A penny-dreadful house for Chinese talkies: notes toward a history of Chinese-language film exhibition in interwar New York

Abstract

Chinese-language films were a small but significant segment of the foreign-language films shown in New York City between the late 1930s and the end of World War II. These films and the theatres in which they were shown were discussed in the New York daily press and in many cases the location of the theatre and its implied audience dictated to reporters and critics the quality of the film. Chinese-language films shown in Lower East Side neighbourhood theatres were summarily dismissed as crude oddities largely because of their immigrant clientele. While there may have been little difference between them, Chinese-language films shown in midtown art theatres were received as cultural artefacts, which while still perceived as ‘exotic’, were nonetheless critiqued for their value as works of art.