Film: General | Period

General

Armes, Roy. Third World Film Making and the West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Bai, Jingsheng. “Throwing Away the Walking Stick of Drama.” In George Semsel, ed., Chinese Film Theory: A Guide to the New Era. New York: Praeger, 1990, 5-9.

Bao Minglian 包明廉. Dongfang Haolaiwu: Zhongguo dianying shiye jueqi yu fazhan 东方好莱坞：中国电影事业崛起与发展 (Hollywood of the East: the rise and development of the Chinese film industry). Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1991.

Bao, Hongwei. Queer Media in China. London: Routledge, 2021.

[Abstract: This book examines different forms and practices of queer media, that is, the films, websites, zines, and film festivals produced by, for, and about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people in China in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It traces how queer communities have emerged in urban China and identifies the pivotal role that community media have played in the process. It also explores how these media shape community cultures and perform the role of social and cultural activism in a country where queer identities have only recently emerged and explicit forms of social activism are under serious political constraints. Importantly, because queer media is ‘niche’ and ‘narrowcasting’ rather than ‘broadcasting’ and ‘mass communication,’ the subject compels a rethinking of some often-taken-for-granted assumptions about how media relates to the state, the market, and individuals. Overall, the book reveals a great deal about queer communities and identities, queer activism, and about media and social and political attitudes in China.]

Barbieri, Maria. “The Other Half of Heaven: Women in Chinese Cinema.” Asian Film Connection (University of Southern California)

Bassan, Raphael. “La longue marche du cinema chinois.” La revue du cinema 380 (Feb 1983): 77?

Barlow, Tani and Donald Lowe. “Movies in China.” Jump Cut 31 (1986): 55-57.

—–. “Media in China.” Jump Cut 34 (1988): 117-121.

Bergeron, Regis. Le cinema chinois. I: 1905-1949. Laussane: Alfred Eibel, 1977.

—–. Le cinema chinois 1949-1983. 3 vols. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1983.

—–. Le cinema chinois: 1984-1997. Aix-en-Provence: Institut de l’image, 1997.

Berry, Chris, ed. Perspectives on Chinese Cinema. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Papers, 1985. Rpt. London: British Film Institute, 1991. [with essays by Lee Oufan, Catherine Yi-Yu Cho Woo, Berry, Wang Yuejin, Esther Yau, Ann Kaplan, Quiquemelle… , 7 of which do not appear in the original 1985 edition]

—–. Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003. [“readings” of 25 films from Republican China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the PRC]

Berry, Chris. “‘Race’ (minzu): Chinese Film and the Politics of Nationalism.” Cinema Journal 31, 2 (1992): 45-58.

—–. “Queer Films in East Asia.” Australian Humanities Review 2 (July 1996).

—–. “Sexual DisOrientations: Homosexual Rights, East Asian Films, and Postmodern Postnationalism.” In Xiaobing Tang, ed., In Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian Culture. Boulder: Westviewl 1996, 157-82.

—–. “If China Can Say No, Can China Make Movies? Or, Do Movies Make China? Rethinking National Cinema and National Agency.” Boundary 2. Special Issue ed. Rey Chow. 25, 2 (Fall 1998): 129-50. Rpt. in Rey Chow ed., Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. 159-80.

Berry, Chris and Mary Farquhar. “From National Cinemas to Cinema and the National: Rethinking the National in Transnational Chinese Cinemas.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 4, 2 (2001): 109-22.

—–. China on Screen: Cinema and Nation. NY: Columbia University Press, 2006.

[Abstract: Berry and Farquhar explore more than one hundred years of Chinese cinema and nation. Providing new perspectives on key movements, themes, and filmmakers, they analyze the films of a variety of directors and actors, including Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Gong Li, Wong Kar-wai, and Ang Lee. They argue for the abandonment of “national cinema” as an analytic tool and propose “cinema and the national” as a more productive framework. With this approach, they show how movies from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora construct and contest different ideas of Chinese nation–as empire, republic, or ethnicity, and complicated by gender, class, style, transnationalism, and more. Among the issues and themes covered are the tension between operatic and realist modes, male and female star images, transnational production and circulation of Chinese films, the image of the good foreigner–all related to different ways of imagining nation.]

Berry, Michael. “Cinematic Representation of the Rape of Nanking.” East Asia 19, 4 (2001): 85-108.

—–. A History of Pain: Literary and Cinematic Mappings of Violence in Modern China. Ph. D. diss. New York: Columbia University, 2004.

—–. “The Absent American: Figuring the United States in Chinese Cinema of the Reform Era.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 552-74.

—–, ed. Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. NY: Columbia University Press, 2005. [CUP abstract]

Bettison, Gary, ed. Directory of World Cinema: China. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2012.

Bettison, Gary and James Udden, eds. The Poetics of Chinese Cinema. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

[Abstract: This book examines the aesthetic qualities of particular Chinese-language films and the rich artistic traditions from which they spring. It brings together leading experts in the field, and encompasses detailed and wide-ranging case studies of films such as Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Spring in a Small Town, 24 City, and The Grandmaster, and filmmakers including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, Chen Kaige, Fei Mu, Zhang Yimou, Johnnie To, and Wong Kar-wai. By illuminating the form and style of Chinese films from across cinema history, The Poetics of Chinese Cinema testifies to the artistic value and uniqueness of Chinese-language filmmaking.]

Bordwell, David. “Transcultural Spaces: Toward a Poetics of Chinese Film.” Post Script 20, 2/3 (Winter/Spring 2001): 9-24. Rpt. in Sheldon Lu and Yueh-yu Yeh, eds., Chinese-Language Films: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005. 141-62.

Braester, Yomi. “The Dream of Flying: Taipei and Beijing Cinematic Poetics of Demolition.” Tamkang Review (Summer 2000).

—–. Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.

—–. “From Urban Films to Urban Cinema: The Emergence of a Critical Concept.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 346-58.

—–. “Film Schools in the PRC: Professionalization and Its Discontents.” In Mette Hjort, ed., The Education of the Filmmaker in Europe, Australia, and Asia. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Braester, Yomi and James Tweedie, eds. Cinema at the City’s Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010.

[Abstract: Cinema has been a primary mechanism for entertaining migrants to the modern city, recording and displaying a historically new experience to urban populations themselves, while also disseminating the city’s promise around the world. But recent city films betray an awareness that the experience of urban life has changed with the dynamic energies and burdens of globalization, with the era of digital video now upon us, and with the emergence of almost limitless megacities throughout East Asia. Contemporary films from the region help define the urban experience in these new environments. These essays trace common concerns among East Asian cinemas of Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, the PRC, and Taiwan, and go beyond the now familiar notion that the Asian metropolises are successful iterations of local identity within a global network. Contributors include Ackbar Abbas, Dudley Andrew, Darrell W. Davis, Zhang Zhen, Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Yiman Wang, Susie Jie Young Kim, Chris Berry, and Akira Lippit]

Browne, Nick, et.al., eds. New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics. Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Chan, Evans. “Chinese Cinema at the Millennium (Part One). Asian Cinema 15, 1 (Spring 2004): 90-115.

Chan, Felicia, Fraser Elliott, and Andrew Willis, eds. Women in East Asian Cinema: Gender Representations, Creative Labour and Global Histories. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2023.

[Abstract: Examines the work of women in East Asian Cinema in front of and behind the screen. Highlights understudied areas on women’s contributions to film – East Asian film in particular. Highlights importance of re-historicising women’s creative labour in film, not just as actors on screen. Recentres women’s film history into film history more broadly. Creates opportunities for dialogue amongst established and emerging scholars working in different areas of East Asian film studies. Women in East Asian Cinema brings together new and emerging work to highlight and explore the understudied contributions of women to the films and creative industries of East Asia. It is a book which foregrounds the importance of re-historicising women’s creative labour in film, not just as actors on screen, but as voices who have steered the production, circulation and consumption of these films across global contexts.]

Chan, Kenneth. “The Contemporary Wuxia Revival: Genre Remaking and the Hollywood Transnational Factor.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 150-57.

Chan, Kenneth and Andrew Stuckey. Sino-Enchantment: The Fantastic in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 2021.

[Abstract: Although Chinese film audiences have always maintained a foundational cultural interest in the fantastic, this trend has dramatically increased over the last decade. Sino-Enchantment is the first work in English to approach this recent explosion of fantastic film in Chinese cinemas, where each re-envisioning of the form is determined by cultural, economic, political and technological factors to produce fresh inventions and creative reinventions of familiar narratives, characters and tropes. With case studies of films such as The Assassin  (2015), Monster Hunt (2015) and The Great Wall (2016), this novel approach uses the framework of ‘Sino-enchantment’ as a new theoretical lens through which readers can engage with elements of the fantastic in Chinese cinema.]

Chang, Hsiao-hung. “The Unbearable Lightness of Globalization: On the Transnational Flight of Wuxia Films.” In Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds., Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007, 95-107.

Chao, Shi-Yan. Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020.

[Abstract: provides a cultural history of queer representations in Chinese-language film and media, negotiated by locally produced knowledge, local cultural agency, and lived histories. Incorporating a wide range of materials in both English and Chinese, this interdisciplinary project investigates the processes through which Chinese tongzhi/queer imaginaries are articulated, focusing on four main themes: the Chinese familial system, Chinese opera, camp aesthetic, and documentary impulse. Chao’s discursive analysis is rooted in and advances genealogical inquiries: a non-essentialist intervention into the “Chinese” idea of filial piety, a transcultural perspective on the contested genre of film melodrama, a historical investigation of the local articulations of mass camp and gay camp, and a transnational inquiry into the different formats of documentary. This book is a must for anyone exploring the cultural history of Chinese tongzhi/queer through the lens of transcultural media.]

Chen Huangmei 陳荒煤, ed. Dangdai Zhongguo dianying 当代中国电影 (Contemporary Chinese film). Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue, 1989.

Chen Mo 陈墨. Bai nian dianying shanhui 百年电影闪回 (Flashbacks to a hundred years of Chinese film). Beijng: Zhongguo jingji, 2000.

Chen Xihe. “Shadowplay: Chinese Film Aesthetics and Their Philosophical and Cultural Fundamentals.” Geroge Semsel, ed., Chinese Film Theory. NY: Praeger, 1990: 192-204.

Cheng Jihua 程季华, et al. Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi 中国电影发展史 (The history of the development of Chinese film) 2 vols. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1980. [first and most complete history of Chinese film; the version linked to here does not include images]

Cheng, Pei-kai. “From Shanghai to Taipei: Metropolis in Spatial, Cultural, and Existential Consciousness in Chinese Cinema, 1930-1990.” In Chen Ruxiu, ed., Xunzhao dianying zhong de Taibei (Focus on Taipei through Cinema). Taipei: Wanxiang, 1995, 138-43.

Chiao, [Peggy] Hsiung-ping. “‘Trafficking’ in Chinese Films.” Modern Chinese Literature 7, 2 (1993): 97-101. [about the exchange of motion picture culture across the Taiwan straits]

—–. “Chinese Cinema 1999-2000: Four Traditions, Four Masterpieces.” Cinemaya 51 (Summer 2001): 4-12.

Chinese Cinema/Le Cinema Chinois 1932-1985. Montreal: Conservatoire d’art cinematographique de Montreal, 1985. [filmography of 30 films from 1985 retrospective]

Chong, Chris K. H. Transcendence and Spirituality in Chinese Cinema: A Theological Exploration. NY: Routledge, 2020.

[Abstract: This book provides a framework by which a global audience might think theologically about contemporary films produced in mainland China by Chinese directors. Up to this point the academic discipline of Christian theology and film has focussed predominantly on Western cinema, and as a result, has missed out the potential insights offered by Chinese spirituality on film. Mainland Chinese films, produced within the nation’s social structure, offer an excellent lingua franca of China. Illuminating the spiritual imagination of Chinese filmmakers and their yearning for transcendence, the book uses Richard A. Blake’s concept of afterimage to analyse the potential theological implications of their films. It then brings Jürgen Moltmann’s “immanent-transcendence” and Robert K. Johnston’s “God’s wider Presence” into conversation with Confucianist and Daoist ideas of there being, spirituality-speaking, “More in Life than Meets the Eye” than simply material existence. This all combines to move beyond film and allow for a Western audience to gain a new perspective on Chinese culture and traditions. One that uses familiar Western terms, while avoiding the imposition of a Western mindset.]

Chong, Woei Lien, “Chinese Cinema at the 1998 International Rotterdam Film Festival.” China Information 12, 4 (Spring 1998): 96-155. (With a contribution by Anne Sytske Keijser)

Chong, Woei Lien and Anne Sytske Keijser. “Chinese Films at the 1994 Rotterdam Film Festival: The Chinese Censor Comes to Rotterdam – In Vain.” China Information 8, 3 (Winter 1993-1994): 53-66.

—–. “Chinese Cinema at the 1995 Rotterdam Film Festival: Dreaming of a Better World.” China Information 9, 4 (Spring 1995): 60-72

—–. “Chinese Cinema at the 25th International Rotterdam Film Festival.” China Information 10, 3/4 (Winter 1995/Spring 1996): 29-43

—–. “Chinese Cinema at the 1999 International Rotterdam Film Festival.” In China Information 13, 4 (Spring 1999): 97-160.

—–. “Modernizing Mainland China: PRC Films and Documentaries at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, 1999”. China Information, 14, 1 (2000): 171-207.

—–. “The Quest for Happiness: Chinese Cinema at the 2000 International Rotterdam Film Festival.” China Information 14, 2 (2000).

Chow, Rey. “Violence in the Other Country: China as Crisis, Spectacle, and Woman.” In Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ed. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, 81-100.

—–. Primitive Passsions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. NY: Columbia UP, 1995.

—–. Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visuality. NY: Columbia University Press, 2007.

[Abstract: What is the sentimental? How can we understand it by way of the visual and narrative modes of signification specific to cinema and through the manners of social interaction and collective imagining specific to a particular culture in transition? What can the sentimental tell us about the precarious foundations of human coexistence in this age of globalization? Rey Chow explores these questions through nine contemporary Chinese directors (Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou, Ann Hui, Peter Chan, Wayne Wang, Ang Lee, Li Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang) whose accomplishments have become historic events in world cinema. Approaching their works from multiple perspectives, including the question of origins, nostalgia, the everyday, feminine “psychic interiority,” commodification, biopolitics, migration, education, homosexuality, kinship, and incest, and concluding with an account of the Chinese films’ epistemic affinity with the Hollywood blockbuster Brokeback Mountain, Chow proposes that the sentimental is a discursive constellation traversing affect, time, identity, and social mores, a constellation whose contours tends to morph under different historical circumstances and in different genres and media. In contemporary Chinese films, she argues, the sentimental consistently takes the form not of revolution but of compromise, not of radical departure but of moderation, endurance, and accommodation. By naming these films sentimental fabulations–screen artifacts of cultural becoming with irreducible aesthetic, conceptual, and speculative logics of their own–Chow presents Chinese cinema first and foremost as an invitation to the pleasures and challenges of critical thinking. ]

—–. “Fetish Power Unbound: A Small History of ‘Woman’ in Chinese Cinema.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 490-506.

“Cinema.” In Information China. NY: Pergamon Press, 1989.

“Cinema of China.” Wikepedia entry.

Clark, Paul. Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

—–. “Generating History: Rethinking Generations in Chinese Filmmaking.” Journal of China Film Studies 1, 1 (2021): 5-18.

[Abstract: This paper argues that the idea of a Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers was created almost as much by critics and others outside of China as by China-based writers on film. I will suggest that this cohort of filmmakers, which emerged in the mid-1980s, was more distinctive and shared more in common than generations of filmmakers before or since that decade. But using the Fifth Generation label can sometimes obscure real differences among the artists to whom the term is applied. Moreover, this cohort, within a matter of a few years, lost its relative coherence as its members went their separate ways. The paper will end by suggesting that in some senses the Fifth Generation, usually hailed as a “New Wave” in Chinese filmmaking, marked an end of certain attitudes to film in China rather than a new beginning.]

Contemporary Cinema, ed. Film Studies in China. Intellect, 2018.

[Abstract: The first volume in Intellect’s Film Studies in China series, this is a collection of articles selected from issues of the journal Contemporary Cinema, translated into English. The goal of publishing this journal in English is to enable in-depth, exchanges about film policy, global culture and film-making with film researchers all over the world. TOC: Chapter 1: The Culture and Aesthetics of Huo JianQi’s Films, by Zhang BinNing. Chapter 2: 12 Citizens: Twelve Chinese People, 1.2 Billion Voices: Successful Localization and Practical Application, by Zhang JingYu. Chapter 3: Intellectual Property Rights Transfers in a Borderless Era, by Ding YaPing. Chapter 4: The Materialist View: Quality Editing Requires Editorial Integrity, by Liao Ching-Sung and Han JiaZheng. Chapter 5: The Most Important Aspect of Film-Making is ‘Discovery’: A Conversation with Director Jia ZhangKe, by Jia ZhangKe and Yang YuanYing. Chapter 6: Film Culture Development in the Wake of New China’s ‘Pretonpian Society’: The ‘Netopia’ of Chinese Auteurs Constitutes a ‘New Force’ in the Industry, by Yin Hong. Chapter 7: Spiritual and Physical Manifestations and Cultural Signifiers of Trauma in Chinese Anti-Japanese War Films]

—–. Film Studies in China, Volume 2. Intellect, 2020.

[Abstract: The second volume in Intellect’s Film Studies in China series, this is a collection of articles selected from issues of the journal Contemporary Cinema, translated into English. The goal of publishing this journal in English is to enable in-depth exchanges about film policy, global culture and film-making with film researchers all over the world. TOC: 1. On Chinese Film Industrial Trade Structure and its Internationalized Strategic Path; 2. On the Differentiation Strategies of Four Internet Film Production Companies; 3. From the Golden Age of the Market to the Golden Age of Creativity; 4. The Analysis and Strategy of Chinese Rural Film Market Development; 5. The Internationalization Strategy of Chinese Cinema: Theory and Practice; 6. Seven Visions: Rooted in the Traditional, Steeped in the Nouvelle; 7. A Kaleidoscopic View of Wang Han-lun’s Celebrity Image; 8. The Impact of Hong Kong Cinema on Mainland Cinema after the Return of Hong Kong; 9. The Celebrity Face: Contemporary Celebrity Culture – Body Obsession and Physical Fetishism; 10. Significance in Survival: On the Auteurial Visions in Lu Chuan’s Films; 11. Revisiting 1920s: Reflections on the Nationalism in Early Chinese Films 12. The Optimistic Tradition in Early Chinese Films: A Perspective of Intellectual History; 13. Interview with Director Guo Ke: Whispers through a Crinkle in Time; 14. Interview with Director Mei Feng: The Aesthetic Compass of Classic Films; 15. Interview with Director Lu Yang: What Matters Is What You Do with the Truth]

Cosandey, Roland. “Pour servir a l’histoire du cinema chinois (1930-82)” Cahiers de la cinematheque. 37 (Summer, 1983):11-27.

Cui, Shuqin. Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003.

—–. “The Return of the Repressed: Masculinity and Sexuality Reconsidered.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 499-517.

Curtin, Michael. Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Goblalization of Chinese Film and TV. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

[Abstract: In this provocative analysis of screen industries in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, Michael Curtin delineates the globalizing pressures and opportunities that since the 1980s have dramatically transformed the terrain of Chinese film and television, including the end of the cold war, the rise of the World Trade Organization, the escalation of democracy movements, and the emergence of an East Asian youth culture. Reaching beyond national frameworks, Curtin examines the prospect of a global Chinese audience that will include more viewers than in the United States and Europe combined. He draws on in-depth interviews with a diverse array of media executives plus a wealth of historical material to argue that this vast and increasingly wealthy market is likely to shake the very foundations of Hollywood’s century-long hegemony.]

—–. “Chinese Media Capital in Global Context.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 179-96.

Dai Jinhua 戴锦华. Dianying lilun yu piping shouce 电影理论与批评手册 (Film theory and critical handbook). Kexue jishu wenxian, 1993.

—–. Jingcheng tuwei: nuxing, dianying, wenxue 镜城突围: 女性, 电影, 文学 (Breaking out of the mirrored city: woman, film, literature). Beijing: Zuojia, 1995.

—–. “Invisible Women: Contemporary Chinese and Women’s Film.” positions east asian cultures critique 3, 1 (1995): 254-80.

—–. Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua. Eds. Wang, Jing and Tani Barlow. London: Verso, 2002. [MCLC Resource Center review by Megan Ferry]

—–. “Rethinking the Cultural History of Chinese Film.” Tr. Lau Kin Chi. In Dai, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua. Eds. Jing Wang and Tani Barlow. London: Verso, 2002, 235-63.

—–. After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

[Abstract: Dai Jinhua interrogates history, memory, and the future of China as a global economic power in relation to its socialist past, profoundly shaped by the Cold War. Drawing on Marxism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, Dai examines recent Chinese films that erase the country’s socialist history to show how such erasure resignifies socialism’s past as failure and thus forecloses the imagining of a future beyond that of globalized capitalism. She outlines the tension between China’s embrace of the free market and a regime dependent on a socialist imprimatur. She also offers a genealogy of China’s transformation from a source of revolutionary power into a fountainhead of globalized modernity. This narrative, Dai contends, leaves little hope of moving from the capitalist degradation of the present into a radical future that might offer a more socially just world.]

—–. Chinese Cinema Culture: A Scene in the Fog. New York: Peter Lang, 2019.

[Abstract: From her early film studies to her most recent critiques of contemporary pop culture, Chinese Cinema Culture: A Scene in the Fog presents Dai Jinhua’s multiple theoretical moves toward writing difference into the Euro-American discourses current in China today; it is an account of both her interrogation of mainstream Western theories and her eventual flight from them. She searches for a theoretical strategy that enables her to narrate critically the intellectual and gendered film history and culture of the post-Mao and post-Deng eras without sacrificing it to the orientalizing gaze of the West. Her work demonstrates brilliant insights into China’s cinema tradition that is inseparable from both the political legacy of Maoism and current postcolonial order of cultural knowledge. This book includes 11 essays organized in three parts and one dialogue on Chinese cinema culture as the afterword.]

Davis, Darrell William. “A Marriage of Convenience: Musical Moments in Chinese Movies.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 438-51

Deppman, Hsiu-Chuang. Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010.

[Abstract: Deppman unites aesthetics with history in her argument that the rise of cinema in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the late 1980s was partly fueled by burgeoning literary movements. Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou’s highly acclaimed films Red Sorghum,Raise the Red Lantern, and To Live are built on the experimental works of Mo Yan, Su Tong, and Yu Hua, respectively. Hong Kong new wave’s Ann Hui and Stanley Kwan capitalized on the irresistible visual metaphors of Eileen Chang’s postrealism. Hou Xiaoxian’s new Taiwan cinema turned to fiction by Huang Chunming and Zhu Tianwen for fine-grained perspectives on class and gender relations. Delving equally into the individual approaches of directors and writers, Deppman initiates readers into the exciting possibilities emanating from the world of Chinese cinema. The seven in-depth studies include a diverse array of forms (cinematic adaptation of literature, literary adaptation of film, auto-adaptation, and non-narrative adaptation) and a variety of genres (martial arts, melodrama, romance, autobiography, documentary drama). Complementing this formal diversity is a geographical range that far exceeds the cultural, linguistic, and physical boundaries of China. The directors represented here also work in the U.S. and Europe and reflect the growing international resources of Chinese-language cinema.]

Des Forge, Alexander. “Shanghai Alleys, Theatrical Practice, and Cinematic Spectatorship: From Street Angel (1937) to Fifth Generation Film.” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 4 (2010): 29-51.

Dangdai Zhongguo dianying shi 当代中国电影史 (History of contemporary Chinese film). 2 vols. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue, 1989.

Ding, Yaping. Chinese Film: A Historical Introduction. Tr. Fiona Wang. Transaction, 2015.

[Abstract: Perhaps no art form in China has engendered as much controversy or has had such a checkered past as film. From the horrors of war to the red carpet at Cannes, the history of Chinese film has illustrated the extremes of politics and art in a delicate dance that has captivated the attention of art and film historians for decades. Ding Yaping’s authoritative, accessible, and concise history of Chinese cinema comprehensively covers the early years of pro-China propaganda films through the first decade of the twenty-first century, where Chinese film now represents a cinematic movement of the highest order. Ding traces the development of Chinese film as a source of high culture from the 1990s to the present day.]

—–. “A Few Issues Surrounding Research into the General History of Chinese Film.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 1, 1 (2021): 83-99.

[Abstract: The practice of film history highlights the value and significance of the researcher. A more comprehensive view of the situation of film history raises several issues. General research into the history of film is directly related to the production of film history. The question of how to reinvent general film history research is necessarily connected to ideologies, cultures, systems and concepts, as well as the broad scope and complexity of film history. Writing a general history of Chinese film demands a combination of innovation and continuing tradition, with an emphasis on the construction of a rational and scientific discipline of film history and historical empiricism. The aim should be a more rational history. The paper expresses my own thoughts and efforts with respect to relevant issues and attempts to deepen and open up general research into the history of Chinese film.]

Dissanayake, Wimal, ed.. Cinema and Cultural Identity: Reflections on Films from Japan, India and China. Lanham, MD : University Press of America, 1988. [contains four articles on Chinese cinema by Paul Clark, Tony Rayns, Ma Qiang, and Shao Mujun]

—–. “Cinema and History.” In 1990 Hawaii International Film Festival Viewer’s Guide. Honolulu: East-West Center, 1990.

Dissanayake, Wimal, ed, Melodrama and Asian Cinema. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Donald, Stephanie. “Chinese Women and Chinese Film: Problems with History and Feminism.” In Einhorn and Eileen Janes Yeo, eds., Women and Market Societies: Crisis and Opportunity. Aldershot, UK ; Brookfield, Vt., US: E. Elgar, 1995, 84-95.

—–. “Women Reading Chinese Films: Between Orientalism and Silence.” Screen 36, 4 (1995): 325-40.

—–. Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2000.

—–. Little Friends: Children’s Film and Media Culture in China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.

Downing, John, ed. Film and Politics in the Third World. NY: Praeger, 1987. [contains essays by Kwok, Quiquemelle and T. Tung]

Du, Daisy Yan. Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s-1970s. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019. [MCLC Resource Center review by Evelyn Shih]

[Abstract: China’s role in the history of world animation has been trivialized or largely forgotten. In Animated Encounters Daisy Yan Du addresses this omission in her study of Chinese animation and its engagement with international forces during its formative period, the 1940s–1970s. She introduces readers to transnational movements in early Chinese animation, tracing the involvement of Japanese, Soviet, American, Taiwanese, and China’s ethnic minorities, at socio-historical or representational levels, in animated filmmaking in China. Du argues that Chinese animation was international almost from its inception and that such border-crossing exchanges helped make it “Chinese” and subsequently transform the history of world animation. She highlights animated encounters and entanglements to provide an alternative to current studies of the subject characterized by a preoccupation with essentialist ideas of “Chineseness” and further questions the long-held belief that the forty-year-period in question was a time of cultural isolationism for China due to constant wars and revolutions. China’s socialist era, known for the pervasiveness of its political propaganda and suppression of the arts, unexpectedly witnessed a golden age of animation. Socialist collectivism, reinforced by totalitarian politics and centralized state control, allowed Chinese animation to prosper and flourish artistically. In addition, the double marginality of animation—a minor art form for children—coupled with its disarming qualities and intrinsic malleability and mobility, granted animators and producers the double power to play with politics and transgress ideological and geographical borders while surviving censorship, both at home and abroad.]

Du, Daisy Yan (leader), John A. Crespi, and Yiman Wang, eds. Chinese Animations: Multiplicity in Motion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2025.

[Abstract: the first edited volume to explore the multiple histories, geographies, industries, technologies, media, and transmedialities of Chinese animation, from early animated special effects to socialist classics, from computer-generated-imagery (CGI) blockbusters to edgy independent films, and from stop-motion to virtual reality. Its fifteen chapters, grouped under the five themes of junctures, gender, identities, digitality, and practices, span a century of animation since the 1920s across mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and the diasporic world. Derived from the 2021 Inaugural Conference of the Association for Chinese Animation Studies (ACAS), this volume as a whole defines Chinese animation studies as a new field of research emerging from the peripheries of modern Chinese literature and film studies on the one hand, and from the margins of Western and Japanese animation studies on the other. Incorporating diverse academic approaches and perspectives, this groundbreaking book is an indispensable guide for a rapidly growing community of scholars, students, animators, fans, and general readers interested in Chinese and world animation.]

Du Yunzhi 杜云之. Zhonghua minguo dianying shi 中华民国电影史 (A history of film in the Chinese Republic). 2 vols. Taibei: Xingzheng yuan wenhua jianshe weiyuanhui, 1988. [Taiwan version of the history of Republican-era, based on Cheng Jihua]

Eberhard, Wolfram. The Chinese Silver Screen: Hong Kong and Taiwanese Motion Pictures in the 1960s. Taibei: Orient Culture Service, 1972.

Eleftheriotis, Dimitris and Gary Needham, eds. Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006.

[Abstract: The West’s current fascination with Asian cinema must be viewed in the context of a complex and often problematic relationship between Western scholars, students, viewers, and Asian films. This book examines a number of detailed case studies (such as the films of Ozu, Bruce Lee, Hong Kong and Turkish cinema, Hindi melodramas, Godzilla films, Taiwanese directors, and Fifth Generation Chinese cinema) and uses them to investigate the limitations of Anglo–U.S. theoretical models and critical paradigms. By engaging readers with familiar areas of critical discourse (such as postcolonial criticism, “national cinema,” “genre,” “authorship,” and “stardom”) the book aims to introduce within such contexts the “unfamiliar” case studies that will be explored in depth and detail. Contributors: Ackbar Abbas, Rey Chow, David Desser, Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Nezih Erdogan, Ian Garwood, Lalitha Gopalan, Ahmet Gürata, Leon Hunt, E. Ann Kaplan, Siu Leung Li, Gary Needham, Chon Noriega, Julianne Pidduck, Yvonne Tasker, Stephen Teo, Rosie Thomas, Ravi Vasudevan, Tony Williams, I-Fen Wu, Esther Yau, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto.]

Erlich, Linda and Ma Ning. “College Course File: East Asian Cinema” Journal of Film and Video. 42.2 (Summer, 1990):53-70.

Erlich, Linda and David Desser, eds., Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Fan, Victor. Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

[Abstract: Examines ways in which Chinese and Euro-American film theorists conceptualize reality and cinema. Victor Fan brings together, for the first time, Chinese and Euro-American film theories and theorists to engage in critical debates about film in Shanghai and Hong Kong from the 1920s through the 1940s. The result is an eye-opening exploration of the potentialities in approaching cinema anew, especially in the photographic materiality following its digital turn.]

—–. Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022.

[Abstract: Victor Fan’s dialogue between Buddhism and Euro-American philosophy is the first of its kind in film and media studies. From Chinese queer cinema to a reexamination of Japanese master Ozu’s work and its historical reception to Christian Petzold’s 2018 existential thriller Transit, Cinema Illuminating Reality forges a remarkable path between Buddhist studies and cinema studies, casting vital new light on both of these important subjects.]

Farquhar, Mary and Yingjin Zhang, eds. Chinese Film Stars. NY: Routledge, 2010.

[Abstract: This volume of original essays fills a significant research gap in Chinese film studies by offering an interdisciplinary, comparative examination of ethnic Chinese film stars from the silent period to the era of globalization. Whereas studies of stars and stardom have developed considerably in the West over the past two decades, there is no single book in English that critically addresses issues related to stars and stardom in Chinese culture. [It] offers exemplary readings of historically, geographically and aesthetically multifaceted star phenomena. An international line up of contributors test a variety of approaches in making sense of discourses of stars and stardom in China and the US, explore historical contexts in which Chinese film stars are constructed and transformed in relation to changing sociopolitical conditions, and consider issues of performance and identity specific to individual stars through chapter-by-chapter case studies. The essays explore a wide range of topics such as star performance, character type, media construction, political propaganda, online discourses, autobiographic narration, as well as issues of gender, genre, memory and identity. Including 15 case studies of individual Chinese stars and illustrated with film stills throughout, this book is an essential read for students of Chinese film, media and cultural studies.]

Ferrari, Rossella. “Transnation/transmedia/transtext: Border-crossing from Screen to Stage in Greater China.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 1 (May 2008): 53-67.

[Abstract: This essay attempts to reconceptualize transnational Chinese cinema along transmedial and transtextual lines by examining two collaborative stage projects devised by major film-makers and theatre practitioners from Hong Kong, Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China under the aegis of Hong Kong art collective Zuni Icosahedron. The multimedia performances Journey to the East ’97 and Experimental Shakespeare: King Lear exemplify a trend in Chinese transnationalism which transgresses and transcends not only regional and geopolitical borders but also textual, linguistic and disciplinary ones. The essay further investigates the ways in which transmedial frictions and interactions are exploited in these productions to articulate chronotopic dichotomies of presence/absence and appearance/disappearance in relation to Hong Kong’s fate and inter-Chinese political developments after 1997.]

Fong, Gilbert C. E., ed. Dubbing and Subtitling in a World Context. HK: Chinese University Press, 2009.

Fowler, Simon. 101 Essential Chinese Movies. Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books, 2010.

Fu, Poshek. Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Gabereau, Eve. “Time, Space, Identity, and the City: Contemporary Urban China and Japan Projected in Film.” Asian Cinema 10, 1 (1998): 160-75.

Gambier, Yves and Haina Jin. Chinese Films Abroad: Distribution and Translation. Routledge, 2024.

[Abstract: This book examines Chinese films made and shown abroad roughly between the 1920s and the 2020s, from the beginning of the international exchange of the Chinese national film industry to the emergence of the concept of soft power. The periodisation of Chinese cinema(s) does not necessarily match the political periods: on the one hand, the technical development of the film industry and the organisation of translation in China, and on the other hand, official relations with China and translation policies abroad impose different constraints on the circulation of Chinese films. This volume deals with the distribution and translation of films from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora. To this end, the contributors address various issues related to the circulation and distribution of Chinese films, including co- productions, agents of exchange, and modes of translation. The approach is a mixture of socio- cultural and translational methods. The data collected provides, for the first time, a quantitative overview of the circulation of Chinese films in a dozen foreign countries.]

Giesen, Rolf. Chinese Animation, A History and Filmography, 1922-2012. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2015.

Gong Haomin 龔浩敏 and Lu Xiaopeng 魯曉鵬 [Sheldon H. Lu], eds. Zhongguo shengtai dianying wenxuan 中國生態電影論集 (Essays on Chinese ecocinema). Wuhan: Wuhan daxue, 2017.

Gongsun Lu 公孫魯. Zhongguo dianying shi 中國電影史 (History of Chinese film). HK: Nantian, 1977.

Green, Peter. “China, The Wind and Joris Ivens.” Sight and Sound (Autumn 1989): 273-75.

Grossman, Andrew, ed. Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade. NY: Harrington Press, 2000. [rpt of a special issue of The Journal of Homosexuality 39, 3/4 (2000).

—–. “Beyond the Western Gaze: Orientalism, Feminism, and the Suffering Woman in Nontransnational Chinese Cinema.” In See-kam Tan, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds., Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009, 138-51.

Guan Wenqing 关文清. Zhongguo yintan waishi 中国银坛外史 (An informal history of the Chinese film world). Hongkong: Guangjiaojing, 1976.

Hao, Dazheng. “Chinese Visual Representation: Painting and Cinema.” In Linda Erlich and David Desser, eds., Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994, 45-62.

He, Chungeng. “The Distilled Art of Ethical Poetry–The Aesthetic Pursuit of Chinese Ethical Melodrama Film.” Asian Cinema 17, 2 (Fall/Winter 2006): 103-13.

He, Chungeng and Fanghua Wang. “Eternal Image in the Mirror: In Pursuit of Modernity and the Construction of Chinese Ethical Film Melodrama.” Asian Cinema 18, 1 (Spring/Summer 2007): 224-37.

Hillenbrand, Margaret. “Chromatic Expression in Contemporary Chinese Language Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, 3 (2012): 211-231.

Ho, Joseph W. Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022.

[Abstract: Ho offers a transnational cultural history of US and Chinese communities framed by missionary lenses through time and space—tracing the lives and afterlives of images, cameras, and visual imaginations from before the Second Sino-Japanese War through the first years of the People’s Republic of China. When American Protestant and Catholic missionaries entered interwar China, they did so with cameras in hand. Missions principally aimed at the conversion of souls and the modernization of East Asia, became, by virtue of the still and moving images recorded, quasi-anthropological ventures that shaped popular understandings of and formal foreign policy toward China. Portable photographic technologies changed the very nature of missionary experience, while images that missionaries circulated between China and the United States affected cross-cultural encounters in times of peace and war. Ho illuminates the centrality of visual practices in the American missionary enterprise in modern China, even as intersecting modernities and changing Sino-US relations radically transformed lives behind and in front of those lenses. In doing so, Developing Mission reconstructs the almost-lost histories of transnational image makers, subjects, and viewers across twentieth-century China and the US.]

Hong, Junhao. “The Evolution of China’s War Movie in Five Decades: Factors Contributing to Changes, Limits, and Implications.” Asian Cinema 10, 1 (1998): 93-106.

Hou, Hsiao-hsien. “In Search of New Genres and Directions for Asian Cinema.” Translated, Edited and Introduced by Lin Wenchi. Rouge 1 (2003).

Howkins, John. Mass Communications in China. NY: Longman, 1982. [contains chapter on film]

Hu Chang 胡昶. Xin Zhongguo dianying de yaolan 新中国电影的摇篮 (The cradle of the new Chinese cinema). Changchun: Jilin wenshi, 1986. [history of the Changchun studio]

Hu, Zhifeng and Yin Chen. “Looking Backwards and Forwards: The Development of Film Art in the People’s Republic of China.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 1, 2 (2021): 237-261.

[Abstract: The development of film art in the People’s Republic of China throughout the past 70 years can be roughly divided into two stages: before and after the reform and opening-up．During this period, Chinese films not only influenced the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres, but they also produced aesthetics with uniquely Chinese characteristics, distinguishing themselves on the world film stage. However, after 70 years of development, Chinese films still have many contradictions and problems, namely: how to deal with the relationships between education and entertainment, plan and market, tradition/China/subjectivity, and modernity/world/diversity. Prejudicial tendencies can be avoided with a dialectical view of these relationships, and a healthy, integrated, and developmental track can be achieved. With this new historical contextualization in mind, to realize the transformation from a big film country to a strong film country, Chinese films should keep pace with the country’s economic and social strategic development, enhancing their quality and making contributions to a culturally advanced country with many high-standard films in the new era.]

Hunt, Leon. “Dragons Forever: Chinese Martial Arts Stars.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 141-49.

Hunt, Leon and Wing-Fai Leung, eds. East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connnections on Film. NY: I. B. Taurus, 2008.

Iovene, Paola and Judith T. Zeitlin, guest editors. Chinese Opera Film, a special issue of The Opera Quarterly 26, 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2010).

Johnson, Matthew. “Propaganda and Censorship in Chinese Cinema.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 153-78.

Joris Ivens and China. Beijing: New World, 1983.

