FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

"Splendid. This is a rich and comprehensive review of the early Chinese movie industry, most eloquently written by a scholar whose amorous attachment to the silver screen is just as deep as her academic commitment. It will become a primary source for anyone in the English-speaking world interested in Chinese cinematic history."
David Wang, Harvard University

An Amorous History of the Silver Screen
Shanghai Cinema, 1896û1937
Zhang Zhen

Chinese cinema is now celebrating its centennial at the same time it is garnering increasing exposure around the world. Thus this first history of film's emergence in China, Zhang Zhen's Amorous History of the Silver Screen couldn't have arrived at a better time.

Named after a major 1931 feature film on the making of Chinese cinema, only part of which survives today, this sustained historical study covers the full sweep of the country's early cinematic history—from 1896, when the first film was screened in China; to 1905, when the first film was produced in the country; to 1937, when the Japanese invasion halted the exciting cinematic transformations then in progress.

The book opens in 1931, a year Zhang Zhen calls "one of those moments when history congeals and implodes, generating as much tension as energy. Everything seemed possible." Film culture, which by the 1930s had become a keynote of urban life, was an integral part of this energy—particularly in China's cinematic capital of Shanghai. Dance music was entering movie theatres with the advent of sound, celebrity culture was in full swing, and the fabric of urban life was lived out in increasingly cinematic terms. Film didn't merely reflect this urban life; it shaped it—and Chinese culture in the process.

Documenting this pervasive power, Zhang Zhen's original archival research here expands the important discussion of how film modeled modern social structures and gender roles in early twentieth-century China. She also reveals the intricacies of this cultural movement and explores its connections to other art forms such as photography, architecture, drama, and literature. In doing so, she has produced a fascinating narrative that that University of Chicago Press is proud to introduce as one of the inaugural volumes in its new and groundbreaking Cinema and Modernity series.

Zhang Zhen is assistant professor of cinema studies at New York University.