1st Edition
Film History and Screen Culture in and beyond Greater China
Bringing together work from established and emerging scholars and practitioners from around the world, this collection expands existing scholarship on cinemas of the Sinosphere by revealing forgotten and emerging aspects of film history.
Organised chronologically, individual chapters cover geographic regions of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to engage with key issues of film history and screen politics that are overlooked by the traditional canon of Chinese cinema. Tackling key debates on (post)colonialism, (cold)war, and their sociopolitical impacts on screen culture in these regions, this collection challenges the binary paradigms that are perpetuated in the historical scholarship of Chinese cinema, such as left-wing and right-wing cinema, commercial entertainment and political propaganda films, and mass consumption of genre films versus the critical acclaim of New Wave auteurism. Together, the essays reveal the cultural mobility across different geographic and sociopolitical borders, their intertwined experience of the past, and historical events’ impact on contemporary filmmaking and screen cultures.
This collection will be of interest to students and researchers of Film, Media, and Cultural Studies as well as Asian Studies and Chinese Studies.
Introduction
Lin Feng
1 A Cinematic Anatomy of Place: Revisiting Manchuria in Colonial Films
Yufei Li
2 The Legends of Ma Yongzhen and Ma Suzhen: From Shanghai Silent Film to Hong Kong Martial Arts Cinema
Paul Bevan
3 Voicing the West: Dubbing Artists and Invisible Labour Behind the Socialist Screen
Lin Feng
4 The City as Marginalised Space: A History of the Urban in Chinese Socialist Animation (1950s–1980s)
Paul Kendall
5 Crazy Bumpkins and City Slickers: Anticipating the Hong Kong New Wave in Shaw Brothers’ 1970s Comedies
Fraser Elliott
6 A New Inception: Reintroducing Film Genres in 1980s People’s Republic of China Cinema
Stefano Locati
7 The Qiong Yao Phenomenon and Chinese Film of the 1980s
Xuelin Zhou
8 Ebola Syndrome (1996) and the Marginalisation of Popular Taste in Hong Kong Film History
Andy Willis
9 The Star Text of Anita Mui: Gender, Genre, and Chineseness in Hong Kong Cinema
Chin-Pang Lei
10 An Alternative Romance: The Gendered Codes in New Taiwanese‑language Melodrama
Yuan Li
11 The Look, Hook, and Book with Chinese Characteristics of the New Mainstream Film The Battle at Lake Changjin (2021)
Stephen Andriano-Moore and Haige Cui
Biography
Lin Feng is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester (UK) and a senior fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. She currently is serving as the Honorary Secretary for the British Association for Chinese Studies.
"Opening this anthology presents the reader with the extraordinary pleasure of discovering a selection of essays that is highly diverse yet shares fresh vitality. Ranging from the cinema of the 1930s Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo to the “new mainstream” movies of the present-day People’s Republic, and from textual analysis to media industries research and archive work, they confirm how much more Chinese cinema – defined as broadly as possible – has to offer."
- Chris Berry, King’s College London
