"Beyond the troubled question of a national style, what Chinese film really shares with the other Chinese visual arts instead of any common style is a body of cultural reference of content and context, both historic and contemporary," Silbergeld said to approximately 30 audience members, including mainly professors and Chinese culture and language students.
Attempting to clearly present a topic that he described as "inherently complex and confusing," Silbergeld pointed out various similarities between modern Chinese films and traditional Chinese visual arts. He particularly emphasized paintings from the Tang and Song dynasties, which controlled parts of China roughly 1,000 to 1,500 years ago. Silbergeld described various Chinese film-making styles, which he said differ from one another and do not constitute a homogenous body of Chinese film.
Traditional Chinese handscroll paintings long paintings that illustrate various scenes and share with cinematography a "desire to move" are unlike film because they lack story lines, according to Silbergeld.
"If [the painting] were a movie, it could only be a documentary film," he said.
While people can view traditional handscrolls by looking at small segments at a time meaning that individuals control "the rate of the painting's motion" viewers cannot control the rate of motion of films, Silbergeld said.
Silbergeld also outlined various characteristics of Chinese films including "flatness," arbitrary use of color, minimal camera movement, suppression of dramatic impulse and appreciation of emptiness and stillness. He emphasized that the typical Chinese tendency toward slowness and silence is usually absent in American cinematography.
Unlike Hollywood movies that tend to have short editorial cuts, Chinese film has traditionally employed long cuts, Silbergeld said. Short cuts involve the combination of more shots and changes in perspective, while longer cuts use the same perspective for more extended periods of time, he said.
"The evidence seems striking, but the real question is, Is [the style of long cuts] characteristic?'" Silbergeld asked, reminding audience members of the dangers of stereotyping Chinese film.
He cited the 2003 Chinese film "Blind Shaft" by Li Yang, which uses particularly short cuts, to demonstrate the lack of uniformity among Chinese film styles.
Another shared characteristic of traditional Chinese art and modern Chinese film is the use of art to portray the external world, although artists perceive and portray reality differently, Silbergeld said.
In many traditional Chinese paintings and in Jiang Wen's "Devils on the Doorstep" (2000), for example, the artists forgo the use of color, according to Silbergeld.
"It may seem ironic that eliminating much of the information normally brought to our eyes would somehow seem more realistic to us," he said.
Historically, many painters from the late Tang and Song dynasties eliminated the "distraction of color" from their paintings in order to "peer into a deeper, inner reality," Silbergeld said.
Other modern Chinese filmmakers, however, have chosen to rely on color to accurately portray reality, according to Silbergeld. The various styles of Chinese film and art demonstrate that there are "different realities" for different people, Silbergeld said.
Chinese films can often be recognized as Chinese by non-natives, but those viewers typically have a difficult time discerning important plot elements and key themes, Silbergeld said.
The lecture "What Is the Chinese Motion in Chinese Motion Pictures? Cinema and the Traditional Arts of China" is part of the College's Rudelson lecture series and took place in Carson Hall. The lecture was sponsored by the Rudelson Family fund of the Asian and Middle Eastern studies department, the art history department, the film and media studies department and the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.
