Date: Wednesday, September 30th
Time: 10am Pacific Time
Location: Online via YouTube
RSVP: Not required – join here or search “Chinese Film Classics Love Everlasting” on YouTube
Details:
Please join us for an event to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Eileen Chang!
September 30, 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing 張愛玲, 1920-1995), one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century. In celebration, the Modern Chinese Cultural Studies YouTube channel is hosting a special premiere of Professor Christopher Rea’s new translation of Chang’s first produced film screenplay Love Everlasting 不了情 (1947). Starring Chen Yanyan and Liu Qiong, the film dramatizes a story of love, social pressure, and a young woman in an impossible situation.
During the 93-minute screening, join Christopher Rea (UBC Professor of Modern Chinese Literature) and Renren Yang (UBC Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Popular Culture) for a live chat (in the YouTube Premiere comments sidebar) about the film and its relations to literary and cinematic culture, as well as to the life of Eileen Chang.
About the Film:
Yu Jiayin, a young professional woman, takes a job in Shanghai as the in-house tutor of an eight-year-old girl, only to fall in love with the girl’s father, Xia Zongyu–a married man. Jiayin’s good-for-nothing father arrives in town and starts trying to exploit the situation for his own benefit. Then Zongyu’s sickly wife arrives from the countryside, and Jiayin finds that an already compromising situation is becoming unbearable. What will she do?
Love Everlasting (also known as Unending Love) was the first of several collaborations between Eileen Chang and director Sang Hu. Later in 1947, for example, Chang and Sang teamed up again on the film comedy Long Live the Missus! 太太萬歲 (1947) (featuring much of the same supporting cast); that year, Chang also revised her “Unending Love” screenplay into the story “How Much Regret” 多少恨, which was published in a magazine Sang edited.
Subtitles translated by Christopher Rea. Subtitles created by UBC PhD student Liu Yuqing.
About the Chinese Film Classics Project:
Love Everlasting is the twenty-first Republican-era film with new English subtitles added to the Chinese Film Classics YouTube playlist. Subscribe to the Modern Chinese Cultural Studies YouTube channel, hosted by Christopher Rea, for announcements and updates about new videos, including a free online course about early Chinese cinema, which will go live this fall on the channel and on www.chinesefilmclassics.org.
