By 1925, China’s young movie industry was emerging as a major source of urban entertainment, and showing signs of maturing as a truly competitive industry. With bustling Shanghai having no lack of well-heeled entrepreneurs and investors eager to get into the game, film studios were beginning to proliferate:. While the Mingxing studio continued its numerical dominance, with 9 movies released that year, all full length features, others were getting into the game, with 14 more studios producing 2 or more films, and 15 “poverty row” studios jumping in with one each. Of the 62 films released and exhibited in Shanghai in 1925, 54 were features, the first time full length productions outnumbered shorts.
In addition to product statistics, the industry was showing other signs of healthy development, such as the opening of movie houses, theaters built specifically for showing movies, not adapted stage venues. The most opulent of these were large facilities intended to exhibit the Western motion pictures which still predominated, but there were countless smaller facilities set up to show Chinese productions. But perhaps the most outstanding sign of development was the infusion of new talent, both before and behind the camera, that the various film schools that emerged in the early 1920s were beginning to turn out in batches, removing the dependence on veteran stage and operatic artists that had been the standard in the earlier years.
Newcomers making their directing debuts in 1925 or late 1924 included Cheng Bugao, Hong Shen, Hou Yao, Shi Dongshan and Wang Yuanlong. Legendary cinematographers beginning about this time were Dong Keyi, Wang Xuchang, Zhou Ke and Zhou Shimu. Writers Tian Han and Zhou Shoujuan had their first film credits in 1925. In front of the camera, actors making their movie debuts included Zhu Fei, soon to be a familiar face to filmgoers. But first-time onscreen actresses were most numerous: 1925 actress movie debuts included future stars Ding Ziming, Hu Die, Lin Chuchu, Wu Lizhu and Xuan Jinglin, but also Fu Lühen, Gu Baolian, Huang Yunzhen, Jiang Naifang, Li Minghui, Liang Menhen, Lin Ruxin and Lu Jianfen, all of whom went on to notable movie careers. We have looked more closely at the lives and careers of several of these people in past articles, and will discuss most of the remainder in the future.
However, the 1925 movie debut that probably had the greatest impact on the history of Chinese cinema, certainly the most long-lasting, was a collective one: in June, four young brothers from Ningpo, Zhejiang, pooled their resources and started their own movie studio, the Tianyi 天一 Film Company, and by year’s end this new family business had completed and released its first two features. The brothers’ family name was Shao 邵, and they soon expanded Tianyi’s operations into Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. After World War II they changed their family name to Shaw, more familiar to eyes and ears in the West, and began distributing their films worldwide. During the 1960s, the renamed Shaw Brothers Studio became synonymous with Hong Kong movies throughout the world, an empire whose roots were planted in Shanghai in 1925.
