Group 7 Blog 4

 To further explore the primary and secondary resources about the Great Star Theater during the historical period 1940s to 1970s, we made an appointment with Sine Hwang Jensen, a friendly librarian at UC Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies library. 

Sine showed us inspiring primary sources that deepened our understanding of the history of the Great Star Theater. We first looked through the newspaper collection of Chinese World from January 1949 to June 1949. This was our first time using a scanning machine to see microfilms on a computer, and it was a very interesting experience, as if flipping through history. 

 

We did not see any posters from Great Star Theater nor mentions about film in these microfilms, and the newspaper was mostly filled with advertisements about groceries and Chinese medicine. However, we did see advertisements about other media products such as wireless messenger, phonograph, and radio. Therefore, it’s reasonable to speculate that by1940s, there was growing interest in seeing and being connected to the broader world through media. Media products such as radio and phonograph freed people from temporality by keeping a record of the sound, and this to some extent enriched their daily lives by incorporating new possibilities and experiences. The wireless messenger, branded “globe,” might be alluding to the exciting globalization that was taking place during this time period. 

Chinese World also included coverage on WWII including the War in Europe and celebration of the end of the Sino-Japanese War.  We plan to connect these political events with the secondary sources to explore whether the Great Star Theater played a cultural role in these events and its impacts on the communities in Chinatown. 

We also looked through the East West newspaper archive and examined the weekly newspapers dating back to 1969. We saw weekly posters from the Great Star Theater in the East West newspaper. Interestingly, earlier posters on romance and comedies were almost written entirely in Chinese. These posters usually include a picture of the main actors and actresses and a few lines of summary of the plot. Perhaps only the Chinese communities were interested in these genres. Later on, the themes of the posters included cultural performance, drama, and  martial arts, and most posters incorporated English: informing audiences that these films were colored and had English subtitles. The later posters also included English translations of the films’ titles. We speculate that Americans became more interested in unfamiliar topics about a foriegn culture, such as Kungfu. 

Sine Hwang Jensen who works at UC Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies library assisted our group with finding secondary sources on Chinese San Francisco culture. We found two main secondary sources which were Ronald Riddle's book Flying Dragons Flowing Streams Music in the life of San Francisco Chinese and Nancy Yunhwa Rao’s book Chinatown Opera Theater In North America. The first source describes Chinese theater in both the 19th and 20th century and the types of entertainment that was being shown during different time periods. As our group is focusing on the time period between 1920’s through the 1960’s, we are able to  showcase different elements of Chinese film culture that may have been affected during events such as World War 2 which Ronald Riddle's book highlights well in the later half of the book. Nancy Yunhwa Rao’s book  focuses on Cantonese Opera during the 1920’s-1940’s and even contains a few segments on the birth of The Great China Theatre as well as its transition to Cantonese opera. The book also provides historical context on Cantonese opera and why it was so impactful which will be useful in our presentation.