Short description:

 Drawing on a broad range of previously untapped sources by and about female directors, writers, actresses, and moviegoers, this book offers new perspectives on the dynamic multidirectional flow of films, culture, and communities in the early twentieth century at a time of intense global political upheaval.

Long description:

Early Chinese Cinema and Two-Way World Flows explores how the term ‘transnational’ became a condition—a site of translations, transactions, and transitions in Chinese cinema. Drawing on a broad range of previously untapped sources by and about female directors, writers, actresses, and moviegoers, including personal recollections from the family of female director Marion Evelyn Hong, this book offers new perspectives on the dynamic multidirectional flow of films, culture, and communities in the early twentieth century at a time of intense global political upheaval. At its heart are ‘transnational’ films and the women, audiences, and immigrants who positioned themselves across borders.

This pioneering scholarship shows how cinema emerges as an affective medium and a tool of negotiation, enabling women to navigate political and immigrant experiences. It also examines how film production and circulation became strategic responses to racial misrepresentation, with diasporic Chinese communities playing a central role in these early economic and cultural exchanges between China and the United States.

By highlighting the role of film in diasporic culture and economic transactions, this book opens new frontiers for scholars of feminist, diasporic, and global film studies, revealing the layered complexities of Chinese and Chinese American diasporic film cultures. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Early Chinese Cinema and Two-way World Flows

Jane Gaines, Kristine Harris, Yanfei Song and Xinyi Zhao

1. The ‘Great Wall’ that Crossed the Ocean: Its rise and Fall—A Preliminary Study of the History of Changcheng Film Company

Mo Chen, Zhiwei Xiao and Yanfei-Song

2. Rose Fong Goes for a Ride: Women, Moviegoing and Social Change in Early 20th Century San Francisco Chinatown

Kim K. Fahlstedt

3. The ‘Queer Woman’ Between Shanghai and Nanyang, 1920s—1930s

Xuelei Huang

4. Playing the minzu/minzoku Card: Melodramas of Race and Nation in Colonial Manchuria

Xinyi Zhao

5. Sticking with Trans: Reconsidering Chinese American Cinema through Anna May Wong

Yiman Wang

6. Love and duty (1931): Chinese Melodrama and the ‘Contradictions of Modernity’

Jane M. Gaines

7. Circuits of Mobility in Love and Duty

Kristine Harris

8. Marion Evelyn Hong Before and After the Curse of the Quon Gwon (1916)

Lisa Kumaradjaja and Chris Kumaradjaja

9. Introduction to the New York State Motion Picture Division Film Script Collection (1924 – 1937): Early Chinese Film Export

Yan-fei Song