Thoughts: Piccadilly

I know we haven’t studied Piccadilly yet, but I went to the screening on Wednesday, and so I’ve already been thinking about it. As we were leaving the Woolley building someone said that Piccadilly seemed a little like Pandora’s Box, which you’ll be pretty familiar with if you’ve done From Silent To Sound Cinema. But the other film from that course it made me think of was Metropolis, or more specifically, the scene in Metropolis when Maria dances in the Yoshiwara nightclub. There is a similar scene in Piccadilly, when Shosho performs a ‘Chinese’ dance. In both films the women are scantily clad in the centre of the shot, and the camera cuts between the dancing woman and the audience (mostly men) watching her with great intensity.

What struck me as really strange about that dance was that it kind of wasn’t a dance at all. She moves her arms around, a little like a snake charmer, but in no way you’d generally think of being a dance. Shosho didn’t seem to be made more seductive from her dancing, in fact, she didn’t really dance differently at all. But she’s shown to be entrancing, and I think maybe the only way in which she’s entrancing, from my perspective, is that she’s foreign and unknown. In terms of Yiman Wing’s ideas about Piccadilly, and his theory that Anna May Wong’s acting of ‘Asian’ characters was ironically excessive and performative, I thought that reading applied less to her dancing really than to any other aspect of the film. You expect her dancing to be comparatively very different to the woman she’s usurping in the film, Mabel, but it’s not. The only difference between the dance Mabel did at the beginning of the film, and Shosho’s dance later on, was that the first was more absurd because Mabel had her mouth open the whole time.

The women in silent films often adopt gestures and expressions which have something of the neurasthenic about them. It seems in a lot of the silent films produced around the time of Piccadilly, whenever they had dancing sequences they were presenting a vehicle for those kind of neurasthenic rhythms - the slower more hysterical versions of which often seemed to lead to female characters swooning away (happens in Piccadilly) - to sexually and more aggressively reassert themselves through movement. When women in those early silent films danced, the rhythm of their performances always becomes slightly manic, and stands at odds with the movement of the other characters in the film or indeed the visual pace of the films themselves. Maybe that’s why they stick on your memory more than others. It’s always struck me, though, that the women in silent films who perform with motions that are manic and semi-sexualised always end up being punished in some way. That’s what happens to Shosho (not to spoil the ending or anything), and it also happens to Lulu in Pandora’s Box and to the robot-version of Maria in Metropolis.