© 2011 William Ahearn
From 1932 to 1937, in Shanghai, more than 70 films were produced that fall into the “leftist film” category. How and why the films were given that name is disputed by film scholars in China, although scholars will endlessly argue about most anything. It needs to be pointed out that “leftist” covers a wide-range of political beliefs and that these films were not made by the Communist Party of China. Many of these films have been lost and others are being restored. If you download from the links provided, the prints will vary in quality – both visual and audio – and some films are not subtitled.
The Mingxing Film Company and the Lianhua Film Company produced most of these films although the Diantong Film Company, Xinhua Film Company, Yihua Film Company, Tianyi Film Company, Xibei Film Company of Taiyuan and the Yiji Film Company also made leftist films as well as other films. When the war officially began with Japan in 1937, The Tianyi Film Company left Shanghai for Hong Kong and became Shaw Brothers.
The leftist films vary in content and how many in all would be considered neo-realism or film noir will require a great deal more research. Much of the research I have done is not included here because it would literally fill a long chapter of a fat book. The sole aim of this essay is to establish that these kinds of pre-war films existed in countries far from France and that the stories being told in China bear a striking similarity to the pre-war French films and the post-war Italian films.
Political content is always in the eye of the beholder and it needs to be emphasized that China had a production code in effect as well as censors, so how political these films could get depended more on subtlety than overt propaganda. It is unlikely at this remove that contemporary viewers would even notice the political content. It is very similar to watching Alexandre Korda’s “That Hamilton Woman” (1941) – considered one of the most successful WWII propaganda films – and seeing it as such at this distance in time. Most of the Leftist films were considered subversive and weren't allowed to be shown in the theatres that catered to westerners or where Hollywood films were on the bill.
(For unabashed Communist Chinese propaganda films from the Cultural Revolution years, see “The East Is Red,” “Breaking With Old Ideas,” and my personal favorite, “The Red Detachment of Women.”) Here is the finale scene:
One of the notable aspects of 1930's cinema is that it is the decade in which filmmakers and more importantly governments were finally grasping the power of the medium. The notion of a national cinema – films that reflected how the country wished to represent itself – began showing up in various countries and while the more extreme examples – the Soviets, Nazis and the Imperial Japanese – are obvious, this also played out in France where the rightwing felt that the film noirs were defeatist. In the United States, what appeared on screen became a moral issue and numerous state censorship boards and religious groups forced Hollywood to create the Production Code (or Hays Office) to keep various ideas from reaching the public. The same struggle played out in China and these films were part of the media war between the communists, the left, the Japanese appeasers, the Chinese willing to be sell out to Westerns influences and the rightwing as well as by Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang.
This conflict produced some brilliant films and perhaps the best example – among many – of Chinese neo-realism is "The Big Road."