The Debate Between "Hard Movie" And "Soft Movie"

This article is about re-inspection on the debate between "Hard movie" and "Soft movie", which happened in 30s of the 20^th century and was considered as the most serious debate on movie theory at Chinese movie industry before the establishment of China. Both internal rules and external characters were discussed by both groups particularly, in order to develop the view on the character of movie, which contributes to the conversion of the Chinese traditional movie on theory.The demonstration beyond the character of movie art by 《Modern Movie》 ensued from this debate, whose significance was not only to bring out the debate between "Hard movie" and "Soft movie", but to express a kind of culture concept more like the character of movie and many advanced culture features by advertising simply that Art the First at the beginning of publication. Huang, Jiamo and Liu, Naou were both the scriptwriters of the 《Modern Movie》 and the important representatives of "Soft Movie". Huang's entertainment theory highlighted the appreciation of movie and Liu's fine art theory put more on self-regulation, which showed us the exploring process by movie-makers step by step on the characteristic of movie at the earlier time of China.The proactive action of "Soft movie" caused left-wing movie-makers' fight-back. This article focuses on the debate of both sides matched point by point with three aspects: the relation between content and style, movie's artistic character and tendentiousness, criticism criteria etc., which are not isolated, but related from the outsider to the insider and from the shallower to the deeper. The difference of emphasis on content and style stems from the different ambition on artistic character and tendentiousness and the disagreement on these two issues results in their different choice of criticism criteria.The reason why this argument happened in 30s of the 20^th century was based on both technology and culture element. In the term of technology, the progress from non-voice movie to voice one contributed to the form of language situation of Chinese movie theory and the involvement of left-wing art into movie industry helped the innovation and advancement when the society was under transformation. They affected the development of movie theory directly. As for the culture, urbanized business culture in Shanghai built up a large number of consumers of popular culture and they turned up dramatically to become the core social basis of "Soft movie". Meanwhile, this culture also assimilated into or penetrated naturally the practice of...