The Mystery Of Modernity:Orphan Imagination In Early Chinese Films(1923-1937)

The emergence of modernity stems from the comprehensive break between the cultural,political,and economic concepts generated by the scientific revolution,the Renaissance,and the religious reform and the Middle Ages,which mainly includes three aspects: the philosophical level of "human discovery," the political level of "the formation of a country," and the economic level of "the establishment of an industrialized world.".At the end of the 19 th century,"China" was forced into the modern river by the Opium War.Liang Qichao and others advocated a revolution in the fiction and drama worlds,proposing a "new people theory" aimed at changing bad customs,opening up the wisdom of the people,and arousing national ideology.In 1923,"The Story of the Orphans Saving the Ancestors" opened the precedent for Chinese film narrative feature films,and the resulting family ethics drama also became the narrative type of early Chinese films.In 1937,Japan fully occupied Shanghai,and the film industry was severely damaged.The focus of the social era was on resisting the invaders,The revolutionary narrative of defending the country."The filmmakers who stayed on the" isolated island "borrowed from the past to satirize the present,while the filmmakers who moved to Hong Kong called for revolution and worked for war.".In 1923-1937,Chinese society,as an infinitely expanded and refolded domain,was mixed with the modernity experience of subjects related to class order and cognitive paradigms."Orphans" in most films carried the cross temporal imagination of the past,present,and future,and also radiated multiple dimensions such as the enlightenment of individual freedom,the dissolution of family order,the transformation of social systems,and the appeal of the nation state,Invoking and placing the individual imagination of the "new people" has also become an aesthetic narrative carrier of social imagination.This article is divided into four chapters to discuss the imagination of orphans in early Chinese movies.The first chapter analyzes the narrative and psychological characteristics of orphan images,from traditional Chinese tragic narration to the literary and drama fields of the late Qing and early Ming dynasties,combining the social situation with the harmony between enlightenment and entertainment of the creators,to comb the foundation of the birth of orphans in movies;The second chapter summarizes the individual representations of orphans in movies from the perspectives of social relations,modern education,and women’s liberation,analyzes the shaping strategies of the subject of orphans in movies from the perspectives of images,bodies,and faces,and finally explores the individual imagination of the public from the perspective of the occurrence of self concepts and the function of visual mirrors;The third chapter takes the orphan of the wanderer as a starting point,elaborates on the identity of the orphan wandering in space in the film,analyzes the connotation of spatial relations,and analyzes the social imagination about the establishment and fragmentation of urban myths.The fourth chapter extends the fragmentation of the orphan family to the narrative of the family state revolution.Firstly,it analyzes and expounds that the relationship between the orphan and the family is a reconstructed model,and presents strategies for restructuring the family from the perspective of motivation and obstacles,Finally,the author uses the isomorphic relationship between family and country to extend the imagination of orphans in the transition period about the emerging family and country.