2021/04/09: Rediscovering Early Chinese Cinema

Viewers around the world are now discovering that, over eighty years ago, Chinese cinema had light sabers. And copies of Mickey Mouse. And full frontal male nudity. What other discoveries – besides novelties of a bygone age – lie in store for historians rediscovering Republican-era cinema, or people delving into Chinese film history for the first time? The Chinese Film Classics project, begun before and accelerated by the pandemic, is aimed at enabling a new generation of global audiences to explore Chinese film history in new ways. Working with a corpus of several score extant films, circa 1920s-1940s, Christopher Rea has been translating both famous and obscure cinematic works and making them available open access in full or in part (so far as copyright and fair use allow), via the YouTube channel Modern Chinese Cultural Studies and the website chinesefilmclassics.org. A key feature of this resource is the inclusion of playlists of hundreds of songs, special effects, animations, significant scenes, how-tos, and other thematically-arranged film clips, which enable viewers to navigate the archive of early Chinese cinema based on their own interests. Another is the production of a full online course on “Chinese Film Classics,” which discusses eleven masterpieces in the contexts of Chinese history and global filmmaking. This talk presents new web-based approaches to film research and pedagogy, and invites the participation of film scholars and film archives in further developing this open-access initiative.