The Ambiguity of Entertainment: Chinese Cinema in Japanese-Occupied Shanghai, 1941 to 1945

Abstract

Recently, Chinese cinema has become a major area of research in the American academy. This is a significant move toward a multicultural approach to film studies. But scholars have focused their research on the cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, the period in which famous auteurs like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige successfully incited widespread enthusiasm in the field for their exquisite films of transnational appeal. This temporally delimited focus has thus perpetuated a misconception that Chinese cinema has no history of its own. This might be a myth the new filmmakers wanted their (Western) audiences to consume, a myth that the narrative of Chinese film history began with their works.' Actually, the national cinema has a rich tradition of ideological contestation, artistic experimentations, and competing national imaginaries reaching as far back as 1910. It is time to redress this temporal-narrative imbalance.2 Film history has been known as a difficult field mainly because of a lack of documentary and filmic sources. These difficulties are particularly formidable when it comes to systematically reconstructing the past of Chinese filmmaking. Due to both economic and political constraints, there had been no public efforts in China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan to collect and conserve old films until the 1980s. Many important films were thus lost to nitrate dissolution and neglect. The same has been true with important documentary evidences, like fan magazines and trade journals, which were scarce and scattered among private collections and research libraries. This dismal situation improved with the creation of film archives in Beijing and Taipei in the 1980s (the Hong Kong Film Archive is, after much delay, due to open in July 1997), but their collections are small and (especially for the Beijing Film Archive) shaped by ideological considerations. Politically sensitive subjects are either excluded from their limited budget or, if available, prohibited even from research screening. One of these politically sensitive subjects is the Chinese cinema under Japanese Occupation during World War II, which has remained a huge gap in the