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Early Cinema, Attraction and Estrangement: Revisiting Bertolt Brecht’s Interpretation of Mei Lanfang
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2025
Abstract
This article revisits Bertolt Brecht’s interpretation of Mei Lanfang, whose Moscow performance reportedly sparked Brecht’s idea of the V-effect. By placing both figures within the early twentieth-century media landscape, characterized by a fascination with attractions, this exploration delves into the transmedial and transcultural currents that sculpted Brecht’s misunderstanding that Mei appeared surprising to the audience. Framed by his exposure to early, particularly silent, cinema, Brecht views Mei’s performance through a cinematic lens, further amplified by Mei’s emphasis on exhibitionist visuality and traditional Chinese theatre’s inherent attraction-based tendencies. Brecht, moreover, overlooked the historical and practical aspects of Mei’s artistry, which sought to enchant rather than shock the audience. This article endeavours, through its transmedia exploration, to cast new illuminations on the myriad pathways of interpreting global theatrical dialogues.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International Federation for Theatre Research
Footnotes
This article was supported by the Youth Project of the Chinese National Social Sciences Fund for the Arts under Grant number 20CB166.
References
NOTES
2 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn, trans. Jack Davis et al. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 152.
3 Bertolt Brecht, ‘On Chinese Acting’, trans. Eric Bentley, Tulane Drama Review, 6, 1 (1961), pp. 130–6, here p. 132. This sentence is absent from the version in Brecht on Theatre, 2015, p. 153.
4 Li Zhang, ‘Brecht in China’, in Antony Tatlow and Tak-Wai Wong, eds., Brecht and East Asian Theatre: The Proceedings of a Conference on Brecht in East Asian Theatre (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1982), pp. 18–27, here p. 19.
5 Brecht’s theory and theatre indeed have formal connections with xiqu, such as the episodic structure, and that, plus his master status and Marxist orientation, contributed to the indiscriminate embrace of his theory by many xiqu people. Brecht was embraced in China as a politically and ideologically favourable alternative to the Stanislavsky system, particularly during periods when Stanislavsky’s realism was denounced due to changing political climates and Sino-Soviet relations. For details see Xingliang Hu, ‘The Influence and Misreading of Brecht in China’, Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, 3, 3 (2009), pp. 381–99; Huizhu Sun, ‘Aesthetics of Stanislavsky, Brecht, and Mei Lanfang’, in Faye Chunfang Fei, ed. and trans., Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance from Confucius to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 175–8; Min Tian, ‘Who Speaks and Authorizes? The Aftermath of Brecht’s Misinterpretation of the Chinese Opera’, in Stanley Vincent Longman, ed., Crosscurrents in the Drama: East and West (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), pp. 86–97.
6 Min Tian, ‘“Alienation-Effect” for Whom? Brecht’s (Mis)interpretation of the Classical Chinese Theatre’, Asian Theatre Journal, 14, 2 (1997), pp. 200–22, here p. 204.
7 Ibid., p. 203.
8 Silvija Jestrovic, Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 110.
9 Brecht, ‘On Chinese Acting’, p. 134.
10 Baocheng Kang, ‘Zailun bulaixite dui Mei Lanfang de wudu’ (Revisiting Brecht’s Misunderstanding of Mei Lanfang), Xiqu Yishu (Journal of National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts), 39, 1 (2018), pp. 6–14, here p. 10.
11 Wei Feng, Intercultural Aesthetics in Traditional Chinese Theatre: From 1978 to the Present (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), p. 192.
12 Kang, ‘Zailun bulaixite’, pp. 6–14.
13 Klaus-Dieter Krabiel, ‘Bertolt Brecht und der chinesische Schauspieler Mei Lanfang’, in Markus Wessendorf, ed., The Brecht Yearbook/Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 47 (New York: Boydell and Brewer Limited, 2022), pp. 202–41, here p. 219.
14 Min Tian, The Poetics of Difference and Displacement: Twentieth-Century Chinese–Western Intercultural Theatre (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), p. 59.
15 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 2015, p. 213. Original emphasis.
16 Ibid., p. 185.
17 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks, ed. Tom Kuhn, trans. Charlotte Ryland (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 124.
18 For Brecht’s uses of these words and their original spelling see Jestrovic, Theatre of Estrangement, p. 17.
19 Alexandra Berlina, ed., Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader, trans. Alexandra Berlina (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), p. 80.
20 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 2015, p. 282, emphasis mine.
21 Jestrovic, Theatre of Estrangement, p. 23.
22 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. I: Introduction, trans. John Moore (London and New York: Verso, 2008), p. 11.
23 For a very detailed study of Chaplin’s influence on Brecht see Paul Flaig, ‘Weimar Slapstick: American Eccentrics, German Grotesques’, PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2013, pp. 55–122. In general, Brecht at least watched these Chaplin films: The Cure, The Face on the Bar-Room Floor, The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight. See Hans Bunge and Sabine Berendse, eds., Brecht, Music and Culture: Hanns Eisler in Conversation with Hans Bunge (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), p. 261; Bertolt Brecht, Bertolt Brecht Diaries, 1920–1922, ed. Herta Ramthun, trans. John Willett (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), pp. 140–1; Brecht, Bertolt Brecht Journals, 1934–55 (London: Methuen Drama, 1993), p. 365.
