Wu Cun Film Studies

Flashing back to early Chinese film history, time passes by, a group of commercial film directors who once enjoyed great social influence and box office appeal has been faded away from the investigation of film historians. Wu Cun, the object of this article is one of the representatives. Influenced by the era's limitations and the lack of available information, our current study of China's early films is always a political recall of'left-wing film','defense film', and other progressive films at that time. The dimensions of economy and film industry are usually neglected thus the contribution to China's early film market made by commercial directors presented by Wu Cun. We must not evade the fact that commercial movie played the mainstream role in the pre-liberation film making, and its position is not replaced by the merging of 'progressive films'. In China's modern market-oriented film status, early commercial films and commercial directors should no longer be ignored by the research on Chinese early films. To some extend, their film making ideas provide a model that we can study from in nowadays. In the study of Wu Cun and his work, we should try to avoid isolated director analysis, covey the research in the historical background, consider not only about the characteristics of the director and art value of the films, but also the purpose of the director and the commercial value of the films. Traditional political criticism and artistic analysis are not enough to identically define early commercial film directors and their works. The film's commercial dimension should be also taken in consideration, understanding the director via changing environment and market perspectives. This paper set the director Wu Cun back into the old film system and social environment, This essay will focus on how did commercial film directors to adapt to the market needs, capture a win-win movie tickets and audience appraise,. Wu Cun's music films are of the most succeeds, thus are chosen as case study in this paper. Type study is applied to sum up the characteristics of Wu Cun's music works. I tried to acquire more profound understanding on music films.