Meticulously researched and theoretically sophisticated, Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China: Kaleidoscopic Histories, edited by Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, reframes Chinese film historiography and focuses on presenting the histories of early Chinese film culture in Chinese cities beyond Shanghai—such as Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Taipei—between 1896 and the 1920s. Structured in two parts, “Revising Historiography: Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Guangzhou,” and “Intermediaries, Cinephiles, and Film Literati,” the eleven chapters in this volume provide an “inclusive history” (p. 2) of early Chinese film development that moves “beyond the regulated geographic, ideological, and conceptual bounds” (p. 13). Central to the volume's intervention is Yeh's project to revise the historiography of early Chinese film history that has been cemented by two generations of scholars’ work in order to expose various cinema practices and movie experiences in other sites beyond Shanghai.

Shanghai has been “crowned as the jewel of Chinese modernity and cosmopolitanism,” and Shanghai cinema is typified as “Chinese cinema in general” (p. 2). By focusing on local and (trans)regional histories, the authors in this volume seek to debunk the grand narrative of Chinese national cinema that privileges Shanghai as the site of modernity and early cinema as Shanghai cinema. While Hui Liu, Shi-Yan Chao, and Richard Xiaying Xu (chapter 5) recover the “forgotten history” of Guangzhou film and the unique “Lingnan-based urban film culture” (p. 138), Kenny Ng (chapter 6) examines how Xue Juexin modernized Cantonese cinema with “the artistic blending of Cantonese opera, Western theater, and modern cinema” in The Platinum Dragon (p. 163), demonstrating how Chinese-language cinemas were situated in the “transnational connections between Hong Kong, Guangdong and South China, Shanghai, Southeast Asia, and Hollywood” (p. 171).

In chapters 1 and 3, Yeh, Ting-yan Cheung, and Pablo Sze-pang Tsoi note that there were various Chinese translations for “film”: dianying, yingxi, and yinghua. One of the central arguments in the historiography of early Chinese cinema is that there was a direct correlation and symbiosis between traditional Chinese opera (shadow play) and Chinese cinema. Since yinghua was a term that prevailed in Canton–Hong Kong areas, Yeh argues that there needs to be a refocus on the term yinghua, thus providing an “alternative genealogy” for the historical development of film in China (p. 20). Based on her rigorous archival research, Yeh concludes that yinghua was more prevalent in Guangzhou. In this way, she argues that the film scene in Hong Kong should not be contained within the “shadow opera” image and the “garden as ‘primal scene’” (p. 25). The excavation of yinghua and resituating the yingxi discourse not only decenters the centrality of Shanghai moderne in the historiography of early Chinese cinema but also “reregister[s] the photographic quality of ying as moving images, instead of its ethnic connotation, [thus widening] the understanding of how cinema was received by Chinese audiences” (p. 44).

Yet, within the context of colonial Taiwan, the discourses of modernity and spectatorship were very much dictated and shaped by colonial politics and the civilizing mission of the Japanese administration. According to Laura Jo-Han Wen in chapter 2, magic lantern shows were used by the colonial government to propagate and proffer Japanese imperial governance in Taiwan. While Cheung and Tsoi argue that during the 1920s, film audiences in Hong Kong “evolved from passive receivers to active participants in the film industry” (p. 86), the audiences in colonial Taiwan were “deprived of their subjectivity” due to the fact that film was used as “a tool to promote colonial policy[,] … Japanese history and culture[,] … and identification with the emperor and imperial Japan” (p. 123). However, foreign influences in Chinese film development should not always be seen as detrimental to the local film industry. Rather, in studying the Shanghai YMCA, Yoshino Sugawara exposes how movies were also recognized not merely as entertainment, but also as ways to disseminate knowledge and promote evangelism by the YMCA in Shanghai (chapter 7). The YMCA in turn helped promote and raise the status of cinema-going as a modern social practice. Meanwhile, in chapter 8 Yongchun Fu reminds us that “[t]he complexity of history risks simplification in the shadow of nationalism” (p. 217). Fu argues that an approach fueled by patriotic feelings may bury the contributions of intermediaries between Hollywood and China, who are often labeled as “aggressors” or “traitors.”

In chapters 9 through 11, the authors examine the intersections between film and other arts, such as literature and music. While Enoch Yee-lok Tam examines the film journal Silver Star to theorize the relationship between wenyi (literature and art), film, and other arts, Yeh and Tam examine the cross-fertilization between literature and film in the early republican era in chapter 10. The contribution of Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies writers to the Chinese film industry has been omitted due to the discrimination against Butterfly writers. Butterfly writers such as Zhou Shoujuan and Bao Tianxiao were film literati who, during the 1910s and early 1920s, wrote literary adaptations of foreign films. Their dual careers in the literary and filmic fields expose their “negotiation between traditional and emergent forms of narrative” (p. 270). In the volume's final chapter (chapter 11), Ling Zhang discusses Liu Na'ou's transcultural and transmedial careers as filmmaker, writer, critic, and theorist. According to Zhang, Liu believed that “cinema could transcend national, linguistic, racial, and ethnic boundaries” (p. 277). Indeed, in her analysis of Liu's travel film, The Man Who Has a Camera, Zhang sheds light on Liu's contribution to sound film aesthetics within and beyond the contexts of international film and literary trends, national cinema, and colonial modernity.

The eleven chapters in Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China provide a critical intervention in the study of early Chinese cinema. They revise a historiography that has focused on Shanghai by providing alternative genealogies that decenter the myth of the yingxi discourse and the grand narrative of an ethnocentric approach to film history. The volume also broadens and deepens our understanding of the diversified filmic experiences and practices in other geopolitical sites like colonial Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and colonial Taiwan, and shows how intermediaries contributed to the filmic development in these cities. However, missing are stories about the filmic experiences and intermediaries in other port cities, which “accounted for 62 percent of the total cinemas in the entire country and 70 percent of the total seats,” according to Chao and Xu (p. 140). Indeed, I would have liked to have learned about film traditions in other regional centers like Tianjin. Finally, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in Chinese film studies, early cinema, and colonial film history.