CHAPTER 24
On and Beyond Mickey-Mousing: Revisiting Yuan Muzhi’s Scenes of City Life (1935) Jingyi Zhang
Proclaimed as ‘the first musical comedy’ in Chinese cinematic history, Yuan Muzhi’s left-wing film Scenes of City Life (Dushi fengguang; 1935) is much celebrated for its creative experimentation with sound and image (Bao 2015, p. 225; Yeh 2002, p. 89). It importantly marks the first instance of original music written solely for film in Chinese cinematic history, reflecting a tight-knit collaboration among three established Chinese composers of the day. Yuanren Zhao composed the theme song ‘Song of the Peepshow,’ Zi Huang wrote ‘City Scenes Fantasia,’ and Lüting He was responsible for all other comical sound effects and musical episodes throughout the entire film. In the 1930s, Scenes of City Life was popularly received among the Chinese audiences who were drawn to this ‘hundred percent new-style musical comedy’ (xinxing yinyuehua youmoju) (Xizi 1993, p. 191). Scenes of City Life is full of ridiculous characters caught up in their own follies. The film primarily revolves around the love triangle between the female protagonist Xiaoyun and two men who come from vastly different socio-economic backgrounds, Menghua and Junsan. Menghua is a writer who turns to books of love expressions to write love letters to his beloved, Xiaoyun; Junsan, the other romantic pursuer of Xiaoyun, is the boss of a tea company but cannot tell the difference among teas; Xiaoyun’s father is a pawnshop shareholder who steals items from his own store to fulfil the
J. Zhang (*) Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: jingyizhang@g.harvard.edu © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Audissino, E. Wennekes (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33422-1_24
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materialistic needs of his daughter. Starting out on a mischievous note, the film ventures into a comical albeit satirical commentary on capitalism in the 1930s Shanghai society. Whilst the film has generated widespread interest among audiences of the day and contemporary film scholars alike, discussions of its acoustic dimension are largely confined to the prevalent use of mickey-mousing at the expense of engaging with many avant-garde sound practices present. Mickey-mousing is directly derived from the Mickey Mouse cartoons in which the sound (effects) slavishly follows every action to create a comic effect, hence accentuating the didascalic uses of sounds. Drawing on primary sources like Chinese newspapers, personal commentaries by composers themselves, writings on film sound, early Chinese film music, and Chinese cultural studies, I contend that the use of sound and music in Scenes of City Life is much more sophisticated and multi-layered than solely mickey-mousing. In turn, I push for a nuanced re-examination of audiovisual expression in early experimental Chinese sound cinema. In doing so, my chapter ties in with broader socio-historical concerns of 1930s Shanghai, and the pervasive impact of Western films and trends of thought in this pivotal work. Through my close examination of this touchtone filmic masterpiece, it will offer a fertile starting point to open new imaginative ways of listening and theorising early Chinese sound cinema in the 1930s. My chapter will specifically be engaging with four important dimensions of sound usage in the film: an experimental, comic prelude that plays with the borders of diegetic and non-diegetic music-making; ‘noise-musicality’ from the lower strata of society; rendering sounds of the city; and the sound of money and materialist dreaming. But before delving into these aspects, one must first acknowledge the significance and impact of the film in the developmental phase of early Chinese sound cinema, as well as how its reception during its day shapes today’s scholarly engagement with the film.
