Life insurance and cinema are two new enterprises, in which life insurance is a supplement to film as the former helps development of the film industry and success of movie stars. Famous western film stars all had life insurance of thousands of thousands of dollars. The tall building in the above picture, which is of the same height as that in the film Safety Last!, is the new building of Hua’an He Qun Life Insurance Company.
----1927 China Cinema Yearbook.
Comparing life insurance to the film industry, this advertisement attempts to convey this message to its readers: as an essential part of the glamorous movie industry, life insurance is able not only to promote success of movie stars, but also to symbolize a movie star’s success. The more famous a movie star is, the more life insurance he/she tends to buy. By connecting life insurance with movie stars, this advertisement tried to depict life insurance as a modern business that caters to those who are identified with a celebrity’s life. Moreover, in order to make a deeper impression of the company’s name, it refers to the film Safety Last!, in which the comedian Harold Lloyd is shown climbing a twelve-storey building and ultimately precariously hanging on a hand of a big clock without any protection. Obviously, the advertisement exploits Shanghai
movie-goers’ familiarity with the image of a struggling Harold half in the sky.310
This type of inter-textuality, i.e. “devising texts from other texts,”
In so doing, it reinforced the impression that Harold Lloyd had paid a large sum of money for his life insurance when he was performing stunts in the film. The advertisement implies life insurance eased the comedian’s mind and enabled him to perform dangerous actions fearlessly.
311 was commonly used in advertisements in newspapers and magazines in 1920s Shanghai, especially in movie periodicals. In their analysis of contemporary advertising discourse, Hitchon and Jura defined inter-textuality as “drawing on multiple texts in different media, strongly affects the construction of meaning and the operation of advertising’s underlying persuasive mechanism.”312 According to them, one main difference in inter-textuality between a classic text and a post-modern text is the dependence of a new text on its original one. In a post-modern text, a text relies heavily upon the original one while a classic one is not.313
By making a comparison or connection among different texts, writers were able to introduce a new idea, concept, value, or a product through familiar texts. The above-mentioned advertising of life insurance is a good example, as I analyzed. An advertisement does not just sell In this sense, advertisements in printed media in 1920s Shanghai could still be considered as in-between texts. On the one hand, these texts referred to the Chinese literary and dramatic tradition familiar to most readers, and on the other hand, they also referred to Hollywood movie, a new medium at that time. As inter-textuality was prevalent in the advertising of Shen Bao and Chinese fan magazines in the 1920s, I will explain the term in more detail by using examples in the following section.
310 Shen Bao, October 5, 1925, 1. The advertising texts in Shen Bao and Chinese fan magazines in this chapter and the rest of my dissertation are translated by Qian Zhang.
311 Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), Chapter 2.
312 Jacqueline Hitchon and Jerzy Jura, “Allegorically Speaking: Intertextulaity of the Postmodern Culture and Its Impact on Print and Television Advertising,” Communication Studies 48 (Summer 1997): 142.
313 Hitchon and Jura, 146.
a product, it also sells a desirable lifestyle of a movie star. In Fables of Abundance, Jackson Lears opens his analysis of cultural significance of advertisements with the following lines,
What do advertisements means? Many things. They urge people to buy goods, but they also signify a certain vision of the good life; they validate a way of being in the world. They focus private fantasy; they sanction or subvert existing structures of economical and political power. Their significance depends upon their cultural setting.314
According to Lears, advertisements have important cultural meanings. They not only reflect current cultural values, but also construct and reinforce them. Advertisements have a stronger political or economic appeal than they appear, at first, to have. It was through identification that advertising fulfils viewers’ fantasy, just like film. “In an atmosphere redolent of sweat and cheap perfume, for the piece of a nickel, they (film viewers) were able to participate in fantasies of the most satisfying kind.”315
314 Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Book, 1994), 1.
Like advertising, film sells values, ideas, principles, and dream. A film is an advertisement disguised in a most fanciful and dreamlike way. It constructs, subverts, and reflects current social structures and values. In 1920s Shanghai, as a novelty from the Western world, movies were represented as a high-technology product that depicted characters’ lives, work, concern, and joy that engaged viewers’ emotions or interests.
