I was honored to receive the CCS Summer Research Grants during the academic year 2024-2025 for my summer archival research. This fellowship was used to support my project, titled “The Magic of History: Early Stereoscopic Cinema in Socialist China,” which aims to explore the technological history, artistic strategies, and perceptual qualities of the short-lived stereoscopic cinema from the late 1950s to early 1960s in China.
During my fellowship, I visited Shanghai Municipal Archives to collect materials. I was able to read and copied official documents detailing the launch of stereoscopic cinema, including the political and financial support provided by the government for its experimentation. I also discovered various documents preserved by Shanghai’s film studios that covered the technological development of the cameras used for stereoscopic filming, as well as the practical methods employed in filming stereoscopic movies.
In addition to utilizing the resources at the Shanghai Municipal Archives, I also gathered several film journals from the socialist period at the second-hand book market in Shanghai. These magazines, such as Cinema Technology (Dianying jishu 电影技术) and some issues of Shanghai Cinema (Shanghai Dianying 上海电影), are not yet part of our library’s collection. Many of them were of tremendous help to my project, as they include technological and ideological discussions of stereoscopic cinema, allowing me to become more aware of the contemporary discursive environment surrounding this particular genre.
Another significant component of my field research drew on the exhibition venue of stereoscopic films. I visited the site where the East Lake Cinema (东湖电影院), once a renowned theater for stereoscopic film screenings during the socialist period, used to stand in Shanghai. Though the cinema itself has been demolished, a new, smaller cinema was built on the same site in memoir of it. This visit offered me an opportunity to learn about the history, cinema design, and infrastructure of the East Lake Cinema.
Currently, I am revising my research paper and hope to submit it to conferences. I owe a debt of gratitude to CCS for their unwavering support through the Summer Research Grants. Without their generous assistance, my research trips and the subsequent discoveries I made would not have been possible.
- Tianyue Zhang
Institute for the Study of Societal Issues