24 Brecht, Bertolt Brecht Journals, p. 4.
25 For Brecht’s indebtedness to Eisenstein see Dietrich Scheunemann, ‘Montage in Theatre and Film: Observations on Eisenstein and Brecht’, in Jan van der Eng and Willem G. Weststeijn, eds. USSR (Leiden: Brill, 1991), pp. 109–35. For xiqu’s influence on Eisenstein see Min Tian, The Spectre of Tradition and the Aesthetic–Political Movement of Theatre and Performance: An Intercultural Perspective (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), pp. 94–135.
26 Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Eisenstein Selected Works, Vol. I: Writings, 1922–1934, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), p. 34.
27 Angelos Koutsourakis, Rethinking Brechtian Film Theory and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), p. 3.
28 Joseph B. Entin, Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 2.
29 Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond and Alexandra Peat, Modernism: Keywords (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), p. 220.
30 Laikwan Pang, The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), p. 7.
31 Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), p. 54.
32 Ibid., p. 85.
33 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 238.
34 Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator’, in Linda Williams, ed., Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 114–33, here p. 128.
35 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Wanda Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), pp. 381–8, here p. 384.
36 Ibid., p. 387.
37 David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 1–13.
38 R. Bruce Elder, Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-Garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010), p. x.
39 Scott Bukatman, ‘Spectacle, Attractions and Visual Pleasure’, in Strauven, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, pp. 71–82, here p. 81.
40 Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]’, p. 382.
41 Bukatman, ‘Spectacle, Attractions and Visual Pleasure’, p. 81.
42 Werner Wolf, ‘Aesthetic Illusion’, in Werner Wolf, Walter Bernhart and Andreas Mahler, eds., Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 1–63, here p. 6.
43 Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment’, p. 128.
44 John Fuegi, The Essential Brecht (Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1972), p. 190.
45 Marc Silberman, ed. and trans., Brecht on Film and Radio (London: Methuen, 2001), p. 161.
46 Marc Silberman, ‘Introduction’, in Silberman, Brecht on Film and Radio, pp. ix–xv, here p. ix.
47 John Willett, Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches (London: Methuen, 1998), p. 122.
48 Marc Silberman, ‘Brecht and Film’, in Siegfried Mews, ed., A Bertolt Brecht Reference Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997), pp. 197–219, here pp. 198–200.
49 Nenad Jovanovic, Brechtian Cinemas: Montage and Theatricality in Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Peter Watkins, and Lars von Trier (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017), p. 36.
50 Jestrovic, Theatre of Estrangement, p. 113.
51 Silberman, Brecht on Film and Radio, p. 11.
52 Silberman, ‘Brecht and Film’, p. 200.
53 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 2015, p. 85.
54 Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke 15: Schriften zum Theater 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), p. 238.
55 Marc Silberman, ‘Brecht, Realism and the Media’, in Lúcia Nagib and Cecília Mello, eds., Realism and the Audiovisual Media (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 31–46, here p. 41.
56 Scheunemann, ‘Montage in Theatre and Film’, pp. 124–5.
57 Ibid., p. 34.
58 Brecht, Brecht on Performance, p. 124.
59 Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1998), p. 4.
60 Theodore F. Rippey, ‘Brecht and Film: Medium and Masses’, in Stephen Brockmann, ed., Bertolt Brecht in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 140–8, here p. 140.
61 While Brecht was predominantly influenced by silent cinema, the broader media context relevant to this discussion is essentially within the scope of early cinema. Early cinema is generally considered to span from the invention of the cinematograph in 1895 to the late 1920s, encompassing the silent-cinema genre. Gunning’s concept of ‘cinema of attractions’ offers an alternative way to categorize certain early films. This concept highlights films that focus less on narrative development and more on creating a sensory impact.
62 Tom Brown, Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 46.
63 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 2015, p. 153.
64 Ibid., p. 152.
65 Ibid., p. 243.
66 Ibid., p. 153.
67 Janne Risum, ‘Press Reviews of Mei Lanfang in the Soviet Union, 1935, by Female Writers: Neher versus Shaginyan’, CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, 35, 2 (2016), pp. 114–33, here p. 124.
68 Ibid., p. 125.
69 Brecht, Gesammelte Werke 15, p. 39.
70 Ramthun, Diaries, p. 141.
71 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 2015, p. 154.
72 Brecht has omitted Buster Keaton, who was even more famous for his stony face, which ‘articulates a sense of estrangement that ensures that he is as much detached from things as he is undoubted involved’. See Alex Clayton, The Body in Hollywood Slapstick (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Co., 2007), p. 201.
73 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York and London: Hill and Wang and Eyre Methuen, 1978), p. 68.
