is the earliest existing film adaptation of " Journey to the West " "Pansi Cave" (1927). In 2024, it will celebrate the 97th anniversary of its premiere in China, the 95th anniversary of its premiere in Norway, and the 10th anniversary of the return of the original copy of the film to the motherland. On June 6, the Jiangnan Branch of the China Film Archive was officially opened in Gusu District, Suzhou. That night, the soundtrack version of this silent film, which has a deep connection with Suzhou, was specially screened.
"Pansi Cave" was produced by Shanghai Film Company. Some scenes were shot in Huqiu Jianchi, Suzhou. The starring Yin Mingzhu is also from Suzhou. According to historical records, the film "had caused a sensation in Shanghai before it was released." "(When it was released), the streets were packed with people, all theaters were sold out, and there was a rush to buy copies in Southeast Asia." The box office on the first day of the Shanghai Central Theater alone was "two "More than a thousand gold", "set a new record for Chinese films to be screened in Shanghai".
Unfortunately, with the passage of history, almost all the early Chinese monster films of the 1920s have disappeared, and the original copy of "Pansi Cave" is also hard to find in China.
Photos of the "Pansi Cave - Journey to the West and Return to the East" exhibition at the Jiangnan Branch of the China Film Archive
On April 15, 2014, the only copy of "Pansi Cave" that had been lost overseas for many years returned to the motherland from the National Library of Norway. , and was re-screened at the China Film Archive, allowing domestic audiences to travel through nearly a century of time and space barriers and revisit a precious "Hong Claw Mud Trace" that showcases the style of early Chinese films.
As one of the first viewers of "Pansi Cave" after "returning to China", Ishikawa, a professor at the Shanghai Theater Academy, recalled that he was very excited and emotional after watching the movie at the China Film Archive. "Everyone was talking about it at the time. The history of Chinese films in this era may have to be rewritten." "Actually, it's not just this one film. With the re-discovery of a number of long-lost old films from the 1920s and 1930s represented by "Pansi Cave", it is necessary for us to understand our own early film culture. We need to re-examine and judge the tradition.” Recently, Professor Ishikawa accepted an exclusive interview with The Paper.
[Oral]
The unique copy was "unearthed", "subverting the understanding of Chinese film history in the early 20th century"
The current Norwegian version of "Pansi Cave" is just a fragment, missing about ten minutes of subtitles and the opening part of the film. But even so, its documentary value is great, and the most important significance is that it almost subverts our existing understanding of Chinese films in the 1920s. Previously, film scholars of our teacher's generation, Cheng Jihua, Li Shaobai, and Xing Zuwen, published their evaluations of "Pansi Cave" and its commercial genre films of the same period in the book "History of the Development of Chinese Film" published in the early 1960s. Not very high. Because in their era, people's perspective and stance on movies were different from those of today. They would not first look at the social and cultural attributes of movies from the perspective of movie type, commerciality or entertainment.
In the mid-to-late 1920s, when "Pansi Cave" came out, ancient costumes, martial arts and mythology formed the three major types of domestic films, collectively called "gods and monsters martial arts", which was somewhat derogatory and easy to relate to. "Weird power and chaos." Martial arts films are represented by "The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple" (directed by Zhang Shichuan, released in 1928); period films include "The Romance of the West Chamber" (directed by Hou Yao and Li Minwei, released in 1927) and "The Legend of the Righteous Demon White Snake" (directed by Shao Zuiweng, released in 1926), etc.; mythological films are represented by "Pansi Cave" (released in 1927) directed by Dan Duyu, an early adaptation of "Journey to the West".
Stills from the movie "Pansi Cave". Spider Spirit Appears
Today we will look at these films again, and naturally there are different criteria for judging them. At that time, the domestic film industry had developed relatively fully and completely, and film production capacity and total consumption, including technical equipment, had reached considerable scale and accumulation. This will require more films to ensure market supply, and it is obviously impossible to meet this demand just by importing British and American films.So Chinese filmmakers began to turn to our traditional culture and literature and art, constantly discovering and exploring new themes and new inspirations from martial arts novels, folklore, traditional operas, and folk art scripts.