Kaplan, Ann E. and Wang Ban, eds. Trauma and Cinema: Cross-cultural Explorations. HK: HK University Press, 2004. [two essays deal with Chinese film]

Keijser, Anne Sytske. “Chinese Films at the 1993 Rotterdam Film Festival: East-Asian Society in Transition.” China Information 7, 4 (Spring 1993): 33-38.

Kong, Haili and John A. Lent, eds. One Hundred Years of Chinese Cinema: A Generational Dialogue. Norwalk, CT: EastBridge, 2005.

Kraicer, Shelly. “Chinese Language Films at the Hong Kong International Film Festival 2000: Review Article.” CineAction 53 (Winter 2000): 64-72

Kramer, Stefan. Geschichte des Chinesischen Films (History of Chinese film). Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1997.

Kuoshu, Harry. Lightness of Being in China: Adaptation and Discursive Figuration in Cinema and Theater. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

—–, ed. Celluloid China: Cinematic Encounters with Culture and Society. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.

[Abstract: each chapter treats a film and includes introductory material on the film and a scholarly essay (by a variety of film scholars) that treats the film. Basically a study guide.]

Kwok and M.C. Quiquemelle. “Chinese Cinema and Realism.” In John Downing, ed. Film and Politics in the Third World. New York: Praeger, 1987, 181-98.

Kyong-McClain, Jeff, Russell Meeuf, and Jing Jing Chang, eds. Chinese Cinema Identity, Power, and Globalization. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2022.

Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah. “Towards a Cultural Understanding of Cinema: A Comparison of Contemporary Films from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.” Wide Angle 11, 3 (1989): 42-49.

—–, ed. Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Medias in Transcultural Asia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. [MCLC Resource Center review by Joelle Collier]

Lee, Leo Ou-fan. “The Tradition of Modern Chinese Cinema: Some Preliminary Explorations and Hypotheses.” In Chris Berry, ed., Perspectives on Chinese Cinema. London: BFI Publishing, 1991, 6-20.

Lee, Vivian. “Virtual Bodies, Flying Objects: The Digital Imaginary in Contemporary Martial Arts Films.” Journal of Chinese Cinema 1, 1 (Jan. 2007): 9-26.

Lent, John. The Asian Film Industry. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

Lent, John, ed. Animation in Asia and the Pacific. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001.

Leung, Helen Hok-Sze. “Homosexuality and Quer Aesthetics.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 518-34.

Leyda, Jay. Dianying: An Account of Film and the Film Audience in China. Cambridge: MIT, 1972.

Lim, Kay Tong. Cathay: 55 Years of Cinema. Singapore: Landmark Boo for Meileen Choo, 1991.

Lim, Song Hwee. “Celluloid Comrades: Male Homosexuality in Chinese Cinemas of the 1990s.” China Information 16, 1 (2002): 68-88.

—–. Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006.

[Abstract: Offers a cogent analytical introduction to the representation of male homosexuality in Chinese cinemas within the last decade. It posits that representations of male homosexuality in Chinese film have been polyphonic and multifarious, posing a challenge to monolithic and essentialized constructions of both “Chineseness” and “homosexuality.” Given the artistic achievement and popularity of the films discussed here, the position of “celluloid comrades” can no longer be ignored within both transnational Chinese and global queer cinemas. The book also challenges readers to reconceptualize these works in relation to global issues such as homosexuality and gay and lesbian politics, and their interaction with local conditions, agents, and audiences. Tracing the engendering conditions within the film industries of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, Song Hwee Lim argues that the emergence of Chinese cinemas in the international scene since the 1980s created a public sphere in which representations of marginal sexualities could flourish in its interstices. Examining the politics of representation in the age of multiculturalism through debates about the films, Lim calls for a rethinking of the limits and hegemony of gay liberationist discourse prevalent in current scholarship and film criticism. He provides in-depth analyses of key films and auteurs, reading them within contexts as varied as premodern, transgender practice in Chinese theater to postmodern, diasporic forms of sexualities. Informed by cultural and postcolonial studies and critical theory, this acutely observed and theoretically sophisticated work will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students as well as general readers looking for a deeper understanding of contemporary Chinese cultural politics, cinematic representations, and queer culture.]

Lim, Song Hwee and Julian Ward, eds. The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011.

[Abstract: provides an essential guide to the cinemas of the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora, from early cinema to the present day. With contributions from leading international scholars, the book is structured around five thematic sections: Territories, Trajectories, Historiographies; Early Cinema to 1949; The Forgotten Period: 1949-80; The New Waves; and Stars, Auteurs and Genres. This important collection addresses issues of film production and exhibition and places Chinese cinema in its national and transnational contexts. Individual chapters examine major film movements such as the Shanghai cinema of the 1930s, Fifth Generation film-makers and the Hong Kong New Wave, as well as key issues such as stars and auteurs. The book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars, as well as for anyone wanting to deepen their understanding of the cinemas of Greater China.]

Lin, Niantong. “The Chinese Cinema in Its Third Period.” Tr. Terry Yip. The Humanities Bulletin 4 (1995): 132-41.

Liu, Alan. The Film Industry in Communist China. Cambridge: Center for International Studies, MIT, 1965.

—–. Communications and National Integration in Communist China. Berkeley: UC Press, 1971.

Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng. China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. [reviewed by David Leiwei Li in Jump Cut, no. 47 (Fall 2004).

—–. Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Chuanhui Meng]

[Abstract: Sheldon Lu’s wide-ranging new book investigates how filmmakers and visual artists from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan have envisioned China as it transitions from a socialist to a globalized capitalist state. It examines how the modern nation has been refashioned and re-imagined in order to keep pace with globalization and transnationalism. At the heart of Lu’s analysis is a double movement in the relationship between nation and transnationalism in the Chinese post-socialist state. He considers the complexity of how the Chinese economy is integrated in the global capitalist system while also remaining a repressive body politic with mechanisms of control and surveillance. He explores the interrelations of the local, the national, the subnational, and the global as China repositions itself in the world. Lu considers examples from feature and documentary film, mainstream and marginal cinema, and a variety of visual arts: photography, painting, digital video, architecture, and installation. His close case studies include representations of class, masculinity and sexuality in contemporary Taiwanese and Chinese cinema; the figure of the sex worker as a symbol of modernity and mobility; and artists’ representations of Beijing at the time of the 2008 Olympics.]

Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng, ed. Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

Lu, Sheldon H. and Yueh-yu Yeh, eds. “Special Double Issue: Chinese Cinema.” Post Script 20, 2/3 (Winter/Spring 2001).

—–. Chinese-Language Films: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005. [contains essays from the above special issue of Post Script, as well as some new essays.]

—–. “Dialect and Modernity in 21st Century Sinophone Cinema.” Jump Cut 49 (Spring 2007).

Lu, Sheldon and Jiayan Mi, eds. Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2009.

[Abstract: This anthology is the first book-length study of China’s ecosystem through the lens of cinema. Proposing ‘ecocinema’ as a new critical frameork, the volume collectively investigates a wide range of urgent topics in today’s world: Chinese and Western epistemes of nature and humanity; the dialect of socialist modernization amid capitalist globalization; shifting configurations of space, locale, cityscape, and natural landscape; gender, religion, and ethnic cultures; as well as bioethics and environmental politics. The individual chapters zero in on diverse Chinese-language films by talented directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye, Fruit Chan, Wu Tianming, Tsai Ming-liang, Li Yang, Feng Xiaogang, Zhang Yang, Wang Xiaoshuai, Wang Bing, Ning Hao, Zhang Ming, Dai Sijie, Wanma Caidan, and Huo Jianqi. The book is a timely engagement with Chinese cinema’s ecological consciousness in a historic moment of unparalleled environmental crises and destruction. In the coming decades, film will be one of the primary ways in which China adopts and expands ecolological consciousness. This book should interest scholars in film studies, environmental studies, ecocriticism, gender and cultural studies, Chinese studies, and globalization studies.]

Lu, Tonglin. Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.

Lu Xun 鲁迅 . Lu Xun yu dianying 鲁迅与电影 (Lu Xun and film). Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1981. [a collection of Lu Xun’s writings on film]

Luo, Hui. “Theatricality and Cultural Critique in Chinese Cinema.” Asian Theatre Journal 25, 1 (Spring 2008): 122-37.

Lupke, Christopher, ed. “The Question of the Nation in Contemporary China Film: A Symposium.” Special section of Asian Cinema 15, 1 (Spring 2004).

Ma, Jean. Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2010.

[Abstract: Jean Ma offers an innovative study of three provocative Chinese directors: Wong Karwai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang, whose highly stylized and non-linear configurations of time have brought new global respect for Chinese cinema. Amplifying motifs of loss, nostalgia, haunting, and ephemeral poetics, they each insist on the significance of being out of time, not merely out of place, as a condition of global modernity and transnational cultures of memory.]

—–. Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. [MCLC Resource Center review by Victor Fan]

[Abstract: From the beginning of the sound cinema era, singing actresses captivated Chinese audiences. In Sounding the Modern Woman, Jean Ma shows how their rise to stardom attests to the changing roles of women in urban modernity and the complex symbiosis between the film and music industries. The songstress—whether appearing as an opera actress, showgirl, revolutionary, or country lass—belongs to the lineage of the Chinese modern woman, and her forty year prevalence points to a distinctive gendering of lyrical expression in Chinese film. Ma guides readers through film history by way of the on and off-screen careers of many of the most compelling performers in Chinese film history, such as Zhou Xuan and Grace Chang, revealing the ways that national crises and Cold War conflict shaped their celebrity. As a bridge between the film cultures of prewar Shanghai and postwar Hong Kong, the songstress brings into view a dense web of connections linking these two periods and places that cut across the divides of war, national politics, and geography.]

Macdonald, Sean. Animation in China: History, Aesthetics, Media. London: Routledge, 2016. [MCLC Resource Center review by Li Guo]

[Abstract: This book is a historical and theoretical study of animation in the PRC. Although the Wan Brothers produced the first feature-length animated film in 1941, the industry as we know it today truly began in the 1950s at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio (SAFS), which remained the sole animation studio until the 1980s. Considering animation in China as a convergence of the institutions of education, fine arts, literature, popular culture, and film the book takes comparative approaches that link SAFS animation to contemporary cultural production, including American and Japanese animation, pop art, and mass media theory.]

Mackerras, Colin. The Performing Arts in Contemporary China. London: Routledge & Kegan Road, 1981.

Marchetti, Gina. “Chinese Cinema: Introduction.” Jump Cut 34 (1988):85-86.

—–. “Plural and Transnational: Introduction.” Special issue of Jump Cut 41 (1998).

—-. From Tiananmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989-1997. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.

—–. Citing China: Politics, Postmodernism, and World Cinemas. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018.

[Abstract: explores the role film plays in creating a common ground for the exchange of political and aesthetic ideas between China and the rest of the world. It does so by examining the depiction of China in contemporary film, looking at how global filmmakers “cite” China on screen. Author Gina Marchetti’s aim is not to point to how China continues to function as a metaphor or allusion that has little to do with the geopolitical actualities of contemporary China. Rather, she highlights China’s position within global film culture, examining how cinematic quotations link current films to past political movements and unresolved social issues in a continuing multidirectional conversation. Marchetti covers a wide range of cinematic encounters across the China-West divide. She looks closely at specific movements in world film history and at key films that have influenced the way “China” is depicted in global cinema today, from popular entertainment to international art cinema, the DV revolution, video activism, and the emergence of “festival films.” Marchetti first considers contemporary Chinese-language cinema (Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-Hsien); she then turns to Italian Neorealism and its importance to the Chinese Sixth Generation (Jia Zhangke, Patrick Tam) and the French New Wave’s ripple effect on filmmakers associated with the Hong Kong New Wave and Taiwan New Cinema (Ann Hui, Evans Chan). As the People’s Republic of China has gained increased global economic clout, filmmakers draw on Euro-American formulae (Bruce Lee, Clara Law) to attract new viewers and define cinematic pleasures for new audiences on the other side of the earth. The book concludes with a consideration of the role film festivals, women filmmakers, and emerging audiences play in the new world of global cinema.]

McGrath, Jason. Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. [MCLC Resource Center review by Victor Fan]

[Abstract: The history of Chinese cinema is as long and complicated as the tumultuous history of China itself. Each Chinese cinematic era, whether the silent, the Communist, or the contemporary, has necessitated its own form in conversation with broader trends in politics and culture. In Chinese Film, Jason McGrath tells this fascinating story by tracing the varied claims to cinematic realism made by Chinese filmmakers, officials, critics, and scholars. Understanding realism as a historical dynamic that is both enabled and mitigated by aesthetic conventions of the day, he analyzes it across six different types of claims: ontological, perceptual, fictional, social, prescriptive, and apophatic. Through this method, McGrath makes major claims not just about Chinese cinema but also about realism as an aesthetic form that negotiates between cultural conventions and the ever-evolving real. He comes to envision this as more than just a cinematic question, showing how the struggle for realism is central to the Chinese struggle for modernity.]

Metzger, Sean. “Desire and Distribution: Queer/Chinese/Cinema.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 301-19.

Mintz, Marilyn. The Martial Arts Film. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1978.

McDougall, Bonnie, ed. Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Mi, Jiayan. “Framing Ambient Unheimlich: Ecoggedon, Ecological Unconscious, and Water Pathology in New Chinese Cinema.” In Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds., Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2009, 17-38.

Neri, Corrado. Ages inquiet Cinémas chinois: une représentation de la jeunesse. Lyon: Editions Tigre de Papier, 2009.

Ni, Zhen. “Chinese Classical Painting and Cinematographic Signification.” In Linda Erlich and David Desser, eds., Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994, 63-80.

Noth, Jochen, et. al. China Avant-Garde: Counter Currents in Art and Culture. HK and NY, 1994.

Ombres Electriques: Panorama du cinéma chinois 1925-1982. Paris: Centre du Documentation du Cinema Chinois, 1982. [contains a filmography of 60 films, plus articles on Zhang Shichuan, realism, Wu Xun zhuan, art and politics in PRC film, etc]

The Oxford Guide to Film Studies . Eds. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. NY: Oxford University Press, 1998. [articles on China (Berenice Reynaud), Hong Kong (Stephen Teo, N.K. Leung) and Taiwan (Kuan-hsing Chen)]

Palmer, Augusta L. Crossroads: Nostalgia and the Documentary Impulse in Chinese Cinemas at the Turn of the 21st Century. Ph. D. diss. NY: New York University, 2004.

Pang, Laikwan “Piracy/Privacy: The Despair of Cinema and Collectivity in China.”boundary 2 31, 3 (Fall 2004): 101-124.

—–. Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia: Piracy and Copyright in Asian Cinema. RoutledgeCurzon, 2005. [MCLC Resource Center review by Shujen Wang]

—–. “New Asian Cinema and Its Circulation of Violence.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, 1 (Spring 2005): 159-87.

—–. “The Institutionalization of Chinese Cinema as an Academic Discipline.” Journal of Chinese Cinema 1, 1 (Jan. 2007): 55-62

Pang, Laikwan and Kwai-cheung Lo, guest editors. Special Issue on Chinese Culture in Inter-Asia. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, 1 (Spring 2005).

Pecic, Zoran Lee. New Queer Sinophone Cinema: Local Histories, Transnational Connections. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. [chapters on Zhang Yuan, Yan Yan Mak, and Zero Chou]

Peng, Hsiao-yen and Ella Raidel, eds. The Politics of Memory in Sinophone Cinemas and Image Culture: Altering Archives. Routledge, 2018.

[Abstract: Cinema archives memories, conserves the past, and rewrites histories. As much as the Sinophone embodies differences, contemporary Sinophone cinemas in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China invest various images of contested politics in order to assert different histories and self-consciousness. As such, Sinophone cinemas and image production function as archives, with the capability of reinterpreting the multiple dimensions of past and present. The Politics of Memory in Sinophone Cinemas and Image Culture investigates Sinophone films and art projects that express this desire for archiving and reconfiguring the past. Comprising ten chapters, this book brings together contributors from an array of disciplines — artists, filmmakers, curators, film critics, and literary scholars — to grapple with the creative ambiguities of Sinophone cinemas and image culture. Blending eclectic methods of scholarly research, knowledge-making, and art-making into a new discursive space, the chapters address the diverse complexities of the cinematic culture and image production in Sinitic language regions.]

Pickowicz, Paul G. China on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation, and Controversy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012.

[Abstract: Pickowicz traces the dynamic history of Chinese filmmaking and discusses its course of development from the early days to the present. Moving decade by decade, he explores such key themes as the ever-shifting definitions of modern marriage in 1920s silent features, East-West cultural conflict in the movies of the 1930s, the strong appeal of the powerful melodramatic mode of the 1930s and 1940s, the polarizing political controversies surrounding Chinese filmmaking under the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in the 1940s, and the critical role of cinema during the bloody civil war of the late 1940s. Pickowicz then considers the challenging Mao years, including chapters on legendary screen personalities who tried but failed to adjust to the new socialist order in the 1950s, celebrities who made the sort of artistic and political accommodations that would keep them in the spotlight in the post-revolutionary era, and insider film professionals of the early 1960s who actively resisted the most extreme forms of Maoist cultural production. The book concludes with explorations of the highly cathartic films of the early post-Mao era, edgy postsocialist movies that appeared on the eve of the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989, the relevance of the Eastern European “velvet prison” cultural production model, and the rise of underground and independent filmmaking beginning in the 1990s.]

Pratley, Gerald, et al. “The Irresistible Rise of Asian Cinema.” Kinema (Spring, 1994). [Includes: Gerald Pratley, “Production Activity”; Toh Hai Leong, “The Great Leap Forward; and Yvonne Ng, “Tian Zhuangzhuang: A Director for the 21st Century”]

Qin, Liyan. “The Intertwinement of Chinese Film and Literature: Choices and Strategies in Adaptations.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 361-76.

Quiquemelle, Marie-Claire and Jean-Loup Passek. Le cinema chinois. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985. [contains 14 articles, a chronology, a filmography, and biographical sketches of directors]

Raju, Zakir Hossain. “Filmic Imaginations of the Malaysian Chinese: ‘Mahua cinema’ as a Transnational Chinese Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 1 (May 2008): 67-?.

[Abstract: This essay locates the Chinese films of Malaysia within contexts ranging from the national to the transnational. First, it attempts to position the films of Chinese Malaysian film-makers alongside Malaysian national cinema as well as the Mahua (Malaysian Chinese) literature that developed in Malaysia over the last one century or so. Second, the paper de-territorializes the Chinese films of Malaysia as transnational and transcultural entities. It further examines Malaysian Chinese films as a ‘new’ transnational Chinese cinema developed in connection with other transnational cinemas in the contemporary cosmopolitan world. It asks how this cinema is ‘transnational’ and if it bears some specific meaning of ‘Chinese-ness’ as it develops in today’s globalizing Malaysia.]

Rayns, Tony. “The Position of Women in New Chinese Cinema.” East-West Film Journal 1, 2 (1987): 32-44. Rpt. in Wimal Dissanayake, ed., Cinema and Cultural Identity: Reflections on Films from Japan, India, and China. Latham, MD: 1988.

Rayns, T. and S. Meek, eds. Electric Shadows: 45 Years of Chinese Cinema. London: BFI, 1980.

—–. More Electric Shadows: 1922-1984 (Programme Notes). London: British Film Institute, 1985.

Reynaud, Berenice. “Chinese Cinema.” In John Hill and Pamela Gibson, eds. World Cinema: Critical Approaches. NY: Oxford UP, 2000, 159-65.

—–. “Societies in Motion, Culture in Commotion.” Cinemaya 43 (Spring 1999): 4-10.

—–. “New Visions / New Chinas: Video-Art, Documentation, and the Chinese Modernity in Question.” In Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg, eds.,Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 226-57.

—–. “Glamour and Suffering: Gong Li and the History of Chinese Stars.” Sight and Sound 3, 8 (1993): 13. Rpt. in Pam Cook and Philip Dodd, eds., Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993, 21-29.

—–. Nouvelles Chines, Nouveaux Cinémas. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1999.

Rodekohr, Andy. “Conjuring the Masses: The Spectral/Spectacular Crowd in Chinese Film.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 526-47.

Rojas, Carlos. “A Tale of Two Emperors: Mimicry and Mimesis in Two ‘New Year’s Films from China and Hong Kong.” Cineaction 60, 1 (2003): 2-9

Rosen, Stanley, ed. “Film Market in China: Translations from Zhongguo dianying shichang.” Special issue. Chinese Education and Society 32, 2 (March-April 1999).

—–. “Hollywood Films and Chinese Domestic Films in China.” Two Part special issues. Chinese Studies and Anthropology 32,1 (Fall 1999); 32, 2 (Winter 2000-01).

Server, Lee. Asian Pop Cinema: Bombay to Tokyo. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999.

Scott, A.C. Literature and the Arts in Twentieth Century China. London: Allen, 1965. Chapter on cinema (65-83).

Shanghai dianying sishi nian 上海电影四十年 (Forty years of film in Shanghai). Shanghai: Xuelin, 1991.

Shapiro, Judith. After the Nightmare: A Survivor of the Cultural Revolution Reports on China Today. New York: Knopf, 1986. [contains an interview with Wu Tianming]

Shaw, Tristan. “Hopping Vampires And Beautiful Ghosts: A Brief History Of Chinese Horror, Pt. 1.” SupChina (Oct. 26, 2018).

—–. “Hopping Vampires And Beautiful Ghosts: A Brief History Of Chinese Horror, Pt. 2.” SupChina (Oct. 26, 2018).

Silbergeld, Jerome. China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. London: Reaktion, 1999.

—–. Hitchcock with a Chinese Face: Cinematic Doubles, Oedipal Triangles, and China’s Moral Voice. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. [with analyses of Suzhou River, The Day the Sun Turned Cold, and Good Men, Good Women] [MCLC Resource Center review by Robert Chi]

—–. “Cinema and the Visual Arts of China.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 400-16.

—–. “From Mountain Song to Silvery Moonlight: Some Notes on Music in Chinese Cinema.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 417-28.

“Special Film Issue” Jintian 2 (1992).

Szeto, Kin-Yan. The Martial Arts Cinema of the Chinese Diaspora: Ang Lee, John Woo, and Jackie Chan in Hollywood. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011.

[Abstract: Kin-Yan Szeto critically examines three of the most internationally famous martial arts film artists to arise out of the Chinese diaspora and travel far from their homelands to find commercial success in the world at large: Ang Lee, John Woo, and Jackie Chan. Positing the idea that these filmmakers’ success is evidence of a “cosmopolitical awareness” arising from their cross-cultural ideological engagements and geopolitical displacements, Szeto demonstrates how this unique perspective allows these three filmmakers to develop and act in the transnational environment of media production, distribution, and consumption…]

Tan, See-kam, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds., Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009.

Tam, Kwok-kan and Wimal Dissanayake. New Chinese Cinema. NY: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Tang, Xiaobing. “Rural Women and Social Change in New China Cinema: From Li Shuangshuang to Ermo.” positions 11, 3 (Winter 2003): 647-74.

Teo, Stephen. “Defining Chinese Cinema and its Position.” Hong Kong Film Archive Newsletter 16 (May 2001).

—–. Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009.

[Abstract: The traditional martial arts genre known as wuxia (literally “martial chivalry”) became popular the world over through the phenomenal hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). This book unveils the rich layers of the wuxia tradition as it developed in the early Shanghai cinema of the late 1920s and in the Hong Kong and Taiwan film industries of the 1950s and beyond. Stephen Teo follows the tradition from its beginnings in Shanghai cinema to its rise as a serialized form in silent cinema and its prohibition in 1931. He shares the fantastic characteristics of the genre, their relationship to folklore, myth, and religion, and their similarities and differences with the kung fu sub-genre of martial arts cinema. He maps the protagonists and heroes of the genre, in particular the figure of the lady knight-errant, and its chief personalities and masterpieces. Directors covered include King Hu, Chu Yuan, Zhang Che, Ang Lee, and Zhang Yimou, and films discussed are Come Drink With Me (1966), The One-Armed Swordsman (1967), A Touch of Zen (1970-71), Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004), The Promise(2005), The Banquet (2006), and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006).]

—–. “Film Genre and Chinese Cinema: A Discourse of Film and Nation.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 284-98.

—–. “The Opera Film in Chinese Cinema: Cultural Nationalism and Cinematic Form.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 209-24.

—–. Chinese Martial Arts Film and the Philosophy of Action. London: Routledge, 2021.

[Abstract: This book focuses on the philosophy of Chinese martial arts film, arguing that philosophy provides a key to understanding the whole genre. It draws on Chinese philosophical ideas derived from, or based on, Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and other schools of thought such as Mohism and Legalism, examines a cluster of recent Chinese martial arts films centering on the figure of the xia—the heroic protagonist, the Chinese equivalent of medieval Europe’s knight-errant—and outlines the philosophical principles and themes undergirding the actions of xia and their narratives. Overall, the author argues that the genre, apart from being an action-oriented entertainment medium, is inherently moral and ethical. TOC: 1. The Assassin and the Philosophy of Non-Action; 2. Shadow and the Mandate of Heaven; 3. Seven Swords and Confucian Militarism; 4. Buddhist Impermanence and Martial Arts in The Grandmaster; 5. The Final Master: A Novel Permutation on the Mohist Youxia; 6. Wolf Warrior II: Latter-day Youxia]

Tian Jingqing 田静清 Beijing dianying ye shiji, 1949-1990 北京电影业事迹 1949-1990 (History of the Beijing film industry). Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1999.

Tobias, Mel. Memoirs of an Asian Moviegoer. HK: South China Morning Post, 1982.

Tong, Chris. “Ecocinema for All: Reassembling the Audience.” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 4, 2 (2013): 113-128.

Tsai, Eva. “Kaneshiro Takeshi: Transnational Stardom and the Media and Culture Industries in Asia’s Global/Postcolonial Age.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, 1 (Spring 2005): 100-32.

Udden, James. “In Search of Chinese Film Style(s) and Technique(s).” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 265-83.

Voyage autour du cinema chinois: nuits de Chine: une selection de 26 films chinois des annees 30 aux annees 80 (A voyage around Chinese cinema. China nights: a selection of 26 Chinese films from the 1930s to the 1980s). L’Association Culturelle des Cineastes Associes (The Cultural Association of Associated Filmmakers). Paris: s.n., 1983.

Wang, Ban. “Trauma, Visuality, and History in Chinese Literature and Film.” In Ann E. Kaplan and Wang Ban, eds., Trauma and Cinema: Cross-cultural Explorations. HK: HK University Press, 2004, 217-40.

Wang, Haizhou. “The Historical Roots and Cultural Core of the Chinese Film School.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 1, 1 (May 2021): 101-13.

[Abstract: Chinese cinema has its own unique features, created through nationally distinct methods. Once revealed, these methods make possible the construction of a unique “Chinese film school.” This article explores the historical development of Chinese film arts in order to uncover general trends along its winding path. While being open to the world, the Chinese film school ultimately returns to traditions in Chinese art as a method to construct a unique theory of Chinese film. This methodology has enabled Chinese films to reflect wider developments in world cinema, while also maintaining distinctive Chinese cultural characteristics.]

Wang, Lingzhen, ed. Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia UP, 2011.

[Abstract: The first of its kind in English, this collection explores twenty one well established and lesser known female filmmakers from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora. Sixteen scholars illuminate these filmmakers’ negotiations of local and global politics, cinematic representation, and issues of gender and sexuality, covering works from the 1920s to the present. Writing from the disciplines of Asian, women’s, film, and auteur studies, contributors reclaim the work of Esther Eng, Tang Shu Shuen, Dong Kena, and Sylvia Chang, among others, who have transformed Chinese cinematic modernity. Chinese Women’s Cinema is a unique, transcultural, interdisciplinary conversation on authorship, feminist cinema, transnational gender, and cinematic agency and representation. Lingzhen Wang’s comprehensive introduction recounts the history and limitations of established feminist film theory, particularly its relationship with female cinematic authorship and agency. She also reviews critiques of classical feminist film theory, along with recent developments in feminist practice, altogether remapping feminist film discourse within transnational and interdisciplinary contexts. Wang’s subsequent redefinition of women’s cinema, and brief history of women’s cinematic practices in modern China, encourage the reader to reposition gender and cinema within a transnational feminist configuration, such that power and knowledge are reexamined among and across cultures and nation-states.]

—–. “Chinese Women’s Cinema.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 318-45.

Wang, Shujen. Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Greater China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.

Wang, Yiman. Remaking Chinese Cinema through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012.

—–. “The Phanton Strikes Back: Triangulating Hollywood, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21 (2004): 317-26.

—–. “The ‘Transnational’ as Methodology: Transnationalizing Chinese Film Studies through the Example of The Love Parade and its Chinese Remakes.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 1 (May 2008): 9-22.

[Abstract: This essay critiques unreflective celebration of transnational Chinese cinema and proposes the ‘transnational’ as methodology. By examining the dual modes of address in a Hong Kong remake of a Lubitsch musical comedy, I demonstrate the importance of scrutinizing border politics and the ‘foreignization’ of Chinese cinema in its transnational production and reception.]

—–. “Made in China, Sold in the United States, and Vice Versa–Transnational ‘Chinese’ Cinema between Media Capitals.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3, 2 (June 2009): 163-76.

Wang, Zhuoyi, Emily Wilcox, and Hongmei Yu, eds. Teaching Film from the People’s Republic of China. MLA, 2024.

[Abstract: This volume brings a diverse range of voices–from anthropology, communication studies, ethnomusicology, film, history, literature, linguistics, sociology, theater, and urban geography–into the conversation about film from the People’s Republic of China. Essays seek to answer what films can reveal or obscure about Chinese history and society and demonstrate how studying films from the PRC can introduce students to larger issues of historical consciousness and media representation. The volume addresses not only postsocialist fictional films but also a wide variety of other subjects including socialist period films, documentaries, films by or about people from ethnic minority groups, film music, the perspectives of female characters, martial arts cinema, and remakes of South Korean films. By exploring how films represent power, traditions, and ideologies, students learn about both the complexity of the PRC and the importance of cross-cultural and cross-ideological understanding. This volume contains discussion of Beijing Bicycle; The Big Shot; Cai Chusheng; Chasing the Carp; Jackie Chan; Children at a Village School; Cui Zien; Fan Lixin; Fish and Elephant; Five Golden Flowers; Hero; Ann Hui; Ip Man; Jiang Hu: Life on the Road; Jiang Nengjie; Last Train Home; Li Shuangshuang; Li Yu; Lou Ye; Meishi Street; New Women; 1911; Ou Ning; The Postmodern Life of My Aunt; Queer China, Comrade China; Red Detachment of Women; River Elegy; The Road Home; Shadow Magic; Shower; Soul Haunted by Painting; Su Xiaokang; Suzhou River; To Live; The Wandering Earth; Wang Bing; Wang Luxiang; Wang Xiaoshuai; West of the Tracks; The White-Haired Girl; Wolf Warrior 2; Wu Bai; Wu Jing; Wu Wenguang; Xia Jun; Xie Jin; Yellow Earth; Ying Yunwei; Wilson Yip; Yu Hua; Zhang Li; Zhang Yang; and Zhang Yimou.]

Way, E. I. Motion Pictures in China. Washington, DC: Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, 1930.

Weiss, Amanda. Han Heroes and Yamato Warriors Competing Masculinities in Chinese and Japanese War Cinema. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: Taking the apparent “tidal wave” of memory in the late 20th and early 21st century as its starting point, this monograph explores remembering in a specific context, World War II in East Asia (1937- 1945), and through a specific mode, film. Weiss argues that Chinese, Japanese, and American collective memory of World War II is intertwined in a “memory loop,” or transnational memory network. This memory loop is constructed through the mediation and remediation of war narratives via transnational sites of memory such as international tribunals, migrant memoirs, photographs, and films. Weiss also argues that gender is central to the representation of (trans)national mediated memory, and that the changing representation of male soldiers, judges, political leaders, and patriarchal father figures in recent East Asian war films reveal Japanese and Chinese challenges to both each other and the perceived American “foundational” narrative of the war. This process continues to intensify due to the transnational memory loop, which drives this cycle of transmission, translation, and reassessment.]

Widmer, Ellen, and David Der-wei Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth Century China. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

Wilkerson, Douglas. “Film and Visual Arts in China: An Introduction.” In Linda Erlich and David Desser, eds., Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994, 39-44.

Wu, Dingbao and Patrick Murphy. Handbook of Chinese Popular Culture. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Xiao, Zhiwei. “The Opium War in the Movies: History, Politics and Propaganda.” Asian Cinema 11, 1 (Spring/Summer 2000): 68-83.

Xu, Gang Gary. “Remaking East Asia, Outsourcing Hollywood.” Senses of Cinema 34 (Jan.-Mar. 2005).

—–. “Chinese Cinema and Technology.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 449-66. .

Yang, Jeff. Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Mainland Chinese Cinema. NY: Simon and Schuster, 2003.

Yang, Mayfair. “State Discourse or a Plebeian Public Sphere. Film Discussion Groups in China.” Visual Anthropology 10, 1 (1994).

Yang, Panpan. Animating Space: Towards a Poetics of Chinese Animation, Ph.D. diss. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2020.

Yang, Qiong. “Tales of Encounter: A Case Study of Science Fiction Films in Greater China in the 1970s and 1980s.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, 3 (2015): 436-52.

[Abstract: An important motif in science fiction films is the encounter between different species—usually between human kind and alien kind. In films of this type, both anxieties and hopes are imagined and exhibited. By examining three science fiction films made in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinese mainland in the late 1970s and early 1980s—that is, The Super Inframan(Zhongguo chaoren, 1975), God of War (Zhanshen, 1976), and Death Ray on Coral Island (Shanhudao shang de siguang, 1980)—this paper analyzes the ideologies and anxieties behind such encounters. These films present different “Chinese” pictures, revealing the fluidity of Chineseness, as well as the variety of frameworks within the genre of Chinese-language science fiction films. In this time of globalization, it is important to examine these early science fiction films in order to explore the relation between local social concerns and their artistic presentation.]

Yang & Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema. London: Connoisseur Video, 1996 . [documentary video with interviews of Stanley Kwan and centering around the issue of how gender has been treated in Chinese film]

Yau, Esther C. M. “China.” In William Luhr, ed. World Cinema Since 1945. NY: Ungar Press, 1987, 116-39.

—–. “International Fantasy and the ‘New Chinese Cinema.'” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14, 3 (1993): 95-107.

—–. “Is China the End of Hermeneutics?; or, Political and Cultural Usage of Non-Han Women in Mainland Chinese Films.” In D. Carson, L. Dittmar, and J.R. Welsch, eds., Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, 280-292.

Yau, Esther C. M. and Kyung Hyum Kim, geust editors. “Asia Pacific Cinemas: A Spectral Surface.” Special issue of positions 9, 2 (Fall 2001).

Yeh, Emily Yeuh-yu. “Defining ‘Chinese.'” Jump Cut 41 (1998).

—–. “A Small History of Wenyi.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 225-49.

Yi Sha. “Daoyan” 导言 (Introduction). In Zhongguo xin wenxue daxi xubian 中国新文学大系续编 (Second edition of the Compendium of Chinese new literature). 10 vols. HK: Xianggang wenxue, 1966, vol. 10.

Yin Hong 尹鸿. Xin Zhongguo dianying shi 新中国电影史 (History of new China’s cinema). Changsha: Hunan meishu, 2002.

Yu, Sabrina Qiong. “Vulnerable Chinese Stars: From Xizi to Film Worker.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 218-38.

Yue, Ming-Bao. “Gender and Cinema: Speaking Through Images of Women.” Asian Cinema 22, 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 192-207.

Zha, Jianying. China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers are Transforming a Culture. New York: New Press, 1995.

Zhang Juxiang 张骏祥, eds., Zhongguo dianying da cidian 中国电影大词典(China cinema encyclopedia). Shanghai: Shanghai cishu, 1995.

Zhang, Xudong. Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and New Chinese Cinema (Post-Contemporary Interventions). Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Zhang, Yingjin. The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996.

—–. “From Minority Film to Minority Discourse: Questions of Nationhood and Ethnicity in Chinese Film Studies.” Cinema Journal 36, 3 (Spring 1997): 73-90. Rpt. In Zhang, Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002, 151-206.

—–. “Chinese Cinema and Transnational Cultural Politics: Reflections on Film Festivals, Film Productions, and Film Studies.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 2, 1 (July 1998): 105-32. Rpt. in Zhang, Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002, 15-42.

—–., ed. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford: SUP, 1999.

—–. Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002.

—–. “The Global City of the Transnational Imaginary: Plotting Disappearance and Reinscription in Chinese Urban Cinema.” In Zhang, Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002, 253-312.

—–. “Seductions of the Body: Fashioning Ethnographic Cinema in Contemporary China.” In Zhang, Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002, 207-51.

—–. Chinese National Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Zhang, Yingjin and Zhiwei Xiao, eds. Encyclopedia of Chinese Films. London: Routledge, 1998.

Zhang, Zhen, ed. The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007.

[Abstract: Since the early 1990s, while mainland China’s state-owned movie studios have struggled with financial and ideological constraints, an exciting alternative cinema has developed. Dubbed the “Urban Generation,” this new cinema is driven by young filmmakers who emerged in the shadow of the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989. What unites diverse directors under the “Urban Generation” rubric is their creative engagement with the wrenching economic and social transformations underway in China. Urban Generation filmmakers are vanguard interpreters of the confusion and anxiety triggered by the massive urbanization of contemporary China. This collection brings together some of the most recent original research on this emerging cinema and its relationship to Chinese society.]

—–. Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema portrays a group of important contemporary women filmmakers working across the Sinophone world including Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and beyond. The book delineates and conceptualizes their cinematic and trans-media practices within an evolving, multifaceted feminist intimate-public commons. The films by these experienced and emerging filmmakers, including Huang Yu-shan, Yau Ching, Ai Xiaoming, Wen Hui, Huang Ji and others, represent some of the most innovative and socially engaged work in both fictional and non-fictional modes in Chinese-language cinema as well as global women’s cinema. Their narrative, documentary, and experimental film practices from the 1980s to the present, along with their work in sister media such as dance, theater, literature, and contemporary art, their activities as scholars, educators, activists, and film festival organizers or jurors, have significantly reshaped the landscape of Sinophone film culture and expanded the borders of world cinema.

Zheng Shusen 郑树森 (William Tay). Wenhua piping yu Huayu dianying 文化批评与华语电影 (Cultural criticism and Chinese cinema). Taibei: Maitian, 1996.

Zhong Dafeng 钟大丰, et al. Zhongguo dianying shi 中国电影史 (History of Chinese film). Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo dianshi, 1995.

Zhou, Xuelin. “From Behind the Wall: Representation of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese Film.” In See-kam Tan, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds., Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009, 125-37.

—–. Youth Culture in Chinese Language Films. NY: Routledge, 2017.

[Abstract: This book explores the vigorous film cultures of mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong from the perspective of youth culture. The book relates this important topic to the wider social, cultural, and institutional context, and discusses the relationship between the films and the changes that today are transforming each society. Among the areas explored are the differences between the three film industries, their creation of new types of screen hero and heroine, and their conflicts with traditional Chinese attitudes such as respect for age. The many films discussed provide fresh perspectives on the ways in which young people are coping with gender, sexuality, class, coming of age, the pressures of education, and major social shifts such as rural to urban migration. They show young adults in each society striving to construct new value systems for a complex, rapidly changing environment.]

