Traditional Culture Encyclopedia - Photography and portraiture - What was the first movie in China? What did people call the movie at that time?

What was the first movie in China? What did people call the movie at that time?

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

This documentary completes the documentary function of the film by filming the performance of "Dingjun Mountain" by Peking Opera master Tan Xinpei. For many years, when mentioning "Dingjun Mountain", it has always been associated with feature films, ignoring the other side of its existence.

The emergence of Dingjun Mountain shows the complex connection between video art and traditional Chinese culture. From the subject matter point of view, choosing Dingjun Mountain as the first film shooting allows us to see the unique way of viewing movies by the Chinese. Zhou Ning said in "Comparative Drama" that Peking Opera presents a narrative language instead of a display language. It is a discursive expression method that emphasizes the external communication system between playwrights, actors and audiences. This discursive expression method is not satisfied with showing the real dramatic situation. Therefore, for the audience, drama stories often rely on the actors' oral narratives. , and the body movements are indeed dance expressions that have nothing to do with the story, so what the audience sees is a performance and what they listen to is a play. It is this special relationship between watching and listening that has affected the development of Chinese documentaries. From the film documentaries of the 1950s to the spoken word series of the 1980s, Chinese documentaries are all expressed in the form of picture explanation. This kind of picture-narrative documentary presents a complex world in which the explanation is not closely related to the picture. However, when we evaluated them in the past, we thought that it was influenced by the "visual political commentary" of Soviet films, but we ignored it. Without understanding the connection between documentaries and traditional Chinese culture, we cannot explain why "Talk about the Yangtze River" and "Talk about the Canal" were able to create such a sensation.

is a beginning, and all connections between Chinese documentaries and Chinese culture should start from here.