong female characters and, in the words of Siu Leung Li, his opera innovation “seems to have been in line with progressive social awareness.”20

These strong female characters all belong to the newly created female role type called huashan (literally, "flower gown") in Mei’s renovated Peking Opera works,21 in addition to the traditional female role types—included among the latter the laodan (old woman), wudan (martial woman), daomadan (lit. sword-and horsewoman), qingyi, and huadan

( the last two are both “civil” role rarely perform acrobatics).22 The huashan straddles the characteristics of qingyi and huadan. The former usually represents an obedient character who is “a virtuous, chaste, married woman from elite or scholarly families" and who

20 Siu Leung Li, Cross-Dressing in Chinese Opera. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003), 78.

21 This new type of female role in Peking Opera was first created by the great opera master Wang Yaoqing, but was fully developed by Mei Lanfang, who stated “I developed this new role type by learning from him (Wang) and carrying on from his original ideas,” p. 98, The Encyclopedia of Chinese Peking Opera, Mei’s words are seen in Forty Years of Stage Life, Mei Lanfang’s Memoirs, p.28.

22 Joshua Goldstein, Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera, 1970-1937, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 123.

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“dressed [modestly] and moved with unobtrusive grace”; while the latter is meant to

“compel visual attention and seduce the audience” by dressing colorfully, moving and gesturing vividly.23 Instead, huashan becomes an amalgam of the qingyi and huadan roles—Mei’s huashan roles, as Goldstein points out, “sport sumptuous, flowing costumes and their dances are clearly meant to amuse and seduce [as huadan], yet they always maintain the qingyi’s elegant bearing, composure, loyalty, and lofty air.”24 By crossing the lines between the traditional constructions of female roles in Peking Opera, huashan breaks the figure of the old-type Chinese women in the old patriarchal society, and suggests an ideal model for women in the new (modern) period.

Yu Ji in Farewell My Concubine is therefore a typical huashan role. On one hand, she dons dazzling costumes and dances to please the audience. On the other hand, she is portrayed as a heroine who is well educated, insightful, chaste, and who always keeps her faith. Love for the king is obviously her motivation. More importantly, love leads her to become a rational person with a strong sense of responsibility and determination. She comforts and encourages the Chu king as he laments his destiny. When their last moment together comes, Yu Ji performs her final solo sword dance to her king, which is the most fascinating moment of this play. When the couple finds out the king’s failure is inevitable,

Yu Ji volunteers to commit suicide in order to let her king escape his surrounding enemy without being trapped by her. By so doing, the king may find other chances to reinstate

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid. 126.

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his reign. Thus Yu Ji’s suicide is an act of courage that shows a woman’s ultimate commitment and loyalty to her beloved man and her greater passion and care for the whole society. Unlike the soldiers of the Chu king (who are men), who give up their faith and flee in the face of failure, Yu Ji’s suicide by no means expresses her fear, nor her pathetic destiny. On the contrary, Yu Ji fulfills herself through faith without being forced by other people. Her action is one of strong devotion that reflects her wish to free the man of his worries and burden so that he will have a chance to survive a military defeat. By ending her life in a radical way, she rationally demonstrates her loyalty, responsibility, virtuousness, and dignity.

In the film version of Farewell My Concubine, there is one life principle, similar to that expressed by Yu Ji’s faith and shared by Dieyi and Ju Xian: people should fulfill themselves through faith (人得自己成全自己). Dieyi’s opera master, Guan Ye, says this in a scene when he is teaching the troupe boys the story of the Peking opera Farewell My

Concubine. He claims that this idea should be taken as an inspiration both for the opera performance and for their own lives. Dieyi and Juan Xian keep this principle, either consciously or unconsciously, throughout their lives. Because of the adherence to this principle, they become the “Yu Ji” for their “king” (Xiaolou) both onstage and off in the film. However, if Yu Ji is portrayed in the Peking Opera version as a flawless woman of irrefutable integrity, Dieyi and Ju Xian in the film are constructed with a much more complicated subjectivity and with multiple layers of humanity. Both of them fight against their would-be destinies. Ju Xian used to be a prostitute—her life is to sell her body in

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exchange for survival without any commitment. As a prostitute challenges the moral boundary of a socially acceptable woman's identity, she contests her sexual status by transgressing social boundaries—marrying Xiaolou to complete the moral transformation.

Ju Xian gradually undermines the relationship between Xiaolou and Deiyi that causes

Dieyi’s hatred. She tries to have a baby with Xiaolou, but unfortunately miscarries when chaos breaks out in the theater. She wants to have a peaceful family life with Xiaolou but she is eventually betrayed by him.

On Dieyi’s part, he differs from Yu Ji in his very nature—he is a man. The experience of being abandoned by his mother since he was a child makes him misogynist.

The only constant in his life is being cared for and protected by his opera partner,

Xiaolou, and this causes Dieyi to be infatuated with him. Dieyi wants to spend a lifetime singing Peking Opera with Xiaolou. Yet when Xiaolou leaves him for Ju Xian by giving up his singing career, Dieyi becomes desperate. He dedicates himself to another man,

Yuan Si Ye, burns up his costume, indulges in opium, and becomes implacably hostile to

Ju Xian. His love for opera performance lets him persist with the artistic principle of

Peking Opera no matter what the situation, thus leading to his removal from performance and his betrayal by his apprentice during the Cultural Revolution.

Although neither Ju Xian nor Dieyi are as innocent as Yu Ji in the opera throughout their lives, the misfortunes in their lives do not make them passive victims of social struggles as “women,” who can only get sympathy and become radical through confronting a tragic destiny. Instead, they keep their passion for their love and their faith

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until the ends of their lives. Both commit suicide, yet their suicides do not make them pathetic or weak, but rather display them as strong and distinguished female personalities.

Female Impersonation in Chinese Theater

The constructions of female characters in the film version of Farewell My

Concubine appear to be problematic at first glance because one of the main characters,

Dieyi, is split into the role of half “woman” and half “man,” which complicates discussion of his sexual identity. In order to put him in the position of a “female” character, with its associated feminine musicality in this film, it is necessary to track the origin of his role onstage—the female impersonator—in Chinese art history. By doing so, we can examine Dieyi’s sexual identity situation by situation, which allows a better focus on his particular relationship with music.

Female impersonation has a long and rich history in various genres of Chinese theater. The start of female impersonation can be traced back to music and dance in

Chinese ancient times. According to Tian Min, the earliest male impersonating ji nv

(female singers and dancers) can be found in the Han dynasty two thousand years ago under a custom named zhuang dan. In the North Zhou dynasty (557-581 A.D.), Emperor

Xuan Di (578-579 A.D.) ordered handsome young men, dressed as women, to sing and dance inside the imperial court for him and his company. In the Tang dynasty (618-906), the Empress once forbade women’s participation in theatrical performance and thus

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caused the segregation of male players from female singers and dancers employed at the court.25

In the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), the Mongolian military triumph undermined the Confucian social, cultural and moral foundations of Chinese society. Li Siu-Leung has found in the Yuan dynasty, a period that scholars generally cite as the “golden age” in

Chinese theatre, that leading female stage performers often played male roles as well.26

There is no evidence that female impersonation existed in mainstream theaters during the

Yuan Dynasty.27

In the Min dynasty (1368-1643) when the Han people supplanted Mongolian government, the Confucian social and cultural ethics were restored and hence restrictions were placed on female singers and dancers and female impersonation flourished again.

Yet young actresses in private troupes still dominated in the most elegant Kunqu opera, continued their cross-dressing in the Ming (1368-1644 A.D.) and Qing (1644-1911 A.D.) dynasties, and made a significant contribution in performance of this opera.28

25 Min Tian, “Male Dan: the Paradox of Sex, Acting, and Perception of Female Impersonation in Traditional Chinese Theatre,” Asian Theatre Journal, Vol. 17, No.1 (Spring, 2000), 79.

26 Siu Leung Li, Cross-Dressing in Chinese Opera. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003),

27 Min Tian, “Male Dan: the Paradox of Sex, Acting, and Perception of Female Impersonation in Traditional Chinese Theatre,” Asian Theatre Journal, 17, No.1 (Spring, 2000), 80.

28 Siu Leung Li, Cross-Dressing in Chinese Opera. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003),

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When Peking opera was born in the early to middle Qing dynasty (the period of the Qian Long Emperor), boy actors and female impersonators monopolized this new style. Traditional Chinese theatre, especially in the Qing dynasty, was attacked for its moral corruption: it was associated with brothels, with female performers inevitably linked with prostitution. Women were therefore completely banned from performing

Peking Opera until the era of the Republic. Female impersonators came to dominate the female roles. Traditional Peking Opera before the 1930s was an exclusively male preserve, and the ambiguous beauty of male cross-dressing achieved its climax in the

1920s and 1930s, with its most famous representative, Mei Lanfang.29

The female impersonator in Chinese opera is usually called the male dan (female role type). Their goal in performance, unlike the Western castratos who sang like a woman as the result of bodily mutilation, was to play a woman in both physical behavior and spiritual ideals. According to Cui Shuqi, the purpose of playing the male dan role is

“not simply the verisimilitude of woman, but involv[ing] strict adherence to artistic conventions in the creation of an idealized woman,” an adherence that satisfied audiences’ desires in displaying high aesthetics of femininity.30 Ji Yun, a well-known writer in the Qing dynasty, documented a male dan’s statement of his experiences. He said:

29 Ibid. 2.

30 Shuqin Cui, Women through Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003), 153.

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Taking my body as a female, I have to transform my heart into

that of a female, and then my tender feelings and charming postures can

become truthful and lifelike. If a trace of male heart remains, there must

be a bit that does not resemble a female.... If a male impersonates a

female on the stage, when he plays a chaste woman, he must make his

own heart chaste, and does not lose her chastity even if she is laughing

and making jokes; when he plays a wanton woman, he must make his

own heart loose, and not hide her wantonness even if she is sitting

sedately; when he plays a noble woman, he must make his own heart

noble, and keep her dignity even if she is in humble dress; when he plays

a virtuous woman, he must make his own heart gentle, and not appear

agitated even if she is angry; when he plays a shrew, he must make his

own heart stubborn and perverse, and not fall silent even if she is in the

wrong. And all other feel-ings, such as happiness, anger, sorrow, delight,

gratitude, resentment, love, and hatred, the actor must experience each of

them, putting himself in the position of the character, and thinking of

them not as fictional but as real, and the spectator also thinks of them as

real.31

31 Fu Kui and Yuhua Wu, ed., “古典戏曲美学资料集”(Anthology of Sources of the Aesthetics of Classical Xiqu). (Beijing: Wenhua Yishu Chubanshe, 1992), 362. Quoted and translated by Min Tian in 1997 “’Alienation-Effect’ for Whom? Brecht’s (Mis)interpretation of the Classical Chinese Theatre.” Asian Theatre Journal 14, no.2 (Fall): 200-222.

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In order to achieve the goal mentioned above of both physical and spiritual similarity

(xing si and shen si), the training of female impersonators should start in childhood. A boy’s candidacy for dan roles was determined, first of all, by whether or not he displayed feminine characteristics and also his voice and temperament. Then, in order to achieve such stylized artistry and possess great skill in female impersonation, a male actor, without castration, undergoes years of training to “learn to discursively mask his gender identity by both stagecraft and the artifices of costume and makeup.”32 Once the male actor takes the role of dan, he officially enters a gendered position and plays female roles exclusively for the rest of his performing life.

Discussion of the male dan in Chinese tradition leads to a further question of what actually constitutes a woman. Is the male dan a woman onstage? There is no easy answer to this question. In feminist theory, gender is no way a stable identity. When Simone de

Beauvoir makes her claim in The Second Sex that “one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman,” she borrows Merleau-Ponty’s idea that “body” is “an historical idea rather than a natural species” and concludes that “woman,” and by extension, any gender, is a historical situation rather than a natural fact.33 In this way, Beauvoir clearly differentiates sex as the biological facticity and gender as the cultural interpretation. Judith Butler, additionally, carries on Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir’s statements about body and gender,

32 Ibid., 153.

33 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Body in its Sexual Being,” in The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Pual, 1962). Simon de Beauvori cits Merleau- Ponty’s idea in her The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1974), 38.

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and points out that “body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time,” and “the gendered body [is] the legacy of sedimented acts rather than a predetermined or foreclosed structure, essence or fact, whether natural, cultural or linguistic.”34 When their ideas about women are applied in a theatrical context, the male dan training in Peking Opera becomes an excellent demonstration of Butler’s claim that gender is “an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.” Therefore, by hiding his biological male differences through costumes, decorations, and makeup, the male dan performs in a way that is based on socially acknowledged appearances and acts as a woman in Chinese society. One may conclude that a professional male dan onstage is is constructed as a woman phenomenally, historically, and culturally.

Although it is clear that Dieyi’s role in the film version of Farewell My

Concubine can be considered a woman when he performs onstage, that role becomes more complex as the film displays his theatrical life and real life in an interactive way.

Long term training as a woman has caused his ambivalent sexual orientation between a culturally constructed female identity and a biological constituted male identity. His obsession with performing female roles in Peking Opera has weakened and obscured his male identity. This is particularly true when Dieyi officially enters the opera world; he announces his gendered identity as a “woman” in masquerade by dressing in women’s costumes and pursuing knowledge of female roles. This masqueraded identity, however,

34 Judith Butler, “Performance acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no.4 (December, 1988): 523.

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genders Dieyi neither as a real man nor as a true woman—his gender identity as a

“woman” is stable and strong when on stage yet fragile and ambiguous as a biological man in his own life. This constructed self, a female impersonator, enforced through canings and sexual humiliations, ironically enables Dieyi to fully immerse himself in the art of opera. Such an androgynous identity achieves the ultimate ideal of the male-dan role in Peking Opera and makes him incredibly successful in his career, but also causes him challenges and suffering in his real life. Dieyi’s sexual orientation is so unclear that an observer may not easily distinguish his gender on sight. However, when he is performing and displaying his womanly “charms” through music, his feminine qualities immediately come out and mold him in femaleness, which captures the imagination of both male and female audiences. Through playing a female role onstage, he conceals masculine weakness with feminine strengths that align him with notions of “rationality,”

“elegance,” and “virtuosity.” For this reason, I will focus on the character Dieyi's relationship with music, a relationship that serves to highlight his feminine qualities, and indeed makes him a female character in this film.35

Music and Women in the Film

Most of the music in Farewell My Concubine is either directly adapted from the preexisting Peking Opera or indirectly extracted and rearranged and played by one or two

35 In most cases that will be discussed in this chapter, Dieyi wears “women’s” makeup on his face, which disguises his male identity and positions him in the “female” role in relationship to whoever stays with him in the diegetic event.

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solo instruments with occasional accompaniment of a Western orchestra. More importantly, the music of Farewell My Concubine is almost exclusively given to female roles in this film, to Dieyi and Ju Xian in particular. Audiences see Yu Ji, Dieyi, and Ju

Xian in Farewell My Concubine in both the opera and film versions as physically defenseless females. However the music provides another angle in which women can be interpreted as much more than people marked by “tenderness and weakness.” In contrast with the limited choices that patriarchal society gives to women, music in this film represents empowered female agency, where female roles are given more freedom and the power to resist oppression, struggle against their would-be destiny, and display their multiply layered characters. Dieyi and Ju Xian own specific music either within or outside the film narrative, which extends their presentation and representation in multiple dimensions, rather than in just the visual track. The music in Farewell My Concubine, in other words, has become integral to the understanding of the construction of female characters.

The Dual-Theme Music

Contrasting with the single theme music exclusively representing a single person

(woman) in the Chinese version of Letter from an Unknown Woman, as discussed in the previous chapter, the film version of Farewell My Concubine uses a dual-theme music model that the protagonists share in representation of their entangled relationship. The two themes are derived from the original opera, reinforcing the inseparable connection of the theatrical and narrative worlds. Such multi-layered musical ownership aims to display 149

the complicated relationships constructed between men, women, and female impersonation.

The First Theme—The Yu Ji Theme

Played by the jinhu (a Chinese two-stringed fiddle), one of the most important melodic instruments used in Peking Opera, the first theme music, named Deep Night (Ye shenchen), can be traced back to the Chinese Kunqu Opera Si Fan. Originally, The Deep

Night in Si Fan told the lonely and dreary tale of a temple nun and her fight for life and love. As rearranged by generations of artists, this melody has been transformed from a temple nun’s lament to a strong battle cry by heavily decorating the original musical phrases.36 As Figure 3.1 shows, the Arabic numbers are a kind of solfege system, and the underlines indicate eighth or sixteenth notes. The Peking Opera version of Deep Night

(the lower line) has a faster tempo with more sixteenth notes than the Kunqu Opera version (the upper line) does. In this way, the Peking Opera version of Deep Night sounds more dramatic and emotional. Thus it has been used in many classical Peking Opera works in drumming and battle scenes (see Figure 3.1.).

36 The Encyclopedia of Chinese Peking Opera, (Beijing: China Encyclopedia Press, 2011): 347.

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Figure 3.1. Deep Night. The comparison between the original melody of Deep Night in Kunqu Opera (upper line) and the rearranged melody in Farewell My Concubine (lower line) in Chinese numbered musical notation37

In the Peking Opera version of Farewell My Concubine, Deep Night is played on a jinhu, a two-stringed instrument most prevalently used in Peking Opera, accompanied by a Chinese traditional orchestra with an emphasis on the bass drum, to complement Yu

Ji’s solo sword dance. It gradually builds emotional intensity by accelerating the tempo from adagio (Man Ban), to moderato (Zhong Ban), and eventually to presto (Ji Ban) as the jinhu, castanets, and bass drum try to outdo one another. Just as the intensity builds to the climax and is about to erupt, the music ends with careful control, never letting the intensity break out. Along with the music, Yu Ji presents a dazzling dance, skillfully mastering two swords. Both the music and the character of Yu Ji are redolent of solemnity and inspiration. Her skilled sword control indicates that she is not an ordinary

37 Ibid.

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young lady who just entertains men with beautiful face and effeminacy, but that she is an extraordinary woman for showing as much courage as men. Through this music, we do not see a sensitive woman with fragile and uncontrollable emotions. Instead, we see her delineated as a heroine with rationality, strength, and, particularly, subjectivity.

In the film version of Farewell My Concubine, the composer Zhao Jiping derives two musical phrases from Yu Ji’s sword dance music to serve as the first theme—the theme that represents “Yu Ji” in the film. The thematic melody is always played by the jinhu. Its high pitch and colorfully dramatic expression perfectly present and represent

Dieyi’s life. jinhu is played either in solo or accompanied by other orchestral instruments in non-diegesis, based on the needs of the narration and emotion. However, this heroic music, like the construction of the character of Dieyi in this film, does not present him as a straightforwardly irrefutable heroine as Yu Ji is in the opera. Instead, the Yu Ji theme music demonstrates the development of Dieyi from an abandoned boy to an opera superstar, as a desperate person struggling between reality and fantasy, and eventually as a heroine by interweaving the complicated historical national sufferings with his individual life experiences.

The film begins in 1977 with Dieyi and Xiaolou’s first reunion after twelve years of separation. They are dressed in the costumes of Yu Ji and the Chu king and are about to rehearse the Peking Opera Farewell My Concubine in a stadium. After all the other lights go off, a spotlight focuses on them in the center of the stadium, so that only the audience can see them. This creates an isolated space that blurs the real and imagined

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world, and creates a self-reflexive opera-within-a-film. At the same time, the music gradually fades in and the tempo is accelerated by the percussive bangu, which is usually used in the beginning of a Peking Opera play. We hardly can tell whether the music is diegetic or non-diegetic; we assume it is a Peking Opera orchestra accompanying Dieyi and Xiaolou’s rehearsal, but they do not see from where the music is coming. This coincides with the ambiguity of the realistic/scenic space and makes the whole film a story-in-a-story. The scene fades to the title sequence where it shows the moment when the Chu king sees Yu Ji’s suicide by his sword. The Yu Ji theme music spills out in a non-diegetic style, played by a combination of Eastern and Western instruments—the jinhu, accompanied how by a Western orchestra, passionately sings out the thematic melody.

The Yu Ji theme music serves three functions at the beginning of the film.

Narratively, it opens the story in response to the visual presentation on screen.

Thematically, the first theme appears when the image focuses on the moment of Yu Ji’s suicide, thus establishing its connection with her. As audiences have seen the character

Dieyi playing the role of Yu Ji in the previous scene, using Yu Ji’s music to present her suicide therefore implies that a similar experience and destiny will be shared by Dieyi.

For the purpose of characterization, the thematic melody played on the jinhu is out of tune in a Western sense and sounds extremely harsh against the accompaniment of the orchestra. This dissonance is intended to exaggerate the dramatic intensity of Yu Ji’s suicide on screen. Furthermore, it also indicates the incompatibility of Dieyi with the

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historical and social realities that China had experienced. The Yu Ji theme music, by this point, has provided the foundation for the story-in-a-story opera, indicating the narrative structure and representing the characters in this film. Then the Yu Ji theme music induces a flashback, bringing the audience to recall the two protagonists' dramatic experiences.

The timeline is brought back to fifty-three years ago (the year 1924) when Dieyi was a boy. From then on, the music leads us, step by step, to witness Dieyi’s experiences,

Dieyi’s emotion, and Dieyi’s way of becoming a reincarnated Yu Ji.

The Yu Ji theme music first officially appears in the story at the scene when Xiao

Douzi’s mother — Xiao Douzi being Dieyi’s childhood name — forces him to become an apprentice at an opera troupe in Beijing. His prostitute mother brings Xiao Douzi to the troupe, begging them to accept her child. But the master Guan Ye sees Xiao Douzi’s six-finger hand and refuses her request. In order to let her son stay, Xiao Douzi’s mother makes a brutal decision—she drags Xiao Douzi out of the troupe and cuts the sixth finger off. At this moment, all non-diegetic sounds are muted. Xiao Douzi slowly looks at his bloody hand. His shouting isn't heard until the shot cuts to the next scene showing the shock of the troupe boys, who are training inside —such sonic delay in diegesis intensifies both physical and emotional traumas, and foretells an emotional eruption.

Then Xiao Douzi, under his mother’s arm, bursts into screams and crying, and is brought back to the living room to sign the apprentice contract. He runs around the house to escape while shouting, but eventually is captured by other boys. After Xiao Douzi is

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forced to sign the contract, his mother takes off her coat, puts it on Xiao Douzi’s back, and then leaves forever.

From the musical perspective, an ominously weighty bass drum starts beating in the non-diegetic space when Xiao Douzi’s sixth finger is cut off. The bass drum’s pounding does not play in a fast tempo to exaggerate the conflict presented in the image.

Instead, it beats every few seconds as if to strengthen its solemnity and heaviness. At the same time, a long and rapid trill played by string instruments in a crescendo works together with solemn pounding in non-degesis and Xiao Douzi’s screaming as well as other people’s shouting in diegesis, to raise the emotional intensity to a climax. When the other boys force Xiao Douzi to kneel down, to bow to the shrine table, and to sign the apprentice contract with his bloodied hand, the Yu Ji theme music cries out in the jinhu above the heavy drum pounding and the string’s trill. It is the first time that the Yu Ji theme music is exclusively linked with Xiao Douzi (its first appearance at the beginning of the film is only an implication). Contrasting with the anxiety felt in the strings’ long trill and the bass drum’s heavy pounding, the Yu Ji theme music is ironically calm as played on the jinhu. It shows, at this moment, not only Xiao Douzi’s official connection with opera performance, and his similar personality as well as destiny with Yu Ji in the opera, but also predicts, just as he strives to escape from the troupe, the painful struggles in his future.

