The Chinese Mirror

Chinese Language Movies Adapted From Foreign Literary Works Updated

    Our page listing these adaptations has been updated through 2006.  Later Chinese productions will be added as they come to my attention.  Given the radically altered political situation post-1949, most of the films listed prior to the 1980s are understandably Hong Kong or Taiwan productions.  Further updates will be announced here as a post.

Chinese Language Movies Adapted From Foreign Literary Works

     Several earlier posts in this space have discussed Chinese fiction films which were based on foreign (i.e. non-Chinese) literary sources.  This stoked my curiosity about what other foreign sources Chinese filmmakers have adapted for the screen.  But in gathering the information I soon came to realize I was proving the wisdom of the old aphorism concerning the unforeseen consequences of swamp-draining.  So I have decided to publish the findings to date, covering the first known adaptation in 1920 through the decade of the 1940s.  This page is archived under Research Aids, and will be updated occasionally, eventually bringing it up to date and including Chinese-language films produced in Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as the mainland.  (There are no Taiwan productions in the list so far.)  Each future update will be announced here as a post.

Announcement: Intute Search Added

Intute, a consortium of seven universities in the UK and based at Oxford, has honored The Chinese Mirror by adding us to their "Best of the Web" database.  Intute strives to provide access to the very best web resources for education and research, and all material in the database has been evaluated and selected by a network of subject specialists before inclusion.  With millions of resources available on the Internet, it is often difficult to find relevant and appropriate material even for those having good search skills and using advanced search engines, so having a vetting service such as this can be invaluable for the researcher.

Click he Intute logo in our left sidebar to go directly to their general search page.  Although The Chinese Mirror is listed in the Arts and Humanities subject area, much useful related material can be found in the Social Sciences section.

2008 Historical Resources Updated

New publications on Chinese film history have been added to the 2008 historical resources page.  Additions since the last update are indicated with a tilde ~.  

Film History Sources Updated

Several new publications from the Chinese scholarly press have been added to the 2008 historical resources page.  New additions are indicated with a tilde ~.

Glossaries Updated

The Chinese-English and English-Chinese glossaries of filmmaking terminology have been updated.  Terms added since the last update are marked with a tilde ~ .

C-E and E-C Film Glossaries

    We have added two film glossaries to The Chinese Mirror, Chinese-English and English-Chinese, linked in the right sidebar under Research Aids.  Both will be updated on a regular basis.  While these are not intended to be comprehensive, our objective is to include as many terms as possible which the editor believes potentially of most use to the student of Chinese motion picture history.  For this reason, some of the terminology may no longer be in use today, but were commonly used in Chinese cinema's classic era.