Hollywood exports resulted in two outcomes. On the one hand, distributors generated their revenues by exporting films to the world market, and, on the other hand, American films also helped to promote American values, principles, lifestyle, cultures, and products.
315 Richard Schickel, The Stars (New York: The Dial Press, 1962), 12.
The social impact of film can also be found in the scholarship on film spectatorship, especially in the study of “empirical movie goers.”316 Miriam Hansen examined how cinema spectatorship transformed the public sphere as well as female daily lives in the United States from the 1890s to the end of 1920s. “The very fact of female spectatorship, for instance, assumes a different meaning in relation to the homosocial tradition of popular entertainments.”317 Cinema created a public space in which spectators with different backgrounds were free to make presence, express joy, and show sorrow.318 The transformative function of cinema was also investigated in a transnational context by non-Western scholars such as Babli Sinha, who argued that American film “offered new forms of social affiliation, entertainment, and vision” in post-colonial South Asia.319 According to her, Hollywood cinema not only created a new public sphere for urban spectators, but also had a strong presence in rural areas through its tie-in products such as film advertisements and posters.320
Theories and methods of this group of scholarship can be applied to my study of the perception of American film in 1920s Shanghai. By analyzing advertisements in fan magazines, together with film review and comment, I aim to reconstruct spectatorship and reception of American film in a trans-national context, with a specific focus on 1920s Shanghai. While film review displays a critical discourse of American films, film advertisement constructs a more popular discourse that shows perception of a wider range of audiences. According to Kathryn In this sense, social impact of film could still be felt even in places where viewers were never exposed to it.
316 Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 3.
317 Hansen, 3.
318 Hansen, 91-125.
319 Babli Sinha, “Misrepresentations and Misunderstandings”: Transnational Media Flows in the age of
Imperialism,” http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/mellon/Misrepresentation%20and%20Misunderstandings.pdf, p.10, last accessed November 6, 2008.
320 Sinha, 8.
Fuller, Motion Picture Story Magazine (MPSM), one of the United States’ earliest fan magazines was founded to attract both female and male readers. By examining the readers’ letters to the MPSM’s forum, Fuller discovered that female fans were more frequently represented as legitimate consumers of film in the magazine as motion picture developed from a new technological gadget into a form of mass entertainment characterized by commercialization and professionalism in the late 1910s.321 Methodologically, she analyzed the advertising in the magazine to judge the gender of its readership. “Consumer goods advertisers, as well, judged a significant proportion of Motion Picture Story Magazines readership to be male, as ads for men’s personal products appeared prominently next to ads for women’s products in the movie fan magazines from 1911 until the late teens.”322 Following her research, I intend to have a general picture of the make-up of readership of major fan magazines and other movie periodicals in 1920s Shanghai by categorizing and investigating their advertisements. As a matter of fact, the method of studying the composition of readers from advertisements of products in magazines has been widely used in fan magazine scholarship, which is based upon the assumption that advertisers are more likely to promote the products of interests to their readers in fan magazines.323
321 Kathryn H. Fuller, “Motion Picture Story Magazine and the Gendered Construction of the Movie Fan,” in In the Eye of the Beholder: Critical Perspectives in Popular Film and Television, ed. Gary R. Edgerton, Michael T.
Marsden and Jack Nachbar (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997), 97-111, 107.