The Yu Ji theme music appears several times, its last appearance at the climax of the film when Dieyi and Xiaolou are rehearsing the final scene of the Peking Opera

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Farewell My Concubine: the scene in which Yu Ji kills herself. It is at this moment that

Dieyi commits suicide. Dieyi is playing the role of Yu Ji and appears as a beautiful woman in glamorous makeup and costume; he slowly pulls out the King's sword and then commits suicide as Xiaolou screams. Dieyi is not scared or desperate at this final moment, but has a small smile on his/her face. In contrast with the close-up shot of Dieyi’s face and his hand slowly pulling out the Chu king’s sword, the Yu Ji theme music plays at a presto tempo. This slow moving/fast playing duality dramatically amplifies the intense relationship between image and sound.

Dieyi’s suicide at end of this film is opaque in terms of motivation. Tom

Simmons thinks that “there is little doubt it is the oppression and horrific revolutionary zeal of the state which pushes the characters (both Dieyi and Ju Xian) over the edge.”38

Jenny Lau argues Dieyi’s suicide is “similar to many other Lie nv stories of the past in which the woman commits suicide for the unattainable man” as well as because of “his confusion of the opera with real life.”39 Although it is true that letting the character Dieyi commit suicide at the end of the film can be considered as a sign of creating the ideal woman, the result of a male fantasy that was ideologized for thousands of years by

38 Tom Simmons, “Boogie Opera: Effie, Douzi, and Artistic Convention.” Journal of Popular Culture, 33, (2000), 115-116.

39 To quote Lau’s explanation: “Lie nv is a term describing a woman’s sexual loyalty even to the degree of martyrdom. The term was first used in the book Lie Nv Zhuan (Biographies of Women), which came out sometime around the first century.” Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, “Farewell My Concubine: History, Melodrama, and Ideology in Contemporary Pan-Chinese Cinema,” Film Quarterly, 49, no.1 (Autumn, 1995), 27.

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Confucianism, 40 Dieyi’s death is not merely for his “unattainable” man, nor for his frustration with life and opera, nor for the suffering induced by national chaos. Since

Dieyi was trained to perform the role of Yu Ji onstage, his whole life has merged with his opera performances as well as Yu Ji’s experiences. He is destined to live as Yu Ji and to die as Yu Ji, both onstage and in real life. Therefore, Dieyi’s suicide is an action of fulfilling himself with faith, exactly like his opera master’s principle of being an artist and being human.

Cui Shuqin observes that in this final suicide scene the “moment of death announces that Deiyi is not simply a woman but more than a woman… one capable of devoting an entire life to the art of opera and loyalty between men.”41 Cui suggests that

Dieyi’s identity completely coincides with Yu Ji’s at the moment of suicide. Presented as the theme music of female heroism, the distorted and intense sword dance music underscores, on one hand, Dieyi’s painful struggle with reality, his incompatibility with society, and the principles and fate that he shares with Yu Ji in the opera. On the other hand, the heroic music negates the idea that Dieyi’s action of suicide is out of despair or any negative emotion. Instead, the powerful music shows that Dieyi and Yu Ji have persisted in the same principle throughout their lives, a life dedicated to wisdom, faith, and bravery.

40 In the original novel, written by a female writer, Li Bihua, the characters Dieyi and Ju Xian do not kill themselves. For both, their lives simply goes on in banality.

41 Shuqin Cui, Women through Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003),

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More importantly, this intense music is abruptly interrupted when Dieyi commits suicide. By not becoming a female musician, in the sense of Laing’s description of the female musician as "easily overwhelmed by the emotional connotations of music, and unable to control her emotionality in a 'proper' and socially acceptable manner,” we see only Dieyi pulling out the sword and Xiaolou turning around, and hear only Dieyi falling and Xiaolou screaming.42 Yet the exact moment of Dieyi's death is punctuated neither visually nor aurally. Such a visual and musical emptiness at the moment of Dieyi’s suicide helps maintain the “rational” sense of his radical action by preventing excessive emotional outpouring.

By applying the heroic Yu Ji theme music carefully in the final scene of Farewell

My Concubine, the Dieyi construction achieves its ideal state of being a woman onstage as well as being a human offstage. The music records his life experiences, displays his emotions, and highlights his spirituality. By balancing his characteristics between dramatic and rational, emotional and reasonable, and complex and understandable, through the Yu Ji theme music, a theatrical heroine and a real life warrior have become one.

The Second Theme—From a “De-masculinized” Song to Women’s Lament

The second theme is derived from the Chu king’s song, the Song of Gaixia (Gai xia ge), in the opera version of Farewell My Concubine. In the opera, the Chu king is

42 Heather Laing, The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 103.

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defeated and trapped in Gaixia (垓下). His enemy, the Han military, starts to sing a song that is originally from the Chu king’s hometown, which makes him believe that his headquarters have been taken by his enemies. All of his followers, except his concubine,

Yu Ji, and his horse, have run away because of the failure. Despite the fact that the Chu king used to be the greatest warrior and was always tough and fearless in battle, he cannot escape the fate of being defeated in the end. Facing such a desperate situation, he laments, in extreme sorrow, to Yu Ji and reveals his inner feelings at the end of his dramatic, short life and his struggle for power:

My strength plucked up the hills, My might shadowed the world; But the times were against me, Dapple (the king’s horse) runs no more; What then can I do? Ah, Yu, my Yu, What will your fate be?43 In this song, two contrary emotions are presented. In the first phrase, the Chu king wants to show that he could lift up the mountains so mightily that no one could rival him. By using two hyperboles, the Chu king elevates himself to a mythical and heroic state.

However, the second phrase, expressing his uncontrollable destiny, turns sharply against his immortal figure. The last two phrases express the king’s grief to Yu Ji—he becomes a mortal person who cannot escape defeat. The whole song thoroughly displays the dramatic contrast between the Chu king’s strength and the harsh reality, exaggerating his unavoidable tragedy.

43 Burton Watson’s translation, quoted by Xiuying Li, “Writing Sima Qian’s Rhetorical Style into English—On Burton Watson’s Translation of Shi Ji (Records of the Grand Historian),” Intercultural Communication Studies, 17, no. 2, (2008), 281.

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Although not presented at the beginning of the film, the Song of Gaixia can be considered the second theme in the film version of Farewell My Concubine. It serves a significant function in building a connection between its original musical and cultural context and the construction of characters and narration in the film. It is presented in two different music styles based on the needs of the particular scene. The first musical style of this second theme is the original song, sung by the opera troupe boys for their singing practices. The Song of Gaixia is sung three times by the boys in the film. In the first time, they sing it in unison with their childish voices. The second appearance is right after the first one, featuring Xiao Shitou’s leading singing followed by boys’ more grown-up voices. At the same time, the Western orchestra, in non-diegesis, helps to build an stronger atmosphere to make up the boys’ immature male voices. For the purpose of identity, their singing voices become stronger than before, which makes the song defined stably in the quality of masculinity. For the purpose of constructing characters, the second time appearance of the song highlights Xiao Shitou’s underlying position in singing, which indicates his future connection with the role of the Chu king. For the narrative purpose, this song, along with the orchestra performance, functions to transfer the timeline in audio in response to the back and forth panning in visual transition. When the song is sung the third time without the accompaniment of the orchestra, these opera troupe boys have grown into their adolescence—they are ready to perform opera officially.

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Another striking point of using of the singing version of the Song of Gaixia in the film version of Farewell My Concubine is that its lyrics are rendered delicately in their interaction with the images, gender representations, and the film’s narration. The boys sing the song three times in the film. Yet they only sing the first two phrases that highlight the sharp contrast between the Chu King’s great strength and the harsh reality of his life. The part of the song about grieving to Yu Ji is completely omitted, which seems entirely purposeful. By revealing the lyrics only partly, the film attempts to suggest a solid masculine quality of the song by excluding femininity. The film shows

Xiao Douzi, from the front, singing the song as a boy in the theme’s first two appearances.

He practices the song just like every other boy—it is definitely a man’s song. At this point in the film, Xiao douzi is holding a hand muff that separates his presentation from other boys. Yet he is still placed in the “boy” zone, as reflected in the next scene when he is asked to perform a girl’s line, but insists that “I am a boy” instead of saying “I am a girl.” In the song’s third appearance, however, the camera only gives a panoramic shot of the boys singing from behind. Audiences cannot tell whether Xiao Douzi is among them, which seems to be an indication of the starting point of his sexual “transformation,” reflected in his embrace of the dan role by dressing and performing as a girl in the next scene. Therefore, the erasure of Xiao Douzi’s image in this scene appears to be an attempt to purposefully keep the “manly” quality of this song (see Figure 3.2.).

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Figure 3.2. Farewell My Concubine. The three scenes where the boys parctice the Song of Gaixia. Xiao Douzi is clearly feature in the first two, but not in the third. (Continued)

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Figure 3.2. Continued

Secondly, when the song appears for the first time in the film, in addition to the omission of the last two phrases, there is neither titling nor reference to its words.

Without the object for which the king is grieving, this song becomes a generalized self- expression rather than an emotional confession to someone else. Therefore, the subject of this song becomes ambiguous, which indicates the transformation of the song’s identity later on. (This fact will be discussed in the following paragraphs).

The second musical style of the Song of Gaixia is a rearranged melodic variation that appears several times in non-diegesis in this film, mainly played by the dongxiao (a vertical bamboo flute), a Chinese traditional instrument that mimics the sound of blowing wind.44 By erasing the lyrics and playing it on a musical instrument, the Song of Gaixia

44 From Huai Nan Zi-Qi Su.

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has been transferred from the boys’ diegetic singing to the dongxiao’s non-diegetic performance, which indicates a potential transformation of its own. Firstly, it removes the music from the boys’ own diegetic level that seems, initially at least, to belong solely to the Chu king, with its masculine quality, and relocates it in the non-diegetic realm. The musical representation of the Chu king with strong masculinity is therefore gone. Instead, with its wind-like timbre that usually describes peaceful as well as sorrowful circumstances, the dongxiao variation of the Song of Gaixia moves beyond its original cultural context and pins its added emotional and narrative functions within the film.

Secondly, the transition of the music from the diegetic to the non-diegetic level in this context seems almost a stereotypical way of expanding the representation of the music from a very particular subjectivity to a broader territory shared by several characters as well as several narrative circumstances. The loss of the Chu king’s lyrics as well as boys’ voices provides a foundation for the gradual “gender transformation” of the

Song of Gaixia. In its first three appearances in the film, the dongxiao variation of the

Song of Gaixia serves as the representation of the close relationship between Xiao Shitou and Xiao Douzi in their childhood. They live, train, and even receive punishment together in the troupe, and they take care of each other without involving anyone else. A strongly intimate tie between Xiao Shitou and Xiao Douzi is thus built through the solo dongxiao performance. Without the accompaniment of the orchestra, this performance in non- diegesis no longer stands for the powerful and tragic figure of the Chu king. Instead, it exclusively shows the inseparable bond between the two protagonists.

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Nevertheless, the gendered identity of the dongxiao variation of the Song of

Gaixia starts to change as the story continues to unfold. The extreme success of Xiao

Douzi and Xiao Shitou’s debut of Farewell My Concubine at the eunuch Zhang’s birthday party causes the separation between the two boys for the first time. After Xiao

Douzi is separated from Xiao Shitou, eunuch Zhang asks to meet him privately and then rapes him. The physical humiliation, symbolically defines Xiao Douzi in a “female” position, and breaks the intimate relationship between Xiao Shitou and him as brotherhood.

During the whole process, Xiao Douzi’s makeup and basic costume as “Yu Ji” is not removed. In other words, his identity is kept as a girl, not a boy. On the return to home, Xiao Douzi finds an abandoned crying baby, of whom he insists on taking care, contrasting with his master’s suggestion of giving up the baby—the maternal quality has grown on him. Acoustically speaking, a bell’s pounding starts to play constantly after

Xiao Douzi, with an “about to cry” face, coming out from the eunuch Zhang’s house. The bell’s ringing, which lasts till the end of the first part of the film, could be interpreted as a passing bell for moaning the death of the old Xiao Douzi as a boy. Yet the baby crying signs a rebirthed Dieyi as a “woman.”

The baby stops crying as it is brought to the troupe house. At the same time, the orchestra performance in non-diegetic space appears with a warm ascending and descending melodic progression, preparing for the coming of the dongxiao performing the variation of the Song of Gaixia. The next scene shows a high angle shot on the boys’

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gathering around the baby. The dongxiao variation of the Song of Gaixia no longer solely describes the relationship between Xiao Douzi and Xiao Shitou. Instead, it responds to the scene of the boys’ gathering, and then to the medium shot of Xiao Douzi alone, and later to the scene where whole opera troupe are taking a group photo in visual track. In soundtrack, it does not perform solo, but with the accompaniment of the orchestra, the bell’s pounding, the boys’ vow to perform opera, and the huckster that he heard when his sixth finger was cut off by his mother. Therefore, with the gradual “shift” of Xiao

Douzi’s sexual identity, the dongxiao variation of the Song of Gaixia begins to alter its connotation that used to be exclusively shared with Xiao Shitou and Xiao Douzi. On the one hand, the music interacts with all of the sounds that appeared before to summarize

Xiao Douzi’s experiences so far. On the other hand, the music gradually transformed to the next step, a melancholy personal moaning by Dieyi (the grown up Xiao Douzi) rather than brotherhood—the song’s gendered identity starts to change.

The dongxiao variation of the Song of Gaixia takes an obvious transformation in the scene showing Xiaolou and Ju Xian’s engagement party. In this scene, Dieyi finds the sword that Xiaolou used in his premier performance as the Chu king at Yuan Siye’s mansion, and he still remembers his promise to Xiao Shitou after their debut in the opera

Farewell My Concubine at the eunuch Zhang’s birthday party:

Xiao Shitou (looking at the sword): If the Chu king had this sword, he would easily kill the Han king and became the emperor. And you (i.e., Dieyi) would be the empress already! Xiao Douzi (speaking to Xiao Shitou): Brother, I will definitely get the sword and give it to you! 166

From this dialogue, audiences see the mind-set of the two boys when they are speaking—while Xiao Shitou is obviously talking about the sword as a joke, Xiao Douzi has taken his words seriously and has kept his promise since then. In Xiao Douzi’s (and later Dieyi’s) mind, the sword is the symbol of the Chu king’s masculine power on stage and Xiao Shitou’s (later Xiaolou’s) devotion to opera performance in life. Since Ju

Xian’s involvement with Xiaolou, however, Xiaolou and Dieyi’s strong relationship begins to fall apart, this causes Dieyi despair. Therefore, by finding the sword and giving it to Xiaolou at the engagement party, Dieyi hopes it will remind Xiaolou of his original passion for opera and recall their sole brotherhood.

Dieyi (throws the sword to Xiaolou): you take a look at the sword! Xiaolou (pulls out the sword): What a nice sword! Dieyi, why do you bring this? We are not onstage now!

At this moment, the solo dongxiao variation of the Song of Gaixia begins and is played twice in this scene. Its first appearance is to disclose Dieyi’s feelings of loneliness at the loss of his strong relationship with Xiaolou. A medium shot of Dieyi (still wearing the Yu Ji makeup) shows him blankly speechless and with an expression of extreme disappointment. As he looks up at an old group photo of Xiaolou and him on the wall, the music refers back to their brotherhood again, but this time in illusion—their sole brotherhood no long exists in reality, but only in a photo, in memory. Then Ju Xian holds a cup of wine, puts it to Dieyi’s mouth (the camera at his back) and asks him to drink:

Ju Xian (speaking on Xiaolou’s point, with smile): Brother, you are coming late. So you should drink it for punishment. Xiaolou (only heard by his voice): Correct! You should be punished.

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Dieyi (slowly turns to Ju Xian without drinking): Thank you, Miss Ju Xian.

During this dialogue, there is no direct camera shot of Xiaolou. Instead, the camera pans between Ju Xian and Dieyi as the solo dongxiao variation of the Song of

Gaixia appears the second time. Although it is still under the presentation of Dieyi’s emotional state, the connection between Dieyi and Ju Xian has been established by the music. When Dieyi walks out the house and says “Xiaolou, from now on, you sing yours, and I sing mine,” the music stops. By cutting off the musical presentation of the brotherhood between Dieyi and Xiaolou, the dongxiao solo of the Song of Gaxia variation develops a new association with female roles. In addition to presenting the exclusive brotherhood between Xiaolou and Dieyi once more, later in the film, the dongxiao variation shifts its solid masculine identity to femininity, expressing personal mourning as well as the tragedy of women’s lives.

The melancholy sentiment of the dongxiao solo of the Song of Gaixia variation also applies to women exclusively. In the scene when Ju Xian loses her baby, she sits in front of a mirror in a medium shot. Compared with the same shot on her wedding day earlier, where she wore her red wedding dress with a satisfied smile and told Xiaolou,

“Don’t perform opera anymore. I will live with you in a peaceful life.” Ju Xian, this time, wearing white, stares at herself blankly and speechless in the mirror. Visually, her blank facial expression can, to some degree, show her feelings of loss for her child. Verbally, her silence deepens the tragic atmosphere. Yet this is not enough. As Claudia Gorbman points out, “the real reason for music is that a piece of film, by its nature, lacks a certain

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ability to convey emotional overtones.”45 When image and text cannot fully deliver a character’s feelings, music enters to satisfy a need to compensate for, or to fill in, the emotional depth that cannot be represented verbally.

The dongxiao solo of the Song of Gaixia variation has contained the emotions of a hero’s pathos, a loss of brotherhood, and an artist’s desperation. After additively carrying the weight of such melancholy in its previous appearances, the soft dongxiao variation of the Song of Gaixia puts its cumulative tragic weight behind describing Ju Xian’s helplessness and emptiness. The musical rendering at this moment surpasses the expressive force possible in image and text alone and projects all of the previously tragic occurrences of the theme on one woman. By this time, a great hero’s lament for his tragic fate has been transformed into the sentimental expression of a woman’s extremely

“silent” grieving—its “gender shift” has therefore been completed.

The last time that the Song of Gaixia variation played by dongxiao solo is at the end of the film when Dieyi and Xiaolou are rehearsing the last scene of the Peking Opera version of Farewell My Concubine (resonates with the beginning of this film which the time line is 1977). During the rehearsal, Xiaolou makes a mistake. He stops acting and keeps saying: “I am old now, old now; cannot do well the perfomance.” Then he takes off his fake mustache and turns around to look at Dieyi. Suddenly, Xiaolou starts to recite the

45 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1987), 67.

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lines from the Kunqu Opera Si Fan, where Dieyi used to struggle to memorize the right sentence referred to gender identity when he practiced at the first time:

Xiaolou: I, a young nun, am sixteen years old… Dieyi (in shock at a moment): I am so young but my hair is cut off by the master! Xiaolou: I am a by nature boy… Dieyi: Not a girl… Xiaolou: Wrong! Dieyi, you are wrong again!

When hearing this, Dieyi is struck with a shock. At this moment, he suddenly realizes his original identity—a man. He slowly turns his head, muttering: “I am a by nature boy, not a girl…”

During their dialogue, the camera gives an equal medium short/reverse shot between the two characters, re-establishing their connection after twelve years separation.

And the dongxiao variation of the Song of Gaixia in solo appears again in this scene. In response to the visual re-establishment of the connection of Dieyi and Xiaolou, the music recalls their initial relationship as brothers in soundtrack, which seems to bring the identity of the song back to the zone of masculinity. Yet at this moment, Dieyi is in Yu

Ji’s role (makeup and costume) that denies his position as a man in reality (the rehearsal is paused) and his relationship with Xiaolou as brotherhood onstage. The shot-reverse shot then disappears; only leaving the single medium shot that Dieyi meditates his past.

The connection of Dieyi and Xiaolou as “brothers” in visual track is thus broken. But the music continues along with Dieyi’s solo image, and becomes the musical “statement” of

Dieyi alone. Thus their connection as brotherhood no longer continues to exist in

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soundtrack. For a short moment, Dieyi is in meditation of his life and realizes he is actually a boy, not a real girl. But his mind quickly goes back to the reality where they continue to rehearse, and eventually Dieyi commits suicide, the same as Yu Ji’s death, in the position of a woman. Therefore, the dongxiao variation of the Song of Gaixia solo does not actually “transfer” back to its original gender context but retains its representation of women to the end of the film.

The Performance of Preexisting Opera in Film

Chinese opera performance is seen throughout this film. Considering the function of opera performance in this movie, Lau argues that it denies its audience a deep relationship with Peking Opera and only shows its colorful and exotic surface, with displays of sex, drugs, and violence. At best, it reflects a peculiar disinterest in this particular national heritage.46 The performance of Chinese opera in this film satisfies

(Western) audiences’ curiosity and visual pleasure. Indeed, the opera scenes are all

“beautifully textured, lavish productions containing exquisite costumes and flawless technical excellence.” 47 Yet the performances function more importantly as part of female character construction, and serve to integrate the film's narrative.

46 Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, “Farewell My Concubine: History, Melodrama, and Ideology in Contemporary Pan-Chinese Cinema,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 49, No.1 (Autumn, 1995), 23.

47 Tom Simmons, “Boogie Opera: Effie, Douzi, and Artistic Convention.” Journal of Popular Culture, 33 (2000), 113.

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Besides transforming opera music into re-arranged pieces in non-diegesis for various purposes in the film version of Farewell My Concubine, the original opera performances in this film function in two ways—to display the charisma and individuality of female singing, and for narrative indication and development. The former aims to highlight Dieyi’s power over music while the latter puts his individual performance into larger narrative context.

In the film version of Farewell My Concubine, Dieyi’s attraction mainly comes from two sources, both of which involve specifically feminine charms: visual pleasure in his gorgeous makeup, outfit, and elegant movement, and vocal pleasure in his astonishing singing voice. The opera costumes in the film are borrowed from its opera version created by Mei Lanfang. Along with his friend Qi Runshan, who is also an innovator of

Peking Opera reformation, Mei has made a significant contribution in recasting Peking

Opera from an aural to a visual spectacle.48 In order to lead Peking Opera to the guoju

(national drama), it is important to make the opera highlight Chinese aesthetic philosophy in its visual presentation. Joshua Goldstein has summarized Qi’s idea about the crucial difference between Western and Chinese drama as “not that Chinese was musical and

Western spoken, but that the latter was ‘realistic’ while the former was ‘aesthetic’

(meishuhua, lit. aestheticized).”49 Therefore, in order to highlight the national identity of

Peking Opera, Qi insists that the key to Peking Opera was to sum up the word mei

48 Joshua Goldstein, Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera, 1907-1937, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 156-157.

49 Ibid.153.

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(beauty) in every detail—in speaking, movement, costume, etc.50 Female roles in Peking

Opera are the primary target of aestheticization. In this process, aestheticization of costume and gesture are two of the most crucial elements in huashan, the female role that combines the purity ascribed to women from elite families with “visions of opulence and graceful sexuality, capturing a new feminine ideal and a new fantasy.”51 Such innovations are clearly “packaged as embodying a traditional Chinese aesthetic that was the binary opposite of Western dramatic realism.”52

Qi’s ideas about the aesthetics of Peking Opera were fully adapted in Mei

Lanfang’s opera works. Particularly in costume design, Mei has added various styles of dresses which successfully attracted women audiences and led a fashion trend. In his ancient-costume opera, he took inspiration from ancient Chinese paintings, developing a brand new style of female dresses and amplifying the beauty of femininity, seen most often in the huashan role. Goldstein describes the common features of “Mei Style” costumes shared by huashan:

“The hair is long and flowing with a bun in the back, the skirt and

shuixiu (“water sleeves”) extravagantly long and diaphanous. The lower

skirt was worn outside the upper dress (which previously had come

50 Qi Ruishan, Guoju gai lun, in QRSQJ 3:29.

51 Joshua Goldstein, Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera, 1970-1937, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 128.

52 Suan Daruvala, “The aesthetics and moral politics of Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town,” Journal of Chinese Cinema, 1, no.3, (2007), 174.

