China on Film A Century of Exploration, Confrontation, and Controversy

China on Film treats the dynamic history of Chinese filmmaking during a nearly 100 year period. The early chapters treat ever-shifting definitions of the modern marriage in 1920s silent features, East-West cultural conflict in the movies of the 1930s, the many appeals of the powerful melodramatic mode of the 1930s and 1940s, the polarizing political controversies surrounding Chinese filmmaking under the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in the 1940s, and the critical role of cinema during the bloody Civil War of the late 1940s. A second grouping of case studies deals with Chinese film during the Mao years, including chapters on legendary screen personalities who tried but failed to adjust to the new socialist order in the 1950s, celebrities who made the sort of artistic and political accommodations that would keep them in the spotlight in the post-revolutionary era, and insider film professionals of the early 1960s who actively resisted the most extreme forms of Maoist cultural production. A final section includes chapters on the highly cathartic films of the early post-Mao era, edgy postsocialist movies that appeared on the eve of the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989, the relevance of the Eastern European Svelvet prison cultural production model, and the rise of underground and independent filmmaking beginning in the 1990s.