A WATERSHED MOMENT IN CHINESE CINEMATIC HISTORY Scenes of City Life is generally regarded as the watershed moment in early Chinese film music development. This was affirmed by one of the composers, Lüting He, who proclaimed, ‘Before [Scenes of City Life], film music had never successfully captured the characters’ actions, psychological transformations, and changes in scenes’ (He 1993, p. 179). Though it was already hugely successful in the 1930s, the composers’ efforts were judged solely on the basis of audiovisual correspondence (i.e., mickey-mousing), thus precluding extended engagements with innovative acoustic procedures beyond tight-knit synchronism. Chen Bao (one of the Chinese newspapers) conveniently labelled the film as a ‘musical cartoon,’ and that ‘the maximum effect’ is contributed by the music’s ‘ab[ility] to work in synchronisation with the image’ (Xizi 1993, pp. 184–185). Though He was particularly praised for his effective use of mickey-mousing techniques, a comprehensive view of his musical creativity was
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not fully recognised and appreciated by the wider public in his day. Huang attributed this to ‘the low public taste, and the lack of talented composers’ (Huang 1993, p. 177). It is critical to revisit Scenes of City Life once more, for this pivotal film reflects a self-conscious attempt by the three Western-trained Chinese composers to forge a new path in Chinese film scoring in the advent of early sound cinema.1 It was reported in a Chinese newspaper that the trio, after agreeing to take on the project, collectively declared their ambitions: ‘Let’s progress together and help our Chinese film industry catch up with the rest of the world, as well as elevate the musical taste and interest of the public’ (Xizi 1993, p. 179). Therefore, Scenes of City Life served as an experimental platform for the composers to try out novel, creative sound ideas uninhibitedly, whilst paying particular attention to the inventive use of sound and music beyond mickey-mousing. Whilst there are several scholars focussing on the soundworld of 1930s Chinese cinema, their studies are often confined to the socio-historical investigation of hybrid sound and particular musical genres (i.e., theme songs) that dominate this phase of Chinese cinematic development. Undoubtedly, theme songs constitute a chief part of the viewing experience in Chinese left-wing cinema from 1932 to 1937. According to Di Liu, they forge ‘a new art style’ in ‘the making of the metropolitan, modern culture of China in the 1920s and the 1930s,’ hence accounting for the disproportionate amount of scholarly attention it receives (Liu 2016, p. 489). In her analysis of Scenes of City Life, Yueh-yu Yeh singled out the opening theme song ‘Song of the Peepshow’ for discussion. Pertaining to the other uses of sound and music in the film, she merely commented on its overall subservience to the image, what she calls ‘film music[’s] […] total integrat[ion] with the images’ (Yeh 2002, p. 89). Yeh also gestured to the co-existence of both Chinese and Western music in early Chinese films, before introducing her concept of ‘negotiated sinification.’ (Yeh 2002, p. 85). Bao Weihong and Dong Xinyu engaged with the acoustic aspects of the film on a deeper level. Dong called attention to ‘Chinese left-wing cinema’s turn to comedy and the ludic tradition of the global avant-garde’ in her intertextual study of Scenes of City Life (1935, dir. Muzhi Yuan, music by Yuanren Zhao, Zi Huang, and Lüting He), Street Angel (1937, dir. Muzhi Yuan, music by Lüting He), and Crossroads (1937, dir. Xiling Shen, music by Lüting He) (Dong 2009, p. 157). She described the opening sequence of the film as ‘a feast of visual and audio gimmicks’ whilst making intertextual connections to Yuan’s other film, Street Angel, particularly his similar use of a ‘mini-city symphony… in its title sequence, adding yet another layer of ludic self-referentiality to the film-spectator relationship’ (Dong 2009, pp. 185, 199). These prevalent, multifaceted associations thus demonstrate how the genre of ‘city symphony’ rapidly morphed into ‘a site of cinematic experimentation for avant-garde filmmakers all over the world’ during the 1920s and 1930s which I will discuss in greater detail in a later section.2 (Dong 2009, p. 181)
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On the other hand, Bao illustrated the ways in which Scenes of City Life partakes in ‘an ingenious experiment in sound and images’ that ‘reflects the growing interest in the aesthetic, economic, and political potential of sound cinema’ (Bao 2015, p. 225). She analysed the ‘element of confusion’ manifested in the diegetic sound, particularly the ‘brief and comically delayed bit of synchronization’ occurring in the opening railway station scene (Bao 2015, p. 225). She further explored the tremendous affective power present in the montage sequence of the film whilst associating it with Feng Zikai’s architectural conception, and how ‘the frantic cutting and music’ contributes to ‘an immediate sensation of rhythm, speed, and motion.’ (Bao 2015, p. 236) Present discussions of Yuan’s film, insightful as they are, are more vested in the aesthetic effects of the theme song and key audiovisual sequences at the expense of arriving at a holistic understanding of acoustic performance at work: particularly how sounds, sound effects, noises, and music work in tandem (or counterpoint) with the image, overall narrative framework, broader intermedial associations with Western filmic influences of that time, as well as significant socio-historical concerns in Chinese early filmic practice, which I will strive to address in this chapter. In bringing different methodologies into dialogue with each other, I further aim to extend the writings of Michel Chion beyond the domain of Western cinematic practice and socio-historical context, whilst illuminating what is particular and unique about early Chinese cinematic tradition.
