© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
Walking into and out of the spectacle: China's earliest film scene
This paper studies China's urban visual culture in the last decade of the nineteenth century to explore how cinema was first introduced to China and how it interacted with the existing mass visual entertainments. This paper focuses primarily on the theme of "movement," which directly and indirectly illustrates the new experiences and significations "moving images" brought along. The paper first discusses the emergence of a new public garden culture that combined traditional Chinese gardens and Western modern fairgrounds to form a new cultural space and it analyzes the experiences of film viewing in these new spaces. By focusing on the specificity of these viewing sites, the paper provides a glimpse of China's earliest film scene. The paper also demonstrates that cinema, in the first few years after it arrived China, was not an independent cultural form but was largely a part of a elite visual culture associated with the importation of modernity.