King’s College London

Department of Film Studies

Chinese Visual Festival Club

 

Presents (probably) the UK premiere of the long lost silent masterpiece

 

Cave of the Silken Web (盘丝洞, 1927)

 

 

When? 18:00, Friday 1 November 2013

Where? The Nash Lecture Theatre, K2.31, King’s College London, Strand Campus

Free.

 

Long considered lost, a print of Cave of the Silken Web was recently discovered in Oslo – with Chinese and Norwegian intertitles – in the Norwegian National Library, who have kindly allowed us to show a DVD of their restored print. The film is based on an episode of the classic tale, Journey to the West, in which the pure and gullible monk Xuanzang goes to India to get the sutras and bring Buddhism back to China. He encounters a group of beautiful young maidens who are in fact spider demons, and misunderstands when one of them tells him how much she’d like to have him for dinner. Is the monk toast? Or will his sidekicks Pigsy, Friar Sand, and the Monkey King rescue him? The film builds to a fast and funny crescendo.

            Cave of the Silken Web was a successful blockbuster that was remade many times, most recently in 1967 by Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong. The 1927 film was directed by Dan Duyu and starred his wife Ying Mingzhu, or, as they were known in cosmopolitan Shanghai, Darwin Dann and Pearl Ing. Just as Hollywood’s daring productions of the 1920 led to protests and eventually self-censorship, the daring “ghost spirit” (shenguai) films of the 1920s led to a ban by the Chinese Nationalist government on such forms of “feudal superstition” – a ban supported by the Communist left. Long dismissed as trash, in recent years scholars have come to understand the fascination in magic, supernatural powers, and cinematic special effects as a “vernacular modernist” response to the scientific wonders of the modern age. But, until now, all this has been based on paper traces. Now, at last, we can see the real thing.