Chinese cinema is now celebrating its centennial at the same time it is garnering increasing exposure around the world. Thus this first history of film’s emergence in China, Zhang Zhen’s Amorous History of the Silver Screen couldn’t have arrived at a better time.
Named after a major 1931 feature film on the making of Chinese cinema, only part of which survives today, this sustained historical study covers the full sweep of the country’s early cinematic history—from 1896, when the first film was screened in China; to 1905, when the first film was produced in the country; to 1937, when the Japanese invasion halted the exciting cinematic transformations then in progress.… Read the press release.