This methodology has its limitations in that it presumes that only a certain group might have some particular behaviours or taste. On the one hand, it can provide us with a general picture of readership of a particular magazine, however, on the other hand, it might exclude those potential readers whom advertisers might not target at. Besides, readership of a magazine could be much larger than its actual subscribers. A person does not necessarily have to buy a magazine
322 Fuller, 104.
323 Adrienne L. McLean, “‘New Films in Story Form’: Movie Story Magazines and Spectatorship,” Cinema Journal 42:3 (Spring 2003): 3-26.
to read it. In this sense, this method, at its best, can only speculate the readers that advertisers aimed at, instead of actual readers. Also such factor as cultural difference in various consumer societies should be taken into consideration because in China, or in some other parts of the world, a female reader could buy a male product for her husband, boyfriend, or her father, and vice versa. Another limitation of using advertising in fan magazines for the study of spectatorship is that consumers of a fan magazine do not necessarily go to movie theatres, as Babli Sinha observed.324 Awareness of these limitations in the primary sources can help to appreciate the uncertainty in historical investigation. Instead of arriving at a definite conclusion, I can discuss what the possibilities were and what might have happened among viewers and readers. However, despite these limitations, fan magazines are still good primary sources for historical research, especially with supplement of other primary and secondary sources. One case in point is a food advertisement that appeared in a local Shanghai fan magazine: eating good food makes you happier, (just like) watching a movie makes you wiser.325 Certainly, the advertisement’s writer would not frown upon a reader’s interpretation that eating food while watching a movie makes a viewer both wiser and happier. According to the ad, it is almost an established fact that a movie can make one wiser. This observation can also be confirmed by a discourse of the social and educational function of movies in the 1920s printed media, which I will discuss in Chapter Nine. This is also a good example to illustrate that advertising in mid-1920s China was more than a marketing strategy because it played into the social discourse as well.326
324 Sinha, 8.
Therefore, use of this ad offers us a glimpse of readers’ perception of film in 1920s
325 Movie Magazine 3, June 1924, advertisement.
326 Weipin Tsai, “Nationalism, Commercialism and Individuality in Shenbao’s Tobacco Advertisements, 1919 to 1937,” in http://www.sinica.edu.tw/imh/symposium/abstract/abstract_WeipinTsainu.pdf, last accessed December 7, 2008.
Shanghai: a film can help increase one’s own knowledge and wisdom. It is a tool for self-education. Therefore, it is also an important instrument for educating the whole society. To sum up, this advertisement is a good example to show how American silent film was perceived in the popular discourse at that period.
In 1920s Shanghai, advertisements in fan magazines and periodicals can be generally divided into seven categories: clothes and shoes, books, healthcare products, liquor, beauty cream and soap, clocks and cameras, and cigarettes.327 Advertisements of these products used such words as “fashionable,” “Western style,” “best,” or “high-class” to describe them. For example, Golden-Dragon cigarettes had the slogan “high-class people smoke high-class cigarettes” in its advertisement.328 By attaching an image of high-class people to this brand of cigarettes, it “signifies a certain vision of the good life,”329
327 Clothes and shoes include fabric, women’s clothes, leather shoes; books include movie star books and dictionary;
healthcare products include tooth brushes, blood tonic, razor, contraceptives, essence oil; liquor includes brandy and champagne.
and creates a desire in common consumers to buy the products. It encourages the general public to identify with a lifestyle of smoking this brand of cigarettes. Using film magazines as a medium, these advertisements not only aim to sell new products and merchandise, but also result in constructing a film culture and a discourse of a modern and prosperous lifestyle for movie goers. As we have seen, good appearance, health, wisdom, and wealth are part of this film-related culture. Ironically, cigarettes were highly present in the urban life in the 1920s China. It was perceived as a sign of sophistication, wealth, and high class, especially for men. In her article, Dolores Mitchell
328 Movie Magazine 12, April 1925, advertisement. Movie Magazine did not have page number. Instead, it is
organized in the order of an article’s Chinese title. If an article is over one page, it would have the only the first word of the title plus the number of the page. For example, if an article on performing skill is three-page long, then, the order of the article would be performing 1, performing 2, and performing 3. Therefore, basically, this magazine did not have numerical order. For this reason, when I make a citation of an issue of the magazine, I can only cite the issue number and the date of the magazine from which an article is cited.
329 Lears, 1.
examines depiction of women smokers at the turn of the twentieth century in the west. She insightfully points out that in popular art, cigarette, like cigars and pipes, was an attribute of assertive masculinity.330 In examining the history of smoking, Gilman and Zhou discusses how cigarette played into the discourse of woman liberation in the 1910s and 1920s United States.
