Framing Time: New Women and the Cinematic Representation of Colonial Modernity in 1930s Shanghai

What Is Time? Modern Time

The February 1935 issue of Shanghai's Liangyou huabao (良友畫報 The Young Companion; literally, "Good Friends Illustrated Newspaper") includes a two-page photo spread titled "The City Man's Life, Twenty Four Hours: A Complete Guide." Going clockwise around a plain-face clock at the center, a young urbanite, Mr. Li Baichuan, and his wife are showcased in fourteen chronologically arranged photographs, performing essential daily activities. The captions of these photos detail in a commanding tone what should be done, and when, how, and in what order they should be performed; for example, "After rising from the bed in the morning, one should first do stretching exercise for fifteen minutes to train his muscle and strengthen his physique," and, "After the morning exercise, to wash up and then have a bowel movement are the first tasks." Others offer directives: "While in the office, concentrate only on work," and, "Life is finite but knowledge is infinite; everyday after dinner and before bed, one must read books for at least an hour in order to keep oneself abreast of the progress of time."¹

There are at least three ways of understanding this photo spread. First, urban life is about time, about the regulation and organization of daily life; everyday practice follows a predetermined schedule, and each and every activity is designed to fulfill a specific purpose, from personal hygiene to health, work and family, and, eventually to modern living at large. Second, those daily activities are intimately linked to technology; the photos prominently feature objects of modern advancement, such as newspapers, automobiles, telephones, electric lights, radios, and, last but not least, the photographic apparatus itself that makes those images possible in the first place. Third, this representation draws attention to its own production and circulation as a part of the modern lifestyle, self-consciously highlighting the complex network of print culture that shapes understandings of modernity in 1930s Shanghai. In short, as a pictorial guide of how to be a modern urban subject, this two-paged photo spread is at once a visual display of objects that make up a population of a modern city and a visualization of a training regime for an aspiring urban subject to become modernized.²

The imaginary modern urban lifestyle represented in this photo spread is thus manifested in an emphatically visualized form of regulated time. This formal feature is reinforced by the physical layout of the photographs, tracing exactly the same abstracted shape of the clock already centrally placed—a reiteration, a redundancy of form. Not only does the content of the photo spread speak directly of the significance of time and its organization, but the very iteration of that content must also conform to the visualized organization in photographic form. The photo spread's visualization forms a narrative that tells a story of becoming a modern subject, but the object of that narrative thus visualized—Mr. Li or any other urban subject in 1930s Shanghai—is shown as already urban.

What is at stake here is textual, formal as well as temporal. More than how one certain story is told, temporally arranged, and justified, the photo spread poses a central question that those still images and their discrete captions address: how to become urban, modern, and new? Through sequential imagistic and linguistic units, the temporal movement from one frame to the next conveys the totality of that question and answers it at the same time in a process of narrativization. Even more significantly, the narrative formation is visually framed; the making of a modern urbanized subject is told by the circular and potentially infinite form of time: the clock, an abstracted formal plane that frames time, its progression and movement. It is then, perhaps, imaginable to see the photo spread in question as cinematic because temporal movement, formal and spatial manifestation of the object cinematized, as well as narrative processes and their various framings, are all defining elements of the cinema. A loop, as it were, this photo spread epitomizes modernization, at this particular historical...