On 7 May 2022, the College of Film of Shanghai Theatre Academy (STA) successfully held an online lecture entitled “Shadow Play Theory”. The lecture was organized and presided over by Professor Wan Chuanfa of STA, with Professor Huang Wangli of STA as the keynote speaker. The main audience of the lecture was the students of "Film Theory and Criticism" course at STA. At the same time, the lecture also attracted many non-STA scholars and students, adding to a total audience of more than 200 people.
The lecture was divided into two parts. First of all, Professor Huang Wangli diachronically reviewed the theoretical origin of "Shadow Play Theory", and reflected a set of "super stable structure", that is, the model of popular plays, in the course of tracing the origin and making comparison; Then, Professor Huang Wangli demonstrated the tradition of storytelling of popular plays from four aspects, i.e. cross genre, times and ethics, and the promoting role of dramatic nature and music in storytelling.
Professor Huang Wangli finally pointed out that a local model of "popularity" has formed in China in the process of localization, and has continued to spread to the field of TV plays, becoming one of the indispensable contents in public life. At present, the value of popular storytelling in communication and its influence on mass culture still have important significance for exploration and discussion.
During the exchange session of the lecture, many students joint the discussions on "the influence of the early shadow play theory on Hong Kong and Taiwan films and its inheritance", "the storytelling structure of war films", "the specific application of Chinese opera in films", "the images of characters in films from 1949 to 1966" and "the popular storytelling expression of realistic films", and engaged in a warm discussion with the two teachers.
With a wealth of cases and analysis, this online lecture opened a direction for the research of film creation from the perspective of film theory, provided a very clear path of cognition based on developing events about Chinese film creation over the past 100 years, and played a role of recap for the "shadow play theory" that has been evolving, developing and changing. The depth and width of studies as revealed in the lecture are very worthy of our further thinking and research.
