Available From UC Press

In the 1930s and 1940s, educators working with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) turned to cinema as a means of educating the nation yet found that film was far from a nimble pedagogical aid. This is the first study of the Chinese Educational Film Movement, the name given to their efforts. Considering the work of institutions often overlooked in Chinese film historiography, including mass education centers and missionary universities, this book chronicles how educators grappled with an unwieldy cinematic apparatus entangled with Euro-American and Japanese colonial projects. To describe this phenomenon, Hongwei Thorn Chen proposes the concept of media failure—that is, when media fail to do what they are supposed to do. While media failure mapped China’s diminutive place in the development of a globalized useful cinema regime, Ungovernable Media shows that Chinese film users also embraced the language of failure to make sense of the predicaments of nation building in colonial modernity, ultimately aligning failure with the story of experiment told by the Chinese state. 

Hongwei Thorn Chen is Assistant Professor of Communication and Asian Studies at Tulane University.