Introduction: the sorrows and joys of Chinese filmmaking: political and personal contexts -- Shanghai twenties: early Chinese cinematic explorations of the modern marriage -- The theme of spiritual pollution in Chinese films of the 1930s -- Melodramatic representation and the "May fourth" tradition of Chinese filmmaking -- Never-ending controversies: the case of remorse in Shanghai and occupation-era Chinese filmmaking -- Victory as defeat: postwar visualizations of China's war of resistance -- Acting like revolutionaries: Shi Hui, The Wenhua Studio, and private-sector filmmaking, 1949-1952 -- Zheng Junli, complicity, and the cultural history of socialist China, 1949-1976 -- The limits of thaw: Chinese cinema in the early 1960s -- Popular cinema and political thought in early Post-Mao China: reflections on official pronouncements, film, and the film audience -- On the eve of Tiananmen: Huang Jianxin and the notion of postsocialism -- Velvet prison and the political economy of Chinese filmmaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s -- Social and political dynamics of underground filmmaking in early twenty-first century China.