Alleys as a Methodology: Urban Space Study in the 1930s Shanghai Leftist Cinema

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_201How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Leftist Cinema; the 1930s; Shanghai Alleys; Spatial Characteristics; Spatial Metaphor

Abstract

Urban, as a discourse expression in Roland Barthes’ Urban Semiology, not only possesses materiality and functionality, but also conveys the emotional relationship with citizens through specific landscapes. The alley, one of the typical landscapes in Shanghai, has witnessed the significant proceeding of modernization and experienced almost all the social changes since it was colonized by the Western and opened to the international market. Cinema, one of the productions of modernization, developed prosperously and was converted into an implement for propaganda during the Guofang dianying yundong (Defense Cinema Movement) launched spontaneously by film companies in the 1930s as the national crisis continued intensifying. Among the 1930s leftist cinema, two typical films, New and Old Shanghai and Street Angel exemplified the spatial characteristics and metaphor of alleys in Shanghai, indicating the influence of modernization on rural areas, traditional culture and human correlations, as well as the directors and writers’ realistic concepts of revealing Shanghai civic culture. This study will focus on these two films to discuss about leftist cinema development in the 1930s Shanghai.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xinyi Li
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/02/13
TI  - Alleys as a Methodology: Urban Space Study in the 1930s Shanghai Leftist Cinema
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 4th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1571
EP  - 1578
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_201
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_201
ID  - Li2023
ER  -