Technology and Culture

Chinatown Film Culture fills an important lacuna in both U.S. film history and the history of Chinese America in the early twentieth century. By shifting focus away from racist on-screen representations to Chinese American moviegoing and film exhibition practices in San Francisco's Chinatown, the book is one of the latest additions to a strand of New Film History scholarship that decenters film analysis and focuses instead on local film culture where the relationship between film exhibition and place is key.

The fecundity of this method lies in the very specificity of the locality in question, an especially crucial lens for studies of the nickelodeon era (1905–1915) when exhibition practices were not yet standardized. Therefore, much of the book usefully describes San Francisco's urban culture, while also detailing media technologies and infrastructures pertinent to the movie theaters under scrutiny. The Wurlitzer orchestrion outside the Oriental Theatre in the liminal space of Grant Avenue, for example, along with the fulgent neon sign of the theater that dazzled passersby, play an equally important role in Fahlstedt's account as the films shown on screen. Similarly, to detail what he terms an ambivalent "Chinatown modernity," Fahlstedt takes pain to show that "film was not the first modern medium to recast everyday life in Chinese San Francisco" (p. 176). Apart from local Chinese newspapers, which constitute one of the book's major sources, Fahlstedt introduces the establishment of San Francisco's Chinatown telephone exchange in the late nineteenth century as a historically singular event insofar as it served as an "important part of the neighborhood's economic and social infrastructure" (p. 177). [End Page 1221]

On a conceptual level, Fahlstedt's study of postquake Chinatown film culture offers yet another example of the "local appropriation of a once alienating instrument of communication" that "offered ways to break the isolation," in this case of Chinatown. This framework of "making new media its own" (p. 177), however, downplays what Brian Larkin calls the "autonomy of objects and the very real uncertainties and epistemic instabilities of objects themselves" (Signal and Noise, 9). Consider, for instance, the Chinese handbill for the Oriental Theatre published in Billboard in 1909 that Fahlstedt repeatedly employs as an example: How might the Chinese word for "movie," yinghua, printed on that handbill shed light on the meanings associated with cinema in this cosmopolitan and diasporic ethnic enclave? Could we understand yinghua as more than a colloquial term that suggests what Fahlstedt calls, quoting architect and historian Philip Choy, a "local appropriation of U.S. film exhibition" (p. 151)? As silent-era film historians know, and as Fahlstedt points out in the book as well, U.S. film exhibition in 1909 was by no means a stable and monolithic practice. What was the so-called "U.S. film exhibition" if not a heterogeneous aggregation of variegated local practices? Can we even talk about "appropriation" in this context? A deep dive into the debates on early Chinese film history—especially on the various "origins" of film exhibition—would reveal that yinghua was used predominantly in Guangdong and in the British colony Hong Kong. It is crucial to note, then, that the term used to market a theater in San Francisco's Chinatown suggests a transpacific exchange not (just) with a revolutionary and modernizing China at large, but with the specific Cantonese-speaking area of Guangdong and Hong Kong that contributed the majority of Chinese emigrants to California in the nineteenth century.

Moreover, in excavating this alternative genealogy of Chinese cinema, Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh in Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China challenges the dominant, Shanghai-based yingxi or "shadow play" theory that emphasizes either a drama-centered Chinese theory of cinema decidedly distinct from the Western early film theory's focus on medium specificity or the "umbilical cord" between cinema and indigenous, traditional art forms such as opera and puppet...