A COMIC PRELUDE The experimental ethos of the film is evident right from the opening prelude which engages in a playful exploration of the medium of sound film. Through intentional reveals of sound producers and the unique use of camera shots in a tongue-in-cheek way, producers of Scenes of City Life delight in befuddling viewers. A train destination display opens the film pointing to the direction of Shanghai. We are then greeted by Menghua, Xiaoyun, and her parents who walk on rhythmically in interlocking elbows, to the beats of the music whilst turning their heads left and right in a comedic fashion. This scene is accompanied by percussive instruments which function non-diegetically up till the moment the camera does a pan shot of a corner where the source of the sound is revealed: a man is playing a cymbal whilst another is tapping a metallic object in an automaton-like fashion. This odd reveal of sound producers astutely utilises comedy that speaks to a particular experimental phase in Chinese sound cinema history that revels in confusing viewers through playing with the borders of diegetic and non-diegetic sounds. After a brief sequence, these four characters, presumably to have heard the percussive sounds, join the two men who continue striking their instruments mechanically, seemingly deaf to all the commotion that is going on around him. This scene is observed in Fig. 24.1.
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Fig. 24.1 Screenshot from the opening comic prelude of Scenes of City Life
Soon after, a resounding drum drifts in from afar, causing them all—including the two indifferent percussionists—to collectively turn towards their right in search of the source of sound. Here, the same acoustic trick is deployed again. Our eyes are aligned with theirs as an eccentric-looking middle-aged man with an eye patch appears before us, clanking his instrument as he breaks into a song to promote his peepshow. Just when we are led to the belief that he is the sole producer of the sounds, we are duped again as we hear additional percussive instruments punctuating the main beats of his singing without actually seeing them. The acoustic tricks utilised by the creative team here—revealing some sound producers whilst concealing others beyond the ken of the camera—assume a comical albeit experimental ethos that provokes us to question the borders between diegetic and non-diegetic play of sounds. Drawn by his singing, a large crowd quickly gathers around him, jostling to catch a glimpse of the peepshow. With the camera pointed to their backs, we are momentarily aligned with the point of vision of the audiences in the film as we concentrate on the performance that is about to unfold before us. This selfreflexive shot where we join in with the four protagonists in the peepshow seems to be making a meta-commentary on the film itself, that it is ultimately about us, and we are watching ourselves partake in the follies of society. To take this idea further, the next scene reverses the camera and shoots from the front.
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We see a sea of faces with expressions of wonder as the spectators—most prominently the four protagonists in the foreground—huddle up close to the peepshow. It is at this moment that we know that we in fact are the show.
‘NOISE-MUSICALITY’ FROM THE LOWER STRATA OF SOCIETY Scenes of City Life showcases the skilful use of sound synchronisation in the performative play between the borders of the diegetic and the non-diegetic, attesting to the composers’ intense fascination with the aural possibilities brought about by the sound medium. Instead of harping on (yet again) the obsessive gestures of synchronisations, let’s focus on a marked—but glaringly overlooked—dimension of sound play: the musicalisation of noise, or what I call ‘noise-musicality,’ in relation to the human foibles and follies aplenty throughout the film. ‘Noise-musicality’ is represented in two striking ways in Scenes of City Life: the effect of speech being perceived as noise, and the literal replacing of speech with gibberish vocalisations. In the former, speech is heard as noise or what we could call ‘noise-musicality’, and in the latter, speech is noise. The second type—where noise completely overtakes speech—in turn generating a newfound sense of musicality via rapid rhythmic repetitions of nonsense syllables, and the furious string tremolos that accompany such moments, effectively blurs the boundaries between the diegetic and the non-diegetic. It occurs in two places. First, in the pawnshop (from 18:55 to 18:59) where Xiaoyun’s father, a shareholder who intends to steal items from his own shop, engages in a heated argument with the old employee banning him from doing so. Second, out in the streets (from 30:34 to 30:53) where two vendors are promoting their clothes to the public. Now, let’s briefly lay out the three instances where the first case of ‘noisemusicality’ (where speech is heard as noise) sets in: Instance #1: The Train Station3 Upon being asked where they are headed, the train passengers enthusiastically proclaim ‘Shanghai!’ one after another in a highly rhythmical manner (resembling a domino effect) corresponding with a visual close-up of each’s face. Eventually culminating in the tones D-C#-D-C# which is then sounded by the brasses. Effect: The rising proclamations of the passengers that culminate in the brass-intoned D-C#-D-C# generate a point-blank slide between noise-speechmusical sounds. Instance #2: Xiaoyun’s Home4 Xiaoyun’s parents are arguing over their dire financial situation whilst accompanied by furious string tremolos and timpani in the background. Each of their
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angry retorts carries the same number of syllables and concludes with the same end rhyme: Xiaoyun’s father: Translation: Xiaoyun’s mother: Translation:
现在生意不好没有钱，要我怎么办? [nine syllables + five syllables] We don’t have money because of the bad business these days, so what do you want me to do? 家里还得买菜没有钱，叫我怎么办? [nine syllables + five syllables] We don’t have money to buy grocery, so what do you want me to do?