74 Flaig, ‘Weimar Slapstick’, p. 95.
75 Silberman, Brecht on Film and Radio, p. 162.
76 Ibid., pp. 171–2.
77 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 172.
78 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 2015, p. 153.
79 Ibid., pp. 153, 154.
80 Sun, ‘Aesthetics of Stanislavsky, Brecht, and Mei Lanfang’, p. 176.
81 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 2015, p. 153.
82 For details of these conventions see Wang-Ngai Siu and Peter Lovrick, Chinese Opera: The Actor’s Craft (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014), pp. 141–7, 154–60.
83 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 2015, p. 152.
84 Min Tian, Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-Century International Stage: Chinese Theatre Placed and Displaced (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 193.
85 Brecht, Gesammelte Werke 15, p. 427.
86 James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 114. Original emphasis.
87 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 2015, p. 152.
88 Years later, when composing ‘Short Organon for the Theatre’, Brecht notes that ‘V-effects [of Asiatic theatre] certainly prevented empathy, yet this technique owed more, not less, to hypnotic suggestion than the technique by which empathy is achieved. The social aims of these old effects were entirely different from our own.’ Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 2015, p. 241. His use of hypnotic suggestion indicates aesthetic illusion, which has nothing to do with ideology.
89 Koutsourakis, Rethinking Brechtian Film Theory and Cinema, p. 30.
90 Peter Brooker, ‘Key Words in Brecht’s Theory and Practice of Theatre’, in Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Brecht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 209–24, here p. 215.
91 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 2015, p. 191.
92 Alex Clayton, ‘Play-Acting: A Theory of Comedic Performance’, in Aaron Taylor, ed., Theorizing Film Acting (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 47–61, here p. 51.
93 Brown, Breaking the Fourth Wall, p. 91.
94 Xinyu Dong, ‘Meeting of the Eyes: Invented Gesture, Cinematic Choreography, and Mei Lanfang’s Kun Opera Film’, Opera Quarterly, 26, 2 (2010), pp. 200–19, here p. 200.
95 Lanfang Mei, Wode dianying shenghuo (My Film Life) (Beijing: China Film Press, 1962), p. ii.
96 Ibid., pp. 1–2.
97 Ibid., p. 56.
98 Yuanjiang Zou, Mei Lanfang biaoyan meixue tixi yanjiu (A Study of Mei Lanfang’s Aesthetic System of Performance) (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 2018), p. 408.
99 Dong, ‘Meeting of the Eyes’, p. 206.
100 Mei, Wode dianying shenghuo, p. 1.
101 Ibid., p. 19.
102 Lanyuan Xu, ‘Lüetan Mei Lanfang de shengqiang yishu’ (A Brief Discussion of Mei Lanfang’s Vocal Art), Xijubao (Journal of Theatre), 8 (1962), pp. 11–14, here p. 13.
103 Among the noted Four Great Dan Actors (Mei Lanfang, Cheng Yanqiu, Shang Xiaoyun and Xun Huisheng) of his time, Mei, according to popular vote, excelled the other three in his stage look (banxiang), expression (biaoqing), movement (shenduan) and voice (sangyin), but fell short of singing skills (changgong), which tells his artistic orientation and strength. See Laochan Su, ‘Xiandai sida mingdan zhi bijiao’ (A Comparison of Today’s Four Great Dan Actors), Xiju Yuekan (Theatre Monthly), 3, 4 (1931), pp. 58–63, here p. 63.
104 Wei Feng and Ye Pi, ‘Antiquity to Modernity: Mei Lanfang’s Preparatory and Presentational Strategies for His American and Soviet Visits’, New Theatre Quarterly, 38, 1 (2022), pp. 60–74, here p. 65.
105 George Kin Leung, Mei Lan-fang, Foremost Actor of China (Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1929).
106 Chao Guo, ‘Cultural Anxiety and the Reconstruction of the Xiqu Tradition through Mei Lanfang’s Overseas Performances, 1919–1930’, Asian Theatre Journal, 37, 2 (2020), pp. 533–48, here pp. 538–9.
107 Brecht, ‘On Chinese Acting’, p. 134.
108 Ibid.
109 Ronnie Bai, ‘Dances with Mei Lanfang: Brecht and the Alienation Effect’, Comparative Drama, 32, 3 (1998), pp. 389–433, here p. 416.
110 Janne Risum, ‘Minutes of “Evening to Sum Up the Conclusions from the Stay of the Theatre of Mei Lanfang in the Soviet Union” at the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS) on Sunday, 14 April 1935’, Asian Theatre Journal, 37, 2 (2020), pp. 328–75, here p. 370.
111 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 2015, p. 155.
112 Joseph Garncarz, ‘The European Fairground Cinema: (Re)defining and (Re)contextualizing the “Cinema of Attractions”’ in André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac and Santiago Hidalgo, eds., A Companion to Early Cinema (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), pp. 317–33, here p. 329.
113 Brecht, Bertolt Brecht Journals, p. 29.