Zhu, Ying. “The Sino-Hollywood Relationship–Then and Now.” Weber: The Contemporary West (Spring/Summer 2015): 26-36.

---

State of the Field/Methodology/Theory

Berry, Chris. “Transnational Chinese Cinema Studies.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 9-16.

—–. “Chinese Film Scholarship in English.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 484-98.

—– and Mary Farquhar. “From National Cinemas to Cinema and the National: Rethinking the National in Transnational Chinese Cinemas.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 4, 2 (2001): 109-22.

—– and Laikwan Pang. “Remappng Contemporary Chinese Cinema Studies.” The China Review 10, 2 (2010).

[Abstract: This essay aims to rethink and remap contemporary Chinese cinema studies. In the past few years there have been many new developments and experiments in the film scenes of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and the Chinese film industries are undergoing dramatic restructuring. The authors argue for an understanding of “Chinese cinema” in close reference to the recent advent of global cinema. Such understanding also has to take into account the internal stratification among various film practices, no longer organized only according to its specific cultural geography (mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) but also according to different modes of filmmaking and different sectors of the industry and culture. The authors believe that scholars can continue to use the notion of “Chinese cinema” as a meaningful concept. However, rather than understanding it as a single and self-sufficient system, as the idea of a national cinema tends to assume, they argue that in the age of flexible production Chinese cinema must also be seen as something more flexible, multiple, and open–an internally stratified but interconnected combinatoire with dynamic participation in global cinema. ]

—– and Xinyu Dong, Zhang Zhen, and Song Hwee Lim. “The State and Stakes of Chinese Cinema Studies: A Roundtable Discussion.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, 1 (2016): 67-86.

Chen, Xihe. “Chinese Film Scholarship in Chinese.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 469-83.

Choi, JungBong. “Of the East Asian Cultural Sphere: Theorizing Cultural Regionalization.” The China Review 10, 2 (2010).

[Abstract: This essay questions the conceptual pertinence of globalization in analyzing the fast-growing cultural exchanges across East and Southeast Asia. Critiquing the theoretical backbone of globalization, it proposes a shift to cultural regionalization as an interpretive framework suited to the emergent cultural topographies of the region. The essay then details the major attributes of cultural regionalization by introducing what might be termed the East Asian Cultural Sphere, a temporary crystallization of East Asian cultural interdynamics that has emerged in the post-Cold War juncture and continues to evolve to date. In an attempt to give concrete pictures of both cultural regionalization and the East Asian Cultural Sphere, the essay broaches the instance of Hallyu, the Korean wave, a cultural crosscurrent arising from the collision of two opposing waves: the escalation of political tension based on post/colonial feuds, which remained largely unaddressed during the Cold War period, on one hand and the sweeping economic integration and collaboration of East Asia on the other.]

Dai, Jinhua. “Rethinking the Cultural History of Chinese Film.” Tr. Lau Kin Chi. In Dai, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua. Eds. Jing Wang and Tani Barlow. London: Verso, 2002, 235-63.

Ding, Yaping. “A Few Issues Surrounding Research into the General History of Chinese Film.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 1, 1 (2021): 83-99.

[Abstract: The practice of film history highlights the value and significance of the researcher. A more comprehensive view of the situation of film history raises several issues. General research into the history of film is directly related to the production of film history. The question of how to reinvent general film history research is necessarily connected to ideologies, cultures, systems and concepts, as well as the broad scope and complexity of film history. Writing a general history of Chinese film demands a combination of innovation and continuing tradition, with an emphasis on the construction of a rational and scientific discipline of film history and historical empiricism. The aim should be a more rational history. The paper expresses my own thoughts and efforts with respect to relevant issues and attempts to deepen and open up general research into the history of Chinese film.]

Desser, David. “Conference Report: First Asian Cinema Studies Society/Tenth Annual Ohio University Film Conference on ‘Asian Cinema.'” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 11, 2 (1989): 99-108.

—- “Conference Report: Session- Trends and Concepts in Chinese Cinema.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 10, 4 (1989): 357-59.

Farquhar, Mary and Chris Berry. “Shadow Opera: Towards a New Archeology of the Chinese Cinema.” Post Script 20, 2/3 (Winter/Spring 2001): 25-42.

de Kloet, Jeroen. “Crossing the Threshold: Chinese Cinema Studies in the Twenty-first Century.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, 1 (Jan. 2007): 63-70.

Hu, Ke. “Contemporary Film Theory in China.” Trs. Ted Wang, Chris Berry, and Chen Mei. Screening the Past (March 1998).

Leung, Helen Hok-Sze. “Unthinking: Chinese – Cinema – Criticism.” Journal of Chinese Cinema 1, 1 (Jan. 2007): 71-74.

—–. “Book Length Studies on Chinese Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinema 1, 1 (Jan. 2007): 75-77.

Lim, Song Hwee. “Six Chinese Cinemas in Search of a Historiography.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 35-45.

Lin Niantong. “A Study of the Theories of Chinese Cinema in their Relationship to Classical Aesthetics.” Modern Chinese Literature 1, 2 (Spring, 1985): 18-33.

Lu, Hsiao-peng, ed. “Problems and Prospects of Teaching Asian Cinema in America: A Symposium.” Special section of Asian Cinema 11, 1 (Spring/Summer 2000): 143-91. [contains short essays by John Lent, Keiko MacDonald, Marcia Landy, Lucy Fischer, Anne Ciecko, and Sheldon Lu].

Lupke, Christopher, ed. “The Question of the Nation in Contemporary China Film: A Symposium.” Special section of Asian Cinema 15, 1 (Spring 2004).

Marchetti, Gina. “Chinese Film Studies Online: Technological Innovations, Pedagogical Challenge, and Teaching Chinese-Language Cinema in the Digital Age.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 1, 1 (May 2021): 135-52.

[Abstract: Because of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education, online initiatives have moved from the periphery to the very heart of teaching and learning across disciplines. However, the profession has just begun to consider the full impact these new technologies have on the way we research and teach Chinese-language cinema. Using the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and University of Hong Kong Common Core campus-based course, Hong Kong Cinema through a Global Lens, as my principal case study, I explore some of the ways in which the digital revolution has transformed research on and teaching about Hong Kong film. From surveying the types of material available for research to exploring the differences between MOOCs and flipped classrooms, this essay considers the positive implications and potential drawbacks of these new technologies in global, regional, and local educational contexts.]

Nakajima, Seio. “Studies of Chinese Cinema in Japan.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 1, 1 (May 2021): 167-86.

[Abstract: Japanese interests in Chinese cinema go as far back as to the 1910s, when film magazines reported on the situation of Chinese cinema. Discussions of Chinese cinema began to flourish in the 1920s, when intellectuals wrote travelogue essays on Chinese cinema, particularly on Shanghai cinema. In the mid-1930s, more serious analytical discourses were presented by a number of influential contemporary intellectuals, and that trend continued until the end of WWII. Post-War confusion in Japan, as well as political turmoil in China, dampened academic interests of Japanese scholars on Chinese cinema somewhat, but since the re-discovery of Chinese cinema in the early 1980s with the emergence of the Fifth Generation, academic discussions on Chinese cinema resumed and flourished in the 1980s and the 1990s. In the past decade or so, interesting new trends in studies of Chinese cinema in Japan are emerging that include more transnational and comparative approaches, focusing not only on film text but the context of production, distribution, and exhibition. Moreover, scholars from outside of the disciplines of literature and film studies—such as cultural studies, history, and sociology—have begun to contribute to rigorous discussions of Chinese cinema in Japan.]

“New Keyworkds to Chinese Cinemas Studies.” Special issue of Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, 1 (2016).

[Contents: essays on “Activism” (Gina Marchetti), “Documentary” (Kiki Tianqi Yu), “Ecocinema” (Kui-wai Chu), “Film Festivals” (James Udden), “Propaganda Film” (Matthew Johnson), “Realism” (Jason McGrath), “Scale” (Christopher K. Tong), “Screens” (Hongwei Thorn Chen), “Soft Power” (Bruno Lovric), “Sound Design” (Timmy Chih-Ting Chen)]

Pickowicz, Paul. “From Yao Wenyuan to Cui Zi’en: Film, History, Memory.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, 1 (2006): 41-53.

[Abstract: This essay discusses the various ways in which scholars have approached old and new Chinese cinema during the last 35 years. Adopting the perspective of a historian rather than the perspective of a film studies scholar, the essay points to significant breakthroughs in scholarship on Chinese cinema, but dwells on a wide range of problems still facing researchers. The essay takes the form of the author’s personal reflection on the development of the Chinese film field, and concludes with an endorsement of multidisciplinary research strategies and methodological flexibility.]

Semsel, George, ed. Chinese Film: The State of the Art in the People’s Republic. NY: Praeger, 1987.

—–. Chinese Film Theory: A Guide to the New Era. NY: Praeger, 1990.

—–. Film in Contemporary China: Critical Debates, 1979-1989. Westport: Praeger, 1993.

Sun, Shaoyi. “Chinese Language Film or Chinnese Cinema? Review of an Ongoing Debated in the Chinese Mainland.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, 1 (2016): 61-66.

Wang, Jing and Tani Barlow. “Introduction.” In Dai, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua. Eds. Jing Wang and Tani Barlow. London: Verso, 2002, 1-12.

Wang, Yiman . “The ‘Transnational’ as Methodology: Transnationalizing Chinese Film Studies through the Example of The Love Parade and its Chinese Remakes.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 1 (May 2008): 9-22.

[Abstract: This essay critiques unreflective celebration of transnational Chinese cinema and proposes the ‘transnational’ as methodology. By examining the dual modes of address in a Hong Kong remake of a Lubitsch musical comedy, I demonstrate the importance of scrutinizing border politics and the ‘foreignization’ of Chinese cinema in its transnational production and reception.]

Xia, Hong. “Film Theory in the People’s Republic of China: The New Era.” In George S. Semsel, ed., Chinese Film: The State of the Art in the People’s Republic. New York: Praeger, 1987, 35-62.

Zhang, Yingjin. “Rethinking Cross-Cultural Analysis: The Questions of Authority, Power, and Difference in Western Studies of Chinese Films.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (Oct-Dec. 1994): 44-53. Rpt. as “Cross-Cultural Analysis and Eurocentrism: Interrogating Authority, Power, and Difference in Western Critical Discourse.” In Zhang, Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002, 115-47.

—–. “Screening China: Recent Studies of Chinese Cinema in English.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29, 3 (1997).

—–. “A Typography of Chinese Film Historiography.” Asian Cinema 11, 1 (Spring/Summer 2000): 16-32.

—–. “The Rise of Chinese Film Studies in the West: Contextualizing Issues, Methods, Questions.” In Zhang, Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002, 43-114.

—–. “Comparative Film Studies, Transnational Film Studies: Interdisciplinarity, Crossmediality, and Transcultural Visuality in Chinese Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinema 1, 1 (Jan. 2007): 27-40.

—–. “National Cinema as Translocal Practice: Reflections on Chinese Film Historiography.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 17-25.

—–. “Chinese Film History and Historiography.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, 1 (2016): 38-47.

---

Early Film (1896-1949)

Bao, Weihong. “From Pearl White to White Rose Woo: The Vernacular Translation of the Serial Queen in Chinese Silent Films, 1927-1931.” Camera Obsura [60] 20, 3 (2005).

—–. “In Search of a ‘Cinematic Esperanto’: Exhibiting Wartime Chongqing Cinema in Global Context.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3, 2 (June 2009): 135-47.

[Abstract: This essay examines the neglected wartime Chongqing cinema by situating it in its local and simultaneously global context of exhibition. Instead of reinforcing the image of Chongqing cinema as sheer state propaganda, I illustrate the film-makers’ and the film critics’ heightened awareness of multiple contexts of exhibition. I propose to consider this wartime cinema as a search for the ‘cinematic Esperanto’, an aspiration toward a world cinema and an international film language that contested the universal language of the Hollywood continuity system so as to bridge film aesthetics and audience responses to register the atrocity of the war and evoke corporeal public responses. By examining the critical interaction between film exhibition, film criticism, and film production, I hope to bring to recognition wartime Chongqing cinema as a highly self-conscious and active participant in an international film culture.]

—–. “Diary of a Homecoming: (Dis-)Inhabiting the Theatrical in Postwar Shanghai Cinema.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 376-399.

—–, with Nathanial Brennan. “Cinema, Propaganda, and Networks of Experience: Exhibiting Chongqing Cinema in New York.” In American and Chinese Language Cinemas: Examining Cultural Flows. Routledge, 2014, 119-135.

—–. “A Vibrating Art in the Air: Cinema, Ether, and Propaganda Film Theory in Wartime Chongqing.” New German Critique 122 (Spring 2014): 175-192.

—–. “Li Lishun’s Medium Ontology.” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung (Journal of Media and Cultural Studies) 5, 1 (2014): 63-71.

—–.  Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of An Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. [MCLC Resource Center Review by Jean Ma]

[Abstract:  What was cinema in modern China? It was, this book tells us, a dynamic entity, not strictly tied to one media technology, one mode of operation, or one system of aesthetic code. It was, in Weihong Bao’s term, an affective medium, a distinct notion of the medium as mediating environment with the power to stir passions, frame perception, and mold experience. In Fiery Cinema, Bao traces the permutations of this affective medium from the early through the mid-twentieth century, exploring its role in aesthetics, politics, and social institutions. Mapping the changing identity of cinema in China in relation to Republican-era print media, theatrical performance, radio broadcasting, television, and architecture, Bao has created an archaeology of Chinese media culture. Within this context, she grounds the question of spectatorial affect and media technology in China’s experience of mechanized warfare, colonial modernity, and the shaping of the public into consumers, national citizens, and a revolutionary collective subject. Carrying on a close conversation with transnational media theory and history, she teases out the tension and affinity between vernacular, political modernist, and propagandistic articulations of mass culture in China’s varied participation in modernity. Fiery Cinema advances a radical rethinking of affect and medium as a key insight into the relationship of cinema to the public sphere and the making of the masses. By centering media politics in her inquiry of the forgotten future of cinema, Bao makes a major intervention into the theory and history of media.]

Bao, Yuheng. “The Mirror of Chinese Society.” Chinese Literature 4 (1985): 190-201.

“The Beginnings and Development of Early Asian Film.” Special section of Screening the Past 6 (July 1999).

Berry, Chris. “Chinese Left Cinema in the 1930s: Poisonous Weeds or National Treasures?” Jump Cut 34 (1988): 87-94.

—–. “Poisonous Weeds or National Treasures: Chinese Left Cinema in the 1930s.” Jump Cut 34 (1989): 87-94.

—–. “The Sublimative Text: Sex and Revolution in Big Road[The Highway]” East-West Film Journal 2, 2 (June 1988): 66-86.

—–. “A Nation T(w/o)o: Chinese Cinema(s) and Nationahood(s).” East-West Film Journal 7, 1 (January 1993): 24-51.

—–. “Sino-Korean Screen Connections: Towards a History in Fragments.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, 3 (2016): 247-64.

[Abstract: How can we pursue the original drive of work on transnational cinema to combat methodological and ideological nationalism, but without becoming complicit with globalization and its ideology? This essay proposes researching Sino-Korean screen connections. It opens up five directions, illustrating each with a particular example: (1) revealing the occluded, illustrated by the role of Korean filmmakers in the Shanghai cinema of the colonial era; (2) understanding the transnational as composed of what Anna Tsing calls distinct ‘transnational projects’ that exceed globalization, such as the popularity of North Korean films in the People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution; (3) showing that there is no ‘smooth space’ of global flows, contrasting the relative absence of South Koreans in Chinese films with the much higher profile of Chinese in South Korean films; (4) looking at transborder production cultures, using the little-known example of South Koreans working in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s; and (5) researching exhibition and distribution, such as the traces of the popularity of South Korean melodramas in Taiwan in the 1960s. Taking these examples, the essay asks what kind of history of Sino-Korean film connections can be written. It argues that the only possibility is a disjunctural history of fragments. Precisely because modernity demands that history take up the form of a teleological progress, disjuncture acts as a counter-history, revealing modernity’s violence.]

Braester, Yomi. “Revolution and Revulsion: Ideology, Monstrosity, and Phantasmagoria in Ma-Xu Weibang’s Film Song at Midnight.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 1 (Spring 2000): 81-114. Rpt. in Braester, Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003, 81-105.

Bren, Frank. “The Fabulous Adventures of Benjamin Brodsky: China’s First Films—Really.” Asian Cinema 20, 2 (Fall/Winter 2009): 1-17.

Brennan, Nate. “A Penny-dreadful House for Chinese Talkies: Notes Toward a History of Chinese-language Film Exhibition in Interwar New York.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3, 2 (June 2009): 123-33.

[Abstract: Chinese-language films were a small but significant segment of the foreign-language films shown in New York City between the late 1930s and the end of World War II. These films and the theatres in which they were shown were discussed in the New York daily press and in many cases the location of the theatre and its implied audience dictated to reporters and critics the quality of the film. Chinese-language films shown in Lower East Side neighbourhood theatres were summarily dismissed as crude oddities largely because of their immigrant clientele. While there may have been little difference between them, Chinese-language films shown in midtown art theatres were received as cultural artefacts, which while still perceived as ‘exotic’, were nonetheless critiqued for their value as works of art.]

Cambon, Marie. “The Dream Palaces of Shanghai: American Films in China’s Largest Metropolis Prior to 1949.” Asian Cinema 7, 2 (Winter 1995): 34-45.

Chan, Jessica Ka Yee. “Translating ‘Montage’: The Discreet Attractions of Soviet Montage for Chinese Revolutionary Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, 3 (Nov. 2011): 197-218.

[Abstract: What happens when a film term such as ‘montage’ undergoes translation? This article looks at the theoretical permutations of ‘montage’ as it was translated and introduced into China beginning in the early 1930s and the resulting film practices as the term continued to be reread, redefined and reinvented during the communist era. As a result of the attraction to the revolutionary allure of Soviet montage in the 1930s, a mysterious aura was attached to the Chinese transliteration mengtaiqi, which literally means ‘veil (is) too strange’. In a period of intense engagement with international film theory during the ‘seventeen years’ (1949-1966), Chinese filmmakers demystified the inscrutability of montage in an effort to broaden its scope to refer to all film editing methods, including Hollywood continuity editing and Soviet montage. Through close reading of selected films, I look at how montage was creatively reinvented to construct a collectivized subject cinematically. ]

—–. “Insulting Pictures: The Thief of Bagdad in Shanghai.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 28, 1  (Spring 2016): 38-77.

—–. “The Screen Kiss in 1937: Re-reading Street Angel and Crossroads.” East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 8, 1 (2022): 71-89.

[Abstract: This article traces the evolution of the screen kiss and the discourse surrounding it in Republican Shanghai leftwing cinema in the 1930s. The period from the 1910s to the 1930s in semi-colonial Shanghai witnessed an influx of Hollywood motion pictures that featured the screen kiss. By the 1930s, the circulation of images of Hollywood screen kiss in semi-colonial Shanghai triggered erotic imagination, comparison with Hollywood norms and most importantly the desire to appropriate, if not to reproduce, Hollywood screen kisses despite censorship. Two Shanghai leftist films, Street Angel (Malu tianshi, Yuan 1937) and Crossroads (Shizi jietou, Shen 1937), released shortly before the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, appropriated and subverted Hollywood representational conventions of the screen kiss, fulfilling both the entertainment and pedagogical functions of cinema by constructing a sexually desiring and potentially class-conscious subject with aspirations for free love and social betterment at a critical moment of national crisis.]

Chang, Michael G. “The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Movie Actresses and Public Discourses in Shanghai, 1920s-1930s.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, 128-59.

Chen Bo, ed. Zhongguo zuoyi dianying yundong 中国左翼电影运动  (The Chinese leftist film movement). Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1993.

Chen, Hongwei Thorn. “Cinemas, Highways, and the Making of Provincial Space: Mobile Screenings in Jiangsu, China, 1933-1937.” Wide Screen 7, 1 (2018).

Chen, Jianhua. “D. W. Griffith and the Rise of Chinese Cinema in Early 1920s Shanghai.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 23-38.

Cheng, Weikun. “The Challenge of the Actresses: Female Performers and the Cultural Alternatives in Early Twentieth Century Beijing and Tianjin.” Modern China 22, 2 (Apr. 1996): 197-233.

Cheng Jihua 程季华, et al. Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi 中国电影发展史  (The history of the development of Chinese film). Beijng: Zhongguo dianying, 1980. [the version linked to here does not include images]

Ch’iu, Kuei-fen. “The Question of Translation in Taiwanese Colonial Cinematic Space.” The Journal of Asian Studies 70, 1 (2011): 77-97.

[Abstract: This essay studies the practice of cultural translation in colonial Taiwanese cinematic space. Just as the Japanese translation of Western cinema brings into play traces of Japanese otherness, the Taiwanese translation of the Japanese translation disrupts the Japanese monopoly on the meaning of cinematic experience in colonial Taiwan. A key figure in this complex cultural translation was the benshi, a translator who performed alongside the screen to interpret the film for the audience. This study argues that an overemphasis on the interventional power of the benshi’s word does not do justice to the complex role of the benshi as a translator. In spite of its inscription of the cultural specific in the cinematic space, the presence of the benshi is also a reminder of an unfulfilled desire: the desire for the (foreign) image and the desire for the other. Insofar as the act of translation is a critical engagement with the challenges posed by the other, a simplistic celebration of local resistance does not help us fully address the complexity of cultural translation that defines the mediascape of the modern age.]

Cho, Pock-rey. “The Emperor of Shanghai Movies of the 1930s: Jin Yan (1910-1983).” Asian Cinema 14, 2 (Fall/Winter 2003): 206-214.

Chua, John. “Something Borrowed, Something New: Ye Ban Ge Sheng (Song at Midnight) and the Cross-Cultural Reinterpretation of Horror in Twentieth Century China.” Asian Cinema 16, 2 (Fall/Winter 2005): 122-46.

Costantino, Mariagrazia. “‘City Lights’ and the Dream of Shanghai.” In Lisa Bernstein and Chu-chueh Cheng, eds., Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai: Cultural Representations from the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020, 53-82.

Curry, Ramona. “Making Connections: Benjamin Brodsky and Early Trans-Pacific Cinema Historiography.” In Ain-ling Wong, ed., Chinese Cinema: Tracing the Origins (in Chinese). Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2011, 94-109.

—–. “Benjamin Brodsky (1877-1960): The Transpacific American Film Entrepreneur, Making A TRIP THRU CHINA .” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 18, 1 (2011): 58-94; 18, 2 (2011): 142-180

Dong, Xinyu 董新宇. Kan yu beikan zhijian: dui Zhongguo wusheng dianying de wenhua yanjiu 看与被看之间对中国无声电影的文化研究 (Between seeing and being seen: cultural studies on Chinese silent cinema). Beijing: Beijing shifan daxue, 2000.

—–. “From Shanghai Document to Shanghai 24 Hours.” In Luca Giuliani and David Robinson, eds., The Collegium Papers VI. Sacile: Le Gironate Del Cinema Muto, 2005.

—–. “The Laborer at Play: Laborer’s Love, the Operational Aesthetic, and the Comedy of Inventions.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20, 2 (Fall 2008): 1-39.

Du, Wenwei. “Xi and Yingxi: The Interaction Between Traditional Theatre and Chinese Cinema.”  Screening the Past (Nov. 2000).

Edwards, Louise. “Localizing the Hollywood Star System in 1930s China: Linglong Magazine and New Moral Spaces.” Asian Studies 1, 1 (Sept. 2015): 13-37.

[Abstract: The Hollywood star system became a significant part of film production and consumption around the world from the 1920s—including in China during the Golden Age of Shanghai cinema. This American technology was localised and expanded tosuit Chinese contexts and achieved far more than increasing sales of cinema tickets. Inthis article I argue that the “Shanghai star system” created a new social and ideologicalspace within which Chinese people, particularly women, were able to assume new, public personae that accorded with their desires for cosmopolitan modernity. The process also created new moral worlds in which feminine visibility, self-adornment and leisure consumption were desirable attributes and came to be recognised for their signification of modernity and global connections. I draw my evidence from the highly successful  Linglong magazine, which was devoted to promoting ‘noble entertainment’ for its target female readership and dedicated about half of each issue to films and commentary about stars. The article explores typologies of patriotic stars, chaste and vulnerable stars as well as Do-It-Yourself stars that included readers’ photos and storiest hat borrowed the grammar of Hollywood stardom.]

Elley, Derek. “Peach Blossom Dreams: Silent Chinese Cinema Remembered.”  Griffithiana (Oct. 1997): 127-80.

Fan, Victor. “Laborer’s Love: An Anthropotechnogenetic Mediation between Cinematism and Animetism.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 2, 2 (Nov. 2022): 239-60.

[Abstract: How can media philosophy help us rehistoricize Zhang Shichuan (director) and Zheng Zhengqiu’s (screenwriter) Laogong zhi aiqing [Laborer’s Love, 1922] and foster a deeper understanding of its aesthetics within its historical context? In this article, I take Zhang Zhen’s (1999, 27–50) book chapter on the film, “Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage Cinema,” as a point de départ of my investigation. I argue that Laborer’s Love is best understood as part of a larger media ecology that has always been in transition, or more properly speaking, always in a process of becoming. I want to demonstrate that in the film, the hybridity between a more presentational style that stemmed from early-twentieth-century Chinese theater and a more representational style that stemmed from American cinema may not be a symptom of the film’s transitionality. Rather, such hybridity might have been Zhang Shichuan’s conscious stylistic choice. Also, in the light of Thomas Lamarre’s understanding of the cinema as a negotiation between two relationships between the human and the machine—cinematism (an alignment between the human body and the moving trajectory of the machine) and animetism (a positing of the body within a moving machine)—we can rethink the film as an anthropotechnical mediation between these two relationships.]

Farquhar, Mary and Chris Berry. “Shadow Opera: Toward a New Archaelogy of Chinese Cinema.” In Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh, eds., Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005, 27-52.

Field, Andrew D. “Selling Souls in Sin City: Shanghai Singing and Dancing Hostesses in Print, Film, and Politics, 1920-1949.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford: SUP, 1999, 99-127.

Fonoroff, Paul. Chinese Movie Magazines: From Charlie Chaplin to Chairman Mao, 1921-1951. London: Thames and Hudson, 2018.

[Abstract: Showcasing an exotic, eclectic array of covers from more than five hundred movie publications from a glamorous bygone age, Chinese Movie Magazines sheds fresh light on China’s film industry from its early years through the highs and lows of a period of incredible social, political and economic change. With expertly curated covers, and authoritative and entertaining commentary, collector and Chinese cinema specialist Paul Fonoroff guides readers through the jewels of the genre, offering unique insights into the evolution of Chinese movies and the influence of Hollywood along the way. From a colourful Charlie Chaplin to earnest portraits of Chairman Mao, this extraordinary volume covers the oldest extant Chinese movie magazine – established in 1921 – and the last independently owned ‘fanzine’ of 1951.]

Fu, Po-shek. “Projecting Ambivalence: Chinese Cinema in Semi-Occupied Shanghai, 1937-1941.” In Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Wartime Shanghai. London: Routledge, 1998, 86-110.

—–. “Struggle to Entertain: The Political Ambivalence of Shanghai Film Industry under Japanese Occupation, 1941-1945.” In Cinema of Two Cities: Hong Kong-Shanghai. Hong Kong: Eighteenth Annual Hong Kong International Film Festival, 1994.

—–. “Eileen Chang, Women’s Film, and Domestic Culture of Modern Shanghai.” Tamkang Review 29, 4 (Summer 1999): 9-28.

—–. “Selling Fantasies at War: Production and Promotion Practices of the Shanghai Cinema, 1937-1941.” Sherman Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing Road: Commerical Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999, 187-206.

—–. “Eileen Chang, Woman’s Film, and Domestic Shanghai in the 1940s.” Asian Cinema 11, 1 (Spring/Summer 2000): 97-113.

—–. Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.

—–. “An Ordinary Shanghai Woman in an Extraordinary Time: A View from Post-War Popular Cinema.” In Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin yeh, eds., Visualizing China: Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2013, 461-80.

Fu, Yongchun. “From ‘Parrot’ to ‘Butterfly’: China’s Hybridization of Hollywood in Distribution Systems in the 1920s and 1930s.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8, 1 (2014): 1-16.

[Abstract: This article examines the relations between Hollywood and the Chinese film industry in the distribution system in the 1920s and 1930s. It shows that the distribution system of China naively mimicked Hollywood in the 1920s. After a decade, the distribution system grew into maturity, and its uniqueness emerged. I characterize hybridization as a way of explaining the process of China’s response to Hollywood in the field of distribution. It suggests that the analysis of power relations is key to identifying different patterns, stages and types of mixing in the process of China’s response to Hollywood.]

—–. “Movie Matchmakers: The Intermediaries between Hollywood and China in the Early Twentieth Century.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 1 (2015): 8-22.

[Abstract: The nationalistic approach dominates the study of Chinese film history due to the concern with ideology and the bias towards the ‘national cinema’ paradigm. This article examines a group of intermediaries between Hollywood and China in the early twentieth century, who were either ignored or treated with open disdain by the late nationalist historians. I focus on two specific types of intermediaries – American film practitioners and Chinese merchants distributing Hollywood films in China – and trace their contributions to the Chinese film industry in the early twentieth century. Drawing on primary materials including English newspapers, trade journals and passport application records, I ascertain the identification of foreign figures in the Asiatic Film Company and stress the contribution of William Henry Lynch (ca.1883–1947), the cinematographer of the company. This article suggests multi-identities of the intermediaries and argues that the intermediaries bridged the relationship between Hollywood and the Chinese film industry and benefited the evolution of the Chinese film industry in various ways.]

—–. The Early Transnational Chinese Cinema Industry. NY: Routledge, 2019.

[Abstract: Based on extensive original research, including in studio archives, industrial surveys, official records, trade journals, and English and Chinese newspapers, this book explores the role of the American film industry in the development of cinema in China. It examines the Chinese industry’s response to the American industry and the consequences of this response. It also considers the attitudes of Chinese film practitioners towards Hollywood and the contribution of those figures who acted as intermediaries between the two industries. Overall, the book casts much new light on the early development of the film industry in China and demonstrates the huge influence Hollywood had on it.]

Gao, Yunxiang. “Sex, Sports, and China’s National Crisis, 1931-1945: The “Athletic Movie Star” Li Lili (1915-2005).” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 22, 1 (Spring 2010): 96-161.

Ge, Congmin. “Photography, Shadow Play, Beijing Opera, and the First Chinese Film.” Eras 3 (June 2002).

Hansen, Miriam Bratu. “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizions: Shanghai Silent Films as Vernacular Modernism.” Film Quarterly 54, 1 (Fall 2000): 10-22.

—–. “The Gender of Vernacular Modernism: Chinese and Japanese Films of the 1930s.” La Valle de l’Eden (Turin) IX.19 (Dec. 2007): 23-41.

Harris, Kristine. “Peach Blossom Dreams: Silent Chinese Cinema Remembered.” Griffithiana  60/61 (October 1997): 126-179.

—–. “The New Woman: Image, Subject, and Dissent in 1930s Shanghai Film Culture.” Republican China 20.2 (April 1995): 55-79. Rpt in Sheldon Lu, ed.,Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

—–. Silent Speech: Envisioning the Nation in Early Chinese Cinema. Ph. D. diss. NY: Columbia University, 1997.

—–. “The Romance of the Western Chamber and the Classical Subject Film in 1920s Shanghai.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford: SUP, 1999, 51-73.

—–. “Ombres Chinoises: Split Screens and Parallel Lives in Love and Duty.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 39-61.

—–. “1935, March 8: On Language, Literature, and the Silent Screen.” In David Der-wei Wang, eds., The New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 394-400.

He, Qiliang. “Way Down East, ‘Way Down West’: Hollywood Cinema and the Rise of Conservatism in 1920s China.” Frontiers of History in China 6, 4 (2011): 505-24.

[Abstract: This article investigates the distribution and consumption of Way Down East (directed by D. W. Griffith, 1920) in Chinese cities in the 1920s in an attempt to explore the impact of foreign films on early Chinese filmmaking in particular and on Chinese society in general. Griffith’s Way Down East highlights a young woman’s trials and tribulations caused by male tyranny and deception. Such films by D. W. Griffith struck a chord in China in the 1920s, when the concerns of women and the loss of family values after the May Fourth movement found expression in film. The embracing of Way Down East in China, particularly among progressive intellectuals, indicates the existence of an anti-May Fourth conservatism. Chinese intellectuals were inspired by Way Down East to deny Chinese women’s subjectivity as new women who could control their own destinies; such a denial thereby rejected romantic love as a means of women’s emancipation and enlightenment. The intellectual class’s jettisoning of the rhetoric of “free love” and free marriage and re-emphasizing family values in the 1920s were conducive to the Nationalist Party’s conservative agenda to discipline individuals and Chinese society in the late 1920s and 1930s. Therefore, the “partification” of China during the Nanjing Decade (1927–37) was a direct outgrowth of a conservative consensus that followed upon May Fourth.]

Ho, Joseph W. Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022.

[Abstract: Ho offers a transnational cultural history of US and Chinese communities framed by missionary lenses through time and space—tracing the lives and afterlives of images, cameras, and visual imaginations from before the Second Sino-Japanese War through the first years of the People’s Republic of China. When American Protestant and Catholic missionaries entered interwar China, they did so with cameras in hand. Missions principally aimed at the conversion of souls and the modernization of East Asia, became, by virtue of the still and moving images recorded, quasi-anthropological ventures that shaped popular understandings of and formal foreign policy toward China. Portable photographic technologies changed the very nature of missionary experience, while images that missionaries circulated between China and the United States affected cross-cultural encounters in times of peace and war. Ho illuminates the centrality of visual practices in the American missionary enterprise in modern China, even as intersecting modernities and changing Sino-US relations radically transformed lives behind and in front of those lenses. In doing so, Developing Mission reconstructs the almost-lost histories of transnational image makers, subjects, and viewers across twentieth-century China and the US.]

Hong, Guo-Juin. “Framing Time: New Women and the Cinematic Representation of Colonial Modernity in 1930s Shanghai.” positions: east asian cultures critique 15, 3 (Winter 2007): 553-80.

Hsieh, Shu-fen. “A Nostaligic Look at Classic Chinese Films.” Sinorama 18, 5 (My 1993): 44.

Hu, Jubin. 2000. “Yingxi (Shadow Play): The Initial Chinese Conception about Film.” Screening the Past (Nov. 2000).

—-. Projecting a Nation: Chinese Cinema Before 1949. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2003. [MCLC Resource Center review by Zhen Zhang]

Huang, Xuelei. “Looking through the Glass of Spatiality: Spatial Practice, Contact Relation, and the Isis Theater in Shanghai, 1917-1937.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 23, 2 (Fall 2011): 1-33.

—–. “From East Lynne to Konggu Lan: Transcultural Tour, Transmedial Translation.” Transcultural Studies no. 2 (2012).

—–. “The Heroic and the Banal: Consuming Soviet Movies in Pre-Socialist China, 1920s–1940s.” Twentieth-Century China 39, 2 (May 2014): 93–117.

[Abstract: Soviet cinema as part of the socialist cultural landscape in Maoist China has been well recognized and extensively researched. This article looks at the earlier exhibition history of Soviet movies in pre-socialist China (from the 1920s to 1940s). It demonstrates that the early Chinese consumption and reception of this film culture involved two intertwined attitudes. On the one hand, Soviet movies were greeted as a much-needed Hero in the Chinese nationalist and anti-imperialist discourses. On the other hand, the exhibition of Soviet movies operated commercially, and commercial sectors promoted the popular appeal of these movies to fulfill the carnal desire of spectators. By examining film reviews, advertisements, and censorship reports, this article explores the ways in which the Hero image and the banal side of the Hero were constructed in the pre-socialist milieu of China.]

Huang, Xuelei. Shanghai Filmmaking: Crossing Borders, Connecting to the Globe, 1922-1938. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2014.

[Abstract:In Shanghai Filmmaking, Huang Xuelei invites readers to go on an intimate, detailed, behind-the-scenes tour of the world of early Chinese cinema. She paints a nuanced picture of the Mingxing Motion Picture Company, the leading Chinese film studio in the 1920s and 1930s, and argues that Shanghai filmmaking involved a series of border-crossing practices. Shanghai filmmaking developed in a matrix of global cultural production and distribution, and interacted closely with print culture and theatre. People from allegedly antagonistic political groupings worked closely with each other to bring a new form of visual culture and a new body of knowledge to an audience in and outside China. By exploring various border crossings, this book sheds new light on the power of popular cultural production during China’s modern transformation.]

—–. “Editor’s Introduction.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 2, 2 (Nov. 2022): 217-19.

—–. “Beyond Labourer’s Love: Rethinking Early Chinese Film Comedy.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 2, 2 (Nov. 2022): 277-97.

[Abstract: This article examines three lost short comedies produced alongside Labourer’s Love by the Mingxing Film Studio in 1922: The King of Comedy Visits Shanghai (Huaji dawang you hu ji), Havoc in a Bizarre Theatre (Danao guai xichang), and The Naughty Kid (Wantong). I propose to look beyond the extant Labourer’s Love and instead to delve into the broader intertextual, intermedial fabric of early film comedy for a re-evaluation of this neglected genre. Drawing on advertising texts, stills, and film reviews, this study corrects misinformation and supplements new data, based on which I posit two notions for a reconceptualization of early Chinese comedy film. First, I propose the Chinese concept of renao (“hot noise”) as a particular sensorial-somatic mode of experience to account for the Chinese engagement with film comedy in the tumultuous 1920s. Second, I borrow the Chinese poetic device of allusion to interpret their widespread references to Hollywood films in structural, narrative, and visual terms. Through the prism of allusion, the appropriation and re-production of Hollywood elements can be regarded as a means of adding authority to inchoate Chinese filmmaking, while at the same time complicating familiar topoi, symbols, and imageries in culturally sensitive ways.]

Huang, Xuelei, ed. Special Section on the Centenerary of Labourer’s Love. Journal of Chinese Film Studies 2, 2 (Nov. 2022).

Huang, Xuelei and and Zhiwei Xiao. “Shadow Magic and the Early History of Film Exhibition in China.” In Song Hwee Lim, and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute, 2011, 47-55.

Iovene, Paola. “Phony Phoenixes: Comedy, Protest, and Marginality in Postwar Shanghai.” In Sherman Cochran and Paul Pickowicz eds., China on the Margins. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010, 267-287.

Jia, Binwu. “Zheng Zhegu and Performances in Early Chinese Film.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 2, 2 (Nov. 2022): 261-76.

[Abstract: The actor Zheng Zhegu is a long-forgotten pioneer in Chinese film. He is perhaps best known for playing the part of Carpenter Zheng in China’s earliest surviving film, Labourer’s Love. Both professionals in the film industry and audiences of the time recognized him as achieving new heights in acting. Starting with Zheng Zhegu’s personal story, this article explores the history of performances in early Chinese film. It emphasizes the transition from “new play-oriented” screen acting to interiors performances, placing this shift in the transformation of Chinese cinema from a “cinema of attractions” to narrative films.]

