Meeting of the Eyes and Mei Lanfang's Kun Opera Film

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Article Review: Meeting of the Eyes: Invented Gesture, Cinematic Choreography, and Mei Lanfang'sKun Opera Film(draft)
Xinyu Dong wrote this article from the University of Chicago in the year 2010. The article examines the professional life of Mei Liefang, a male actor who best-impersonated females before he died in 1961. He played a significant role in the film Dream of the Garden, which is an excerpt from The Peony Pavilion, a classics play of Kunqu. Dong used this article to outline the life and success of Mei in his artwork. There is another aspect of Mei's career in theatres and generally in the art, which is his artistic experiment of various kinds of visual forms, from Kun opera to Peking opera to cinema. Dong uses Mei in his article to link the old tradition and the new emerging media. This expands the scope of the article from Mei's art life to the transitions of art from the traditional ways (Thorpe, 165).
Mei is so determined to see Kun opera continue being famous and even expanding to other countries. When he saw the popularity of Kun opera coming down and even on the verge of totally collapsing, he offers to do some performance to revive Kun opera and maintain its popularity. He gets help from Qi Rushen, a scriptwriter of the Peking opera reform, who is determined to take Kun opera global. Qi dedicated his time and resources to see Mei rise to more fame as well as promoting Kun opera to gain international recognition since he had traveled abroad and attended foreign opera houses. Both Mei and Qi had the same goal, which enabled them to work together for around twenty years, beginning in 1913 successfully (Dong, 202).
The success of Mei's career is also attributed to his outstanding performances. He knows how to use his body language very well. Dong says,"…Mei perfects the gesture to a degree comparable to a martial arts actor and makes it his signature performance as a female impersonator." The author goes ahead and describes his stage performance and terms them as outstanding. Mei was voted the best for impersonating a female character in a poll that was conducted by a newspaper called Shuntian News based in Beijing. This marked the beginning of the climax in his career as many more achievements followed him.
The author compares the effectiveness of cinematic treatment over the traditional Kun opera too. Cinemas employ the use of cameras, which adds flavor from shots of angles and the prominence given to a subject from how much they cover on the screen. To bring out the exact effects given by cameras, he uses figures which give short and precise information. Figure 1 shows Du entering the garden with her face covered. The message contained in the figure is easily decoded as the image of Du entering the garden with the face covered can be seen and the effect seen in the next shot, which he names figure 2. He brings out aspects of editing, too, that are well seen in the comparison of the shots. The editing, Dong says, brings out the ...