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down to the knees), accentuating the previously indistinguishable waist

and outlining a more feminine figure.”53

Such dress style is adapted for Ju Ji’s costume in the opera Farewell My Concubine, as it is for Dieyi in the film version. He wears a gorgeous gown with exquisite hair decorations, moving elegantly with outstanding beauty and grace. Yet his charming beauty as a woman on stage doesn't come only from his visual features: his “female voice” takes the most credit towards his success.

Besides the fact that music can speak for female silence in Chinese films, as has been discussed in chapter two, singing is an important way for Chinese women to present themselves in films. Laing has pointed out that the singing woman specifies the nature of the performance and her archetypal resonance not only through the style of music, and perhaps even the lyrics, but also through the direct mode of musical communication constituted by song. This leaves her unmediated and unencumbered by any musical instrument other than the body itself.54

At the same time, even if femininity, as compared to masculinity, can be described in terms of physical vulnerability, it doesn’t mean that the power of female musicality can be devalued and underestimated. As Linda P. Austern says, “…performing music before men could be seen in a positive light… [in so much as] the female

53 Joshua Goldstein, Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera, 1970-1937, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 122.

54 Heather Laing, The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman's Film. (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 101.

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musician’s embodiment [is that] of the most powerful sensual partnership of femaleness…”55 No matter whether they are consciously aware of what types of female musicality they possess, music empowers female musicians to take some level of control over men. When comparing the ways that women can express their message musically, taking control through their own musical voices is a more powerful way than through an instrument. Laing argues that “the singing woman specifies that nature of the performance and its lyrics, but also through the ‘direct’ mode of musical communication constituted by song. This leaves her unmediated and unencumbered by any musical instrument other than (dangerous) body itself… the man… is often helplessly attracted and potentially completely disempowered.”56

As mentioned in the earlier part of this chapter, female musicians, especially female singers, are also commonly seen displaying what Laing and Austern describe as

“a woman’s power” in Chinese films. Farewell My Concubine grants Dieyi such powerful female musicality that other people, especially men, cannot resist. Dieyi’s singing makes his career extremely successful and he uses the charisma of the female voice to attract powerful men—the theater manager, the eunuch, the magnate Yuan Siye, and the Japanese military general. Even without the splendid decoration of costume and accessories, Dieyi can still use his “female” voice in association with his “female” body

55 Linda Phyllis Austern, “’Sing Againe Syren’: The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature,” Renaissance Quarterly, 42 (1989), 420-28.

56 Heather Laing, The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman's Film. (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 101.

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movement while dressing up in a man’s costume—dancing, in this case, to enhance sensuous pleasure, doubling his “feminine” charm to men.

During the scene depicting Xiaolou’s rescue, for instance, audiences can only see the silhouette of Japanese soldiers standing outside a room of the Japanese military mansion because of the contrast between the brightness indoors and the darkness outside.

Audiences first see the shadow of Dieyi’s graceful body movement, reflected in the light, and hear from outside the accompaniment of the small ensemble behind him. At the same time, we hear Dieyi’s elegant singing of the Kunqu opera song the Peony Pavilion, which is the most elegant and effeminate piece. The diegetic environment is so quiet that

Dieyi’s singing stands out within the ensemble. Then the image is cut to inside the room where a group of Japanese officials dressed in military uniforms are watching Dieyi’s performance intently (see Figure 3.3.).

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Figure 3.3. Farewell My Concubine. Dieyi, in man’s clothing, performing Peony Pavilion for the Japanese military.

Unexpectedly, audiences do not see Dieyi dressed up as a gorgeous theatrical lady, rather, in this somber situation, he is performing with a fan in men’s clothes—no attractive outfits enhance his “femininity.” Yet he sings and moves like a woman, which catches everyone’s breath at that moment. Pleased by Dieyi’s excellent opera performance, the Japanese general eventually releases Xiaolou. Such a feminine presentation of musicality—sandwiched between the previous scene in which people talk about Japanese brutality and the following scene that shows an execution by Japanese firing squad—indicates that the unseen but audible female musicality displays its power by overriding the visible strength of masculinity.

Dieyi’s feminine voice is so powerful onstage that it can be interpreted as pure sexual seduction, yet he also had an internal motivation for singing and performing opera.

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Growing up in the opera troupe, Dieyi has been trained as a professional female impersonator since childhood. He has lost the most important people in life—his mother, his opera partner Xiaolou, and his opera master—step by step, and has been surrounded by people who ingratiate themselves to him for their own gains without any true caring.

The only precious friend he has left is opera performance, where he can transport himself into the theatrical world, distancing himself from ugly reality, and releasing himself without caring about anyone or anything else in life.

An example can be found in the scene where he is performing the Peking Opera work The Druken Beauty for the Japanese military, a work that displays how the famous ancient Chinese beauty Yang Guifei waits in frustration for the emperor's company, Dieyi literally becomes the drunken beauty abandoned by her “king”—as Xiaolou abandoned him at his engagement party. In this opera, the beautiful concubine Yang is extremely disappointed by the emperor who has broken his promise to have a banquet with her, but went to meet one of his other concubines. Yang shows her jealousy, her bitterness, and her intention to forget all her unhappiness by getting drunk. Echoing the film’s narrative, the dialogue between the beauty, Yang, and the eunuch, Gao Lishi, as well as her singing onstage become the key to peering in on Dieyi’s emotions:

Dieyi in Yang’s role: Gao Lishi, what wine are you presenting to me?

Gao Lishi: I am presenting the “all-night-long awake” wine to you.

Dieyi: Ya, ya, cui! (Imitating sound, representing anger) Who wants to

stay awake all night long with you people!

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(Yet the beauty Yang still drinks the wine, and starts to sing)

Life is as an illusion as a dream

why don’t I just drink some wine for the moment

Although extremely frustrated by the emperor, the beauty Yang still tries to keep her dignity despite the emperor’s humiliation and the eunuch’s adulation. Without bursting into a rage, Dieyi (as Yang) starts to release her emotions by drinking and singing gracefully. After the opera partnership with Xiaolou broke up, Dieyi immerses himself in the role of the beauty Yang. By singing her words, he overlaps his inner emotions with the sentimental expression of a theatrical character and that character becomes sublime through the music and dance as practiced under Dieyi's rational control.

Suddenly, numerous protesters against the Japanese invasion spread out from the roof of the theater and the Japanese general immediately orders his soldiers to stop it—a riot in the audience seems inevitable. People start to push, shout, and run; the lighting becomes unstable; and the atmosphere in the theater keeps increasing in intensity.

Nevertheless, Dieyi, caring about nothing but the opera, continues to perform elegantly onstage; with the accompaniment of music, he is undisturbed by the chaos around him.

Instead, he keeps dancing as the beauty Yang in his own theatrical world until the end of the act. His courageous focus on the performance touches everyone at that moment—the audience starts to applaud him for his devotion. It was not Dieyi’s ultimate goal to acquire praise and reputation from the audience or to ingratiate himself to the Japanese invaders through his opera performance. Rather, it is that only through opera performance

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can he be in an ideal world where all the interference from negative people, emotions, and troubles in his real life are swept away, and where he has freedom of will. At the same time, the potential eruption of his radical emotions suffered in real life have been subsumed by his theatrical performance and transformed into a tremendously artistic expressive force, saving him from being out of emotional control and becoming a

“madwoman” in life.

Furthermore, as a form of self-reflective opera-within-film, the Farewell My

Concubine movie uses the opera story as the reference for the film narrative. In addition to the destinies of female-identified characters in the film overlapping with the fates of women in the opera, specific theatrical scenes onstage can cue plot developments in the film. One example is the scene when Dieyi and Xiaolou are performing the farewell scene of the opera Farewell My Concubine onstage and Ju Xian is seeing them from offstage. A close-up shot shows Xiaolou as the Chu king onstage, despairing over his destiny. Immediately another close-up shout gives Ju Xian happily watching his performance. The two equal close-up shots build the connection between the Chu king

(Xiaolou) and Ju Xian, and their attraction to each other. When the Chu king speaks to

Dieyi as Yu Ji onstage, “Oh my dear, it seems that today is our farewell day…,” the image cuts to a small panorama view where Ju Xian is standing up, turning around and going outside. (In the next scene, the audiences will see she is paying off her debts at the brothel and decides to marry Xiaolou.) In this image, prominent positions are given to the three standing characters: Xiaolou as the Chu king and Dieyi as Yu Ji are onstage,

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performing the touching “farewell” scene, and Ju Xian is leaving while everyone else is sitting offstage. The positions of the three standing characters form a triangle indicating their irreconcilable relationship in the visual track. A lumbering gong sounding onstage, like a funeral lament, corresponds to the “farewell” scene in the soundtrack. Not only this scene represent the story telling of the “farewell” between the Chu king and Yu Ji in opera terms; but the particular operatic scene, along with the echoes in visual and sound tracks, also indicates the split in the relationship between Xiaolou and Dieyi—a

“farewell” between them in life is about to happen because of Ju Xian's involvement (See

Figure 3.4.).

Figure 3.4. Farewell My Concubine. The “farewell” between Yu Ji and the Chu king onstage indicates the “farewell” between Dieyi and Xiaolou offstage because of the involvement of Ju Xian. (Continued)

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Figure 3.4. Continued.

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Figure 3.4. Continued.

Connecting Women through Motifs Preexisting in Film

Besides the preexisting music that had a separate life before the start of the film, another special type of “preexisting” musical motif also plays a significant role in constructing women in Farewell My Concubine. Firstly, these motifs could be heard as an original score composed for this particular film. Secondly, instead of being repeated several times as would a film’s theme, these motifs, from their first appearance, become closely associated with a particular character or narrative situation and reappear in various functions, usually for purposes of contrast. Perhaps one could think these motifs are minor thematic music used for particular characters or scenes—in any event they are not the central theme music for the whole film. Claudia Gorbman thinks these melodies are “freer from unilinear identification; thus they are more expressive than referential.”

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Yet she argues when a motif “no longer refers to a specific object, it cannot very well operate to recall either.”57 Her argument ignores the possibility that the music could recur with other characters or in other scenes, creating a shared or contrasted emotion to reinforce the initial context in which the music occurred.

Thirdly, from the moment these motifs reappear in the film, their “preexisting” status means that they bring with them an assortment of accumulated meanings that function in diverse dimensions. It can be used just like any other “ordinary” preexisting music, in forms such as hybridization, contrast, resonance, and ambiguity. Yet unlike other conventional preexisting music that comes from an old context and indirectly functions in a new story, these motifs can connect to characters as well as narrative scenes within a film in a much closer way than could original scoring. When a character or scene is associated with a particular musical motif, its “preexisting” status means that it can bring specific “preexisting” meanings to its reappearance with other characters or in other situations. For the construction of women in particular, a recurring motif can bind female characters in the same soundtrack, and expose relationships that might not be easily seen on screen or in the narrative. When establishing a connection between female characters, a motif can create either resonance or dissonance between them according to the scene.

In the film version of Farewell My Concubine, these motifs link the two female characters, Ju Xian and Dieyi, in the same soundtrack, despite the fact that they are

57Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1987), 29.

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extremely hostile to each other. By presenting them through the same music, in either a contrary or shared emotional way, Dieyi and Ju Xian are connected through a similarity in experience and resonance in emotion, thus deepening their entangled relationship in the film.

Musical Connection in Contrary Emotion

Unlike Dieyi, who becomes a woman by enculturation, Ju Xian is from birth a woman in the film. She is a prostitute, a type of individual that is widely considered as a violable victim. However, Ju Xian’s individuality as a woman stands out to the audience.

Her life is a demonstration of a woman’s struggle against oppression in the society as she transforms her identity from a prostitute to a wife, a mother, and eventually a heroine. In the scene when she resigns herself to being a prostitute, she takes off all jewelry and accessories, and pays off the ransom with her earnings without waiting for a man’s (that is, Xiaolou’s) rescue. She thereby unconsciously aligns herself with the life principle advocated by Dieyi’s master Guan Ye—“People should fulfill themselves through their faith”, a principle shared by three female roles (Yu Ji, Dieyi, and Ju Xian) in the film.

Therefore, although not actually performing as a heroine onstage as Dieyi does, Ju Xian is, like Dieyi, a female warrior in life.

Unlike Dieyi, Ju Xian has neither a positive reputation nor a respectable career. Ju

Xian has to fight more to wash away her identity as a prostitute, and to become a virtuous woman by marrying Xiaolou. Without possessing Dieyi’s advantage of musicality, Ju

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Xian uses her own voice entangled with circumambient sound, creating an aural duality, a duality representing her would-be individuality and actual individuality.

As Robynn J. Stilwell describes, a sonic duality is usually established by non- diegetic scores which ‘tend[s] toward subjectivity” in combination with diegetic music/sound which tends to “a kind of realistic ‘objectivity’.”58 However, even without a non-diegetic score, diegetic music/sound can still establish an objective/subjective duality that creates the functions of empathy and anempathy. On one hand, the environmental acoustic space plays the role of the commentator: including music, sound, and human voice within the narrative, it focuses objective observation and judgment on the main characters. On the other hand, these main characters’ own voices and their operated sound could provide their subjective reactions to other objective sonic sources.

We can find an example of an acoustic duality in diegesis in the scene of Ju

Xian’s first presentation in Farewell My Concubine. Before her first physical appearance, we already sense Ju Xian by sound. When Xiaolou goes to the brothel to look for Ju Xian, the film shows a lobby decorated with pink and red lanterns, flowers and a folding screen with beauties depicted on it, which immediately gives a sense of eroticism. Men's and women’s provocative laughter accompanies the erotic image. At the same time, effeminate music creates territory sounds, which identify a particular locale through pervasive and continuous presence (a brothel in this case), and bring to the foreground

58 Robynn J. Stilwell, "The Fantastic Gap Between Diegetic and Non-Diegetic," Beyond the Sroundtrack, edited by Lawrence Kramer, Richard leppert Daniel Goldmark, (Berkeley, Los Angles, London, 2007).

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the identity of Ju Xian. 59 Such sonic design is what Pierre Schaeffer theorized as acousmatic—sounds one hears without seeing their originating cause.60 Chion argues that acousmatic sound maintains suspense, constituting a dramatic technique in itself. It makes a mystery of its source, its properties and its powers. In such acousmatic scenes it is common to see evil, awe-inspiring characters introduced through sound in film before they are de-acousmatized.61 Therefore, the acousmatic introduction of Ju Xian to the audience is an object expectation of her should-be individuality—she is a toy-like prostitute who is randomly played with men and commits to no one. Yet a sudden smashing sound breaks the effeminate acoustic atmosphere when Ju Xian dashes out from a room on the second floor (at this time we still cannot see her face clearly), wrathfully scolding those men who are teasing her. Surprised by everyone but Xiaolou, she bravely jumps from the second floor into Xiaolou’s arms, and continues to loudly curse the other men. Against the objective sound, she uses her own voice and actions to make a powerful subjective counterpunch. Sonic duality within the narrative space in this scene challenges and shakes the audience’s pre-existing point of view. Ju Xian has her own morality. Even if she lives on selling her body, she still strives for happiness.

Effeminate sound is supposed to be harmonic to Ju Xian’s identity. However, contrasting with the decadent sound in the objective environment, Ju Xian’s shrew-like actions and

59 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. (New York: Columbia University, 1990).

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

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voice betrays her should-be female representation as a powerless woman and an unfaithful prostitute, offering instead a forthright and strong characterization.

The wedding music for Ju Xian in this film offers another audible symbol of her power. Wedding music is the audio representation of her victory of becoming a socially acceptable woman as well as her triumph in the “women’s battle” in which she competes with Dieyi for Xiaolou. By marrying Xiaolou, she can take off the ugly “clothes” of a prostitute, some looked down upon and violated, and taken on the role of the wife and mother accepted by mainstream moral society.

In the scene showing Ju Xian’s wedding day, a musical “parallel montage” presents the different situations Ju Xian and Dieyi experienced during the same day, connected by the wedding music. For Ju Xian, the crowds are applauding and cheering on the sides of the aisle, waiting for her appearance. A stepping back, tracking shot provides a small panorama of Ju Xian walking, led by two bridesmaids, to Xiaolou’s side. Then the image cuts to a medium front shot of Ju Xian, where she suddenly shakes off two bridesmaid’s leads and raises her own bridal veil, which is supposed to be done by the groom later. In this medium front shot, the shocked as well as disdainful reactions to Ju

Xian’s dauntless action contrasts with Ju Xian’s hidden face, a contrast that highlights her individuality and distinguishes her from other women. A close-up shot of Ju Xian’s face shows she is too excited to speak. She raises the veil, kicks off the red carpet, and quickly walks to Xiaolou’s side by herself. The circle of small panoramamedium shotclose- up shotsmall panorama increasingly emphasizes Ju Xian’s increasing boldness. In the

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soundtrack, the rumbustious wedding music and cheers from the crowd praise her success in overcoming social bias and taking Xiaolou away from Dieyi. At the same time, the diegetic wedding music, played by a group of suona (Chinese trumpets) and accompanied by a luo (a small drum) and the sound of firecrackers, acoustically amplifies the boisterous atmosphere adding to the visual excitement. There is no other sound that can compete with the wedding music and firecrackers—they have been beaten by Ju

Xian’s musical triumph.

The fanfare of the wedding music on Ju Xian’s side becomes the lament for Dieyi.

On Xiaolou and Ju Xian’s wedding night, Dieyi is in the mansion of Yuan Siye, the man who admires Dieyi’s performance and becomes attracted to him. Heartbroken by

Xiaolou’s marriage, Dieyi has no choice but to throw himself at Yuan Siye. Visually, a tracking shot from left to right penetrates a thinly veiled door and captures red candles— the sign of marriage—in the room then slowly moves to show Dieyi, drunk and wearing

Yu Ji’s makeup, applying the Chu king’s makeup to Yuan Siye’s face. Then a series of close-up shots between Dieyi and Yuan Siye occupy the rest of this scene:

Dieyi’s face fondled by Yuan Siye’s hand

pans from Dieyi’s single shot to the joint shot of Dieyi and Yuan Siye’s profiles

(several red candles between them)

shot/reverse shots between Dieyi and Yuan Siye’s contrasted facial expressions

The whole scene unfolds in an ambiguous, veil-covered way. Dieyi, in despair, tries to make Yuan Siye into the illusion of the Chu king, and by implication Xiaolou.

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Nevertheless, the veil-covered ambiguity visually negates the authenticity of Dieyi and

Yuan Siye’s “wedding”.

In the soundtrack, Ju Xian’s wedding music singularly overwhelms this scene and its several layers of functionality. Firstly, no live music is played in diegesis to cheer up the “wedding” scene, which again, works to deny the trueness of Dieyi and Yuan Siye’s

“marriage.” Secondly, the “borrowed” wedding music symbolically represents the sexual relationship between Dieyi and Yuan Siye—it vividly highlights the differences between this “dirty” relationship and the “normal-and-good” relationship of Xiaolou and Ju Xian’s marriage. Furthermore, when played in non-diegesis, Ju Xian’s wedding music cannot be actually heard by Dieyi within the narrative, which relentlessly ignores his emotion and serves to further aggravate his despair. In addition, when the film cuts to a close-up of

Dieyi’s face, Ju Xian’s wedding music in non-diegesis is transformed to what Gorbman calls meta-diegetic music, meaning that it occurs neither in diegesis nor in non-diegesis, but in one character’s mind, recalling the context of its previous appearances.62 It takes over this portion of the film’s narration so that we can read the character’s musical thoughts. Dieyi knows today is Xiaolou and Ju Xian’s wedding day and thus stays with

Yuan Siye for comfort. Even without seeing their wedding day Dieyi bears, their wedding music echoes like a ghost, constantly reminding him of this desperate reality.

Without a visual flashback, the return of this leitmotif shows that the “borrowed” wedding music neither exists within the actions of the scene nor is it really for Dieyi—he

62 Ibid., 23.

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does not really “marry” Yuan Siye nor can he stay with Xiaolou singing opera alone together for the rest of their lives. The wedding music for Dieyi, therefore, becomes an illusion of happiness and a funeral bell for reality (see Figure 3.5.).

Figure 3.5. Farewell My Concubine. With the same music, one woman’s sweet dream becomes another “woman’s” nightmare.

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As one woman’s sweet dream becomes another woman’s nightmare, the wedding music becomes Ju Xian’s “weapon” against all her opponents. The powerful music owned by Ju Xian helps her reach the pinnacle of her life’s success by excluding other

“inharmonic” sounds. At the same time, as in the dongxiao solo of the Song of Gaixia variation, the wedding music spatially connects these two women—Dieyi and Ju Xian— in a contradictly emotional position.

However, Ju Xian does not keep her brave voice and winning music through the whole film. She loses her voice in the trial scene during the Cultural Revolution. In this scene, Dieyi discloses Ju Xian’s previous identity as a prostitute, and this causes

Xiaolou’s forced betrayal. Although she experienced endless suffering in her previous life, Ju Xian stills stands up and remains confident. But all of her motivatopm and courage are from Xiaolou’s support. When hearing Xiaolou's forced confession “I don’t love her anymore, I want to divorce her,” Ju Xian’s final safeguard has been crushed. All of sudden, she is completely alone in the world without any protection. Suffering from the ultimate betrayal, her facial expression and physical movement show nothing. Audio presentation, responding to the close-up shot of Ju Xian’s face, is created in a three-layer cocoon of sound. The first layer, the voice of Xiaolou’s statement “I divorce her from now on” expands from lowness to loudness in realistic territory. Then the sound transforms to an encompassing sound, similar to the wedding music in Dieyi’s mind mentioned above, meta-diegetically permeating Ju Xian’s mind and echoing around.

Ironically at the same time, the second layer, a non-diegetic ascending melody with

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peaceful and hopeful sensibility presents a crescendo (this music will be discussed in detail in the following paragraphs). It gradually pervades the whole acoustic space while the image dissolves from the close-up shot of Ju Xian’s face to the upturned angle shot of the flaming opera costume. Yet between these two contradictory sonic layers, Ju Xian’s voice remains silent, which builds the third sonic layer.

After the trial when everyone has gone away, Ju Xian slowly walks to Dieyi to give him the sword, which is the symbol of the relationship of the Chu king and Yuji as well as Dieyi and Xiaolou, and then slowly leaves. On her way, she turns around to look at Dieyi twice, feeling like she wants to say something to him, but keeping silent eventually. One might expect her to yell at Dieyi, who destroys everything she has. But she doesn’t. Instead, she only sympathetically looks at Dieyi, knowing that she has destroyed everything for Dieyi as well—they are now in the same tragedy. With the close-up shot depicting both of their faces, neither of them speaks in the end—thus audiences cannot clearly figure out the complicated emotions going on in their minds.

The next scene is cut to Xiaolou and Ju Xian’s home yard where audiences suddenly hear

Xiaolou’s screaming Ju Xian’s name, and see Xiaolou and Dieyi fighting each other.

Then the image is cut to the scene where Ju Xian has committed suicide by hanging herself in the living room. From the visual perspective, the camera gives many close-up shots to those items that remind us of Xiaolou and Ju Xian’s wedding day: wedding shoes, wedding candles, wedding character, wedding picture, and most importantly, the dead Ju

Xian wearing her wedding dress. From the acoustic perspective, we can still hear Xiaolou

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and Dieyi’s screaming outside the window. At the same time, a Model Opera song, that sings “Listen to grandma’s story about revolution. How brave and solemn it should be!

But turns out, I am just suffering too much pain…” is enveloping the whole sonic space.

At last, the sound of the pendulum and chime of the clock ends the scene, metaphorically signaling for Ju Xian’s death.

Ju Xian keeps silent all the way to her suicide. Her diegetic silence hinders audience’s interpretation of her emotional activity on one hand, yet maximizes the possibility of her emotional expression to the highest level on the other. Her silence at these crucial moments is the eloquent presentation that goes beyond the fullest meaning of reality. At the same time, the surrounding sonic presentations, both diegetic and non- diegetic, provide a contradictory way of reinforcing the strength of Ju Xian’s silence. In contrast to Xiaolou’s statement of betrayal during the trial, Ju Xian does not let herself change into a desperate woman whose furious emotion erupts.

