Impurity and Identification

Abstract

Throughout its history, the cinema of mainland China has displayed a particular affinity with Chinese opera in its different regional and national varieties. An overview of this intermedial history reveals how Chinese opera intermingled with film in myriad ways. This chapter suggests that an intermedial history of Chinese cinema, framed through the opera lens, blurs the divide between old and new media, socialist and postsocialist arts, theatrical and photographic ontology, foreign and national styles, operatic and realist modes, allowing for a more encompassing appreciation of what are, in effect, necessarily impure and hybrid artistic manifestations. The intermedial approach also encourages a reevaluation of Brecht’s misinterpretation of the antinaturalistic performances of Mei Lanfang and the Peking Opera as alienation effects. Instead, the intermedial relationship between cinema and opera purposely promotes spectatorial identification at both individual and collective levels. Ending with an analysis of Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (霸王别姬 Bawang Bie Ji, 1993), the chapter traces some vectors for a future comprehensive study of Chinese cinema’s intermedial history, one that will find in operatic theatre, among other arts, hybrid elements capable of inspiring new, nonteleological, and nonbinary configurations and understandings of history.