This international project on Chinese opera film to be based at the Chicago Beijing Center emerges from a pioneering two-day symposium on this topic co-organized by Judith Zeitlin (EALC) and Paola Iovene (EALC) at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center in April 2009. The success of the symposium led to an invitation from The Opera Quarterly to co-edit a special double issue on this topic, the first time that this journal (published by Oxford) has ventured outside the Western canon. This special issue was simultaneously published both as a hard copy and on line in September 2010: http://oq.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/2-3.toc?etoc
Chinese opera films are much more than mere stage recordings and by no means a minor byproduct for the film industry. Opera films were produced in astounding numbers in socialist China—120+ from 1953-1966 alone; another 216+ were produced from1970-1988, and although the number of releases has since radically decreased, new opera films continue to be released every year and the old “classics” are constantly aired on the CCTV opera channels. Although many of these films can be considered important works in their own right, scholars of Chinese cinema have only paid scant attention to them. Scholars of Chinese drama, on the other hand, have basically treated them as documents of stage practices and have not adequately considered their status as films and their position in Chinese film history. As our preliminary 2009 symposium demonstrated, to make sense of Chinese opera film, a collective effort is needed to bring together a variety of fields of inquiry and disciplinary approaches, including history, politics, drama, music, art design, and cinema.
The papers presented at the 2009 symposium focused on discourses and practices in the People’s Republic from its founding through the Cultural Revolution, bringing to light widely shared theoretical and practical concerns as well as the performative and musical elements that filmmakers adapted from various arts forms. In the Beijing conference we will expand the inquiry into two directions: we will explore opera film as a transregional genre that was popular in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and throughout Southeast Asia, and will consider PRC opera films produced after 1978–a time in which Chinese state studios underwent important transformations. This will also involve considering the impact of “diasporic cinema” on these later PRC productions, thereby also enabling us to draw clearer connections between opera film reception abroad and post Cultural Revolution production. We expect the Beijing conference to continue the important work begun at the Chicago symposium of undertaking case studies of key films, filmmakers, and performers; such case studies provide a crucial empirical foundation for more sweeping overviews and analyses. Finally, it is hoped that the conference will contribute to strengthening the dialog between scholars based in the US and Europe, and those based in China, Hong Kong, and Singapore—a central mission, as we see it, of the Chicago Beijing Center.
Organizers:Judith Zeitlin (Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations) and Paola Iovene (Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations) in collaboration with Shanghai University and the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts.