Film History and Screen Culture in and beyond Greater China

Bringing together work from established and emerging scholars and practitioners from around the world, this collection expands existing scholarship on cinemas of the Sinosphere by revealing forgotten and emerging aspects of film history.

Organized chronologically, individual chapters cover geographic regions of mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan to engage with key issues of film history and screen politics that are overlooked by the traditional canon of Chinese cinema. Tackling key debates on (post)colonialism, (cold)war and their sociopolitical impacts on screen culture in these regions, this collection challenges the binary paradigms that are perpetuated in the historical scholarship of Chinese cinema, such as left-wing and right-wing cinema, commercial entertainment and political propaganda films, and mass consumption of genre films versus the critical acclaim of New Wave auteurism. Together, the essays reveal the cultural mobility across different geographic and sociopolitical borders, their intertwined experience of the past, and historical events’ impact on contemporary filmmaking and screen cultures.

The collection will be of interest to students and researchers of Film, Media and Cultural Studies as well as Asian Studies and Chinese Studies.