I.

Introduction

Chinese Cinema, historical development of the cinema in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Although the cosmopolitan port city of Shanghai held projections of films from unidentified Western companies in 1896 and 1897, China’s capital Beijing had to wait until 1902 for its first glimpse of the new medium. There was also a disastrous attempt to screen films for the Empress Dowager Cixi in the Forbidden City in 1904. The earliest known Chinese production was Dingjun Shan (Dingjun Mountain, 1905), a record of the Peking Opera star Tan Xinpei in scenes from the stage opera of the same title, made by staff of the Fengtai photographic store in Beijing. The short comedy Tou Shao Ya (Stealing the Roast Duck), also based on a stage opera scene, was shot in Hong Kong in 1909 by the theatre director and sometime actor Liang Shaobo, with financial backing from the American entrepreneur Benjamin Polaski.

By 1920, Shanghai was established as the centre of Chinese film production, with a modest amount of ancillary activity in Hong Kong. However, the Chinese market for films was surprisingly small (a United States government trade official noted that there were fewer than 100 cinemas in 1922, almost all of them in the treaty ports of the east coast), and the bankruptcy rate among film companies was high. At the time, 80 to 90 per cent of all films screened in China and Hong Kong were American imports. China’s own production in the 1920s divided neatly into two types of film: those derived from Hollywood models (chiefly melodramas, comedies, and romances) and those drawn from sources in Chinese popular culture (chiefly historical and legendary stories from the opera stage, and martial arts fantasies from pulp fiction). Very little Chinese cinema from this period survives today.

Chinese cinema reached remarkable creative heights in the 1930s, partly because the medium began to attract young artists and intellectuals, such as the American-educated writer-director Sun Yu and the Japanese-educated Communist screenwriter Xia Yan, and partly because the growing threat of a Japanese invasion provided the impetus for films to become the voice of patriotic resistance and national identity. Formal innovations, generally derived from experimentation in Hollywood and Soviet silent cinema, meshed with an agenda of Communist-inspired themes, including women’s rights, social inequality, and national defence. Technique, however, lagged behind; silent films and part-sound hybrids remained in production until 1935.

The combination of under-investment, poor distribution, and political censorship by the Kuomintang (KMT) government guaranteed that many production companies were short-lived, but the industry was dominated by two “majors” in the 1930s. One was the MGM-like Star Company (Mingxing, founded in 1922 by pioneer directors Zhang Shichuan and Zheng Zhengqiu); the other was United Photoplay Service (Lianhua, founded in 1930 by Luo Mingyou). Both companies averaged one release per month. United, which had the star Ruan Lingyu (“China’s Garbo”) under contract, made such outstanding films as Wu Yonggang’s Shennü (1934; The Goddess), probably the world’s first non-moralistic film about prostitution, and Sun Yu’s startlingly erotic patriotic thriller Da Lu (1934; The Highway). Star peaked with such sophisticated films as Yuan Muzhi’s Malu Tianshi (1937; Street Angel), a tough-but-romantic vignette of life, love, and social injustice in Shanghai’s “lower depths”.

This golden age in Shanghai cinema was abruptly curtailed when the city fell to the Japanese in 1937. Few directors stayed to work under Japanese supervision; most fled to Hong Kong or inland to Wuhan, using severely limited resources to make agitprop films for the war effort. When production resumed in Shanghai in 1946, much had changed. The approaching civil war between KMT Nationalists and Communists sharpened the political climate, forcing all film-makers to take sides. Some left-wing directors fled to Hong Kong to avoid persecution; they were followed by many right-wing directors after the Communist victory in 1949. Shanghai films of the late 1940s relied more on dialogue and theatrical-style staging than had the pre-war films, but included a number of titles now internationally acknowledged as classics, such as Fei Mu’s searching analysis of post-war depression Xiao Cheng zhi Chun (1948; Spring in a Small Town) and Zheng Junli’s parable of working-class solidarity Wuya yu Maque (1949; Crows and Sparrows).