Journal of Chinese Film Studies｜Special Issue: The Centenary of Labourer's Love
《中国电影研究》专栏 | 《劳工之爱情》百年诞辰
Guest Editor: Huang Xuelei (University of Edinburgh)
客座主编：黄雪蕾教授（爱丁堡大学）
《劳工之爱情》海报（图源网络）
本专栏旨在纪念《劳工之爱情》诞生一百周年。一个世纪已然过去，但这部电影仍然能够让观众开怀大笑，并且激励学者继续思考。通过本专栏的解读，期望能够激发学者对电影媒介起源时代的杂糅多义一些新的认识。
1 Introduction
1922年中秋，《劳工之爱情》（又名《掷果缘》）在上海夏令配克影戏院上映。这部影片经历了中国二十世纪的历史浪潮后得以保留，成为现存尚可放映的最早的中国电影。
作为中国默片时代喜剧的唯一留存，《劳工之爱情》的观众遍布全球。这部电影是五四时代的社会缩影，同时也是上海本土大众文化的代表，是受好莱坞启发之中国电影语言的研究样本，亦是影业先锋明星影片公司的遗存，更是中国电影奠基人张石川与郑正秋的传奇合作的见证。正是因为上述原因，《劳工之爱情》已频频出现在大量的学术文献中。
本专栏旨在纪念《劳工之爱情》诞生一百周年。一个世纪过去了，但这部电影仍然能够让我们开怀大笑，并且激励我们继续思考。学界对于这部电影所蕴含的历史、电影和美学层面意义的探讨与研究已经十分丰富。本专栏所收录的四篇文章认为，这部电影是一个开放的文本，诞生于混沌多元的场域中，许多问题仍有待研究，并且寻求新的解读。我们希望，本专栏的解读能让人们对电影媒介起源时代的杂糅多义有一些新的认识。
A hundred years ago, on the day of the Moon Festival, Shanghai's foreign-run Olympic Theatre (Xialing peike yingxi yuan 夏令配克影戏院）screened two Chinese film comedies. One of them was known as Laogong zhi aiqing 劳工之爱情 (Labourer's Love), although merely five days ago it was introduced under the more classical-sounding Zhi guo yuan 掷果缘 (Romance of Fruit-throwing). For reasons unknown to us, it has survived the whirlwind of twentieth-century Chinese history, standing now as the much fêted First (extant Chinese film).
Being the sole "brand ambassador" of Chinese silent-era film comedy, it has been screened worldwide to a diverse mix of audience—film festival cinephiles, historians, college students, and youtube or bilibili surfers. It has been featured in a sizable scholarly literature, representing a slice of post-May-Fourth Chinese society, the Shanghai-based vernacular mass culture, a sample of Hollywood-inspired filmic language, and a remnant of the pioneering Mingxing Company and the legendary partnership of Zhang Shichuan and Zheng Zhengqiu, the founding fathers of Chinese film.
This special section is dedicated to celebrating the 100th birthday of Labourer's Love. A century has passed, but the film still makes us laugh and continues to inspire, to invite us to think. Of course, much has been said about the historical, filmic, and aesthetic layers of meaning embedded in Labourer's Love . The four essays gathered here, collectively, argue that the film remains an open text situated in a messy web of contexts, still provoking new questions and begging for new readings. The alternative readings gathered in this special section, we hope, will shed some new light on the muddled beginnings of the film medium within and beyond China.
2 Four Research Articles
01 Alternative Readings of Labourer's Love: The Shakespearean, Pan-Laborist, and Technological Uncanny by Meimei Xu
《劳工之爱情》另类解读：莎士比亚式的、泛劳工主义的与技术诡奇
Abstract: Contemporary source materials confirm that Labourer's Love was designed to be experimental and editable. It puts the credibility of the extant film in question, and opens up many hermeneutic possibilities. Intriguing issues such as its titles, thematic narrative, and technological aspects of its production call for alternative readings. Based on Zheng Zhengqiu's benshi (the original synopsis), this paper discusses about the film's Shakespearean predilection and pan-laborist ideologies. A further relational sociological analysis, however, shows that with the hidden functioning of technical media like lighting and noise, the film has transcended the superficial laborer/non-laborer narrative and created a craftsman/technology discourse. As a result, the established spatial-temporal relations were annihilated and the film generated an experience of technological uncanny.
摘要：现有资料证实《劳工之爱情》具有实验性和可编辑性，它使现存电影的可信度受到质疑，并由此产生了许多解释学的可能性。影片名、主题叙事，和生产技术方面等有趣的问题亟待另类解读。本文以郑正秋的《本事》(原剧情提要)为基础，探讨了影片的莎士比亚倾向和泛劳工主义意识形态。然而，进一步的关联社会学分析表明，影片借助灯光、噪音等技术媒介的隐藏功能，超越了表面的劳工/非劳工叙事，创造了一种工匠/技术话语。由此，既定的时空关系被湮灭，影片产生了一种技术上的诡奇体验。
02 Laborer’s Love: An Anthropotechnogenetic Mediation Between Cinematism and Animetism by Victor Fan
《劳工之爱情》：电影性倾向与动画性倾向之间
Abstract: How can media philosophy help us rehistoricize Zhang Shichuan (director) and Zheng Zhengqiu's (screenwriter) Laogong zhi aiqing [Laborer's Love, 1922] and foster a deeper understanding of its aesthetics within its historical context? In this article, I take Zhang Zhen's (1999, 27-50) book chapter on the film, "Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage Cinema," as a point de départ of my investigation. I argue that Laborer's Love is best understood as part of a larger media ecology that has always been in transition, or more properly speaking, always in a process of becoming. I want to demonstrate that in the film, the hybridity between a more presentational style that stemmed from early-twentieth-century Chinese theater and a more representational style that stemmed from American cinema may not be a symptom of the film's transitionality. Rather, such hybridity might have been Zhang Shichuan's conscious stylistic choice. Also, in the light of Thomas Lamarre's understanding of the cinema as a negotiation between two relationships between the human and the machine—cinematism (an alignment between the human body and the moving trajectory of the machine) and animetism (a positing of the body within a moving machine)—we can rethink the film as an anthropotechnical mediation between these two relationships.
