The Living Space And Urban Culture In Shanghai Film Before 1949

This essay concerns about early movies of Shanghai urban lives before 1949. It majorly discusses how early films depicted living conditions, crowded shuffles and daily Shanghai lives of ordinary people, and also the complex relationships among crowded experiences, Shanghai impression and Shanghai culture.Since the foundation of the city, Shanghai became a split place due to the magnificent changes of the city’s framework. It’s the alienated name card of the city and the charisma of the “modern city” that attracted a huge amount of ordinary people to Shanghai. With the limited space of the place, it’s clearly that the large population couldn’t be fit elegantly in the city, and that’s why it’s impossible to live in Shanghai without being squeezed into the narrow space of living.The lives of ordinary people were terribly affected by the narrow living space, which helped local residents of lower shelter-ish accommodations evolve their own kind of survival code. Considering opening to the world as the start, narrow living space must be one of its consequences. Then how citizens of Shanghai were able to reproduce in its living space also represented the new type of production of social relations during the transition of traditional society to a modern one. Thus the discussion of this kind of reproduction and also the social, cultural as well as political features behind this reproduction is especially symbolic and meaningful.On the bright side, the narrow living space met Shanghai movies at a moderate time, for the fact that early Shanghai movies depicted urban space as often as possible, especially in 1930 s, when our nation was faced with the life and death moment, advanced movie makers were more likely to regard urban life as an “original sin”. It was the conflict between the “negative” existence of the city and the modern look of it in the motion pictures, as well as the complicated structure of the space that allowed us to get a look at lower people’s urban lives through the films.It’s obvious that the evolution and alternation of Shanghai urban life continues to change. Conservative Shanghai culture was challenged continuously by modern culture, which lead to the transition from small country society to metropolis. Despite the fact that early images didn’t depict the transition of culture, creators still sensitively sensed the changes and emerged them within the story telling of the movies. That’s also why looking back through the early urban movies has a profound meaning.In addition, it’s out of consideration of lower class people to discuss the changes of Shanghai daily life and urban culture from the angle of living space of ordinary people. In the past related researches of Shanghai urban culture and movie, conductors of the researches usually focuses majorly on modern side of Shanghai life, such as depiction of the Bund, Nanjing Road and so on, but seldom on how narrow living space affected lower class people’s routine lives.However, although ideology often interferes with daily life of ordinary people in early films, its vivid features could not be overlooked. Some petty nobodies and mesne landlords also founded urban culture of Shanghai, which was influenced by the reproduction of lower class people to a great extent. Both material lives and prospective were subtly altered by the crowed and narrow living space. With the analyzation of rare given subtexts of Shanghai lives, we can still get a general understanding of the diversity of Shanghai urban culture and daily lives.