Image power: seriality, iconicity and The Mask of Fu Manchu
Image power: seriality, iconicity and The Mask of Fu Manchu
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形象力量：连续性、标志性和《傅满洲的面具》
作者：
这篇文章探讨了通俗连续剧的运作方式，涉及到一个充满意识形态的连续剧人物--傅满洲的演变。本文从1932年的前密码电影《傅满洲的面具》出发，重点探讨了象似性在这一语境中的作用。这部电影以鲍里斯·卡洛夫为主角，在傅满洲的文学生涯和随后的跨媒体怀孕几十年后塑造了这个人物的标志性形象。我将通过探索电影的“图像力量”来研究系列化和图像化的相互关联的过程--它使用了强烈的视觉安排和戏剧性的场面，这些场面爆炸了个别电影的立意，但却是连续串联的节点实例。为了说明这一发展的系列动态，本文最后将转向广受欢迎的系列电影《福满洲鼓》(1940)，这部电影在1932年的电影中自由即兴创作，不仅借鉴了近十年前规划的情节，而且还借鉴了电影的悬念管理和叙事结构。结合各种连载和连载的方法，从流行文化研究、符号学、电影研究到政治理论，我认为强大的意识形态形象(如黄色危机的意象)本质上是连载的。
This essay explores the workings of popular seriality with respect to the evolution of an ideologically fraught serial figure – Fu Manchu. It focuses on the function of iconicity in this context, taking its point of departure from the pre-Code film The Mask of Fu Manchu of 1932. The film features Boris Karloff in the title role and forges Fu Manchu's iconic image several decades after the figure's literary inception and ensuing crossmedial gestation. I shall investigate the interrelated processes of serialization and iconization by probing the film's ‘image power’ – its employment of intense visual arrangements and melodramatic tableaux which explode the individual film's diegesis yet figure as nodal instances of serial concatenation. To illustrate the serial dynamics of this development, the essay will finally turn to the popular film serial Drums of Fu Manchu (1940), which improvised freely on the film of 1932, drawing heavily not only on the plotline mapped out almost ten years before, but also on the film's suspense management and narrative structure. Combining various approaches to seriality and the serial, ranging from popular culture studies, semiotics, film studies, to political theory, I argue that powerful ideological figurations (such as the imagery of the yellow peril) are serial in nature.