Street scenes in Shanghai

From the collection of

Screen Archive South East at the University of Brighton collects, preserves, catalogues and provides public access to its collection of films and magic lantern slides. The collection charts the rise of screen culture in the region and the nation and captures many aspects of life, work and creativity in the South East from the late 19th century to the present day. It is available for research, screenings, creative re-use and commercial access.

Street scenes in Shanghai

Screen Archive South East at the University of Brighton
Shanghai
1933-01-01
Silent
26m

A Dragon Festival tops the bill in this atmospheric look at life in the streets, parks and harbourside of 1930s Shanghai.

This film captures life in Shanghai and in the surrounding countryside. Street performers, acrobats and a 'human pile-driver' are seen hard at work. A Dragon Festival passes through the streets while Europeans converse with Chinese peasants. City dwellers of all nations relax in Shanghai's parks as street traffic gives way to a river cruise. Gliding past a variety of river traffic, dainty bridges and hill-top pagodas we return to see junks at their moorings in Shanghai.

Richard Martin, the maker of this film, was a member of the Shanghai Municipal Police, which acted independently of any Chinese jurisdiction in the city's International Settlement. Though China and Japan were engaged in vicious fighting in other parts of the Chinese mainland it was not until the 8th December 1941 that Japan finally invaded the previously neutral International Settlement thus completing their occupation of Shanghai in its entirety. However, it was not until 1943 that all American and European citizens of belligerent countries, who were resident in Shanghai, were finally sent to internment camps by the Japanese occupiers. Richard Martin was himself interned in Poodong Camp in 1942.

Shanghai - Pearl of the Orient

Western filmmakers captured the first moving images of one of the world's great cities. These remarkable films preserve a metropolis whose streets and waterways teem with life.

When cinema first came to China's shores, Shanghai was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. The new technology was exhibited at the city's Xu Gardens in August 1896 (just months after the Lumière Brothers' first demonstration in Paris), and the earliest ever filmed images of the city were captured - by Western filmmakers - soon after.

Some of the oldest surviving footage of Shanghai was shot by a British war correspondent, dispatched to China to cover the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. It captures the teeming multi-national traffic on the central Nanjing Lu thoroughfare, from gliding bicycles and rattling rickshaws, to a Sikh police detachment and German soldiers enjoying a cigarette. Shanghai's famous waterfront, the Bund, captivated numerous filmmakers in the 20s and 30s, and several films here show a remarkable thronging harbour life, with sampans clustering beneath the Bund's baroque temples of commerce and leisure.

Also featuring in this collection of newsreels, travelogues and home movies are scenes of the Japanese occupation of the city in 1937, and the death and destruction that followed. These are sombre, even harrowing scenes, but a crucial chapter in Shanghai's history.