Xiaowu, Aladen
"Lyceum Theatre" is the twelfth feature film directed by Lou Ye. As a spy war drama set in the early 1940s, the main line of the film is the story of the Allied spy Yu Yan returning to Shanghai and using acting and rescuing her ex-husband to take the Japanese telegraph code. Although the film chose a seemingly pleasing commercial genre shell, it caused a polarization of reviews. The negative evaluation believes that the film has lost Lou Ye's consistent advantages, the character image is blunt and flat, lacks the support of emotional motivation, the relationship between the characters is complex but too conceptual, and the details are vague. Positive evaluations believe that the film not only continues the consistent theme and style of Lou Ye's works, but also integrates authorship well into the narrative of genre films.
This article believes that "Lyceum Theatre" is one of the few works with a distinct left-wing creative consciousness and style among the video creations released in the mainland in recent years. Through handheld photography and a unique lens language, the film creates a black-and-white image with a sense of presence but with uncertainty about meaning. With the help of intertextual installations of multiple texts/spaces such as play-in-play, the film provides an in-depth discussion of the relationship between reality and literature (e.g., whether literary and artistic works can avoid being stitched into the ideological order described by Žižek and through illusions) and how to transform symbolic identities into resources for action. Perhaps it can be seen as the latest development of New Left literature and art in the country. This may be an important turning point for Lou Ye's creative team.
The silence of meaning
"Lan Xin" borrows The Death of Shanghai, the original novel of Hongying, in the overall framework of the plot and character setting. Through the complex relationship between Yu Yan and her adoptive father Hubert (the leader of the Allied intelligence agency), the left-wing drama director Tan Na, the Chongqing military commander Bai Yunsheng, and her ex-husband Ni Zeren, we can see that the heroine Yu Yan must switch between different identities to advance the task of obtaining Japanese telecode intelligence.
The original book "The Death of Shanghai" was republished
However, the film has a certain distance from the original work of Rainbow Shadow in terms of its purpose and theme exploration. In fact, through the adaptation of character relationships and key plots, the substitution of plays within plays, and the intertext of multiple texts, the film seems to form a symbol system of "ambiguity". The deliberate and restrained performance method of Gong Li, played by Yu Wei, and the more fragmented editing of the creator in the later stage, make it more difficult for the audience to obtain a predictable unified interpretation of fixed paragraphs or scenes. The resulting competitive system of meaning can confuse theater audiences. As far as genre films are concerned, the emotional arc behind the actions of the characters will be fatal if they lack certainty. But this is not the result of a screenwriting or performance error. By going back in time to the incomplete text involved in the film, it will be easier to understand the film's intent in doing so.
In fact, the play-within-a-play in the film was replaced by "Foxtrot Shanghai" in Rainbow Shadow's original book to "Saturday Novel", which is based on the novel "Shanghai" by Japanese Neo-Sensation writer Ritsuichi Yokomitsu. It's easy to overlook this play-within-a-play, which always repeats the same lines in a single scene, because it doesn't seem to inform our understanding of the real life in the film—as a type of concession espionage—but it does give us the impression that a left-wing drama that might have been around in that era involves strikes, the love of strike leaders (the leftist literary genre of "revolution + love"), even though the title of the play refers to the exact opposite.
Toshiichi Yokomitsu, Shanghai
The Literature of the Sixth School, as the bourgeois conservative literature that was heavily criticized by the Left League tree in the 1930s, was clearly a pastime created by the upper class imperial literati to make people decay and degenerate. But Toshiichi Yoko's "Shanghai" is completely outside the narrative context of modern Chinese literary history. One of the main lines used in the novel is the story of Sammu, a Japanese employee in Shanghai during the May Thirtieth Movement in 1925, who fell in love with Qiulan, a female Communist Party member in China. Taking the original work as a reference, in the face of the anti-imperialist patriotic wave in Shanghai and the rising strike movement in Japanese-owned spinning mills, two enemies who should have been inseparable fell in love. The two not only fell in love with each other, but also made moves that deviated from their national identity. Samgi twice saved Akiran, who had launched a strike, from the suppression of workers by Japanese soldiers. At the end of the novel, Qiulan pays the price for this forbidden love: she is executed by her revolutionary comrades suspected of being spies. Here, of course, is also "revolution + love", but love exists as a remnant rejected by the ideological discourse that occupies the revolution, and is accused of being an immoral result because it exposes the cracks in the ideological order.
