Early Chinese Cinema and Two-Way World Flows

Early Chinese Cinema and Two-Way World Flows explores how the term ‘transnational’ became a condition—a site of translations, transactions, and transitions in Chinese cinema. Drawing on a broad range of previously untapped sources by and about female directors, writers, actresses, and moviegoers, including personal recollections from the family of female director Marion Evelyn Hong, this book offers new perspectives on the dynamic multidirectional flow of films, culture, and communities in the early twentieth century at a time of intense global political upheaval. At its heart are ‘transnational’ films and the women, audiences, and immigrants who positioned themselves across borders.This pioneering scholarship shows how cinema emerges as an affective medium and a tool of negotiation, enabling women to navigate political and immigrant experiences. It also examines how film production and circulation became strategic responses to racial misrepresentation, with diasporic Chinese communities playing a central role in these early economic and cultural exchanges between China and the United States.By highlighting the role of film in diasporic culture and economic transactions, this book opens new frontiers for scholars of feminist, diasporic, and global film studies, revealing the layered complexities of Chinese and Chinese American diasporic film cultures. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas.

About the Author

Jane M. Gaines , is Professor of Film, Columbia University, New York, and Professor Emerita of Literature and English, Duke University, North Carolina, USA. She holds the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Distinguished Career Award and an honorary doctorate (Stockholm University). Her books include Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era, Pink- Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?

Kristine Harris is Professor of History at the State University of New York, New Paltz, USA. Her writing has appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas; the Harvard New Literary History of Modern China; Les Sons de l’exotisme au cinéma: Bruits, voix, musiques; History in Images: Pictures and Public Space in Modern China; The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870’s through the 1960’s, among others.