The song played in the scene of Ju Xian’s death is from one of the scenes in the

Model Opera The Red Lantern (Hong Deng Ji), where the grandma is singing her own story about revolution to her grandchild. Compared to Xiaolou’s despair after Ju Xian’s death, this Model Opera song, influencing audiences’ feelings in non-diegesis, objectively summarizes the story of her life—she has had a woman’s revolution of struggles between resist—defeated—resist with braveness, solemnness and too much pain. On the other hand, this inscribed female voice in the soundtrack melding with Ju

Xian’s experience of fighting for life that we see in the visuals and narrative, has been

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transformed to her acoustic voice or her metaphorical voice/self when she loses her voice during the trial, to express who she really is and what she has actually been through.

Complicating Ju Xian’s emotions is the duality between the radical male’s screaming inside the narrative and the passion within calm of the music outside of the narrative.

Under the semiotically multilayered sonic fabric, Ju Xian rationally fulfills herself in a sufficiently complete and dramatic characterization of woman as well as heroine.

During the whole scene above, a preexisting music appears in the trial when

Xiaolou betrays Dieyi. It is an ascending orchestral music, in crescendo: it expands in non-diegetic space, and gradually smoothes the negative effect of Xiaolou’s voice. This warm music was previously played in the scene when Xiao Douzi, on his way to escape from the opera troupe, sees the performance of the Chu king in the opera Farewell My

Concubine for the first time. Previously in this film, Xiao Douzi could not endure the pain and punishment of the opera training with the troupe. So he runs away (there is a scene displaying his sorrowful goodbye with Xiao Shito). However, when Xiao Douzi sees the excited battle scene that the Chu king plays onstage, the first time and the only time that the film shows off the bravery and strength of the Chu king in the opera, Xiao

Douzi is deeply attracted to this manly role. Meanwhile, an ascending orchestral sound appears non-diegetically, sweeps away Xiao Douzi’s fears of opera training, and builds up initial faith for his life—the faith of performing Yu Ji onstage by the Chu king’s side, and living with Xiao Shitou in life forever. Then Xiao Douzi immediately runs back to the troupe, continues his training and becomes obsessed with opera performance. The

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orchestral music played in this scene becomes the “hope and love for the king” music.

However, as Xiaolou leaves for Ju Xian, Dieyi realizes that his own faith is not for

Xiaolou the person, but for the spirit that Xiaolou plays as the Chu king onstage—the spirit that one can bravely keep his/her faith and fulfill himself/herself in his/her life no matter what. The “hope and love for the king” music transcends Dieyi’s longing for

Xiaolou, to express Dieyi’s faith in the spirit that the Chu king and Yu Ji possess.

Therefore, when the same “hope and love for the king” music re-appears in this trial, in addition to the silence that calmly demonstrates Ju Xian’s ultimate loyalty to Xiaolou “till death do them part.” Applying this music in such a visually ruthless scene aims to articulate Ju Xian’s despair upon Dieyi's rebuke, and on the other prevents Ju Xian from emotionally disrupting the scene in aural terms. The Dieyi-owned music, along with Ju

Xian’s silence, creates a heard-unheard duality in the sound space that doubles the strength of her faith. At the same time, Dieyi’s pre-owned music, by projecting its reverse sentiment onto Ju Xian’s tragedy, also takes its “revenge” on Ju Xian’s wedding music for attacking Dieyi before, and thus connects the two characters in a contrary emotional way.

Musical Connection in Shared Emotion

Despite the fact that Dieyi and Ju Xian are hostile to each other because of the composition for Xiaolou, they still share similar experiences and emotions as female characters in this film. Regardless, they are both the “Yu Ji” for Xiaolou, whether in the opera or film narrative; they both lose the right to be a real mother. Therefore, one 196

particular piece of music in the film version of Farewell My Concubine is designed exclusively to represent their motherhood in “the absence of their real child.” It is also played by the dongxiao and is accompanied by the orchestra in non-diegesis. Sharing a similar musical style with the dongxiao variation of the Song of Gaixia, this piece of music appears twice in the film.

In this film, Dieyi was sold by his mother to the opera troupe when he was a boy; therefore, motherhood was missing from his childhood. Although Dieyi plays a female role onstage and lives as a “woman” as an adult, his biological identity still distances himself from motherhood. Yet his feeling of “motherhood” never disappears. Therefore, in the scene where Yuan Siye invites Dieyi to a banquet, Xiaolou leaves to be with Ju

Xian, which causes Dieyi extreme grief. On screen, Dieyi, wearing Yu Ji’s makeup and hair accessories, sits blankly in front of a mirror—the audience, at this moment, can only see Dieyi’s reflection, which projects him as a “woman.” Yet the illusionary image projected by the mirror reveals the truth: Dieyi is not a real woman and hence has lost

Xiaolou. The dongxiao appears in the soundtrack, melancholic, and crying out the music of “motherhood” for Dieyi’s frustration about his reality—the reality that he is neither a biologically complete woman nor a psychologically normal man.

Then the image is switched to a close-up of Dieyi’s hands pulling a quilt over the sleeping children who are living in the troupe with him. Along with the image, the orchestra performs a relatively warm chord progression that resolves the dissonant chord from the preceding crying dongxiao tune. The image is cut from a close-up of Dieyi’s

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smiling face to the children, to where audiences see him, without any mirror projection, dressing up in men’s clothes and without makeup—his original gender identity has been confirmed. At the same time, the dongxiao repeats its crying of the “motherhood” theme in response to the close-up of Dieyi looking at the sleeping children—his motherhood is thus presented through the visual and soundtrack. However, the orchestra then repeats the chord progression, not following the dongxiao but synchronously playing with it. Unlike its first appearance, in which one plays after the other in a call and response action, in this second appearance the two parts are incompatible, articulating the reality that Dieyi has tried to make up for his lost and missing “motherhood” by taking care of the young children in a mothering role. Yet he can never be a real mother.

For Ju Xian, her ideal life is to marry to Xiaolou, give birth, and live a peaceful life. Unfortunately, she miscarries their baby during the chaos in the opera theater and thus loses the chance to be a mother. Ju Xian’s sentiment of “motherhood” is revoked when she sees Dieyi trying to rehabilitate from his drug addiction. After a painful struggle, in which Xiaolou helped to control Dieyi’s drug addiction, Ju Xian hastily comes into the room to aid Dieyi while Xiaolou is getting him medicine. The camera provides a subjective shot of the group photo of Xiaolou and Dieyi that was broken by his delirious actions just a moment ago, and then switches to a medium shot of Ju Xian looking at the exhausted Dieyi on the bench. While Dieyi keeps whispering to himself

“Mother, I feel cold… Mother, the water has become ice…”—phrases he said when his mother was trying to cut off his sixth finger in childhood—Ju Xian spontaneously covers

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him with clothes, holds him in her arms, and cuddles him like her baby with her tears.

Corresponding to the visual track, the non-diegetic music for the “motherhood” theme appears, playing exactly the same as its first appearance to construct Ju Xian’s lost motherhood in musical discourse. However, the “motherhood” music always sounds in non-diegetic space. Its emotional comfort can never be accessed by Ju Xian, and this denies, as much as it does Dieyi, the opportunity to be a real mother. While displaying sorrow in melody but harshness in reality, the music for “motherhood” indeed reconciles the dysfunctional relationship between Dieyi and Ju Xian and ties them to a shared harmonic resonance as people, as well as “women” in musical territory.

Conclusion

Farewell My Concubine raises two important issues concerning the construction of women through preexisting music in Chinese films. Firstly, the use of preexisting music in films can establish a more complex and layered connection between the music, characters, and film narrative. Its preexisting cultural context can bring multiple interpretations to the new story, strengthening the interaction of each element within the mise-en-scene. For the purpose of constructing women in Chinese films, preexisting music can resonate with an existing model from any past period as well as any region to reconstruct the female characters beyond already-defined stereotypes and build them into a very particular subjectivity. The two preexisting pieces in the Peking Opera version of

Farewell My Concubine are presented as double theme music in its film version, serving to build a dual-layer presentation for the characters both in their onstage and offstage

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lives, as well as for their entangled relationships. Yu Ji’s heroic theme music is designed exclusively to shape Dieyi in this film into a Yu Ji like figure—a real character in life has been, through the pre-existing music, turned into a theatrical heroine. Courtesy of the

“borrowed” music, Dieyi comes to share characteristics with the theatrical female role he possesses, and eventually becomes a heroine who always struggles in art and life but who always insists on faith. Although passionate enough, the first theme music is under careful control without subduing the emotion on its presented character. The second lamenting theme music, which is originally the Chu king’s song, is gradually “de- strengthened” and re-configured to an emotional instrumental lament. It has been transferred from a song that tells a hero’s crying for his unfinished ambition in the opera, to a thematic melody that presents female characters’ emotions in a sublime but rational way in the film. It moves from representing intimate brotherhood to representing personal lament, and is eventually possessed by female roles, therefore taking on the important role of constructing women characters' first theme music. Nevertheless, its effeminacy in musical sound never erases its gendered strength in emotional discourse. The two theme musics move on and surpass their pre-existing contents, and work together to intensify the complicated relationships between the three main characters. More importantly, by using the musically strong-soft contrastive model, the two theme musics insist emphatically on their “rational” dimensions and claim such “masculine only” virtues to female characters, while strongly highlighting their controversial identities and humanness as presented in this film.

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Additionally, a special musical motif furthers the functionality that ordinary preexisting music possesses in the film and plays a vital role in constructing women. In the film Farewell My Concubine, the connection between Ju Xian and Dieyi is established by the music of “the hope and the love for the king” theme, the wedding music, and the “motherhood” theme. The first two pieces are shared by Dieyi and Ju Xian, which affect each other in different scenes in counter-emotional dynamics. Yet the third piece exposes the same sentiment of the lost (or missing) motherhood resonated by the two female characters. Such “preexisting in film” soundtracks connect spatially/temporally disjunctive scenes into a larger coherent unit to present women musically.

Secondly, preexisting songs heard from a female voice within the narrative, the female singing voice in particular, displays multi-layered functionalities in associating female characters in Chinese films. For narrative purposes, the exact and subtle meaning of a particular sung piece can reflect on specific personal significances for either an individual character or broader narrative concerns. For character constructing purposes, female singing can break the patriarchal limits on repressing women’s emotional expression, and give voice to them through music. At the same time, unlike the non- diegetic “musical voiceover” which cannot be accessed by female characters—such as the “unknown woman” in diegesis in chapter 3, diegetic female singing directly bestows on women an expressive medium within the narrative, which makes their power grow even stronger. In the film version of Farewell My Concubine, Dieyi has been granted the

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ultimate female singing voice which no one, especially men, can resist. Nevertheless,

Dieyi’s initial opera performing is by no means restricted to showing off his capacity as well as his sexual attraction. Instead, he immerses himself in the theatrical world in order to achieve his life principle and faith. Through his female singing, Dieyi has the chance to express his emotion as he wants, to experience the life he longs for, and to fulfill himself as he wishes.

Although preexisting music was not introduced into films specifically to aid female characters, it has shown its potential and uniqueness of presenting and representing women in diverse ways within particular Chinese historical and cultural contexts. The idiosyncratic functionalities of preexisting music provide a new perspective, one that is crucial to understanding the construction of women by projecting them beyond a particular spatial-temporal limit in Chinese films.

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Chapter Four: Women, Relationships, and Popular Music in Contemporary

Chinese Urban Cinema

In Cry Woman (Kuqi de nvren, 2002), a film that could be labeled as contemporary Chinese urban cinema, there is a scene displaying a middle aged female singer with heavy makeup, coquettishly singing Teresa Deng’s famous song

“Sweetness” (Tian mimi) in Karaoke style at a low-class club. The camera gives a stable shot of audiences, only half listening, cheering the singer occasionally in order to be polite (see figure 4.1.). After singing, the female singer walks down to the audiences and thanks them, with a big smile, for their support. Yet when she sits down with her friend, her smiling face has changed into a tired one. As her friend asks her

“how have you been?” she waves her hand in frustration, only replying, “Let’s drink.”

At this moment, the background music is another clumsy woman—heard but not seen—singing another Teresa Deng song, “I Miss You So Much” (Zhende haoxiang ni).

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Figure 4.1. Cry Woman. The middle-aged lady is singing “Sweetness” onstage while the audiences are cheering.

Judging from the scene above, we can identify three important circumstances in terms of women and music. First, the female singers (the seen and the unseen ones) are more like amateur performers than well-trained musicians. Second, the women are singing pop songs. Third, what the women sing onstage has nothing to do with what they think and experience in life. In other words, music does not stand as a medium for women’s self-expression, and therefore performs a different role than the ones I have discussed in previous chapters. These women no longer use music to tell their stories and release their emotions. Instead, their singing is perhaps only a matter of survival.

This scene of Cry Woman is dramatically different in the way it presents woman’s singing, as compared with the film scenes mentioned in chapters two and three. A quick initial observation begins to explain the change: Cry Woman is urban cinema

204 and takes place in contemporary China. The genre itself as well as the time and space of the film text largely differ from previous films. But why does the film use pop songs and popular music? Why does the popular music not associate with women as their “truth teller”? What factors change music’s functionality for women? From this change, what conclusion can we make in terms of the relationship of music and women in contemporary Chinese urban cinema?

Popular Music in Contemporary Chinese Urban Cinema: Definition and

Characteristics

Before launching the discussion of popular music and women in contemporary

Chinese urban cinema, it is necessary to clarify the term “popular music” that will be used in this chapter. Popular music is a problematical term that has been widely discussed from musical, cultural, historical, geographical, and technological perspectives. Theodor W. Adorno considers popular music distinct from “serious” music and “art” music because it is a “standardized (e.g., in thirty-two bar song forms, in a range limited to one octave), mass-produced, and commodified product, involving minimal creativity.”1 Peter Manuel argues that popular music can be distinguished from other types of music since it is largely disseminated by the mass media, and this substantially influenced its form. 2 In this sense, some of the well-known “classical” music—such as the first movement of Mozart’s Eine kleine

1 Theodor W. Adorno, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, (New York: Institute of Social Research, 1941, IX): 17-48. 2 Peter Manuel, Popular Music of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 205

Nachtmusik in G or the famous opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth

Symphony—could also be considered “popular music” in contemporary times in terms of their wide recognition and countless appearances in mass media. The reception of popular music also varies from society to society. In Italy opera is widely popular across social classes, where other countries treat it as a refined art form that is appreciated by certain elite groups. As there is no way to give a formal definition to popular music, it is necessary to locate popular music in particular cultural and social context, and define it in terms of theme, style, production, performance, and reception.

In China, the term “popular music” is interpreted variously through different historical backgrounds. Xie Chengqiang has described the development of Chinese popular music in the twentieth century in the song “What Are the 90s Gonna Bring”

(Jiushi niandai zenmeyang):

The 30’s was a laid-back melody The 40’s a tender threnody The 50’s had that vigorous feel As all the nation smelted steel The 60’s sang “going down to the country” The 70’s model operas were revolutionary The 80’s was breakdance but that’s not all There was a fever for rock and roll Still there are many songs to sing.3

As we can see from the lyrics above, Chinese popular music in every decade of

3 Chengqiang Xie, translated by Linda Javin in Asian Wall Street Journal 12.10.1990. 206 the pre-1980 period shared certain similarities: it has been pressed to the service of various social movements and political needs. During the Maoist period (1949-1976), popular music was designed primarily for ideological purposes, whereas in the 1980s the concrete themes and dominant styles of popular music were more diverse. This was due to social transformation and globalization in China. More and more genres came to co-exist, claiming various purposes. In academia, there has been growing scholarship on popular music in contemporary China in terms of political, economic, cultural, nationalist, and gender discussions. Yet many of them, as Nimrod

Baranovitch argues, mainly build up their discussions on a binary framework—mainstream versus margin, state versus individual, hegemony versus resistance.4 Andrew Jone’s Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary

Chinese Popular Music (1992), for instance, is one of the pioneering studies on contemporary Chinese popular music. He mainly categorized Chinese popular music around the 1990s into two broadly defined genres: tongsu music that is officially sanctioned and underground rock music that is often labeled as anti-hegemonic mainstream. Jones mainly compares the two genres by emphasizing their different orientations of ideology, production, performance, and emotion. He concludes that the genre of popular music in contemporary China around 1990 is to “indicate the whole constellation of institutional structures, activities, individual sensibilities, discursive practices and ideological aims by which any given type of popular music is produced,

4 Nimrod Baranovitch, China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, 1978-1997, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003):7. 207 performed, disseminated, discussed, and used by its audienes.”5 However, he almost completely ignores the significant position of the soft, sentimental, and non-ideologically related popular music from Hong Kong and Taiwan or in Hong

Kong and Taiwan style. This style leads Chinese people to listening experiences that go beyond the hegemony-resistance duality, getting away from serious issues such as nationalism and ideology, and actually engaging their private sentiments in a public voice.

To narrow down the genre, the term “popular music” used in this chapter mainly refers to liuxing gequ and rock music, the two genres that are most prevelant in contemporary Chinese urban cinema. Liuxing gequ (pop song) includes songs from

Hong Kong and Taiwan and pop songs produced in mainland China. Musically speaking, these songs have a standardized musical structure such as quadruple meter, moderate speed, and thirty-two units. Emotionally speaking, they are created neither for political propaganda nor for ideological brainwashing. Their lyrics cover the sentiments such as life, love, friendship, and family. Rock music, on the other hand, is much more intense in sonic design, featuring electric guitar and bass, amplifier, keyboard and saxophone. Its musical style is both influenced by Western rock music and Chinese folk music. Most of the rock music heard in contemporary Chinese cinema was produced in mainland China. These songs are not particularly created for the purpose of political rebellion. Most of their lyrics concern life changes due to the

5 Andrew Jones, Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music, (Ithaca, New York: East Asian Program at Cornell University, 1992): 3. 208 social transformation in the 1980s and claim for self-expression. (I will discuss

Chinese liuxing gequ and rock music separately in detail later in this chapter).

Although liuxing gequ and rock music are distinctively different in terms of production, theme, style, and reception, their applications in film are not oppositional nor articulated in absolutes and binaries such as mainstream and margin, hegemony and resistance. Instead, liuxing gequ becomes a key aural component of the mise-en-scene in Chinese urban cinema, heard either diegetically or non-diegetically, in live performance or lip-synch, in a sing-along or during dancing, on source radio or record players. Ultimately, the complex intermingling of musical styles in contemporary Chinese urban cinema becomes a realistic and telling metaphor for society. The thinking about popular music in film soundtracks—in their many varied manifestations—is crucial to the understanding of the interactions among individual, genders, public, and society in contemporary China.

Although most popular music used in Chinese urban cinema existed roughly contemporaneously to the films, its nature is fundamentally different from the preexisting music I have discussed in chapter three. There are three main factors defining popular music that are particularly apt for Chinese urban cinema. Historically speaking, when the subject matter of a film involves a specific era in recent history, only popular music from that time can evoke the feelings of that period. Chinese urban cinema uses popular music that is composed, produced, and performed in the contemporary timeframe rather than early Chinese popular music or any other musical

209 genre in previous historical periods. The reason is obvious. Robb Wright has pointed out that for those who lived through that era, familiar examples of its music “can have a powerful effect on their reaction to accompanying images, carrying with them not only the musical memories of the day, but the attitudes and mores that were current at the time.”6 The historical and cultural contexts of pre-1980s popular music are likely to create a strong sense of nostalgia. In so doing, the pre-1980s popular music may blur or even weaken the main theme of post-socialist realism, the theme that most

Chinese urban cinema is devoted to. Wright states that “popular music by definition is of the moment,” 7 and only popular music created in contemporary China can reinforce the Chinese urban cinema motif of displaying the reality of the city.

Culturally speaking, most popular music used in Chinese urban cinema is a

“made in China” commodity, including the popular music from the mainland, Hong

Kong, and Taiwan. Robb Wright points out that popular music is “culturally relative—a shared experiential vocabulary is essential, and the greater that shared experience, the more effective its associative power.”8 Chinese-language popular music is most frequently heard in reality in the same way it is used in urban cinema. It can, as Wright claims, “evoke and subtly call to the viewer’s mind a related or comparable situation, to act as shorthand to steer the viewer emotionally.” 9

6 Robb Wright, “Score vs. Song: Art, Commerce, and the H Factor in Film and Television Music,” Popular Music and Film, edited by Ian Inglis, (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003): 13. 7 Ibid, 11. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 210

Non-Chinese popular music is occasionally heard in contemporary Chinese urban film.

Yet its appearances are usually for particular purposes at given moments, invoking the

“modern” and “popular” rather than “foreign,” and not invoking communal experience as such. They are neither noticeably identified nor play an important role in film.

Musically speaking, the popular music used in Chinese urban cinema has many common features. First, most of the pre-existing songs were already popular with the public before they were used in the films. For the occasional original scores, their composers, such as Zhang Yadong, Gao Xiaosong, Xiao Ke, Wang Jian, Dou

Wei, Cui Jian, were already been famous in the Chinese popular music industry. Thus the film scores they composed have been heavily imprinted with popular music styles.

Second, most of the popular music—both liuxing gequ and rock music—is played in quadruple meters—the standard meter of popular music. Third, popular music in

Chinese urban cinema is usually played on electronic instruments, and their sound effects are far beyond what traditional acoustic instruments can do. Electronic instruments and musical synthesizers are usually heard in the soundtracks of Chinese urban cinema, and their newly created sounds take on different functions than acoustic musical sounds do. It is as Anahid Kassabian suggests, that the “gradual disappearance of effective distinctions between noise, sound and music offers new possibilities for the roles that music might play within film….film soundtracks may be constructed from a variety of aural materials, in which traditional concepts of

211 melody, progression and narrative are replaced by technicity, repletion and iteration.”10

The identity of popular music in Chinese urban cinema is mostly public rather than private, which can be demonstrated according to its nature as well as its applications in film. First, popular music represents collective memory or sentiments rather than a presentation of private emotion. Unlike an original score that is composed to a particular scenario or character’s mood, popular music enjoys more autonomy and may be used to characterize anyone in any cinematic situation—a woman’s song can be used in a man’s scene while a heterosexual love song can be used for friendship between two men—as long as it resonates with similar feelings.

Second, popular songs can be sung by anyone regardless of gender, age, and background. Their performers need no professional training. They sing not with a particular goal in mind but for fun, for money, or for other purposes. Third, in contemporary Chinese urban cinema popular music is mostly presented (sung and played) in public spaces. If music is diegetic, it is usually heard in such places as barbershops, the street, public broadcasting, night clubs, small plazas, and restaurants.

This principle particularly applies to the independent urban cinema whose goal is to highlight social reality (e.g. the films of Jia Zhangke, Zhang Yuan, and Guan Hu).

When popular music is used in non-diegetic space, it usually accompanies a collage of images, connecting different people in diverse temporal-spatial dimensions and

10 Ian Inglis ed., Popular Music and Film, (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003): 5. 212 providing a uniform or static text to manipulate the connection of different people or deconstruct different temporal-spatial dimensions. Many examples can be found in the new urban cinema by Xu Jinglei, Zhang Yang and Zhang Yibai. Their films often montages accompanied by popular music that juxtapose different characters, places, and emotions within the same song. Therefore, the public identity makes popular music, in both diegesis and non-diegesis, run freely and creatively in Chinese urban cinema, a film genre where no particular gender or individual exclusively possesses musical authority. Popular music in films presents a more or less involuntary reflection of the daily lives of contemporary Chinese urban society by embodying general as well as specific meanings relating to people’s relationships in public space.

Its function is mainly not for individual expression but for public identity.