Photos of the May Thirtieth Movement mass parade
In this way, we understand even more (if) the inopportune time of arranging Tan Na to rehearse the play. It is difficult to be appreciated by any political force in reality: as a drama adaptation of a Japanese novel, without a clear anti-Japanese theme, it will not be recognized by the national regime. And because it presents the Japanese army's suppression of the Chinese people and creates the image of Sammu not serving militarism, the Japanese side will also be very disgusted. In short, the play is hard to judge. When we make up the Saturday Novel in this way, the meaning of theater is clarified. However, our completion above is not dominated by leadership, but is driven to a marginal position.
For the vacancy of meaning is never vacant. It's filled with the Saturday Novels we can see. Thus, this play-within-a-play can indeed be filled in as a variant of a talented beauty who crosses the class — similar to La Traviata (Foxtrot Shanghai in Rainbow Shadow's original is such a play-in-play). It may be a reenactment of the romantic relationship between Vio and Tan Na, and the crystallization of their love, which the audience is likely to expect. Perhaps, on the contrary, it was not the resurrection of the Saturdays on the isolated island of the Concession, but was filled as a revolutionary literature under the leadership of the Left League, although the Left League had been dissolved in 1935. But in any case, different meaning systems, with the help of the audience, are in the middle of a struggle for this position.
Not only that, but in other key episodes, such as Yu Yan telling his adoptive father Hubert of false information, choosing to return to the theater and go to the appointment after completing the task, the significance is equally uncertain. The chains that these floating signifiers ultimately form determine our final understanding of the main characters and the film. The audience's task, then, seems to turn into a puzzle: to piece together these floating pieces into a unified picture.
For example, the viewer could have tried to incorporate the choice of yan into the nationalist ideological order. Yu Told his adoptive father that the erroneous information was to speed up the war situation between Japan and the United States and force the United States to declare war on Japan as soon as possible in order to reduce China's losses. Here, Yu plays the role of a patriotic heroine who conforms to her Chinese identity and thus betrays her father as a representative of allied interests – it is easy for us as viewers to think so. Alternatively, this deception can also be understood as a form of revenge for love's inability to be satisfied. Yu Yan was suspicious of his adoptive father's use of himself as a spy, so he betrayed him at the last minute. According to this understanding, Hubert's mistake was not to love her "selflessly" like a real father. We can even get Nietzsche's prompt here: "Expecting love in return is not a demand for love, but a kind of vanity." But this understanding is incorporated into the order of the daughter role in a patriarchal family. In fact, we can find in the original work of Rainbow Shadow that the image of Yu Yan is filled with these two meanings.
Even, in order to avoid the Japanese army's search, Hongying's Yu Yan would rather jump from the room of the International Hotel to commit suicide. And the author emphasizes that this is a sacrifice for the country. The film changes Yu's death, but it still fails to allow the audience to navigate the illusion of ideology. When she returned to the theater, wasn't she saving her fellow nationals and fighting the Japanese invaders? When she goes to the dock bar for an appointment, isn't she planning to dedicate herself to her love affair with Tan Na? If understood in this way, this is indeed a servant pandering to Nietzsche's aphorism: not to reciprocate, but to give. For the sake of the country and her lover, this woman really should have sacrificed herself in this way. It seems that in this way, we will be able to take the place of Yu Yan and experience a real glory. Isn't that exactly what we get from ideological icons?
The problem is that we can't get the thrill out of this coding game, or the reward for completing this unified game. From the scene-within-a-play with a distancing effect, to the mask-style "stiff" performance, until the last moment of the film, the truth is not revealed. Does she really love her ex-husband? Or is she in love with the director, her adoptive father, or even the Japanese? Is she in love with her country? There's no answer here, and the film doesn't give any stimulus — extremely unfriendly. Here, it does not match the work of this sense of stitching. When the film ends, we seem to gain meaning, but we feel empty. That's what the film tries to bring to us.
If we take a literary work as a way of speaking, then it is always in the order of language. If we reject the capture of ideology, can we say something unspeakable? Or, can literary and artistic works speak outside the ideological arena? The answer of "Blue Heart" is, silence. The silence of meaning. Of course, this silence is always a deceptive play (such as a spy war genre film), just like Yu Yan's deception of her adoptive father, but only in this way is it true. The key is to be aware of the play and can be deceived. So we see broken truths, inaccessible whispers in the clinic, unfinished dramas on stage, and films that reject integrity. When Gramsci's ideology completes the cleaning of art, what coding methods can art use to convey the secrets as truth to the audience? How does art encrypt the truth and give the audience the way it encrypts and decrypts it—the whole set of coding tools? Should art wage a trench war to compete for gaps in meaning? And, are these really possible?
