Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-wing Cinema Movement, 1932–1937. By Laikwan Pang. [Lanham, MD, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. xvi+279 pp. £22.95. ISBN 0-7425-0946-X.]

Extract

As the first monograph on the Chinese left-wing cinema movement published in English, this book makes a significant contribution to the growing literature on pre-1949 Chinese film. Based on extensive research in both primary and secondary sources, Pang traces the historical development of the leftist cinema movement and makes several insightful observations about 1930s film culture in China in general and the leftist cinema movement in particular. She argues that during the 1930s, a group of Chinese filmmakers, despite their individual differences in social and political backgrounds, shared some common understandings about the social mission of the film medium and visions of modernity and nationhood, which resulted in a body of films that was coloured by a leftist orientation. Pang argues that some of the unique features of those films were continuously visible in the 1940s (pp. 231–238).