This chapter focuses on issues relating to women, people’s relationships, and popular music in contemporary Chinese urban cinema. I examine popular music, mainly the liuxing gequ and rock music, as used in Chinese urban cinema in order to discuss: (1) how women connect to liuxing gequ; (2) how the relationship between liuxing gequ and women reflects their situations in contemporary Chinese urban society; (3) if liuxing gequ no longer associates with women only, how it is presented in diegesis in terms of lyrics, performance, meanings, and space, and in non-diegesis in terms of musical texture and editing, to articulate people’s relationships in an audio-visual duality; and (4) how rock music indicates women’s experiences and women’s connection with the larger social context in contemporary Chinese urban

213 society. In the end, I contend that popular music, both liuxing gequ and rock music in contemporary Chinese urban cinema, no longer stands as a “personal” channel for women’s presentations and representations only. Instead, popular music indicates various people’s interpersonal connections in film by varying from their initial themes.

In this way, women are placed in a larger interpersonal public space where women are part of the public and share the music with others. This change is one of the consequences resulting from the social transformation involving the shifts of the women’s roles in economy, politics, media, and culture of contemporary China.

Women and Liuxing gequ in Chinese Urban Cinema: What Does Singing Mean to Women

Women in contemporary Chinese urban cinema are portrayed as strong individualists rather than as symbols of nation or merely subordinate to men. Because of the change in women’s attitudes, roles, and experiences in contemporary society, their images in Chinese urban cinema are no longer limited to traditional roles of

“obedient daughters,” “virtuous wives,” and “good mothers” in the domestic space.

Generally speaking, there are three relative freedoms for women identified by contemporary Chinese urban cinema.

First, women are free from the limits of the domestic space as well as the control of the elders. Contemporary Chinese urban cinema no longer limits women to the household. Instead, it focuses on women’s experiences in a larger social environment.

Many of these films show that women are far away from their homes, and living

214 independently in a new place, which weakens the bond with their families. They encounter much more than just anxiety about marriage, as women faced in previous films; instead their diverse experiences include both the personal problems of working, relationship, friendship, and public conflicts with the society. At the same time, unlike women whom the elders constrained in suffocated spaces in previous films, most women’s parents and parents-in-law are absent in contemporary urban cinema. Even if the family elders exist, they no longer retain absolute power over women. The absence of family signifies the greater freedom of women’s life choices.

Second, women are largely independent. Female characters in urban cinema are presented as working women rather than economic dependents of men. After getting married, most of them choose to continue working outside the home.

Sometimes women’s incomes even become the main support for their families.

Meanwhile, their goals for working are not only to satisfy their need to be economically independent, but also to promote their public status. The discussion of their careers will be a main focus in the later part of the chapter.

Third, women in contemporary urban cinema experience some sexual emancipation without harsh moral judgment by the society. Unlike the women in previous Chinese films whose marriages are arranged by family or some male authority and whose sexuality is extremely repressed, women in urban cinema choose their partners based on their own will. A female character can be sexually involved with anyone for various purposes—for fun, for money, for power, for career, and even

215 for saving their lovers and husbands. Urban cinema does not depict their sexual activities with a strong subjective prejudice or patriarchal judgment. Instead, these films more objectively record women’s real-life sexual experiences. These films not only display plenty of non-leading female characters who are working in the sex trade, but also fearlessly place their female protagonists in sexually emancipated roles. Li

Xin in Weekend Lover swings between two guys—A Xi and Lala; the married woman

Wang Guixiang in Cry Woman re-finds passion with her ex-lover, and devotes herself to the policeman in order to save her husband; Meimei in Xiao Wu dumps Xiaowu for a rich man for money and power; Zhong Ping in Platform, without her parents’ approval, is sexually involved with her boyfriend Zhang Jun, and then aborts her unexpected pregnancy; Fu Shaoyin in The Making of Steel becomes the concubine of many rich men for luxury life. The bold revelation of these women’s “improper” sexual activities, which are initiated by their own wills and desires, signal rebellion against women’s long-time repressed sexuality.

Accordingly, women’s connection to music in Chinese urban cinema also differs from previous ones. Indeed, the freedoms women have do not mean they are absolutely free from worries in society. Instead, the signs of their freedoms display objectively the changes of women’s situations in the way no clear–cut dichotomy between men as agents and women as victims exists in film. With much less repression within or outside the narrative, women’s voices share an equal position with men’s, on one hand, and retain their power over men in musical performance, on

216 the other. Nevertheless, unlike women in previous films who are allowed by music to express what they are kept from saying in real life, music in Chinese urban cinema loses its functionality as the absolute channel for women’s self-presentation. Instead, music in these films corresponds to the collective identity of public memories rather than personal experience, and presents and represents characters as a whole.

Among all of the female types appeared in Chinese urban cinema, one group of women particularly connects to music—the female liuxing gequ entertainers. They mainly belong to a special group of women who are music entertainers rather than music professionals per se. Their emergence results from the tremendous changes have occurred in China’s rural areas since 1980. The economic reform transformed

China from a traditional agricultural society to a modernized industrial social system.

Consequently, de-agriculturalization has proceeded at an unprecedented rate: the absolute number of laborers engaged in agricultural production has decreased, and a large part of the workforce has shifted from agricultural to non-agricultural industries.

According to Jin Yihong’s statistics, by the early 1990s, more than 100 million of the nation’s total rural workforce of 450 million had left farming and taken jobs in the manufacturing, service, and other nonagricultural sectors.11 The reclassification of rural occupations accompanied this shift of the workforce. Rural residents, formerly listed under the single heading of nongming (peasant), are now classified into such

11 Yihong Jin, “Rural Women and Their Road to Public Participation,” Holding Up Half the Sky: Chinese Women Past, Present, and Future, edited by Jie Tao, Bijun Zheng, and Shirley L. Mow, (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 2004): 221. 217 occupational groups as agricultural laborers; rural workers; township or village collective enterprises, private enterprise owners; village cadres, and so forth.12 Many are attracted by the seemingly endless opportunities in urban areas, and they give up their old lives in the countryside and develop their new lives in the city. Beginning in the mid-1980s, young people from China’s rural villages began their migrations to industrially developed regions. At first there were several million. By the 1990s, their number had grown to tens of millions. The census in 2000 put the total at almost 90 million.13

Within this large group of migrants, approximately one-third are women, totaling around 26 million. They come primarily from undeveloped inland provinces and poor rural villages. Most of them seek employment opportunities in cities and towns within their own province, but 20-40 percent leaves their home provinces and move to industrially developed regions along the east coast.14 Among the various reasons these women leave home, three primary ones stand out. The first two are “to earn money” and “to help the family get out of poverty,” which resulted from difficulty of supporting the whole family by only man’s working. The third reason is “to see the world and to seek opportunities for self-development,” influenced by the modern ideas of gender equality and women’s liberty in modern China.15 These reasons break

12 Ibid. 13 Shen Tan, “Leaving Home and Coming Back: Experiences of Rural Migrant Women,” Holding Up Half the Sky: Chinese Women Past, Present, and Future, edited by Jie Tao, Bijun Zheng, and Shirley L. Mow, (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 2004): 248. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 249. 218 the tradition that women must stay with parents before marriage and fulfill responsibilities for her new family at home after getting married. Therefore, such migration promotes for the growth of individualism and autonomy in these women’s lives.

However, being a migrant worker is not easy for rural women. The labor market is split between locals and migrants. First, the jobs open to outsiders are usually the physically demanding, low-wage jobs that the locals are unwilling to do. Second, employment advertisements clearly state gender requirements. Most jobs that female migrant workers do are unskilled, labor-intensive and poorly paid. Third, many of the jobs for women are in the service industry such as small restaurants, night clubs or massage clubs, where the sex trade can easily emerge and grow. These female rural workers, regardless of their intention or not, are thus easily led into prostitution.16

Among these jobs, performing liuxing gequ is the one form of work that connects women to music most closely; yet the characteristics of popular music differentiate female liuxing gequ entertainers from previous female musicians. In terms of technique, traditional opera and other artistic musical genres require strict long-term training. A person needs years of practice to utilize these skills. Liuxing gequ, however, can be easily sung by anyone who has no musical background. In terms of performance, an opera singer usually performs in a concert hall or theatre fully furnished with orchestra, sound-control table and other necessary equipment and

16 Ibid. 250. 219 professional staff. But a female liuxing gequ entertainer can sing in any domestic or public space simply with a microphone, recording, and speaker, or even singing without accompaniment. Whereas an opera singer mostly pursues the artistic ideal and fame in singing, the liuxing gequ entertainer aims to please her customers for economic benefit. Whereas an opera singer is mostly judged by her devotion to the role she performs and the artistic expression she presents in singing and performing, the female liuxing gequ entertainer is evaluated by such non-musical factors as whether she satisfies employers’ or customers’ particular requirements.

Female liuxing gequ entertainer can frequently be seen in Chinese urban cinema.

The leading characters such as Meimei in Xiao Wu (1998), Ruan Hong in So Close to

Paradise (Biandang guniang, 1999), Qiaoqiao in Unknown Pleasures (Ren xiaoyao,

2002), and Xiaoyun in Dam Street (Hong Yan, 2005), are the stereotypical female liuxing gequ entertainers. There are also countless similar women appearing as supporting characters in film. As pop singers, these women are not exclusive to

Chinese urban cinema. They share a similar image with their Western counterparts on screen. Kelly Konway, in her discussion of the chanteuse realiste (realist singer) in

French film of 1930s, demonstrated the realist popular song’s association with changing construction of femininity and class. She points out that the incorporation of songs and singers is an important phenomenon in both French film and popular music of that era. And one particularly compelling crossover figure from live entertainment to the French cinema is the realist song. This musical genre, which mainly narrates

220 poverty and prostitution, quickly became “associated almost exclusively with female performers.”17 Its performers are usually the poor and dispossessed women such as prostitutes, waitresses, or failed singers in cheap bars. Konway argues that the realist song functions, in a multifaceted way, in French cinema of the 1930s “as the mark of authenticity in the representation of the underworld, as a symbol of transgressed female sexuality, and as the repository of anxiety over new cultural roles for women.”18

Konway brings out the relationship between popular music, women, and public space. Yet she concludes that the realist song associated with female singers is “one of the few forums for the expression of female subjectivity and validation of women’s experience in its era.”19 In the Chinese case, the similar pop singer—the female liuxing gequ entertainer—connects to popular music in a different way. These singers are all poorly educated, and are capable of doing only low-skill work. Therefore, the publicity and the flexibility of liuxing gequ require little from the performers, which gives these women a chance. Most of them are music amateurs who live on performance yet never devote themselves to it. They work at Karaoke clubs, night clubs, and non-professional music groups. They work purposefully to satisfy and entertain people, occasionally involving the sex trade, in exchange for money.

17 Kelley Conway, “Flowers of the Asphalt: The Chanteuse Realiste in 1930s French Cinema,” Soundtrack Available: Essays on Films and Popular Music, edited by Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001): 135. 18 Ibid. 154. 19 Ibid. 136. 221

Therefore, a female liuxing gequ entertainer can easily manipulate the song by her will and achieve her goal through it. She has no need to truly immerse herself in the emotion that the song presents, and can easily finish the performance without connecting her experiences and emotions to the music.

Cry Woman: A Strange Relation between Pop Song and Women

The film Cry Woman (2002), directed by Liu Bingjian, is perhaps one of the best examples to display the reality of female migrant workers whose job is associated with liuxin gequ. The film tells a story of a young and ambitious migrant woman

Wang Guixiang who dreams to develop a great career in the urban city. Unfortunately her gambling-addicted husband drags her into a miserable life when he is sentenced to jail after hurting people. In order to bail out her husband, Guixiang goes back to her hometown to look for the help from her ex-boyfriend Liu Youming—the man who is running a funeral supplies business. Guixiang not only re-discovers passion for her ex, but she also becomes a successful funeral mourner that brings her fortune. However, her husband is shot to death when he is trying to break out of prison. The film ends with Guixiang’s actual keening for her husband’s death. Ironically, she eventually gets monetary rewards for her vivid “keening” performance at someone else’s funeral.

Besides the scene that has been described at the beginning of the chapter, all of the liuxing gequ in Cry Woman are from the female protagonist’s singing at funerals.

She was a local opera performer before she came to the urban city. Yet opera singing did not bring her success, even though the opera training gives her an attractive voice.

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On the contrary, Guixiang’s poor singing of liuxing gequ as well as her “astonishing” dress-up in funeral lament helps her gain the popularity and fortune. It may suggest that the liuxing gequ empower the female protagonist with special charisma—the well-known tune, openly-accepted lyrics and associated body movement can easily draw attentions and arouse sympathy, echoing with their own experiences and emotions.

Guixiang’s “talent” of keening is scouted by her ex-lover Liu Youming, who realizes her wail is great for funeral laments. He persuades her to be a professional mourner to make money. In one scene, Guixiang is learning the lyrics and singing style of keening: she makes notes and follows the singing from a recorder. The keening music in repeated phrases sounds humorous rather than sorrowful. The lyric is sung in dialect that blurs audiences’ understandings of it, additionally weakening its

“sadness.” While learning the singing, Guixiang checks herself in the mirror to see whether her gestures of singing look “professional.” She learns the skill so quickly that she does not need to work hard. At the same time, Youming is calculating how much they can earn from Guixiang’s keening and constantly arguing with her about the dividends. Such sarcastic audio-visual duality has grounded a problematic relationship of the keening music and Guixiang—their connection is not established by long-term hard training and deep understanding, but by superficial learning and desire for profit (see Figure 4.2.).

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Figure 4.2. Cry Woman. Guixiang is practicing the lament while Liu Youming is calculating their possible profits of their “crying business.”

Guixiang’s first keening performance continues to amplify the irony between music and emotion. In the funeral scene, a small panorama shows a mourning tent where the dead man’s photo is hanging in the middle. His wife, wearing a white head band, is kissing with another man in front of her husband’s photo. Two groups of people are sitting outside of the tent, paying no attention to others, are focusing on their ma-jiang game. Another woman’s call interrupts the widow’s kissing. The widow immediately turns to wail for her husband “how can you die so tragically” when the first mourner starts performing. Yet Guixiang rushes to the widow and sings to compete with the first mourner who withdraws quickly. Guixiang is singing, with fake tears, “The Song of The Free Tibetan Slaves” (Fanshen de nongnu ba ge chang).

While singing, Guixiang, dressed in a Chinese opera costume, is dancing in the

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Chinese style by waving the long water sleeves (shuixiu). After finishing her first performance, Guixiang gets some money from the widow for her singing. Then she starts to sing the second song “Going Home Frequently” (Chang huijia kankan). At the same time, she constantly comforts the widow with her brilliant acting and her

“truly” fake compassion, which successfully makes her customer tear up. In the end, without a properly emotional transition, the keening scene is ruthlessly cut to the next that shows Guixiang and Youming’s returning home after finishing the job (see Figure

4.3).

Figure 4.3. Cry Woman. Guixiang is performing her lament by singing pop songs. Other people don’t pay attention to her but to their ma-jiang game.

Guixiang’s performance in the first kenning scene describes her relationship between music in three ways. First, with the same melody, the original contents of the

225 two songs have been altered by Guixiang: “The Song of Free Slaves” is a Communist

Party propaganda song that was popularized in the 1953. Yet the lyrics she is singing in the scene are the texts she made up by herself. She compares the widow and her dead husband to Zhu Yingtai and Liang Shanbo, a legendary couple, whose faiths for love has been long glorified in Chinese culture. “Going Home Frequently” is a mainstream pop song that asks young people to visit their parents more often as a sign of filial piety. Yet in Guixiang’s keening scene, she changes the song from the purpose of moral education to a call for the return of the dead man’s spirit. Such dramatic transformation of the two songs’ identities is accomplished by Guixiang’s improvisation, which does not require singing skills. Secondly, Guixiang has made the contents of the two songs applicable to any funeral for a dead spouse. Their meanings are generic in as much as their lyrics are applicable to different purposes. Thus, the two songs have become a tool for public delivery rather than a private expression of grief. Thirdly, Guixiang has no beloved one to lose so far, yet she still succeeds in making other people cry. Her connection with the music is established with neither real experience nor emotion.

Guixiang’s keening goes to even more absurd lengths when she performs for a pet’s funeral. At first she refuses to cry for a dog. Yet when Youming tells her that the pay is double what she would receive for a human, she agreed. The scene begins with a panorama where the funeral procession is moving along the mountain road, led by a man who is carrying a photo of a dog and a woman who is carrying a small coffin.

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While everyone else is kept silent, Guixiang is vividly singing Xin Xin’s pop song

“Don’t Throw Me Aside” (Bie bawo rengzai yibian) with the lyrics:

“Please look at my face with tears, you know I can do anything for you; Don’t throw me aside, my world is waiting for you to appear; I miss your smiling face to me, I miss you loving my purity; Kiss your face gently, but you can see nothing.”

Although seeing extremely ironic at the first hearing, “Don’t Throw Me Aside” in this scene matches to the pet owner’s emotion suprisingly. Originally this song described a young woman’s moaning after being abandoned by her man. Yet as a pop song that is created for the public rather than for an individual, “Don’t Throw Me Aside” can serve to express many emotions and occasions. The “you” and “me” mentioned in the lyrics can refer to any two subjects, without the necessity of being used in the similar scenario, saying a woman to a man or vice versa. Therefore, a person’s moaning for a beloved pet is appropriate to the lyrics. For the music, how wide that a pop song can spread is usually depended on its catchy melody. Thus when re-arranging a pop song for self-performance, people often focus on the melody rather than other parts of the music. The original sentimental and lyrical style of “Don’t Throw Me Aside” is suggested by its delicate interaction between piano and strings, the two instruments that require intensive training. Yet in the dog funeral scene of Cry Woman, the song has been transcribed to a rhythmic tune simply accompanied by two guitars with the basic harmony. By transforming the theme, text and musical arraignment, “Don’t

Throw Me Aside” has been successfully reshaped from a moaning for love to a

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“comic” farewell for a dead pet.

At the same time, Guixiang acts “improperly” in the funeral. Her clothing—heavy makeup, a pink shirt, and a flowered skinny pants—is conspicuous among the funeral procession. Instead of heavy crying, Guixiang smiles all the time, distancing herself from the funeral participants around her. She shakes her body to dance in the rhythm of the guitar accompaniment. In the soundtrack, Guixiang sings

“Don’t Throw Me Aside” with vivacity, contrary to the pet owner’s weeping. She sings as if she is enjoying it rather than echoing the tragedy of the funeral. It is very likely that Guixiang has already gotten permission from the pet owner, who might ask for a “not-too-sad” style of keening. Her “comic” performance at the dog funeral can be considered a result of the conflict between her desire for money and her reluctance to do what the job requires. For a very practical reason, Guixiang has given up her subjective will in exchange for an objective reality; pop song, with its flexibility in theme, text, and music, helps her easily to achieve the exchange (see Figure 4.4.).

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Figure 4.4. Cry Woman. Guixiang with hot pink cloth is singing and dancing in the front of the dog funeral march.

As Cry Woman has exemplified above, the nature of popular music has changed the relationship between music and women in contemporary Chinese urban cinema, and the independent urban cinema in particular. Without long-term devotion to and training in music, women’s musicianship has transformed from professionship to entertainment in urban cinema. Because the applications of the popular music in

Chinese independent urban cinema are not designed for presenting individuals but for depicting the public, the music may lack the deep connection that can truly resonate with women’s personal experiences in these films. Even if sometimes music has a direct connection with women’s emotion, its public identity can easily diminish the connection by playing in an-emphatic way. Performing popular music that is relatively simple for learning and is mostly acceptable for everyone has provided a major livelihood for women. Thus the female liuxing gequ entertainer in Chinese

229 urban cinema has become an amateur in music but the professional in earning a profit—Musical performance no longer stands for their self-expression, but has become only a tool for various practical purposes.

Cry Woman mainly concerns women’s stories, yet there are many more contemporary Chinese urban cinemas that shift away from women’s concerns. As liuxing gequ loses its role in expressing the emotion of women in contemporary

Chinese urban cinema, it then turns to indicate people’s entangled connections in family, friends, lovers, employment and so forth. Women are placed in these complex relationships. They might not be the primary characters, and thus share music with others. In the following two sections, I will mainly focus on two films—an independent urban cinema and a new urban cinema—to analyze the roles in which liuxing gequ play. As I will demonstrate from the two cases, liuxing gequ is not devoted to women alone. The same song used in different scenes can indicate people’s relationships with or without women. This does not mean women in contemporary

Chinese urban cinema are not related to music anymore. Instead, the relationship between women and music involves more diverse ways of situating women within a larger context.

The Diegeitc Liuxing Gequ in Chinese Urban Cinema: Realism and People’s

Connections

The diegetic liuxing gequ mainly appears in the independent urban cinemas by the young Sixth Generation directors (e.g. Zhang Yuan, Zhang Ming, Lou Ye, Jia

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Zhangke, and Wang Quan’an). Among many possible reasons for not using non-diegetic original scores, one might first think that these low-budget independent urban cinemas could barely afford a separate (famous) film composer who can create an impressive work. Yet the more important reason is that the diegetic liuxing gequ portrays the social circumstances of contemporary Chinese society. Likewise, these films present a certain kind of realism.

In terms of emotional connection, the songs that are heard in the films are contemporary well-known hits. James points out that “we hear—but do not necessarily listen closely to—a ‘hit’ song over and over again in the context of many different public activities and motional states. Through repeated listening and affective investment, popular songs become a ‘repository of a vast range of private associations.’”20 When the hit songs appear in film, audiences can easily identify their names, singers, and related information. At the same time, popular hits of that period feed the sentiment throughout the film, reinforcing the realistic feeling acoustically. Therefore, audiences’ memories of that period are immediately recalled by the familiar tunes and voices, and echo their personal experiences with the film narrative. In so doing, audiences can get closer to the social atmosphere that the film creates.

In terms of space, liuxing gequ are heard everywhere in the cinematic scenes—such as bars, restaurants, streets, barber shops, stores, and homes—the places

20 Andrew Jones, Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music, (Ithaca, NY: East Asian Program in Cornell University, 1992): 42. 231 that people are most familiar with in daily life. The sources of the music are also easily identified—like public broadcasting, tape recorder, karaoke machine, television—the facilities that are frequently seen and used in reality. Within the diegetic space, the position of liuxing gequ sometimes does not have a more prominent position than other sounds such as characters’ talking, moving, and other environmental noises. Instead, liuxing gequ is poorly presented. It coexists with other sounds, just like the bad quality of the music we hear in public spaces. Therefore, the presentations of the liuxing gequ in Chinese independent urban cinema create a realistically sonic atmosphere that is deeply interwoven with actual life.

In terms of the social context, most of the liuxing gequ that appeare diegetically in the independent urban cinema are in the less ideologically attached, which mirrors the reality of the transformation period (zhuanxing qi) in contemporary Chinese society. Since the 1980s, popular music from Hong Kong and Taiwan became important in mainland China’s pop scene. The music is not political, but advances in its soft melody, simple structure, easy catch-up, pleasant hearing, and sentimental expression, which can be quickly accepted and spread among the public. Especially in the 1990s, when the economy grew are distracted people’s attention shifted from social problems to life improvement, Chinese rock music dramatically declined, and the gangtai musical culture quickly replaced the popularity of rock among Chinese youth. Nimrod Baranovitch has described the expanding of gangtai music in the mid-1990s mainland China:

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The record companies from Hong Kong and Taiwan were much better

equipped than local companies and had more experience operating in a

free-market economy and commodifying music and musicians, the increase

in free-market activity in the 1990s meant that such companies could now

also expand their activity…their main investment was naturally in

mainstream gangtai music…gangtai music started to dominate to an

unprecedented extent the mainland’s musical landscape.21

Thus the social phenomenon of everywhere-existing liuxing gequ is exemplified in the diegetic soundtracks of Chinese independent urban cinema. Its frequent appearances in cinematic scenes show that the music has penetrated into people’s daily life, which is resulted by the increasing commercialism in the social transformation period China during the 1990s.

