This year marks the 120th anniversary of Chinese cinema, which began in 1905 with the film “Dingjun Mountain.” Fittingly for a country with a rich, centuries-old opera tradition, this first domestic production was an opera. Performance culture would go on to shape early Chinese moviemaking.

“Dingjun Mountain” tells the story of a battle that took place in the year 219, during the Three Kingdoms period. It was adapted from a Peking opera production and featured Tan Xinpei, a leading opera performer of the era. Shot with a stationary camera, it aimed to recreate the feel of a live stage performance.

Despite its technical limitations, “Dingjun Mountain” set the stage, quite literally, for a lasting relationship between opera and film in China that would later morph into a genre of movies: the Chinese opera film.

Such a movie is not merely a filmed stage show or a Western-style musical — it translates a performance system based on codified gestures, vocal technique, and stylized acting into cinematic terms. For viewers, part of the experience is seeing actors adhering to traditional opera conventions in a more modern format.

And though this genre is less popular today than a century ago, it still has new titles and its share of fans — and global influence. International movie stars Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan trained in Peking opera schools, for example. And Hollywood action cinema — from “The Matrix” to Marvel — often directly borrows from operatic physical vocabulary.

Another famous early opera film was 1919’s “Chunxiang Causes a Stir at School.” Legendary performer Mei Lanfang, the most internationally famous Peking opera master of the early 20th century, played both male and female leads. Through stylized body language, Mei’s superb performance technique brought the subtle charm of opera to film, according to contemporary newspaper reports. Sadly, all that remains of the film today are a handful of still photographs.

Mei also helped give Chinese opera films their first international exposure. In the 1920s, he filmed select opera scenes such as “Stabbing the Tiger” — a famous martial episode in which a hero confronts and defeats a tiger, frequently staged to display an actor’s martial arts ability and acting chops — during a visit to the United States. And in the 1930s, Mei teamed up with a Soviet Union director on the opera film “Rainbow Pass.”

After initially focusing on recordings of opera performances, filmmakers started to create narrative feature movies with operatic elements, turning opera films into a genre. Some movies were direct adaptations of stage repertoire, while others produced original narratives that incorporated singing, stylized movement, and operatic music.

“Sing-Song Girl Red Peony” (1931) pushed artistic and technological boundaries. It was the first film to integrate Peking opera arias into cinematic storytelling, and it was the first film with sound — previous productions relied on live performers. “A Tale of Life and Death,” released in 1948, was another experimental new take on the genre. It mixed stage and screen by combining live-location shooting and stylized opera performance, while also putting to use the latest color and sound technologies of the time.

A year later, the founding of the People’s Republic of China, whose government proved supportive of opera films, was the start of a golden age that lasted until the Cultural Revolution.

“The Butterfly Lovers” (1954) was a landmark production. Its opera was of the Yue genre, a regional form originating in eastern China’s Zhejiang province that features predominantly female casts, sentimental romance narratives, and a style similar to Hollywood musicals. It achieved not only runaway domestic success but also found resonance in Hong Kong and across Southeast Asia, leaving a lasting impression on Chinese-speaking diaspora communities.

Its popularity even inspired the Shaw Brothers Studio — Hong Kong’s largest film studio — to produce numerous opera films. The company went with the Huangmei form, a regional opera form developed from tea-picking folk songs known for its light, lyrical melodies, accessible language, and strong emphasis on romantic folklore.

Meanwhile, “Wild Boar Forest” (1962), a Peking opera film, broke new ground in exploring the aesthetics of “the abstract” and “the real,” striking a delicate balance between expressionism and realism, as well as lyricism and storytelling. It employed sparse sets, stylized performances, and expressive camera work to create a tension between abstract symbolism and palpable, on-screen realism.

Between 1966 and 1976, during the Cultural Revolution, “model opera” films became the dominant and most influential form of art for Chinese audiences. Representative works like “The Red Lantern” and “Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy” fused the stylized performance techniques of traditional opera with ballet and orchestral music, focusing on revolutionary narratives and the drive toward modernization. Iconic musical numbers from these films, such as “The Duel of Wits” and “The North Wind Blows,” even crossed over into mainstream popularity and were widely sung like pop hits.

After China’s subsequent “reform and opening-up,” opera films found themselves navigating two major currents: commercialization and realism. Opera films not only competed with burgeoning domestic popular genres but also faced pressure from imported foreign films.

That push gave rise to productions like the 1980 Peking opera film “The Legend of the White Snake,” which was based on a well-known, centuries-old folk tale. The film staged two emblematic sequences — the flooding of Jinshan Temple and the search for a healing herb — that benefited from then-state-of-the-art special effects.

At the same time, opera films in the 1980s and ’90s showed a strong interest in real-world issues. One example is the 1984 Yue opera film “Five Daughters Offering Birthday Felicitations,” which uses a family gathering as a backdrop to explore tensions between traditional filial piety and evolving modern values.

Since the 2000s, the genre has entered a phase of digital innovation, embracing cutting-edge tools, like 4K visuals, 3D effects, and surround sound, to reimagine the tradition for the digital age. For instance, the 2018 Peking opera film “Cao Cao and Yang Xiu” introduced entirely new scenes not present in stage versions, rendered with 3D technology to immerse audiences in the cinematic spectacle.

Likewise, the 2021 Cantonese opera film “Love of the White Snake” — based on the same story as the 1980 film — employed CGI and panoramic audio to evoke the poetic beauty of classical Chinese landscape paintings. These innovations not only elevated how audiences experienced the aesthetic richness of opera, but also breathed new life into timeless tales.

The movie — the most commercially successful opera film of the 21st century — reflects a larger transformation in opera, from a traditionally vocal-centered art form to a visually immersive one. This shift toward “watching” rather than just “hearing” opera marks one of the most significant modern transitions in the genre since the Ming and Qing dynasties.

However, it’s worth noting that such success isn’t easily replicable. The folk tale at the basis of the movie is inherently dramatic and visually rich, full of fantasy, martial-arts action, and emotional spectacle, making it particularly well-suited for cinematic adaptation. Its themes also lend themselves to contemporary interpretations, touching on ideas like female solidarity. In contrast, classic opera stories like “Execution at the Ancestral Hall,” in which a man kills his wife to obey his mother, are unlikely to find traction among modern audiences.

Chinese opera has spent centuries traveling — across regions, across forms, across platforms. Opera films are one of its most ambitious experiments: a truly cross-media art form, and a uniquely Chinese contribution to global cinema.

For 120 years, opera films have been trying to reconcile the physicality of traditional opera with the audiovisual language of cinema. In the end, perhaps the relationship between opera and cinema is not one of contradiction, but of evolution — a testament to Chinese cinema’s enduring search for its own modern identity.

Translator: Dasha Cowley; editor: Wu Haiyun; portrait artist: Wang Zhenhao.

(Header image: Visuals from Douban and VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)