The Chinese Character (pt. 1): Confounding the Textual Cinemascape

Both Piccadilly (1929) the film and Piccadilly the geographical location are comprised of text; that is to say, Piccadilly exists as an environment which is to be read, like any sign system, and which subsequently writes its occupants - an environment which I hereafter shall designate the ‘textual cinemascape.’ Forming the central hub of this cinemascape is the Piccadilly Club, serving as an emblem of the textuality by which it is surrounded and geographical point in and through which text and textuality intersect.

The Club, by virtue of its designation ‘club,’ becomes a space of regulated flow in which its occupants fit themselves into the title ‘club’ by conducting themselves in an appropriate fashion: eating, dancing, and wearing dapper suits. And hereby, the sign, as it operates on the Club’s occupants, justifies its own existence by rendering the space it designates as ‘club’ the Piccadilly Club. As a result of this, Piccadilly depicts a state of symbiosis in which text (the signifier) and the cinemascape (the signified) are mutually reliant, coexisting with, in, and through one another. Piccadilly is, in effect, a structured machine.

The camera pans about this textual cinemascape passively and omnisciently, refusing to interfere with the state of symbiosis. Like the environment, the camera simply lends itself to the symbiotic mechanisms of Piccadilly and depicts the text which abounds on almost every surface – ostensibly relishing the words – foregrounding the machine at the expense of its occupants.

Yet, naturally, the first thing which truly stands out in this highly ordered cinemascape is disruption to the symbiosis: a dirty plate, no less! The mere existence of dirt on a plate challenges the standards of the Piccadilly Club and, by extension, the state of symbiosis itself. From behind the camera, we follow the relegation of responsibility, attempting to determine at which point the machine stopped working. The structure of relegation holds strong until, perhaps not at the hurricane’s centre but very close, we find Shosho: the butterfly, flapping her wings.

Framed by highly structured symbiosis in a fashion not dissimilar to how Cornell’s Medici Princesses are bound by form, Shosho disrupts the film, and warps the frame by which she is restricted. Her informal dancing is not only anathema to the textual cinemascape; additionally, the hypnotic rhythm of her movements penetrate the camera itself, drawing its intent gaze, transforming it from a passive spectator to an affected eye, actively conveying the mesmerised dream-like qualities attributed to the eponymous actress of Rose Hobart (1936). Hereby, Shosho seduces both the audience and the means by which the audience reach her. Thus, by virtue of the camera and of her audience – both wooed by that which is foreign and disruptive to the normative structure of Piccadilly – Shosho becomes the exemplary leading lady.

Subsequent to this performance, Willmot offers Shosho a contract to perform as the Piccadilly Club – an offer to place her disruption centre-stage, under the lights, for all to see! – an offer on which she takes him up. Significantly, such a contract not merely advances the plot but metaphorises the courting of Eastern culture by that of the West to very curious effects.

Shosho’s means of signing her name is simultaneously exquisite and subversive: the Chinese characters are elegant, exotic, and unfamiliar; and, by feigning ignorance, Shosho situates herself in a place of underestimation, hereby crafting a title for herself as the femme fatale. And through the complexity of her character – just like the Chinese characters she writes – Shosho transcends the textual cinemascape, for she becomes an elegantly and deceptively ornamental figure: the other.