The three ways of displaying social reality musically in Chinese independent urban cinema make it almost impossible for the diegetic liuxing gequ to refer to any particular character or gender. Its appearance in films is not conspicuously designed for place in the extremely dramatic moments, but is heard as background music everywhere, functioning as either an emotional realism or to implicitly articulate the narrative. Thus, when it comes to the association with characters, the diegetic liuxing gequ in Chinese independent urban cinema becomes a communal music that is aimed to indicate people’s relations rather than to create a portrait or speak for any particular

21 Nimrod Baranovitch, China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, 1978-1997, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2003): 45-46. 233 individual. While Chinese independent urban cinema lacks specific theme music for their characters, the diegetic liuxing gequ takes the responsibility of binding them together and displaying their relationships in reality.

The Diegetic Liuxing Gequ in Xiao Wu: Between Anempathy and Satire

Jia Zhangke’s Pickpocket (Xiao wu, 1998) exemplifies the use of the diegetic liuxing gequ in Chinese independent urban cinema. The film is one of his “Home

Trilogy” filmed in his hometown (the other two are Platform (Zhantai, 2000), and

Unknown Pleasure (Ren xiaoyao, 2002). It tells a simple story about Xiaowu, a

“professional” pickpocket’s experiences of life and emotion. In this film, Xiaowu lives on stealing other people’s money in a small city. Although his career categorizes him as a “bad guy” in society’s eyes, he does show some good sides of his personality—steals money but returns victim’s ID cards; steals money for his friend’s marriage; and steals money for his girlfriend’s gift. Xiaowu is struggling with changes in his relationships with people and the society: while other people in the group of pickpockets have gradually moved on to become small traders and legal or semi-legal,

Xiaowu is still living in the same way as he always did. Xiaoyong, one of his former

“thief buddies” who later becomes a small businessman does not invite Xiaowu to his wedding. Xiaowu becomes extremely disappointed but makes no effort to change. He acquires a girlfriend, Xiaomei, a semi-prostitute working at a karaoke club who shares similar emotions with him. But eventually Xiaomei dumps him for another rich man.

Xiaowu visits his poor-living family but ends up in a big fight with his family saying

234 he will never come back. In the end, he is arrested for his stealing and is handcuffed in the middle of the street, where a crowd looks at him with disapproving eyes.

Pickpocket, similar to Jia’s other works, aims to portray the transformation of social reality in contemporary China. Jia’s films always focus on ordinary people, the ones in social periphery in particular. By presenting their lives and interactions with each other through documentary style photography and narrative, Jia aims to display the general picture of the reality in the social transformation period China. Although

Pickpocket focuses on one character, the director Jia Zhangke’s goal is to show, according to the character’s story, people’s experiences and relationships as a whole.

The film does not aim to subvert conventional justice of people’s misbehaviors, nor criticize the unfairness of society. Instead, Jia incorporated in this film his personal witness of the changes in his hometown as well as in the lives of his old friends, influenced by the fast growing market economy in the 1990s, and used a documentary style to record the realistic situation of the ordinary people in the contemporary China.

In Pickpocket people’s relationships, such as family kinship, friendship, and love, have gradually transformed during economic-social pressures.

Echoing with realistic exhibition of people’s relationships, music in

Pickpocket mainly connects several characters rather that firmly standing on a particular one’s side. Without thematic music that leads the whole film, three diegetic liuxing gequ in Pickpocket play an important role in presenting people’s connections.

These three songs are Tu Honggang’s “Farewell My Concubine” (Bawang bieji), and

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Yang Jueying and Mao Ning’s “Crying Heart” (Xin yu) and Ye Qianwen and Lin

Zixiang’s “The Choice” (Xuanze). Their lyrics, unlike in Cry Woman, where lyrics do not play a key role, in Pickpocket, have considerable importance. As Lauren Anderson points out, song lyrics can “perform tasks such as ‘speaking’ for a character, thus establishing or underlining character traits…assist in the movement and development of the narrative.”22 In Pickpocket, the lyrics of liuxing gequ reflect and indicate characters’ current or potential situations. Yet the lyrics have the function not of presenting any particular character's thought, but of relating different characters' experiences. In terms of theme, all the liuxing gequ in this film are love songs, with the subjects of desiring love, committing to love, being happy in love, and missing a lost love. At the same time their applied themes, melodies, lyrics, and means of presentation are very different from their origins. Thus, these songs can contribute to the exhibitions of various interpersonal relationships in this film.

Farewell My Concubine—From a Heroic Song to?

Although the origin of the pop song “Farewell My Concubine,” sung by Tu

Honggang, is inspired by the Peking Opera of the same title, the song alters its initial representation from elitism to populism. As a pop song, “Farewell My Concubine” borrows the theme of heroism from its Peking Opera version, yet focuses on ordinary people rather than one particular hero. Similar to the Peking Opera version that

22 Lauren Anderson, “Case Study 1: Sliding Doors and Topless Women Talk About Their Lives,” Popular Music and Film, edited by Ian Inglis, (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003): 112. 236 highlights the Chu King’s heroic spirit as well as his tragic but passionate love with his concubine Yu Ji, the song’s lyrics, divided into two parts, separately express a man’s ambition of conquering the world with a strong emphasis on rhythm and heroic passion, and his private emotion for his beloved with a more cantabile melody.

However, the song does not specifically clarify who is the subject. The lyrics use the first person “I” instead of the “Chu king” to refer to anyone who sings the song, normalizing a heroic figure to everyman, achieving its goal of popularization.

Meanwhile, the original music video of “Farewell My Concubine” fully displays the

Chu king’s great valiance as well as the pure love between him and Yu Ji in the

Peking Opera performance. Yet the pop singer Tu Honggang, plays neither of the roles.

Instead, he stands as an observer, expressing the emotion for them.

In Pickpocket, the song “Farewell My Concubine” dramatically transforms its initial themes of heroism and heterosexual love to various purposes. In its first appearance, the song is played to refers to the deteriorating friendship between two men—Xiaowu and his old friend Xiaoyong. We hear the first stanza of the song, the one that emphasizes heroism, nondiegetically:

I am standing in the strong wind,

With the regret of being incapable of sweeping away all of grief; I look at the sky, all clouds are moving, With sword in hand, who is the hero in the world?

The song appears when Xiaowu discovers that Xiaoyong did not invite him to his wedding. Xiaowu sits in a chair next to the street, smoking. Then a close shot shows

237 his hand holding a cigarette while the song begins with its instrumental prelude.

Contrasting with the strong rhythmic prelude, the camera frames two shots: one stable shot of the street displaying Xiaowu’s empty chair with people passing by, indicating that Xiaowu has left, presumably out of anger at Xiaoyong, and another subjective moving shot that shows Xiaowu arriving at Xiaoyong’s home. As the subjective camera (presenting Xiaowu’s motion) steps into the yard, we hear the part of the song with the above lyrics. The passionate prelude with a strong emphasis on its drum beat tries to ground an intensive atmosphere for the encounter of the two people—a fight may happen when they meet each other.

But the excited music does not lead to an intense fight between Xiaowu and

Xiaoyong. When Xiaowu looks at the wall that records the height markings of

Xiaoyong in childhood, the happy memory of their friendship comes to Xiaowu’s mind and he decides to leave without fighting. At this moment, the song with its repeating first stanza is changed from solo singing to a male chorus. Another tracking shot is given to Xiaoyong, who walks out his house when the male chorus is singing with greater passion. Yet again, the excitement stops when the image cuts to Xiaowu, who is standing on the street at the time “Farewell My Concubine” comes to the lyrics about the great love:

There are many beauties in the world, But I only love you; It is always the same sadness for saying goodbye, So many great loves are buried.

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With the mix of the noisy environmental sounds, the song (coming from a streetseller's tape recorder selling on the street) is barely heard in diegesis. However, when Xiaowu is trying to steal the wallet from the person who is bargaining with the recorder seller, the volume as well as the emotion of “Farewell My Concubine” is rapidly increasing, dramatizing the moment of his stealing. Suddenly, the seller closes the music, and so does the end of Xiaowu’s action.

The pop song “Farewell My Concubine” in Pickpocket is purposefully played to highlight the heroism part and satirize the two men’s dysfunctional friendship. The indication of the song in this film is separated from its initial context as well as its preexisting theme in the Peking Opera version. As the visual track blurs the understanding of the song, the song is simultaneously re-created with many idiosyncratic meanings complicating interpretations of what happens visually in the film. Its transformation from the non-diegetic sarcasm of Xiaowu and Xiaoyong’s friendship to the diegetic demonstration of the realistic environment within the narrative highlights the song’s public identity by expanding the indication of its lyrics from a specific explanation to a broader and open interpretation. Meanwhile,

“Farewell My Concubine” indicates the mixed connections among characters—the relationship of Xiaowu and Xiaoyong—a broken friendship and a potential fight of two “heroes,” the relationship of the seller and the customer—judging the quality of the recorder through the song performance, and the relationship of Xiaowu and his potential “victim”—a thief is trying to steal money from a careless person while the

239 song distracts him.

“Crying Heart” and “The Choice” in Karaoke—From Love Duets to?

“Crying Heart” and “The Choice” are love duets that are purely about heterosexual love in daily life. The former one displays the sentiments of the separated couple who miss each other after breaking up:

Female: My feeling of missing you is like a net, My feeling of missing you is no longer like a bursting sea. Male: Why always in the gloomy days, I am thinking of you so much. Female: My heart is crying like the June rain. Male: Miss you, miss you, and miss you for one more time. Together: Because you/I will become someone else’s bride tomorrow, let me think about you one more time.

The latter song on the contrary, expresses two loves’ commitment to a lifetime together:

Male: When the days become windy, we just see flowers falling with a smile. Female: When the days become snowy, we just toast to the moon. Male: This mood, Female: This road, Together: We come through together.

As we can see from the lyrics above, though displaying the opposite situations of two lovers, the two songs present a strong mutual emotion. Both songs became extremely popular in mainland China in 1990s, and can be heard everywhere in stores, television and broadcasting. They are hits in Karaoke clubs, where people sing them

240 not for indicating true emotions, but for pure fun. Their appearances in Pickpocket are in various diegetic places and do not follow the original theme but display the multiple layers of people’s relationships in an ironic way.

The first time “Crying Heart” appears is in the scene where Xiaowu drinks at a small restaurant. A close shot is given to his repeating actions of pouring wine into a small cup and then lifting it to his mouth. Such repeating action indicates his restless emotion, his frustration with the abandonment of Xiaoyong, his so called “dear old friend.” Xiaowu’s drinking action is interrupted when a female news reporter’s voice appears diegetically, announcing the news of Xiao Yong’s upcoming marriage. The image is then cut to a shot/reverse shot between the television interview and Xiao

Wu’s reaction:

An over-the-shoulder-shot is given of Xiaowu, one in which we share his view of the television interview with Xiaoyong. Then we see Xiaowu again in a medium shot, establishing a contrasting duality between the visual-track and the soundtrack

(see figure 4.5). Xiaowu is placed in the very left side of the image, distancing him from the place of the television, which is off-screen to the right. The reporter’s voice-off continues interviewing Xiaoyong on TV. She asks, “How do you feel there are so many people requesting songs over our program to congratulate you on your marriage,” a question that seems to sharpen Xiaowu’s speechlessness out of frustration. Xiaowu’s visibility and silence offer contrast with the television’s invisibility and sound, creating an ironic disjunction and making Xiaowu seem even

241 more marginalized from both the public image and the public voice.

Figure 4.5. Pickpocket. Xiao Wu is isolated from his old friend as well as the mainstream.

The camera, again, gives a shot of Xiaoyong’s interview on television.

Presented differently from the first image, which was an over-the-shoulder-shot, this time we are located directly in Xiaowu’s subjective view of Xiaoyong on TV, thanking people for their blessings (See Figure 4.6.). The camera continues zooming in, excluding the reporter’s image but leaving Xiayong on screen. Such focus forces audiences to experience straightforwardly how Xiaowu feels at this moment, leaving no space to escape the awkward moment. While Xiaoyong’s talking voice and noisy environmental sounds overwhelm the soundtrack, Xiaowu remains silent and unmoved (See Figure 4.7.).

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Figure 4.6. Pickpocket. Xiaowu is watching Xiaoyong on TV.

Figure 4.7. Pickpocket. The zoom-in shot of Xiaoyong’s interview on TV.

The last image in the restaurant scene is given to a medium shot from behind

Xiaowu’s back: the shot locates both Xiaowu and the television in the image, allowing audiences to escape Xiaowu’s bitterness and go back to being objective observers.

Xiaowu returns to drinking, and the television begins to broadcast the pop song

“Crying Heart,” playing in music video style as Xiaoyong takes congratulations on his marriage.

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The first appearance of “Crying Heart” in the film grounds its basic function in multiple ways. In terms of narrative, “Crying Heart” appears in the soundtrack to bridge the scenes of Xiaowu in the restaurant and the scene of Xiaoyong watching his own television interview at home. The two scenes have no visual contact, yet they are immediately connected by the TV broadcast of “Crying Heart,” smoothing the abrupt jump cuts from one image to the other. Its musical content, “Crying Heart” also implies the relationship between Xiaowu and Xiaoyong. Although it is originally a love song, presenting the emotions of two lovers who will be apart and missing each other, “Crying Heart” is played in the two scenes to indicate the friendship that

Xiaowu and Xiaoyong used to have—they are related to the two lovers described in the song who still care about each other despite their difference in social status, yet ruthless reality ruins the ideal. In terms of visual-sound relationship, “Crying Heart” is a duet sung by a female and a male who share sentimental feelings; however, the music is connected with the scenes of Xiaoyong at home and Xiaowu at the restaurant and it overwhelms those scenes with its bittersweet lyrics, ironically indicating the two people’s relationship (see Figure 4.8. and Figure 4.9.). In the end, Xiaowu plays music from his lighter—Für Elise which conflicts with the music of “Crying Heart” until the second song takes over the soundstage. Contrasting with the satire of “Crying

Heart,” the off-key Für Elise—Xiaowu’s “congratulation” song to Xiaoyong’s marriage—is not heard by Xiaoyong, which directly exposing the distorted relationship between the two people. Just as Xiaowu’s lighter runs out of battery

244 power, his friendship with Xiaoyong is over completely.

Figure 4.8. Pickpocket. The “Crying Heart” from TV in the restaurant.

Figure 4.9. Pickpocket. The “Crying Heart” from TV at Xiaoyong’s home.

The second time that “Crying Heart” appears is in the scene of the Grand

Shanghai Karaoke club room where the female protagonist Meimei asks Xiaowu to sing along with her. Meimei starts singing the first two phrases and then gives the microphone to Xiaowu. Yet Xiaowu refuses to sing because it reminds him of the bad 245 memory of his broken friendship with Xiaoyong. The two people are sitting there, letting the accompaniment melody of “Crying Heart” play alone. The appearance of

“Crying Heart” in this scene, after connecting Xiaowu and Xiaoyong in previous scene, establishes the relationship between Xiaowu and Meimei. Unlike the last time that Xiaowu and Xiaoyong are separated in two different places, this time Xiaowu and

Meimei are in the same room sharing the song. The lighting in this scene is suggestively pink, indicating the erotic atmosphere of the Karaoke room as well as the potential love between the two people. The sentimental melody of “Crying Heart” in the soundtrack furthermore reinforces the suggestive sensation. Nevertheless, the absence of their duet singing causes the incompleteness of this song, which indicates the imperfectly initial relationship built up between Xiaowu and Meimei (see Figure

4.10).

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Figure 4.10. Pickpocket. Meimei and Xiaowu are watching but not singing “Crying Heart” at Karaoke room.

The third time that “Crying Heart” appears is in the scene where a group of people, including Xiaowu, are watching two people (a man and a woman) singing the song in karaoke in a store (See Figure 4.11.). Here “Crying Heart” gradually de-constructs the specific connection between Xiaowu and Xiaoyong, serving both as the collection of public sentimental presentation and as Xiaowu’s private emotional release. As it appears in the form of karaoke, “Crying Heart” can be sung by anyone, anywhere, in either a private room or public space. At the same time, it can also speak exclusively to a particular individual with the aid of image editing. After an unofficial

“date” with Meimei, Xiaowu no longer refuses the song as strongly as he did before.

Instead, he walks to the front of television, starts to listen carefully to learn how to sing it. When the lyrics “Miss you, miss you, miss you for the last time” appears the camera gives Xiaowu a front medium shot, straightforwardly explaining his 247 potentially unspoken feelings about Meimei. Yet the image then cuts to a small panorama of the store (the image shows all the people’s shadows projected on the window, which recalls to the song’s function as a collection of public emotion). When the lyrics render “let me think about you deeply once more”—Xiaowu’s “statement” of longing for Meimei is abruptly cut off. Therefore, during the conflict of the sentiment between the mass and the individual, as a popular song, the “Crying

Heart”’s mainstream identity as the collection of public emotion ruthlessly overrides

Xiaowu’s peripheral identity as a “bad” individual, and negates his right of personal expression.

Figure 4.11. Pickpocket. The unknown people on street are singing “Crying Heart” surrounded by the public.

The fourth time that “Crying Heart” appears, unlike the previous scenes, is

Xiaowu’s solo practice at the bathroom. After seeing Meimei at her apartment and 248 finding the resonance of the depressed emotion with Meimei in previous scene,

Xiaowu is officially in love with her. Stepping forward from the last time that he starts to listen to the song, Xiaowu, at this time, begins to practice “Crying Heart.” In the otherwise empty public bathroom, he loudly sings the song, particularly the part “I miss you, miss you, miss you, badly miss you…” completely releasing his feeling about Meimei through the lyrics. By transferring the song from a public sphere such as street and karaoke club to a relatively private space such as empty public bathroom without anyone, “Crying Heart,” in this scene, has transformed from the presentation of public sentiments to Xiaowu’s subjective release. Its connection with Xiaoyong is also completely removed. It is the first time, as well as the only time, that the song services as the exclusive medium of delivering individual emotion.

The last time “Crying Heart” appears in this film is in the scene when Xiaowu and Meimei are happily singing in duet in the karaoke club. The song serves two functions here. For the narrative purpose, contrasting with the first time Meimei sang the song alone in the karaoke club, “Crying Heart” sung by Xiaowu and Meimei signals the development of their relationship (See Figure 4.12.). Yet its ominous lyrics about the separation of two lovers indicate at the same time, the potentially sad ending between Xiaowu and Meimei. For the identity purpose, the song, at the beginning of the scene, signals the love between Xiaowu and Meimei, and is defined as a presentation of personal sentiment. However, such a sweet atmosphere is soon ruined by the unhappy interruption in by a person who brings Xiaoyong’s message to

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Xiaowu—Xiaoyong refuses to accept Xiaowu’s cash gift for his marriage because the money is not “clean” (he thinks the money is from Xiaowu’s theft). In a space as karaoke club whose identity swings between public and private, pop song’s identity between a public collection and a private release shifts correspondently frequently. As

Xiaowu and Meimei’s intimacy established through “Crying Heart” is broken by the unexpected visitor as well as his representation Xiaoyong, the song loses its exclusive representation of Xiaowu and Meimei’s love. Instead, “Crying Heart” acquires again the connection with Xiaoyong. Thus the song has exhibited an entangled relationship among Xiaowu, Xiaoyong, Meimei, the unexpected visitor, and the public who are singing and watching on the street (See Figure 4.13.).

Figure 4.12. Pickpocket. Xiaowu and Meimei are happily singing “Crying Heart” in Karaoke room

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Figure 4.13. Pickpocket. Xiaowu and Meimei’s love “Crying Heart” is interrupted by the unpleasant visitor.

Another duet song, “The Choice,” that appears twice in the film also helps to define the internal relationship between Xiaowu, Xiaoyong and Meimei. Functioning as similar “Crying Heart” does, “The Choice,” presented in karaoke style, connects the three characters rather than associating with any particular one. Yet different from the presentation of “Crying Heart,” whose identity wanders between private and public based on the needs of narrative and the change of scene, we never see who is singing “The Choice” in the film, but only hear it in an extremely ambiguous and poor quality outside the camera frame in the narrative. Thus the song never involves personal presentation, but only exists as an anempathetic or even satiric “public comment.”

“The Choice” first appears as the “background” music in diegesis in the scene when Xiaowu, at Xiaoyong’s home, asks why he did not tell him about his upcoming marriage. Xiaoyong insists that he forgot to inform Xiaowu. Yet everyone, including 251

Xiaowu and the audience, knows clearly that Xiaoyong, who used to be a thief like

Xiaowu but has now become a “successful” entrepreneur, wants to distinguish himself from his old identity as a thief and his old “thief buddy” Xiaowu. Eventually

Xiaowu leaves the cash gift as his “congratulation” on Xiaoyong’s marriage and goes away in frustration. While the two people are situated in the sphere of unspoken tension, “The Choice” is heard as karaoke singing by Xiaoyong’s neighbor—a man and a woman are singing the song that tells the story about two lovers making lifetime vows to each other. Yet what the song actually refers to, like the “Crying Heart” heard the first time in the film, the friendship of Xiaowu and Xiaoyong falling apart.

“The Choice” also appears in the scene when Xiaowu is looking for Meimei at the karaoke club. When the boss of the club, who is actually a madam, tells him that

Meimei is leaving him for some rich people, Xiaowu starts to fight with her. At the same moment, “The Choice,” sung by two people from the karaoke room appears to enhance the irony of Xiaowu’s situation as well as his poor relationships between with

Meimei, Xiaoyong, and the bawd.

Preexisting as love duets, “Crying Heart” and “The Choice” through karaoke style in Pickpocket have been transformed to a public mirror, projecting an interlaced relationship among different people. By playing and singing it through the minimal technology, these liuxing gequ can be accessed everywhere and anytime. The liuxing gequ can represent a broken friendship of two men, an entertainment medium for random people on street, an erotic song for karaoke host and her customer, an erotic

252 catalyst for the karaoke host and her customer, or a fragile bond between two lovers.

As demonstrated by the case of Pickpocket, the diegetic liuxing gequ in

Chinese independent urban cinema neither represents one specific gender’s point of view, nor speaks for one particular character. Instead, these songs are presented mostly in public space, connecting people regardless whether they are known or unknown by audiences in film. Sometimes, these off-screen liuxing gequ can extend the space within the narrative, and turn the private space into the public through its musical “penetration.” At the same time, the meanings of liuxing gequ in Chinese independent urban cinemas are not designed for one explanation. By losing their initial meanings, audiences' “readings” of liuxing gequ and their roles in film are to some extent shaped by how these songs are presented to different people, different situations, and different places through different media. Thus in Chinese independent urban cinema, the diegetic liuxing gequ have become a powerful display of the reality of Chinese society during the social transformation period, particularly in the ways they portray people connecting with each other.

Non-Diegetic Liuxing gequ in Chinese New Urban Cinema

Since the contemporary Chinese urban cinema in the mid-1990s “began the march toward the center [mainstream]”—the so called “new urban cinema,” its employment of popular music has also progressed in different directions.23 As music commonly appearing in the “new mainstream film,” liuxing gequ has a different

23 Jing Wang and Tani Barlow, eds. Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, (London: Verso, 2002): 85. 253 function in the new urban cinema than it does in Chinese independent urban cinema, a genre marked by a dramatic decline in listening pleasure. In the new urban cinema, liuxing gequ is able to grab the audience's attention. By involving various kinds of celebrities (famous music composers, producers, and singers), liuxing gequ enhances the sales of the music as well as the film itself in the new urban cinema. Although liuxing gequ in the new urban cinema shares the similar goal of depicting urban life and displaying people’s connection through the same song as the independent urban cinema does, the way of liuxing gequ used in the two types of urban cinema differs largely. In the new urban cinema, liuxing gequ is non-diegetically connected to the visual in music video style. The non-diegetic liuxing gequ is more striking than the diegetic use of liuxing gequ in independent urban cinema, where music is used to suggest realism. When liuxing gequ is used outside the narrative, film time (editing rhythm, narrative time) is replaced by musical time (metronomic rhythm, the musical beat, the musical phrase). Through the use of the same musical reference, the editing of the images brings together the characters that are separated in the narrative. As a result, the social realism created by documentary style photography and diegetic popular music in the independent urban cinema gives way to the urban fantasy created by such music-over-image editing.