Smoking cigarette was represented as a sign of gender equality as well as a sign of “New Woman.”331
The construction of cigarette as a male product struck a contrast with that of liquor, which was advertised as a medicine for all people on all occasions. Here is one advertisement of brandy that sounds like a cure-all medication, “Jin San Jiao (Golden-Triangle) Brandy was created in France, with a history of over one hundred years. It is good for supplementing your blood, keeping up your strength, especially in winter, it is able to get rid of cold if you drink it frequently. If you have an upsetting stomach or you feel dizzy, you can drink a little to make you feel better either cold or warm with boiling water.”
Such representation of cigarette as male pleasure in patriarchal society was also evident in advertisements in Shen Bao and fan magazines in 1920s China. A decent woman was seldom depicted as a smoker; instead, she was represented as a spectator or a purchaser of cigarette, commonly regarded to be a male product.
332
330 Dolores Mitchell, “The ‘New Woman’ As Prometheus,” Woman’s Art Journal 12:1 (Spring/Summer 1991): 3.
In this advertisement, the strong liquor is represented as a traditional Chinese medicine such as ginger tea that is reputed to treat almost all petty illnesses in the winter season. However, unlike ginger tea, with its exotic name, brandy is depicted as of a higher standard and more of a modern drink in the ad. No wonder, the brandy’s price was not even hinted at in this advertisement. The difference in the advertisements might
331 Sander Gilman and Zhou Xun, “Introduction” in Smoke: A Global History of Smoking, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Zhou Xun (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 22-23.
332 Movie Magazine 12, April 1925, advertisement.
indicate the prevalent perception of the Chinese in the 1920s: while cigarette was root of all evil for a woman, brandy was a high-quality medication for people of different genders and ages.
From these examples, we can find that advertisements in Shen Bao and fan magazines in the 1920s provided us with useful information regarding how Chinese popular media constructed people’s perception of new foreign and domestic products including American film. Among all the advertisements, I choose to compare and analyze those of both cigarette and film for two reasons: first, both of them were initially imported products; second, both of them were prevalent in popular Chinese media, intended for a variety of consumers, with cigarette targeting different groups of male consumers. As advertising of cigarettes also shows such factors as gender and class, it provides a good example to compare and contrast with that of film. Therefore, in this chapter, by analyzing film advertisements in Shen Bao and 1920s American media, I will examine how Hollywood film was promoted in a transnational context. Considering the fact that there is different advertising of the same American film in print media in both China and the United States, I will examine how the meaning of film is constructed in both American and Chinese print media in the 1920s. In analyzing the differences, I discern a range of the different perceptions of a film. Because advertising was so extensive, I will focus my attention on a single case study, Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush. My examination of Hollywood film advertisements in a transnational context prompts several questions: How were American films promoted? How were other American products promoted, such as cigarettes?333 Were there any similarities or differences in advertisements of Hollywood films and other American products?334
333 Marchand, Advertising the American Dream. Also see Lears, Fables of Abundance; Carolyn Kitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
What did
334 Cinema Pressbooks from the Original Studio Collections (microfilm) (Woodbridge, Conn.,: Primary Sources Microfilm, 2001): Reel 29.
these similarities or differences mean in a trans-national context? In answering these questions, this chapter will be divided into two main sections. In the first part, using Shen Bao and other Chinese fan magazines, I will discuss how American products such as cigarettes were promoted in print culture in 1920 Shanghai, and how advertising of an American cigarette differs from that of Chinese brands cigarettes. In the second section, using The Gold Rush as a case study, I will examine how the comedy film was promoted in different media such as Shen Bao, Chinese fan magazines, and 1920s American press. Therefore, differences and similarities of the publicity of the masterpiece in a transnational context will be investigated. And based upon the analyses of the previous two parts, I will conclude this chapter with a summary on the role film advertising played in a film culture in the 1920s.
5.1 ADVERTISING OF CIGARETTES IN THE POPULAR MEDIA IN 1920S