Reclaiming the Invisible Pioneers: Chinese Female Filmmakers of the 1920s and 1930s

The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the rise of Chinese female filmmakers. The first known Chinese female screenwriter, Pu Shunqing (濮舜 卿), entered the film industry in 1925. Subsequently, a group of actresses in Shanghai and Hong Kong, including Yang Naimei (楊耐梅) and Tong Sing-to (唐醒圖), expanded their roles behind the camera by writing and producing films. However, their names and contributions have been overlooked or marginalized within the official historical narrative. This kind of invisibility is not an accident of memory but a political and institutional process — an outcome of how the film industry, academia, and the canon itself were structured. It signifies the unequal distribution of narrative wealth in film history, in which credit, authorship, and prestige have been disproportionately allocated to men, while women’s creative labor has been quietly erased. A research gap remains in developing a systematic understanding of the contributions made by early Chinese female filmmakers. Combining archival research with textual analysis, this study explores how their filmmaking practices influenced the representation of women in early cinema; how their “invisible” status reveals the mechanisms underlying historical narrative construction and a male-dominated film industry; and how a feminist historiographical approach can reframe our understanding of their contributions. By comparing the lives and careers of early Chinese female filmmakers with those of their foreign counterparts, this paper also breaks free from the restrictive framework of the nation-state and initiates a dialogue among early female filmmakers on a global scale.