The cinema of China is the filmmaking and film industry of mainland China, one of three distinct historical threads of Chinese-language cinema together with the cinema of Hong Kong and the cinema of Taiwan. China is the home of the largest movie and drama production complex and film studios in the world, the Oriental Movie Metropolis and Hengdian World Studios. In 2012 the country became the second-largest market in the world by box office receipts behind only the United States. In 2016, the gross box office in China was (). China has also become a major hub of business for Hollywood studios.
History
Beginnings While early accounts traditionally date the introduction of cinema to China to an anonymous variety show in August 1896 at Shanghai's Xu Garden teahouse, archival newspaper research by Dr Yongchun Fu demonstrates that this event was a magic lantern exhibition projecting still glass slides (yingxi). The historical record confirms that the first true motion picture exhibition in China occurred on May 22, 1897, when itinerant showman Harry Welby Cook projected celluloid film strips using Edison's Animatoscope at the Astor House Hotel in Shanghai. Later that summer, Cook also produced China's earliest localized actualities by filming local bicycle riders and swimming baths, before expanding his commercial film circuit north to Tianjin and Beijing. Chinese-made short melodrama and comedy films began emerging in 1913. In 1913, the first independent Chinese screenplay, The Difficult Couple, was filmed in Shanghai by Zheng Zhengqiu and Zhang Shichuan. Zhang Shichuan then set up the first Chinese-owned film production company in 1916. The first full-length feature film was Yan Ruisheng (閻瑞生) released in 1921, which was a docudrama about the killing of a Shanghai courtesan.
Chinese film production developed significantly in the 1920s. During the 1920s film technicians from the United States trained Chinese technicians in Shanghai, and American influence continued to be felt there for the next two decades. Since film was still in its earliest stages of development, most Chinese silent films at this time were only comic skits or operatic shorts, and training was minimal at a technical aspect due to this being a period of experimental film. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, filmmaking in China was largely done by film studios and there was comparatively little small scale filmmaking.
Upscale movie theaters in China had contracts which required them to exclusively show Hollywood films, and thus as of the later 1920s, Hollywood films accounted for 90% of screen time in Chinese theaters.
After trial and error, China was able to draw inspiration from its traditional values and began producing martial arts films, with the first being Burning of Red Lotus Temple (1928). Burning of Red Lotus Temple was so successful at the box office, the Star Motion Pictures (Mingxing) production later filmed 18 sequels, marking the beginning of China's esteemed martial arts films. Many imitators followed, including U. Lien (Youlian) Studio's Red Heroine (1929), which is still extant. It was during this period that some of the more important production companies first came into being, notably Mingxing and the Shaw brothers' Tianyi ("Unique"). Mingxing, founded by Zheng Zhengqiu and Zhang Shichuan in 1922, initially focused on comic shorts, including the oldest surviving complete Chinese film, Laborer's Love (1922).Berry, Chris. "China Before 1949", in The Oxford History of World Cinema, edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1997). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 409–410. This soon shifted, however, to feature-length films and family dramas including Orphan Rescues Grandfather (1923). Meanwhile, Tianyi shifted their model towards folklore dramas and also pushed into foreign markets; their film White Snake (1926) proved a typical example of their success in the Chinese communities of Southeast Asia. In 1931, the first Chinese sound film Sing-Song Girl Red Peony was made, the product of a cooperation between the Mingxing Film Company's image production and Pathé Frères's sound technology. However, the sound was disc-recorded, which was then played in the theater in-sync with the action on the screen. The first sound-on-film talkie made in China was either Spring on Stage (歌場春色) by Tianyi, or Clear Sky After Storm by Great China Studio and Jinan Studio. Musical films, such as Song at Midnight (1937) and Street Angels (1937), starring Zhou Xuan, became one of the most popular film genres in China.
In the late 1920s, the ROC banned the adaptation of martial arts novels into films. The Nationalist government contended that the masses were superstitious and would take the fantastical elements of these narratives as factual.
News films increased in importance following the Japanese air raid on Shanghai in 1932. The bombing also destroyed significant amounts of the Chinese film industry and resulted in the loss of many early films.
Leftist movement
Many important Chinese films were produced beginning in the 1930s with the advent of the "progressive" or "left-wing" movement, including Cheng Bugao's Spring Silkworms (1933), Wu Yonggang's The Goddess (1934), and Sun Yu's The Great Road, also known as The Big Road (1934). These films were noted for their emphasis on class struggle and external threats (i.e. Japanese aggression), as well as on their focus on common people, such as a family of silk farmers in Spring Silkworms and a prostitute in The Goddess. In part due to the success of these kinds of films, this post-1930 era is now often referred to as the first "golden period" of Chinese cinema. The Leftist cinematic movement often revolved around the Western-influenced Shanghai, where filmmakers portrayed the struggling lower class of an overpopulated city.Laikwan Pang, Building a New China in Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield Productions, Oxford, 2002)
As part of their strategy to use art as a medium for its political messages, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) became active in Shanghai's film industry. Films with themes of women's liberation that were produced as a result of this strategy included the 1935 film Children of Troubled Times, the theme song of which (The March of the Volunteers) became the PRC's national anthem.
