Left: Photo of a film crew at Manchuria Film Association, a Japan-managed film studio in Manchukuo. Photo courtesy of Aflo.
Right: Photo of a group of Chinese audience gathering for an open-air screening in rural Manchuria, in State-Owned Railway Album (Manshūkoku kokuyū tetsudo shashinchō), Takushoku University Library.
A culmination of archival research activities in Japan and China, the dissertation presents a media and cultural history of cinema in the then Japanese-occupied region of Manchuria (today’s Northeast China). At the heart of the dissertation are two interlocked processes of “becoming”: (1) the process of transforming Manchuria into Manchukuo, the Japanese Empire’s multi-ethnic client state during the 1930s and 1940s, and (2) the process of creating a national cinema for the radically invented “pseudo-nation." Taking Manchuria’s liminal position as an entry point, the first portion of the dissertation explores the construction of local film culture and how it played into the transregional knowledge production about race/ethnicity and nation among Japan, China, and the United States. The middle portion reconsiders cinema as a point of intersection among different modes of viewing informed by the then emergent media practices such as colonial tourism, open-air exhibitions, and hygiene education. Finally, it closes with a critical reflection on the aporia concerning the film historiography of Manchukuo and its contested legacy in Communist-led postwar China. Overall, the dissertation not only expands our understanding of the cinematic (de)construction of discourses of nation and race/ethnicity on the global plane, but also sheds light on the myriad potentialities of cinema as entertainment, education, ethno-national articulation, and their interrelationship.