‘Journey to the seat of war’: the international exhibition of China in early cinema

Abstract

Much about early Chinese cinema remains unknown. This article demonstrates that colonialism, war and cross-cultural contact were important to the emergence and growth of a national film industry. At the same time, they instilled in filmmakers the belief that visual technologies and mass media exerted a significant influence over national sovereignty. By the 1920s, globally-circulating techniques of propaganda, as well as reinvented aesthetic traditions (e.g. yingxi, or shadowplay) shaped the cinema's form as well as its function. Yet like the Qing dynasty before it, Republican China was ensnared in an epistemological ‘net’ created by foreign interests and capital. Proto-national culture industries, such as those envisioned by the Commercial Press and patriotic overseas elites, provided one possible way out.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.