The origins of left-wing cinema in China, 1932-1937

Left-wing cinema dominated the Chinese silver screen for over fifty years, longer than in any other country in the world. This dissertation examines the origins of this cinema through reviewing films produced from 1932 to 1937 in China, an era known as the Left-wing Chinese Film Movement. By analyzing representative films, popular film reviews, and the various declarations, manifestoes and statements made by left-wing filmmakers during the 1930s, I argue that left-wing filmmaking, the dominant Chinese school in the 1930s, involved a potent combination of social reform and nationalist politics.; In the 1910s and 1920s Chinese filmmakers were preoccupied with the economic rules of the game and the perceived need to turn out works of entertainment for the market place. But by the 1930s, when filmmaking achieved a definite maturity in China. an increasingly vocal group of socially conscious filmmakers felt that they could no longer treat filmmaking as a mere artistic practice when the nation was facing the social disruptions and undeniable crises caused by the constant threat of Japanese imperialism. The left-wing film movement was a response to the call to “save the nation” after the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931. From this point on, Chinese filmmakers used carefully crafted language and images to redefine the function of Chinese cinema. Their films focused on tensions in gender relations, problems in countryside and city under foreign capitalism and imperialism, and the responsibilities between self and society. In so doing, they revealed a historical reality of the 1930s and called for ways to better society and country.; This dissertation takes a cultural studies approach to analyze and account for the ways in which questions related to film, literature, cultural production, ideology, social change and modernity were raised in the left-wing film movement of the 1930s. Few would disagree that the 1930s was the most important moment in the formative age of Chinese filmmaking, and that leftist films were the dominant school in China, but we still have no English-language book length study of the topic. I hope this dissertation will fill the void.