Laborer's Love Analysis

Laborer’s Love (1922), a silent film made by Chinese cinema pioneers Zhang Shichuan and Zheng Zhengqiu, is said to be “the earliest complete extant Chinese film” (Zhang, 90). Despite the film’s numerous similarities to Harold Lloyd 's Never Weaken (1921), Zhang Zhen argues in her writing that Laborer’s Love was ultimately a product of the “nascent…urban culture” and “confluence of discourses and practices of shadow-play” in Shanghai during the 1910s-1920s (100). Zhang Yingjin reiterates this notion, highlighting that since it “was a transitional moment in Chinese films, the producers threw in pieces grabbed from various sources”, resulting in “a mixture of disparate, sometimes contradictory elements” within Laborer’s Love (25). This response

The adaptation of Never Weaken’s plotline by Zhang Shichuan and Zheng Zhengqiu in Laborer’s Love is apparent with both the male protagonists attempting to improve the business of their beloved women’s workplaces so as to marry her in the end. Given the popularity of Lloyd 's movies in China at that time, it is not unlikely that Laborer’s Love was directly inspired by Never Weaken (The Chinese Mirror, 2008). Yet, while “the narrative trajectory of Laborer’s Love is clear”, “the film is less concerned with the internal psychology of the characters than with their actions, which often amounts to a show that disrupts any insipient diegetic absorption” (Zhang, 109). In showing “its stubborn exaltation of theatrical and performance exteriority while flirting with narrative interiority”, Laborer’s Love reveals an “obsession with movement and optical play” that is “inscribed” in the story based on the narrative of Never Weaken (Zhang, 109). The local inflexions within Laborer’s Love thus make it a very different film from its source of