Becoming Awakened: Four Yue Opera Segments in Xie Jin’s Two Stage Sisters

Abstract:A major work of the renowned director Xie Jin, the 1964 film Two Stage Sisters (Wutai jiemei 舞台姐妹) has received popular reception and critical acclaim both domestically and internationally. Existing scholarship has interpreted Two Stage Sisters primarily through the film analysis methodology, which overlooks the critical component of the film’s aesthetics—the Chinese Yue opera performance. My analysis will shed new light on the film’s depiction of Yue opera actresses by examining details of Yue opera performances and their intermedial interactions with the film. Examination of the “drama-within-drama” device in Two Stage Sisters—in which several excerpted opera segments are inserted into the film’s narrative—reveals that it serves both political and humanistic purposes. Drawing on my fifteen years of personal experience with Yue opera theater, I analyze the film through a new methodological approach that takes into account the film’s transmedial and multimedia connections with the operatic lyrics, singing, music, costume, and movement. This paper invites a rereading of Two Stage Sisters by presenting an original decoding of four Yue opera segments, particularly regarding the parallels and tensions between the onstage opera world and the off-stage film narrative. I demonstrate that each opera segment directly matches one step in the four-step framework of “escape → anger → half-awakened → awakened” identified by Wang Hui as the construction trajectory of female protagonist Zhu Chunhua’s revolutionary subjectivity. In this, I hold that all the Yue opera segments are carefully chosen and crafted into the film holistically to bear meaning and purpose, both in relationship with each other and in relationship to the overall film narrative. I will argue that the selected opera segments serve three central purposes in Two Stage Sisters. First, they externalize Chunhua’s interiority in her becoming a revolutionary subject. Second, they showcase the historical transformation of Yue opera theater. Third, rather than posing a stark disconnect, the premodern opera segments speak to and connect with the historicity and sufferings of women depicted in the last two modern segments, thus integrating gender and collective consciousness into the overarching revolutionary discourse. Overall, this paper uncovers the unacknowledged subtleties and richness of the film owing to the Yue opera segments.