For a brief period during the 1930s, Chinese film entrepreneurs struggled to create a small studio system in the face of serious difficulties. During the 1920s, Chinese production had been spread mostly among many small companies that made a few films before going out of business. The market was largely supplied by imports, principally U. S. films. In 1929, only 10 percent of the 500 films released were made in China. The introduction of sound, however, gave a little boost to domestic filmmaking: while educated urban audiences were used to western culture, many workers and peasants wanted more familiar fare that did not require subtitles, which few could read.
There were two relatively large Chinese firms, though neither was vertically integrated. The Mingxing Film Company had been founded in 1922 in Shanghai, the center of Chinese film production. By the 1930s, it was the largest producer. In 1930, a former cinema owner started the Lianhua Film Company, Mingxing’s primary competitor. There were also three small producers: Yihua (founded in 1932), Diantong (1934), and Xinhua (1935). These companies mostly turned out melodramas patterned after popular literature.
The political temper of the times, however, injected controversy into this system. Chiang Kai-shek had
11.45, left The Goddess featured Ruan Lingyu, the wildly popular star whose death at age 25 devastated Chinese audiences.
11.46, right An ironic juxtaposition of a doll in a college graduate’S gown with a Mickey Mouse figurine in the hero’s apartment (Crossroads).
Seized power in a bloody coup d’etat in 1927, establishing the right-wing Guomindong government. The government’s forces were engaged in an armed conflict with Mao Zedong’s Communist insurgents, who controlled portions of the country outside the largest cities. In 1931, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria and overran other portions of the country, Chiang Kai-shek mistakenly decided that it was more important to fight the Communists than the Japanese. In this atmosphere, a split developed between right-wing nationalists on the side of the Guomindong and leftists who, while not Communists, sympathized with the oppressed working and peasant classes.
These two groups struggled to control the output of the budding studios. In 1932, a Communist cultural group, the League of Left-Wing Writers, formed the Film Group to guide and encourage leftists in the film industry. Although most of the members were scenarists, many important actors and directors also belonged. They were not necessarily Communists but typically came from urban, middle-class backgrounds. They were thoroughly familiar with western filmmaking. Although they never came to dominate the film industry or have any real power, they were to create some of the decade’s most significant films.
The right-wing nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek set up strict censorship to control the cinema. As a result, leftists in the studios had to craft their films subtly to convey their ideas. The leader of the Film Group, scenarist Xia Yan, became head of the script team at the Mingxing company. His adaptation of a novel, Spring Silkworms (1933, Cheng Bugao), was the first major left-wing film of the decade. It follows the life of a peasant family during the yearlong cycle of raising worms and harvesting silk. Documentary-style scenes explaining the process are interspersed with scenes of family life; at the end, the family suffers through an unfair drop in silk prices. The emphasis on the dignity of labor and on the plight of peasants made this a controversial film. Although left-wing films were popular, they created censorship problems. Xia Yan was fired from the Mingxing company the following year and moved to Lianhua.
The owner of Lianhua, the second-largest company, was loyal to Chiang’s nationalist cause, and the Film Group found it harder to infiltrate the firm. Nevertheless, one of its three production units was dominated by leftists in the early 1930s. Lianhua released two important liberal films in 1934. The first was The Goddess, written and directed by Wu Yonggang. In Chinese, goddess was the term for a prostitute, and the story treats the heroine in a straightforward fashion rather than creating a melodrama (11.45). She struggles against an unjust society, saving money to send her son through school; when her money is stolen, she kills the thief and her pimp. The second film, The Highway (aka The Big Road, directed by Sun Yu), follows a group of unemployed men as they get jobs constructing a road that will serve as a defense against the Japanese invaders. The film emphasizes their friendship and the joys of physical labor.
The three small companies reflected the struggle between right-wing and left-wing tendencies in more extreme ways. Yihua was dominated by members of the Film Group from its founding in 1932. The following year, right-wing extremists destroyed its filmmaking facilities, but the company rebuilt, producing more innocuous fare from 1934 on. The Diantong firm was even more overtly leftist in its orientation; after it had produced only four films, the government shut it down. Xinhua, founded in 1935 by right-wing extremists, met no opposition.
In 1937, the left-wing elements of the Chinese cinema seemed to be in resurgence. Xia Yan was rehired by the Mingxing company, which produced two extremely popular, controversial films. Street Angels (Yuan Muzhi) combined influences from Frank Borzage melodramas and Rene Clair musicals to portray the lives of an itinerant trumpet player and his friends, living opposite a prostitute and her sister. The cheerful treatment of the characters’ lives is belied by the ending, in which the prostitute is killed by the gang that controls her, and the other characters are left with little hope of a better life.
Crossroads (Shen Xiling) follows the lives of four graduates who cannot find jobs (11.46). The protagonist feuds with the unseen woman in the flat next to his, unaware that she is the worker he has been interviewing to write an expose on factory conditions (and with whom he has fallen in love). The ending implies that the couple will go off to join the Communists in fighting the Japanese.
Such films suggest that the Chinese film industry might have expanded in the late 1930s. In 1937, however, the Japanese overran Shanghai. All the producers except Xinhua ceased production. (Xinhua closed in 1942.) China’s filmmakers dispersed, some going to the few areas of the country under Communist control, others fleeing to Guomindong territory. Many of those who had worked at the Mingxing Film Company would become important filmmakers in the era just after the Communist Revolution of 1949.
Our four examples—Britain, Japan, India, and China—illustrate how studio systems of filmmaking took various forms. A group of filmmaking firms could form a solid oligopoly, with some companies being vertically integrated. In Britain and Japan, the larger firms distributed their own films and owned theater chains. The scale of production and the power of domestically made films in the local market helped determine how stable such a system would be. India’s studio system was more artisanal, with many producers competing against each other. And, the Chinese industry struggled to develop in a way that imitated western models, only to be overwhelmed by political circumstances. In the next chapter, we shall examine how other film industries functioned under political dictatorships.
World History