Spring Subway: People’s Connections through Music-Image Collage

The film Spring Subway (2002) is an example of Chinese new urban cinema: the filmmaker takes a heavily-detailed realism and renders it unrealistic through the use

254 of non-diegetic liuxing gequ in MTV style. The film presents the emotional lives of people in the city by delivering a multi-layered narrative, each narrative happening in the same time-frame and having a link to another narrative, and each layer devoted to different characters. The story pays the most attention to the married couple Xiaohui and Jianbin, who once believed their lives revolved around love, and that their love would last “until death do us part.” Yet life pounds them ruthlessly. After working and living in Beijing for a long time, each of them faces "the seven year itch." Jianbin lost his job three months ago and hasn't had the courage to tell Xiaohui. He pretends to go to work every morning, stays in the subway the whole day, and keeps his wife at a distance. Xiaohui is upset by Jianbin’s unknown frustrations, and becomes attracted to a coffee shop owner called “Tiger” who confess his love for her. But she controls herself. Discovering his wife’s interactions, Jianbin becomes angry and plans to leave her. At the same time, Jianbin is himself attracted to the brave kindergarten teacher

Lichuan who seriously hurts her eyes during an accidental explosion, and he goes to take care of her under the name of her date, Wang Yao. Yet he also keeps his head and leaves Lichuan after her eyes recover. At the end of the film Jianbin leaves Xiaohui, but then they reunite accidently in the subway, and realize they still love each other.

The film ends inconclusively.

In addition to the story of Xiaohui and Jianbin, the experiences of two other couples are briefly presented. The first couple is the chef Wang Yao who accidently meets the breakfast checkout girl after he finds out his girlfriend Lichuan has been

255 seriously injured in an explosion. Their narrative ends in marriage. The second couple is the deaf boy Damin and the girl he has a crush on, Tian’ai. They always run into each other in the subway, yet their ambiguous relationship eventually falls apart because each misunderstands the other.

Theme Music of Spring Subway: An Inharmonic Relation between People

The main title theme of Spring Subway is heard in a sung version and in a melodic version without the lyrics. The sung version appears only at the end whereas the melodic version plays a bigger role in the film. It appears four times in the film with two different types of presentation. The first type presenting focuses on the thematic melody: its accompaniment lines foreground its primary position as well as strengthen its expressivity. It is played at the beginning and the end of the film, opening and closing the story. The second type of presentation is to vary the thematic melody mainly played on the piano, with an emphasis on a gradual change of the accompanying drum’s speed. This is used only once in the film exclusively to indicate

Tian’ai and Daming’s relationship.

The film starts with an unsettled atmosphere. A close-up shot in a shaking low-angle position is given to the two main protagonists whose hairs are flying in the air: Jianbin and Xiaohui, who are looking at each other with nervousness and uncertainty. The soundtrack corresponds to the unsettling emotions established by the visual. In diegesis, Jianbin counts “one…two…” as Xiaohui slowly closes her eyes and leans her head on his shoulder. A windy sound fully fills the diegetic space,

256 indicating they are in a very high place. At the same time, a rhythmic suspended cymbal in non-diegesis is restlessly whispering, waiting for a potential musical eruption (see Figure 4.14.).

Figure 4.14. Spring Subway (2002). Jianbin and Xiaohui are nervous before jumping.

Suddenly, a medium shot at a low-angle is quickly cut in with the scene where the couple jumps, and then the image is immediately cut to a running subway scene (See

Figure 4.15.).

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Figure 4.15. Spring Subway (2002). Jianbin and Xiaohui jump out of the screen.

Figure 4.16. Spring Subway (2002). The fast running subway scene immediately follows Jianbin and Xiaohui’s jumping scene.

The abrupt cut of the two scenes does not literally create the understanding that the two characters are “committing suicide for love.” Rather, it establishes a direct connection between their relationship and the subway. While displaying the mixture of the fast moving subway in the visual track, the non-diegetic music in its 258 repetitiveness seems to refer to the subway passing “station to station” in the visual track (see Figure 4.17.):

Figure 4.17. Zhang Yadong, Spring Subway. The accompaniment in three lines keep repeating throughout the music.

As seen from the score above, the bass drum repeats a scale ascending of F-G-A in the bass line. It pounds heavily for every four beats, rhythmically supporting the upper melodic lines. In the middle line, the piano, in a faster triplet pattern, simultaneously circles around the broken chords of the bass line. In the upper line, the strings alter the second phrase of the bass line (A-B-B-A instead of F-G-A) and repeat the progression.

A few seconds later, the camera jumps back from the scene of subway to the back-and- forth cut between the images of Xiaohui and Jianbin:

Shot One: Xiaohui, in a slow zoom-in shot, is sitting in the couch of her room

(starts from a medium shot) where the image’s light goes from dark to bright

Shot Two: Jianbin, in a medium front shot, is looking at us (the audience) in the 259 lobby of the subway. Half of his face is hidden by the passing people’s backs. The actions of other people in the scene are extremely slowed down, while Jianbin is standing still with his hair flying.

Shot Three: Xiaohui (same scene with the image one, except zooming-in from a close shot to a close-up shot) in where the light of on her face is divided into half dark and half bright.

At this moment, the erhu, the Chinese two-string instrument, above all the accompanying lines, starts to play the thematic melody and repeats once (see figure

4.18).

Figure 4.18. Zhang Yadong, Spring Subway, the main theme played by erhu.

Shot Four: Jianbin (same scene with the image two) is standing in the lobby of the subway. Yet the people around him (who only appear from the back) start to move in a slow shot (faster than the image two), where Jianbin’s face is no longer hidden by them.

Shot Five: Xiaohui (same scene with before, but in a stable close-up shot) starts to speak: “Everyone calls me Xiaohui. Actually I am very content. I have been with

Jianbin with seven years.” 260

Shot Six: the scene is cut back to the subway where the theme music gives way to a melodic transition by every line except the erhu line. The film title appears.

As seen above, the beginning scene of Spring Subway has set up its urban theme by catching the cityscape and its resident in a music video style. The shots highlight the subway and two city people in different spaces by crosscutting: the subway train shuttling in the tunnel is positioned in the in-train passenger’s view; Xiaohui sitting at home; and Jianbin surrounded by the crowd is standing in the subway lobby. The editing also disrupts the chronological sequences: Xiaohui’s scene is drawn out from the middle part of the plot; Jianbin’s scene is derived from the end of the plot; and the running subway train is repeatedly presented throughout the whole film.

Yet all of the disconnected shots are drawn into a collage by the soundtrack: the repeated rhythm in the percussion and the ostinato in the bass and string lines resonate with the subway train running station to station while the sentimental erhu melody accompanies with Xiaohui and Jianbin’s images. The two phrases of the melody do not represent the two characters. Rather, the duality of visual and music are placed on a desynchronized pattern where a shot of one character is already cut to another while the former musical phrase has not yet given way to the latter. This syncopated visual-audio dislocation indicates a dysfunctional relationship between Xiaohui and

Jianbin. Together with the ostinato in the lower lines, the theme music at the beginning part acoustically opens up the story and echoes the visual theme of the film—the subway/the city and its people.

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After the short transition in crescendo, the music, without the erhu line, continues with the intercut between the running subway train in the in-train passengers’ view and the credits. The train is running endlessly between stations, against by the ostinatos in a higher register in all lines but the erhu in the soundtrack. Yet this time the synthesizer adds a bass drum with clap in a delay effect, emphasizing the second and the fourth beats, accompanies to the upper lines. The powerful beats reinforce the editing pace between the shots of the running subway train and the credits, further emphasizing the film’s narrative that the city life is like the restless subway train from station to station where the living routine repeats every day.

The second time this music appears, the thematic melody on the erhu appears to link the moving subway with its passengers. The two phrases and their repetitions are equally devoted to the two shots of the subway’s arrival at and departure from the station and the two shots of passengers entering and leaving the train. Unlike the

“syncopated” pace of the melody and the shots of Shaohui and Jianbin at the beginning of the film, the “harmonic” pace between the visual and the music establishes a smooth connection of subway and the working people—they are inseparable from each other.

In the following sequences, the main characters appear with their voices, and the music continues with its particular emphasis on the necessary moments:

Jianbin and Xiaohui sit in the train, looking differently with no cares about each other. Jianbin’s voiceover is heard at first, stating his frustration of unemployment. As

262 he says, “I lost my job three months ago and I have spent the whole day in the subway since then,” the music dramatically descends in response to his mood, yet immediately goes back to its ostinato. Yet the thematic melody by erhu does not appear concurrently. At the same time, we do not hear Xiaohui’s voiceover responding to Jianbin’s, which acoustically denies her connection with Jianbin. Therefore, even though they are visually connected; the incompleteness in the soundtrack indicates, again, their problematic relationship. (see Figure 4.19.)

Figure 4.19. Spring Subway (2002). Jianbin and Xiaohui look at different places, which indicate their problematic relationship.

The thematic melody is then relocated to other characters while the camera turns to the other couples. The image is cut to Wang Yao, the chef who is calling his date, the kindergarten teacher, asking her to wear a red dress for their first meeting. The thematic melody is not heard until the image is cut to the teacher who is choosing her dress, thus its late appearance of the thematic melody hints at the unhappy ending of 263 the two people.

The music continues dislocating the visual editing. Without finishing the second phrase of the thematic melody, the image is again cut from Wang Yao’s close up to a close up shot of two people’s hands together on the same bar in the subway—the hand of a fashionable boy and the hand of the girl he has a secret crush on. The boy reveals his inner thoughts, lacking the courage of meeting the girl face-to-face while the girl is unaware. The emptiness of her voice in the scene, same as Xiaohui, negates the boy’s emotion. Meanwhile, the melodic music does not match the rhythm of the visual editing, reinforcing the disharmony between the two youths. Eventually, the image goes back to the shot of Jianbin and Xiaohui where Jianbin continues narrating his frustration and Xiaohui is still unaware of it. The thematic melody gives its volume to Jianbin’s voice, and leaves with the unsettled mood in the air.

The film Spring Subway’s rather elaborate and extended prologue, featuring the title song as discussed above, hints at the leading role that music will play throughout the film. During the song-length beginning, the accompanying music plays a crucial role in a couple of ways. First of all, the soundtrack at the start underlines a distinctive popular musical style by emphasizing the synthesizer and its array of sounds, by presenting a quadruple rhythmic pattern with an emphasis on the down beats, and by using a thirty-two-bar, AABB song form. Such a musical style suggests the “urban” theme, as exemplified by the recurring subway image in the film. Secondly, different from the liuxing gequ in Xiao Wu that connects different characters in different places

264 by a diegetic placement in the film, the popular music in Spring Subway, played in non-diegesis, links all characters from different spaces and timelines simultaneously by linking its rhythm to the editing of the image. Rather than being one part of the anemphatic environmental sounds that counterpoint with popular music in previous realist urban cinema, music in Spring Subway dominates the visual-audio relationship by controlling the pace of the narrative progression with its rhythmic pattern. Thirdly, even without lyrics, the music of Spring Subway uses audio-visual counterpoint to hint at the relationship between characters. But the placement of its rhythm and melody in the scene of the moving subway and the characters is remarkable: When the music links to the scene of the moving subway train, the editing of the image echoes with the rhythm of the progression of the musical phrases. Yet when referring to characters’ connections, musical phrases are often played in syncopation with the editing of the images, either incomplete in presenting characters or mismatching the visual counterparts. Such dissonant affiliation of visual and music shadows those characters' potential conflict, misunderstanding, and loss in the later part of the film.

Theme Variation

In addition to the melodic presentation of the song, the theme music of Spring

Subway has a variation that emphasizes the rhythm rather than melody. Unlike the theme music at the beginning of the film that is placed to desynchronize the visual presentations of people’s connections, the theme variation played in the film echoes characters’ specific moves and the development of emotion on the beat of the melody.

265

The theme variation appears at the scene when Tian’ai confronts Damin in the subway as he broke the promise of waiting for her the other day. Before this scene, the film has displayed that Tian’ai, who works at a photo store, received an invitation in a photo from Damin, who asks her to meet at the subway at a specific time. Yet he didn't show up that day and she becomes angry with him. Therefore, when she sees him in the subway this time, she decides to query him.

The theme variation starts, with a deep bass drum beat on the synthesizer, as

Tian’ai is approaching to Damin in the train. The piano plays a musical duality—a repeated chord in quadruple rhythmic progression in the left hand, responding to

Tian’ai’s walking pace, and a free pattern in arpeggio-like style in the right hand, echoing her approach to Damin in a small panorama. The arpeggio-like melody moves from ascending to descending to color the restless atmosphere in this scene, while the repetition of the stable chords keeps the narrative continuing. (see Figure

4.20.).

266

Figure 4.20. Spring Subway (2002). Tian’ai walks to Damin’s front and confronts him directly.

As the bass drum beats the second time after sixteen beats, the piano repeats the same musical duality yet with a close shot/reverse shot of Tian’ai’s and Damin’s faces, increasing the intensity between the two. Both of them keep silent, where Tian’ai shows obvious discontent on her face and Damin tries to withstand her anger. When a

267 close-up shot shows Tian’ai’s hand holding the same subway handle bar as Damin, the arpeggio-like melody, instead of repeating an up-and-down movement, keeps ascending without going down as it did in the first appearance. It musically coordinates the increasing intensity and pushes the narrative forward to the next stage

(See Figure 4.21.).

Figure 4.21. Spring Subway (2002). The close shot/reverse shots display Damin’s awkwardness and Tian’ai’s anger. (Continued)

268

Figure 4.21. Continued.

In the following scene, both visual and audio suggest more unsettled feelings when Tian’ai and Damin’s confrontation actually begins. In visual terms, Tian’ai takes out Damin’s photo showing an invitation to meet her, and asks him: “why did you not come as you promised?” Damin still doesn't speak, and looks around. Then Tian’an pins the photo on Damin’s clothing, and at this point Damin feels more awkward looking at her. In the soundtrack, a synthesizer-produced hand drum rapidly beats in the background while the piano plays a faster ostinato in triplet pattern—the restless ostinato symbolizes Tian’ai’s anger contrasting with the rapid hand-drum beatings that objectify Damin’s inner emotional struggle. The noticeable change in the speed of rhythm and melodic motion thus makes the unpleasant mood of the scene even heavier (see Figure 4.22.).

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Figure 4.22. Spring Subway (2002). Tian’ai takes out the photo and asks Damin. Damin looks embarrassed.

Above the accompaniment of the hand-drum and piano, there appears the thematic melody played by the keyboard, instead of the erhu. Its first phrase joins the shots of Damin’s embarrassing face and the shots of Tian’ai getting off the train while casting a gloating smile at him. Yet the second phrase is completely devoted to Damin, who is doing sign language while the train door closes, explaining silently that he is deaf. Then the repetition of the two phrases desynchronize the cutting pace of the shots between Tian’ai’s shocked face and Damin’s expression in sign language, further disallowing any “harmonic” connection between the two. In the end, when the train starts to move again, the thematic music continues, but is largely overwhelmed by strong dotted beats on the bass drum at a presto tempo, pushing the emotion of the narrative to a climax. Facing the fast moving train taking Damin away, Tian’ai stares blankly on the platform with evident guilty. The presto tempo and powerful beats

270 contrast with her speechlessness on the one hand, yet seem to penetrate her inner emotional restlessness on the other (see Figure 4.23.).

Figure 4.23. Spring Subway (2002). Damin tells Tian’ai silently that he is a deaf. Tian’ai is shocked and feels guilty.

Similar to the theme music played at the beginning of Spring Subway, the theme

271 variation offers rhythmic compatibility and melodic asymmetry in audio-visual relationship in the Tian’ai-Damin confrontation scene. The rhythm of the theme variation is not only on the beat of the cuts within the shot, but also alters its speed with the narrative development and highlights the changes in emotion. The thematic melody, however, is not equally placed on the characters , indicating their problematic connection.

The End: A Final Audio-Visual Harmonization

Despite all the dissonant feelings and tensions, Spring Subway, as its title hints, ends with a positive indication of the relationship between Xiaohui and Jianbin by finally achieving the audio-visual synchronization. The final scene starts on the subway when Xiaohui goes to work after Jianbin leaves her. As she is about to go out the subway lobby, she turns around. Giving no flash back in audio or visual, the image directly cuts to Xiaohui, who sees the scene when she and Jianbin first appeared in in the crowded Beijing subway seven years ago. As she remembers the happiness that they initially shared, the theme music starts. The thematic melody on the erhu is accompanied by synthesizer, guitar, piano, and drum kit. This melody first refers to

Xiaohui’s alone. Yet its repetition accompanies a shot showing Jianbin standing at the right side of the lobby, and Xiaohui coming into the image from the left side. Their joint appearance in the same scene under the same music finally resolves their previous problematic audio-visual interactions. Then the lyrics appear, sung by the Yu

Quan band, and the shots/reverse shots of Xiaohui and Jianbin are cut rhythmically to

272 the presentation of the musical phrases. The end of their relationship resembles their beginning, the sentimental song with its balanced placement of musical phrases and lyrics about the two characters, suggesting a possible reunion.

Spring Subway has shown us, by employing the MTV style, a different way that liuxing music’s functions in connecting people in Chinese new urban cinema. Liuxing music in MTV style can go beyond linear storytelling, linking people in different spaces and narrative timelines for particular purposes. By subverting conventional continuity editing, the priority of the visual track largely gives way to the music, the rhythm and melody of which can overtake the narrative, control the pace of action, and subtly hint at people’s relationships.

Women, Public, and Rock Music in Urban Cinema

Rock music is one of the popular music genres that are least associated with women. Rock is mostly positioned as a masculinized voice that is “explicitly concerned with sexual expression.”24 As Mavis Bayton points out, for young boys, performing rock music is “part and parcel of youth rebellion which a bohemian one

[is] against everyday convention and, specifically, the norms of domesticity.”25 Many young women feel similar rebellion. Yet when their rebellion connects with the signification of rock music, a musical genre referring to a world of rootlessness, freedom and promiscuousness, women making rock music often represents "a

24 Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, "Rock and Sexuality," in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London: Routledge, 1990): 371. 25 Mavis Bayton, Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 55. 273 subversion of the restrictions imposed by femininity.”26 Rock is also strongly bonded with social movements. The 1960s counterculture's spread in Europe and the United

States has brought rock music as the representation of its spirits. Shila Whiteley defines the counter culture as “a generic label for a somewhat loose grouping of young people, a generational unit, who challenged the traditional concepts of career, family, education and morality and whose lifestyle was loosely organized around the notion of personal freedom,”27 as originally exemplified by the Hippies of the Haight

Ashburry district of San Francisco. The counter culture was soon extended to pose a greater challenge to the dominant culture, with political protest and cultural upheaval

(e.g. Civil Rights movements and opposition to the Vietnam War). Whiteley points out that there was a shared belief that rock could articulate the concerns of the counter culture, and that rock music “had an evangelical purpose which tied it to the values of the group, expressing its attitudes, providing a particular location for self-identity, and establishing common cultural and political bonds.”28 However, gender expression and social concern in rock very much marginalized women’s positions. Whiteley argues that “apart from biting social and political commentaries from many successful female rock performers…both the lifestyle and the musical ethos of the period undermined the role of women, positioning them either as romanticized fantasy

26 Ibid. 27 Sheila Whitely, Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity, (London and New York: Routledge, 2000): 22. 28 Ibid. 23. 274 figures, subservient earth mothers or easy lays.”29 Apparently, rather than being seen as mere entertainment, rock was thought to have cultural and political importance.

Therefore, women’s musical spirits are mostly confined to the ethos of light, romantic, dollybird pop where the spirits of rebellion, social consciousness, and political protest that rock possesses are too much overwhelmed by women’s responsibilities.

Rock music in China is, as Andrew Jones points out, an underground phenomenon, synonymous with the essential spirit of rebellion, subversion, and resistance to the mainstream. According to Jones, the development of rock music

“took place outside the state run music industry and was spurred along only through the aid of private entrepreneurs, college students, and the musical and financial support of foreigners residing in Beijing.”30 Exemplified by the story of the most innovative rock figure Cui Jian— “China’s Bob Dylan” or “China’s John Lennon”31

— Chinese rock had a short heyday in the periods of rapid economic growth and relative ideological relaxation in the mid-1980s, yet was quickly marginalized and restrained in the mid-1990s because of increasing government censorship. Therefore,

Chinese rock was born out of social concerns rather than merely as entertainment and personal thirsting for expression. Such themes of public concern are shared by the emergent Sixth Generation directors.32 The alliance of the rock spirit and the young

29 Ibid. 30 Andrew F. James, Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music, (Ithaca, NY: East Asian Program in Cornell University, 1992): 92. 31 Ibid. p.127. 32 Chinese Rock films should be generally divided into two parts. The ones made in 1980s were much idea-liberal than the ones made in 1990s. Because of the Tian’anmen Square Movement in 1989, Chinese government strengthened the censorship on films, where the rock 275 directors, as Zhang Yingjin points out, “vis-à-vis the mainstream political and commercial cultures further endangered several significant parallels between these two groups of rebel artists.”33 According to Zhang, Chinese rock parallels the Sixth

Generation directors insofar as “the collective performance is not simply a common ritual of release and resistance, but more a process of self-discovery and moral self-redefinition” 34 — the process demanded in China during its social transformations.

Although the major groups of people who perform and consume rock music in

Chinese urban cinema are youth, the used rock music in film does not signify the subculture of the peripheral group nor symbolize the rebellion or young people's feelings of agitation. Instead, these films use rock music to develop themes relating to the general public. For example, at the beginning of The Troubleshooters (Wanzhu,

1988), Wang Di’s “Speak with Worries” (Youxin chongchong de shuo), featuring a piano boogie-woogie by piano and a strongly rhythmic pattern by drum kit in the bass line. Wang’s powerful voice, accompanied with an electric guitar in melodic line, expresses the worries of life changes caused by the urbanization. Meanwhile, the film

theme was extremely restraint. Most of Chinese rock films since mid-1990s were independent films or documentary films where the budgets were low and whose theme limited to individual rebellion without directly displaying its public concern. In this chapter, I mostly focus on the rock films in the 1980s and early 1990s. 33Zhang, Yingjin, “Rebel without a Cause? China’s New Urban Generation and Postsocialist Filmmaking,” edited by Zhang Zhen, The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, (Durham and London: Duke University Press): 61. 34 Another two parallel that Zhang points out is quotes are the pursuit of “authentic self-expression (zi wo biao xian) and emotional release (xuan xie) in the face of oppression” and the “lack of state support and their subsequent reliance on private and foreign venues;” Ibid. 61-62. 276 gives many shots, edited based on the rhythm of the song, of urban skyscrapers and the portraits of crowds—regardless of age, gender, career, nationality, and attire—who are living in the city. The music and the images work together to display the urban life as well as the worries it brings. Yet neither their presentations refer to any particular person or persons. Rather, they refer to everyone. In Rock Kids (Yaogun qingnian,

1988), Long Xiang’s break dance develops from his solo performance to his lead in a group dance show, indicating that attitudes toward creativity and individuality in art and life are no longer any individual’s ideal but a whole people’s pursuit. Several scenes of the rock performance in Dirt (Toufa luan le, 1994) catch the reactions from listeners of various backgrounds. In the scene of Peng Wei singing the extremely passionate “Revisit Chensheng and Wuguang” (Chongfan Chengsheng Wuguang), a song that undeniably invokes memories of the 1989 Tian’anmen Square Incident, the camera gives many shots of the listeners—children, housewives, old and young people—outside the hut. They all show great curiosity about the heavy metal band

Overload (chaozai yuedui)’s performance. In another scene when Ye Tong first plays electric guitar with Overload at a bar, the audience of elders and teachers are at first bothered by Overload’s interruption. Yet when Peng Wei starts the song “When

Dream Engulfs” (Meng chanrao de shihou), the camera gives several close shots that display the audience's concentration on the music—some of them tapping their fingers along with the music and some of them smiling. Although the audience seems to be against rock music at beginning, the music quickly draws their attention, and they

277 emotionally connect with the spirit of energetic youthfulness it has released.

