Cinema, City And Publicity

The dynamic between cinema and publicity has been ignored although it has always existed. In Habermas' 'literary public sphere' concept, what he emphasized is literature, the newspaper, the magazine and other press media. Film and broadcasting were ignored because their 'liquid' characteristic has denied the public's right to 'answer back'. Protesting Habermas''literary elitism', Negt and Kluge argue that the cinema provides a public sphere of experience, which is open and democratic. Hansen, following Negt and Kluge's direction, describes cinema as a 'sensory reflexive horizon', providing a public space for the public to observe, reflect and reject the trauma of modernity. As to the only two human activities in Arendt's'public realm', that is, speech and action, cinema provides a 'show' space for them in a media term, so that the public can watch, talk and comment on their presence and performance. Hence cinema can be regarded as the media form of the ancient Greek's public square or marketplace.The city, as the first place tried to solve human's needs in a'specialized, professional and collective form', can be regarded as the vessel of human's publicity. As the vessel of civilization, the city represents the publicity of human's history and culture. As the space for residence, the city is closely connected with human's common condition and fate. As the space for socialization, the city simulated the formation and development of Habermas'public sphere. The city not only represents our past, but also decides our future. The publicity of the city represents the publicity of people's fate living in the city.Describing the change of China's publicity in the past 60 years through the production and consumption of Shanghai Studio's urban films-films produced by the Shanghai Film Studio and centered on urban life-is an effort to include the interactivity between cultural mechanisms and cultural texts in observation. As a cultural industry, cinema's publicity is not only embodied in its content, but also the mechanism of its production and consumption. As to the Chinese cinema, which has been developing under the flag of 'People's Cinema', the change in the mechanism of production and consumption has caused a crucial change in the publicity of the cinema, so as to affect film's content, production and consumption. Shanghai Film Studio's urban film production has been controlled by political publicity during the first 30 years, and has been liberated and diversified by the market economy during the second 30 years. However, due to the high ticket price, Chinese film audiences have developed 'Blockbusterism' in cinema-going, parallel to 'consumerism' in other fields. Films reflecting real life can hardly make a profit or get listed in the box office. Going to the cinema in China is no longer a 'public' activity but rather 'elitist', which has made China distinct from the rest of the world.The content of a film is an important channel to observe social publicity. Film not only presents its character's emotions and activities, but also the material environment around them. Studying the material environment in a film is the subject of sociological or historical studies and the humanity and emotion circulated in films is the essence for film's publicity. That's how film responded to Habermas'expectations for the literary public sphere, that is, through communication with personal experience, to build the subjectivity of the public and their understanding of humanity, and through open discussion, to cultivate the development of reasonability and publicity.As an important instrument in the public sphere of cinema, film reviewing needs to uphold the job of interpreting, explaining and comparing the publicity of films, as well as cinema, to the film industry and its audiences.