The Chinese Lubitsch Touch: Post-WWII Comedies of Disguise

Xinyu Dong will explore how Chinese Lubitsch films rivaled American films on their own ground and gained competitive edge in challenging the Hollywood domination of the post-war market.

Xinyu Dong, Stanford IHUM Fellow

DATE:      Wednesday, March 18, 2009
TIME:       4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
PLACE:   IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor

As the brand name of the Hollywood German director Ernst Lubitsch’s unique cinematic style, the term “Lubitsch touch” is most aptly elusive and becomes only more so in a trans-cultural context. In the film journals and newspaper supplements of Republican China, quite a number of Chinese directors were hailed as the “Lubitsch of the East” (Dongfang Liu Bieqian) - from Hong Shen in the 1920s to Zhu Shilin in the 30s and Sang Hu in the 40s, and even more pronounced themselves avid students of Lubitsch films. What did the name of Lubitsch mean in these diverse accounts? And how was it able to maintain the lasting hold on the modern Chinese cultural imagination? This paper takes a close look at a few examples of what could be called “comedies of disguise” from the post-WWII period to showcase the profound translatability of the Lubitsch touch. Once understood as “gags” in comedies, the Lubitsch touch suggests a kind of visual and narrative economy that favored cinematic play and thus broadened creative space for Chinese filmmakers working under tight financial constraints. As such, these Chinese Lubitsch films rivaled American films on their own ground and gained competitive edge in challenging the Hollywood domination of the post-war market.