Effect: The strictly patterned and rhymed dialogue taking place between Xiaoyun’s parents that is acoustically overtaken by the dense string tremolos and timpani sound effect blurs the boundary between noisy speech-soundmusical sounds. Instance #3: The Pawnshop5 Menghua decides to trade in his watch, so he can afford to take Xiaoyun to the movies. His bargaining with the pawnshop employee back-and-forth is characterised by the rapid pattering of two-syllable articulations: Pawnshop employee: 两块 [two syllables] Translation: Two dollars Menghua: 四块 [two syllables] Translation: Four dollars Pawnshop employee: 两块 [two syllables] Translation: Two dollars Menghua: 四块 [two syllables] Translation: Four dollars Pawnshop employee: 两块 [two syllables] Translation: Two dollars Menghua: 好吧， 就两块 [two syllables + three syllables] Translation: Ok, two dollars
Effect: The patterned exchange between Menghua and the pawnshop employee gradually morphs into a slide between speech-noise-soundmusical sounds. This idiosyncratic sound effect marks the first of its kind in Chinese cinematic history, and above all, lends an absurdist, avant-garde touch to the film itself. Depriving characters of sensible exchange, ‘noise-musicality’ satirises them. Sounding during moments of senseless proclaiming, arguing, and bargaining, this bizarre—and exaggerated—sonic marker induces what Diran John Sohigian would call ‘thoughtful laughter’ in audiences as they simultaneously revel in the characters’ foolish acts and reflect on the societal ills of 1930s Shanghai (Sohigian 2007, p. 139). Therefore, ‘noise-musicality’ is endowed with the power of social commentary in the process of painting a less-thanflattering image of characters who belong to the petty bourgeois class of Shanghai’s class-stratified society.
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This preoccupation with noise has to be understood alongside the development of early sound cinema in the West where it was a source of fascination, and against the dominant trends of Chinese cinematic sound practices in the 1920s and 1930s. Western cinema in the late 1920s and 1930s, according to Michel Chion, was characterised by ‘the celebration of rhythm and the idea of a vital force,’ as observed in the lack of clear distinction between music and noise (Chion 2009, p. 41). This notion is pushed to even greater extremes in Scenes of City Life, where the borders between noise, speech, sound, musical sounds, and music collapse in these marked moments of the film. However, these radical acoustic procedures signify a sharp departure from early Chinese film music conventions which is dominated by popular musical styles, most notably Jinhui Li’s ‘yellow music’ and Er Nie’s ‘phonographic realism’ (Jones 2001, pp. 105–136). Li cultivated ‘the popular hybrid of jazz and Chinese folk melody’ whilst Nie drew on a diverse palette of sounds ranging from Hollywood, Tin Pan Alley, and the Soviet Union in achieving a revolutionary style of music (Jones 2001, pp. 106, 114, 117, 121). As contrasting as they seem, both are in favour of an easily accessible idiom through the use of crowd-pleasing music, and various forms of aesthetic standardisations aimed at the erasure of class differences. In expressing ‘a collective “we”’ through envoicing the masses, they celebrate the petty bourgeois class of the day. (Jones 2001, p. 123) On the other hand, the creative team of Scenes of City Life is doing something very different here with ‘noise-musicality.’ Materialising in the form of acoustic othering, it provokes us into laughter, and through such critical distancing, forces a direct confrontation with the incredulity of these characters and their actions. These exaggerated moments further serve as a sarcastic commentary on the pervasive materialism and greed that dominates Shanghai society in the 1930s.
RENDERING SOUNDS OF THE CITY The opening theme song ‘City Scenes Fantasia’ composed by Zi Huang represents the first mini city symphony film sequence in Chinese sound cinema, which was recycled in the opening of Yuan’s Street Angels, another film celebrated for the inventive use of sounds.6 This audiovisual montage exhibits sonic cosmopolitanism through synchresis, by enabling our ears to ‘feel’ the urban soundscape come alive (Chion 2009, p. 492). Put another way, the music does not merely reproduce, but re-presents the metropolitan Shanghai cityscape in the 1930s, which stood at ‘the centre of the cultural production and consumption of Chinese modernity,’ hence making Shanghai the ideal subject to feature in a city symphony film (Lee 1999, pp. 101, 104–5). ‘City Scenes Fantasia’ hence serves as a window into Shanghai’s cosmopolitan present and colonial past through an acoustic reconstruction, or re-presentation of its urban environment.
