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Chinatown Film Culture
The Appearance of Cinema in San Francisco's Chinese Neighborhood
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Book Presentation:
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.
About the Author:
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.
Press 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
"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."
- Zhang Zhen
See the publisher website: Rutgers University Press
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