"Pansi Cave" as a movie is actually a "visual modernization" of Chinese classical mythology. In the past, people could only be exposed to the text and illustrations of novels, or traditional art forms such as stage operas, shadow puppets, and New Year pictures. However, after being made into a movie, it has become a modern visual text using modern media as a carrier. Although "Pansi Cave" is not the earliest film adaptation of "Journey to the West", it is the only film we can still see today. Its huge cultural relic and documentary value is also reflected in its "unique" attribute. superior.
Stills from the movie "Pansi Cave". Fairies get married, feast, sing and dance
How a Chinese classical myth is transformed into a modern form of cultural entertainment through movies is a very interesting topic in itself. For example, the scene of the spider spirit's wedding in the film is very secular, which is equivalent to "disenchanting" classical mythology and eliminating its sense of distance from our secular life. No one has ever seen a monster get married, but in the film we see that monsters also have to worship heaven and earth, give gifts, sing, dance, and feast. This is almost the same as a mortal wedding. In this way, the mysterious, abstract, and distant ancient myths are transformed into scenes of secular life that are no different from ordinary people like you and me.
Mysterious fairy tales have therefore become easy to understand, convenient for the public to read and consume, and are also enjoyed by them. This method is actually still used today. For example, the Taiyi real person in the cartoon " Nezha: The Devil Boy Comes into the World " speaks "Trump", has a big belly, is greasy and cunning, and can unlock the alchemy furnace with a mask... These are basically young talents in the Internet era. Some mythological imaginations also cater to the cultural consumption habits of current audiences. As for the little demon fire slave played by Gu Yunjie in "Pansi Cave", he prepares food in the kitchen and chops up ducks, which is no different from the way the chef of Nanjing Street Duck Shop chops up ducks; there are also two children playing a rope-turning game. The spider spirit is also an innocent and romantic type of alley girl. Through this method, the myth of "Journey to the West" has completed a gorgeous transformation from classical to modern.
"Pansi Cave" movie set photos
From the perspective of film creation itself, whether it is "costume", "martial arts" or "mythology", they all represent the exploration of local genres in Chinese films. They are all grown from the soil of Chinese culture and cannot and cannot be found abroad. When movies are combined with traditional Chinese culture, a series of unique and rich local cultural languages and visual expression mechanisms are formed, completely completing the localization transformation of the imported movie - what we call "Chinese movies" today. It was in the 1920s that through the hard exploration of that generation of filmmakers, it became a new cultural reality. Traditional film history regards such films as "vulgar", "obscene and pirated" and have little cultural value. From today's perspective, this evaluation is obviously unfair.
This set of copies of "Pansi Cave" was discovered in Norway, Northern Europe. This once again proves that Chinese films at that time had already joined the cycle of international cultural trade. Some passages in the film were deleted, and even the Chinese subtitles were printed backwards, which shows how unfamiliar and cautious they were to Chinese culture at the time. But this is what history is. It is in this strangeness, caution and disorder that Chinese films have squeezed into the ranks of global cultural trade and exchanges and become a member of the global cultural family.
In fact, mythological stories like "Pansi Cave" are not unique in early world movies. For example, in Japanese and Korean movies in East Asia at that time, there were also images of monsters such as fox fairies and beautiful snakes; in European movies, there were vampires - "bat spirits" who transformed from bats into human forms. These can be regarded as the cultural references of "Spider Spirit" around the world. This shows that traditional cultural images such as "Spider Spirit" do not exist in isolation, but have similar echoes all over the world.This reminds us that we should use a more open global perspective to look back at our own existing cultural context.