摘要：媒介哲学如何帮助我们重新历史化张石川(导演)和郑正秋(编剧)的《劳工之爱情》，并在其历史语境中加深对其美学的理解？本文以张真关于这部电影的论文（“Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage Cinema”）为出发点进行研究。本文认为，《劳工之爱情》是一个更广大的媒体生态的一部分，而这个生态一直处于过渡中，更恰当地说，一直处于成为的过程中。本文旨在证明，中国传统戏剧的“表现风格”与好莱坞电影的“再现风格”的混合风并非仅为这部电影过渡性的一个表征；相反，这种混合可能是张石川有意识的风格选择。此外，根据托马斯·拉玛尔（Thomas Lamarre）对电影的理解，电影是人与机器之间的两种关系的协商——电影性倾向（cinematism）(人体与机器移动轨迹之间的协调)和动画性倾向（animetism）(将人体置于移动的机器中)——我们可以把电影重新看作这两种关系之间的调协。
03 Zheng Zhegu and Performances in Early Chinese Film by Binwu Jia
郑鹧鸪与中国早期电影表演
Abstract: The actor Zheng Zhegu is a long-forgotten pioneer in Chinese film. He is perhaps best known for playing the part of Carpenter Zheng in China's earliest surviving film, Labourer's Love. Both professionals in the film industry and audiences of the time recognized him as achieving new heights in acting. Starting with Zheng Zhegu's personal story, this article explores the history of performances in early Chinese film. It emphasizes the transition from "new play-oriented" screen acting to interiors performances, placing this shift in the transformation of Chinese cinema from a "cinema of attractions" to narrative films.
摘要：演员郑鹧鸪是中国电影史上被遗忘已久的先驱，他最著名的角色可能是在现存最早的中国电影《劳工之爱情》中扮演的郑木匠。电影行业的专业人士和当时的观众都认为他在表演上达到了新的高度。本文以郑鹧鸪的个人故事为切入点，探讨中国早期电影表演的历史，强调从“新剧化”的银幕表演到内心表演的转变，并将这种转变置于中国电影从“吸引力电影”到叙事电影的转型中。
04 Beyond Labourer's Love: Rethinking Early Chinese Film Comedy by Xuelei Huang
《劳工之爱情》之外：中国早期喜剧电影再思考
Abstract: This article examines three lost short comedies produced alongside Labourer's Love by the Mingxing Film Studio in 1922: The King of Comedy Visits Shanghai (Huaji dawang you hu ji), Havoc in a Bizarre Theatre (Danao guai xichang), and The Naughty Kid (Wantong). I propose to look beyond the extant Labourer's Love and instead to delve into the broader intertextual, intermedial fabric of early film comedy for a re-evaluation of this neglected genre. Drawing on advertising texts, stills, and film reviews, this study corrects misinformation and supplements new data, based on which I posit two notions for a reconceptualization of early Chinese comedy film. First, I propose the Chinese concept of renao ("hot noise") as a particular sensorial-somatic mode of experience to account for the Chinese engagement with film comedy in the tumultuous 1920s. Second, I borrow the Chinese poetic device of allusion to interpret their widespread references to Hollywood films in structural, narrative, and visual terms. Through the prism of allusion, the appropriation and re-production of Hollywood elements can be regarded as a means of adding authority to inchoate Chinese filmmaking, while at the same time complicating familiar topoi, symbols, and imageries in culturally sensitive ways.
摘要：本文研究了1922年明星影片公司与《劳工之爱情》同时期制作的业已失传的喜剧电影:《滑稽大王游沪记》、《大闹怪戏场》和《顽童》。本文提出在《劳工之爱情》之外如何挖掘早期喜剧电影中更广泛的互文性和媒介架构，以重新评价这一被忽视的电影类型。本研究利用广告文本、剧照和影评，纠正了错误信息，补充了新的数据，在此基础上，提出了重新思考早期中国喜剧电影的两个概念。首先，本文提出“热闹”这一中国概念，以此特殊的感官躯体体验模式，解释在动荡的20世纪20年代中国人参与电影喜剧的原因。其次，借用中国诗歌的典故手法，从结构、叙事和视觉的角度来解读早期中国电影与好莱坞电影之关系。从典故的角度看，对好莱坞元素的挪用和再生产可以看作是为早期中国电影增添权威的一种手段，同时以文化敏感的方式再加工，使熟悉的主题、符号和画面复杂化。
Journal of Chinese Film Studies
《中国电影研究》
Journal of Chinese Film Studies立足中国，面向国际，旨在搭建一流国际学术平台，发表国内外高水平的中国电影研究成果，加强不同文化背景的研究者之间的对话和沟通，促进国内外电影研究界开展交流与合作，推动中国电影研究的全球发展。想与国内外知名学者一起探讨中国电影吗？赶快行动投稿吧！
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