After summarizing the general situation of rock music in Chinese urban cinema, the next question is: what is woman’s position in Chinese rock films? Do women share the experience of their Western counterparts? With many social forces preventing women from engaging in rock music, Chinese women, who have been restrained by the longtime Confucian as well as political pressures, seem even more distant from musical expressions of rebellion. Nevertheless, Chinese film often shows women to be inseparable from presentations of social transformation, and, there is no doubt that Chinese women are also connected to the rock music and its spirit in certain ways. Indeed, women in Chinese film are not as noticeably connected with rock music as men, but they are not completely invisible. In the last part of this chapter I use the rock film Dirt to demonstrate women’s relationship with rock in contemporary Chinese urban cinema. I argue that women’s response to rock music, as shown in Chinese film, is not merely an action of individual rebellion. On the contrary, their engagement with rock music also transcends individual behavior and participates in social movement influenced by the vast urbanization in contemporary China.

Dirt: A Woman’s Rock Experience

Guan Hu’s Dirt is one of the few Chinese films that observe Chinese rock music from a female perspective. The female protagonist Ye Tong narrates her experiences with her four grown-up childhood friends as well as with Peng Wei, the leading singer of a rock group—played by Beijing’s heavy metal band Overload (Chaozai). Leaving

278 for Guangzhou as a child during the Cultural Revolution, Ye Tong comes back to

Beijing for medical study, revisits her childhood friends, and tries to re-find her memories of the bittersweet past. However, everyone and everything have changed in the late 1980s. Getting bored by her medical study, Ye Tong is attracted to Peng Wei and his band, and finds new freedom by engaging with rock performance with them.

After experiencing the conflicts between friends, Ye Tong quits medical study, ends her nostalgia for the old Beijing and her old life, sings her last rock song, and leaves

Beijing.

To many critics, Dirt mostly focuses on youth rebellion and thus connects to the drastic social changes during the sensitive period in late 1980s China. Therefore,

Rock music plays the key role to echo the unsettling and inspiring spirits aired in the film. As Zhang Yingjin points out, Dirt, for the director, is intended as a “rebellious film” that articulates a kind of ‘nostalgia for the past and indulgence in the future’ and

‘a lingering sense of idealism and sentimentality’ unique to his generation of filmmakers who experienced “moments of crisis in the postsocialist China of the

1990s.”35 He believes the juxtaposition of the private with the public in the film

“raises the issues of history and memory, as the cross-cutting simultaneously suggests the fragmentation of private memory and the seeming irrelevance of public history in

35 Zhang Yingjin quotes Han’s “Dui diwudai de wenhua tuwei,” in his “Rebel without a Cause? China’s New Urban Generation and Postsocialist Filmmaking,” edited by Zhang Zhen, The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, (Durham and London: Duke University Press): 58-59. 279 postsocialist China.”36 Harry H. Kuoshu also describes Dirt as “reticent it its politics that can only use other public gatherings at the square to hint at the shattering effect of the 1989 tragedy.”37 He points out that Dirt represents “the abhorrence for the dominance of professionalism and commercial culture,” the “nostalgia for the lost innocence of childhood,” “the root-searching spirit,” and the “emotional unsettlement of all who are involved in the drastic round of urbanization and the expression of the confusion of the whole nation.” 38

From the perspective of gender in rock film, Dirt has given women an important role in rock music. Generally speaking, women have two ways of connecting to rock music—emotional connection and actual performance—in Chinese rock film. It is true that rock performance is mostly exemplified by men in most cases. Yet women’s relationship with rock is emotionally connected far more than music only. They may not directly lead the musical creations and performances, but actively participate in or exemplify what rock represents in their life activities. Still, a few women in Chinese rock films actually perform rock and express themselves directly through music. One of the examples is Ye Tong in Dirt. The whole film is narrated by Ye Tong’s voiceover, thus establishing a very female subjective view. Zhang points out that the female first-person voiceover “foregrounds the female consciousness and thus distances itself from the type of male narcissism—sometimes even misogyny-typical of the all-male

36 Ibid. 59. 37 Harry H. Kuoshu, Metro Movies: Cinematic Urbanism in Post-Mao China, (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011): 118. 38 Harry H. Kuoshu, Metro Movies: Cinematic Urbanism in Post-Mao China, (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011): 120-121. 280

Sixth Generation.”39 Yet he thinks Guan Hu, like other Sixth Generation directors,

“cannot but depict his female lead as the ‘other’ against whole male characters negotiate their social, sexual, and ‘aesthetic’ identities.”40 However, as we closely analyze Ye Tong’s relationship with rock music in Dirt, we can find that she is much more than the “other” who stands outside and “observes” the conflicts among men.

Instead, her gradual engagement with rock music transplants her personal emotional experiences with them, and helps her achieve self-fulfillment in her life decision. At the same time, the film brings the new image of women’s performance of rock to the screen, and demonstrates that women’s performances in popular music are not merely a matter of realism, but can truly display both personal and public experiences and emotions through their voices.

The film starts with a flashback of Ye Tong’s childhood life in one of the hutong

(back alleys) in Beijing with her four friends. They gather in Ye Tong’s home, listening to Charles Gounod’s Ave Maria sung by a soprano from her father’s gramophone on the piano. It was the Cultural Revolution time; listening to Western

“bourgeois” music was almost banned in the country. Thus when Ye Tong’s father came in, he was extremely surprised by the children’s activities. The film then cuts to a grown-up Ye Tong walking along a set of railroad tracks, carrying a guitar on her back, while Ave Maria keeps continuing but serves in the non-diegetic soundtrack.

39 “Rebel without a Cause? China’s New Urban Generation and Postsocialist Filmmaking,” edited by Zhang Zhen, The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, (Durham and London: Duke University Press): 56. 40 Ibid. 281

Along with the music, Ye Tong’s voiceover starts to introduce her four childhood friends who used to live in her neighborhood. In the meantime, the fragments of her childhood memory—practicing violin under her father’s guidance and playing with her friends are presented visually.

Suddenly, the sweet image of her childhood life has cut abruptly to a nightmare memory in the Cultural Revolution where Ye Tong and her father are sent to trial.

Responding to the sharp contrast in visuals, Ave Maria in the soundtrack is also interrupted by a chaotic music, featuring a shakuhachi’s airing “decoration” mixed with noisy electronic instrumental sounds. Then the music returns to stable but repeated gloomy chords played by electronic keyboard when the visual comes back to show Ye Tong’s childhood memory—Farewells to her friends and departures from her father to Guangzhou. During the whole process, the image of the grown-up Ye Tong who carries a guitar is constantly inserted among the fragments of her memory, crosscutting with glimpses of the modern cityscape in MTV like fashion in the visuals.

When her voiceover explains that she has come back to Beijing to pursue medical training and revisit her childhood friends, the main plot starts.

During the three and half minutes of the opening, Dirt shows Ye Tong’s individuality and established her story aurally as well as visually. First, her life experiences are directly represented by the music. The happy memories of spending time with her friends and learning music conveyed through Ave Maria, where the horrible reminiscences are associated with the chaotic electronic music. For her

282 present time back in Beijing, the gloomy repeated chords on the electronic keyboard indicate her unsureness about her old friends as well her future. Second, Ye Tong has been placed in a contradictory position. On the one hand, the intensive flashback of her childhood experiences shows her nostalgia for the past as presented by the very lyrical Ave Maria. The music not only indicates her strong bond to the “old,” but also models her as a Virgin Mary-like figure who possesses traditional feminine aspects

—substantiated by her “womanly” figure—of a beautiful face, long hair, and white dress. Visually, on the other hand, the association of the guitar with Ye Tong immediately highlights her as a “new modern woman”—later we will see that Ye

Tong plays electronic guitar. As Mavis Bayton points out, the electric guitar “has a strong gendered association with masculinity for a variety of reasons, such as its association with technology, the masculine terrain of guitar shops, and the generic convention of rock requiring electric guitar.”41 Regarding such an association of women with the guitar, Norma Coates argues that it “is to open up the field of male sexuality, a move which I hope would lead to a political rethinking of rock and sexuality and ultimately, masculinity.” 42 Certainly, Ye Tong is not portrayed as aggressive and masculine-cool as her Western counterparts, for example as Sofia

41 Mavis Bayton, "How Women Become Musicians," in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London: Routledge, 1988); Bayton, "Women and the Electric Guitar." In Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whitely (London: Routledge, 1997), pp.37-49 42 Norma Coates, "(R)Evolution Now?: Rock and the Political Potential of Gender," in Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whitely (London: Routledge, 1997), p.58.

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Coppola presents the queen bee Chloe in Lick The Star. Yet the guitar does empower her with an “untraditional” or even rebellious image. Therefore, the beginning of Dirt has grounded the struggle of old and new, tradition and modern, in Ye Tong herself, in her friends, and in China and its people during the late 1980s.

Ye Tong’s engagement with rock music is staged through her experiences in

Beijing—it is a progression from depression to liberation. As she carries a guitar at the beginning of the film, she has shown some rebellious spirit connected to the rock theme. When she was a child, she was trained to perform piano and violin by her father, and possessed a great talent for music. Yet she gave up it when her family was attacked during the Cultural Revolution. Therefore, her initial reaction to music after she arrives in Beijing is careful, not passionate. Ye Tong first met the members of

Overload after taking off from medical school. She walks into their rehearsal room and hears Peng Wei’s performance of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” on piano, against other people’s noises of moving and electric guitar practice. One of the guys tries to flirt with Ye Tong, but gets rebuffed. Facing other people’s laughter, Ye Tong’s voiceover reveals her confusion about these new people and new phenomenon in Beijing—she does not think she belongs among the “Beijing people” anymore. “Hey Jude” stops, and Peng Wei turns around to look at Ye Tong, the music changes to the gloomy harmonic progression on the keyboard. At this moment, Ye Tong is attracted to him and to the tender “Hey Jude,” which inspires her to become re-interested in music.

However, she still keeps a distance from rock, a music whose style is far away from

284 the spirit that she had since leaving Beijing.

Right after the first meeting scene with the band, Ye Tong is introduced to Chi

Xuan at their apartment. The room is fully filled with the energetic rock music on tape recorder. Under the noise, Ye Tong hesitantly plays “Hey Jude” on Wei Peng’s piano.

Wei Peng sees her playing and turns off the recorder. Comparing to the last scene where she only hears the music, this time she starts to play by herself. Then they take a walk outside, and Wei Peng gives her a loud whistle, reminding Ye Tong of her childhood friends’ whistle. The whistle, accompanied by a sentimental electrical guitar solo with piano ascents, disturbs people’s dancing in the near plaza. Ye Tong then laughs aloud. She finally has found the connection between her childhood good memory and the rock spirit, and let down her guard against Wei Peng and his band, and against rock music.

Ye Tong re-finds the energy, hope, and fun of her life by engaging with Overload.

In visual terms, she starts to wear some cool outfits such as jeans, jackets, jump suits, and a “Bulls” cap instead of the very feminine clothes she wore at the beginning of the film. In narrative terms, she skips her medical courses and stays with the band as long as there is a chance—helping them to clean the practice room, watching their rehearsal, singing with them, and wandering with them on the street. In the soundtrack,

Ye Tong’s voiceover narrates her feeling about Overload: though she cannot figure out their life purposes, she likes to be with them. At the same time, energetic heavy metal music with scream-like singing plays along with the MTV style juxtaposition of

285 their happy activities. Ye Tong’s physical and emotional compatibility with Overload corresponds to her involvement with the non-diegetic rock music. From the Beatles’ soft “Hey Jude” to the crazy heavy metal screaming, Ye Tong’s is now able to accept rock music and its spirit.

Her first experience of singing “Red Kite” with Overload is her first engagement with rock performance, and the awakening of her self-awareness through rock music.

After witnessing the conflicts between Weidong and Datou as well as Peng Wei and

Chi Xuan, Ye Tong realizes that their friendship is falling apart. Thus she immerses herself in the singing to express her frustration with reality. The song “Red Kite”, compared with the masculine heavy metal song “Revisit Chensheng and Wuguang” sung by Peng Wei in the previous scene, is lyrical rather than powerful. Red Kite features the piano’s accompaniment at a moderato tempo, grounding its less heavy style. But the passion of the music gradually increases as the melody ascends and joins the electric guitar, electric bass, and the beats of the drum kit. Yet its tempo is limited in the moderato, keeping the energy of the music from “going wild.” While the music plays, the visual track alternates the image of Ye Tong’s live singing, her childhood life with Ye Tong and friends, and the adult Weidong. Unlike Peng Wei’s singing of “Revisit Chensheng and Wuguang,” which highlights a strong sense of calling for the awakening of the public, as well as the struggling between old and new, past and present, tradition and freedom in the society; Ye Tong’s singing of “Red

Kite” is still limited to her personal nostalgia for the past.

286

After everything she has witnessed and experienced in Beijing, Ye Tong’s connection with rock music is not merely limited to personal sentiment of nostalgia for the past, but turns to a meaningful systemic and “public” quality, rather than merely an individualistic and “private” one. As she sees everyone starting to change,

Ye Tong decides to give up her medical study and go back to Guangzhou. Her voiceover narrates her impression that Beijing is still the back alley where she spent her childhood. As the back alley will be torn down for new buildings, her nostalgia for her childhood life is ended. Society has changed, and so do Ye Tong and her friends.

Ye Tong’s decision to quit study indicates that she no longer restrains herself to a disciplinary life, but wants to choose the life she wants, and to live as she wishes.

Ye Tong’s final performance of the fully empowered song “When Dream

Engulfs” highlights her complete release through rock music. This song in the film functions as a sort of reprise, subtly reminding the audience that the larger context in which this story is played out is not a neutral one—it was the beginning of the social transformation period in China. Everything is changing. Therefore, people have started to put down the past and look to the future.

Yet Tong sings the song at the medical school’s anniversary party on campus.

Before her singing, there is a student onstage reciting a modern poem:

“Who’s neither crying nor laughing? We don’t want this kind of life.

Cry out loud if you want; be happy and free.

The lake is so calm; it has no waves.

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I don’t want this kind of life.

I would rather be drawn into the ocean; or silently watering the fields.”

Ye Tong’s following singing of “When Dreams Engulfs” musically echoes the poem that asks for freedom and release. First, unlike performing in closed rooms such as the rehearsal room and small club, Ye Tong sings the song on the campus plaza, where much of the audience are college students and staff members. Before singing the song, she loosens her long hair and lets it fly in the wind to help liberate all of her passions, both physically and emotionally. Second, “When Dreams Engulfs” is not a sentimental song like “Red Kite,” the theme of which is all about missing the past.

Instead, strongly empowered by the drum kit, electronic guitar and bass, “When

Dreams Engulfs” is a fiery song fully engaged with passion and enthusiasm. Third, the lyrics describe “the past” as the “musical notes in the air.” Ye Tong has “lost” these notes. She sings that “I can no longer go back” but “I desire for courage and passion...and wake up from my sleep and start to move on.” At the same time, the visual alternates the images of her live performance on campus and in the rehearsing room, the excited audiences who are watching her singing, the past and the current lives of her, her friends, the disbanded Overload, the unknown public from a different time and space, and the razed hutong where she used to live. The lyrics she sings not only express her decision not to be entangled in the past, instead to “look ahead in life,” but also deliver an unknown but still positive call to open the mind to the present and future. As Ye Tong’s passionate singing reaches a climax in the last part of

288 the song, the vocal part is switched to Peng Wei’s non-diegetic singing, singing that continues Ye Tong’s passion. This female-male joint singing of the same song indicates that Ye Tong’s rock statement is as powerful and influential as a man’s.

From passively facing the reality that everyone and everything she used to be familiar with has been changed to a positive moving forward to the present and future, Ye

Tong’s singing and the public’s engagement with rock music signals the country’s awakening and revival.

Dirt, as one of the representative Chinese rock films, is unique in showing us women’s activities with rock music in urban cinema are both a process of self-awakening and self-release and the reflection of the social awakening in public, influenced by the social transformation. Ye Tong’s personal encounters reflect the experiences of a generation of people, regardless of gender, who are living in the rapid transitional period where there is a painful struggle between old and new, the past and the present. Responding to it, Chinese rock music also symbolizes the public’s battle cry for progress and variety rather than merely personal rebellion against the mainstream in films. Chinese women, like men, are influenced by great social transformations, and play an active part in it. Not only can they spiritually connect to rock, they also can musically engage with it. Unlike the female pop singers discussed in the first part of the chapter, who manipulates liuxing gequ as a tool for solving practical problems only, Ye Tong makes a strong personal statement through rock music. Yet different from the socially and culturally repressed female musicians

289 discussed in previous chapters, who can only express personal experiences and emotions through music, Ye Tong’s musical expression goes beyond the individual sentiment, and lifts up to a public claim. Therefore, under the particular historical background, women’s connection of rock music in Chinese urban cinema is not a passively personal activity, but is socially constructed, spiritually connected, and musically presented.

Conclusion

This chapter has generally examined the different applications of popular music—liuxing gequ and rock music—in contemporary Chinese urban cinema in terms of its association with women and with people’s relationships more generally.

As one cultural demonstration that was introduced by the urbanization process in contemporary Chinese society, popular music has shifted in function from presenting individuals to connecting people as a whole - and this includes both liuxing gequ and rock music, a style where identities are mostly public rather than private in Chinese urban cinema. At the same time, the social transformation since the late 1980s has caused women’s situation dramatically change from previous historical periods, just as their relationship with music in Chines contemporary urban cinema has changed.

On one hand, without the intensively personal devotion, women’s emotional connection with liuxing gequ becomes vulnerable and ambiguous. Thus women no longer use singing to replace their suppressed voices for self-presentation but use them for practical reasons. On the other hand, rock music in the urban cinema grants

290 women the powerful voice of self-statement. Yet their rock statement, either with the rock spirit only or in directly performing rock music, is not limited to the release of private experiences and sentiments, but breaks off the limits of their conventional domestic insight and expresses their consciousness and concern to the public and society more broadly.

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Conclusion

This dissertation has demonstrated an ongoing relationship between women and music in contemporary Chinese film, a dynamic that exemplifies both historical changes in Chinese film and changes in Chinese history itself as expressed in cultural and social terms. This study encompasses several topics. With each individual topic, I first track the historical development of the music-women connection through a particular perspective, such as the duality of voice and music, music genre, social connotations of music, musicianship, gender relations in music, musical instruments, and performing techniques in Chinese film. Second, I conduct close readings on how music relates to women through visual-audio interactions in

Chinese films—whether the music is presented through live performance, is heard through media within the narrative, or is played outside the narrative; whether the music is from women’s voices (singing) or from instrumental performance; whether the music—with or without the lyrics— parallels, reverses, or complicates the visual presentations of women. Third, I compare the relationship of music and women in

Chinese film to their counterparts in American and European films as a way of demonstrating that images of women are culturally constructed rather than universal,

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and that the use of music to present and represent women in film must be discussed in terms of the particular cultural framework to which the film relates.

In examining both the general historical context and specific filmic texts, I demonstrate that the relationship between music and women in contemporary Chinese film has evolved through historical changes in Chinese society. When women’s voices and emotions are restrained either by the old patriarchal social system or by an ideological authority as shown in history and in film, the music conveys content that is otherwise suppressed; and understanding these musical signifiers gives us access to this content. The use of preexisting music, such as opera and folk music, in Chinese film both draws on and subverts existing stereotypes, and conveys aspects of character in a diverse and compelling way. However, in the urban cinema that focuses on people rather than one particular gender in the city, popular music does not advocate for women exclusively because its identity is a collection of public emotion rather than personal memory. Instead, popular music places women in the larger social context and connects people as a whole.

This dissertation contributes to the larger project of women’s studies in Chinese film by mapping the relationship between women and music onto various historical, cultural, and social constructions. First, the historical examination of music and

Chinese women, in addition to the better known visual, narrative, and psychoanalytical aspects, offers a new approach to studying women in Chinese history.

Second, examining women in Chinese films from the perspective of music contributes

293 an alternative view, an original and significant refiguring of women that goes beyond the conventional images that have resulted from traditional visual and narrative interpretations in film studies. Third, the comparison of the relationship between music and women in Chinese films and their counterparts in Euro-American films provides a transnational perspective of feminist theory and music on screen. In accomplishing these goals, my dissertation will provide a broader understanding of women in Chinese film, in music, in culture, and in history.

Writing about women is difficult; writing about women from the perspective of music is even more of a challenge. This dissertation, while providing new approaches on women in Chinese film, still has some limitations and unsolved issues. First, the dissertation chapters cannot be divided according to discrete genres or film generations. In any period or genre, music is not designed for women exclusively throughout the whole film. Thus the choice of film cases for textual analysis is confined to a relatively small pool. Chinese filmmakers' differing views on music may cause difficulty for summarizing musical associations with women in film. With the similar making of independent urban cinema, Jia Zhangke applies extensive diegetic pop songs in his works in order to display the reality of daily life. Yet for Li Yu, who thinks music is too emotional to be objective, music is “inappropriate” to show her version of “realism.”

Second, we have witnessed a change in women’s relations to music in contemporary Chinese urban cinema, a change that demonstrates how their

294 connections have been modified as society develops. Yet some of their relations may remain the same as in their earlier historical “models” and some of them almost remain the same regardless of time and genre. The best example can be found in the employment of pipa. Because of the two conventional connotations the instrument possesses in history, pipa music in Chinese film is generally used in two ways: describing a fight or battle scenario in an ancient historical context, and presenting women either by portraying their visual and emotional presentations or by having them perform in a way that helps narrate the story. Even in the contemporary Chinese urban cinema where popular music takes the place of the “classical” score in soundtracks, the rare appearance of pipa is always connected with women. Such an exceptional relationship between women and music in Chinese film provides an alternative observation, one that because of its fixity could seem to contradict the importance of ever-changing social developments.

Third, because of the limited size of the dissertation, some of the topics that deserve a book-long focus have been generalized. First, the relationship between women and music in China could be traced in a long history. Their connection varies in different historical periods, regions, social statuses, and races, both Han and ethnic minorities. Future study on this subject could show specifically how these factors affect music-women relations. Second, since popular music in the ongoing contemporary urban cinema no longer associates with women exclusively, it will be necessary to examine the relationship between popular music and both genders in

295 terms of music itself, lyrics, performance, and sociocultural context.

China is still changing, and so are the relations between film, music, and women.

Since China has largely engaged with the world, the multi-dimensional influences will greatly impact Chinese society and its people. Still, the Chinese film will keep recording and reflecting women’s experiences, thoughts, and emotions, and their connections with society and history. However, as the cultural “mirror” that both implicitly and explicitly displays the social reality of the country, the most recent

Chinese films, unlike films of previous generations, can no longer be categorized by one or a few words: they can no longer be pigeonholed as “early post-Mao melodramas,” “root-seeking films," “new wave films," or “urban cinema,” terms that summarize a general style shared by existing works within a period. Instead, the diversity in themes, settings, technology, and mise en scene in recent Chinese film helps Chinese women avoid being limited to a monolithic image, presentation, or metaphor. Undoubtedly, the diversity will also have an impact on Chinese film music.

As used in the soundtracks of Chinese film, music will continue to impress us with more acoustic stories about Chinese women.

296

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