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It is first important to acknowledge the rich intermedial weaving of various urban genres of the day, which directly contributes to the significance of ‘City Scenes Fantasia.’ The city symphony film genre taps into both the rising interest in ‘urban environments combined with an avant-garde film practice,’ and the cliché tradition of ‘compar[ing] urban life to a symphony,’ as observed in Love Me Tonight (1932, dir. Rouben Mamoulian, music by Richard Rodgers) and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927, dir. Walter Ruttman, music by Edmund Meisel) (Schwartz 2018, p. 1; Chion 2009, pp. 239–240). According to Daniel Schwartz, ‘the cinematic city’ portrayed in the city symphony film speaks to the desire to ‘establish a special relationship between cities, cinema, and modernity’ (Schwartz 2018, p. 2). Whilst Berlin: Symphony of a Great City strove to ‘defin[e] the “cross-section,” “street,” or “slice of life” films of the 1920s [Berlin],’ ‘City Scenes Fantasia’ renders the sonic cosmopolitanism of Shanghai in the 1930s (Natter 1994, p. 213). This fascination with the city further made its way into the 1930s Shanghai literary scene where city narratives were unsurprisingly a common fixation among its writers. The first major realistic novel, Midnight: A Romance of China, 1930 (1933) by Dun Mao was ‘intended to picture the metropolis of Shanghai’ as the ‘nucleus of uncontrollable economic and political energy in modern China’ (Zhang 1995, p. 13). In ‘City Scenes Fantasia,’ the creative team effectively portrays Shanghai as a city of spectacle by liberating sound from its shackles of naturalism, in turn generating new meanings, possibilities, and associations. The transformation of mundane city noises into compositional elements onto themselves invokes a particular musical sensibility that flaunts the uniquely modernistic appeal of Shanghai. Right from the opening, Shanghai night scene bursts forth with its dazzling neon lights, emblematic of what Leo Ou-fan Lee calls the ‘“semiotics” of material culture’ (Lee 1999, p. 84). As the acoustic imagination is so powerful, the neon lights alone would immediately evoke Shanghai as a modern metropolis, as observed in Fig. 24.2. The great diversity of modern spaces featured include dancing halls, Far Eastern Hotel, national state lottery administration, municipal buildings, massage and bath venues, nightclubs, The Dutch Village, Indian curry restaurant, Shanghai Grand Opera House, insurance companies, public park, church, and the list goes on. Nara Dillon and Jean C. Oi drew attention to the importance of these public spaces and institutions ‘in shaping borderblurring networks,’ which is further emphasised here through rapid visual cuts forcefully punctuated by musical accents (Dillon and Oi 2008, p. 6). Juxtaposing the dancing halls and nightclubs (hallmarks of Shanghai’s urban milieu in the 1930s) against the Art Deco style public buildings (legacy of British colonial power) contributes to the unique modernist appeal of Shanghai, in the co-existence of old and new, past and present, and Chinese and Western. Public structures like the Western hotels, banks, churches, and restaurants further serve as sober reminders of Shanghai’s colonial-metropolitan roots. A long panning shot of the public park accompanied by serene music echoes Shanghai’s British colonial legacy, particularly the 1928 abolition of the
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Fig. 24.2 City Life
Screenshot from the opening still of ‘City Scenes Fantasia’ from Scenes of
notorious ban of Chinese and dogs from Western parks. According to Lee, these hybrid spaces ‘served as public markers in a geographical sense, but they were also the concrete manifestations of Western material civilization in which were embedded the checkered history of almost a century of Sino-Western contact’ (Lee 1999, p. 77). In employing Chion’s concept of rendering, I posit that the creative team endows the city of Shanghai with immense agency and narrative powers through the conscious forging of new audiovisual relationships in the film. This contributes to the local modernist appeal of the city back in the 1930s. Chion introduced the notion of rendering to interpret the active engagement with our multi-sensory perception and the inscription of physical motion through the chief medium of sound such that the film spectator recognises sounds to be truthful, effective, and fitting not so much if they reproduce what would be heard in the same situation in reality, but if they render (convey, express) the sensations—not necessarily auditory—associated with the situation. … A rendering is always the rendering of something. (Chion 2009, p. 488)
Chion attributes sound’s potential of rendering to ‘its flexibility with respect to causal identification’ and its ‘forgiving [nature] in that the spectator is quite
