If the cloud is developed, Gu Youwei is also

Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat official account “RET Rui Yide” (ID: retweixin) , author: here yes.

“Hello, theater!”

Three days ago, this greeting from the Review Department of People’s Daily expressed the voice of filmmakers, commercial real estate people and more ordinary people.

After 180 days of waiting, people finally welcomed back to the theater. For many people, this is a wonderful feeling. It seems to be a reunion with old friends and a reconnection with real life.

As a cinema in social space, perhaps because of its characteristics, it has physical significance and commercial market value.

From the perspective of the industry, no matter whether the resumption of work can bring about a recovery, we are already thinking about where the cinema format will go? How will commercial real estate and cinema coexist?

In this issue, we detailed history, briefly talked about business, and looked for discoveries about the future from the past of Chinese cinemas.

Lead the bud of emerging business districts

In China, cinemas and commercial spaces are born together.

In 1905, Russian architect Pan Wa Kobtsev founded the Ilyudyan Cinema in Harbin, known as the “Moscow of the East”. This is considered the first cinema in Chinese history.

Two years later, at the north of Chang’an Avenue in Beijing, a foreign businessman opened the first cinema in Beijing, Ping An Film Company. At that time, the theater had 200 seats, well-decorated and well-equipped, but it was only open to foreigners.

In 1913, a businessman “due to the commercial depression of Daguanlou in Dashilan, he specially collected more capital to renovate the contents of the building, singing women during the day, and experimenting with movies at night.” The Qianmen Daguanlou photo studio has been in business since July of that year, and the business has been extremely developed.

The Chinese film industry, which is still in the silent era, has since entered a period of rapid take-off. Statistics show that by the mid-1920s, with the exception of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, the total number of domestic movie theaters exceeded 140, including about 13 in Beijing and more than 10 in Harbin, Tianjin, and Hankou. Statistics from the US Department of Commerce at the time showed that there were 106 theaters in 18 major cities in China with a total of 68,000 seats.

Among the cinemas in Beijing, 4 are near the front door, namely Daguanlou Cinema (1913), New World Cinema (1918), Amusement Park Cinema (1918) and Garden CinemaChang (1918); Dong’an Market, which is now known as apm shopping mall, was home to Zhenguang Cinema (1920) and Kaiming Cinema (1921). These new spaces with built-in fans, exhaust fans, flush toilets, electro-optical equipment, and Western-style architecture outside create an entertainment experience completely different from bookstores, theaters, and tea houses for residents of old Beijing.

Of course, the most prosperous film industry in the country is Shanghai. Its theater hardware level, film quality, and audience appreciation are significantly better than other regions.

Interestingly, the budding of Shanghai cinema can be said to have led the first-generation upgrade of the Shanghai business district. In the 1910s, when “point-and-show” was the main focus, most of the newly built movie theaters in the 1920s spontaneously jumped out of the two traditional business districts of Nanshi Laochengxiang and Nanjing Road. New-style entertainment “disdains” the association with theaters, wine shops, and gambling caves in the two places, and instead concentrates on Hongkou, a new business district in the northern part of the public concession.

At the same time, due to the gradual gathering of businessmen, overseas Chinese, literati, and immigrants from Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong, Hongkou formed a modern citizen culture and entertainment lifestyle very early.

As the most fashionable entertainment venue, movie theaters are quite popular in this kind of environment where “taxi and businessmen want to mix”. From October 1927 to February 1930, Mr. Lu Xun, who lived in Jingyunli, recorded 21 viewings in 8 theaters in his diary, 18 of which were in Hongkou.

For the Chinese, before the advent of theaters, the entertainment consumption mode represented by drama was a noisy experience of auditory-oriented and people celebrating.

The theater brings a dark and quiet environment, a neat and reasonable layout, and a visual focus on the screen, which is in sharp contrast with the old casino, making it possible for the enlightened Chinese to perceive, experience, and learn , Imitate things that are beyond their existing knowledge.

The audience’s viewing, consumption and evaluation in the theater also give cultural and social significance to the physical entity of the theater.

Simultaneously with China’s initial urbanization and the construction of modern business circles, cinemas began to develop into “purpose-oriented cultural and entertainment consumer places” and promoted the social consensus of this concept.

A public space that tells the will of the nation

Then the turbulent years began.

In the 1930s and 1940s, when national capital set foot in the film industry, it not only faced the dilemma of foreign capital monopolizing the market, but also had to survive the cultural and educational control of the Japanese and puppet regimes.

In 1935, Lianhua Pictures launched the domestic film “Sky Wheel”. This “heavy blockbuster” has few channels to enter the Chinese people’s vision-if it is to be screened in the American-invested Shanghai Da Guangming Theater, “Sky Wheel” must accept the strict conditions that it can only be shown for two days and have a 3:7 split.