Relying only on a few surviving titles, how can we claim that Chinese films produced in the 1920s are generally “pornographic” and “feudalistic”? And how can we ignore so easily the modernity of Chinese films during this period? To my knowledge, there are no substantial works of scholarship that systematically investigate the modernity of Chinese cinema in the 1920s. This is precisely what my research seeks to explore.

I judge that it is important to find out the relationship between Chinese cinema and Hollywood in the 1920s. Chinese cinema began to mature in the 1920s in both narrative and technological forms. Early Chinese films duplicated, imitated, and localized Hollywood’s film language and industrial practices, thereby achieving local success and prosperity. In other word...[ Read more ]

Relying only on a few surviving titles, how can we claim that Chinese films produced in the 1920s are generally “pornographic” and “feudalistic”? And how can we ignore so easily the modernity of Chinese films during this period? To my knowledge, there are no substantial works of scholarship that systematically investigate the modernity of Chinese cinema in the 1920s. This is precisely what my research seeks to explore.

I judge that it is important to find out the relationship between Chinese cinema and Hollywood in the 1920s. Chinese cinema began to mature in the 1920s in both narrative and technological forms. Early Chinese films duplicated, imitated, and localized Hollywood’s film language and industrial practices, thereby achieving local success and prosperity. In other words, without the presence of Hollywood, and without the active borrowing and appropriation of Hollywood practices, it is hard to imagine what shape Chinese national cinema would have taken in the 1920s, even harder to imagine it would soon experience its first “golden age” in the 1930s. Therefore, I argue that the influence of Hollywood contributed to the cultivation of a national cinema in China and finally helped the Chinese to define the concept of modernity in the 1920s.

Through a careful investigation of a variety of “vernacular” cultural forms in the 1920s, such as magazines, newspapers, and pictorials, I raise some broad questions in this thesis that go beyond the narrow understanding typical of Chinese cinema studies. Based on the analysis of a limited number of Chinese films that survived the turbulent history of modern China, as well as on examination of archival materials and print media in both Chinese and English, I conclude that Chinese films in the 1920s framed or represented the “modern” and then created a “modern” sensibility in China, particularly in the city of Shanghai. I also argue in this thesis that the introduction of cinema into the everyday life of the Chinese, as well as the subsequent appropriation of cinema as a visual medium by early Chinese filmmakers, played a key role in defining the Chinese sensibility of the “modern.”