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tolerant when a sound does not resemble what one would hear in a given real situation, since there are no laws that rigidly unite a given sound with its cause’ (Chion 2009, p. 488). This ‘flexibility’ and ‘forgiving’ nature of sound lends itself to synchresis, an intuitive ‘perception of the concomitance of a discrete sound event and a discrete visual event as a single phenomenon,’ in the words of Chion (Chion 2009, p. 492). The creative team employs visual anchors to ground our imaginary translations of impressions. We hear church bells sounding as we see churches without focussing specifically on the source of sound production. Likewise, we hear honking sounds made by brass instruments without seeing the impatient drivers behind the cars. They further resort to the deliberate elision of the musical and the unmusical, the real and the imaginary in this audiovisual montage, contributing to a certain acoustic liminality that emerges from the slide between noise-sound-musical sounds-music. What we might originally perceive as noises made by cars easily slides into the charming realm of the musical in this nondiegetic rendering. A newfound sense of visual vitality is further brought forth through the shaky images framing the emphatic opening and conclusion of ‘City Scenes Fantasia’ which lends a certain haptic quality to what we see. ‘City Scenes Fantasia’ is distinguished from other Western city symphony films of its day by its sheer diversity of spaces portrayed and the intense audiovisual synergy generated. Tying in with the broader socio-historical context of Shanghai, the audiovisual sequence weaves an unusually rich texture of the modern metropolis and its colonial history, resonating with what Michel Foucault calls heterotopia which is constituted of ‘a whole series of places that are foreign to one another … [possessing] very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings … in this sort of microcosm’ (Foucault 1984, p. 6). The heterotopic spaces represented in ‘City Scenes Fantasia’ places Shanghai at the very centre of urban cultural production, consumption, and circulation. Above all, employing sound and music in rendering the bustling soundscape of 1930s Shanghai further reinforces the notion of sonic cosmopolitanism whereby one is prone to believe in the cliché notion that a city scene is saturated with sounds and music all the time, thereby accounting for the carrying over of sound and noises into the pan-musical world of the film. The intuitive association drawn between sound and sight in rendering the cosmopolitan appeal of 1930s Shanghai resonates with Schwartz’s push for ‘a robust conception of sound as a multi-sensory phenomenon.’ (Schwartz 2018, p. 27)
THE SOUNDS OF MONEY AND MATERIALIST DREAMING Money and materialism are chief subject matters in Scenes of City Life, reflecting key concerns of the petty bourgeois class, which constitutes an important community in the urban elite of Shanghai society back in the 1930s. According to Eddy U, their approach to life is best characterised by an ‘extreme individualism,’ leading them to ‘focus on their own narrow lives and possessions, and naturally deal with every issue by placing their personal interests ahead of
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everything else’ (U 2015, pp. 596, 586, 587). This is true of every character in the film: Xiaoyun would rather steal from her father’s pawnshop than miss her friend’s wedding; Menghua would rather delay his rent payment than skip a date with Xiaoyun; Junsan would rather waste his money on betting than manage his tea business well. So on and so forth. Since money and materialism are prominently foregrounded in Scenes of City Life, it is fruitful to engage on a deeper level with sounds related to these ideas. This category of sound demands its own separate study for it assumes great agency both within the filmic narrative, and fits into the genealogy of other similarly themed leftist films of the day, set against the broader Shanghai sociohistorical climate in the 1930s. Many leftist films produced in Shanghai in the 1930s deal with the subject of money, among which notably include Symphony of Lianhua (1937, dir. Chusheng Cai, Mu Fei, Mengfu He, Huimin Situ, Fu Shen, Yu Sun, Youliu Tan, and Shilin Zhu, music by Er Nie), New Year’s Coin (1937, dir. Shichuan Zhang, music by Lüting He), and—again—Yuan’s Street Angel. Not only is money the chief subject matter in these films, but it is also responsible for driving the story forward, serving as the sole thread that connects the different characters together into a coherent narrative framework. In Cai and Fei’s Symphony of Lianhua, money is the cornerstone of the film, as we gather right from the very beginning.7 Following the opening credit sequence, we are greeted by the image of a banknote with the Chinese characters ‘twenty cents’ superimposed on it, accompanied by the emphatic sounding of the gong. Next, virtuosic piano music sets in, seeking to capture all the visual frenzy that is about to ensue. We observe the literal circulation of the banknote from the hands of a rich philanderer who uses it to light his cigarette, to a poor commoner who irons it and uses it to pay for her grocery, to a pickpocket in the market who steals it to purchase a meal, and finally landing in the hands of a young trishaw puller. In this wild audiovisual sequence, it can be said that the twenty-cent banknote offers an opportunity, or a pretext for us to examine the diverse social-class makeup of Shanghai back in the 1930s. Following through the energetic piano music in Symphony of Lianhua, we observe the different ways twenty cents is