'Colonial Tactics and Everyday Life' by Yuxin Ma
Most film buffs know of Manchukuo, Japan’s puppet state in Manchuria from 1932 to 1945, through Bernardo Bertolucci’s brilliant (if erroneous) epic, The Last Emperor (1987). Few suspect that Manchukuo had its own film industry and film school.
Manchukuo’s movies are the subject of Yuxin Ma’s Colonial Tactics and Everyday Life. The book has several themes, including Manchukuo’s competition with China’s well-established film industry in Shanghai (which continued after the city fell to Japan). She describes many of the 117 narrative films produced in Manchukuo, but her focus is on the people—the Chinese actors, directors, technicians, screenwriters and film critics who worked under the auspices of the state’s sole studio, the Manchurian Film Association. The studio was controlled by the Japanese and staffed with Japanese directors and support crews but gave the inhabitants of China’s northeast their first opportunity to work in cinema.
Much like Christine Leteux’s Continental Films: French Cinema Under German Control, Ma disputes the simplistic ideas about life under occupation. According to Ma, most of the Chinese working under the Japanese weren’t traitors or willing collaborators. Neither does she maintain that they were helpless victims. The Chinese who worked for Manchurian Film came “with economic, opportunistic, and artistic motivation, and they made choices based on their personal interests.” For some young women, a career in film meant an escape from narrowly defined female social roles; for others, it meant supplementing their family’s income as economic hardships worsened. Ma recounts specific stories of young movie fans who auditioned for Manchurian Film because their dreams had already been colonized by glamorous images on the big screen.
Colonial Tactics and Everyday Life: Workers of the Manchurian Film Association, is written by Yuxin Ma, associate professor of history at the University of Louisville, and published by University of Wisconsin Press.
