A Two-Way Mirror: Set Design and Social Reflection in Shanghai Cinema, 1937-1941

Despite the rapid recovery of the Shanghai film industry after the Battle of Shanghai, one thing that filmmakers hardly recuperated during the Orphan Island period was the practice of location shooting due to the conditions of the war. Film companies almost relied completely on studio sets for production and set designers were increasingly compared to magicians who created the illusion of infinite worlds out of confined studio space. This talk examines how varied strategies of spatial configurations in Orphan Island cinema conditioned the viewers’ experience of the diegetic world and their reflections on social reality. Using the “two-way mirror” model to complicate the meaning of contemporary relevance, the talk demonstrates the critical role of set design in determining the reflective quality of a film text.