Stage Sisters (舞台姐妹Wutai jiemei)

Director: Xie Jin

Screenplay: Lin Gu, Xu Jin, Xie Jin

Cinematographer: Zhou Daming, Chen Zhenxiang

Producer: Ding Li

Music: Huang Zhun

Cast: Xie Fang, Cao Yindi, Li Wei, Shangguan Yunzhu

Studio: Shanghai Film Stduio, 1964

Description: color; sound; VHS format w/ English subtitles; about 120 minutes.

Synopsis:

Chunhua (Xie Fang), a young widow about to be sold by her in-laws, escapes and becomes an apprentice in a traveling Shaoxing folk opera troupe. Yuehong (Cao Yindi), who plays the male roles in the all-female opera company, befriends Chunhua. After the death of Yuehong's father, Chunhua and Yuehong find themselves sold to a Shanghai opera theater to replace the fading star, Shang Shuihua (Shangguan Yunzhu). Eventually, Yuehong falls in love with their manipulative stage manager, Tang (Li Wei), and the sisters quarrel and separate.

Inspired by the radical woman jounalist, Jiang Bo (Gao Yuansheng), Chunhua continues her career, giving a political flavor to her performances. After an attempt to blind and ruin Chunhua by using Yuehong's testimony to trick her in court Tang goes off to Taiwan to escape the revolution. Although unable to harm her stage sister in court, Yuehong has been publicly humiliated. Abandoned by Tang, she disappears into the countryside. After Shanghai's liberation by the Communists, however, Chunhua manages to track down Yuehong, and the two reconcile. (Marchetti 2002, 32)

About the director:

Xie Jin (1923-) is a native of Shangyu, Zhejiang Province. While young, he was educated in Chinese opera and classical literature and began his career as an actor in Shanghai in 1938. He later became a student of dramatists Cao Yu and Hong Shen in the State Theater Institute. There he was exposed to Western dramatic and cinematographic forms. He then studied Marxist theory at the Political Research Institute in the Northeastern Revolutionary University in 1950. He started out as an assistant director to the noted film personality Zhang Junxiang in 1948 and has been directing his own films in Shanghai since 1953. His directorial style mainly took shape in the 1950s and 1960s, when he wrote and directed many award-winning feature films, including Nülan 5 hao (No. 5 Woman Basketball Player, 1957), which won a silver medal at the 6th World Youth Festival, Hongse niangzi jun (Red Detachment of Women, 1960), which won best feature movie and best direction prizes at the 1st Hundred Flower Movie Festival, Wutai jiemei (Stage Sisters, 1965), which won the annual prize from the British Film Society at the 24th London International Movie Festival, among others. Many of his films focus on the lives of women, workers, artists, or students, and in a style that is ""an aesthetic crucible that ground together Hollywood classicism, Soviet socialist realism, Shanghai dramatic traditions, and indigenous Chinese folk opera forms" (Marchetti, 60). After making Stage Sisters, Xie Jin was denounced as a "bourgeois humanist." He was later imprisoned for several years during the first few years of the Cultural Revolution. He restarted directing in 1975 and made a few influential political melodramas in the 1980s, including Tianyunshan Chuanqi (Legend of Tianyun Mountain, 1980), which won the first national Golden Rooster Award in PRC and the Best Feature at the first Hong Kong Film Festival, Hibiscus Town (1986), which won out at the Seventh Golden Rooster Awards in 1987 and the Grand Prix at the 26th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czechoslovakia, and Yapian zhanzheng (The Opium War, 1997), which won the 17th Golden Rooster Award in China and an award at the Montreal International Film Festival.

About the stars:

Xie Fang (1935-), originally named Xie Huaifu, was born in Hubei and was educated at Ruoyi Girls' School in Hankou. After graduation in 1951, she became an opera actress in the Mid-South Art Troupe and performed in both modern and traditional operas. In 1959, she was selected to play the leading role Lin Daojing in Qingchun zhi ge (Song of Youth, dir. Cui Wei, Chen Huaikai), film adaptation of Yang Mo's influential autobiographic fiction. The film was a great success and she was selected by China's Culture Bureau as one of the 22 most favorite film stars in New China in 1962. In 1963, she was transferred to the Beijing Film Studio, where she starred in Early Spring in February (1963), Stage Sisters (1965), Tear Stains (1979), and appeared in some spoken dramas and TV series. In 1995's centennial commemoration of the birth of world cinema and 90 years of Chinese cinema, Xie Fang was awarded the "Centennial Award" as one of the best actresses in Chinese cinema.

Questions to ponder: These are a few questions suggested for you to think about while reading the assigned articles and watching the film. Please jot down ideas and notes on details or scenes you think are relevant for class discussion. 1. How does the film structure its narrative around reality and the representations of reality in the two stage sisters' onstage and offstage lives? 2. The film centers on the female experiences from the early Republican period, through the war time, to the post-Revolution period. While it serves a propagandist purpose, do you think it conveys anything beyond political ideologies? In what sense does the film director manage to develop his own cinematic style from "an aesthetic crucible that ground together Hollywood classicim, Soviet socialist realism, Shanghai dramatic traditions, and indigenous Chinese folk opera forms"? 3. Can you read it as a feminist film? How gender, nation, and class issues are integrated in the representations of female experiences in the film? 4. Zhang Yingjin quotes Gina Marchetti: "...Stage Sisters therefore contains an already 'very sophisticated' articulation of a 'revolutionary aesthetic'." Please explain what is this 'revolutionary aesthetic' as you see in the film.

Relevant readings:

Marchetti, Gina. "Two Stage Sisters: The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic," first appeared in Jump Cut 34 (1989): 95-106, reprinted in Sheldon Lu ed. Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997. 59-80, and Harry H. Kuoshu ed. Celluloid China: Cinematic Encounters with Culture and Society. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.

Semsel, George, ed. Chinese Film: The State of the Art in the People's Republic. New York: Praeger, 1987.