Three production companies dominated the market in the early to mid-1930s: the newly formed Lianhua ("United China"), the older and larger Mingxing and Tianyi. Both Mingxing and Lianhua leaned left (Lianhua's management perhaps more so), while Tianyi continued to make less socially conscious fare.
The period also produced the first big Chinese movie stars, such as Hu Die, Ruan Lingyu, Li Lili, Chen Yanyan, Zhou Xuan, Zhao Dan and Jin Yan. Other major films of the period include Love and Duty (1931), Little Toys (1933), New Women (1934), Song of the Fishermen (1934), Plunder of Peach and Plum (1934), Crossroads (1937), and Street Angel (1937). Throughout the 1930s, the Nationalists and the CCP struggled for power and control over the major studios; their influence can be seen in the films the studios produced during this period.
Japanese occupation and World War II
The start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, in particular the Battle of Shanghai, ended this golden run in Chinese cinema. All production companies except Xinhua Film Company ("New China") closed shop. A large number filmmakers left to join the War of Resistance, with many going to the Nationalist-controlled hinterlands to join the Nationalist film studios Central Motion Picture Studio or China Motion Picture Studio. A smaller number went to Yan'an or Hong Kong.
The Shanghai film industry, though severely curtailed, did not stop however, thus leading to the "Solitary Island" period (also known as the "Sole Island" or "Orphan Island"), with Shanghai's foreign concessions serving as an "island" of production in the "sea" of Japanese-occupied territory. It was during this period that artists and directors who remained in the city had to walk a fine line between staying true to their leftist and nationalist beliefs and Japanese pressures. Director Bu Wancang's Hua Mu Lan, also known as Mulan Joins the Army (1939), with its story of a young Chinese peasant fighting against a foreign invasion, was a particularly good example of Shanghai's continued film-production in the midst of war. This period ended when Japan declared war on the Western allies on 7 December 1941; the solitary island was finally engulfed by the sea of the Japanese occupation. With the Shanghai industry firmly in Japanese control, films like the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere-promoting Eternity (1943) were produced.
By the 1930s and 1940s, both the Nationalist government and the CCP used documentary films as a form of propaganda.
During the 1930 and 1940s, both the Nationalist government and the Japanese occupation authorities sent mobile projectionist units into areas under their control to show propaganda films.
In the Yan'an Soviet during September 1938, the Eighth Route Army established its first film group. In 1943, the CCP released its first campaign film, Nanniwan, which sought to develop relationships between its forces and local people in the Yan'an area by showcasing the army's production campaign to alleviate material shortages.
Following Japan's unconditional surrender in August 1945, the Soviet Red Army helped the CCP to take over the Japanese colonial film establishment in Manchuria, the Manchukuo Film Association (Man-ei). Man-ei had state-of-the-art film production equipment and supplies. The former colonial studio was relocated to Hegang, where it was established as Northeastern Film Studio, the CCP's first full-capacity film studio. Yuan Muzhi was its director and Chen Bo'er was its party secretary. Northeastern Film Studio began production in early 1947, focusing on news and documentary films, as well as some fiction, educational film for children, and animation.
During the later phase of the Chinese Civil War, filmmakers trained in Yan'an and Northeastern Film Studio documented all the major battles leading to the CCP's defeat of the Nationalists.
Second golden age
The film industry continued to develop after 1945. Production in Shanghai once again resumed as a new crop of studios took the place that Lianhua and Mingxing studios had occupied in the previous decade. In 1945, Cai Chusheng returned to Shanghai to revive the Lianhua name as the "Lianhua Film Society with Shi Dongshan, Meng Junmou, and Zheng Junli." This in turn became Kunlun Studios, which would go on to become one of the most important studios of the era (Kunlun Studios merged with seven other studios to form Shanghai film studio in 1949), putting out the classics The Spring River Flows East (1947), Myriad of Lights (1948), Crows and Sparrows (1949), and Wanderings of Three-Hairs the Orphan, also known as San Mao, The Little Vagabond (1949). Many of these films showed the disillusionment with the oppressive rule of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party and the struggling oppression of nation by war. The Spring River Flows East, a three-hour-long two-parter directed by Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli, was a particularly strong success. Its depiction of the struggles of ordinary Chinese during the Second Sino-Japanese war, replete with biting social and political commentary, struck a chord with audiences of the time.