Johnson, Matthew. International and Wartime Origins of the Propaganda State: The Motion Picture in China, 1897-1955. Ph. D. diss. San Diego: University of California, San Diego, 2008.

[Abstract: This dissertation is a study of elite efforts to master new technologies of political communication in twentieth-century China. In particular, it focuses on an unlikely pair of topics–cinema and state formation. While motion pictures are not often included in discussions of the media, they too have played a role in the creation and exercise of political power. Numerous choices have been made throughout modern Chinese history concerning the proper role of culture in state affairs. A central argument here is that propaganda activities have shaped mass media production from the moment of China’s own “communications revolution” onward. Cinematic technologies–like those of the telegraph, radio, and journalistic press–were instantly appreciated for their powers to enhance political efficacy and shape mass opinion. The relentless pursuit of state prerogatives in each of these areas, partly in response to decades of foreign threat and social crisis, has creating an enduring institutional basis for centralized media management which has survived to the present day.]

—–. “‘Journey to the Seat of War’: The International Exhibition of China in Early Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3, 2 (June 2009): 109-22.

[Abstract: Much about early Chinese cinema remains unknown. This article demonstrates that colonialism, war and cross-cultural contact were important to the emergence and growth of a national film industry. At the same time, they instilled in film-makers the belief that visual technologies and mass media exerted a significant influence over national sovereignty. By the 1920s, globally-circulating techniques of propaganda, as well as reinvented aesthetic traditions (e.g. yingxi, or shadowplay) shaped the cinema’s form as well as its function. Yet like the Qing dynasty before it, Republican China was ensnared in an epistemological ‘net’ created by foreign interests and capital. Proto-national culture industries, such as those envisioned by the Commercial Press and patriotic overseas elites, provided one possible way out.]

—–. “Regional Cultural Enterprises and Cultural Markets in Early Republican China: The Motion Picture as Case Study.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 16 (Sept. 2015).

Kangri zhanzheng shiqi de Chongqing dianying 抗日战争时期的重庆电影 (Film in Chongqing during the War of Resistance Against the Japanese). Chongqing: Chongqing chubanshe, 1991.

Kapitanoff, Nancy. “Moving Pictures: Shadow Magic Explores the Burgeoning Film Industry of 1902 China.” Pulse (April 2001): 79-80.

Kerlan, Anne. “Wishful Images: Three Cinematographic Portraits of a National Film Company.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 15, 1 (March 2021): 1-21.

[Abstract: This paper explores how the Lianhua Film Company, founded in 1930 and active until 1937 communicated its identity and project through its films. These drama films offered an idealized portrait of the movie world and the Chinese society, revealing how the company’s members defined their role in a society looking to build a national identity. The paper focuses on three films: Two Stars of the Milky Way (1931) was a cinematographic interpretation of the founding statement of the company and depicts the company’s utopia. Lianhua’s Symphony (1936), composed of eight shorts, was a patriotic call to resist the Japanese enemy. A Sea of Talents (1937) was produced in the final days of Lianhua, just before the Japanese invasion. It offers a portrait of the artistic world disillusioned and far from patriotic anxieties. These films, analysed here alongside written sources, draw a portrait of the company both as it wanted to be seen and as it actually was. Studying them illuminates the hopes, battles and disillusions of a world of professionals who projected on the screen theirs visions, sometimes conflicting, of a stronger and unified Nation.]

Kingman, Spencer. “China’s First Moving Pictures.” Asia (May 1933): 278-279.

Lee, Daw-ming. “How Cinema Came to China: Some Theories and Doubts.” In Law Kar, ed., Early Images of Hong Kong and China: The 19th Hong Kong International Film Festival. HK: Urban Council, 1995, 33-36.

Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah. “Marion E. Wong.” Women Film Pioneers Project. Columbia University Libraries.

Law, Kar and Frank Bren. “The Enigma of Benjamin Brodsky.” HK Film Archive Newsletter 14 (2000).

Lee, Leo Ou-fan. “The Urban Milieu of Shanghai Cinema.” In Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.

—–. “Face, Body, and the City: The Fiction of Liu Na’ou and Mu Shiying.” In Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999, 82-119.

—–. “The Urban Milieu of Shanghai Cinema, 1930-40: Some Explorations of Film Audience, Film Culture, and Narrative Conventions.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, 74-96.

—–. “Eileen Chang and Cinema.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 2, 2 (Jan. 1999): 37-60.

“Leftist Chinese Cinema of the Thirties.” Cineaste 18, 3 (1990): 36-37.

Li Daoxin 李道新. Zhongguo dianying shi, 1937-1945 中国电影史1937-1945 (History of Chinese film, 1937-1945). Beijing: Shoudu shifan daxue, 2000.

Li, Jie. “A National Cinema for a Puppet State: The Manchurian Motion Picture Association.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 79-97.

—–. “Phantasmagoric Manchukuo: Documentaries Produced by the South Manchurian Railway Company, 1932-1940.” positions: east asia cultures critique 22 (2014): 329-369.

Li Suyuan 郦苏元 and Hu Jubin 胡菊彬. Zhongguo wusheng dianying shi 中国无声电影史 (Chinese silent film history). Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1996.

Li, Suyuan [郦苏元]. Chinese Silent Film History. Tr. Wang Rui, et al. Beijing: China Film Press, 1997.

Lin, Pei-yin. “Comicality in Long Live the Mistress and the Making of a Chinese Comedy of Manners.” Tamkang Review 47, 1 (Dec. 2016): 97-119.

Liu, Lu. “Sorrow after the Honeymoon: The Controversy over Domesticity in Late Republican China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13, 1 (Spring 2001): 1-35.

Lu, Sheldon H. “Review Essay: Agitation or Deep Focus?: Early Chinese Film History and Theory.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 76, 1/2 (2016): 197-207.

Ma, Ning. “Symbolic Representation and Symbolic Violence: Chinese Family Melodrama of the Early 1980s.” East-West Film Journal 4, 1 (Dec 1989): 79-112.

—–. “The Textual and Critical Difference of Being Radical: Reconstructing Chinese Leftist Films of the 1930s.” Wide Angle 11, 2 (1989): 28.

Ma, Yuxin. “Collaborating with Japanese in Making Entertainment Movies for Chinese Viewers: Chinese Filmmakers at Manchurian Film Association.” The Chinese Historical Review 27, 2 (2020): 119-45.

[Abstract: The article studies the experiences of Chinese filmmakers who collaborated with Japanese film specialists at Manchurian Film Association (Manying 1937–45) to make entertainment movies primarily for Chinese viewers in Manchukuo. Chinese filmmakers were neither entirely innocent nor solely complicit in their participation in Manying. Most collaborated with Japanese in making entertainment movies without sharing Japanese colonial ideology. They were not victims, but survivors who made choices based on their best interests. They negotiated with Manying to meet their normal human needs of making a livelihood, getting married, and finding satisfaction in their crafts. They acquired cinema expertise, accumulated professional experiences, and developed social networks that later served them. They made diverse choices under Japanese colonial rule— some left Manying and Manchukuo, others stayed for practical reasons, still others adopted covert resistance. A few sympathized with Japanese rule, and another few resisted at the risk of their freedom or lives.]

Macdonald, Sean. “Li Lili: Acting the Lively, Jianmei Type.” In  Mary Farquhar and Yingjin Zhang, eds., Chinese Film Stars. Oxon: Routledge, 2010, 50-66.

Mazzilli, Mary. “Female Chinese Stars on Screen: Desiring the Bodies of Ruan Lingyu and Linda Lin Dai.” In Brian Berergan-Aurand, Mary Mazzilli, Wai Siam Hee, eds., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics of Failure. Transactions, 2015, 69-94.

McGrath, Jason. “Acting Real: Cinema, Stage, and the Modernity of Performance in Chinese Silent Film.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds.,The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 401-20.

Meyer, Richard J. Ruan Ling-yu: The Goddess of Shanghai. HK: HK University Press, 2005.

[Abstract: Tells the story of one of the greatest Chinese movie stars of the silent era, from her humble origins to her tragic death at the height of her career. Included with the book is a DVD of her most famous film The Goddess]

—–. Jin Shan: The Rudolf Valentino of China (with DVD of The Peach Girl). HK: HK University Press, 2009.

—–. Wang Renmei: The Wildcat of Shanghai (With DVD of Wild Rose). HK: HK University Press, 2013.

[Abstract: Wang Renmei was on a fast track to become one of China’s leading film stars in the 1930s. Her early films were received with magnificent praise by audiences and critics alike, though she later lamented that she became famous too early and never had a chance to properly study acting. The film Song of the Fishermen in which she sang and played a major role was the first Chinese motion picture to win an International Award in Moscow in 1935. Wang’s personal struggles reflected the turbulent period from the end of the Qing dynasty to the rise of Deng Xiaoping. This study explores her artistic achievements amid the prevalent anti-feminist and feudal society in China prior to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949–attitudes which contributed to the downturn of Wang’s promising career and forced her to accept various bit parts among the more than twenty films in which she appeared. In addition, personal problems as well as the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution led to her hospitalization for mental illness. Wang’s life is emblematic of the experiences of many left-wing and Communist Party members from the Shanghai film community who were viewed with suspicion and enmity by the Yan’an clique headed by Mao and later the Gang of Four. Wang’s performances in World War II for the Nationalist troops as well as her work with the US forces in China had a dire effect on her career after 1949. Yet today, her films are being discovered again.]

Motion Pictures in China. Trade Information Bulletin no. 722, US Department of Commerce. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1930.

Ng, Kenny K. K. “The Screenwriter as Cultural Broker: Travels of Zhang Ailing’s Comedy of Love.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20, 2 (Fall 2008): 131-84.

North, C. J. The Chinese Motion Picture Market. Washington, DC: Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, US Department of Commerce, 1927.

Ong, Donna. “Liu Na’ou: The Fate of ‘Middling Modernity’ and the Global Pure Film Movement in Republican-Era China.” Film Quarterly 72, 2 (Winter 2018): 26-37.

Palmer, Augusta. “Scaling the Skyscraper: Images of Cosmopolitan Consumption in Street Angel (1937) and Beautiful New World (1998).” In Zhen Zhang, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21st Century. Durham: Duke UP, 2007, 181-204.

Pang, Laikwan. The Chinese Left-Wing Cinema Movement, 1932-1937: History, Aesthetics, and Ideology. Ph.d. diss. St. Louis: Washington University, 1997.

—–. Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-Wing Cinema Movement, 1932-1937. Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. [MCLC Resource Center review by Shaoyi Sun]

—–. “The Making of a National Cinema: Shanghai Films of the 1930s.” In Song Hwee Lim, and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute, 2011, 56-64.

Pickowicz, Paul. “Melodramatic Representation and the ‘May Fourth’ Tradition of Chinese Cinema.” In Ellen Widmer and David Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentiety-Century China. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993, 295-326.

—–. “Sinifying and Popularizing Foreign Culture: From Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths to Huang Zuolin’s Yedian.” Modern Chinese Literature 7, 2 (Fall 1993): 7-31.

—–. “The Theme of Spiritual Pollution in Chinese Films of the 1930s.” Modern China 17, 1 (January 1991):38-75.

—–. “Victory as Defeat: Postwar Visualizations of China’s War of Resistance.” In Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 365-97.

—–. “Chinese Filmmaking on the Eve of the Communist Revolution.” In Song Hwee Lim, and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute, 2011, 76-85.

Pickowicz, Paul and Yap Soo Ei. “Single Women and the Men in Their Lives: Zhang Ailing and Postwar Visual Images of the Modern Metropolis,” In Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin yeh, eds., Visualizing China: Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2013, 439-60.

Qian, Kun. “Gendering National Imagination: Heroines and the Return of the Foundational Family in Shanghai during the War of Resistance to Japan.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, 1 (March 2014): 78-100.

Quiquemelle, Marie-Claire and Jean-Loup Passek. Le cinema chinois. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985. [contains 14 articles, a chronology, a filmography, and biographical sketches of directors; emphasis on republican era film]

Rayns, Tony. “Missing Links: Chinese Cinema in Shanghai and Hong Kong from the 1930s to the 1940s.” In Law Kar, ed., Early Images of Hong Kong and China: The 19th Hong Kong International Film Festival. HK: Urban Council, 1995, 105-11.

Rea, Christopher. Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949. NY: Columbia University Press, 2020.

[Abstract: Chinese Film Classics, 1922–1949 is an essential guide to the first golden age of Chinese cinema. Offering detailed introductions to fourteen films, this study highlights the creative achievements of Chinese filmmakers in the decades leading up to 1949, when the Communists won the civil war and began nationalizing cultural industries. Christopher Rea reveals the uniqueness and complexity of Republican China’s cinematic masterworks, from the comedies and melodramas of the silent era to talkies and musicals of the 1930s and 1940s. Each chapter appraises the artistry of a single film, highlighting its outstanding formal elements, from cinematography to editing to sound design. Examples include the slapstick gags of Laborer’s Love (1922), Ruan Lingyu’s star turn in Goddess (1934), Zhou Xuan’s mesmerizing performance in Street Angels (1937), Eileen Chang’s urbane comedy of manners Long Live the Missus! (1947), the wartime epic Spring River Flows East (1947), and Fei Mu’s acclaimed work of cinematic lyricism, Spring in a Small Town (1948). Rea shares new insights and archival discoveries about famous films, while explaining their significance in relation to politics, society, and global cinema. Lavishly illustrated and featuring extensive guides to further viewings and readings, Chinese Film Classics, 1922–1949 offers an accessible tour of China’s early contributions to the cinematic arts.]

Rist, Peter. “Visual Style in the Shanghai Films Made by the Lianhua Film Company (United Photoplay Service): 1931-37.” The Moving Image: Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 1, 1 (Spring 2001).

Robinson, David. “Return of the Phantom: Maxu Weibang’s Ye Ban Ge Sheng.” In Steven Jay Schneider, ed., Fear Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe. Goldaming, UK: FAB Press, 2003, 39-43.

Russell, Frances. “Hollywood in China.” Vox Magazine (October 1935).

Shen, Jing. “Male Subjectivities: The Idealization of the Democractic Public Sphere: Crossroads (1937) and The Trouble Shooters (1988).” Asian Cinema 22, 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 208-39.

Shen, Vivian. “From Xin nuxing to Liren xing: Chang Conceptions of the ‘New Woman’ in Republican Era Chinese Films.” Asian Cinema 11, 1 (Spring/Summer 2000): 114-130.

—–. The Origins of the Left-wing Cinema in China, 1932-37. New York and London: Routledge, 2005.

Stephenson, Shelley. “‘Her Traces Are Found Everywhere’: Shanghai, Li Xianglan, and the ‘Greater East Asian Film Sphere.'” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, 222-45.

Sugawara, Yoshino. “Beyond the Boundary between China and the West: Changing Identities of Foreign-Registered Film Theatre Companies in Republican Shanghai.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 1 (2015): 23-31.

[Abstract: This article re-examines the film theatre companies managed by Chinese individuals but registered under foreign laws, focusing on the representative film theatre owner He Tingran and his companies. The article elucidates three roles of the foreign-registered film theatre companies: the capitalist, nationalist and social reformer. The owners of these companies occasionally switched between their Chinese and foreign identities to obtain various benefits, enjoying the various privileges of extraterritoriality, as well as maintaining control over the unconditional oligopoly of foreign distributors. This tactic included proclaiming the interests of the entire Chinese film industry within the foreign companies’ association, on which they exerted a strong influence. The identity of being a foreign-registered film theatre company became crucial for resisting foreign pressures and protecting the domestic film market and film theatre culture post 1930s. However, these practices by the foreign-registered film theatre companies were not concluded either in terms of simple capitalist activities or blind nationalism; the many owners of those companies aimed to reform society through establishing a universal cinema culture]

Sutcliffe, Brett. “A Spring River Flows East: Progressive Ideology and Gender Representation.” Screening the Past 5 (Dec. 1998).

Tam, Enoch Yee-lok. “The Silver Star Group: A First Attempt at Theorizing Wenyi in the 1920s.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 1 (2015): 62-75.

[Abstract: Wenyi is an imported term from Japan and became a local term in China for literary discussion in the early-twentieth century. The term was later adopted by the film industry to designate films with ‘literary’ quality. Recent studies show that wenyi was widely used for branding films after 1935. Yet before that, evidence shows that the notion had already been appropriated by film critics, directors and scriptwriters in their conceptualization of what a good film should be. By focusing on Silver Star (Yinxing, 1926–1928), the most important film magazine for promoting film-as-art in the 1920s, and the anthology Film and Wenyi (dianying yu wenyi, 1928), this article aims to provide a crucial account on the discursive practice of film and wenyi in the 1920s, reflecting upon the early theorization of wenyi in film. Notions like neo-heroism, which was derived from Romain Rolland’s thinking, and symbols of anguish, which was adapted from Kuriyagawa Hakuson via Lu Xun’s translation, are employed to articulate the relationship between film and wenyi by the group of writers from Silver Star.]

Tang, Xiaobing. “Radio, Sound Cinema, and Community Singing: The Making of a New Sonic Culture in Modern China.” Twentieth-Century China 45, 1 (2020): 3-24. Rpt. in Shengqing Wu and Xuelei Huang, eds., Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture. London: Routledge, 2022, 128-47.

[Abstract: The rise of choral singing as public performance in Shanghai during the mid-1930s was the result of overlapping historical developments and conditions. This study considers how new sound technologies, the introduction of new singing subjects as well as subject matter, and an acute sense of the nation in crisis converged to turn “community singing” into a fresh musical practice and generate a new sonic culture. Sound cinema in particular made new heroes visible as well as audible. Liu Liangmo, a secretary of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Shanghai, was instrumental in initiating and promoting the community singing movement. His efforts, along with contributions by Lü Ji, a composer and music theorist of the cultural left, propelled the emergence of China as a “singing nation” by the outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japan in 1937. This process was an integral part of the cultural as well as political history of producing an articulate and audible subject against the soundscape of modernity.]

Teng, Tim Shao-Hung. “Murderous Shadows, Terrifying Air: Dr. Caligari in China.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 14, 3 (2020): 223-41.

[Abstract: This article traces the relocation of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to interwar China, when the nation began to experience a proliferation of terror amid the bleak premonitions of an impending war. Revising Kracauer’s famous interpretation of the film, I reformulate terror as an environmental experience that goes beyond both national and psychological terms, identifying instead the cinematic design of shadows and air as the primary site of horror that hails wartime subjects into being. With a major reference to Fei Mu’s much-neglected work Nightmares in Spring Chamber, the article conducts a transnational mapping of discourses and styles informed by the German and Chinese discussions of air and atmosphere. In cross-referencing genres, critical accounts, and military cultures, this study introduces ‘mismatches’ to Dr. Caligari’s reception in China in hopes of defying the thesis of unidirectional influence often assumed uncritically in transnational film studies.]

To, Li Cheuk. “Le Printemps d’une petite ville, un film qui renouvelle la traditin chinoise.” In Marie-Claire Quiquemelle and Jean-Loup Passek, eds., Le Cinema Chinois. Paris: Centre George Pompidou, 1985, 73-76.

Toroptsev, Sergei. “Xia Yan and the Chinese Cinema.” Far Eastern Affairs 4 (1985): 126-31.

Totaro, Donato. “The Golden Age of Chinese Cinema: Chinese Cinema 1933-1949.” Off Screen (May 12, 1999).

Tsang, Gabriel F. Y. “The Architectural Structure of Prewar Shanghai: Analysis of the Longtang Setting in Street Angel (1937).” In Lisa Bernstein and Chu-chueh Cheng, eds., Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai: Cultural Representations from the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020, 37-52.

Tuohy, Sue. “Metropolitan Sounds: Music in Chinese Films of the 1930s.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, 200-21.

Wall, Michael C. Chinese Reaction to the Portrayal of China and Chinese in American Motion Pictures Prior to 1949. Ph.D. Diss. Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 2000.

Wang, Yiman. “The Phantom Strikes Back: Triangulating Hollywood, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21 (2004): 317-26.

—–. “From Word to Word-image–Film Translation of a ‘Sketchy’ Chinese Short Story /Spring Silkworm.” Literature/Film Quarterly 33, 1 (Jan. 2005): 41-50.

—–. “The Art of Screen Passing: Anna May Wong’s Yellow Yellowface Performance in the Art Deco Era.” Camera Obscura 60 (2005): 159-192.

—–. “Li Xianglan / Yamaguchi Yoshiko and Pan-Asianism.” IIAS Newsletter 38 (Sept. 2005): 7.

—–. “To Write or to Act, That Is the Question: 1920s to 1930s Shanghai Actress-Writers and the Death of the ‘New Woman.” In Lingzhen Wang, ed., Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia University Press, 2011, 235-54.

—–. “Wartime Cinema: Reconfiguration and Border Navigation.” In Song Hwee Lim, and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute, 2011, 65-75.

Way, E. I. Motion Pictures in China. Washington, DC: Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, US Department of Commerce, 1930.

Wei, S. Louisa. “Pu Shunqing.” Women Film Pioneers Project. Columbia University Libraries.

—–. “Esther Eng.” Women Film Pioneers Project. Columbia University Libraries.

—–. “To Marry or To Write? Sheng Qinxian and Her (Screen) Writing in 1940s Shanghai.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 3, 3 (2023): 489-507. 

[Abstract: During the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, writer-translator Sheng Qinxian (1921–2017) joined the script division of the Incorporated Film Studio of China and wrote the screenplays of three successful films: The Honourable Beggar (义丐, 1944), Reunion of a Troubled Couple (冤家喜相逢, 1945), and Modern Women (摩登女性, 1945). Despite this success, she did not receive a writing credit for the third film, which might be one of the reasons that caused her to quit shortly after its theatrical release. It was never easy to be the only woman in any trade during this time, but Sheng’s story allows us to see an era from a unique perspective. What were her working conditions? Where is her position in Chinese film history? Did she make a unique contribution? This article aims to find answers to these questions in view of 1940s’ Shanghai cinema and via the context of Chinese culture and society before 1949.]

—-. “Women Screenwriters of Early Sinophone Cinema: 1916–1949.” In Rosamund Davies, Paolo Russo, and Claus Tieber, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Screenwriting Studies. PalgraveMacmillan, 2023, 295-313.

[Abstract: This chapter presents women screenwriters in early Sinophone cinema—defined to include films made by ethnic Chinese filmmakers, or, in Chinese languages, both in and outside China—from 1916 to 1949. Among silent film writers, the focus is on Chinese-American Marion E. Wong (1895–1969), China’s first female screenwriter Pu Shunqing (1902–1998), and writer-actress Ai Xia (1912–1934). In the early talkie period, Esther Eng (1914–1970) and Wan Hoi Ling (1910–19??), who worked in Hong Kong, the United States, and Singapore, are compared with Sheng Qinxian (1921–2017) and Eileen Chang (1920–1995) who joined film productions in Shanghai. While paying attention to the linkage between women writers and their working conditions in their respective film industries, the objective is to construct a women’s trajectory in screenwriting and its influence on later Sinophone production, which split into parallel streams in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinese diasporas.]

Wilson, Patricia. “The Founding of the Northeast Film Studio 1946-1949.” In George S. Semsel, ed., Chinese Film: The State of the Art in the People’s Republic. New York: Praeger, 1987, 35-62.

Xiang, Adrian Song. “Hollywood and Shanghai Cinema in the 1930s.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15, 2 (2013).

Xiao, Zhiwei. Film Censorship in China, 1927-1937. Ph. D. diss. San Diego: University of California, San Diego, 1994.

—–. “Anti-Imperialism and Film Censorship During the Nanjing Decade, 1927-1937.” In Sheldon Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

—–. “Constructing a New National Culture: Film Censorship and the Issues of Cantonese Dialect, Superstition, and Sex in the Nanjing Decade.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford: SUP, 1999, 183-99.

—–. “Social Activism during the Republican Period: Two Case Studies of Popular Protests against Movies.” Twentieth Century China 25, 2 (April 2000): 55-74.

—–. “Movie House Etiquette Reform in Early-Twentieth-Century China.” Modern China 32, 4 (2006): 513-536.

—–. “American Films in China Prior to 1950.” In Ying Zhu and Stanley Rosen, eds., Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2010, 55-70.

—–. “Policing Film in Early Twentieth-Century China, 1905-1923.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 452-71.

—–. “The Myth about Chinese Leftist Cinema.” In James B. Cook, Joshua Goldstein, Matthew D. Johnson and Sigrid Schmalzer, eds., Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750-present. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015.

Xu, Meimei. “Alternative Readings of Labourer’s Love: The Shakespearean, Pan-Laborist, and Technological Uncanny.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 2, 2 (Nov. 2022): 221-37.

[Abstract: Contemporary source materials confirm that Labourer’s Love was designed to be experimental and editable. It puts the credibility of the extant film in question, and opens up many hermeneutic possibilities. Intriguing issues such as its titles, thematic narrative, and technological aspects of its production call for alternative readings. Based on Zheng Zhengqiu’s benshi (the original synopsis), this paper discusses about the film’s Shakespearean predilection and pan-laborist ideologies. A further relational sociological analysis, however, shows that with the hidden functioning of technical media like lighting and noise, the film has transcended the superficial laborer/non-laborer narrative and created a craftsman/technology discourse. As a result, the established spatial–temporal relations were annihilated and the film generated an experience of technological uncanny.]

Yang, Panpan. “Repositioning Excess: Romantic Melodrama’s Journey from Hollywood to China.” In Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National Cultures. NY: Columbia University Press, 2018, 219-36.

Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu. 2002. “Historiography and Sinification: Music in Chinese Cinema of the 1930s.” Cinema Journal 41, no. 3 (Spring): 78-97.

—–. “New Takes on Film Historiography: Republican Cinema Redux, an Introduction.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 1 (2015): 1-7.

—–. “Translating Yingxi: Chinese Film Genealogy and Early Cinema in Hong Kong.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 1 (2015): 76-109.

[Abstract: The essay targets the concept of yingxi and its translation, “shadowplay,” in prevailing histories of Chinese cinema. Yingxi, a popular Chinese term used for motion pictures between 1897 and 1910s, has been translated as “shadowplay” in English language literature. By translating yingxi as “shadowplay,” scholars have presumed and forged a link between early cinema and traditional artforms like shadow puppetry, or Peking opera. However, little evidence has been produced to link yingxi (motion pictures) with shadow puppetry, or Peking opera in terms of production, exhibition and reception. This de-stabilizes the equation made between yingxi and “shadowplay.” Furthermore, based on new evidence recently recovered on early film exhibition in Hong Kong (1900–1924), we found yinghua (photo pictures) was used more frequently than yingxi, indicating the early reception of cinema was more fluid than what has been prescribed by the yingxi concept. Following yinghua, we discovered that the film screenings in colonial Hong Kong of the 1910s and 1920s were multifaceted events serving various functions, ranging from missionary talks to fund raising and enjoyment of the theatre space. The discovery urges us to look beyond the standard film historiography in the early Republican period, as prescribed by the “drama-centered” yingxi concept and its attendant spatial setup in opera theatres and teahouses.]

Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu, ed. Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China:Kaleidoscopic Histories. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018.

[Abstract: This volume features new work on cinema in early twentieth-century Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China. Looking beyond relatively well-studied cities like Shanghai, these essays foreground cinema’s relationship with imperialism and colonialism and emphasize the rapid development of cinema as a sociocultural institution. These essays examine where films were screened; how cinema-going as a social activity adapted from and integrated with existing social norms and practices; the extent to which Cantonese opera and other regional performance traditions were models for the development of cinematic conventions; the role foreign films played in the development of cinema as an industry in the Republican era; and much more.]

Zhang, Ling. “Rhythmic Movement, the City Symphony and Transcultural Transmediality: Liu Na’ou and the Man Who Has a Camera.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 1 (2015): 42-61.

[Abstract: This article explores how the creative career, protean experiments and theoretical writings of Taiwanese/Shanghainese/Japanese writer, translator, filmmaker and critic Liu Na’ou (1905-1940) were enriched by the interpenetration of his transcultural and transmedial aspirations. Through close reading of Liu’s amateur “city film,” The Man Who Has a Camera (1933), paying explicit homage to Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s “city symphony” film The Man With a Movie Camera (1929), I investigate how it embodies and encompasses the notions of reinvention and transculturation. Furthermore, through Liu’s film criticism, especially on sound aesthetic and rhythmicity, I examine how camera movement and body movement, rhythm and musicality communicate and become entangled with the concept of transmediality. These complications also mediate Liu’s ambiguous cultural identity as a colonial subject and transnational practitioner. I suggest how these intertwined concepts and practices created new aesthetic possibilities in 1930s Shanghai and contributed to—as well as constrained—a distinctively cosmopolitan vision.]

—–. “Sounding Travel Documentary in Wartime China: The Dual Journey of Long Live the Nation.” In James Leo Cahill and Luca Caminati, eds., Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice. NY: Routledge, 2020, 158-80.

Zhang, Yingjin. “Engendering Chinese Filmic Discourse of the 1930s: Configurations of Modern Women in Shanghai in Three Silent Films.” Positions 2, 3 (Winter 1994): 603-28.

—–. “Introduction: Cinema and Urban Culture in Republican Shanghai.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford: SUP, 1999, 3-23.

—–. “Prostitution and Urban Imagination: Negotiating the Public and the Private in Chinese Films of the 1930s.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford: SUP, 1999, 160-80.

—–, ed. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

—–. Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002.

—–. Chinese National Cinema. London; New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.

—–. “Zhao Dan: Spectrality of Martyrdom and Stardom.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 2 (July 2008): 103-111.

[Abstract: here is an uncanny link between martyrdom and stardom in Zhao Dan’s film career. In real life he was twice incarcerated for multiple years, and on screen he appeared often as suffering martyrs. His stardom, based on ‘I play myself’ after Crossroads/Shizi jietou (1937), acquired an eerie dimension of spectrality as his self-performance was attuned to a ghostly mechanism engineered by precarious history more than individual subjectivity. Through Zhao’s fated star performance of self as others, this study investigates spectrality as an irrational logic that integrated martyrdom and stardom in socialist China.]

—–. “Gender, Genre, and Performance in Eileen Chang’s Films: Equivocal Contrasts Across the Print-Screen Divide.” In Lingzhen Wang, ed., Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia UP, 2011, 255-73.

Zhang, Zhen. “An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: The Actress as Vernacular Embodiment in Early Chinese Film.” Camera Obscura [48] 16, 3 (2001): 229-63.

—–. “Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage: Laborer’s Love and the Question of Early Chinese Cinema.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford: SUP, 1999, 27-50.

—–. “Bodies in the Air: Magic of Science and the Fate of the Early ‘Martial Arts’ Film in China.” Post Script 20, 2/3 (Winter/Spring 2001): 43-60. Rpt. in Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh, eds., Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005, 52-75.

—–. “Cosmopolitan Projections: World Literature on Chinese Screens.” In Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, eds., A Companion to Literature and Film. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004, 144-63. [deals mostly with A Spray of Plum Blossoms]

—–. “Asia Film Co.” In Richard Abel, ed. Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 2005: 39.

—–. An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

[Abstract: Shanghai in the early twentieth century was alive with art and culture. With the proliferation of popular genres such as the martial arts film, the contest among various modernist filmmakers, and the advent of sound, Chinese cinema was transforming urban life. But with the Japanese invasion in 1937, all of this came to a screeching halt. Until recently, the political establishment has discouraged comprehensive studies of the cultural phenomenon of early Chinese film, and this momentous chapter in China’s history has remained largely unexamined. The first sustained historical study of the emergence of cinema in China, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen is a fascinating narrative that illustrates the immense cultural significance of film and its power as a vehicle for social change. Named after a major feature film on the making of Chinese cinema, only part of which survives, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen reveals the intricacies of this cultural movement and explores its connections to other art forms such as photography, architecture, drama, and literature. In light of original archival research, Zhang examines previously unstudied films and expands the important discussion of how they modeled modern social structures and gender roles in early twentieth-century China.]

—–. “Transplanting Melodrama: Observations on the Emergence of Early Chinese Narrative Film.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 25-41.

—–. “Transnational Melodrama, Wenyi, and the Orphan Imagination.” In Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National Cultures. NY: Columbia University Press, 2018, 83-98.

Zhong, Dafeng, Zhen Zhang, and Yingjin Zhang. “From Wenmingxi (Civilized Play) to Yingxi (Shadowplay): The Foundation of Shanghai Film Industry in the 1920s.” Asian Cinema 9, 1 (1997): 46-64.

Zhongguo dianying yishu zhongxin, ed. Zhongguo zuoyi dianying yundong 中国左翼电影运动 (The Chinese leftist cinema movement). Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1993.

Zhongguo dianying ziliao guan 中国电影资料馆, ed. Zhongguo wusheng dianying 中国无声电影 (Chinese silent film). Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1996.

Zhongguo zuoyi xijujia lianmeng shiliao ji 中国左翼戏剧家联盟史料集 (Historical materials of the Chinese left-wing dramatists association). Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1991.

Zhu, Ying. “The Sino-Hollywood Relationship–Then and Now.” Weber: The Contemporary West (Spring/Summer 2015): 26-36.

---

1950s-1970s (Mao Era)

Bao, Weihong. “The Politics of Remediation: Mise-en-scene and the Subjunctive Body in Chinese Opera Film.” The Opera Quarterly 26, 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2010): 256-90.

Bao, Ying. “The Problematics of Comedy: New China Cinema and the Case of Lu Ban.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20, 2 (Fall 2008): 185-228.

—–. “National Cinema, Local Language, Trans-regional Adaptation: Dialect Comedy in the Early People’s Republic of China.” Asian Cinema 21, 1 (Spring/Summer 2010): 124-38.

Berry, Chris. “Sexual Difference and the Viewing Subject in Li Shuangshuang and The In-laws.” Berry, ed., Perspectives on Chinese Cinema. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Papers, 1985. Rprt. London: British Film Institute, 1991.

—–. “Stereotypes and Ambiguities: An Examination of the Feature Films of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” Journal of Asian Culture 6 (1982): 37-72.

—–. “Every Colour Red? Colour in the Films of the Cultural Revolution Model Stage Works.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, 3 (2012): 233-246.

—–. “Sino-Korean Screen Connections: Towards a History in Fragments.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, 3 (2016): 247-64.

[Abstract: How can we pursue the original drive of work on transnational cinema to combat methodological and ideological nationalism, but without becoming complicit with globalization and its ideology? This essay proposes researching Sino-Korean screen connections. It opens up five directions, illustrating each with a particular example: (1) revealing the occluded, illustrated by the role of Korean filmmakers in the Shanghai cinema of the colonial era; (2) understanding the transnational as composed of what Anna Tsing calls distinct ‘transnational projects’ that exceed globalization, such as the popularity of North Korean films in the People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution; (3) showing that there is no ‘smooth space’ of global flows, contrasting the relative absence of South Koreans in Chinese films with the much higher profile of Chinese in South Korean films; (4) looking at transborder production cultures, using the little-known example of South Koreans working in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s; and (5) researching exhibition and distribution, such as the traces of the popularity of South Korean melodramas in Taiwan in the 1960s. Taking these examples, the essay asks what kind of history of Sino-Korean film connections can be written. It argues that the only possibility is a disjunctural history of fragments. Precisely because modernity demands that history take up the form of a teleological progress, disjuncture acts as a counter-history, revealing modernity’s violence.]

—–. “Why Remember Everyday Movie-going in Cultural Revolution Shanghai?” In Peng Hsiao-yen and Ella Raidel, eds., The Politics of Memory in Sinophone Cinemas and Image Culture: Altering Archives. Routledge, 2018, 17-31.

Berry, Chris and Shujuan Zhang. “Film and Fashion in Shanghai: What (Not) to Wear during the Cultural Revolution.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13, 1 (2019): 1-25.

[Abstract: Recent scholarship has challenged the assumption that China was an ocean of drab sartorial uniformity during the Cultural Revolution decade. This essay extends this tendency by asking what role cinema played in people’s choices about what to wear. Based on data gathered in group interviews in Shanghai, it finds several tendencies: revolutionary history films inspired contemporary military-style clothing, but not only for political reasons; foreign films screened during the Cultural Revolution built up a mental archive of contemporary international fashion that was drawn upon as the strictures of the era were relaxed in the 1970s; and memories of films screened before 1966 provided another mental archive of retro-fashion possibilities, also drawn on as strictures were relaxed. Overall, our research demonstrates that even though socio-political frameworks always condition individual agency, even in the most difficult of times, individual agency continues to be exercised in the interstices of everyday life.]

Braester, Yomi. “The Purloined Lantern: Maoist Semiotics and Public Discourse in Early PRC Film and Drama.” In Braester, Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 106-27.

—–. “A Big Dying Vat: The Vilifying of Shanghai during the Good Eighth Company Campaign.” Modern China 31, 4 (2005): 411-47.

[Abstract: This article demonstrates how the popular perception of Shanghai as a decadent city was heightened during the campaign for Emulating the Good Eighth Company of Nanjing Road and argues for the central role of cinema in shaping the symbolism of Shanghai’s locales. The campaign, which peaked in 1963, was linked to the Lei Feng campaign and was an important preamble to the Cultural Revolution. The Good Eighth Company campaign shifted the emphasis from Shanghai’s image as a revolutionary bastion to that of a reactionary stronghold, a “big dying vat” that might contaminate the revolutionary forces and that needed to be brought back into the socialist fold. Using internal Party documents, the author maps out the campaign; by examining films, culminating in Sentinels under the Neon Lights (1964), the author also traces the dynamics that made Nanjing Road into a metonym of Shanghai’s depravity and redefined the city’s revolutionary status.]

—–. “The Political Campaign as Genre: Ideology and Iconography during the Seventeen Years Period.” Modern Languages Quarterly 69, 1 (March 2008): 119-140.

—–. “A Genealogy of Cinephilia in the Maoist Period.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 98-115.

Braester, Yomi and Tina Mai Chen. “Film in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979: The Missing Years.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, 1 (March 2011): 5-12.

Chan, Jessica Ka Yee. “Translating ‘Montage’: The Discreet Attractions of Soviet Montage for Chinese Revolutionary Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, 3 (Nov. 2011): 197-218.

[Abstract: What happens when a film term such as ‘montage’ undergoes translation? This article looks at the theoretical permutations of ‘montage’ as it was translated and introduced into China beginning in the early 1930s and the resulting film practices as the term continued to be reread, redefined and reinvented during the communist era. As a result of the attraction to the revolutionary allure of Soviet montage in the 1930s, a mysterious aura was attached to the Chinese transliteration mengtaiqi, which literally means ‘veil (is) too strange’. In a period of intense engagement with international film theory during the ‘seventeen years’ (1949-1966), Chinese filmmakers demystified the inscrutability of montage in an effort to broaden its scope to refer to all film editing methods, including Hollywood continuity editing and Soviet montage. Through close reading of selected films, I look at how montage was creatively reinvented to construct a collectivized subject cinematically. ]

—–. Chinese Revolutionary Cinema: Propaganda, Aesthetics and Internationalism, 1949-1966. London: I. B. Tauris, 2019.