Another point is that "Pansi Cave" still retains some unique film language of the silent film period that has disappeared today. For example, there are three different color film bases: one is grayish, one is reddish, and one is blueish. These colors are not just caused by technical reasons, but have specific symbols and meanings. For example, in the scene where Sun Wukong releases the true fire of Samadhi and burns the demon cave, the base of the film is reddish, symbolizing fire. It is achieved by adjusting the blending ratio of chemicals through darkroom technology during the film development and printing process. Correspondingly, the blue base of the film means that this is a night scene. Because at that time, the photosensitivity of most films was low, and it was impossible to shoot at night, so the night could only be symbolically represented by a bluish visual effect. Today, these technical means have become a thing of the past, but with the re-release of "Pansi Cave", they have returned to people's vision like unearthed cultural relics.
"Integrating painting into shadow", controversy and flaws do not conceal the artistic charm of film
On the first day of the Lunar New Year in 1927, "Pansi Cave" was released and achieved great success at the box office. At the same time, there were also some controversies, the most important of which was that there was a scene in which the spider spirit only wore a bellyband on his upper body, which was "naked" and "indecent". From this kind of criticism and controversy, we can see some self-contradictory "symptoms of the times" in Chinese society and culture in the 1920s.
film director Dan Du Yu was once a famous "calendar" painter in Shanghai. He was best at painting "hundreds of beautiful pictures" on calendars. Even after changing his career to acting, he was still an active figure in Shanghai's art circle. He has an open concept and is relatively "Westernized". He is fond of women in the subject matter of his paintings, and is especially good at painting various female bodies using Western painting techniques. After switching to movies, this style has continued. Rather than saying that the "naked belly and back" of the spider spirit in his shot is immoral, it can rather be said that it represents an open, avant-garde, and modern cultural concept or aesthetic taste.
Actor Yin Mingzhu
Yin Mingzhu, who played the Spider Queen, was also a famous "modern girl" in Shanghai at the time. She graduated from a Chinese and Western girls' school, speaks fluent English, and is good at singing, dancing, horse riding, and driving, which makes her comfortable in social circles. The media at the time called her "miss.f.f (foreign fashion)", which means Miss Western. People who like her regard her as a "fashion goddess", but in the eyes of conservative defenders, she is a deviant and charming "temptress".
Stills from the movie "Pansi Cave". The three apprentices planned how to rescue the master.
In "Pansi Cave", she actually took off her clothes and took off her belt in front of everyone, which will definitely make some people at the time exclaim "How unbecoming". But this kind of controversy itself just reflects the ubiquitous dispute between ancient and modern China and the West in the cultural personality of Shanghai at that time. On the screen, when the spider spirit was burned back to its original shape by Sun Wukong's Samadhi True Fire, a line of subtitles was printed on the screen: "Just for one thought of lust, you will die by self-immolation for life." This straightforward moral admonition is different from the previous ambiguous visual presentation. , seems to have reached a delicate value balance.
Speaking of which, Du Yu and Yin Mingzhu are still the number one couple in the Chinese film industry. In 1921, Yin Mingzhu was spotted by Dan Du Yu, and she played the heroine in the first love feature film "Every Oath" produced by the "Shanghai Film Company" (founded by Dan Du Yu in 1921). Later, she played the heroine in "Everyone" directed by Dan Du Yu. She acted as the heroine in films such as "Gujing Chongbo Ji", "Return to the Hometown", " Heirloom " and other films, and became a movie star. The two fell in love through drama and got married in 1926. "Pansi Cave" is the first film that Dan Du Yu and Yin Mingzhu collaborated on after their marriage.
"Shanghai Film Company" is a family-owned film company born in the early 1920s. It is also known as "Dajiaban" and has a distinct symbol of a family workshop. In the main creative list of "Pansi Cave", in addition to first-line stars such as the director's wife Yin Mingzhu, the photographer Dan Ganting is also a member of the Dan family. There is also a young actor who plays the role of The Book Boy in Centipede. He is Dan Erchun, Dan Du Yu’s nephew. He is also one of the earliest movie child stars in China.In the film, he plays the role of a "melon-eating crowd" who, while watching Sun Wukong fight against a group of monsters, also steals the fruits and vegetables on the wine table, which is hilarious. Finally, his true form was revealed, and he turned out to be a petite and cute bunny spirit.
