Overview
Chinatown Film Culture provides the first comprehensive account of the emergence of film and moviegoing in the transpacific hub of San Francisco in the early twentieth century. Working with materials previously left in the margins of grand narratives of history, Kim K. Fahlstedt uncovers the complexity of a local entertainment culture that offered spaces where marginalized Chinese Americans experienced and participated in local iterations of modernity. At the same time, this space also fostered a powerful Orientalist aesthetic that would eventually be exported to Hollywood by San Francisco showmen such as Sid Grauman. Instead of primarily focusing on the screen-spectator relationship, Fahlstedt suggests that immigrant audiences' role in the proliferation of cinema as public entertainment in the United States saturated the whole moviegoing experience, from outside on the street to inside the movie theater. By highlighting San Francisco and Chinatown as featured participants rather than bit players, Chinatown Film Culture provides an historical account from the margins, alternative to the more dominant narratives of U.S. film history.
Full Product Details
Author: Kim K. Fahlstedt
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Imprint: Rutgers University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.20cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.467kg
ISBN: 9781978804418
ISBN 10: 1978804415
Pages: 302
Publication Date: 14 August 2020
Recommended Age: From 18 to 99 years
Audience:
College/higher education
,
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Chinatown Film Culture is an impressive and exhaustively researched history of early film exhibition practices and filmgoing culture in San Francisco's Chinatown. It is a remarkable contribution to film history! --Philippa Gates author of Criminalization/Assimilation: Chinese/Americans and Chinatowns in Classical Hollywood Film Original and compelling, Chinatown Film Culture fills a significant gap in cinema history. Drawing on fascinating and highly illustrative primary sources, Kim K. Fahlstedt explores the place of Asian American communities in the emergence of cinematic modernity in the United States. --Zhen Zhang editor of The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
Chinatown Film Culture is an impressive and exhaustively researched history of early film exhibition practices and filmgoing culture in San Francisco's Chinatown. It is a remarkable contribution to film history! Original and compelling, Chinatown Film Culture fills a significant gap in cinema history. Drawing on fascinating and highly illustrative primary sources, Kim K. Fahlstedt explores the place of Asian American communities in the emergence of cinematic modernity in the United States.
Chinatown Film Culture is an impressive and exhaustively researched history of early film exhibition practices and filmgoing culture in San Francisco's Chinatown. It is a remarkable contribution to film history! Original and compelling, Chinatown Film Culture fills a significant gap in cinema history. Drawing on fascinating and highly illustrative primary sources, Kim K. Fahlstedt explores the place of Asian American communities in the emergence of cinematic modernity in the United States.
Chinatown Film Culture is an impressive and exhaustively researched history of early film exhibition practices and filmgoing culture in San Francisco's Chinatown. It is a remarkable contribution to film history! --Philippa Gates author of Criminalization/Assimilation: Chinese/Americans and Chinatowns in Classical Hollywood Film
Author Information
KIM K. FAHLSTEDT is a postdoctoral scholar at Stockholm University's Media Studies Department and a research affiliate for the Swedish Institute for North American Studies at Uppsala University.
