Liu, Na’o (1905–1940)

On 3 September 1940 Liu Na’ou (1905–40), the Taiwan-born, Japan-educated leader of the Shanghai Neo-Sensation School, was killed by an unknown gunman. He had just succeeded to the directorship of National Subjects Daily after Mu Shiying (1912–40), a fellow Neo-Sensation writer and filmmaker who had likewise been assassinated on the job. It is unknown whether these two murders were connected. National Subjects Daily was a news agency run by Wang Jingwei’s puppet regime collaborating with the Japanese. It could be the Japanese who had Liu killed for allegedly playing double agent for the Chinese Nationalist Party or, conversely, the latter who retaliated against him for collaborating with the Japanese.

Liu Na'ou: The Fate of “Middling Modernity” and the Global Pure Film Movement in Republican-Era Shanghai

The Pure Film movement to elevate cinema as an art form enjoyed a global following amongst commercial to avant-garde filmmakers and theorists during the interwar period. In East Asia, the influence of this vibrant discourse is perhaps best represented by the widely studied Japanese Pure Film movement, but little is known about its presence in China or the enigmatic figure Liu Na'ou who imported these discourses from the West, via Tokyo to Shanghai. Intended to improve the quality of Chinese films, these modernist film theories inevitably became embroiled in Liu's political campaign to protect freedom in the arts and entertainment against leftist political dogma of national defense and rising proletarianism. Following Liu's violent assassination for treason during the Sino-Japanese war, what is now considered Western Classical film theory became subject to the same stigma and taboo that has plagued the writing of Republican-era Chinese film history.

Liu Na’ou And The 1930s Soft Film Movement: A New Approach In Revisionist Chinese Film Historiography

This essay analyzes how the 1930s Chinese “Soft Film” movement emerged and developed in film historiography, and finds it is a discursive formation by the Leftists to create an ideological enemy that serves to define its own group’s identity through a struggle against an “other”. It challenges the naming of “Soft Film” through examining documents beyond the official archive. Unearthing the film writings of Liu Na’ou as the movement’s leading figure is a good entry point into excavating the history of the people and films associated with the label “Soft Film”. Reconstructing this “reactionary cinema” will reveal previously unknown cultural connections with classical and avant-garde Western film theories, and more importantly renovate the established Chinese film canon of the 1930s.

Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism: Liu Na'ou's Urban Shanghai Landscape

In 1924 a half-Taiwanese, half-Japanese man travelled from Japan to Shanghai to study French at the Jesuit Université L'Aurore. He was young, flamboyant, and rich, and eventually used his own personal funds to found two bookstores and three journals in Shanghai. Despite his ambiguous national identity and lack of formal Chinese education, he also became the founder of a Chinese modernist literary movement called new sensationism (xinganjue pai), earned substantial notoriety, and attracted a host of followers. Murdered by an unidentified assassin in 1939, in his shorr life Liu Na'ou (1900–39) mirrored the literary movement that he created and that died with him. But this was not before he had published an intriguing collection of short stories entitled Scène (his own French title, 1930a), which was in some measure to define what urban writing meant for Chinese writers in Shanghai during the Nanjing decade (1927–37), as the quotation above suggests.