Photos from the "Pansi Cave - Journey to the West and Return to the East" exhibition at the Jiangnan Branch of the China Film Archive
The professionalism of the actors was also taken into consideration in the casting of "Pansi Cave". The actor who plays Sun Wukong, Wu Wenchao, was originally a martial artist, and later served as a director in "New Pansi Cave" (1940). Look at his martial arts scenes in "Pansi Cave", he moves around, his hands, eyes, body, and moves are all very flexible. He has a figure for the opera stage and a professional background as a dragon and tiger martial artist, making Sun Wukong, a man with great supernatural powers, believable.
The scene visual effects of "Pansi Cave" also have a mixture of ancient and modern, new and old. Whether it is costumes, props or makeup, they all follow the existing forms of the opera stage. The demons that appear in the wedding banquet scene include bull-headed and horse-faced ones wearing hooded masks, as well as the ugly "little painted face" turtle spirit master in opera and literature. There is also a handsome demon who borrows the shape of the door god from folk New Year paintings. The fire slave holds an exaggerated large copper hammer and a large razor in his hands, and the spider spirit uses mechanical props similar to marionettes after revealing its original form. The visual presentation of the film is a mixture of ancient and modern times, an intersection of China and the West, which typically reflects the atmosphere and personality of Shanghai's urban culture of that era.
"Pansi Cave" also tried its best to use various film visual stunts that were available at the time to restore the bizarre mythological plots in the original work, such as the seventy-two transformations of Sun Wukong, including using a handful of monkey hair to conjure a group of monkeys. All practitioners need to be proficient in using specific shooting and post-production darkroom techniques. In the film, Centipede is drinking happily when he suddenly discovers a miniature Sun Wukong hidden in the wine. This is the effect of using the camera's perspective principle of near and far, and when developing the film in the later stage, the Sun Wukong shot in the distance and the wine glass shot in close-up are overprinted. In the early film stunts, the French magician and film director Georges Méliès made a lot of contributions. He created many film stunts such as slow motion, fast motion, reverse playback, multiple exposures, stacking, and stopping and reshooting. Most of them were Traces can be found in "Pansi Cave". This shows that in the 1920s, Chinese films were almost in sync with global films in terms of technology, special effects and craftsmanship.
According to the descriptions by newspapers and media at the time, there should be two mythical scenes in the film: "Zhu Bajie turns into a fish and plays with a spider spirit" and "Monkey King flies as an eagle and steals clothes", but they are missing in the Norwegian version. Why is this so? There are probably two possibilities: One is that it was cut when it was released to Norway. The currently screened version is an "only copy". We cannot find the version released domestically at that time for comparison, so we can only guess. Another possibility is that these two sections were not filmed that year due to technical and financial constraints. The above-mentioned media reports were found in "Shen Shen" at the end of 1926, and were published before the film was officially released. It is very likely that the film crew released the information in advance at the time, but during the actual shooting, they found it difficult to complete underwater photography, a difficult and risky shooting technique.
Stills from the movie "Pansi Cave". Zhu Bajie put his head on backwards
We can also see that there are many scenes in "Pansi Cave" that break away from the original settings of "Journey to the West". For example, Zhu Bajie finally recovered the severed pig head but turned it upside down, and a monster appeared and turned into a huge chamber pot? ! These are not descriptions in the original work, but "private goods" incorporated by the director for the visual effects of the film, as well as the entertainment and fun of the film. This makes the visual presentation of the film look a bit messy and even absurd, but it exactly reflects the cultural landscape of the 1920s when China and the West blended ancient and modern times and were full of the cultural charm of that era.