[Abstract: Engaging with fiction films devoted to heroic tales from the decade and a half between 1949 and 1966, this book reconcieves state propaganda as aesthetic experiments that not only radically transformed acting, cinematography and screenwriting in socialist China, but also articulated a new socialist film theory and criticism. Rooted in the interwar avant-garde and commercial cinema, Chinese revolutionary cinema, as a state cinema for the newly established People’s Republic, adapted Chinese literature for the screen, incorporated Hollywood narration, appropriated Soviet montage theory and orchestrated a new, glamorous, socialist star culture. In the wake of decolonisation, Chinese film journals were quick to project and disseminate the country’s redefined self-image to Asia, Africa and Latin America as they helped to create an alternative vision of modernity and internationalism. Revealing the historical contingency of the term ‘propaganda’, Chan uncovers the visual, aural, kinaesthetic, sexual and ideological dynamics that gave rise to a new aesthetic of revolutionary heroism in world cinema. Based on extensive archival research, this book’s focus on the distinctive rhetoric of post-war socialist China will be of value to East Asian Cinema scholars, Chinese Studies academics and those interested in the history of twentieth-century socialist culture.]

Chen, Letty Lingchei. “Cultural Imagining of the Cold War: An Introduction.” China Perspectives 1 (2020): 3-6.

Chen, Thomas. “Surrogate Infrastructure: The Noncommercial Circulation of Chinese Films in the Early Cold War,” Comparative Literature Studies 57, 3 (2020): 398-407.

Chen, Tina Mai. “Propagating the Propaganda Film: The Meaning of Film in Chinese Communist Party Writings, 1949-1965.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, 2 (Fall 2003): 154-93.

—–. “Internationalism and Cultural Experience: Soviet Films and Popular Chinese Understandings of the Future in the 1950s.” Cultural Critique 58 (Fall 2004): 82-114.

—–. “Socialism, Aestheticized Bodies, and International Circuits of Gender: Soviet Female Film Stars in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1969.”Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 18, 2 (2007): 53-80.

—–. “International Film Circuits and Global Imaginaries in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–57.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3, 2 (June. 2009): 149-61.

[Abstract: This article analyses patterns of film export from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to socialist and non-socialist countries during the period from 1949 to 1957. By focusing on the types of films and the countries in which they are exhibited, the article argues for a multilateral and comparative approach to understanding the filmic geographies created, and the ways in which this international film exhibition and its dant filmic geographies participated in Maoist articulations of socialism and modernization as national and global projects. The focus on the first eight years of the PRC and the global circulation of PRC films during this time further encourages a reassessment of scholarship on world cinema that tends to locate socialist cinema and the films of Maoist China outside of global aesthetics, politics and cultural exhibition and production.]

—–. “Film and Gender in Sino-Soviet Cultural Exchange, 1949-1969.” In Hua-yu Li and Thomas Bernstein, eds., China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949 to the Present. Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2010, 421-445.

—–. “Mobile Film Projection in Socialist and Post-Socialist China,” China Policy Institute Blog (May 8, 2015).

Clark, Paul. “The Film Industry in the 1970s.” In Bonnie McDougall, ed. Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the PRC, 1949-1979. Berkeley: UCP, 1984, 177-196.

—–. Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

—–. “Closely Watched Viewers: A Taxonomy of Chinese Film Audiences from 1949 to the Cultural Revolution Seen from Hunan.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, 1 (March 2011): 73-90.

[Abstract: Who were watching films in China from 1949 to the Cultural Revolution Research on this question has been patchy and frustrated by the kinds of sources available. Box office statistics, viewers’ polls and commentaries, and even fandom were open to manipulation to put a positive spin on the growth of audiences and the appropriate popularity of particular films. This article uses a provincial film distribution list of all Chinese and foreign films distributed nationwide in these years to tease out indirect indications of the nature of film audiences. The number of prints struck in 35-mm and 16-mm formats, the language used (in the case of foreign films) and the timing of release all indicate the importance of a differentiation of audiences. Not all film-goers were expected to watch all films: particular titles suited particular viewers. Comparisons are made with a useful profile of the readership of literature in these years.]

—–. “Artists, Cadres, and Audiences: Chinese Socialist Cinema, 1949-1978.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 42-56.

—–. “Singing in the Dark: Film and Cultural Revolution Musical Culture.” In Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-huang Tsai, eds. Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, 107-27.

Coderre, Laurence. “Cultural Revolution Models on Film: The Third World Politics of Self-Reflexivity in On the Docks (1972) In Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi, eds., 1968 and Global Cinema. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018, 345–62

Dai, Jinhua. “Gender and Narration: Women in Contemporary Chinese Film.” Tr. Jonathan Noble. In Dai, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua. Eds. Jing Wang and Tani Barlow. London: Verso, 2002, 99-150.

Delmar, R. and M. Nash. “Breaking with Old Ideas: Recent Chinese Films.” Screen 17, 4 (1976): 67-84.

Donald, Stephanie Hemelryk. “Red Aesthetics, Intermediality and the Use of Posters in Chinese Cinema after 1949.” Asian Studies Review 38, 4 (2014): 658-75.

[Abstract: This article focuses on the aesthetic and affective techniques of saturation through which posters legitimated the Party-State in Mao’s China by closing the gap between everyday experience and political ideology. Propaganda posters were designed to put into practice the principle of unity, as conceptualised by Mao Zedong. The argument posits that while the “poster” is normally a printed edition of a painting or design intended for mass distribution in this way, the term may fairly be deployed to capture other cultural objects that function as “posters”, in that they provide public, political information that expresses or constructs a political self in aesthetic form. This approach requires a metonymic understanding of a visual field in which cultural objects are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The essay draws on recent in-depth interviews with poster artists of the 1960s and 1970s.]

Dong, Xinyu. “Meeting of the Eyes: Invented Gesture, Cinematic Choreography, and Mei Lanfang’s Kun Opera Film.” The Opera Quarterly 26, 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2010): 200-19.

Du, Daisy Yan. “The Dis-appearance of Animals in Animated Film duringthe Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76.” positions: asia critique 24, 2 (May 2016): 435-80.

[Abstract: Conventional studies of the Cultural Revolution usually come from a human-centered perspective that focuses on politics, revolution, and class struggle dramatized in well-established artistic forms such as literature, live-action film, theater, and painting. This kind of approach is presence-centered by drawing attention to the most visible scenarios under the revolutionary limelight at that time. In contrast, this article calls attention to what was invisible in the much-discussed cultural scene: how animals were represented and underrepresented in animation, a marginalized artistic form. Animation, like fairytale, fable, and parable, is usually an artistic form of fantasy full of (talking) animals. Prior to the CR, animated film was replete with (anthropomorphic) animals. As animated film began to be dominated by politicized human action in the mid-1960s, animals systematically disappeared from the silver screen until the late 1970s. The CR can therefore be redefined as a decade of absent animals. However, these animals did not vanish completely during the CR; rather they took refuge in the bodies of ethnic minorities and villains, waiting for opportunities to return, seek revenge, and talk back…. When the wrathful animals returned to the screen in the late 1970s, the seemly impregnable ideology of the CR gradually disintegrated.]

Du, Weijia. “Beyond the Ideology Principle: The Two Faces of Dubbed Foreign Films in PRC, 1949-1966.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 2 (2015): 141-58.

Du, Ying. “Pursuing the Special Agent—Adaptation of Mao Dun’s Fushi and the Politics of Representing Espionage.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29, 2 (Fall 2017): 159-205.

Gong, Haoming. “Reshaping Nature: Humanism, Ethnicity, and Literary and Film Production of the Story of Daji.” Frontiers of Literary Study in China 15, 1 (March 2021): 136-58.

[Abstract: This article discusses the role that nature plays in ethnic literature and films in the Seventeen‐Year Period (1949–66). It takes the story of Daji and Her Fathers as an example and investigates the ways in which nature features in the reconstruction of ethnic identity in the formation of a multiethnic nation as in the case of China. I will explore three aspects: first, the debate on humanism, which was closely related to ethnic minority film production at the time. A central issue of the debate then was the question of “humanistic”—that is, affective, emotional, subjective, and most importantly, natural—expression in literary and art works. Ethnic minority identity, with its unique status, was given some latitude for humanistic expression and “natural” understanding. Second, due to ethnic minority groups’ special significance in China’s nation‐building, a reconstruction of ethnic minority nature became imperative for the People’s Republic of China. This reconstruction involves mostly restructuring a “second nature,” or dialectic nature of minority under the socialist mandate. This dialectic nature demands something more than natural, immediate constituents and requires a socially and politically mediated ethnic minority nature that is aligned with multiethnic nationality. Third, this dialectic nature is to be formed following Marxist dialectical materialism, mainly through the means of social(ist) labor that changes nature.]

Gong, Qian. “Masters of the Nation: Representation of the Industrial Worker in Films of the Cultural Revolution Period.” China Perspectives 2 (2015): 15-23.

Han Yanli. “Film, Ethnic Minorities, and the Anti-Japanese War: An Analysis of the Muslim Detachment and Jin Yuli.” Tr. Timothy Y Tsu. In King-fai Tam, Timothy Y Tsu, and Sandra Wilson, eds., Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War. New York: Routledge, 2015, 26-39.

Harris, Kristine. “Re-makes/Re-models: The Red Detachment of Women between Stage and Screen.” The Opera Quarterly 26, 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2010): 31-42.

He, Qiliang. Working the System: Motion Picture, Filmmakers, and Subjectivities in Mao-Era China, 1949–1966. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: Qiliang He inquires into the making of the new citizenry in Mao-era China by studying five preeminent Shanghaibased filmmakers. These case studies shed light on how individuals’ subjectivities took shape in the cinematic arena under a new sociopolitical system after 1949. He suggests that a filmmaker’s subjectivity was not fixed or stable but constantly in flux, requiring a host of “subjectivizing practices” to (re)shape and consolidate it. These filmmakers endeavored to reap maximal benefits from Mao’s sociopolitical system and minimize the disadvantages that would make them victims under the system. In short, Qiliang He argues that the filmmakers not only worked under the socialist system imposed upon them but also worked the system in their own best interests.]

He, Qiliang and Meng Wang. “From Wu Xun to Lu Xun: Film, Stardom, and Subjectivity in Mao’s China (1949-1976).” Modern China 48, 3 (May 2022).

[Abstract: This article focuses on Zhao Dan’s (1915–1980) career in film after 1949 to investigate a specific type of stardom unique to Mao Zedong’s China (1949–1976). We argue that this new stardom was similar to what conventionally defines stardom, but with an added political dimension: Zhao Dan’s acquisition of high political standing in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). To arrive at a fuller understanding of the state–artist relationship in the PRC, this article challenges the paradigm of accommodation and resistance between the tyrannical state and subordinated artists, which presupposes a subjectivity or selfhood on the part of artists that pre-existed and was maintained against the intrusive hegemonic ideologies of the state. Instead, we underscore that the making of Zhao Dan’s subjectivity in the PRC—his subjectivity-in-stardom in this case—was a dynamic process, a “becoming.” Zhao Dan’s checkered career indicates that he not only acclimated himself to the ever-changing political atmosphere of Mao-era China but also sought to benefit from it.]

Healy, Gavin. “Fuwuyuan on Film: Cinema, Socialist Education, and Service Labor from the Great Leap Forward to Reform and Opening Up.” Modern China 50, 2 (2024).

[Abstract: As industrial and agricultural production kicked into overdrive during the Great Leap Forward, so too did cinematic production. Factories and agricultural collectives promoted labor models, and the film industry created new cinematic models of heroic production workers. At the same time, valorization of production labor heightened the alienation of workers in the “nonproductive” service sector. To address this situation, service sector work units nominated their own model workers, and the film industry brought tales of service workers to audiences nationwide. Through a close reading of three such films— Fuwuyuan 服务员 (1958), produced during the Great Leap Forward; Manyi bu manyi 满意不满意 (1963), produced just after the Great Leap Forward; and Duan panzi de guniang 端盘子的姑娘 (1981), produced shortly after the implementation of market reforms—this article charts the evolution of cinematic discourse on the value of service work in the economy and society of socialist and early post-socialist China.]

Hoare, Stephanie. “‘The New Year’s Sacrifice’: Using Literary Adaptation in the Chinese Literature Classroom.” Asian Studies Review 14, 3 (April 1991): 88-92.

Hu, Nan. “Familiar Strangers: Images and Voices of Soviet Allies in Dubbed Films in 1950s China.” China Perspective 1 (2020): 25-31.

Huang, Nicole. “Azalea Mountain and Late Mao Culture.” The Opera Quarterly 26, 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2010): 402-25.

Hui, Calvin. “Socks and Revolution: The Politics of Consumption in Sentinels under the Neon Lights (1964).” In Poshek Fu and Man-Fung Yip, eds., The Cold War and Asian Cinemas. NY: Routledge, 2019.

Johnson, Matthew D. “The Science Education Film: Cinematizing Technocracy and Internationalizing Development.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, 1 (March 2011): 31-54.

[Abstract: An important chapter in the longer story of forgotten socialist cinemas, PRC film-making for scientific education (kexue jiaoyu, or ke-jiao) was distinguished by a persistent international orientation. Prior to 1949 elite enlightenment efforts, League of Nations-inspired educational reform and missionary institutions of higher learning had created a vibrant, though limited, web of institutions devoted to popularizing scientific education through cinema. Like the propaganda system itself, these intellectual and institutional initiatives expanded further following Chinese Communist Party takeover. Scientific educators not only hoped to raise national standards of production, behaviour and knowledge, but also to use images of scientific evidence and progress to bolster the PRC’s reputation on the world stage. Despite deep geopolitical cleavages during the Cold War period, film-making for scientific education suggests the existence of a shared global culture technocratic, homogenizing and nationally directed which transcended nationally specific forms. The origins of this culture, however, lay not in the Cold War itself but rather in earlier, inter-war attempts to internationalize the uniform practices of state-led development and social management. In this sense, China’s cinematic history sheds light on the origins and dissemination of scientific culture during the twentieth century.]

—–. “Cinema and Propaganda during the Great Leap Forward.” In James B. Cook, Joshua Goldstein, Matthew D. Johnson and Sigrid Schmalzer, eds., Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750-present. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015.

Kang, Ling. “Cinemascope’s Chinese Journey: The Technological Modernisation and the Logistics of the Perception of the Cold War.” China Perspectives 1 (2020): 7-14.

Karl, Rebecca E. “The Burdens of History: Lin Zexu (1959) and the Opium War (1997).” In Xudong Zhang, ed., Whither China? Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

Kuoshu, Harry H. “The White-Haired Girl and Li Shuangshuang: Female Visibility and the Socialist Feminism.” In Harry Kuoshu, Lightness of Being in China: Adaptation and Discursive Figuration in Cinema and Theater. NY: Peter Lang, 1999, 71-94.

Lam, Ling Hon. “Reading off the Screen: Toward Cinematic Il-literacy in Late 1950s Opera Film.” The Opera Quarterly 26, 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2010): 291-315.

Lewis, Greg. “The History, Myth, and Memory of Maoist Chinese Cinema, 1949-1976.” Asian Cinema 16, 1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 162-83.

—–. “New China’s Forgotten Cinema, 1949-1966: More Than Just Politics.” Education About Asia (Fall 2004): 57-64.

Li, Jie. “Gained in Translation: The Reception of Foreign Cinema in Mao’s China.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13, 1 (2019): 61-75. Rpt. in Poshek Fu and Man-Fung Yip, eds., The Cold War and Asian Cinemas. NY: Routledge, 2019.

[Abstract: This article studies the exhibition and reception of popular foreign titles in the cinematic memories of those who grew up in the Cultural Revolution: Soviet film Lenin in 1918 (1939), North Korean film The Flower Girl (1972), Albanian film Victory Over Death (1967), and Indian film Awara (1951). I argue that, as films crossed national, even continental borders to meet with mass audiences for whom they were never intended, the radically different exhibition and reception contexts helped generate new meanings “gained in translation.” Those heteroglossic “extrinsic meanings” revise David Bordwell’s referential, explicit, implicit and symptomatic meanings. This article will also delve into affective responses, hidden pleasures, and viewer identifications. Studying foreign cinema’s reception in Mao’s China broadens the field of “Chinese cinema studies” to include “cinema in China” with all of its cosmopolitan connections, revises our assessment of the Cultural Revolution, and invites us to reconsider today’s Chinese media ecology in light of its socialist past.]

—–. “Cinematic Guerrillas in Mao’s China.” Screen 61, no. 2 (2020): 207-229

—-. “The Hot Noise of Open-Air Cinema.” Grey Room 81 (Fall 2020): 6-35. Rpt. in Shengqing Wu and Xuelei Huang, eds., Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture. London: Routledge, 2022, 199-227.

—–. Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China. NY: Columbia University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: How might cinema make revolution and mobilize the masses? In socialist China, the film exhibition network expanded from fewer than six hundred movie theaters to more than a hundred thousand mobile film projectionist teams. Holding screenings in improvised open-air spaces in rural areas lacking electricity, these roving projectionists brought not only films but also power generators, loudspeakers, slideshows, posters, live performances, and mass ritual participation, amplifying the era’s utopian dreams and violent upheavals. Cinematic Guerrillas is a media history of Chinese film exhibition and reception that offers fresh insights into the powers and limits of propaganda. Drawing on a wealth of archives, memoirs, interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, Jie Li examines the media networks and environments, discourses and practices, experiences and memories of film projectionists and their grassroots audiences from the 1940s to the 1980s. She considers the ideology and practice of “cinematic guerrillas”—at once denoting onscreen militants, off-the-grid movie teams, and unruly moviegoers—bridging Maoist iconography, the experiences of projectionists, and popular participation and resistance. Li reconceptualizes socialist media practices as “revolutionary spirit mediumship” that aimed to turn audiences into congregations, contribute to the Mao cult, convert skeptics of revolutionary miracles, and exorcize class enemies. Cinematic Guerrillas considers cinema’s meanings for revolution and nation building; successive generations of projectionists; workers, peasants, and soldiers; women and ethnic minorities; and national leaders, local cadres, and cultural censors. By reading diverse, vivid, and often surprising accounts of moviegoing, Li excavates Chinese media theories that provide a critical new perspective on world cinema.]

Liu, Alan P. L. The Film Industry in Communist China. Cambridge: Center for International Studies, MIT, 1965.

Liu, Lydia. “A Folksong Immortal and Official Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century China.” In Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia Liu, with Ellen Widmer, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003, 553-609. [deals with film “Liu Sanjie” and its folk roots]

Liu, Lu. “Bacterial Imagination: Seeing the Enemy in the People’s Republic of China of the Early 1950s.” China Perspectives 1 (2020): 17-24.

Liu, Mia Yinxing. Literary Lenses: Wenren Landscape of Chinese Cinema of the Mao Era. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019.

[Abstract: Chinese cinema has a long history of engagement with China’s art traditions, and literati (wenren) landscape painting has been an enduring source of inspiration. Literati Lenses explores this interplay during the Mao era, a time when cinema, at the forefront of ideological campaigns and purges, was held to strict political guidelines. Through four films—Li Shizhen (1956), Stage Sisters (1964), Early Spring in February (1963), and Legend of Tianyun Mountain (1979)—Mia Liu reveals how landscape offered an alternative text that could operate beyond political constraints and provide a portal for smuggling interesting discourses into the film. While allusions to pictorial traditions associated with a bygone era inevitably took on different meanings in the context of Mao-era cinema, cinematic engagement with literati landscape endowed films with creative and critical space as well as political poignancy. Liu not only identifies how the conventions and aesthetics of traditional literati landscape art were reinvented and mediated on multiple levels in cinema, but also explores how post-1949 Chinese filmmakers configured themselves as modern intellectuals in the spaces forged among the vestiges of the old. In the process, she deepens her analysis, suggesting that landscape be seen as an allegory of human life, a mirror of the age, and a commentary on national affairs.]

Liu, Shasha. “Zooming in on the Animated Background: Mediated Dunhuang Murals with Design in The Conceited General.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 15, 1 (March 2021): 22-38.

[Abstract: The Conceited General (directed by Te Wei, 1956) is widely celebrated as the first Chinese animation to represent a national style (minzu fengge). Taking a closer look, the ‘national style’ manifested in this film also refers to specific zaojing murals at Dunhuang rather than Peking Opera art or a traditional painting technique alone as discussed by existing scholarship. Analysing the Dunhuang background design, the film presents a visual referencing to Dunhuang murals through a process of complex mediation. This paper seeks to trace the history of adaptations of Dunhuang murals manifested in this case. It points to the cultural-historical journey in which zaojing was transformed from architectural-based murals into two-dimensional images that highlight geometrical patterns, and eventually entered the animation as cultural objects. Approaching animation from the perspective of animated background and in an intermedia context, this paper complicates the understanding of the national style and recontextualizes Chinese animation in the long-neglected history of design, both graphic and industrial.]

Loh, Wai-fong. “From Romantic Love to Class Struggle: Reflections on the Film Liu Sanjie.” In Bonnie McDougall, ed. Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the PRC, 1949-1979. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, 165-176.

Lu, Xiaoning. “Zhang Ruifang: Modelling the Socialist Red Star.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 2 (July 2008): 113-22.

[Abstract: Adopting a historical approach, this essay uses the concept of Red Star to examine the construction of the star in Chinese socialist cinema. Through a case study of Zhang Ruifang, this essay argues that a theoretical paradigm of modelling is crucial to comprehending the Red Star, one who embodies the ideal socialist person both on screen and off screen. As Zhang Ruifang’s film stardom illustrates, the Red Star served as a model for the masses and was subject to remodelling by the socialist ideology.]

—–. “The Politics of Recognition and Constructing Socialist Subjectivity: Reexamining the National Minority Film (1949-1966).” Journal of Contemporary China 23 (March 2014): 372-486.

[Abstract:Adopting an historical approach, this essay reexamines the national minority films produced between 1949 and 1966 in socialist China with a focus on its role in the Chinese Communist Party’s political project of building an ideal socialist citizenry. Shifting the critical anchoring of the national minority film from questions of representation to those of performance and spectatorship, it points out that cross-ethnic performance embedded within film narrative and discerned by historically situated audiences simultaneously constructs and deconstructs ethnicity, thus encouraging a transformative recognition across the ethnic boundary. Ultimately the national minority film models fraternity of citizenship essential to creating socialist subjectivity.]

—–. “Villain Stardom in Socialist China: Chen Qiang and the Cultural Politics of Affect.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 3 (2015): 223-38.

[Abstract: Despite playing various kinds of roles across genres from 1949 to 1965, Chen Qiang acquired stardom mainly due to his remarkable screen performance as villainous landlords in socialist China. His villain stardom is an aberrant case, compared to the majority of film stars in Chinese socialist cinema who encouraged identification and emulation and helped propagate socialist ideology to reform Chinese citizens. Paying special attention to socio-historically specific film exhibition practices and the actor’s own reflections on his villain performance, this article argues that Chen’s stardom functioned as an important affective technology within a wider and complex Communist propaganda enterprise in that it helped cultivate class hatred necessary for the Communist revolution and socialist land reform campaigns. Through this case study, the article suggests that close engagement with both cultural–historical specificities of cinema and recent critical theories of affect open up a space for researching the diversified star phenomena in contemporary China.]

—–. “Intermedial Laughter: Hou Baolin and Xiangsheng Dianying in Mid-1950s China.” In Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath, eds., Maoist Laughter. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2019, 73-88.

—–. Moulding the Socialist Subject: Cinema and Chinese Modernity (1949-1966). Leiden: Brill 2020.

[Abstract: What role did cinema play in the Chinese Communist Party’s political project of shaping ideal socialist citizens in the early People’s Republic? In Moulding the Socialist Subject, Xiaoning Lu deploys case studies from popular film genres, movie star culture and rural film exhibition practices to argue that Chinese cinema in 1949–1966, at once an important political instrument, an enjoyable yet instructive form of entertainment, and a specific manifestation of the socialist society of the spectacle, was an everyday site where the moulding of the new socialist person unfolded. While painting a broad picture of Chinese socialist cinema, Lu credits the human agency of film professionals, whose self-reflexivity and individual adaptability played an intrinsic role in the Party’s political project.]

Ma, Ning. “Satisfied or Not: Desire and Discourse in the Chinese Comedy of the 1960s.” East-West Film Journal 2, 1 (Dec 1987): 32-49.

Mangalagiri, Adhira. “A Poetics of the Writers’ Conference: Literary Relation in the Cold War World.” Comparative Literature Studies 58, 3 (2021): 509-531.

[Abstract: This article offers a poetics of the writers’ conference as conducted via channels of Cold War–era cultural diplomacy through a reading of the Asian Writers’ Conference (New Delhi, 1956), a largely forgotten predecessor of the better-known Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences. Focusing particularly on the Chinese writers in attendance, I read the conference literarily, with an eye to its aesthetics and the particular performance of transnational literary relation that it engendered. The Conference’s fortuitous confluence with the Hundred Flowers Campaign in China unexpectedly made possible an approach to transnational literary exchange that actively eschewed and rebelled against state intervention in the literary sphere. As such, the Asian Writers’ Conference effected a form of transnational literary relation that thrived in its self-avowed uselessness to mandates of diplomacy. The Conference warns against the tendency in South–South studies to valorize the decentering of colonial powers as cultural mediators without a critical engagement with the nation-state’s overseeing presence once it occupies that agential role in transnational literary exchange.]

Marchetti, Gina. “Two Stage Sisters: The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic.” Jump Cut 34 (1988): 95-106. Rpt. In Sheldon Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997, 59-80.

McGrath, Jason. “Cultural Revolution Model Opera Films and the Realist Tradition in Chinese Cinema.” The Opera Quarterly 26, 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2010): 343-76.

—–. “Communists Have More Fun! The Dialectics of Fulfillment in Cinema of the People’s Republic of China.” World Picture 3 (Summer 2009). [deals in part with Xie Jin’s Red Detachment of Women and with Song of Youth]

Meek, Scott and Tony Rayns. “Before the Cultural Revolution” Sight and Sound 49 (Autumn, 1980).

Meng Liye 孟犁野. Xin Zhongguo dianying yishu shigao, 1949-1959 新中国电影艺术史稿，1949-1959 (Draft history of new China’s film art, 1949-1959). Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 2002.

Meng Liye 孟犁野, et al., eds. Zaijian geming lishi de yishu: geming lishi ticai dianying yanjiu lunwen ji 再见革命历史的艺术: 革命历史题材电影研究论文集 (Goodbye to the art of revolutionary history: collection of essays on films wit revolutionary history themes). Beijing: Beijing dianying, 1993.

Mills, Ian. “Why Did Chiang Ching Close Down Chinese Film Production? Or, the Garden of Eden Re-Opened.” Australian Journal of Screen Theory 15-16 (1983): 7-34.

Mittler, Barbara. “‘Eight Stage Works for 800 Million People’: The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Music–A View from Revolutionary Opera.” The Opera Quarterly 26, 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2010): 377-401.

Pang, Laikwan. “Between Will and Negotiation: Film Policy in the First Three Years of the People’s Republic of China.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 472-89.

—–. “The Visual Representation of the Barefoot Doctor: Between Medical Policy and Political Struggles.” positions: asia critique 22, 4 (Fall 2014): 836-75.

—–. “Colour and Utopia: The Filmic Portrayal of Harvest in Late Cultural Revolution Narrative Films.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, 3 (2012): 263-82.

Pickowicz, Paul G. “Cinema and Revolotion in China: Some Interpretive Themes.” American Behavioral Scientist 17 (Jan-Feb 1974): 328-59.

—–. “Acting Like Revolutionaries: Shi Hui, the Wenhua Studio, and Private-Sector Filmmaking, 1949-1952.” In Jeremy Brown and Paul Pickowicz, eds., Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008.

Qian, Ying. “Crossing the Same River Twice: Reenactment and the Founding of PRC Documentary Cinema.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 590-609.

Rayns, Tony. “Director: King Hu.” Sight and Sound 45 (1976): 8-13.

Robinson, Lewis. “Family: A Study in Genre Adaptation.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 12 (1984): 35-57.

Stephen Teo. “The Lin Shop Family: A Chinese Melodrama of Capitalist Existentialism.” Senses of Cinema 28 (Sept.-Oct. 2003).

Tang, Aubrey. “Filmagining Ethnicities: The Making of a Chinese Nation with Film Genres and Styles Between 1940 and 1963.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, 3 (Sept. 2014): 443-67.

[Abstract: This article is about the movies from Chinese mainland under the production category of minority cinema (shaoshu minzu dianying), between the years 1940 and 1963. It argues that the taxonomic effort of grouping different non-Han ethnicities together into a single category of minority cinema is a sociopolitical attempt to construct, maintain and control the definition of ethnic minorities. It calls into question not what is within the film, but the classificatory practices outside of the film collectively engaged by the government, the film industry, the critics and the mass audience. Moving away from the methods of examining the representation and generic conventions of the cinema other scholarship has employed, this article emphasizes the classification system used during the time of the cinema. By comparing it with a similar classificatory problem in Western national history, using an epistemological perspective, this article criticizes the negative impact inevitably left in rhetorically driven classification systems.]

Tang, Xiaobing. “Rural Women and Social Change in New China Cinema: From Li Shuangshuang to Ermo.” positions 11, 3 (Winter 2003): 647-74.

Tessier, Max. “Hsu Feng: Steel in Velvet.” Cinemaya 15 (1992): 13-15.

Toroptsev, Sergei. “The Space of the Subjective: Pre-Fifth Generation Chinese Cinema.” Cinemaya 16 (1992): 14-17.

Van Fliet Hang, Krista. “Creativity and Containment in the Transformations of Li Shuangshuang.” In Van Fliet Hang, Literature the People Love: Reading Chinese Texts from the Early Maoist Period (1949-1966). NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 57-90.

Wang, Ban. “Art, Politics, and Internationalism: Korean War Films in Chinese Cinema.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 250-68.

—–. “Laughter, Ethnicity, and Socialist Utopia: Five Golden Flowers.” In Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath, eds., Maoist Laughter. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2019, 19-36.

Wang, Lingzhen. “Wang Ping and Women’s Cinema in Socialist China: Institutional Practice, Feminist Cultures, and Embedded Authorship.” Signs 40, 3 (2015): 589-622.

[Abstract: This essay examines Wang Ping 王苹, the first Chinese socialist female film director, and her most representative film: The Story of Liubao Village (柳堡的故事, 1956), retheorizing female cinematic authorship as a contingent articulation embedded within dynamic interactions among a multiplicity of historical forces. This analysis addresses three critical issues in Chinese studies and cross-cultural feminist analysis: the dismissal of socialist cinema as mere propaganda, the influence of the Cold War on the study of socialist China and women since the 1980s in American academia, and the liberal and radical feminist approaches to gender, which tend to separate gender from other political, social, and cultural practices by adhering to a Western-centered universalism. Methodologically, this essay critically reconstructs socialist feminist institutionalization in Chinese socialist revolution (1921-1949), as well as the formation of socialist feminist public/official space and cultural practice in early socialist China (1949-1966), rehistoricizes the practice of early Chinese socialist cinema (1949-1957) as dynamic and experimental; and resituates Wang Ping within those socialist feminist and filmmaking contexts to reconfigure women’s cultural agency as a historical effect of multiforce significations.]

—–. Revisiting Women’s Cinema: Feminism, Socialism, and Mainstream Culture in Modern China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.

[Abstract: Wang ponders the roots of contemporary feminist stagnation and the limits of both commercial mainstream and elite minor cultures by turning to socialist women filmmakers in modern China. She foregrounds their sociopolitical engagements, critical interventions, and popular artistic experiments, offering a new conception of socialist and postsocialist feminisms, mainstream culture, and women’s cinema. Wang highlights the films of Wang Ping and Dong Kena in the 1950s and 1960s and Zhang Nuanxin and Huang Shuqin in the 1980s and 1990s to unveil how they have been profoundly misread through extant research paradigms entrenched in Western Cold War ideology, post-second-wave cultural feminism, and post-Mao intellectual discourses. Challenging received interpretations, she elucidates how socialist feminism and culture were conceptualized and practiced in relation to China’s search not only for national independence and economic development but also for social emancipation, proletarian culture, and socialist internationalism. Wang calls for a critical reevaluation of historical materialism, socialist feminism, and popular culture to forge an integrated emancipatory vision for future transnational feminist and cultural practices.]

Wang, Qi. “Those Who Lived in a Wall-papered Home: The Historical Space of the Socialist Chinese Counter-Espionage Film.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, 1 (March 2012): 55-72.

[Abstract: This article seeks to engage socialist Chinese counter-espionage film beyond the frame of analysis dictated by state propaganda and film genre. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines textual analysis and contextual research in history, architecture and interior design, the article travels between cinematic and historical spaces such as the homes of spies and socialist workers, the offices of official investigators, the urban as well as social landscape of the 1950s and in the process observes a dynamic incomplete alignment between cinema and history, representation and reality, politics and society.]

Wang, Yuejin. “Melodrama as Historical Understanding: The Making and the Unmaking of Communist Historry.” In Wimal Dissanayake, ed., Melodrama and Asian Cinema. NY: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Wang, Zhuoyi. “From the Life of Wu Xun to the Career of Song Jingshi: Crisis and Adaptation of Private Studio Filmmaking Legacy, 1951-1956.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, 1 (March 2011): 13-30.

[Abstract: Current literary studies frequently assume that early PRC cinema is monolithic and univocal. Historical research has started to reveal the complex and shifting divisions in both the cultural leadership and film-making ranks in early PRC, but offer little in-depth textual analysis to expand our understanding of the films beyond the prevailing assumption that all of them are identical. This study seeks to introduce a fluid understanding that departs from the conventional homogenization of this cinema. It calls for a turn to user-centered study of discursive cases, and analyzes the film Song Jingshi (1957) as a key case showing how conflicts and compromises among multiple agendas rendered early PRC films ambivalent and polysemous. The film Song Jingshi was meant to be a coherent part of the campaign against The Life of Wu Xun (1951) and other private studio productions. But because various groups had high, competing stakes in the outcomes of this production, the film was forced into a long and painful revision process, in which rival interests produced contradictory interpretations of and inserted contending voices into the text. When examining this multipartite struggle, I particularly focus on how former private studio artists, constituting most of the film crew, actively adjusted and strategically defended their private studio film-making legacy.]

—–. Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 1951-1979. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jessica Ka Yee Chan]

[Abstract: A comprehensive history of how the conflicts and balances of power in the Maoist revolutionary campaigns from 1951 to 1979 complicated and diversified the meanings of films, this book offers a discursive study of the development of early PRC cinema. Wang closely investigates how film artists, Communist Party authorities, cultural bureaucrats, critics, and audiences negotiated, competed, and struggled with each other for the power to decide how to use films and how their extensively different, agonistic, and antagonistic power strategies created an ever-changing discursive network of meaning in cinema.]

Wang, Zihan. “Revolutionary Appropriation of Disability in Socialist Chinese Literature and Film.” China Perspectives 1 (2021): 61-70.

Ward, Julian. “The Remodelling of a National Cinema: Chinese Films of the Seventeen Years (1949-66).” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 87-94.

Weakland, John. “Chinese Film Images of Invasion and Resistance.” China Quarterly 47 (July-September, 1971): 439-70.

Winzenburg, John. “Musical-Dramatic Experimentation in the Yangbanxi: A Case for Precedence in The Great Wall.” In Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-huang Tsai, eds. Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, 189-212.

Wong, Chuen-Fung. “The West Is Red: Uyghur Adaptations of the Legend of the Red Lantern (Qizil Chiragh) during China’s Cultural Revolution.” In Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-huang Tsai, eds. Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, 147-66.

Xiao, Jiwei. “A Traveller’s Glance: Antonioni in China.” New Left Review 79 (Jan-Feb. 2013).

[Abstract: It is understandable that Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the few Western directors permitted to film in China during the Cultural Revolution, was able to catch only a ‘quick glance’ of the country, as he put it in his 1972 documentary, Chung Kuo-Cina; time constraints and the political situation did not allow him to do otherwise. But what a glance! The film galvanized the PRC in a mass campaign against the director and touched off diplomatic incidents across Europe; four decades later, it would again stir intense but very different responses among Chinese viewers. In between, Chung Kuo had become that intriguing oxymoron: a well-known obscure film. The least seen and least studied of Antonioni’s works in the West, in China its notoriety was once inversely matched by the number of its viewers–it was the film that everybody deplored but almost nobody had watched.]

Xiao, Zhiwei. “The Expulsion of American Films from China, 1949-1950.” Twentieth-Century China 30, 1 (Nov. 2004).

Xu, Gary. “Edification through Affection: The Cultural Revolution Films, 1974-1976.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 269-80.

Xu, Lanjun. “The Southern Film Corporation, Opera films, and the PRC’s Cultural Diplomacy in Cold War Asia, 1950s and 1960s.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29, 1  (Spring 2017): 239-281. Rpt in Jeremy Taylor and Lanjun Xu, eds., Chineseness and the Cold War: Contested Cultures and Diaspora in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. London: Routledge, 2022, 25-44.

—–. “Contested Chineseness and Third Sister Liu in Singapore and Hong: Songs, Landscape, and Cold War Politics in Asia.” In Poshek Fu and Man-Fung Yip, eds., The Cold War and Asian Cinemas. NY: Routledge, 2019.

Yau, Esther C.M. “Compromised Liberation: The Politics of Class in Chinese Cinema of the Early 1950s.” In David James and Rick Berg, eds., The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 138-71.

—–. Filmic Discourse on Women in Chinese Cinema (1949-65): Art, Ideology and Social Relations. Ph. D. diss. LA: University of California, Los Angeles.

Yu Lan 于蓝. “Ertong dianying sanshiwu nian xunli” 儿童电影三十五年巡礼 (An overiew of 35 years of children’s film). In Zhonghua renmin gonghe guo dianying shiye sanshiwu nian, 1949-1984 中华人民共和国电影事业三十五年 1949-1984  (Thirty-five years of film industry in the People’s Republic of China). Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1985, 224-235.

Zeitlin, Judith T. “Operatic Ghosts on Screen: The Case of A Test of Love (1958).” The Opera Quarterly 26, 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2010): 220-55. [the film was adapted from the “ghost opera,” written by Tian Han]

Zhang, Ling. “Navigating Gender, Ethnicity and Space: Five Golden Flowers as a Socialist Road Movie.” In Jose Duarte and Timothy Corrigan, eds., The Global Road Movie: Alternative Journeys around the World. Bristol: Intellect, 2018, 149-71.

Zhang, Yingjin. “War, History, and Remembrance in Chinese Cinema.” In Michael Berry and Chiho Sawada, eds., Divided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in East Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016, 21-39.

Zhang, Yu. “Socialist Builders on the Rails and Road: Industrialization, Mobility, and National Imagination in Chinese Socialist Films, 1949-1965.” Twentieth-Century China 42, 3 (October 2017): 255–273.

—–. “Creating a Rural Industrial Aesthetics: Socialist Homecoming and the Rural Modernization Project in Representational Forms in the 1950s and Early 1960s.” In Zhang, Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915-1965, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2020, 147-181.

—–. “Socialist Builders on the Rails and Road: Railway Travel, Industrialization, and Social Engineering in Chinese Socialist Films, 1949–65.” In Zhang, Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915-1965, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2020, 182-211.

Zhang, Zhen. “Orphan of Shanghai.” e-flux Journal 142 (Feb. 2024).

—–. “Flood Dashing against the Temple of the Dragon King: The Allegorical Nature in Wind from the East (1959).” Prism 21, 1 (2024): 116-30. 

