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A Study of the Narrative Strategies in the Movie of Road Angel

Woo Kwang Jung 1

1숙명여자대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to analyse the narrative strategy of the movie “Road Angel 马路天使”, the most representative production by Yuan Muzhi 袁牧之(1909-1978) during the 1930s. This movie has distinctive narrative styles and aesthetic characteristics of new urban films, which had introduced the Shanghai common people’s lives through new cinematic methods since 1933. The “Road Angel” played an important role in the development of new urban films,featuring not only a narrative strategy conditioned by urban lower class people as the main characters but also a witty style, audio-visual achievement, and symbolic correlations between the beginning and the ending scene. This study also focuses on analysing three aesthetic characteristics that appear in the Film “Road Angel”, and therefore this contains three parts. PartOne examines the thematic structure of the movie and how is it different from the Left-wing films? Part Two explores this film’s second aesthetic characteristic that the narrative strategy achieves its goal with the help of the satiric and touching dialogue, the simple and innocent character, the slapstick acting, the sound effects, the background music, etc. Part Three analyze this film’s third aesthetic characteristic that the heroine Zhou Xuan 周璇(1920-1957) sings two folk songs “Four Seasons 四季歌” and “A Songstress Far in the Distance 天涯歌女”, the former once and the latter twice respectively. Her important changes both in tone and melody for singing “A Songstress Far in the Distance” shows Yuan Muzhi’s another narrative driving skill.

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