| dc.description.abstract | Studies on Chinese early cinema and its extended history in the Republi-
can period (1911–1949) have trod a rocky path.1
After the founding of the
People’s Republic in 1949, film historiography developed into a guarded
field, even until today. In the immediate postwar time the term “Republi-
can” was tainted by its attachment to the defeated Nationalist Party and its
associated autocratic capitalism, corrupt bureaucracy, and dependence on
foreign imperialist powers. Because of these negative associations, the no-
tion of Republican cinema became suspect and was subject to monitoring
and constraint, in the 1950s and after. The formerly “infamous” epoch was
acknowledged as pivotal to the development of Chinese modernity when
the censorious treatment of the Republican period relaxed in the twenty-
first century. Subsequently, Republican history was reconstructed by many
scholars as Shanghai history, given the city’s unrivaled position (so-called
Paris of the Orient) in early twentieth-century China. “Shanghai cinema”
was then upheld as a synecdoche for cinema of the entire era as the city
was then the country’s center of film production, distribution, and exhibi-
tion. The term “Shanghai,” despite its mythology (qipao, jazz, dance halls,
intrigues, department stores, hippodrome, canidrome, dandies, motor cars,
Ruan Lingyu, sultry Mandarin pop), risks reducing the scope of Republican
history into a “looking glass” containing the most alluring facets. “Shanghai
cinema,” too, when used as the overarching Republican cinema or Chinese
cinema before 1949, entails a limited, partial approach to the vast terrains
of cinema practices in many parts of China and colonies like Hong Kong,
Taiwan, Macao, and the Chinese diaspora generally. | |