being used, and the manners it is acquired from the previous owner. This forces a confrontation with the dramatic wealth gap existing between the opposite spectrums of Shanghai society. Put another way, we come to acquire a holistic picture of citizens spanning both extreme economic ends of the society, as the banknote gets passed on to the hands of different people. Likewise, in New Year’s Coin, we observe the circulation of a silver coin— not banknote—this time, which accumulates greater agency throughout the narrative, as it gets passed to the hands of many people over the course of one whole year.8 Andrew Jones posited that this narrative pivoting around the coin functions as ‘a clever gimmick to deliver to the viewer a roughly synchronic slice of Shanghai life in all of its class-stratified diversity’ (Jones 2001, p. 131). Whilst no music accompanies these money-related scenes, the sound of the
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coin landing on hard surfaces or crashing into other objects is significantly amplified, inviting us to pay attention to the specific moment the next person acquires the coin, and reflect on the difference in social class standing among the various owners. Another more recent instance where microstories are strung together by a banknote that is passed from hand to hand is most notably seen in Twenty Bucks (1993, dir. Keva Rosenfeld, music by David Robbins). Though Yuan’s Scenes of City Life is not as narrowly focused on the subject of money as like in the above films mentioned, every character struggles with money issues of some sort: Xiaoyun steals from her father’s pawnshop and depends on her suitors to satisfy her materialistic needs; Menghua is a poor writer who has difficulty paying his monthly rent in time, but splurges on expensive dates with Xiaoyun; Junsan is coping with his soon-to-be-bankrupt tea company by making big bets on lottery. As can be seen, these characters brought it upon themselves just to fulfil their greed. Now, let’s trace the two acoustic standouts recurring in the film that are intimately associated with these notions: a sonorous timpani and cymbal interlude, and an ascending arpeggio figure sounded by the triangle.
TIMPANI-CYMBAL MOTIF The brief timpani-cymbal motif appears sixteen times in total throughout the film, directly envoicing the characters’ materialistic desires. It appears everytime Menghua daydreams of himself buying a car and being with his love, whenever Xiaoyun acquires another fashionable item through dishonest means, when Xiaoyun’s father discovers that his daughter is dating Junsan who is the boss of a tea company. It also shows up in some random money-betting scenes. Another prominent instance demonstrates Xiaoyun’s materialistic dreaming, as she imagines herself donning on a fashionable outfit to attend her friend’s wedding. In short, the pervasive timpani-cymbal figure that is deeply entwined with the characters who are led astray by their own desires and illusions is far from arbitrary but should be viewed alongside the religious soundscape of the Chinese Buddhist tradition at large. The power of sound plays a central role in Buddhist teaching and its material culture, as stated by Chen Pi-yen, ‘Sound in this religion is the most important medium and merit by which the Buddha teaches the dharma to all beings, and by which beings receive salvation’ (Chen 2001, p. 44). The bell in particular is responsible for regulating monastic life, along with other instruments like the drum, the muyu (wooden fish), and the bronze gong. Not only are these instruments sounded in daily monastic life, but also during special ceremonies, functioning as a form of summoning (Burdorf 2019, pp. 331–332). Besides performing regulatory and summoning functions within the walls of the temple, the Chinese Buddhist soundscape also wields great affective charge among lay members (from outside the temple) due to the proliferating nature of bell sounds such that
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[w]hen it is struck inside a temple, its sound is also heard outside. Along with it, the teaching [spreads] everywhere, emitted with a clear, resonant sound. It reaches both the [areas with] tall buildings and cramped chambers, and those who live in seclusion deep in the hinterland; everywhere, it causes [people] to hear. (Burdorf 2019, p. 333)
This is an important point to bear in mind, for the sheer resonance and proliferating power of the instruments associated with Chinese Buddhism have transmitted and found its way to the secular world of Chinese early sound cinema, and its deaf characters who are wrapped up in their own desires and indulgences. Their deafness is rendered both literally and figuratively: they are deaf to the timpani-cymbal motif, non-diegetic sounds that are only privy to us; they are likewise deaf to the true teaching of Chinese Buddhism, moral principles, faith, and so on. Therefore, the sounding of the timpani-cymbal figure at various moments of the characters’ materialist dreaming is ‘music for our ears only.’ In witnessing—and laughing at—these characters’ follies from a distance, we naturally adopt the stance of the enlightened outsider who viscerally partakes in the act of warning them not to succumb to their desires and the illusion of life.