[Abstract: Toward the end of the 1950s, China and the Soviet Union were heading down two different paths, ultimately leading to the disastrous Sino-Soviet split. The Sino-Soviet film coproduction Wind from the East (Feng cong dongfang lai 風從東方來, 1959), a film to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, inadvertently captures such a historical transition. Situating the film in the context of transnational ecocinemas, this article looks into the relationship between natural disasters and Sino-Soviet brotherhood in 1959. The author argues that the film captures a somewhat ambiguous Sino-Soviet bond under threat, oscillating between a nostalgic communist internationalism, on the one hand, and, on the other, a rising and subtle Chinese nationalism. The ecological crises, flooding in particular, serve as an unpronounced and unspecified threat to the Sino-Soviet brotherhood, which could be annihilated by the Sino-Soviet bond. The film captures a moment of natural and political, propagandistic and aesthetic “climate change,” pointing to a future of Sino-Soviet cooperation without sacrificing the Chinese national interests.]

Zhelahovtsev, A. “A Soviet Reporter’s View of Cinema in the Chinese People’s Republic.” Film Comment 5, 1 (1968): 28-32.

ZDX, ed. Zhonghua renmin gonghe guo dianying shiye sanshiwu nian, 1949-1984 中华人民共和国电影事业三十五年 1949-1984 (Thirty-five years of film development in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1984). Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1985.

Zhong, Xueping. “‘Long Live Youth’ and the Ironies of Youth and Gender in Chinese Films of the 1950s and 1960s.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture11, 2 (Fall 1999): 150-85.

Zhou, Chenshu. The Versatile Film Projectionist: How to Show Films and Serve the People in the 17 Years Period, 1949–1966.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, 3 (2016): 226-48.

[Abstract: In the early years of the People’s Republic of China, the state recognized the power of film as a mass medium and expanded a national exhibition network consisting of movie theaters, workers’ clubs and mobile film projections to bring film to the people. One figure that soon caught the attention of national media was the film projectionist, who traditionally occupied a marginal position in the film industry. Meanwhile, Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum of Literature and Arts’ was held as a guiding document for all cultural workers, who were expected to ‘serve the people’ by both making culture accessible to the masses and teaching them to be socialist subjects. This paper proposes to see the film projectionist as an embodiment of Chinese socialist cultural ideals that had roots in Mao’s ‘Talks’. Previous scholarship has paid little attention to film exhibition during the 17 years period (1949–1966). Using newspapers, magazines and government documents, I detail exhibition practices and screening procedures that Maoist film projectionists were instructed to follow. I argue that as an ideal figure, the projectionist integrated mass entertainment and education by simultaneously playing the roles of the people’s servant, the party propagandist and the film lecturer.]

—–. Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021.

[Abstract: At a time when what it means to watch movies keeps changing, this book offers a case study that rethinks the institutional, ideological, and cultural role of film exhibition, demonstrating that film exhibition can produce meaning in itself apart from the films being shown. Cinema Off Screen advances the idea that cinema takes place off screen as much as on screen by exploring film exhibition in China from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Drawing on original archival research, interviews, and audience recollections, Cinema Off Screen decenters the filmic text and offers a study of institutional operations and lived experiences. Chenshu Zhou details how the screening space, media technology, and the human body mediate encounters with cinema in ways that have not been fully recognized, opening new conceptual avenues for rethinking the ever-changing institution of cinema.]

Zhu, Yun. “Fantastic Laughter in a Socialist-Realist Tradition? The Nuances of ‘Satire’ and ‘Extolment’ in The Secret of the Magic Gourd and Its 1963 Film Adaptation.” In Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath, eds., Maoist Laughter. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2019, 89-104.

Zhuang, Muyang. “Animation of Experiment: The Science Education Film and Useful Animation in China.” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 18, 2 (2023): 152-66.

---

Post-Mao

Berry, Chris. “Chinese ‘Women’s Cinema’: Introduction.” Camera Obscura 18 (Sept. 1988): 4-7.

—–. “China’s New ‘Women’s Cinema.'” Camera Obscura 18 (Sept. 1988):8-19.

—– “Chinese Urban Cinema: Hyper-Realism Versus Absurdism.” East-West Film Journal 3, 1 (1988): 76-88.

—–. “Market Forces: China’s ‘Fifth Generation’ Faces the Bottom Line.” First Published in Continuum 2, 1 (1988/89): 106-27.

—–. Postsocialist Cinema in the Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution After the Cultural Revolution. NY: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.

[Abstract: This book argues that the fundamental shift in Chinese Cinema away from Socialism and towards Post-Socialism can be located earlier than the emergence of the “Fifth Generation” in the mid-eighties when it is usually assumed to have occured. By close analysis of films from the 1949-1976 Maoist era in comparison with 1976-81 films representing the Cultural Revolution, it demonstrates that the latter already breaks away from Socialism.]

Berry, Chris and Mary Ann Farquhar. “Post-Socialist Stategies: An Analysis of Yellow Earth and Black Cannon Incident.” In Linda Erlich and David Desser, eds., Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994, 81-116.

Braester, Yomi. “A Blinding Red Light: The Displacement of Rhetoric in the Cinema of the Early 1980s.” In Braester, Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003, 131-45..

Chang, Hsien-Chen. “The Small Freedom of the Market: Chinese Cinema during the Period of Reform.” In Noth, Jochen, et.al., eds. China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture. HK, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 60-62.

Chen Huangmei 陈荒煤, ed. Dangdai Zhongguo dianying 当代中国电影 (Contemporary Chinese film). 2 vols. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue, 1989.

Chen, Ming-May Jessie and Mazharul Haque. “The Chinese Fifth Generation Directors and Their Films.” Asian Cinema 16, 1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 306-24.

—–. Representation of the Cultural Revolution in Chinese Films by the Fifth Generation Filmmakers: Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and Tian Zhuangzhuang. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007.

Chen, Xihe. The Major Developments and Their Ideological Implications of Chinese Film and Film Education since the Cultural Revolution. Ph.D. diss. Columbus: The Ohio State University, 1994.

Chen, Xiaoming. “The Mysterious Other: Postpolitics in Chinese Film.” Trs. Liu Kang and Anbing Shi. In Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds.,Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 222-38.

Chong, Woei Lien. “Le mysticisme de la nature dans le cinéma chinois après la Révolution culturelle” (Nature mysticism in post-Cultural Revolution Chinese cinema). Critique internationale 20 (July 2003): 48-58.

Chong, W.L. and A. S. Keyser. “Director Zhang Zeming on His Film Swansong.” China Information 4, 4 (1990): 37-43.

Clark, Paul. “Filmmaking in China: From the Cultural Revolution to 1981.” The China Quarterly (June 1983): 304-22.

—–“Ethnic Minorities in Chinese Films: Cinema and the Exotic.” East-West Film Journal 1, 2 (June 1987): 15-31.

—– “Reinventing China: The Fifth Generation Filmmakers.” Modern Chinese Literature 5, 1 (Spring 1989): 121-36.

—–. “A Women’s Cinema? The Films of Hu Mei, Peng Xiaolian and Liu Miaomiao.” In Clark, Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2005, 122-36.

—–. “The Rise of Entertainment Film: Zhang Jianya and Jiang Haiyang.” In Clark, Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2005, 137-45.

Cohen, Joan Leobld. “The Fifth Generation.” Attention (July/Aug. 1988): 88-93.

Cornelius, Sheila (with Ian Haydn Smith). New Chinese Cinema: Challenging Representations. London and New York: Wallflower, 2002.

Dai, Jinhua. “Rewriting Chinese Women: Gender Production and Cultural Space in the Eighties and Nineties.” In Mayfair Mei Hui Yang, ed. Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 191-206.

—–. “Invisible Women: Contemporary Chinese and Women’s Film.” positions 3, 1 (1995): 254-80.

—–. “Severed Bridge: The Art of the Sons’ Generation.” Trs. Lisa Rofel and Hu Ying. In Dai, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua. Eds. Jing Wang and Tani Barlow. London: Verso, 2002, 13-48.

—–. “Gender and Narration: Women in Contemporary Chinese Film.” Tr. Jonathan Noble. In Dai, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua. Eds. Jing Wang and Tani Barlow. London: Verso, 2002, 99-150.

—–. “’Human, Woman, Demon’: A Woman’s Predicament.” Tr. Kirk Denton. In Dai, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua. Eds. Jing Wang and Tani Barlow. London: Verso, 2002, 151-71. [on Huang Shuqin’s film]

Donald, Stephanie. Chinese Cinema and Civil Society in the Post-Maoist Era. Ph.D. diss. University of Sussex, 1996.

—–. “Chinese Women and Chinese Film: Problems with History and Feminism.” In Barbara Einhorn and Eileen Janes Yeo, eds., Women and Market Societies: Crisis and Opportunity. Aldershot, UK ; Brookfield, Vt., US : E. Elgar, 1995, 84-95.

—–. Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China. Lanham, Md : Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.

Eder, Klaus and Deac Rossell, eds. New Chinese Cinema. London: National Film Theatre, 1993.

Gladney, Dru. “Tian Zhuangzhuang, the Fifth Generation, and Minorities Films in China.” Public Culture 8 (1995): 161-75.

—–. “Film and Forecasting the Nation.” In Gladney, Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 85-98.

Hao, Xiaoming. and Chen, Yanru. “Film and Social Change: The Chinese Cinema in the Reform Era.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 28 (2000): 36-45.

Healy, Gavin. “Fuwuyuan on Film: Cinema, Socialist Education, and Service Labor from the Great Leap Forward to Reform and Opening Up.” Modern China 50, 2 (2024).

[Abstract: As industrial and agricultural production kicked into overdrive during the Great Leap Forward, so too did cinematic production. Factories and agricultural collectives promoted labor models, and the film industry created new cinematic models of heroic production workers. At the same time, valorization of production labor heightened the alienation of workers in the “nonproductive” service sector. To address this situation, service sector work units nominated their own model workers, and the film industry brought tales of service workers to audiences nationwide. Through a close reading of three such films— Fuwuyuan 服务员 (1958), produced during the Great Leap Forward; Manyi bu manyi 满意不满意 (1963), produced just after the Great Leap Forward; and Duan panzi de guniang 端盘子的姑娘 (1981), produced shortly after the implementation of market reforms—this article charts the evolution of cinematic discourse on the value of service work in the economy and society of socialist and early post-socialist China.]

Hitchcock, Peter. “The Aesthetics of Alienation, or China’s ‘Fifth Generation.'” Cultural Studies (London) 6 (1992): 116-41.

Hoare, Stephanie. “‘Hsiao-hsiao’ and Girl from Hunan: Teaching Chinese Narrative, Not Just Chinese Literature.” Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association 26, 2 (May 1991): 25-32.

Huot, Claire. “Colorful Folk of the Landscape: Fifth Generation Filmmakers and Roots Searchers.” In Huot, China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000, 91-125.

Jacks, Wesley. “The Personal, the Political and the Popular: Sino-Japanese Film Collaboration in the Early Reform Era.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13, 3 (Nov. 2019): 202-214.

Jiang, Zoe Meng. “Mass Film Criticism and its Digital Afterlives.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 15, 2-3 (2021): 148-157.

[Abstract: This article looks at a unique kind of Chinese film culture known as the ‘mass film criticism’ (qunzhong yingping), namely, film discussion and criticism initiated by the non-professionals – workers, peasants, soldiers, students, etc. The practice of mass film criticism (MFC), led spontaneously by grassroot film enthusiasts and supported by state institutions, gained momentum in the 1980s: it is estimated that by 1988 there were more than 20,000 local groups of mass film criticism across the country, and the total number of amateur film critics reached ten million. The analogue history of MFC comprises a different genealogy for the emergence of amateur cinephiliac writing, which is almost exclusively associated with digital cinephiles in the west. This article examines the style and structural formation of MFC, as well as the role it played in fostering knowledge and appreciation of cinema for a large population with uneven film literacy. More importantly, often preforming a kind of sanctioned social criticism, MFC helped to carve out a public space for intense negotiations of what cinema and what China should become.]

Kaplan, Ann. “Problematising Cross-cultural Analysis: The Case of Women in the Recent Chinese Cinema” in Chris Berry, ed. Perspectives on Chinese Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1991.

Kuoshu, Harry H. “Beyond the Yellow Earth: The Postsocialist City as a Cinematic Space of Anxiety.” American Journal of Chinese Studies 4, 1 (April 1997): 50-72. [deals with Zhang Zeming’s Sunshine and Shower, Huang Jianxin’s Samsara, and Mi Jiashan’s Troubleshooters]

—–. “Othering the National Minorities: Exoticism and Self-Reflexivity.” In Harry Kuoshu, Lightness of Being in China: Adaptation and Discursive Figuration in Cinema and Theater. NY: Peter Lang, 1999, 95-122.

—–. “Filming Marginal Youth: The ‘Beyond’ Syndrome in the Postsocialist City.” In Harry Kuoshu, Lightness of Being in China: Adaptation and Discursive Figuration in Cinema and Theater. NY: Peter Lang, 1999, 123-52.

—–. Metro Movies: Cinematic Urbanism in Post-Mao China. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.

[Abstract: Metro Movies takes readers on a comprehensive tour of the urbanization of Chinese cinema. Focusing primarily on movies from the end of the twentieth century, it is the first single-authored work to explore the relationship between the changes in Chinese society—caused in part by the advent of postsocialism, the growth of cities, and globalization—and the transformation of Chinese cinema. Kuoshu examines such themes as displacement, cinematic representation, youth subculture, the private emotional lives of emerging urbanites, raw urban realism, and the allegorical contrast of the city and the countryside to illustrate the artistic richness and cultural diversity of this cinematic genre. Kuoshu discusses the work of director Huang Jianxin, whose films follow and critique China’s changing urban political culture. He dedicates a chapter to filmmakers who followed Huang and attempted to redefine the concept of art films to regain the local audience. These directors address Chinese moviegoers’ disappointment with the international adoption of Chinese art films, their lack of interest in conventional Chinese films, and their fascination with emerging audio-video media. A considerable amount of attention is given to films of the 1990s, which focus on the social changes surfacing in China, from the trend of hooliganism and the Beijing rock scene to the arrival of an urban pop culture lifestyle driven by expansionist commerce and materialism. Kuoshu also explores recent films that confront the seedier aspects of city life, as well as films that demonstrate how urbanization has touched every fiber of Chinese living. Metro Movies illustrates how cinematic urbanism is no longer a genre indicator but is instead an era indicator, revealing the dominance of metropolitan living on modern Chinese culture. It gives new insight into contemporary Chinese politics and culture and provides readers with a better understanding of China’s urban cinema. This book will be an excellent addition to college film courses and will fascinate any reader with an interest in film studies or Chinese culture.]

Lang, Miriam. “Swan Songs: Traditional Musicians in Contemporary China – Observations from a Film.” East Asian History 5 (June 1993).

Larson, Wendy. “The Fifth Generation: A Reassessment.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 113-21.

Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah. “A Cultural Interpretation of the Popular Cinema of China and Hongkong” in Berry ed. Perspectives on Chinese Film. London: British Film Institute, 1991. 166-74.

Li, H.C. “Color, Character, and Culture: On Yellow Earth, Black Canon Incident, and Red Sorghum.” Modern Chinese Literature 5, 1 (Spring 1989): 91-119.

Liu Shusheng 刘树生. Zhongguo diwu dai dianying 中国第五代电影 (China’s fifth generation film). Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo dianshi, 1992.

Lo, Kwai-cheung. “Feminizing Technology: The object a in Black Cannon Incident.” In William Burgwinkel, et.al., eds., Significant Others: Gender and Culture in Film and Literature East and West. Honolulu: East-West Center, 1993, 88-95.

Lu, Tonglin. Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.

Ma, Ning. “Notes on the New Filmmakers.” In Semsel ed., Chinese Film: The State of the Art in the People’s Republic. New York: Praeger, 1987, 63-93.

—–.”New Chinese Cinema: A Critical Account of the Fifth Generation.” Cinemaya 2 (1988-89): 32-35. [reprinted here on AsianFilms.org]

Mayo, Lewis. “Images of ‘Feudal’ Marriage in Recent Chinese Art Films.” In Mabel Lee and A.D. Syrokomla-Stefanowska, eds., Modernization of the Chinese Past. Sydney: Wild Peony, 1993, 137-51.

McKibbens, Adrienne. “China’s Studio System.” Cinema Papers 4 (July 1989): 23-24.

Mi, Jiashan. “Discussing The Troubleshooters.” Chinese Education and Society 31, 1 (1998): 8-14.

Nakajima, Seio. The Chinese Film Industry in the Reform Era: Its Genesis, Structure, and Transformation Since 1978. Ph.D. diss. University of California, Berkeley, 2007.

—–. “Official Chinese Film Awards and Film Festivals: History, Configuration and Transnational Legitimation.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13, 3 (Nov. 2019): 228-43.

Ni, Zhen. Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: The Genesis of China’s Fifth Generation. Tr. Chris Berry. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

Padgaonkar, Latika. “Xie Fei: Twixt Teaching and Shooting–Time for a Good Story.” Cinemaya 32 (1996): 34-38.

Petitprez, Veronique. “Being a Woman in the Films of the Fifth Generation.” Cinemaya 21 (1993): 32-36.

Pickowicz, Paul. “Popular Cinema and Political Thought in Post-Mao China.” In Perry Link, et al. eds., Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the PRC. Boulder: Westview Press, 1989, 37-56.

—–. “Huang Jianxin and the Notion of Postsocialism.” In Nick Browne et al., eds. New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 57-87.

—–. “The Theme of Spiritual Pollution in Chinese Films of the 1930s.” Modern China 17, 1 (1991): 38-75.

—–. “Velvet Prisons and the Political Economy of Chinese Filmmaking.” In Deborah Davis, et.al, eds., Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995, 193-220.

Pinsky, Mark. “Entering Middle Age: China’s Urban Intellectuals” Jump Cut 31 (1986):50.

Rashkin, Elissa. “Rape as Castration as Spectacle: The Price of Frenzy‘s Politics of Confusion.” In Lu Tonglin, ed., Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993, 107-21.

Rayns, Tony. “Bertolucci in Beijing.” Sight and Sound 56, 1 (Winter 1986/87): 39.

—–. “The Fifth Generation: A New Cinema in China.” Monthly Film Bulletin (Oct. 1986): 296-98.

—–. “The New Chinese Cinema: An Introduction.” In Chen, Kaige and Wan Zhi. King of the Children. London: Faber, 1989.

—–. “The Sun and the Rain: The Next Stage for China’s Fifth Generation.” Monthly Film Bulletin (Mar. 1988): 69-71.

Reynaud, Berenice. “Glamour and Suffering: Gong Li and the History of Chinese Stars.” Sight and Sound 3, 8 (1993): 13. Rpt. in Pam Cook and Philip Dodd, eds., Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993, 21-29.

Shao Mujun. “Chinese Films Amidst the Tide of Reform.” East-West Film Journal 1, 1 (Dec. 1986): 59-68.

Shen, Jing. “Male Subjectivities: The Idealization of the Democractic Public Sphere: Crossroads (1937) and The Trouble Shooters (1988).” Asian Cinema 22, 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 208-39.

Silbergeld, Jerome. China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. London: Reaktion, 1999.

Stanbrook, Alan. “The Flowers in China’s Courtyard.” Sight and Sound 56, 3 (Summer 1987): 183-87.

Tam, Kwok-kan and Wimal Dissanayake. New Chinese Cinema. NY: Oxford UP, 1998.

Tang, Xiaobin. “Configuring the Modern Space: Cinematic Representations of Beijing and Its Politics.” East-West Film Journal 8, 2 (1994): 47-69.

Wang, Haizhou. Imagined China: Research on Chinese Films in the 1980s. London: Routledge, 2022.

[Abstract: This book explores how Chinese films constructed an image of China in the 1980s through analyzing the characters, composition of space, and conflict patterns of the films. It also examines the relationship between the representations in Chinese cinema and the realities of Chinese society. The study analyzes the imagery, metaphors, and cultural values of Chinese films in the 1980s to discover the common creative focus of Chinese film directors at the time. It also examines the specific creative elements and cultural significance of Chinese cinema in the 1980s. This book is neither a “period history” of Chinese cinema in the 80s, nor a thematic study of the “fifth generation”. Rather, it is an analysis of films as narrative texts that reflected on history. It uses the perspectives revealed by characters, narrative patterns, and conflicts in films of the 1980s to examine how the era was perceived at that time as well as how China’s national future and individuals’ personal futures were being conceptualized.]

Wang Yuejin. “The Cinematic Other and the Cultural Self? Decentering the Cultural Identity on Cinema.” Wide Angle 11, 2 (1989).

—–. “Melodrama as Historical Understanding: The Making and the Unmaking of Communist Historry.” In Wimal Dissanayake, ed., Melodrama and Asian Cinema. NY: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Ward, Julian. “‘The One and the Eight’ and Cultural Production in Modern China: How a Poem about the Anti-Japanese War Written in the 1950s Was Transformed as a Film in the 1980s and for Television in 2015.” Screening the Past 45 (Dec. 2020).

—–. “Mainstream Film production in a Country on the Cusp of Change: An Army Officer’s View of Three Chinese Films of the Early 1980s Produced by the August First Film Studio.” British Journal of Chinese Studies 8, 2 (2018): 63-88.

Wei, Louisa S. “The Encoding of Female Subjectivity: Four Films by China’s Fifth Generation of Women Directors.” In Lingzhen Wang, ed., Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia UP, 2011, 173-90. [deals with Hu Mei’s Army Nurse, Liu Miaomiao’s Women on the Long March, Li Shaohong’s Blush, and Peng Xiaolian’s Shanghai Women]

Yau, Ether C.M. “Is China the End of Hermeneutics? Or, Political and Cultural Usage of Non-Han Women in Mainland Chinese Films” Discourse 11, 2 (1989): 115-36.

—–. “Cultural and Economic Dislocations: Filmic Phantasies of Chinese Women in the 1980s” Wide Angle 11, 2 (1989).

—–. “International Fantasy and the ‘New Chinese Cinema.'” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14, 3 (1993): 95-107.

Young, Suzie Sau Fong. “Encountering (China, My) Sorrow.” Asian Cinema 10, 1 (1998): 107-11.

Zeng, Hong. Semiotics of Exile in Contemporary Chinese Film. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Zeng, Li. “Ghostly Vengeance, Historical Trauma: The Lonely Ghost in the Dark Mansion (1989).” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 2 (2013): 109-21.

Zhang, Dan. “The Great Mind Matures Slowly-A Introduction to Li Shaohong.” China Screen 2 (1993): 14-15.

Zhang, Jie. “Death Ray on a Coral Island as China’s First Science Fiction Film.” In Sonja Fritzsche, ed., The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014, 39-55.

[Abstract: The first Chinese science fiction film, Death Ray on a Coral Island (dir. Hongmei Zhang, 1980) emerged at a defining moment of nation’s history. It not only redefined science fiction as a genre independent from juvenile literature, but also played an important role in the discursive reconstruction of China’s national identity immediately after the destructive Great Cultural Revolution (1966-76). The chapter examines the film in three contexts: 1) the conflicting notions of the modernization and utopia among intellectuals and the state, 2) the influence of contemporary ‘traumatic culture’ and 3) the narrative conventions of Chinese science fiction works. The film was a product of multi-directional negotiations in which boundaries were subtly transgressed and redrawn in order to respond to old concerns and new crises.]

Zhang, Xudong. Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction and the New Chinese Cinema. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.

—–. “Generational Politics: What Is the Fifth Generation?” In Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms. Durham: Duke UP, 1997, 215-231.

—–. “The Making of a Modernist Cinematic Language.” In Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms. Durham: Duke UP, 1997, 232-65.

—–. “Ramifications and Allegories.” In Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997, 267-81.

Zhang, Yingjin. “From ‘Minority Film’ to ‘Minority Discourse’: Questions of Nationhood and Ethnicity in Chinese Cinema.” In Sheldon Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

—–. “The Idyllic Country and the (Post) Modern City: Cinematic Configurations of Family in Osmanthus Alley and Terrorizer.” Tamkang Review 25, 1 (1994): 81-99.

—–. Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002.

—–. “Directors, Aesthetics, Genres: Chinese Postsocialist Cinema, 1979-2010.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 57-74.

—–. “War, History, and Remembrance in Chinese Cinema.” In Michael Berry and Chiho Sawada, eds., Divided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in East Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016, 21-39.

Zhao, Henry. “Seeking Roots on the Loess Plateau.” China Now 128 (1989): 39.

Zheng, Yi. “Narrative Images of the Historical Passion: Those Other Women–On the Alterity in the New Wave Chinese Cinema.” In Sheldon Lu, ed.,Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

Zhong, Dafeng and Li Ershi. China in the Movies, 1978-2006. Beijing: Xinxing, 2007.

Zhou, Xuelin. Young Rebels in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2007.

[Abstract: In the 1980s, a new type of central character emerged in contemporary Chinese films – angry and alienated youth. Filmmakers treated youth as a separate category and showed them in urban situations behaving in unconventional and socially rebellious ways. Young Rebels in Contemporary Chinese Cinema looks for evidence in films that exemplify this trend.]

Zhu, Ying. Chinese Cinema During the Era of Reform: The Ingenuity of the System. NY: Praeger Publishers, 2003.

—–. “Cinematic Modernization and Chinese Cinema’s First Art Wave.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 18, 4 (2001).

—–. “From New Wave to Post New Wave: Chinese Fifth Generation’s Cinematic Transition.” Asian Culture Quarterly 2 (Summer 2000).

—–. “Commercialism and Nationalism: Chinese Cinema’s First Wave of Entertainment Films.” CineAction 47 (Summer 1998).

Zhuang, Muyang. “Animation of Experiment: The Science Education Film and Useful Animation in China.” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 18, 2 (2023): 152-66.

---

Post-1989/Postsocialist

A.C. “Chinese Cinema Since the June Fourth Tiananmen Square Incident.” Metro 87 (1991): 3-5.

Bao, Ying. “Remembering the Invisible: Soundscape and the Memory of 1989.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 3 (Oct. 2013): 207-224.

[Abstract: This article intends to draw attention to the strategic exploitations of cinematic soundscape as a powerful affective tool to reflect personal and social memory, loss and trauma in three exemplary films, Yangguang canlan de rizi/In the Heat of the Sun (Jiang, 1994), Zhantai/Platform (Jia, 2000), and Dongci bianwei/Conjugation (Tang, 2001). Taking a semiotic approach to film sound, I scrutinize how the post-1989 trauma makes its presence as an acoustic and psychologically-penetrating experience. While the June Fourth Crackdown remains a taboo in cultural representations in the PRC, Chinese filmmakers have responded to the psychological, ideological, and socio-economic impacts of the event in various creative ways. Cinematic soundscape, in particular, constitutes powerful acts of remembering, recognizing, and critically reflecting the unspeakable and the invisible.

Berra, John. “Urban China on Screen: The Sixth Generation and the Postsocialist Cinematic City.” Geography Compass 7, 8 (2013): 588-96.

[Abstract: This article will consider the relationship between the city and the cinema with regard to the films of China’s ‘Sixth Generation’, a group of filmmakers who mostly graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in the late 1980s and proceeded to make films on the subject of their nation’s urban fabric. These are films which utilise city narrative to comment on social–economic change, but largely observe such conditions, rather than to take apolitical stance. To explore the urban representation of the Sixth Generation, this article will provide analysis of three works that depict life in top-tier or second-tier mainland China cities: Biandan, guniang / So Close to Paradise (1999), Suzhou he/Suzhou River (2000) and Xiari nuanyangyang/I Love Beijing (2001). The manner in which urban space is represented will be considered, alongside the social positioning of the characters, in order to address arguments made by scholars that these films focus on the plight of the individual rather than considering the wider implications of urban planning.]

Berra, John and Liu Yang. “Cheap Laughs: The Mass-Production of Low-Budget Chinese Comedies from Fengkuang de shitou/Crazy Stone (Ning Hao, 2006) to Gao Xing (Agan, 2009).” Asian Cinema 23, 1 (2012): 45-58.

[Abstract: This article will focus on the burgeoning production of low-budget feature film comedies in Mainland China. A number of these productions have achieved considerable success at the local box office since 2006. The popularity of these swiftly-produced features is the result of rapid industrialization and the increasing emphasis on genre in the Mainland China market. It also suggests a worrying trend in terms of the mass-production of films for local audiences; these films are manufactured in a rough manner with little regard for aesthetic quality or tonal consistency, leading to concerns about malformed genre product. This article outlines the definition, origins and variations of the low-budget comedies produced in China. Based on data gathered through several large-scale industry studies of the local audience, it will show that a relationship exists between the cultural mind-set of young cinemagoers and the styles of low-budget comedy films. To chart the success of this genre, and its evolution from low-budget production to mid-budget production due to consistent box office returns, the article will examine two industrially significant examples: Crazy Stone and Gao Xing. The former arguably started the genre, leading to a host of imitators, of which the latter has been particularly well-attended, despite evidencing a decline in quality as satirical humour is replaced by vulgarity. In this respect, it will be argued that the Mainland China production cycle of the low-budget comedy is an example of ‘ShanZhai’ culture as this is a form of commercial film-making that is largely based on imitation.]

Berry, Chris. “Outrageous Fortune: China’s Film Industry Takes a Roller-Coaster Ride.” Cinemaya 33 (1996): 17-19.

—–. “Seeking Truth from Fiction: Feature Films as Historiography in Deng’s China.” Film History 7 (1995): 87-99.

—–. “If China Can Say No, Can China Make Movies? Or, do Movies Make China? Rethinking National Cinema and National Agency.” Boundary 2. Special Issue ed. Rey Chow. 25, 2 (Fall 1998): 129-50. Rpt in Rey Chow ed., Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. 159-80.

—–. Postsocialist Cinema in the Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution After the Cultural Revolution. NY: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.

[Abstract: This book argues that the fundamental shift in Chinese Cinema away from Socialism and towards Post-Socialism can be located earlier than the emergence of the “Fifth Generation” in the mid-eighties when it is usually assumed to have occured. By close analysis of films from the 1949-1976 Maoist era in comparison with 1976-81 films representing the Cultural Revolution, it demonstrates that the latter already breaks away from Socialism.]

—–. “Ten Years Young: The Shanghai International Film Festival.” Senses of Cinema 45 (Oct.-Dec. 2007).

Bertozzi, Eddie. “A Still Life of the Wildest Things: Magic(al) Realism in Contemporary Chinese Cinema and the Reconfiguration of the Jishizhuyi Style.”Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, 2 (2012): 153-72.

[Abstract: By considering a number of films produced in Mainland China since 2000, this article seeks to illustrate a specific form of cinematic realism that can be interpreted within the framework of magic(al) realism. Directors such as Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye and Jiang Wen have challenged previous cinematic practices, in particular the jishizhuyi style (on-the-spot realism) of the 1990s, by engaging disorienting tones and unusual visual elements in their films. Breaking and re-tracing the borders of cinematic realism, these works privilege a ‘feeling of the real’ over the ‘documentary real’ to express authenticity through the director’s individual sensibility. To investigate the main features of such a new aesthetics, this analysis critically applies the theories of magic(al) realism to contemporary Chinese cinema to illustrate how the jishizhuyi style has been reconfigured. Finally, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life is closely examined to illustrate the arguments outlined above.]

Braester, Yomi. “From Real Time to Virtual Reality: Chinese Cinema in the Internet Age.” Journal of Contemporary China 13, 38 (Feb. 2004): 89-104. Rpt. in Jie Lu, ed., China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century. NY: Routledge, 2008, 139-54.

[Abstract: What has become of the collective memory in the years between the Tian’anmen incident of 1989 and the PRC joining the WTO in 2001, a period that witnessed the proliferation of McDonalds restaurants and Internet bars in Chinese cities? This paper explores the changing values through three works that take the World Wide Web as their subject, namely Love in the Internet Age, also known as Love in Cyberspace(Wanglu shidai de aiqing, 1999), Q3 (1999), and First Intimate Encounter, also known as Flyin’ Dance (Diyici de qinmi jiechu, 2001). The films do not offer a single vision of cyberspace, nor do they ascribe to the same filmic aesthetics or genre. Yet as a whole they provide a glimpse of China in the Internet age. They suggest that from a repository of collective memory, cyberspace has become the arena for an alternative existence free of the limitations of time and space. They trace the trajectory from a culture insistent on collective commemoration to a society willing to suspend its consciousness outside historical memory.]

—–. “Chinese Cinema in the Age of Advertisement: The Filmmaker as a Cultural Broker.” The China Quarterly 183 Sept. 2005): 549-564

—–. “Tracing the City’s Scars: Demolition and the Limits of the Documentary Impulse in the New Urban Cinema.” In Zhen Zhang, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21st Century. Durham: Duke UP, 2007, 161-80.

—–. “Contemporary Mainstream PRC Cinema.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 176-84.

—–. “From Urban Films to Urban Cinema: The Emergence of a Critical Concept.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 346-58.

Cai, Shenshen. Contemporary Chinese Films and Celebrity Directors. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

[Abstract: This new text examines recent popular Chinese films and derivative cultural phenomena, with a focus on films directed by celebrity directors such as Han Han, Guo Jingming, Xu Jinglei and Zhao Wei. In opposition to Fifth and Sixth Generation Chinese filmmakers who explored the grand-narratives of history, the oppression of the pre-socialist and socialist eras, and those marginalized by socio-economic changes, the celebrity directors at the heart of this book center on the new trends of living and emotional challenges faced by contemporary Chinese people, in particular the younger generations. This book sheds light on newly emerging social and cultural fashions in contemporary China, such as the social stigma of being ‘left-over’ (reflected in Xu Jinglei’s films), the issue of wealth ‘flaunting’ (represented in Guo Jingming’s films) or nostalgia for the long lost innocence of adolescence (demonstrated in Zhao Wei’s film). Considering present-day consumer capitalism through the lens of cinema, this text analyses in detail the significance of films chosen for their relevance, providing a reflection of social reality and cultural changes in 21st century China.]

Chen, Lora. “Breaking the Silence: Sun Zhou.” [review] Cinemaya 50 (Winter 2000).

Chen, Mo and Zhiwei Xiao. “Chinese Underground Films: Critical Views from China.” In Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang eds., From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006,143-60.

Chen, Thomas. “Remade in China: Rule of Law, Democracy, and the Chinese 12 Angry Men.” positions: asia critique 30, 1 (2022): 137-58.

[Abstract: Against the background of the growing effort in the Xi Jinping era to sinicize democracy and rule of law, much critical attention has surrounded Chinese models of governance variously conceived as “humane authority” and “political meritocracy.” What is missing from the literature on the export of the so-called “Chinese solution,” however, is the consideration of popular cultural products. This article takes as its case study the state-sponsored film 12 Citizens, the 2014 remake of the classic 12 Angry Men, most famously known in its 1957 version directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Henry Fonda. As there is no jury system in China, 12 Citizens instead presents the scenario as a law school mock trial on Anglo-American law, with crucial elements indigenized to the local setting. In one masterly maneuver after another, the remake overturns the democratic tenor of the original. Yet as a metanarrative about adaptation, the film reveals ambivalent attitudes not only toward the jury system and the West but also toward adaptation itself, open to an alternative interpretation in which the figure of the citizen, as a member of a political community actively engaged in public matters, precisely takes center stage. This ambivalence challenges the very concept of “Chinese characteristics.”]

—–. Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film. NY: Columbia University Press, 2022.

[Abstract: The violent suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations is thought to be contemporary China’s most taboo subject. Yet despite sweeping censorship, Chinese culture continues to engage with the history, meaning, and memory of the Tiananmen movement. Made in Censorship examines the surprisingly rich corpus of Tiananmen literature and film produced in mainland China since 1989, both officially sanctioned and unauthorized, contending that censorship does not simply forbid—it also shapes what is created. Chen explores a wide range of works made despite and through censorship, including state propaganda, underground films, and controversial best-sellers. Moving across media, from print to the internet, TV to DVD, fiction to documentary, he shows the effects of state intervention on artistic production and consumption. Chen considers art at the edge of censorship, reading such disparate works as a queer love story shot without permission that found official release on DVD, an officially sanctioned film that was ultimately not permitted to be released, a novel built on orthographic elisions that was banned and eventually reissued, and an internet narrative set during the SARS epidemic later published with alterations. He also connects Tiananmen with the story of COVID-19 in China and considers the implications for debates about the reach and power of the Chinese state in the public realm, both domestic and abroad. A bold rethinking of contemporary Chinese literature and film, this book upends understandings of censorship, uncovering not just what it suppresses but also what it produces.]

Chen, Timmy Chih-Ting. “Ziyuan: Film Mining and Cinephilic Expedition and Exploitation in Twenty-first Century China.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 15, 2-3 (2021): 164-75.

[Abstract : This essay studies the Chinese spectators’ active releasing, searching for, and illicit sharing of imported, voluntarily subtitled, and secretly stored foreign films and videos by offering an etymological study of ziyuan (literally translated to English as ‘resource’), the most pervasively used term in the lexicon of contemporary Chinese cinephilia. Delineating the semantic shift of ziyuan from a concept of computer networking to a film and media idiom, I examine how the discursive practice of calling a digitalized film or video ‘ziyuan’ and the corresponding metadata model of representing a video by its digital identification and location information provide the mechanism both for locating and retrieving films as digital files from the Internet and for hiding them away from clear recognition and immediate access. As the neologism replacing daoban, the Chinese equivalent of ‘piracy’, ziyuan as the popular argot, I argue, rehabilitates Chinese cinephilia thriving on piracy by metaphorically reconceptualizing the global Internet as a vast reservoir and the Internet-based media files as untapped natural resources with potential use value. The common use of this term thus mounts a collective resistance to both the unequal global capitalist order and the party-state intervention in the media market by symbolically exonerating participators and beneficiaries of making, disseminating, downloading, or streaming unauthorized films of any blame or criminal charges.]

Chen, Xiaoming. “The Mysterious Other: Postpolitics in the Narrative of Chinese Film.” Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997): 123-41. Rpt. in Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 1997, 222-38.

Chong, Woei Lien. “The Quest for Happiness: Chinese Cinema at the 2000 International Rotterdam Film Festival.” China Information 14, 2 (2000): 194-218. [treats 7 films screen at the festival: Darkness and Light, Paper, The Longest Summer, Suzhou River, So Close to Paradise, Shower, Not One Less].

—–. “Le mysticisme de la nature dans le cinéma chinois après la Révolution culturelle” (Nature mysticism in post-Cultural Revolution Chinese cinema).Critique internationale 20 (July 2003): 48-58.

Chung, Elaine. “Chick Flick Fantasy and Postfeminism in Chinese Cinema: 20 Once Again as a Transnational Remake.” In Kenneth Chan and Andrew Stuckey, eds., Sino-Enchantment: The Fantastics in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021, 149-65.

Clark, Paul. “Distance and Memory: Chinese Film in 1990.” 1990 Hawaii International Film Festival Viewer’s Guide. Honolulu: East-West Center, 1990.

—–. “Beyond the Fifth Generation.” In Clark, Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2005, 187-204.

—–. Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2005.

Cohen, Herve and Renaud Cohen, dirs. Electric Shadows. First Run Icarus Films, 1993.

