FILM

"Film came early to China. The first moving picture was exhibited in 1896 at a ""tea house variety show"" in Shanghai, where the country's first cinema would also be built just twelve years later. By the 1930s, modern cinema as we know it today was already playing an important role in the cultural life of Shanghai, though the huge number of resident foreigners ensured a largely Western diet of films - at least eighty percent of them were from Hollywood. Nevertheless, local Chinese films were also starting to be made, mainly by the so-called May Fourth intellectuals (middle-class liberals inspired by the uprising of May 4, 1919), who wanted to turn China into a modern country along Western lines. Naturally, Western stylistic influences on these films were very strong, and early Chinese films have little to do with the highly stylized, formal world of traditional performance arts such as Beijing Opera or puppet shadow theatre. However, early film-showings often employed a traditional style ""storyteller"" who sat near the screen reading out the titles as they came up, for the benefit of those who could not read the language
1920-1940: The Shangai studios
Of the few important studios in Shanghai operating in the 1920s and 1930s, perhaps the most famous was the Mingxing , whose films were generally of a left-leaning, anti-imperialist nature quite at odds with the general tenor of...

1940-1980: Communism and the cinema
Chinese film-making under the Communists is a story which really dates back to 1938, when Mao Zedong and his fellow Long Marchers finally set up their base in Yan'an deep in Shaanxi Province and began to prepare for the seizure of...

1980s and beyond
In 1984 the Chinese film industry was suddenly brought to international attention for the first time by the arrival of the so-called ""Fifth Generation"" of Chinese film-makers. This was the year that director Chen¡­"