Chinese Cinema

Chinese Cinema

By Kat Pan

The Chinese Cinema Collection covers a heterogeneous body of film publications in China’s Republican era. The collection highlights localized conceptions of Chinese film cultures, the cultivation of movie fandom in its semi-colonial society, as well as the history of the Chinese film industry spanning the three decades preceding the Second Sino-Japanese War.

The collection includes Movietone (Dian Sheng 電聲), one of the longest running and the most popular film periodicals in China’s Republican era. This magazine offers news on cinema that unsettles the boundary between scandal, true crime, sensation, actuality and fictionality. Published in Shanghai, it is representative of the roles that Chinese movie magazines played in the making of Chinese cinephiles (yingmi 影迷). The first film periodical published in Hong Kong, Silver Light (Yin Guang 銀光), showcases indigenous film writing of Hong Kong between 1926 and 1927.

The 1924 monograph On Photoplay (Yingxi xue 影戲學), allegedly the first film book published in China, systematically introduced filmmaking craft and the idea of medium specificity to the Chinese audience. China Cinema Year Book 1927 (Zhonghua yingyue nianjian 中華影業年鑑), another foundational text for the formation of China’s film industry, presents a comprehensive history while surveying the filmscape in Republican China circa 1926. The Year Book showcases the sensibility of the adult, the worldly, and the glamorous—the roaring twenties of Republican China. The material in this collection gives key historical context and offers fascinating insight into China’s film culture.