A Comparative Study On Mainland Chinese Opera Film And Hongkong Shaw Brothers’ Huangmei Opera Movies—a Case Analysis Of "Seventeen Years"

The Opera film is a special type of Chinese film,which performs the Chinese traditional opera,uses the image method,and combines the opera and the film perfectly.It has a long history about 100 years as the Chinese film.The Chinese film is called’Seventeen Years’ Film between 1949 and 1966.As the most popular and the most influential art media,besides embodying the aesthetic value,the films of this period were also considered as the tool to form the authority of ideology and create the linguistic film system full of political passion as far as the conjunction of politics and art was concerned.The prosperity of the opera film added the extraordinary glory to the film development during the period of 1949 to 1966.This period was considered the’Golden Times’ of the opera film,in which a large number of excellent opera films sprang up like mushrooms.Slightly later,Hongkong Shaw Brothers also started to create Huangmei Opera Movies.From the first work Diao Chan,it set off a wave called’no piece except Huangmei’,therefore the Huangmei Opera Movie played a very vital role in the Chinese film internationalization.The ’Seventeen Years’ Film had a lot of subjects in common with the Hongkong Shaw Brothers’ Huangmei Opera Movies.Based on the collection of the plays,the paper compared the narrative characteristics,the image language,and the aesthetic style and so on,analyzed the differences,and deduced the factors of the formation of their arts in the same or similar subject of the both of the films.Affected by political tendency and social cultural environment of that period,opera film’s value was to propagate its social mission of political tool and social effect of inspiring public cognition,as well as movies of other types.As for a private filmmaker,Shaw Brothers’viewed movies as business products,and all focused on box office.Although there were many differences,the Chinese opera film shared the same personal feelings and inherited and carried forward Chinese traditional culture and aesthetics with the Shaw Brothers’ Huangmei Opera Movies,which created two miracles with the same root in China.