TY - JOUR
T1 - Benjamin Brodsky (1877-1960)
T2 - The Trans-Pacific American Film Entrepreneur, Part One, Making A Trip Thru China
AU - Curry, Ramona
N1 - Funding Information:
1 Generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Humanities Research Board and Department of English measurably facilitated this essay’s research and writing. A number of documents presented here have come to me from researchers including, besides Frank Bren and Law Kar, Masako and Kazuo Okada of Tokyo, who initiated research on Brodsky’s Yokohama-based activities during the 1910s; Liao Gene-fon, producer of the recently released documentary film
Publisher Copyright:
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011.
PY - 2011/7
Y1 - 2011/7
N2 - Authoritative statements have long credited the elusive American immigrant entrepreneur Benjamin Brodsky (1877-1960) with founding film production companies in Shanghai and Hong Kong as early as 1909 and initiating filmmaking collaborations with local Chinese. Yet those histories prove on close examination to consist mostly of sketchy assertions offered without clear evidence. This essay draws on original archival research and recent work of scholars in Hong Kong, Europe, and Japan to reframe the historical narrative, dating most developments a few years later while revealing fresh aspects of Brodsky's trans-Pacific operations and high-level Chinese involvement. The new findings have intriguing implications for our understanding of early twentieth-century trans-Pacific cultural associations as well as Chinese cinema. Part One of this article reconstructs Brodsky's early career and reveals new evidence of his interactions with Chinese returned students and government officials, with a focus on the production in China of Brodsky's feature-length travel documentary A Trip Thru China (1916).
AB - Authoritative statements have long credited the elusive American immigrant entrepreneur Benjamin Brodsky (1877-1960) with founding film production companies in Shanghai and Hong Kong as early as 1909 and initiating filmmaking collaborations with local Chinese. Yet those histories prove on close examination to consist mostly of sketchy assertions offered without clear evidence. This essay draws on original archival research and recent work of scholars in Hong Kong, Europe, and Japan to reframe the historical narrative, dating most developments a few years later while revealing fresh aspects of Brodsky's trans-Pacific operations and high-level Chinese involvement. The new findings have intriguing implications for our understanding of early twentieth-century trans-Pacific cultural associations as well as Chinese cinema. Part One of this article reconstructs Brodsky's early career and reveals new evidence of his interactions with Chinese returned students and government officials, with a focus on the production in China of Brodsky's feature-length travel documentary A Trip Thru China (1916).
KW - Hong Kong cinema
KW - Chinese returned students
KW - ethnographic film
KW - film production in Shanghai
KW - historiography
KW - early transnational cinema
KW - Chinese film history
KW - trans-Pacific trade
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U2 - 10.1163/187656111X582090
DO - 10.1163/187656111X582090
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84960487836
SN - 1058-3947
VL - 18
SP - 58
EP - 94
JO - Journal of American-East Asian Relations
JF - Journal of American-East Asian Relations
IS - 1
ER -