Research On The Early Chinese Cinema Space Culture(1896-1949)

Built in the early half of the 20th century,the early Chinese cinema is used to be a recognizable symbol of the City and important urban public space.It is a place where the public recollected the past and carried the city memory and cultural tradition.In this paper,the author takes Chinese cinema as analysis object and adopts the new cultural history of microcosmic research perspectives from bottom to top.This article tries to observe the historical phenomenon from the nobodies' daily life,aiming to tease out the development process,cultural logic and market law of the early cinema and offer a whole picture of social culture.From the 1970s,western sociologists have shifted the favor of time to space.H.Lefebvre,a forefather of western space theory,set up the spatial practices,representation of space and representational space in The production of space,which inspires this article structure into three sections:The Perceived Space of Cinema,The Social Space of Cinema,and The Extension Space of Cinema.The Perceived Space of Cinema is a material space of cinema,which can be read and analyzed on two levels——Image description including distribution,location,environment,architecture,screen,voice,and social cultural interpretation of physical space in the term of history,politics,economics,culture and psychology.Firstly,cinema is a geographical space and map space,which involves the distribution of early Chinese cinema in China in the macroscopic view and the distribution of cinemas in urban space on the micro level.The cinema building is not only a kind of engineering technology,but also a materialized form of social culture behind which the cultural significance and symbolism are more important than the building itself.After the visual sense,the auditory sense is another important perception in the cinema.The coming of sound film era,not only bringst the sound technology to the film,but also is a subversive revolution to the film aesthetics.It affected the way the film shot,changed the audience's perception and experience,and involved the issues about modernity,nationality nation and local.The social space of cinema is composed of a variety of complex real world and social networks outside of physical space.It is rooted in the relations of production,ideology,power struggle,discourse pattern,behavioral habit.It involves the business philosophy and market behavior of cinema dealers,the standard of viewing behavior implemented by the social improvement family,the regulations of the national cinema and the film censorship system promulgated by the state,etc.Meanwhile,the cinema also presents a complex social microcosm which has the disaster caused by soldiers and cops,the violence because of patriotic emotion or occupational discrimination,the war of national identity between the Colonizer and the Colonized.To some extent,the cinema itself is more wonderful than the film.It implies many issues including consumption,power,race,sex,modernity,identity,which makes it become the best text researching social space.The Extension Space of Cinema,focusing on the film,media and people,develops the process of production and reconstruction of symbol,experience,memory and imagination.It involves ordinary citizen's aesthetic taste of film and film transmission.It is also closely related to the people in the cinema.The ordinary citizen is the largest audience for the early Chinese film.Chinese traditional culture and thinking mode play an important role in the film market.The media incuding the film advertising,poster,film specification as well as the film are the part of individual collective memory on cinema.The practice of all activities in the cinema ultimately points to the subject of action,namely the person,including audience,stars and workers in the cinema.Finally,this article tries to present and restore the rich and colourful social picture.At the same time,it considers some inevitable problems and think that it is the main course of the early Chinese cinema that the early Chinese cinema participates in the construction of grand issues such as modernity and nationality.