红粉1995

苏童＋李少红，柏林银熊，金熊提名，被遗忘的好电影。记得以前看这个片子就特喜欢，时隔多年再看，依旧喜欢。
颠沛的人生，哀伤戳人。喜欢老浦，喜欢秋仪。喜欢王志文、王姬、何赛飞这三个优秀的好演员，情感游韧、韵味十足。喜欢里面的吴侬软语和评弹，还有苏州乡下的老宅。

人的命运真是很奇妙的东西，你无法预知未来，更无从知晓归宿。从感伤的秋仪到唏嘘的老浦，对这部电影前后20年的情感体验竟截然不同。
日子怎么都是过，无论过去、现在，和将来，生活永远都是与你如影随形的空气、阳光和水，多不堪多艰难，也不能不要。放弃了，就什么都没了。命都没了，自尊和脸面还算个什么。

当年很小 模模糊糊看的
不知道讲什么的，情结我丝毫没有理解，
然而那大段的画面和情结留在我脑海中
清峻的火车道、暗淡的玻璃瓶车间、脂粉气十足的婚礼，
还没被新中国和谐的旗袍、尚存的老资本家、带着锁的红色木柜子、
几个眼神，一把雨伞。

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很多年后，读苏童的小说
恍然大悟

我常常在想，建国只是一个时刻性的点儿，可是为什么，在我们的印象和认识中，建国前后，人们生活的气味是截然不同的，在我的脑海中则是无法连接起来。一瞬间，人们的生活的气息发生巨大的改变是不可能的，那么那些一点点发生中的变化，是很吸引我的。这个电影的原著小说，写的是一个片段。




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 至今难忘
那时候大概四五岁，除了动画片和闪闪红星之类的片子，
这个应该是我最先接触的文艺类电影。

Laopu/landlord Huang Shiren (黄世仁) is on the stage, accused by the ghostlike white-haired girl. Ghost or human, Laopu touches this ambiguous terrain no less than the accuser in a dramatic moment. Acting as a role he once belonged to in a broad sense of class, Laopu joins the trend initially against himself. Huang Shiren is chanting the political slogans with the audiences against himself and suddenly feels something wrong. Allegorically, this points to Laopu, who should have yet doesn’t feel anything wrong. What unravels here is the logic of self-negation in the phase of social transformation, which must be internalized and self-adapted in order not to always feel something wrong.

The logic of self-negation is for all, who and which are relegated to the remnants of the dark old society but are still retained the chances to regenerate, partially for the evocation of a reshaped subjectivity, and partially for the demonstration of a promiseful de-oppressive regime. The “labor camp” for the prostitutes is one of the apparatuses of this logic. In a closely watched space, former prostitutes are deprived of the right to live as before and even, the right to die, yet are endowed a self-supporting and dignified future life. The enforced space itself has already indicated that these women are taken as corrigible vermin, although they are ironically taught to ascribe their “sins” to the brothel madam or social mechanism other than the degrading fate during the pedagogy of “speaking bitterness”. In other words, the labor camp is designed to erase the structural inscriptions of the feudal or capitalist society on the body and spirit of the prostitutes, but at a cost of implicitly duplicating the prejudices to them and negating all their past, their personal history except a good nature that hasn’t decayed totally. I’m not denying the seminal impact of this discipline, especially the redistribution of body, from the haircut, physical examination, regular routine and factory labor—every motion, every form or sign is politically considered--, which transforms the objectified body “for play” or “for sale” to the autonomous body for socialist construction. Indeed, life is not so bad for some of these reformed women. Nevertheless, I have to point out two problems remained. First, how can we really distinguish the transformed body, the labor in the factory with the capitalist production that reduces human to machine? The great will of working for socialism or the bright scene in which these seemingly free women are running through the rape flower fields cannot explain all. Second, the pedagogical apparatus and public opinion push the former prostitutes to thorough self-negation, which reduces their past to nothing or dirtiness. For instance, in a scene Xiao’e is irritated by a forewoman who suggests the money she made before was “unclean”, and as a counterpunch Xiao’e declares that money is all the same and call her names later. That’s how the traditional discrimination for prostitutes slips into the conjuncture of the new logic of self-negation. “Unclean”, this is a too rough generalization for the complicated situation of subjectivity and feelings of the prostitutes. To some extent, strategically, it is precisely this kind of thorough negation that leads to the impossibility of the reformation, because no room for the past, no empirical agreement for the future.

Back to the specific details in the movie, I want to future stress the bifurcate of Qiuyi and Xiao’e: For Xiao’e, does the labor camp really change something? (Also, we don’t know whether the former prostitutes are married to the former clients.) Or rather, is the self-negation effective on her? For Qiuyi, escaping from the negating process of the labor camp qua an entrance to a new social life, what is left for her in the society? We see another direction of redistribution of body— To take tonsure, give up her hair that is cherished as a feminine character (versus the haircut of the disciplined ones) and become a nun. But where she comes back to at last is still the symbolic position of Laopu’s embrace, the only position having something to do with an acceptable past.

Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in. Twentieth- Century Shanghai. Berkeley: University of California Press,. 1997. xii + 591 pp.

原書396-8頁，翻譯本《危險的愉悅》409-11頁。

Moving into politically more volatile territory, the 1994 film Blush (Hong fen), by the renowned woman director Li Shaohong, offered an oblique comment on the limited success of the 195os campaign to reform prostitutes. In the film's opening sequence, Qiuyi and Xiao'e, two Suzhou courtesans, are rounded up for reform. Disdainful of the entire process, Qiuyi stops to purchase a sweet potato, commenting that "even a condemned man gets a last meal." She escapes from the reform institute immediately upon arrival and goes to live with one of her customers, a gilded youth named Lao Pu. Xiao'e remains incarcerated. Frustrated by the hard work of bowing cotton in the institute factory, she tries unsuccessfully to hang herself.

In one of the film's most interesting moments, Xiao'e's political instructor urges her to tell her "classmates" that she attempted suicide because she was worn down by the oppression and exploitation of her past life as a pros- titute. Without directly contradicting the instructor, Xiao'e makes it clear that it is not the past that troubles her: rather, she is afraid of the future, exhausted by the work, and uncomfortable because of blisters on her hands. Undaunted by Xiao'e's refusal to draw the proper political conclusions, the instructor then goes on to tearfully recount what is apparently her own story. She is the daughter of a prostitute who sacrificed to put her through university, yet it has taken her many years to get over her shame at her mother's occupation and to appreciate her efforts. Communist reformers are not pilloried or satirized in this account-in fact, the reform campaign is treated sympathetically--but it is clear that the attempt to impose a single narrative of oppression on a heterogeneous group of women is doomed to fail.

The remainder of the plot (which is based on a story by the popular young male writer SuTong) is worthy of a first-class soap opera. Like SuTong's story Raise the Red Lantern, which became a prize-winning film by Zhang Yimou, Blush contains enough inconsistencies and problems to annoy feminists, historians, and assorted other viewers. Qiuyi's liaison with Lao Pu during her stay in his family's house is incoherent: the two use each other mercilessly in an exchange of protection for sexual pleasure, then suddenly and inex- plicably discover their undying love for each other long after the liaison has ended. By that time Qiuyi has left Lao Pu in a fit ofpique, become a Buddhist nun, discovered she is pregnant with Lao Pu's child, miscarried, and mar- ried an older teahouse keeper whom she does not love. Meanwhile, Xiao'e is released from the reform institute, works briefly in a factory, quarrels with a woman who implies that she is still a prostitute, and marries Lao Pu. In the process she metamorphoses rapidly from petulant prostitute to sweet young worker and back. Xiao'e and Lao Pu are unhappy together; they fight continually about money, and Xiao'e exhibits what the reformers would undoubtedly call an unreconstructed courtesan's mentality, demanding material goods and throwing tantrums.

Ultimately, Blush is not a story about reform at all. Rather, the author and filmmaker regard the 195os reform efforts as a safely distant treasure trove oflong-ago times, to be mined for interesting dramatic material rather than contemporary political lessons. And the film's success-it won the Silver Bear award at the 1995 Berlin Film Festival-suggests that such material will find a receptive audience in the international artistic realm as well.

In these late twentieth-century reconstitutions of the past, prostitutes were multiply deployed: as figures in Republican China's interconnected social ills, as important historical figures who contributed to the nation's cultural heritage, as worthy subjects of elite male observation and writing, as exemplars of traditional female virtue, as sites of nostalgia and popular entertainment, as subjects incompletely reformed by the state. But perhaps something more was promised as well. As the editor's introduction to the reprint of Hell on Earth explained, "Through this book, longtime Shanghai residents can arouse their childhood memories; young people can see the bizarre and motley character of old Shanghai, and sense the health and prosperity of new Shanghai; social historians can find material they need; psychologists can rely on it to research the particular states of mind of the people who were active in those circles; linguists can make use ofit to investigate changes in Shanghai dialect."18 The reissue of courtesan novels was meant not only to facilitate research, but also to restimulate individual memories that might well have been buried under the state's master narrative of twentieth-century history. At the same time, although the introduction expressed the pious hope that young people would appreciate the contrast between the bad old days and the healthy present, the book itselfaimed to make available to them a textured and colorful body of knowledge about the past, one that they might well use to fashion their own understanding so fold Shanghai, of their own heritage, of their own Chineseness. Prostitutes were important figures in this reach for a new and improved past, making it likely that the meanings of prostitution will continue to be re-created and negotiated in China as elsewhere.