Heidelberg University: Details of event: Film screening: Woman Demon Human (1987) directed by Huang Shuqin

Back to Events of Week No. 25: Monday 17th June 2024 to Sunday 23rd June 2024

Wednesday
19
JUN

06:00 PM

Film screening: Woman Demon Human (1987) directed by Huang Shuqin—China's first feminist film?

Huang Shuqin’s powerfully unorthodox drama Woman Demon Human is part biopic, part stage fantasy, part psychological mystery. It is based on the life of the female Beijing opera star Pei Yanling who was famous for portraying male roles on stage, especially the ghost-catching underworld god Zhong Kui. In the film version, Pei is called Qiu Yun, a young girl whose parents are Beijing opera performers. Qiu catches her mother making love with another actor, after which the mother abandons the family. Qiu then powerfully identifies with her father and consequently determines to inhabit a male stage persona. The film gives elliptical fragments of her career, from brutal training regimens, through dangerous flirtations, incipient fame and national renown.
Pei herself plays Zhong Kui, who manifests himself in Qiu Yun’s subjective point of view at moments of crisis in her life. The film’s most famous scenes stage imaginary encounters between Qiu Yun and her alter ego Zhong Kui, in a black undefined space splintered by mirror images, rent by the stresses of a fractured subjectivity. Called China’s ‘only genuinely feminist film’ by leading scholar Dai Jinhua, Huang’s film bravely disrupts biopic conventions from a female point of view, with stunningly inventive film technique, leaping in and out of Qiu Yun’s subjective world with brilliant confidence and technical bravura. (SK: https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2008/films/woman-demon-human)

Address

Institut für Sinologie

010.00.05

Voßstraße 2

69115 Heidelberg

Homepage Event

https://www.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/sinologie/research/tls

Organizer

Institut für Sinologie

Homepage Organizer

www.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/sinologie

Contact

Institut für Sinologie

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