Travel through illusions
For artists, breaking down the "fourth wall" often seems to be an important subject. But whether or not we open the stage of the theater and decide whether to immerse or engage the audience, how can we detach ourselves from the symbolic order in which language itself finds itself and say the unspeakable? Isn't that the real purpose of breaking down the "fourth wall"? We see some very exploratory attempts in Lyceum.
An ingenious design blurs the line between the real world of the play-within-a-play and the film. In terms of lens language, the stage and the film reality are seamlessly connected, and the single black and white tone also covers up the difference between the stage and the film reality in terms of lighting and set, giving the audience a vague texture of virtual reality. Spatially, the reproduction of the real scene (dock bar) by the stage set in the play makes it impossible to distinguish between the two. There is no difference in the costumes of the actors inside and outside the play. Even the lines of the play-within-a-play, which were originally used as a sign of the language that distinguished them from real life, were also removed from the reality of the movie.
Reading the lines of Rainbow Shadow's original play-within-a-play ("Foxtrot Shanghai"), we will find that this language style is deliberately far away from daily life. The heroine's first line in the sixteenth chapter of the original book is a very special sentence:
"The legs of these street trees, the legs of electric poles, all have the color of spring, and the legs of all buildings are also painted with the color of spring. Stretching out the thighs full of grease powder, the slender legs wearing high heels, the shy legs wearing glass stockings, gracefully, from the quiet alley, from the Nanjing Road, which has always been lively and festive... To dye a trace of rose red, to dye a trace of violet, red, green, blue, white, shadow of light, shadow of light, look at your rainbow beauty. Shanghai, you are a paradise built in hell! ”（p181-182）
However, this stylization, which is far from the everyday, creates a clear distinction between the stage and the offstage. Because we know that almost no one would make such a large lyrical monologue in real life. It is this distinction that establishes the direction of the clear symbolic meaning of the genre drama, from which we can determine the established character of the heroine and where her destiny lies. In the case of familiarity with this context, we will get our precognitive opinion. But this directivity is exactly what the film is trying to cancel. As viewers, we are constantly challenged by the language of the lens in our certainty of meaning. For example, in the 50th-51st minutes of the film, when Tan Na tells the driver to go to the dockyard bar, we expect that this is a scene in the reality of the movie, so that the relationship between Tan Na and Yu Yan can be clearly unfolded here, and our imagination of this relationship is obviously romantic. As the conversation between the two progresses smoothly, the audience thinks that the film is meeting our expectations — a moment when former lovers reunite and renew their old love.
However, Yu Yan's forgotten words remind us that this is still a rehearsal of the play within a play. Then the other actors stop rehearsing, and the camera cuts to the cast outside the scene and offstage. So we knew that our expectations were wrong.
Here, we thought the rehearsal was over for the time being. In the next episode (51:30-52:40), the camera cuts from the cast and crew at the curtain to Yu Andyo and Tan Na. In the previous shot, the conversation between the two has already begun, existing as a voiceover, as if the cast members were eavesdropping on their conversation. Here the audience's expectations for romanticism begin again. But as the two men stepped out of the set's door as the camera moved, they seemed to come to another unknown place where the light was dim. Here they kiss, but who exactly is this and who is kissing? Or is it kissing or performing kissing? Going back in time, are the cast members in the first few shots peeking at reality or peeking at the performance? The audience still doesn't get what they want. This is two teases on the audience in succession using the language of the camera.
This ambiguity of emptiness (in order to create a silence of meaning) reaches a high point when Yu Yan returns to the theater after completing his mission, so that the boundaries are completely broken. We see parallel clips in front of the stage and behind the scenes. Behind the scenes are rape and shooting, while Tai Yu is trying to convey the message of danger to Tan Na. Although the lines here are prescribed, what Yu Yan has to do is actually not to play Qiulan, so that Tan Na realizes that Qiulan is not Qiulan at this time. And Tan Na — like the audience in the audience — didn't realize it, even though the behind-the-scenes gunfire that heralded the chaos had arrived earlier. They still complete their prescribed movements. As an intruder and rebel, Yu Yan used language while finding that language was quickly incorporated into the established symbolic order. However, we, as moviegoers, are clearly aware of the problem here: Yu Wei wants to deny his own playfulness, to deny the system of meaning that we originally expected. It would be ridiculous if we thought Tan was still doing her role-play in a step-by-step manner — but maybe it was. The shootout of the intruders was brought about by Yu Yan, the rebel. Thus, boundaries (order) are briefly broken, cracks arise, and chaos emerges.
