Traditional Culture Encyclopedia - Photography major - What was the name of China's first film? How was it born?

What was the name of China's first film? How was it born?

1905 Ren Qingtai, the owner of Beijing Fengtai Photo Studio, filmed China's first film Dingjun Mountain.

This documentary completed the recording function of the film by shooting the performance of Peking Opera master Tan Xin in Dingjun Mountain. For many years, Dingjun Mountain has been associated with feature films, ignoring the other side of its existence.

The appearance of Dingjun Mountain shows the complex relationship between image art and China traditional culture. From the subject matter, we can see China's unique way of watching movies by choosing Dingjun Mountain as the location of the first film. In Comparative Drama, Zhou Ning said that Peking Opera presents a kind of discourse expression in which narrative language replaces display language, emphasizing the external communication system among playwrights, actors and audiences. This kind of discourse expression is not satisfied with showing the real drama situation. Therefore, for the audience, drama stories often depend on the actors' oral storytelling, and the body movements are indeed dance performances that have nothing to do with the story, so the audience is watching the performance and listening to the drama.

It is this special relationship between watching and listening that has influenced the development of China Documentary. From the film documentaries in the 1950s to the series of talks in the 1980s, China's documentaries are all illustrated. This kind of documentary with picture explanation presents a complex world with no close relationship between explanation and picture, but when we evaluated them in the past, we all thought it was influenced by the "visual political theory" of Soviet movies. However, it ignores the connection between documentary and China traditional culture. If you don't understand this, you can't explain why The Story of the Yangtze River and Talking about the Canal have such a sensational effect.

Dingjun Mountain is the beginning, and all the connections between China documentary and China culture should start from here.