Leading scholar Paul G. Pickowicz traces the dynamic history of Chinese filmmaking and its stunning development decade-by-decade since the 1920s. During the last one hundred years, China has been embroiled in a seemingly unending series of wars, revolutions, and jarring social transformations. Despite daunting censorship obstacles, Chinese filmmakers have found ingenious ways of taking political stands and weighing in--for better or worse--on the most explosive social, cultural, and economic issues of the day. Exploring the often gut-wrenching controversies generated by their work, Pickowicz offers a unique and perceptive window on Chinese culture and society.

Introduction: The Sorrows and Joys of Chinese Filmmaking: Political and Personal Contexts
Chapter 1: Shanghai Twenties: Early Chinese Cinematic Explorations of the Modern Marriage
Chapter 2: The Theme of Spiritual Pollution in Chinese Films of the 1930s
Chapter 3: Melodramatic Representation and the May Fourth Tradition of Chinese Cinema
Chapter 4: Never-Ending Controversies: The Case of Remorse in Shanghai and Occupation-Era
Chinese Filmmaking
Chapter 5: Victory as Defeat: Postwar Visualizations of China's War of Resistance
Chapter 6: Acting like Revolutionaries: Shi Hui, the Wenhua Studio, and Private-Sector Filmmaking,
1949-1952
Chapter 7: Zheng Junli, Complicity, and the Cultural History of Socialist China, 1949-1976
Chapter 8: The Limits of Cultural Thaw: Chinese Cinema in the Early 1960s
Chapter 9: Popular Cinema and Political Thought in Early Post-Mao China: Reflections on Official
Pronouncements, Film, and the Film Audience
Chapter 10: On the Eve of Tiananmen: Huang Jianxin and the Notion of Postsocialism
Chapter 11: Velvet Prisons and the Political Economy of Chinese Filmmaking in the Late 1980s and
Early 1990s
Chapter 12: Social and Political Dynamics of Underground Filmmaking in Early-Twenty-First-Century
China
Additional Work on Chinese Cinema

Paul G. Pickowicz is Distinguished Professor of History and Chinese Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and inaugural holder of the UC San Diego Endowed Chair in Modern Chinese History.