A Preliminary Study On Cinema In Japanese-Occupied Shanghai (1941-1945)

Under Japanese manipulation from December12,1941to August15,1945, the entire Shanghai film industry had merged into two monopolies, China United Productions Ltd. and China Film United Ltd. They called on numerous Shanghai filmmakers, who had completed124feature films, a lot of newsreels and education films. The official history written concerning this period, no other than duplication or modification to the Chinese Film Phylogeny, seems over-simplified, due to the complexity of the political background in China. While the academics are still debating on the true identities of those works, Shanghai Cinema during this period, as a crucial component in Chinese film history, could never be overlooked.In my project, based on the historical materials and visual texts, Shanghai Cinema in this period would be discussed from these aspects as follows:first, I try to examine the structure and development of film industry in this period, by analyzing their capital, organization and staffing condition; in the second chapter, I would argue that there was a thematic trend from the romance diegesis to the education narration, by observing policies and strategies of film production, meanwhile, presenting the discontinuity between the ideological manipulation and the practical operation; in order to generalize the filmmaking trend, the last chapter deals directly with the occupied period film texts, which are carefully scrutinized from the perspectives of: limitation of production, generic characteristics, adaptation of some conventional themes and the development of the film forms.The project would be aimed at, on one hand, exploring the general map of Shanghai film industry at this specific moment by observation on the historical materials; on the other hand, preparing for the followed more detailed research.