Yu's self-awareness and denial of activism (which we can also understand as subjectivity, that is, the suture of the subject by the ideological order) creates the true subject, which actually gives us a very clear hint through the scene of the treatment room. The treatment room – the double-sided mirror – the monitoring room forms a model of a theater – here is also a play-within-a-play, and Saburo Furutani and Yu Yan, who are on both sides of the double-sided mirror, form a pair of watching/being watched relationships with Hubert and Thor. Here, out of her obligation to her adoptive father and allies, Yu is required to play Furuya's deceased wife, Miyoko. The camera lens passes through the double-sided mirror and switches back and forth between the treatment room and the monitoring room. Hubert and Thor in the monitoring room are actually like moviegoers in front of the screen, watching the scenes happening on the screen. Although Yu Yan could not see her adoptive father, she knew what her adoptive father was watching her. However, just as the key information that needed to be obtained was about to come out, the voice suddenly disappeared. The conversation between the two was silenced. This actually implies that communication is already outside the symbolic order of language, and therefore cannot be symbolized (encoded and decoded) by the "father" (the great other) standing behind the mirror and secretly staring. This is also the core of the entire two-sided mirror project, but "Father" finds himself unable to touch it.
For the audience, we can't hear these whispers, simply because we are in the same viewing position as "father". In other words, if the great other (society) is unable to interrogate the audience as a symbolic subject, then the ideological order will fail. This goes back to what we said earlier, that under the gaze of the great other, the viewer must complete this kind of unity puzzle game – here it is not "me" who is coding, but "he" is "encoding" me. The reason why we can't receive sound is because language has withdrawn from the field at this time and is in the chaos of meaning vacancies. We cannot know the truth about the failure of language. Whether the machine fails or the signal is disturbed, it is not within the rational plan. Even – this is the "apparition" of the dead woman Miyoko. So instead of noise, it's silence, it's nothing.
Identify with the pathology of society
Let's go back to the film's portrayal of female characters. If Lou Ye's creative theme has any continuation in "Lan Xin", it is indeed a concern for women. But this kind of attention has always been difficult to detach from an essentialist understanding of women in the past.
In fact, a common feminist critique is to point out that the female characters in his past works have always pushed irrationality to the extreme in the midst of lust. We can see such images in works such as "Suzhou Creek" and "Clouds Made of Rain in the Wind". Women always have the hope of the director to question and rebel against the rational order, but such an image is another kind of gaze. In this rational/irrational construction, women are still stereotyped. It seems that it is more about irrationality than the women themselves. As a result, women rebelled and were banished to the margins, but their rebellion remained in a symbolic (symbolized) order. For example, they always have to fight against knowable or unknowable behemoths by seeking male love.
When Lou Ye focuses the lens on emotions and feelings outside of reason, he can indeed always find gender and relationships outside the mainstream life vision. But once this irrationalism is confronted with historical narratives, it is easy to find a Sisyphean narcissistic lyrical resistance to the grandeur of the individual. For example, the contradiction between individual freedom of love and collective political constraints that "Purple Butterfly" tries to capture is of course objective. But the film's foothold becomes to expose the falsehood of the grand narrative by presenting the traumatic experiences of individuals. Women are constantly accepting the identity divided by the organization, and the emotions and values given by the organization weaken the individual's emotions and values again and again. This logic is deduced to the extreme, and the last set of retaliatory montages in "Purple Butterfly" appears: a documentary clip of the Japanese aircraft bombing Shanghai is accompanied by the love pop song "Can't Get Your Love" from the Republic of China period. Love is elevated to a dominant theme, and here it does deconstruct the mythical narrative of collectivism. But such dualities can still be easily incorporated into another ideological order (master can refer to the stitching of ideology) – such as a liberalism that declares the end of history (but also contains a patriarchal and exclusive family order that suppresses women). After all, love, as a signifier, is floating. Trying to escape from one abstract universality is immediately captured by another abstract universality.
In Lyceum, the creative team noticed these problems. Therefore, in the treatment of character relationships, we can find a decoding tool that uses the identity of damaged, oppressed and marginal identities as the key. If we voluntarily accept what Althusser calls the ideological machine and stitch up the subject of our own audience, we will only be disappointed by this work. But if, on the contrary, we reject this inquiry, then we have obtained the true subject.
