Even limiting China's cinema down to its main artistic and historical discourses - Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China's cinema (setting aside politics) - summarizing just one of the three is no easy task. Just like its plethora of different inter-mingling cultures, spanning across its vast geographical landscape, Chinese cinema similarly has numerous intersecting identities, too. From the Palmer reading's notes below, we are brought to understand a small niche of a greatly transformative time period for China, where the country's economic development and political liberalism actually influenced the medium substantially.
Speaking of "Chinese films" today, rarely do people refer to the early or classic cinema and film culture of China, with record setting feature films dating as far back as the 1920s. Instead, a contemporary audience is likely going to be more familiar with the fifth and sixth generation filmmakers who have brought their craft to a global stage. But before I get ahead of myself, allow me to quickly summarize how we arrive at this point today.
The Timeline
I'll be completely shameless and admit that I ripped the exact dates off of Wikipedia, but the commentary is offered by myself.
The Beginning was in 1905 when the first Chinese film was completed. This time period is commonly referred to as 早期电影, which literally translates to "Early Cinema" by Chinese film scholars, yet this is a term worth further defining because as Zhang Zhen notes in An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937 the term "early cinema" is referred to by Western scholars as a critical category. This category, for the purposes of discussion, refers to a pre-Hollywood time when formal and canonical film techniques have not yet been solidified among filmmakers. This definition is not particularly helpful to studying Chinese cinema, as basing a time period's film analysis off of another non-existent film culture is problematic in its own ways. Instead, usage of this term generally look at 1896 until the 1920s, when the first major box office hits have been produced.
Hu Die, "Butterfly" Hu from Wikipedia
This takes us up to the First Golden Age right before the 1937 Japanese occupation period, where stereotypical, glamorous 老上海 or Old Shanghai is set. This era marked a significant increase in film consumption and a turn of attention to film and entertainment as something fashionable. It paved the path for the rise of Mingxing Newspaper's Movie Queens, the first of which is the infamous Hu Die or "Butterfly" Hu. Should one get their hands on a well-preserved, well-produced poster for perfume, soap, beer, or cigarette advertisements of Old Shanghai, chances are you will find one of the first film celebrities featured on it.
The Second Golden Age came shortly after Japanese occupation, when cinema resumed business after 1945, addressing post-war issues. Personally, I regard this as a transitionary period into the Early Communist Era.
The Early Communist Era began in 1949 when Mao's government saw cinema as an effective tool for mass communication and propaganda. China banned most foreign productions as an effort to tighten control over the media. Instead, local productions which focus on the lives of peasants and factory workers were encouraged. Films of this era are marked by their social realist qualities, which are in fact sponsored mainly by the Chinese government as Communist propaganda. Slowly, films also began to have higher production value, in addition portraying ethnic minorities and the management of ethnic minorities in positive light during the mid-1950s and 60s. This shows the government's expertise in filmmaking, as well as produces a favorable public image of the government aligned with its party ideologies projected to its people.
However, as we use loaded terms such as propaganda, it is important to note that while it is a tool that authoritarian regimes tend to use to establish control over its people, nothing is in fact unbiased from any narrative perspective. Even "liberal" news channels such as CNN and BBC can be see as tools that reinforce Western thoughts and philosophies. While performing criticism, it is important to not throw terms around without fully grounding the argument in close readings of the text.
Shortly after the Cultural Revolution, which honestly holds more value to Chinese history in general more than its cinema, we have the rise of the fifth generation filmmakers. This movement began in the
New Year's Films 贺岁片