I. The Inspiration: Introducing American Films to China: 1895-1927

China was among the few countries exposed to cinematic culture at a very early stage. A year after he invented cinematography in France, Louis Lumeire sent his cameraman to Shanghai to show some shots (it was not yet a film in the modern sense) of magic and acrobatic performances. The historical date was August 11, 1896. Another year had barely passed, when James Rication, an American from Maplewood, NJ, arrived in China to exhibit some episodes shot in America. In those early episodes, the principle of Hollywood had already emerged: to entertain with novelty and sensuality. In 1897, the first film review in Chinese history was published in Shanghai. It refers to Rication’s show as an “American electrical light shadow play” and the word “shadow” is typically Daoist:

American electrical light shadow play... magical and illusionary, all beyond imagination.... Two fluffy-haired blondes dance in a charmingly naive manner... Two Westerners wrestle.... Two Russian princesses dance to music... A woman bathing... Bothered by a bedbug, a guy tries to catch it... A magician covers a female with a blanket. When he lifts the blanket, she has disappeared.... All these tricks cannot be comprehended.... The strangest scene is a bicycle race... I then heave a deep sigh: thousands of changes between heaven and earth... are similar to what we see in the shadow play.... Life is nothing but shadow of bubbles.[2]

“Dianying (electrical shadow),” the Chinese term for “film,” is perhaps derived from the above review. The first Chinese to enter this growing “electrical shadow” business was Lin Chushan, who in 1903 brought back from America a projector and rented a teahouse in Beijing’s theater district to show some episodes shot in the U. S. So, the first film shown by a Chinese to a Chinese audience was American. At that time, this film was not accessible in most parts of the US, which in 1905 had only ten cinemas nationwide. Contrary to what many people would assume, the court of the Qing dynasty was not against this dazzling innovation from the West. In 1904, a British official presented a film at the Empress Dowager’s palace in Beijing. It was a disaster, which resulted not from the content of the film but from an electrical fire caused by a primitive generator. Even so, Her Majesty only banned the film inside her palace, not outside.

The period of Classical Hollywood is usually dated between 1906 and 1927. The Chinese film industry came into being almost simultaneously. Between 1905 and 1908, Fengtai Photography Shop in Beijing made its first film, “Dingjun Mountain”. Shot with a French camera and film cassettes bought from a German photography supply store in Beijing, it was a Beijing Opera adopted from a popular Chinese novel, The Three Kingdoms. General Huang Zhong, the hero of the film, was played by Tan Xinpei, an eminent Beijing Opera performer patronized by the Empress Dowager. This film was a classic application of a doctrine prevalent in the last years of the Qing dynasty: “[to treat] Chinese learning as the foundation and Western learning as utilities.” It was eight years prior to the establishment of Hollywood. At the turn of the century, American films did not have any superiority in China, where most foreign films were imported from France. At that time, English and German films were also quite popular. Although China’s first counter with the West was characterized with distrust and resistance, the advent of film was never resisted by the Chinese audience. Within one decade, cinemas were established in all major Chinese cities. In June 1911, the Qing court issued “Regulations of Film Plays” in Shanghai, forbidding “showing films without a license,” “films containing obscenity,” “male and female viewers sitting together,” and “showing films after mid-night.”[3] Considering the traditional moral concerns and stern control over art and literature in feudal China, these earliest restrictions on films were not exceptionally harsh and they were not specially targeted at American films.

Exactly a half century later, The Chinese History of Film Development, which was then the most authoritative, summarizes this period with the following words:

Due to the lengthy stagnation of Chinese feudalism, especially to its semi-colonial and semi-feudal condition caused by imperialist invasions, Chinese science and technology was extremely backward. Therefore, Chinese cinema started with films made not by Chinese but by foreigners. [The birth of] Chinese cinema was a result of imperial commercial export and cultural invasion. Although it was not yet an established art form, film was already opium of the decadence from imperialist “civilization.” Nevertheless, the appearance of films in China did bring a new form of entertainment to Chinese people and was welcomed by the [Chinese] audience. It also aroused some intellectuals’ desire to make Chinese films.[4]

Reading it today, we may feel that the above summary is politicized, but given the situation in the 1960s, when all Western films were banned in China and Sino-Western cultural exchanges had been withheld for more than a decade, it took some courage for the authors to reveal the truth that the first Western films introduced to China were entertaining, and both common audience and intellectuals welcomed them. As a result, when the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966, all the copies of The Chinese History of Film Development were burned and all of its three authors persecuted for “distorting history” and “rampantly attacking Mao Zedong’s guidelines for art and literature.”[5]

By 1909, there were already more than 10,000 cinemas in the United States. About ten years after the First World War, Hollywood became the superpower of the film world. Supported by a peaceful domestic environment and rapid economic growth, a group of talented individuals started to shape an effective system of film production in America and to win fame all over the world. Like the atmospheric “Oriental,” theaters constructed in America in the 1920s, oriental images created by Hollywood were stereotyped but not always, as some film historians assert, negative. In spite of its obvious commercial purposes, which were devoid of any genuine interest in comprehending the “inscrutable,” Hollywood never formed a unified perception for, or against, Chinese. The 16-part “The Yellow Menace” produced in 1916 is undoubtedly a shining example of a racist attitude against Asians. But “Broken Blossoms”, which has often been used to exemplify the distorted image of Chinese people, is not exactly the case. Directed by D. W. Griffith in 1919, it depicts a sensitive Chinese man who saves a white girl abused by her father. Consequently, he is murdered by her father, the villain in the tale. The Chinese man appears mystic and feminine but not at all evil. His admiration for the girl is spiritual and his caring for her, unselfish. As claimed in the prologue of the film, “Broken Blossoms” advocates such Confucian virtues as “gentleness and benevolence.” These two films are better understood in their historical contexts. “The Yellow Menace” is a reenactment of the age-long nightmare caused by the Mongolian invasion of Europe; whereas “Broken Blossoms” serves as a contemporary reminder of the fragility of China in the face of Western invasions at the turn of the century. In this period, two other controversial films about the Chinese were produced, “The Mask of Fu Manchu” and “The Bitter Tea of General Yen”. While the former creates a prototype of the wise and wicked detective who functions well in a dramatic situation but reveals little complexity in characterization; the latter presents a much more complicated warlord who is at the same time a pervert and a gallant.

During the silent film era, most Chinese filmmakers were from drama circle, whose film training was minimal. Like their counterparts in Japan, Chinese filmmakers’ education was a combination of oldfashioned apprenticeship in the studio and observation of Hollywood products. Thematically, Hollywood did not exert any significant influence on the Chinese film industry. Technologically, however, China learned a great deal from America. Practical skills such as analytical editing, soft focus, backlighting, masking (blocking off parts of the frame image to create different shapes within the frame) and so on were all borrowed from Hollywood.

During the first phase, Hollywood treated China as a source of exoticism to attract its domestic audience rather than a potential market in international competition. There is no record that any of those films was shown in China.

Once Hollywood was ready to conquer the world, the first country its eyes turned to was China. For a time, American filmmakers seriously contemplated taking advantage of China’s cheap labor and material as well as its exotic scenery. The first joint venture, American Oriental Picture Company, was established in 1926. “Shattered Jade Fated to be ReUnited”, the first Chinese film made with American money, was a melodrama derived from the Chinese classical theater—a promising beginning. Had the First Civil War not broken out in China and thus made further investment infeasible, making film in China could have become very profitable for Hollywood. Because of the war, Hollywood gave up the idea of producing films in China; instead it doubled its efforts to export films to this country, whose own film industry was seriously crippled by the war.