Chinese film history and historiography

Abstract

Reflecting on the remarkable rise of Chinese film studies, Paul G. Pickowicz observes that, merely 35 years ago, world-wide scholars knew little about Chinese cinema, yet now ‘scholarly interest in Chinese cinema is on the verge of overtaking or perhaps has already overtaken interest in modern Chinese literature’ (Huang 2014, vii), at least so in English scholarship. A sure sign of the maturity of Chinese film studies is the recent publication of three comprehensive volumes in English that cover various territories, trajectories, and historiographies (Lim and Ward 2011), investigating different aspects of history and geography, industry and institution, arts and media (Zhang 2013), and reevaluate competing interpretations of history, form, and structure (Rojas and Chow 2013). None of these volumes aspires to be a general history of Chinese cinema (as in Zhang 2004), but historiography remains a central organizing principle in all three. Another common feature of these volumes is the endeavor to move beyond the previously dominant national cinema paradigm (as in Hu 2003), which has been increasingly critiqued from the perspectives of polylocality (Zhang 2010, 16 28) and Sinophone cinema (Yue and Khoo 2014). This article represents my latest attempt at tracking the development of Chinese film history and historiography (Zhang 2000). One entrenched habit of film historiography is binary thinking, which has previously instituted the dominance of center over periphery, elite over popular, progressive over conservative, arts over industry, auteurs over institution, classical cinema over early cinema, fiction over documentary, the West over the non-West, and so on. In Chinese film studies, such binary habit is most pronounced in the 1963 official film history (Cheng, Li, and Xing 1963), which constructs a narrative exclusively centered on perceived struggles between the Communist (or Left-wing) versus the Nationalist (or Right-wing). At a subtle level, binary thinking is still operational in the narrativization of film history in terms of Shanghai versus Yan’an (Clark 1987), commercial cinema versus Left-wing cinema (Pang 2002), or Shanghai versus Hong Kong (Fu 2003). To reiterate my earlier call for moving ‘beyond binary imagination’ (Zhang 2008), I seek to map the latest development in Chinese film historiography by reviewing four new books on early Chinese cinema in relation to other recent scholarship in the field. In my view, Huang (2014) and Liao (2015) have both consolidated the global or transnational perspective on Chinese cinema, Bao (2015) has intervened in the emergent exploration of