From Creation to Trauma: The Ambiguous Laughter in Postwar Shanghai Movie Love Far Away (1947)

Proceedings of The 5th International Conference on Advanced Research in Social Sciences

Year: 2022

DOI:

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From Creation to Trauma: The Ambiguous Laughter in Postwar Shanghai Movie Love Far Away (1947)

Zhang Jian

ABSTRACT: 

Love Faraway (1947) is a left-wing movie in post-World War II Shanghai with a narrative structure developed from Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion ” (1913) and a relative fiction “The Creation”(1928) of a famous Chinese left-wing writer Mao Dun.  When Shanghai movies were divided into ideological left-wing and liberal groups in the late 1940’s, this film was proved to be an ambiguous text and the symptoms of cultural and ideological contradiction, and represent the feeling structures, and the imagination of modernity of China. The paper will discuss how the movie combined women comedy and representation of trauma in the war, and investigate the issues of class, women’s laughter, and nationality in the movie, and examine how it negotiated the political and aesthetic pursuit with the commercial reality. The paper will highlight the ambiguity in the issues of women’s liberation, revolution, and nationalism, which are reinforced by the gap between the film’s narrative and visual performance and the film’s commodity attributes.

keywords: feeling structure, trauma, women’s laughter, comedy.