RISING ARPEGGIO MOTIF The rising arpeggio figure carries immense efficacy in the film as it is intimately associated with the sound of money. This connection is cemented right from the beginning where Menghua is dressed up and about to leave his rented apartment to buy a gift for Xiaoyun. The camera closes in on both his hands as he starts striking a coin with another, landing it on the ground, and stimulating an arpeggio accent intoning C-E-G-C (by the bright shimmering tones of the triangle) which straddles the boundary of the diegetic and non-diegetic. As we are wondering whether this stylised figure is meant ‘for our ears only,’ what happens next confirms that it belongs to the diegesis, for Menghua’s landlords immediately rush up to his room to demand his overdue payment. The other occasion where we next hear this characteristic arpeggio takes place in the pawnshop soon after. To impress Xiaoyun, Menghua has decided to trade in his precious watch for two dollars to treat her to the movies. The motif—now rendered in its diminished form C-Eb-Gb-Bbb—sets in the moment Menghua parts with his belonging, as he bitterly observes the pawnshop employee place his watch onto the scale. In both scenes, it is sound—not image—that gives Menghua away. In the first instance, it is literally through sound that alert the landlords to his presence, and we, likewise, are let in on his precarious financial situation. Put another way, this sequence constitutes an important moment of truth that forces a confrontation with Menghua’s self-interested behaviour. Therefore, this same figure that later appears in crunched-up form takes on a more sinister tone, perhaps gesturing to the ludicrousness of his actions.
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CONCLUSION As one views the various creative and sophisticated audiovisual procedures in relation to the broader intertextual associations with other related films and socio-historical concerns of the day, it becomes clear that the creative team of Scenes of City Life is venturing far beyond slavish replication characteristic of the mickey-mousing sound practice, and actively forging a new path for early Chinese sound cinematic practices. In promoting the humorous interplay of diegetic and non-diegetic sounds in the prelude, ‘noise-musicality’ from the lower strata of the society, rendering sounds of the city, and the sounds of money and materialist dreaming, I posit that Scenes of City Life is not merely about mickey-mousing, it is in fact on and beyond mickey-mousing. In essence, a masterclass in the diverse uses of sound.
NOTES 1. All three Chinese composers of Scenes of City Life received compositional training in the United States. Huang Zi (1904–1938) first received Western musical training in Tsinghua College in 1916 and after graduating in 1924, headed to Oberlin College to study psychology. He was then accepted into Yale University in 1928 to study composition, before returning to China in 1929 to teach in music schools and establish the Shanghai Orchestra. His students include Lüting He (1903–1999), who is also one of the composers of Scenes of City Life. Though He was not trained in the West, he received a strong Western music education under Huang and Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin in the 1930s at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. He also composed for Yuan Muzhi’s later film, Street Angel (1937). The third composer of the film, Zhao Yuanren (1892–1982) is a multi-talented figure. Besides being an accomplished composer, Zhao was also known to be a gifted polyglot and linguist, having earned degrees in mathematics and physics at Cornell University, and received his PhD degree in philosophy from Harvard University. 2. Read more on existing scholarship on the genre of city symphony films in Steven Jacobs, Anthony Kinik, and Eva Hielscher, The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity between the Wars, AFI Film Readers (New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019). François Penz and Thomas Maureen, Cinema & Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia (London: British Film Institute, 1997); Leo Charney and Vanessa R Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, Screening the City (London; New York: Verso, 2003); Charlotte Brunsdon, “The Attractions of the Cinematic City,” Screen 53, no. 3 (2012): 209–27. 3. This opening sequence can be accessed via this YouTube link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF6N1xhT54k&t=277s) from 2:45 to 3:05. 4. This arguing scene can be accessed via this YouTube link (https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=MF6N1xhT54k&t=277s) from 14:30 to 14:40.
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5. This back-and-forth bargaining scene can be accessed via this YouTube link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF6N1xhT54k&t=277s) from 20:00 to 20:10. 6. The opening mini symphony film sequence, ‘City Scene Fantasia’ can be accessed via this YouTube link (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=MF6N1xhT54k&t=277s) from 5:55 to 8:00. This music is reused in Yuan’s later film, Street Angel (1937) which can be accessed here via this YouTube link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hzyhBmd0TQ) from 0:20 to 2:35. 7. The opening audiovisual sequence of Lianhua Symphony can be accessed via this link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4Tkhr7fKP8&t=820s) from 1:00 to 4:30. 8. New Year’s Coin can be accessed via this link (https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=M8y0JZKCO88&t=74s).
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