| As the physical representation of home, domestic space has great significance across a vast array of intellectual traditions, ranging from Confucian theories of statecraft to literary psychoanalysis and Marxist sociology. Yet its most distillated values, such as privacy, intimacy, and timelessness, are an odd fit with the modern city of Shanghai's most common abode: the longtang fangzi, or lane-house. Coinciding with the arrival of cinema and waves of political and artistic reform occurring in the semi-colonial metropolis, the lane-house archetype was uniquely positioned within the Shanghai's popular culture, particularly among the city's progressive filmmakers.;This dissertation examines the cinematic representations of lane-house life from the origins of the Left-wing film movement of 1930s Shanghai to its permutations up through the PRC's Seventeen Year Period (1949-1966). Drawing on literary and film criticism and the study of urban planning and social movements, western theoretical concepts are combined with local Chinese articulations of film theory to highlight the deliberateness of Shanghai's hybrid culture and question assumptions about uncritical cross-cultural borrowing, convenient adaptation from the dramatic arts, and strict divisions between ideological camps of cultural brokers.;The resulting analysis uncovers connections between the representations of gender, subjectivity, and politics on screen with local, economic and spatial factors, thus highlighting a legacy of social activism and revolution within the bounds of Shanghai's urban imaginary. In the process, it delineates a "lane-house sensibility", or transgressive cinematic approach reflective of the communal and unruly nature of lane-house life. The lane-house's hybridity, mutability, and malleability, born of practical concerns, opened up a host of possibilities for filmmakers experimenting with their own new sets of aesthetics, ideologies, and technologies over and over again. |
