Provenance of early Chinese movie publications

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Abstract

Researching the past often depends on chance and serendipity. Sometimes an incidental discovery can unexpectedly fill a missing piece in a puzzle; often, a relentless search may result in nothing. A film historian’s task is not always rewarding, and frustration abounds when the work needed is to seek materials of the early twentieth century, an era before there was a notion of a film library or archive. In the case of Chinese film, it is especially challenging, as many films before the 1930s did not survive, and many print sources such as handbills, posters, scripts, and company records were destroyed or scattered around the world. In working with the Media History Digital Library (MHDL) and curating books and periodicals for digitization, we find revisiting early Chinese film history an uneven path, though it sometimes seems miraculous or, more often, quotidian. This chapter details the process of choosing, searching, and introducing key sources in early Chinese-language film history, including artifacts from China, Hong Kong, and, to some extent, Taiwan, while also balancing among three distinct sources of film history: periodicals, catalogs, and book-length publications. In every case, there were important influences from abroad, via Hollywood, Japanese, and European film industries. We single out the period before 1930 in this study, as it is less familiar to global researchers.1 This phase is normally called “early cinema” by Chinese historians; that term is defined differently from its use in European and US film scholarship. Due to the scarcity of surviving films predating 1930, the “early” phase of cinema in China and Hong Kong usually refers to the period from the 1900s to early 1930s (rather than the period between the 1890s and 1910s). This periodization follows the time line of films made by the first Chinese producers to the advent of sound and the rise of left-wing cinema, two concurrent developments in the early 1930s.2 Recently this early phase has been extended to the 1890s, with growing interest in exhibition history and audience reception before the twentieth century. Not only must we acknowledge differences in periodization, but we should also emphasize the provenance of sources online, offline, and between the lines. What we call “historic” sources have their own background or derivation, not only their original creation and circulation but also the routes they may have taken to their online, virtual forms. And there are other materials that may be at least as important that were not or could not become available for digital scanning and upload. Even so, we can profit from dead ends, also-rans, and sources that may not arrive in the digitized forms of canonical history. Hence, we envision the personification of this process as a form of biography, a record of the recovery of the materials in their digital afterlives.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationGlobal Movie Magazine Networks
EditorsEric HOYT, Kelly CONWAY
Place of PublicationBerkeley
PublisherUniversity of California Press
Chapter20
Pages347-368
Number of pages22
ISBN (Electronic)9780520402775
ISBN (Print)9780520402768
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2025

Bibliographical note

The authors thank Yongchun Fu, Wenchi Lin, Enoch Yee Lok Tam, Snowie Wong, the late Zhang Wei (1959–2023), and the staff at the National Library of China for their assistance in this project.

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