China Travel Guide

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