Corliss, Richard. “Bright Lights.” Time Asia 157, 12 (March 26, 2001). [on Sixth Generation films]

Cui, Shuqin. “Working from the Margins: Urban Cinema and Independent Directors in Contemporary China.” Post Script 20, 2/3 (Winter/Spring 2001): 77-92. Rpt. in Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh, eds., Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005, 96-119.

Cornelius, Sheila (with Ian Haydn Smith). New Chinese Cinema: Challenging Representations. London and New York: Wallflower, 2002.

Cui, Shuqin. “Negotiating In-Between: On New-Generation Filmmaking and Jia Zhangke’s Films.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18, 2 (Fall 2006): 98-130.

Curtin, Michael. Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

[Abstract: In this provocative analysis of screen industries in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, Michael Curtin delineates the globalizing pressures and opportunities that since the 1980s have dramatically transformed the terrain of Chinese film and television, including the end of the cold war, the rise of the World Trade Organization, the escalation of democracy movements, and the emergence of an East Asian youth culture. Reaching beyond national frameworks, Curtin examines the prospect of a global Chinese audience that will include more viewers than in the United States and Europe combined. He draws on in-depth interviews with a diverse array of media executives plus a wealth of historical material to argue that this vast and increasingly wealthy market is likely to shake the very foundations of Hollywood’s century-long hegemony.]

Dai, Jinhua. “The Criss-Cross Visions: Multi-Identification in the Artistic Film in Post-1990 Mainland China.” Seminar paper in Chinese (Lingnan University; February 1998).

—–. “Rewriting Chinese Women: Gender Production and Cultural Space in the Eighties and Nineties.” In Mayfair Mei Hui Yang, ed. Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 191-206.

—–. “Postcolonialism and Chinese Cinema of the Nineties.” Tr. Harry H. Kuoshu. In Dai, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua. Eds. Jing Wang and Tani Barlow. London: Verso, 2002, 49-70.

—–. “A Scene in the Fog: Reading the Sixth Generation Films.” Tr. Yiman Wang. In Dai, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua. Eds. Jing Wang and Tani Barlow. London: Verso, 2002, 71-98.

—–. “Gender and Narration: Women in Contemporary Chinese Film.” Tr. Jonathan Noble. In Dai, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua. Eds. Jing Wang and Tani Barlow. London: Verso, 2002, 99-150.

—–. After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

[Abstract: In After the Post–Cold War eminent Chinese cultural critic Dai Jinhua interrogates history, memory, and the future of China as a global economic power in relation to its socialist past, profoundly shaped by the Cold War. Drawing on Marxism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, Dai examines recent Chinese films that erase the country’s socialist history to show how such erasure resignifies socialism’s past as failure and thus forecloses the imagining of a future beyond that of globalized capitalism. She outlines the tension between China’s embrace of the free market and a regime dependent on a socialist imprimatur. She also offers a genealogy of China’s transformation from a source of revolutionary power into a fountainhead of globalized modernity. This narrative, Dai contends, leaves little hope of moving from the capitalist degradation of the present into a radical future that might offer a more socially just world.]

—–. “The Spy-Film Legacy: A Preliminary Cultural Analysis of the Spy Film.” Tr. Christopher Connery. In Dai Jinhua, After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018, 109-26.

Dauncey, Sarah. “Screening Disability in the PRC: The Politics of Looking Good.” China Information 21, 3 (Nov. 2007): 481-506.

Davis, Darrell William. “Marketization, Hollywood, Global China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 26, 1 (Spring 2014): 193-241.

Davis, Darrell William and Emily Yueh-yu Yeh. “Re-nationalizing China’s Film Industry: Case Study on the China Film Group and Film Marketization.”Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 1 (May 2008): 37-52.

[Abstract: In the mid 1990s ‘transnational’ meant a pan-Chinese universalism trying to reconcile the differences and conflicts among the mainland, colonial Hong Kong, KMT Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora. But since the rise of the new China market and the centralization of Chinese blockbusters, the transnational currency may have been replaced by an intra-national, if not hyper-national tender. The essay addresses the tension and dialectics between marketization and protectionism of the national screen industry in China. A political-economic approach analyzes the rise of the China Film Group (CFG) and its attempt to re-nationalize and transnationalize Chinese cinema. Accounting for recent developments of pan-Asian strategy, and CEPA, this case study will explain tensions inherent in China’s integration to global media. CFG presents marketization as liberalization but this is part of a scheme to utilize the market to consolidate state power.]

Donald, Stephanie. “Symptoms of Alienation: The Female Body in Recent Chinese Film.” Continuum (April 1998): 9-103.

Fan, Xiang. “Beyond Fortresses: Piracy and Grassroots Cinephile Culture in China.” Senses of Cinema 105 (May 2023).

Gai, Qi. “Image Reconstruction and the Reflection of Values in the Formation of National Traumatic Memories: A Review of Recent Anti-Japanese War Films and Teleplays in China.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, 2 (2015): 306-17.

[Abstract: The cosmopolitan cultural behaviors employed by war films and teleplays in the reconstruction of national traumatic memories are worthy of understanding and respect. However, in present-day China, the quantity of Anti-Japanese War films and teleplays is abnormally high, and their values deeply enmeshed in a radical nationalism. The result is a general trend towards a “carnival of vengeful images.” Given the potential harms implicit in this situation, the question of just what kind of war narratives are appropriate for the contemporary circumstances of globalization should receive serious attention and reconsideration from society at large.]

Gallagher, Mark and Julian Stringer. “Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Film Sound: Dolby Laboratories and Changing Industrial Practices.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 3 (Oct. 2013): 263-76.

[Abstract: The recent growth of mainland China’s commercial film industry has been accompanied by the transformation of its production cultures, exhibition arrangements and audience experiences. This article provides an analysis of the complex role Chinese film sound has played in these developments. Taking as its focus the work of Dolby Laboratories in China, the article investigates how and why complex international dynamics underpin both high-end commercial Chinese sound designs and the audio tracks of foreign films released in the country. By considering audio post-production personnel’s mediating role and their professional contributions to a range of industrial developments as well as specific films, the article demonstrates how different stakeholders manage the changing needs (at the level of film sound) of producer and consumer alike. It therefore develops a critical perspective of workflows in Chinese screen industries where local and global investments merge.]

Gieselmann, Martin. “Chinese Cinema in the Post-Cold War Era and the Legacy of the Sino-Japanese War: Devils on the Doorstep and Purple Sunset.” In Weigelin-Schweidrzik, ed., Broken Narratives: Post-Cold War History and Identity in Europe and East Asia. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 57-84.

Gladwin, Derek. “No Country for Young Men: Chinese Modernity, Displacement, and Initiatory Ritual in Chinese Sixth Generation Cinema.” Asian Cinema23, 1 (2012): 31-44.

[Abstract: This article examines youth initiation in two Chinese Sixth Generation films, Wang Xiaoshuai’s Shiqi sui de dan che/Beijing Bicycle(2001) and Li Yang’s Mang jing/Blind Shaft (2003). It addresses the broader issue of the ‘floating population’ in China and the impact that rapid modernization has on the social fabric of Chinese society. It also suggests that in light of such social injustices and cinematic representation in the post-socialist China of today, under the guise of modernity and economic progress, there exists a dislocated and disconnected transition into adulthood for youth populations. This article argues that Wang and Yi directly investigate one of the consequences of Chinese modernity: disrupted youth initiatory ritual. Beijing Bicycle and Blind Shaft depict in a narrative documentary form an entire generation of Chinese youth who have been geographically and psychologically displaced as they lose their family connections and education opportunities, move from job to job, and fail to experience appropriate initiation into adulthood, all of which have contributed to a fractured social system.]

Gong, Haoming. “‘If I Love You, What Business is It of Yours?’ Or, Is It? The Symptomatics of the Wenyi Film in Contemporary China.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 39, 4 (May-June, 2022): 776-98.

Gu, Zhun. Screen Media and the Construction of Nostalgia in Post-Socialist China. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

[Abstract: This book traces the cultural transformation of nostalgia on the Chinese screen over the past three decades. It explores how filmmakers from different generations have engaged politically with China’s rapidly changing post-socialist society as it has been formed through three mutually constitutive frameworks: political discourse, popular culture and state-led media commercialisation. The book offers a new, critical model for understanding relationships between filmmakers, industry and the State.]

Hao, Xiaoming, and Y. Chen. “Film and Social Change: The Chinese Cinema in the Reform Era.” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 28 (Spring 2000): 36-45.

Harding, James. “China’s Cultureless Revolution.” Prospect (Jan. 1998).

He, Donghui. “‘Reconstructing the God-Fearing Community’: Filming Tibet in the Twenty-First Century.” In Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds., Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2009, 271-86.

He, Weihua. “The Wandering Earth and China’s Construction of an Alternative Cosmopolitanism.” Comparative Literature Studies 57, 3 (2020): 530-40.

[Abstract: As an epoch-making event in the history of the Chinese sci-fi film industry, The Wandering Earth boasts the extraordinary acting skills of cinema superstars and fabulous special effects. Instead of providing a description of the technical issues surrounding the film’s production, this paper looks at the film as a cultural expression and dramatization of China’s reconceptualization of the notion of cosmopolitanism. After scrutinizing tianxia, which is generally taken to refer to classical Chinese cosmopolitanism, this paper goes on to describe its experiential dimension, its techno-socio-economic foundation, and its cosmopolitan solidarity as shown in the film. Finally, after analyzing the ethical dimension of the cosmopolitan community, which is embodied in the idea of “home” in the film, the paper concludes by proposing a cosmopolitanism of ethicality.]

Herring, Lara. Hollywood and China in the Post Postclassical Era. Routledge, 2024.

[Abstract: This book examines the contemporary relationship between Hollywood and China as case studies that help to define a new era in Hollywood film industry, style, and economics, which is termed the ‘post‑postclassical’ period. Centred around a case study of Legendary Entertainment, the analysis shows how the studio adopted and adapted its global strategies in order to gain access to and favour within the Chinese film market, and how issues of censorship and financial performance affected the choices they made. Demonstrating Legendary’s identity as a ‘post‑postclassical’ studio and examining how this plays into its China‑strategy, this book explores how this particular case and the necessary analysis of wider political economic relations offer a periodisation of the contemporary Hollywood‑China relationship.]

Ho, Wing Shan. Screening Post-1989 China: Critical Analysis of Chinese Film and Television. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Hu, Tingting and Tianru Guan. “‘Man-as-Nation’: Representations of Masculinity and Nationalism in Wu Jing’s Wolf Warrior II.” Sage Open Access (2021).

[Abstract: Through an in-depth analysis of gender representation in the box office record-breaking Chinese movie Wolf Warrior II, this study interrogates how the male body is used as a site for the projection of Chinese national power. Furthermore, it illustrates a revival of patriotic pride in China through a contemporary reading of cross-genre action-military films. Developing Shuqin Cui’s notion of “woman-as-nation,” which understands on-screen female victimization in Chinese films as signifying the past suffering of the nation, this study proposes the new concept of “man-as-nation” to explain how the masculine virtues of male protagonists in Chinese films signify the nation’s rejuvenation and strength. Framing male virtue into the paradigms of wu (武), as martial valor, and wen (文), as cultural attainment, this article argues that masculinity has come to symbolize China’s enhanced comprehensive power and to embody its ideological orientation in both global and domestic domains.]

Hua, Chaorong. “Lapian (拉片): The Disseminated Professionalism and the Co-constituted World.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 15, 2-3 (2021): 139-47.

[Abstract: Current Chinese cinephilia has developed an obsession with what is known as lapian, a practice that consists of scholarly or professional analysis of films and a fascination with cinematic details both textual and inter-textual. What can be discerned through such a phenomenon are not only Chinese film aficionados’ love for cinema and movie going, but also their aspiration to participate in and contribute to the nation’s emerging film culture. Having originated in classrooms at Beijing Film Academy around 1958, lapian has been disseminated to the country’s myriad of film communities; together with it, is the professionalism of engaging films. Enabled by fan-based platforms on the Internet (especially social networking sites such as Douban, Mtime, and Wechat public accounts), the tactile nature in lapian broke down the barrier between professional film critics (as well as scholars) and ordinary film lovers. On the one hand, the proliferation of lapian among common viewers produces a discourse that competes with professional criticisms in China. Unlike the implicit elitism that pervaded the pre-Internet world of cinephilia (as well as its lapian practices), current Chinese film communities have appropriated the professionalism of film criticism for co-constituting a cinematic world that involves a greater population of film viewers. On the other hand, opportunities to comment on and discuss films on these more democratic platforms without formal qualification (such as certification of the author’s accomplished status in traditional journalism) encourages younger generations to pursue their dreams of filmmaking, film criticism, and film scholarship, which could seem impossible to them. Hence, lapian prepares the greater number of cinephiles to be not only involved in the film world but also actively constituting it.]

Huang, Erin Y. Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. [MCLC Resource Center review by Hongwei Thorn Chen]

[Abstract: Huang theorizes the economic, cultural, and political conditions of neoliberal post-socialist China. Drawing on Marxist phenomenology, geography, and aesthetics from Engels and Merleau-Ponty to Lefebvre and Rancière, Huang traces the emergence and mediation of what she calls urban horror—a socio-political public affect that exceeds comprehension and provides the grounds for possible future revolutionary dissent. She shows how documentaries, blockbuster feature films, and video art from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan made between the 1990s and the present rehearse and communicate urban horror. In these films urban horror circulates through myriad urban spaces characterized by the creation of speculative crises, shifting temporalities, and dystopic environments inhospitable to the human body. The cinematic image and the aesthetics of urban horror in neoliberal post-socialist China lay the groundwork for the future to such an extent, Huang contends, that the seeds of dissent at the heart of urban horror make it possible to imagine new forms of resistance.]

Huang, Su-ching. “Rewriting History, Narrating Nation: The Great Wall in Sino-US Coproductions in the New Millennium.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 14, 3 (2020): 181-204.

[Abstract: This paper compares the representations of the Great Wall of China in three Sino-US co-produced films, Shadow Magic (西洋鏡, Ann Hu 胡安, 2000), Dragon Blade (天降雄師, Daniel Lee 李仁港, 2015), and The Great Wall (長城, Zhang Yimou 張藝謀, 2016). Instead of seeing the Great Wall as a structure that demarcates clear boundaries, I read its film representations as symptoms of anxieties over the impossibilities of maintaining well-defined borderlines. All three films employ the image of the Great Wall to serve as a metonym for the Chinese nation. They tell the story of East-West encounters to construct their own versions of Chinese identity. As each film “narrates its nation,” it engages with recorded or imagined histories to construct an alternative historiography and reconstruct a new Chinese identity. Although all of the three films begin with references to historical facts, they all take liberties and embellish historical accounts with sensationalized fantasies of cross-cultural encounters. I read such rewriting of history as an expression of the PRC’s official policy of advancing a nationalist agenda of global domination through soft power.]

Hui, Calvin. The Art of Useless: Fashion, Media, and Consumer Culture in Contemporary China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.

[Abstract: Since embarking on economic reforms in 1978, the People’s Republic of China has also undergone a sweeping cultural reorganization, from proletarian culture under Mao to middle-class consumer culture today. Under these circumstances, how has a Chinese middle class come into being, and how has consumerism become the dominant ideology of an avowedly socialist country? The Art of Useless offers an innovative way to understand China’s unprecedented political-economic, social, and cultural transformations, showing how consumer culture helps anticipate, produce, and shape a new middle-class subjectivity. Examining changing representations of the production and consumption of fashion in documentaries and films, Calvin Hui traces how culture contributes to China’s changing social relations through the cultivation of new identities and sensibilities. He explores the commodity chain of fashion on a transnational scale, from production to consumption to disposal, as well as media portrayals of the intersections of clothing with class, gender, and ethnicity. Hui illuminates key cinematic narratives, such as a factory worker’s desire for a high-quality suit in the 1960s, an intellectual’s longing for fashionable clothes in the 1980s, and a white-collar woman’s craving for brand-name commodities in the 2000s. He considers how documentary films depict the undersides of consumption—exploited laborers who fantasize about the products they manufacture as well as the accumulation of waste and its disposal—revealing how global capitalism renders migrant factory workers, scavengers, and garbage invisible.]

Jeffreys, Elaine. “Zhang Ziyi and China’s Celebrity–Philanthropy Scandals.” Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 8, 1 (Jan. 2011).

[Abstract: In January 2010, the internationally acclaimed Chinese actor, Zhang Ziyi, became a focus of public criticism for allegedly defaulting on a pledge to donate one million yuan to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake disaster-relief fund. That earthquake not only killed 70,000 people and left five million homeless, but also produced a dramatic rise in individual and corporate philanthropy in China. Philanthropic donations in 2008 amounted to a total figure of 100 billion yuan, exceeding the documented total for the preceding decade. Zhang’s ‘failed pledge’ led fans and critics to accuse her in interactive media forums of both charity fraud and generating a nationwide crisis of faith in the philanthropic activities of the rich and famous. Dubbed ‘donation-gate’, the ensuing controversy obliged Zhang Ziyi to hire a team of USA-based lawyers, to give an exclusive interview to the China Daily, and to engage in renewed philanthropic endeavours, in an effort to clear her name. Hence, contrary to claims that celebrity philanthropy is an apolitical mode of philanthropy, an examination of the Zhang Ziyi scandal and its disaster-relief precursors demonstrates that celebrity philanthropy in the People’s Republic of China is a political affair.]

Jia, Zhangke. “Irrepressible Images: New Films in China from 1995.” China Perspectives 1 (2010): 46-51.

Jian, Pu. “Modern Chinese Cinema: Box Office Boom in Full Swing.” Tr. Yang Yichen, with Lennet Daigle. Chinese Literature Today 3, 1/2 (2013): 78-81.

Jiang, Hong, ed. “The Cultural Configuration of Literature and Film in the 1990s China: A New Perspective,” a special issue of The China Review 3, 1 (Spring 2003).

Jiang, Zoe Meng. “Mass Film Criticism and its Digital Afterlives.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 15, 2-3 (2021): 148-157.

[Abstract: This article looks at a unique kind of Chinese film culture known as the ‘mass film criticism’ (qunzhong yingping), namely, film discussion and criticism initiated by the non-professionals – workers, peasants, soldiers, students, etc. The practice of mass film criticism (MFC), led spontaneously by grassroot film enthusiasts and supported by state institutions, gained momentum in the 1980s: it is estimated that by 1988 there were more than 20,000 local groups of mass film criticism across the country, and the total number of amateur film critics reached ten million. The analogue history of MFC comprises a different genealogy for the emergence of amateur cinephiliac writing, which is almost exclusively associated with digital cinephiles in the west. This article examines the style and structural formation of MFC, as well as the role it played in fostering knowledge and appreciation of cinema for a large population with uneven film literacy. More importantly, often preforming a kind of sanctioned social criticism, MFC helped to carve out a public space for intense negotiations of what cinema and what China should become.]

Johnson, Ian. “True Grit: You Won’t See China’s Sixth Generation of Film Directors at Cannes.” Far Eastern Economic Review (July 11, 1996): 46-47.

Johnson, Matthew D., Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani, eds. China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Karl, Rebecca E. “The Burdens of History: Lin Zexu (1959) and the Opium War (1997).” In Xudong Zhang, ed., Whither China? Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

Keyser, Anne Sytske and Han The. “Recent Developmentss in Chinese Cinema: An Interview with Film Critic Tony Rayns.” China Information 7, 4 (Spring 1993): 39-47.

Knight, Deirdre Sabina. “Madness and Disability in Contemporary Chinese Film.” Journal of Medical Humanities 27, 2 (Summer 2006): 93-103.

[Abstract: This article draws on recent research in the medical humanities to analyze two contemporary Chinese films: Zhang Yuan’s Sons(1996) and Zhou Xiaowen’s The Common People (1998). By portraying psychic and physical anguish in ways that refuse to divorce biology from culture, such films offer rare moral dialogues on biomedical issues and contribute a cross-cultural perspective invaluable to the task of responding to illness and suffering.]

Kokas, Aynne. Hollywood Made in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. [MCLC Resource Center review by Darrell William Davis]

[Abstract: China’s entry into the WTO in 2001 ignited a race to capture new global media audiences. Hollywood moguls began courting Chinese investors to create entertainment on an international scale—from behemoth theme parks to blockbuster films. Hollywood Made in China examines these new collaborations, where the distinctions between Hollywood’s “dream factory” and Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream” of global influence become increasingly blurred. With insightful policy analysis, ethnographic research, and interviews with CEOs, directors, and film workers in Beijing, Shanghai, and Los Angeles, Kokas offers an unflinching look at China’s new role in the global media industries. A window into the partnerships with Chinese corporations that now shape Hollywood, this book will captivate anyone who consumes commercial media in the twenty-first century.]

Kong, Shuyu. “Big Shot from Beijing: Feng Xiaogang’s He Sui Pian and Contemporary Chinese Commercial Film.” Asian Cinema 14, 1 (Spring/Summer 2003): 175-87.

—–. Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse in Contemporary China. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Hui Faye Xiao]

[Abstract: Against the backdrop of the rapid development of China’s media industry and the huge growth in social media, this book explores the emotional content and public discourse of popular media in contemporary China. It examines the production and consumption of blockbuster films, television dramas, entertainment television shows, and their corresponding online audience responses, and describes the affective articulations generated by cultural and media texts, audiences and social contexts. Crucially, this book focuses on the agency of audiences in consuming these media products, and the affective communications taking place in this process in order to address how and why popular culture and entertainment programs exert so much power over mass audiences in China. Indeed, Shuyu Kong shows how Chinese people have sought to make sense of the dramatic historical changes of the past three decades through their engagement with popular media, and how this process has created a cultural public sphere where social communication and public discourse can be launched and debated in aesthetic and emotional terms. Contents: Introduction 1. Aftershock: The Sentimental Construction of Family in Post-Socialist China 2. Crying your Heart Out: Laid-off Women Workers, Kuqingxi, and Melodramatic Sensibility in Chinese TV Drama 3. Magic Cube of Happiness: Managing Conflicts and Feelings on Chinese Primetime Television 4. Are You the One? The Competing Public Voices of China’s Post-1980s Generation 5. Undercover: Internet Media Fandom and the Sociality of Cultural Consumption 6. Let the Bullet Fly: Film Discussions and the Cultural Public Sphere]

Kraicer, Shelly. “Man, Woman and Everything in Between.” [review of Man, Man, Woman, Woman]. Virtual China.

—–. “Chinese Language Films at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival.” MCLC Resource Center Publication, 2004. [reviews films from mainland China and Hong Kong]

—-. “Lost in Time, Lost in Space: Beijing Film Culture in 2004.” Cinemascope 21 (Winter 2004).

Kuoshu, Harry. “Beyond the Yellow Earth: The Postsocialist City as a Cinematic Space of Anxiety.” American Journal of Chinese Studies 4, 1 (1997): 50-72.

—–. Metro Movies: Cinematic Urbanism in Post-Mao China. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.

[Abstract: Metro Movies takes readers on a comprehensive tour of the urbanization of Chinese cinema. Focusing primarily on movies from the end of the twentieth century, it is the first single-authored work to explore the relationship between the changes in Chinese society—caused in part by the advent of postsocialism, the growth of cities, and globalization—and the transformation of Chinese cinema. Kuoshu examines such themes as displacement, cinematic representation, youth subculture, the private emotional lives of emerging urbanites, raw urban realism, and the allegorical contrast of the city and the countryside to illustrate the artistic richness and cultural diversity of this cinematic genre. Kuoshu discusses the work of director Huang Jianxin, whose films follow and critique China’s changing urban political culture. He dedicates a chapter to filmmakers who followed Huang and attempted to redefine the concept of art films to regain the local audience. These directors address Chinese moviegoers’ disappointment with the international adoption of Chinese art films, their lack of interest in conventional Chinese films, and their fascination with emerging audio-video media. A considerable amount of attention is given to films of the 1990s, which focus on the social changes surfacing in China, from the trend of hooliganism and the Beijing rock scene to the arrival of an urban pop culture lifestyle driven by expansionist commerce and materialism. Kuoshu also explores recent films that confront the seedier aspects of city life, as well as films that demonstrate how urbanization has touched every fiber of Chinese living. Metro Movies illustrates how cinematic urbanism is no longer a genre indicator but is instead an era indicator, revealing the dominance of metropolitan living on modern Chinese culture. It gives new insight into contemporary Chinese politics and culture and provides readers with a better understanding of China’s urban cinema. This book will be an excellent addition to college film courses and will fascinate any reader with an interest in film studies or Chinese culture.

Kyung-McClain, Jeff, Russell Meeuf, and Jing Jing Chang, eds. Chinese Cinema Identity, Power, and Globalization. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022.

[Abstract: In Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization, a variety of scholars explore the history, aesthetics, and politics of Chinese cinema as the Chinese film industry grapples with its place as the second largest film industry in the world. Exploring the various ways that Chinese cinema engages with global politics, market forces, and film cultures, this edited volume places Chinese cinema against an array of contexts informing the contours of Chinese cinema today. The book also demonstrates that Chinese cinema in the global context is informed by the intersections and tensions found in Chinese and world politics, national and international co-productions, the local and global in representing Chineseness, and the lived experiences of social and political movements versus screened politics in Chinese film culture. This work is a pioneer investigation of the topic and will inspire future research by other scholars of film studies.]

Lai, Linda Chiu-Han. “Whither the Walker Goes: Spatial Practices and Negative Poetics in 1990s Chinese Urban Cinema.” In Zhen Zhang, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21st Century. Durham: Duke UP, 2007, 205-39.

Lam, Adam. Identity, Tradition and Globalism: Post-Cultural Revolution Chinese Feature Films 1977-1996. VDM Verlag, 2008.

Lau, Dorothy W. S. “On (Not) Speaking English: The ‘Phonic’ Personae of Transnational Chinese Stars in the Global Visual Network.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 12, 1 (2018): 20-40.

Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah. “Globalization and Youthful Subculture: The Chinese Sixth Generation Films at the Dawn of the New Century.” In Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, ed., Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003, 13-27.

—–. “Chinese Cinema Revisits the City: Beijing Trilogy and Global Urbanism in the 1990s.” In See-kam Tan, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds., Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009, 220-33. [deals with Good Morning Beijing, Beijing Bastards, and City Paradise]

Li, Cheuk-to, Wong Ain-Ling and Jacob Wong. “New Chinese Cinema at HKIFF: A Look Back at the Last 20 Years.” China Perspectives 1 (2010): 78-84.

Li, Jie. “From Auto-Ethnography to Autobiography: Representations of the Past in Contemporary Chinese Cinema.” Senses of Cinema 45 (Oct.-Dec. 2007).

—–. “Discolored Vestiges of History: Black and White in the Age of Color Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, 3 (2012): 247-62.

Lim, Song Hwee. “Celluloid Comrades: Male Homosexuality in Chinese Cinema in the 1990s.” China Information 16, 4 (2002): 68-88.

Lin, Mu. “A Great Media Wall–China’s Film Policy and Its Impact on U.S. Film Exporters.” Asian Cinema 18, 1 (Spring/Summer 2007): 91-103.

Lin, Sylivia Li-chun. “The Politics of Filmmaking and Movie Watching.” In Lional M. Jensen and Timothy B. Weston, eds., China’s Transformations: The Stories beyond the Headlines. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.

Lin, Xiaoping. Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-garde Art and Independent Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010.

[Abstract: … affords a deep study of Chinese avant-garde art and independent cinema from the mid-1990s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Informed by the author’s experience in Beijing and New York—global cities with extensive access to an emergent transnational Chinese visual culture—this work situates selected artworks and films in the context of Chinese nationalism and post-socialism and against the background of the capitalist globalization that has so radically affected contemporary China. It juxtaposes and compares avant-garde artists and independent filmmakers from a number of intertwined perspectives, particularly in their shared avant-garde postures and perceptions.]

Liu, Jin. “The Rhetoric of Local Languages as the Marginal: Chinese Underground and Independent Films by Jia Zhangke and Others.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18, 2 (Fall 2006): 163-205.

—–. Signifying the Local: Media Productions Rendered in  Local Languages in Mainland China in the New Millennium. Leiden: Brill, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Lauren Gorfinkel]

Liu, Lihsing. “The Chinese Cinema in the 1980s: Toward a Systematic Study of Its Socialist Realism.” PhD dissertation. Brigham Young University.

—–. “Return to Commonality-About Director He Qun.” China Screen 3 (1994): 24-25.

Liu, Petrus and Lisa Rofel, eds. “Wolf Warrior II: The Rise of China and Gender/Sexual Politics.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (Feb. 2018).

—–. “The Wandering Earth: Gender, Sexuality, and Geopolitics.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (Sept. 2020).

Liu, Xiao. “From the Glaring Sun to Flying Bullets: Aesthetics and Memory in the ‘Post-‘Era Chinese Cinema.” In Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani, eds, China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 321-55.

—–. Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2019.

[Abstract: A groundbreaking, alternate history of information technology and information discourse. Information Fantasies offers a revisionist account of the emergence of the “information society,” arguing that it was developed out of a set of techno-cultural imaginations and practices that arrived alongside postsocialism. Ranging over forgotten science fiction, unjustly neglected films, corporeal practices such as qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories, it constructs an alternate genealogy of digital and information imaginaries. Xiao Liu’s creative, erudite, and richly researched book entirely reconfigures our understanding of the media landscape in 1980s China. Her dense explorations of how new media emerged, coalesced, and interacted in this crucial period range over multiple formats—forgotten science fiction stories, neglected films, photographs, videotapes, computers, television and teletext, qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories—to draw science and aesthetics into a charged and illuminating encounter. The result is unquestionably one of the most original works to appear in Chinese cultural studies since the millennium.]

Liu, Xinmin. “Play and Being Playful: The Quotidian in Cinematic Remembrance of the Mao Era.” Asian Cinema 15, 1 (Spring 2004): 73-89.

—–. “‘Place’ Construction: Innovative Reworking of Fiction in Recent Chinese Films.” Journal of Contemporary China 57 (Nov. 2008): 699-716.

—–. “In the Face of Development Ruins: Place Attachment and Its Ethical Claims.” In Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds., Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2009, 217-34.

Lo, Kwai-Cheung. “When China Encounters Asia Again: Rethinking Ethnic Excess in Some Recent Films from the PRC.” The China Review 10, 2 (2010).

[Abstract: The essay deals with ethnic excess through the dynamism of self-other relationships in China’s films about ethnic minorities. As the notion of social harmony becomes the defining discourse of Chinese policy in the 21st century, its repercussions can be found in the cinematic treatments of the ethnic other. A different handling of the ethnic or foreign other in some recent productions could be related to China’s consciousness of its new social relations. Those films reveal a strategy of othering in which recognition and alienation of oneself in the other is always in play. The focus, however, is on Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, which depicts a Japanese visitor being offered the greatest hospitality from his Chinese hosts during his trip to Yunnan. On the surface, the film resonates with China’s harmonizing foreign policy, but it implicitly gives voice to the alterity within nationhood by functioning as the internal re-marking of the disturbing excess in China’s capitalization project.]

Lu, Hongwei. “From Roots to Routes or Vice Versa: Transformation of Urban Space and Familial Intimacy–On New Urban Cinema.” Asian Cinema 19, 2 (Fall 2008): 102-134.

Lu, Jie. “Multiple Time-Spaces Dialogical Representation of the Global City in Chinese New Urban and Rural-Migrant Films.” Prism 19, 1 (2022): 6-27.

[Abstract: A reading of the cinematic representation of the global city in Chinese “new urban films” and in rural-migrant films leads this article to focus on the plurality and dialogism among different chronotopes produced collectively across these films. The article argues that the global city is constructed by visible and invisible urban spaces whose representation offers a restructured urban world and captures the profound transformations of the Chinese city since the onset of this century. In redefining mainstream commercial/popular urban cinema via incorporation of rural-migrant films (often regarded as a separate category), this article also argues that new urban and rural-migrant films share many features. One such feature is the articulation of the neoliberal ideology of individualistic striving and personal improvement that is very much in line with socialist values and crucial to achieving the official Chinese vision of a “harmonious society.”]

Lu, Sheldon H. “Tear Down the City: Reconstructing Urban Space in Contemporary Chinese Popular Cinema and Avant-Garde Art.” In Zhen Zhang, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21st Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, 137-60.

—–. Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by Chuanhui Meng]

[Abstract: Sheldon Lu’s wide-ranging new book investigates how filmmakers and visual artists from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan have envisioned China as it transitions from a socialist to a globalized capitalist state. It examines how the modern nation has been refashioned and re-imagined in order to keep pace with globalization and transnationalism. At the heart of Lu’s analysis is a double movement in the relationship between nation and transnationalism in the Chinese post-socialist state. He considers the complexity of how the Chinese economy is integrated in the global capitalist system while also remaining a repressive body politic with mechanisms of control and surveillance. He explores the interrelations of the local, the national, the subnational, and the global as China repositions itself in the world. Lu considers examples from feature and documentary film, mainstream and marginal cinema, and a variety of visual arts: photography, painting, digital video, architecture, and installation. His close case studies include representations of class, masculinity and sexuality in contemporary Taiwanese and Chinese cinema; the figure of the sex worker as a symbol of modernity and mobility; and artists’ representations of Beijing at the time of the 2008 Olympics.]

Lu, Tonglin. Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.

—–. “Trapped Freedom and Localized Globalism.” In Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang eds., From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006, 123-42.

Lu, Yi. “The Malling of the Movies: Film Exhibition Reforms, Multiplexes, and Film Consumption in the New Millennium in Urban China.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, 2 (2016).

[Abstract: The aim of this article is to examine China’s multiplex boom in the new millennium. As a result of film exhibition deregulation policy, the hot investment trend caused a ‘cinema building frenzy’, which significantly changed the face of the movie exhibition sector in the Chinese film industry. The dramatic growth in the multiplex is congruent with commercial real estate developments, urbanization and consumerism in China. This article considers the multiplex as a cinematic heterotopia and the state’s support for the multiplex development as a case study of China’s strategies of ‘controlled commodification’. I argue that through the modernization and commodification of cinema-going space, the state recreated the social relations between the government and the film industry, as well as between cultural regulation, people’s public life and human behavior.]

Mak, Monica. “East West Movie Magic: Shadow Magic as Hybrid Art with Third Space.” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 1, 1 (Spring 2002): 68-82.

Marchetti, Gina. From Tian’anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989-1997. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.

[Abstract: Global perceptions of China have changed dramatically since the massive student protests that took place in Tian’anmen Square in April 1989. The media spotlight trained on Beijing, and the international uproar over the events of that spring still shape the world’s perceptions of the People’s Republic and the ways that Chinese people, within and beyond China, see and portray themselves. In From Tian’anmen to Times Square, leading film scholar Gina Marchetti considers the complex changes in the ways that China and the Chinese have been portrayed in cinema and media arts since the Tian’anmen revolt. Drawing on her interviews with leading contemporary Chinese filmmakers, Marchetti looks at a wide range of work by Chinese and non-Chinese media artists working in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore and on transnational co-productions involving those places. Focusing on the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality on global screens, Marchetti traces the momentous political, cultural, social, and economic forces confronting contemporary media artists and filmmakers working within “Greater China.”]

—–. “Where in the World are Chinese Women Filmmakers? Transnational China and World Cinema in the Twenty-First Century.” Studies in World Cinema 1, 2 (2021).

[Abstract: Transnational Chinese women filmmakers reflect the enormous changes happening in the global film industry as well as political, economic, technological, social, and cultural transformations taking place in the region since the beginning of the millennium. An analysis of Hong Kong writer-director Aubrey Lam’s Anna & Anna (2007) uncovers how this film explores the divided psyche of a woman torn between “two systems” that model femininity for women in Singapore and Shanghai in the 21st century. Lam’s narrative touches on issues central to the work of many women working across the Chinese-speaking world including migration, labor relations, postcolonial and postsocialist identities, commodification of female bodies in consumer culture, cross-border sexualities, female desire and domesticity.]

—–. Women Filmmakers and the Visual Politics of Transnational China in the #MeToo Era. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: Manoeuvring around mainland China’s censors and pushing back against threats of lawsuits, online harassment, and physical violence, #MeToo activists shed a particularly harsh light on the treatment of women in the cinema and entertainment industries. Focusing on films from the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora, this book considers how female directors shape Chinese visual politics through the depiction of the look, the stare, the leer, the glare, the glimpse, the glance, the queer and the oppositional gaze in fiction and documentary filmmaking. In the years leading up to and following in the wake of #MeToo, these cosmopolitan women filmmakers offer innovative angles on body image, reproduction, romance, family relations, gender identity, generational differences, female sexuality, sexual violence, sex work, labor migration, career options, minority experiences, media access, feminist activism and political rights within the rapidly changing Chinese cultural orbit.]

Martin, Fran. Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2003. [reviewed by Kam Louie in Intersections 10 (Aug. 2004)].

McGrath, Jason. “The New Formalism Mainland Chinese Cinema at the Turn of the Century.” In Jie Lu, ed., China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century. London: Routledge, 2008, 207-22.

—–. Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008.

—–. “The Urban Generation: Underground and Independent Films from the PRC.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 167-75.

Meng, Jing. Fragmented Memories and Screening Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020.

[Abstract: argues that films and TV dramas about the Cultural Revolution made after China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 tend to represent personal memories in a markedly sentimental, nostalgic, and fragmented manner is new trend is a signi cant departure from earlier lms about the subject, which are generally interpreted as national allegories, not private expressions of grief, regret or other personal feelings With China entering a postsocialist era, the ideological con ation of socialism and global capitalism has generated enough cultural ambiguity to allow a space for the expression of personalized reminiscences of the past.]

Nakajima, Seio. “Film Clubs in Beijing: The Cultural Consumption of Chinese Indepedent Films.” In Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang eds., From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006, 161-188.

—–. The Chinese Film Industry in the Reform Era: Its Genesis, Structure, and Transformation Since 1978. Ph.D. diss. University of California, Berkeley, 2007.

—–. “Film as Cultural Politics.” In Ching Kwan Lee and You-tien Hsing, eds. Reclaiming Chinese Society: The New Social Activism. London: Routledge, 2009, 159-183. [discusses the field of cultural production and consumption of contemporary Chinese cinema.]

—–. “Official Chinese Film Awards and Film Festivals: History, Configuration and Transnational Legitimation.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13, 3 (Nov. 2019): 228-43.

Ni, Zhen. “Reflections on Chinese Cinema in the Context of Globalization.” Tr. Lingling Pan. Asian Cinema 18, 1 (Spring/Summer 2007): 248-52.

Nie, Jing. “A City of Disappearance: Trauma, Displacement, and Spectral Cityscape in Contemporary Chinese Cinema.” In Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds.,Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2009, 195-213.

Noble, Jonathan. “Titanic in China: Transnational Capitalism as Official Ideology?” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 1 (Spring 2000): 164-97.

Ouyang Jianghe and Cui Weiping, ed. Zhongguo duli dianying: Fangtanlu (Chinese independent film: interviews). HK: Oxford, 2007. [interviews with Jia Zhangke, Wang Chao, Li Yang, Li Yu, Zhang Ming, Lou Ye, Zhu Wen, Wanma Caidan, Li Hongqi, and Han Jie]

Palmer, Augusta. “Scaling the Skyscraper: Images of Cosmopolitan Consumption in Street Angel (1937) and Beautiful New World (1998).” In Zhen Zhang, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21st Century. Durham: Duke UP, 2007, 181-204.

