Beyond Binary Imagination: Progress and Problems in Chinese Film Historiography

Abstract

Chinese film historiography has shown amazing vitality since 2000 and has established itself with a growing list of books in both Chinese and English, covering various historical periods and geopolitical regions. This article reviews the progress and problems in this fast-expanding interdisciplinary subfield as exemplified in four single-authored English books on pre-1949 Chinese cinema, respectively by Poshek Fu, Jubin Hu, Laikwan Pang, and Zhang Zhen. Contrary to its Chinese counterparts, an outstanding strength of recent English scholarship is its extensive use of archival materials, ranging from rare early films to voluminous publications such as newspapers, periodicals, and memoirs. Another salient characteristic of English scholarship is its willingness to go against official film historiography and to explore uncharted or forbidden territories in modern Chinese history. However, problems exist in a disguised form of binary imagination, which, in its efforts to speak for the undervalued and underrepresented, tends to tip the balance of historiography in favor of the commercial, the popular, and the marginal, and which therefore engenders new ideological and geocultural complications that demand further research. This article is divided into three parts: “Prewar Cinema” provides snapshots of the significant progress made, “Wartime Cinema” concentrates on debatable evidence and interpretations, and “Postwar Cinema” addresses issues of politics and place, diasporic ventures, and binary imagination.