Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age Jason McGrath. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. 424 pp. $30.00 (pbk). ISBN 9781517914035

Abstract

Chapter three details the publication history of work by left-leaning European woodcut artists promoted by Lu Xun, as well as the work of George Grosz, whose artistic style was widely emulated by Chinese artists, but about whom Lu Xun, for reasons unclear, had little to say. Lu Xun’s critiques of Wenyi huabao guide the discussion in chapter four. Bevan attributes these bitter verbal attacks to the famous author’s longstanding enmity against Ye Lingfeng, and to Lu Xun’s desire to defend his turf as the main spokesperson for leftist art in China. Part three, “The Rise and Rise of the Pictorial Magazine,” shifts focus away from the largely monochrome left-wing woodcut print and toward the colourful cartoons, or manhua, that flourished in the milieu of the mid-1930s’magazine boom. Chapter five, after offering a background analysis of why 1934 came to be called “The Year of the Magazine,” turns its attention to bold cartoon-style magazine illustrations that thumbed their nose at Chiang Kai-shek’s puritanical New Life Movement. Balancing the discussion of the “New-sensationist” writers in chapter one, chapter six then looks at the work and careers of three visual artists – Guo Jianying, Huang Miaozi and Ye Qianyu – whose illustrations accompany the book’s four short story translations. The two chapters comprising part four, “The Shanghai Jazz Age,” examines the role of the pictorial magazine in generating the multilayered connections behind the city’s fascination with cinema, celebrity, illustration, literature and live music. Readers of “Intoxicating Shanghai” will be impressed with, and at times overwhelmed by, the amount of fine-grained detail Bevan has extracted from an array of primary sources, ranging from the American humour magazine Ballyhoo, to the book lists in Lu Xun’s private diaries, to Busby Berkeley’s cinematic extravaganzas. For researchers of Shanghai’s jazz-age culture, the extensive footnotes and bibliography cataloguing the book’s source materials provide a wealth of leads for further research. What one does not find in this book, however, is explicit engagement with existing scholarship on Shanghai’s globalized urban culture. In the end, however, one can well argue that the resolutely empirical approach informing all of “Intoxicating Shanghai” is precisely what sets it apart from the other studies of Republican-era Shanghai.