Modern films first hit China’s shores in the late nineteenth century—not long after the technology’s premiere in France and America—and audiences of all classes rushed to be entertained by the new technology. Yet, by 1933, only five of the dozens of cinemas in the city were in the Chinese-controlled section. Of these, the grande dame must have been the Isis Theater, “the first Chinese-run movie house in Shanghai,” writes historian Xuelei Huang.
Known in Chinese as the “Shanghai Grand Theater,” the Isis opened in 1917 on the site of a former Cantonese opera house, near an area of the city controlled by the British and Americans. Though other cinemas were already operational in the city, Huang argues that the Isis stands out for its location on the fringe of an international settlement.
“This geographical peculiarity gave it a certain advantage, such as the possibility of evading censorship by both Shanghai’s foreign administration and Chinese government,” she explains.
Shanghai was a divided city at the time, carved into parts by foreign powers, with the British, Americans, and French exercising their sovereignty in these territorial “concessions.” And, in the 1910s, theaters were split between “ill-reputed Chinese-run movie houses” and the much fancier Western venues, where tickets could cost more than ten times as much as it would at a local joint. Then, just two blocks away from Western cinemas, the new Isis began offering “an affordable alternative for Chinese movie fans,” Huang reports, and “changed the asymmetry between the movie theaters.”
Publicity material for the grand opening of the Isis emphasized its cosmopolitan modernity. A splashy newspaper advertisement “begins by stating that the motion picture is a ‘civilized’ form of entertainment and can ‘introduce new knowledge and improve social mores,’” Huang remarks. The management also noted that equipment used at the Isis was imported from Europe, while the movies screened were European and American productions.
At the same time, the ad touted “the Chinese essence,” of the Isis—“which means that it charges low prices affordable to the average audience” of lower-middle-class moviegoers, explains Huang.
The Isis’s selling points went beyond just its affordable tickets or its prime location on the busy North Sichuan Road, which was easily accessible by a central tram route. The theater’s management, which was led by a local Cantonese merchant, took full advantage of the fact that the Isis fell under Chinese and not foreign jurisdiction. As one Chinese writer noted in a diary entry in 1934, “Films banned in foreign concessions are bound to be shown at the Isis Theater.” These included Hollywood films that violated the Hays Code, an industry standard that forbade “immoral” or “obscene” depictions of sexuality and other hanky-panky.
“For the managers of the Isis, such acts of ‘transgression’ might have been nothing more than a financial consideration,” Huang writes. “When banned films were shown at the Isis, advertisements invariably highlighted the fact that they were ‘Forbidden in the Foreign Concessions.’”
Huang writes that the Isis both “became entangled in a complex contact relation among global powers” and “introduced a challenge to the domination of Hollywood film culture in China.” Soviet films, which faced strict screening restrictions in the foreign concessions, were on offer in what Huang calls the “special ‘no-man’s land” where the Isis was situated. China and the Soviet Union had established diplomatic relations at the end of 1932, and the Isis was the first commercial cinema in Shanghai to clinch a distribution contract for Soviet films.
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“By publicizing and screening Soviet movies, the Isis (and its physical space)…noticeably generated an anticolonial discourse critical of imperialism and capitalism and supportive of the Soviet social system,” Huang writes. For instance, the first Soviet film to be aired at the Isis was 1931’s The Road to Life, in which homeless Moscow children become happy, productive participants in Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan.
Huang concludes that the Isis’s operations “were deeply interwoven with the contestation between the competing discourses of colonialism and nationalism and between bourgeois capitalism and socialist ideology in the tension-laden historical moment of the 1920s and 1930s.”
But the Chinese management of the Isis was obliged to carry out other forms of censorship. The offensive Orientalist depictions of Chinese characters that were common in Hollywood films of that era inevitably aroused strong passions in Chinese audiences. Notably, the 1925 classic The Thief of Baghdad was so controversial that, four years later, male lead Douglas Fairbanks had to cut short his planned trip to Shanghai because of local outrage. The movie ran for three weeks at the Isis, on the back of advertisements that highlighted Chinese elements in the story, such as Chinese American star Anna May Wong’s billing in the cast.
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But there was much to lambaste in the film, Huang notes. Wong played a slave; one major antagonist is a “crafty and dishonest” Mongolian prince; and “[m]ost offensive were the scenes in which Fairbanks seizes two Mongolians by the queues, beats them, and throws them from a veranda.”
Nationalist audiences successfully prevailed upon the Isis’s Chinese management to censor such scenes—an act that would not have been possible at Western-run cinemas.
Unfortunately, the groundbreaking Isis didn’t survive the Sino-Japanese war. It closed for routine renovations in mid-1937—just months before Shanghai fell to the Japanese. While the foreign concessions were spared Japanese occupation, the Isis, located in the Chinese-controlled part of Shanghai, was seized by Japan’s imperial army and used as a factory.
“Tragically, its demise was again linked with its geographical location,” Huang observes.
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