It is based on this that we found that Yui and the Japanese Furutani Saburo were also able to achieve an emotional exchange. Yu seems to be playing a Japanese wife of a Japanese, but she is ultimately playing a woman who has died and been sacrificed. This woman, like many other forgotten and ostracized women, ended up falling victim to national wars and political struggles. When this woman came alive in her, this inability to be symbolized gave Yu Wei a kind of liberation. Thus, yu's unity with Miyoko goes beyond the anchorage of nationalism to the position of national identity, and also beyond the anchoring of a patriarchal family order to the position of women. And the words of a dead neglected woman cannot be heard by those of us living "fathers" - what a marginal figure Miyoko is in the movie, who would identify with a character who only appears in the photo? (Who would agree with the hotel laundry and ironer woman who is glanced at in the film by Thor?) It was at Saul's place that we had a quick glimpse. ）
We can also find a kind of love in Bai Yun and Yu Yan. Unlike the female rivalry between the two in Rainbow Shadow's original work, we see their close integration across political organization identities in the film. Bai Yunsheng's original task was to kill Ni Zeren for the Chongqing military commander by the hand of Yan, but in the film we can't even be sure that the Chongqing military commander sent someone to kill Ni Zeren - when Bai Yunsheng saw Yu Wei and Ni Zeren get out of the car in the distance, she just threw away her cigarette and returned to the car. When Bai Yuncao told Yu Yan about her origins in the hotel room, she didn't have to do it at all — but the orphan who lost her parents was the identity of the two. Her original name was Bai Mei, but only Yu Yan cared about this name. (Bai Mei mentioned her father's longing for her mother when introducing the origin of the word "Mei", so Bai Mei was only a substitute for a deceased woman in "Father") In the end, they not only developed gender identity mutual identity, but also became comrades for the same theater career. When Bai Mei was finally humiliated and died by men, Yu Yan would be deeply distressed by her death.
The love that Yu Yan shows for other men is not because they are the men who occupy the viewing position, but because of the oppressed identity that exists in them. As we analyzed earlier, the love between Yu Yan and Tan Na that the audience expected has never been satisfied by the film. In the scene of the reunion of the two (starting at 15:40), Tan Na takes Yu Yan to the theater's office, he can't restrain himself many times, showing the urge to make love to Yu Yan, but Yu Yan deliberately avoids such a move, and only gives a responsive hug before leaving. The only kiss between the two characters outside the play is arranged at a banquet where the Japanese army leaves (starting at 1:1:40). The Japanese officers used force and strength to ask for a photo with Yu Yan, and the camera was in the hands of the Japanese at this time. Yu Yan's intimate act towards Tan Na afterwards is really an identification with a weak and humiliated nation. Here, it is not even the identity of the lover, love is no longer stitched into the demand for freedom in the sense of the individual, nor is it entering the order of heterosexual love, and the national identity is not the compulsion of the collective hegemony on the individual, but the care of the weak for the weak.
So, when Yu Yan left the hotel and returned to the theater to try to save Tan Na and Bai Mei, her actions added another layer of identification with the repressed literary and artistic workers. Here is by no means an ontological exaltation of the supremacy of art, but of recognizing art as a political mechanism for asserting power for the injured. As a way to tell the truth, art can question and reject the dominant political order and ideological leadership in the Gramsci sense, and present itself as a real political possibility. And when she finally goes to the dock bar for an appointment, she clearly chooses death—if she can't love, if she can't tell the truth, then throw herself into eternal silence. (We can find the influence of Bergman's Masquerade here, in which the heroine Elizabeth falls into a state of aphasia due to her awareness of her role in family and society.) ）
Bergman's "Masquerade"
In the final scene, Yu Protects the vulnerable person around him—a man who injects love and ideals into art but doesn't learn to resist with a gun. He will also be miserable at the last moment. Because under the coercion of power, what he regarded as precious love became bait for hunting and killing lovers. This was a punishment for his lack of action. He received love, but What Yu Yan gave him was not that kind. Maybe he could finally wake up.
At the end of this article, please allow us to conclude with Lou Ye's repeated reading of Malraux's "The Human Condition". The protagonist, the revolutionary Joe, says: "The whole reason why people are willing to die beyond material gain is to melt the human condition into dignity and at the same time to prove its legitimacy more or less: Christianism to slaves, nations to citizens ,......" (p245) This is an ideologicalized human condition. Malraux expressed doubts about this situation through the mouth of others: "What we lack most is the spirit of Bushido. However, the possibility of a Japanese person who kills himself by caesarean section may become an idol, which is the beginning of the ills. "When the caesarean warrior becomes an idol and begins to eat people, the caesarean section it requires is a universal harm. But is it possible not to eat people? First of all, let us identify with those who are damaged, they are the diseases of society, the concrete universality that we have ripped off as heterogeneous.
Editor-in-Charge: Wu Qin
Proofreader: Ding Xiao