Pang, Laikwan . “Piracy/Privacy: The Despair of Cinema and Collectivity in China.” boundary 2 31, 3 (Fall 2004): 101-124.

Pecic, Zoran Lee. New Queer Sinophone Cinema: Local Histories, Transnational Connections. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. [chapters on Zhang Yuan, Yan Yan Mak, and Zero Chou]

Pickowicz, Paul G. and Yingjin Zhang, eds. From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. [publisher’s blurb]

Pickowicz, Paul G. “Social Dynamics of Underground Filmmaking in China.” In Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang eds., From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006, 1-22.

—–. “Independent Chinese Film: Seeing the Not-Usually-Visible in Rural China.” In Catherine Lynch, Robert C. Marks, and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds., Radicalism, Revolution, and Reform in Modern China. New York: Lexington Books, 2011, 161-184.

Qian, Kun. “Love or Hate: The First Emperor on Screen–Three Movies on the Attempted Assassination of the First Emperor Qin Shihuang.” Asian Cinema 20, 2 (Fall/Winter 2009): 39-67.

Ran, Ma: “Celebrating the International, Disremembering Shanghai: The Curious Case of the Shanghai International Film Festival.” Culture Unbound  4, 2012: 147–168.

Rayns, Tony. “China: Censors, Scapegoats and Bargaining Chips.” Index on Censorship 6 (1995): 69-81.

Reynaud, Berenice. Nouvelles Chines, Nouveaux Cinémas. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1999.

—–. “Modern Times.” Film Comment 39, 5 (Sept./Oct. 2003). [overview of recent Chinese film]

—–. “Chinese Women Directors: Strong Voices from the Margins.” Cinemaya 58 (2003).

Riep, Steven L. “Disability in Modern Chinese Cinema.” In Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Disability History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018,

[Abstract: Depictions of disability in Chinese-language films from China and Taiwan, once a rarity, have become mainstream since the 1980s and have shifted from critiquing national policies, historical accounts, and collective experiences to highlighting disabled people as complex characters and advocating for greater support for them. These films reveal how disability has become a positive source of identity in its own right. Films from the late 1980s and early 1990s such as Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite use disability to offer critiques of official policies or alternative accounts of historical events. Zhou Sun’s Breaking the Silence and Xue Xiaolu’s Ocean Heaven, which focus on caregiving parents and their disabled children, reveal the need for private, extragovernmental networks of support as well as greater government support for those with disabilities and their families. Finally, films such as Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times feature characters with impairments living rich and rewarding lives, countering stereotypes about disability.]

Robinson, Bruce. ” Chinese Mainland New Era Cinema and Tian’anmen.” Asian Cinema 10, 1 (1998): 37-56.

Rojas, Carlos. “Touching Father: Sight, Sound, Touch, and Intermedial Intimacies.” In Shengqing Wu and Xuelei Huang, eds., Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture. London: Routledge, 2022, 231-49.

[Abstract: provides a study of the intertwining of touch, vision, and intimacy in contemporary art and films. In his discussions of mediated physical contact and conflicted relationships between different pairs of male protagonists, Rojas delves into “a dialectics of proximity and distance, intimacy and alienation.” Relying upon reciprocity and connectivity, tactile contact between individuals, perceived as being potentially more direct, intimate, and sensuous, is subject to more restrictions than other modes of sensory perception. Determined by a complex set of personal, cultural, social, religious, and institutional factors, physical contact thus acquires a range of significance entwining with different circumstances. In contemporary artist Song Dong’s work “Touching my father” (1997), Song projects his own hand image onto his father’s face and body to “caress” him in the process of the father’s unclothing. The work, overcoming his estranged relationship with his father and ethical and physical barriers, opens the possibilities for trans-generational affective connections. Through detailed examination of unexpected moments of physical intimacy (between lovers, acquaintances, or strangers) in the films of Wong Kar-wai 王家衛, Zhang Yuan 張元, and Tsai Ming-liang 蔡明亮, Rojas unfolds the delicate, nuanced dialectics of desire and alienation. In Happy Together (1997), East Palace West Palace (1996), and The River (1997), the male protagonist’s relationship with his male lover or even a stranger functions as a displaced substitution for his estranged relationship with his actual father. As Rojas’s sensitive readings of these films show, it is “precisely intimate tactile contact (typically prohibited in a familial relationship, yet compulsory in a sexual one) that functions as a fulcrum across which this process of displacement operates.” The critical exploration of sensuous tactility, intimacy, and alienation in a nexus of male romantic, erotic, and ethical relationships boils down to one deeply touching image, both literally and metaphorically: the touching hand.]

Rosen, Stanley. “The Wolf at the Door: Hollywood and the Film Market in China from 1994-2000.” Published in Eric J. Heikkila and Rafael Pizarro, eds.,Southern California in the World and the World in Southern California. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002, 49-78.

—–. “China Goes Hollywood.” Foreign Policy (January/Feb., 2003): 94-98.

—–, ed., “The China Film Market.” Chinese Education and Society. 32, 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1999).

—-. “Hollywood, Globalization and Film Markets in Asia: Lessons for China?” 2nd Chinese Advanced Forum on Visual Arts (Shanghai: Nov. 2002). [downloadable pdf version from Asian Film Connections]

—–. “Film and Society in China: The Logic of the Market.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 197-217.

Rosen, Stanley, ed. “‘The Troubleshooters,’ by Wang Shuo.” Chinese Education and Society 31, 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1998). [translation of the filmscript with an editorial introduction]

Schein, Louisa. “Ethnographic Representation across Genres: The Culture Trope in Contemporary Mainland Media.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 507-25.

Shao, Xuesong and Sheldon Lu. “Reconfiguring the Chronotope: Spatiotemporal Representations and Cultural Imaginations of Beijing in Mr. Six.” Prism 19, 1 (2022): 67-85.

[Abstract: This article adopts Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the chronotope to analyze the 2015 film Laopaoer 老炮兒 (Mr. Six), directed by Guan Hu 管虎 and starring Feng Xiaogang 馮小剛, exploring its representation and reconfiguration of the real as well as the imagined time-spaces of Beijing. Revolving around generational conflicts against the grain of a globalized and gentrified Beijing, Mr. Six creates a strong nostalgic appeal and laments the withering of mores from the past. The film not only attends to the physiognomic remapping of contemporary Beijing but also incorporates topographical imaginaries from the culture of the martial arts. By invoking hybrid sites of memory, Guan Hu mobilizes cultural legacies associated with Beijing and creates a palimpsestic urban chronotope. Furthermore, this article compares Mr. Six to its literary and filmic predecessors, probing its insights and oversights in restoring cultural memories and in capturing the zeitgeist of contemporary China. With gaps and conflicts on textual, contextual, and intertextual levels calling into question the efficacy of Mr. Six‘s exposé of China’s social stratification and urban gentrification, the stories in, of, and around Mr. Six reiterate the coordination between cultural elites and consumer culture.]

Shi, Yaohua. “Maintaining Law and Order in the City: New Tales of the People’s Police.” In Zhen Zhang, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21st Century. Durham: Duke UP, 2007, 316-43/.

“Special Chine.” special segment devoted to contemporary Chinese film. Cahiers du Cinema 586 (January 2004): 10-41. [essays on: Tian Zhuangzhuang’sSpringtime in a Small Town; an interview with Tian Zhuanzhuang; on Jia Zhangke; independent film; Wang Bing’s Tiexi Qu; the fever for documentary; the San Yuan Li project in Guangdong; and Li Yang’s Blind Shaft]

Stuckey, Andrew. Metacinema in Contemporary Chinese Film. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2018.

[Abstract: Depictions within a movie of either filmmaking or film watching are hardly novel, but the dramatic expansion of the reach of the metacinematic into contemporary Chinese cinemas is nothing short of remarkable. To G. Andrew Stuckey, the prevalence of metacinematic features forms the basis of a discourse on film arising from the films themselves. Such a discourse, in turn, outlines the boundaries of the possible for film in China as aesthetic or sociopolitical practice. Metacinema also draws our attention to the presence of the audience, people actively responding to a film. In elucidating the affective responses elicited by the metacinematic mode in the viewers, Stuckey argues that metacinema reflects ways of being in the world that audiences may take up for themselves. The films studied in this book are drawn across the full spectrum of Chinese films made in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the 1990s and 2000s, from award-winning conceptual art films to popular crowd pleasers, blockbusters to low-budget productions, and documentary-style social realist exposé projects to studio assembly-line investments. The recurrence of the metacinematic across this broad range of works is indicative of its relevance to Chinese films today, and the analysis of these diverse examples allows us to gauge the cultural, social, and aesthetic implications of Chinese cinemas as a whole.

—–. “Special Effects and Spectacle: Integration of CGI in Contemporary Chinese Film.” Journal of Chinese Film Studies 1, 1 (2021): 49-64.

[Abstract: Film production in China, like that in Hollywood, increasingly attempts to achieve blockbuster status, through reliance on large budgets which enable the cultivation of star systems and world-class production values. More and more we see a reliance on computer-generated special effects to drive audience appeal and, thus, ticket sales. This article compares two recent films from Chinese auteurs, Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall and Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart, to examine the degree to which integration of computer-generated effects is achieved and how that translates into film art.]

Su, Wendy. “The Platformization of China’s Film Distribution in a Pandemic Era.” Chinese Journal of Communications 15, 1 (2022).

[Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally transformed global media industries’ practices and altered audiences’ media consumption habits. The film industries have shortened theatrical windows and expanded streaming services to cope with this reality, which has accelerated the so-called digital distribution revolution. This study focuses on the transformation of China’s film distribution and exhibition sector before and during the pandemic. Specifically, the study tracks the strategies of China’s digital giants, iQIYI, Tencent-backed Maoyan, and Alibaba-backed Tao Piao Piao, for promoting and exhibiting films. By integrating digital media studies and industrial studies, the study seeks to tackle the issue of whether distributional platformization can serve as the infrastructure of the film industry and usher in a new era of the digital entertainment revolution. The findings indicate that digital corporations’ strategies have accelerated the platformization of the distribution infrastructure of the film industry. However, current industrial practices nourish the prospect of coexistence in the foreseeable future.]

Sun, Shaoyi. “Under the Shadow of Commercialization: The Changing Landscape of Chinese Cinema.” Presented at “Filmic Text and Media Production in Transnational China” Conference (Los Angeles); published in Celluloid (April 1999).

—–. “Global Image Consumption and Chinese Cinema: Random Thoughts on Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl.” Unpublished manuscript on the Asian Connections website.

Sun, Shaoyi and Li Xun, eds. Lights! Action! Kai shi!: In Depth Interviews with China’s New Generation of Move Directors. Norwalk, CT: Eastbridge, 2008.

[Contents: includes interviews with Guan Hu, Jia Zhangke, Jiang Wen, Jin Chen, Li Xin, Liu Binjian, Lou Ye, Lu Chuan, Lu Xuecheng, Ma Liwen, Meng Qi, Shi Runjiu, Tang Danian, Wang Chao, Wang Guangli, Wang Quanan, Wang Xiaoshuai, Xu Jinglei, Zhang Ming, Zhang Yang, and Zhang Yuan]

Talmacs, Nicole. China’s Cinema of Class: Audiences and Narratives. NY: Routledge, 2017.

[Abstract: This book investigates the web between the representation of class themes in Chinese film narratives, local audience reception to these films, and the socialisation of China’s contemporary class society. Bringing together textual analyses of narratives from five commercially exhibited films: Let the Bullets Fly (Jiang: 2010), Lost on Journey (Yip: 2011), Go Lala Go! (Xu: 2011), House Mania(Sun: 2011) and The Piano in the Factory (Zheng: 2011); and the reception of 179 Chinese audiences from varying class positions, it investigates the extent to which fictional narratives inform and reflect current class identities in present-day China. Through group discussions in Beijing, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Lanzhou and Taiyuan, the author searches for audiences beyond major cities that are typically the focus of film consumption studies in China. As such, the book reveals not only how deeply and widespread the socialisation of China’s class society has become in the imaginations of Chinese audiences, but also what appears to be a preference of both audiences and filmmakers for the continuation of China’s new class society.]

Tang, Xiaobing. “Why Should 2009 Make a Difference? Reflections on a Chinese Blockbuster.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (December 2009).

Teo, Stephen [interviews with Li Yang]. “There is No Sixth Generation: Director Li Yang on Blind Shaft and His Place in Chinese Cinema.” Senses of Cinema27 (July/Aug. 2003).

—–. “Wind Blast, a Chinese Western in a Nomadic Plateau.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8, 2 (2014): 123-34.

[Abstract: This analysis of Wind Blast (2010) presents a type of genre filmmaking in Chinese cinema heavily indebted to Hollywood. Wind Blast is a Chinese Western; in fact it falls into a category of Asian Westerns, including Tears of the Black Tiger (Thailand, 2000), Sukiyaki Western Django (Japan, 2007), The Good, The Bad, The Weird (South Korea, 2008), A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop (China, 2009), and Let the Bullets Fly (China, 2010). All these Westerns may be described as ‘Nomadic’ films, to use a Deleuzian principle, unfolding along rhizomatic ‘lines of segmentarity’ (from A Thousand Plateaus, p. 21). The paper will set out to delineate the Western space ofWind Blastand to examine its signs of spatiality that connects it to the Hollywood Western, while also exploring how it is also disconnected from its source. The Chinese Western possesses its own Western space that is located in the Western topographical regions of China. The paper will examine how this space is infused and affected by the Deleuzian concept of difference.]

Tong, Zhaosheng. “Traditional Culture in Chinese Movies: The Case of Movies Shot in Huizhou.” African and Asian Studies 20, 4 (2021): 401-19.

[Abstract: Movies are often viewed as important tools to promote cultural communication. Many international moviegoers and researchers endorse Chinese movies as authentic representation of traditional Chinese history and culture. However, in this era of commercialism, movies are often produced as commercial products to win the maximum profits at global market; thus, the history and culture in Chinese movies are often reshaped and reconfigured to meet the taste of foreign moviegoers. This paper uses Judou (1990), Inkstone Bed (1995) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), three movies shot in Huizhou, a land known for its profound traditional culture, as a case study to explore how and why traditional culture is reshaped and reconfigured. The results show that those three movies diverge from traditional culture in one way or another. The distortion or stigmatization of Huizhou culture in Judou and Inkstone Bed caters to global audience’s preconceived notion of a corrupted and chaotic “ancient China.” Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon transcends local settings to address cross-cultural and multinational themes. With a diversity of cultural elements hybridized and well-attuned, it sets a good example for Chinese movies to win global recognition and commercial success worldwide.]

Vanderstaay, Lara. “Female Consciousness in Contemporary Chinese Women Directors’ Films: A Case Study of Ma Xiaoying’s Gone is the One Who Held Me Dearest in the World.” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 16 (Feb. 2008).

Veg, Sebastian, ed. “Independent Chinese Cinema: Filming in the ‘Space of the People.'” Special feature of China Perspectives 1 (2010).

—–. “Opening Public Spaces.” China Perspectives 1 (2010): 4-10.

Visser, Robin. “Spaces of Disappearance: 1990s Beijing Art, Film, and Fiction in Dialogue with Urbanization.” In Jie Lu, ed., China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century. NY: Routledge, 2008, 223-56.

Voci, Paula. China on Video: Small Screen Realities. NY: Routledge, 2010.

[Abstract: China On Video is the first in-depth study that examines smaller-screen realities and the important role they play not only in the fast-changing Chinese mediascape, but also more broadly in the practice of experimental and non-mainstream cinema. At the crossroads of several disciplines—film, media, new media, media anthropology, visual arts, contemporary China area studies, and cultural studies–this book reveals the existence of a creative, humorous, but also socially and politically critical “China on video”, which locates itself outside of the intellectual discourse surrounding both auteur cinema and digital art. By describing smaller-screen movies, moviemaking and viewing as light realities, Voci points to their “insignificant” weight in terms of production costs, distribution size, profit gains, intellectual or artistic ambitions, but also their deep meaning in defining an alternative way of seeing and understanding the world. The author proposes that lightness is a concept that can usefully be deployed to describe the moving image, beyond the specificity of recent new media developments and which can, in fact, help us rethink previous cinematic practices in broad terms both spatially and temporally.]

Wang, Eugene. “Film and Contemporary Chinese Art: Mediums and Remediation.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 566-89.

Wang, Changsong. Chinese Youth Cinema: Youth Film as a Genre. Scholars’ Press, 2015.

[Abstract: This book focuses on the youth film is an invention of the 1950s in Chinese communities. Also, this book discusses in the second half of the decade starting in the year 2000 appeared certain youth styles/images and promoted certain perspectives on young people’s psychological well-being. By giving Chinese youth more ‘power’ of self-identification, youth films in recent decades have begun to place more responsibility on young characters to deal with their journey through adolescence. This journey offers any number of directions and route, but their destination is always to approach maturity. Timothy Shary initiated his earlier academic study on ‘teen film’. His work on gender continued in studies of youth cinema. His works inspired the author of this book to look at the development of youth genre in Chinese context, as well as to give a more precise definition of Chinese youth genre and sub-genres.]

Wang, Qi. Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Luke Robinson]

[Abstract: provides a historically informed examination of independent moving image works made between 1990 and 2010 in China. Showcasing an evolving personal mode of narrating memory, documenting reality, and inscribing subjectivity in over sixteen selected works that range from narrative film and documentary to experimental video and digital media (even including a multimedia avant-garde play), this book presents a provocative portrait of the independent filmmakers as a peculiarly pained yet active group of historical subjects of the transitional, post-socialist era. Through a connected investigation of cultural and cinematic concepts including historical consciousness, personal memory, narrative, performance, subjectivity, spatiality, and the body, Wang weaves a critical narrative of the formation of a unique post-socialist cultural consciousness that enables independent cinema and media to become a highly significant and effective conduit for historical thinking in contemporary China. Covering directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Jia Zhangke, Jiang Wen, Lou Ye, Meng Jinghui, Wang Bing, Wang Guangli, Duan Jinchuan, Cui Zi’en, Shi Tou, and Tang Danhong, this book is essential reading for all students and scholars in Chinese film]

—–. “Homecoming, Postsocialist Memory, and Subjects: On the 9th Reel China Biennial.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright June 2020)

Wang, Shujen. Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Greater China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.

Wang, Ting. “Hollywood’s Crusade in China prior to China’s WTO Accession.” Jump Cut 49 (Spring 2007).

Wang, Xiaoping. Ideology and Utopia in China’s New Wave Cinema: Globalization and Its Chinese Discontents. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

[Abstract: Ideology and Utopia in China’s New Wave Cinema investigates the ways in which New Wave filmmakers represent China in this age of neoliberal reform. Analyzing this paradigm shift in independent cinema, this text explores the historicity of the cinematic form and its cultural-political visions. Through a close reading of the narrative strategy of key films in New Wave Cinema, Xiaoping Wang studies the movement’s impact on film, literature, culture and politics.]

—–. Postsocialist Conditions: Ideas and History in China’s “Independent Cinema,” 1988-2008. Leiden: Brill, 2018.

[Abstract: WANG offers a comprehensive survey and trenchant critique of China’s “Independent Cinema” by the sixth-generation auteurs. By showing the multi-valence of the postsocialist conditions in contemporary Chinese society, their films articulate a new cultural-political logic in postsocialist China, which is also the logic of the market in this era of neoliberal transformation, brought about by the forces of marketization since the late 1980s. The directors laudably show the spirits of humanism and the humanitarian concerns of the underclass, yet the shortage and repudiation of class analysis prohibits the artists from exploring the social contradictions and the cause of class restructuration.]

Wang, Yiman. “Remade in China: Cinema with ‘Chinese Elements’ in the Dapian Age.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 590-609.

Ward, Julian. “Serving the People in the Twenty-first Century: Zhang Side and the Revival of the Yan’an Spirit.” Screening the Past 22 (Dec. 2007).

Wedell-Wedellsbord, Anne. “Chinese Literature and Film in the 1990s.” In Robert Benewick and Paul Wingrove, eds., China in the 1990s. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1995, 224-33.

Williams, Louise. “Troubled Masculinities: Questioning Gender and Sexuality in Liu Bingjian’s Nannan Nunu (Men and Women). In Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, eds., Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film. NY: Columbia UP, 2007.

Wolte, Isabel. “Persuasive Communication in Chinese Historical Films: The Founding of a Republic as a Milestone.” In Peng Hsiao-yen and Ella Raidel, eds., The Politics of Memory in Sinophone Cinemas and Image Culture: Altering Archives. Routledge, 2018, 32-45.

Wu, Guo. “Subversion of the Feminist Myth in Chinese Film and Its Dilemma.” Asian Cinema 16, 1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 325-33.

[Abstract: looks at the representation of women in Sixth Generation films such as Green Tea, Unknown Pleasures, Beijing Bicycles, etc.]

Wu, Lydia. “From Chinese Independent Cinema to Art Cinema: Convergence and Divergence.” Asian Cinema 33, 1 (2022): 3-19.

[Abstract: With the decline of Chinese independent cinema, art cinema has grown at a fast pace since the mid-2010s in China. There has been a convergence as well as a divergence of independent cinema and art cinema facilitated by institutional reforms of the Chinese film industry. This article examines how small- to medium-sized film production companies work as market actors as well as intermediaries between independent filmmakers, the state and the market to co-opt independent cinema into an officially approved art cinema and activate the market potential of art cinema through engaging with the cultural economy. This officially approved art cinema is not construed as an alternative to, and a form of resistance to, the mainstream but as a booster for the industry. This article offers new insights into the interrelation of artistic, commercial and political interests and demonstrates how these interests shape meanings and modes of ‘independence’ and ‘art’ in contemporary global film industries.]

Wu, Shengqing. “Figuring Time: Lyricism in Contemporary Chinese Poetic Films.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. NY: Routledge, 2023, 355-66.

Wu, Xianggui. The Chinese Film Industry Since 1977. PhD dissertation. Eugene: University of Oregon, 1992.

Xiao, Hui. “Chinese Melodrama, Japanese Nostalgia.” Asian Cinema 16, 2 (Fall/Winter 2005): 63-84. [deals mostly with Huo Jianqi’s film Nuan, an adaptation of a Mo Yan short story]

—–. “Cross-Cultural Nostalgia and Visual Consumption: On the Adaptation and Japanese Reception of Huo Jianqi’s 2003 Film Nuan.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 31, 2 (July 2005): 227-48.

Xiao, Ying. “‘Yesterday Once More:’ IP film, Phantom/Fandom of Music, and the Youthful (Re)turn of Chinese Cinema in the Age of New Digital Media.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 15, 1 (March 2021): 87-103.

[Abstract: China in the second decade of the twenty-first century has seen an upsurge of coming-of-age cinematic narratives by a cohort of Millennial filmmakers—referenced in Chinese discursively as the post-1970s or post-1980s Generation. Heralded by Zhao Wei’s So Young (one of the highest grossing films in 2013), these productions feature many thematic and formal aspects of the Bildungsroman genre. Such generic features as retrospective narration and a storyline that chronicle the physical, psychological, and intellectual growth of the protagonists from youth to adulthood are employed to explore broader social-cultural transformations of China in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. My paper examines the ascendance of the Chinese Millennial narrative (qingchun pian) and its distinguishing formal qualities symptomatic of intersectionality and intermediality that also define IP film in the new century and in the wake of new digital media. Through a close analysis of such examples as Lu Gengxu’s Forever Young (2014) and Rene Liu’s Us and Them (2018), the essay reengages and reinterprets critical discourses of Bildungsroman, nostalgia, and heterotopia by placing them in a specific contemporary Chinese context. Moreover, the subgenre/cross-genre’s appeal across a broad audience and generation not only derives from its visual effects, the existing literary, theatrical resources and fanbase but also from its soundtrack and musical imagination. With a second focus on film music, the article illustrates how the creative, intricate employment and remix of Cantopop, Mandapop, Chinese campus folklore and rock music in the films represent youthfulness, authenticity, and the (ideal) past and selfhood as opposed to an alienated, postmodern reality. The contrast creates a heterotopian spatiotemporality on screen and articulates a distinctly Chinese Bildungsroman that engages with the complex, rapidly transforming network of Chinese media ecology.]

Xie, Fei. “Art Film is Immortal and National Film Lives Forever.” Tr. Chen Xiaoling. Asian Cinema 10, 1 (1998): 86-92.

Xu, Gary G. Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.

[Abstract: including discussion of films like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Kung Fu Hustle, Devils on the Doorstep, Suzhou River, Beijing Bicycle, Millennium Mambo, Goodbye Dragon Inn, and Hollywood Hong Kong, the book emphasizes the transnational nature of contemporary Chinese cinema.]

Xu, Ying. “Animation Film Production in Beijing.” Asian Cinema 11, 2 (Fall/Winter 2000): 60-66.

—–. “Impact of Globalization on the Cinema in China.” Asian Cinema (Spring/Summer 2002): 39-43.

Xu, Ying and Xu Zhongquan. “A ‘New’ Phenomenon of Chinese Cinema: Happy-New-Year Comic Movie.” Asian Cinema (Spring/Summer 2002): 112-27.

Yang, Haosheng. “Myths of Revolution and Sensual Revisions: New Representations of Martyrs on the Chinese Screen.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, 2 (Fall 2012): 179-208.

Yang, Li. The Formation of Chinese Art Cinema: 1990-2003. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

[Abstract: examines the development of Chinese art film in the PRC from 1990, when the first Sixth Generation film Mama was released, to 2003, when the authorities acknowledged the legitimacy of underground filmmakers. Through an exploration of the production and consecration mechanisms of the new art wave and its representative styles, this book argues that the art wave of the 1990s fundamentally defined Chinese art cinema. In particular, this vital art wave was not enabled by democratic liberalism, but by the specific industrial development, in which the film system was transitioning from Socialist propaganda into a commercialized entity in the 1990s. Allowing Chinese art film to grow but denying its legitimacy, this paradoxical process shaped Chinese art film’s institutional and aesthetic alternative positioning, which helped to consolidate the art wave into art cinema. Ultimately, The Formation of Chinese Art Cinema is a history of the Chinese portion of global art cinema, one which also reveals the complex Chinese cultural experiences in the Reform Era.]

—–. “The Changing Face of Mao: From Texing Actor to Star Casting in Chinese Main Melody Films.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 35, 1 (Summer 2023): 162-200.

Yang, Mei. “Domesticity, Sentimentality, and Otherness: The Boundary of the Human in Monster Hunt.” In Kenneth Chan and Andrew Stuckey, eds., Sino-Enchantment: The Fantastic in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021, 203-21.

Yang, Xiao. “The Era of Baokuan Films: How Chinese Social Media Creates Box Office Successes” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 15, 1 (March 2021): 104-20.

[Abstract: Exemplified by Wolf Warrior 2 (2017), Dying to Survive (2018), and The Wandering Earth (2019), a group of popular Mainland Chinese films labelled baokuan (爆款) has emerged since the mid-2010s. These baokuan movies are known in China for their extremely high domestic box office takings and overwhelmingly positive online word-of-mouth from audiences. Using a combination of Internet studies, film marketing studies, and audience studies, this article focuses on why these baokuan films enjoy great popularity assisted by the Internet and social media in China. It argues that social media has brought two major changes: new strategies for film marketing, which predominantly rely on online promotion, and the blurring of the roles of film audiences and marketers. These changes jointly enable a film’s prestige to be continuously escalated and circulated.]

Yeh, Emily Yueh-yu and Darrell William Davis. “Re-nationalizing China’s Film Industry: Case Study on the China Film Group and Film Marketization.”Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 1 (May 2008): 37-51.

[Abstract: In the mid 1990s ‘transnational’ meant a pan-Chinese universalism trying to reconcile the differences and conflicts among the mainland, colonial Hong Kong, KMT Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora. But since the rise of the new China market and the centralization of Chinese blockbusters, the transnational currency may have been replaced by an intra-national, if not hyper-national tender. The essay addresses the tension and dialectics between marketization and protectionism of the national screen industry in China. A political-economic approach analyzes the rise of the China Film Group (CFG) and its attempt to re-nationalize and transnationalize Chinese cinema. Accounting for recent developments of pan-Asian strategy, and CEPA, this case study will explain tensions inherent in China’s integration to global media. CFG presents marketization as liberalization but this is part of a scheme to utilize the market to consolidate state power.]

Yu, Hongmei. The Politics of Images: Chinese Cinema in the Context of Globalization. Ph.d. diss. Eugene: University of Oregon, 2008.

—–. “Visual Spectacular, Revolutionary Epic, and Personal Voice: The Narration of History in Chinese Main Melody Films.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 25, 2 (Fall 2013): 166-218.

Yun, Duo. “Liu Miaomiao-A Fervent Director.” China Screen 3 (1994): 22-23.

Zeng, Hong. Semiotics of Exile in Contemporary Chinese Film. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Zhang, Benzi. “Re-Siting the Global/Re-Sighting the Local: The Politics of Cultural Diaspora.” In Kwok-kan Tam et al., eds., Sights of Contestation: Localism, Globalism and Cultural Production in Asia and the Pacific. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2002, 35-56.

Zhang, Jia-xuan and Pat Duffy. “China: After the Crackdown.” Sight and Sound 60 (1990/91): 3-4.

Zhang Pingfan. “Configuring the History of Others: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Nanjing Massacre Cinema.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 37, 2 (2020): 145-166.

Zhang, Yingjin. “Chinese Cinema and Transnational Cultural Politics: Reflections on Film Festivals, Film Productions, and Film Studies.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 2, 1 (July 1998): 105-32.

—–. “My Camera Doesn’t Lie?: Truth, Subjectivity, and Audience in Chinese Independent Film and Video.” In Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang eds., From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006, 23-46.

—–. “Rebel Without a Cause? China’s New Urban Generation and Postsocialist Filmmaking.” In Zhen Zhang, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21st Century. Durham: Duke UP, 2007, 49-80.

—–. Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009.

[Abstract: Yingjin Zhang proposes “polylocality” as a new conceptual framework for investigating the shifting spaces of contemporary Chinese cinema in the age of globalization. Questioning the national cinema paradigm, Zhang calls for comparative studies of underdeveloped areas beyond the imperative of transnationalism. The book begins by addressing theories and practices related to space, place, and polylocality in contemporary China before focusing on the space of scholarship and urging scholars to move beyond the current paradigm and explore transnational and comparative film studies. This is followed by a chapter that concentrates on the space of production and surveys the changing landscape of postsocialist filmmaking and the transformation of China’s urban generation of directors. Next is an examination of the space of polylocality and the cinematic mappings of Beijing and a persistent “reel” contact with polylocality in hinterland China. In the fifth chapter Zhang explores the space of subjectivity in independent film and video and contextualizes experiments by young directors with various documentary styles. Chapter 6 calls attention to the space of performance and addresses issues of media and mediation by way of two kinds of playing: the first with documentary as troubling information, the second with piracy as creative intervention. The concluding chapter offers an overview of Chinese cinema in the new century and provides production and reception statistics.]

—–. “Directors, Aesthetics, Genres: Chinese Postsocialist Cinema, 1979-2010.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 57-74.

—–. “War, History, and Remembrance in Chinese Cinema.” In Michael Berry and Chiho Sawada, eds., Divided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in East Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016, 21-39.

Zhang, Zhen. Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema portrays a group of important contemporary women filmmakers working across the Sinophone world including Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and beyond. The book delineates and conceptualizes their cinematic and trans-media practices within an evolving, multifaceted feminist intimate-public commons. The films by these experienced and emerging filmmakers, including Huang Yu-shan, Yau Ching, Ai Xiaoming, Wen Hui, Huang Ji and others, represent some of the most innovative and socially engaged work in both fictional and non-fictional modes in Chinese-language cinema as well as global women’s cinema. Their narrative, documentary, and experimental film practices from the 1980s to the present, along with their work in sister media such as dance, theater, literature, and contemporary art, their activities as scholars, educators, activists, and film festival organizers or jurors, have significantly reshaped the landscape of Sinophone film culture and expanded the borders of world cinema.

Zhang, Zhen, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21st Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

[Abstract: Since the early 1990s, while mainland China’s state-owned movie studios have struggled with financial and ideological constraints, an exciting alternative cinema has developed. Dubbed the “Urban Generation,” this new cinema is driven by young filmmakers who emerged in the shadow of the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989. What unites diverse directors under the “Urban Generation” rubric is their creative engagement with the wrenching economic and social transformations underway in China. Urban Generation filmmakers are vanguard interpreters of the confusion and anxiety triggered by the massive urbanization of contemporary China. This collection brings together some of the most recent original research on this emerging cinema and its relationship to Chinese society. Contributors: Chris Berry, Yomi Braester, Shuqin Cui, Linda Chiu-han Lai, Charles Leary, Sheldon H. Lu, Jason McGrath, Augusta Palmer, Bérénice Reynaud, Yaohua Shi, Yingjin Zhang, Zhang Zhen, Xueping Zhong]

—–. “Urban Dreamscape, Phantom Sisters, and the Identity of an Emergent Art Cinema.” In Zhen Zhang, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21st Century. Durham: Duke UP, 2007, 344-88.

Zhao, Wentao. “Huang Jun and his Triology.” China Screen 4 (1994): 30-31.

Zheng, Yiran. Writing Beijing: Urban Spaces and Cultural Imaginations in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Films. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016.

Zhong, Dafeng and Li Ershi. China in the Movies, 1978-2006. Beijing: Xinxing, 2007.

Zhong, Xueping. “Mr. Zhao On and Off the Screen: Male Desire and Its Discontents.” In Zhen Zhang, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21st Century. Durham: Duke UP, 2007, 295-315.

Zhou, Xuelin. Young Rebels in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2007.

[Abstract: In the 1980s, a new type of central character emerged in contemporary Chinese films – angry and alienated youth. Filmmakers treated youth as a separate category and showed them in urban situations behaving in unconventional and socially rebellious ways. Young Rebels in Contemporary Chinese Cinema looks for evidence in films that exemplify this trend.]

—–. Youth Culture in Chinese Language Films. NY: Routledge, 2017.

[Abstract: This book explores the vigorous film cultures of mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong from the perspective of youth culture. The book relates this important topic to the wider social, cultural, and institutional context, and discusses the relationship between the films and the changes that today are transforming each society. Among the areas explored are the differences between the three film industries, their creation of new types of screen hero and heroine, and their conflicts with traditional Chinese attitudes such as respect for age. The many films discussed provide fresh perspectives on the ways in which young people are coping with gender, sexuality, class, coming of age, the pressures of education, and major social shifts such as rural to urban migration. They show young adults in each society striving to construct new value systems for a complex, rapidly changing environment.]

Zhou, Yuxing. “Pursuing Soft Power through Cinema: Censorship and Double Standards in Mainland China.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 3 (2015): 239-52.

[Abstract: The Chinese government is seeking to promote the country’s soft power internationally through cinema as China becomes the world’s second-largest economy. China’s current censorship rules, which feature a dual-track censoring mechanism for films circulated on different channels, and a double standard for foreign and independent films in comparison with domestic and official productions, have become an obstacle for creativity. Whilst this dual-track and complex censorship mechanism can help release tension under the government’s media control and offer market protection for domestic films, it will not help with Chinese cinema’s ‘go abroad’ strategy. As economic globalization and new media technology constitute effective forces in opening up and diversifying China’s film market, Chinese cinema will present more varieties of film despite the government’s rigid censorship control. It is this pluralism that would boost creativity and help expand China’s cultural influence through cinema around the world.]

Zhu, Yanhong. “The Human and the Beast: Humanity, Animality, and Cultural Critique in Contemporary Chinese Cinema.” Chinese Literature Today 7, 1 (2018): 107-17.

[Abstract: With its capacity to visually demonstrate the interconnectedness of human and other life forms, cinema is perfect for interrogating the set boundaries between humans and animals. This article explores the cinematic representation of the human–animal relationship in two Chinese-language films, Cow and Wolf Totem, and examines the ways in which these two films foreground the animal figures and their interactions with humans to question and destabilize the conventional human–animal divide. Reading Cow through the Deleuzian lens of becoming, Yanhong Zhu argues that this film seeks to reposition humans and animals in “the zone of proximity,” where boundaries can be blurred or dissolved. Zhu further argues that through the shift from “becoming-animal” in the original novel to the animal’s Umwelt (environment) in the film adaptation, Wolf Totem reveals how cinema can possibly grant agency to animals and challenge the anthropocentric human–animal distinction.]

Zhu, Ying. Chinese Cinema During the Era of Reform: The Ingenuity of the System. NY: Praeger Publishers, 2003

—–. “Commercialization and Chinese Cinema’s Post-Wave.” Consumption, Markets, and Culture 5, 3 (Sept. 2002): 187-209.

—–. “Chinese Cinema’s Economic Reform from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s.” Journal of Communication 52, 4 (2002): 905-921.

—–. “Cinematic Modernization and Chinese Cinema’s First Art Wave.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 18, 4 (2001).

—–. “From New Wave to Post New Wave: Chinese Fifth Generation’s Cinematic Transition.” Asian Culture Quarterly 2 (Summer 2000).

—–. “Commercialism and Nationalism: Chinese Cinema’s First Wave of Entertainment Films.” CineAction 47 (Summer 1998).

—–. “Chinese Underground Filmmaking.” In David Gerstner, ed., International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture – Contemporary Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transexual Cultures. London: Routledge: 2006.

—–. “Chinese Cinema’s Commercial Wave.” In Luis Miranda, ed., Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Granada, Spain: Festival Cines del Sur, 2007, 157-92.

—–. “The Sino-Hollywood Relationship–Then and Now.” Weber: The Contemporary West (Spring/Summer 2015): 26-36.

Zhu, Ying and Bruce Robinson. “Cross-Fertilization in Chinese Cinema and Television: A Strategic Turn in Cultural Policy.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 429-48.

Zhu, Ying and Stanley Rosen, eds. Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema. HK: HK University Press, 2010.

[Abstract: Art, politics and commerce are intertwined everywhere, but in China the interplay is explicit, intimate and elemental, and nowhere more so than in the film industry. Understanding this interplay in the era of market reform and globalization is essential to understanding mainland Chinese cinema. This interdisciplinary book provides a comprehensive reappraisal of Chinese cinema, surveying the evolution of film production and consumption in mainland China as a product of shifting relations between art, politics, and commerce. Within these arenas, each of twelve chapters treats a particular history, development, genre, filmmaker or generation of filmmakers, adding up to a distinctively comprehensive rendering of Chinese cinema. The book illuminates China’s changing state-society relations, the trajectory of marketization and globalization, the effects of China’s stark historical shifts, Hollywood’s role, the role of nationalism, and related themes of interest to scholars of Asian studies, cinema and media studies, political science, sociology, comparative literature, and Chinese language. Contributors include Ying Zhu, Seio Nakajima, Zhiwei Xiao, Shujen Wang, Paul Clark, Stephen Teo, John Lent, Ying Xu, Yingjin Zhang, Bruce Robinson, Liyan Qin, and Shuqin Cui.]

Zhuang, Muyang. “Animation of Experiment: The Science Education Film and Useful Animation in China.” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 18, 2 (2023): 152-66.