Imagining in Isolation: Hongkong Movies in Shanghai from 1949 to Early 1960s

East China Normal University's Jishun Zhang will be speaking at University of California, Berkeley on April 18, 2012.

The history of People's Republic of China in the 1950s, a period of great transformation in Modern China, is a fascinating and challenging research area in which the history of Shanghai plays a major role. However, studies in this area have been overshadowed by bias, error, and extreme perspectives.

In recent years, due to the disclosure of huge amount of local archives, the collection of non-government historical materials and the discovery and utilization of audio-visual data, research on Shanghai in the 1950s is moving beyond earlier dominant perspectives and emerging with renewed vigor as new issues are addressed and a solid research foundation is constructed.

This lecture by Zhang Jishun will take a socio-cultural perspective on Hongkong Movies in Shanghai. It will reinterpret some relevant archives and audio-visual data, in an attempt to unveil Shanghai People's reaction and attitude towards Hongkong movies at that time, and trace the continuation and discontinuation of the history in Shanghai during the period of great transformation.

Soon after Hollywood movies were banished in the early 1950s in China, a craze for Hongkong films swept over Shanghai, as the urban population found in film a fashionable form of cultural consumption. In an era of isolation, this phenomenon in China's cities is particularly striking. Watching Hongkong movies was at once a spontaneous group behavior and functioned as shared memory, enabling urban populations to imagine the outside Capitalistic World, and to escape ideological pressure. The underclass in Shanghai maintained unique cultural values; at the same time, there was room for the development of popular culture in Shanghai even during the dramatic transformation of social and cultural system.

This talk will be presented in Chinese.