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Journal of American-East Asian Relations 18 (2011) 58–94
brill.nl/jaer
Benjamin Brodsky (1877-1960):
The Trans-Pacific American Film Entrepreneur –
Part One, Making A Trip Thru China
Ramona Curry
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Email: [email protected]
Abstract
Authoritative statements have long credited the elusive American immigrant entrepreneur
Benjamin Brodsky (1877-1960) with founding film production companies in Shanghai and
Hong Kong as early as 1909 and initiating filmmaking collaborations with local Chinese. Yet
those histories prove on close examination to consist mostly of sketchy assertions offered without
clear evidence. This essay draws on original archival research and recent work of scholars in Hong
Kong, Europe, and Japan to reframe the historical narrative, dating most developments a few
years later while revealing fresh aspects of Brodsky’s trans-Pacific operations and high-level
Chinese involvement. The new findings have intriguing implications for our understanding of
early twentieth-century trans-Pacific cultural associations as well as Chinese cinema. Part One of
this article reconstructs Brodsky’s early career and reveals new evidence of his interactions with
Chinese returned students and government officials, with a focus on the production in China of
Brodsky’s feature-length travel documentary A Trip Thru China (1916).
Keywords
Chinese film history, early transnational cinema, historiography, ethnographic film, Chinese
returned students, Hong Kong cinema, film production in Shanghai, trans-Pacific trade
The contributions of immigrant American entrepreneur Benjamin Brodsky
(1877-1960) to cinema’s early transnational developments have gained widening attention in recent years, primarily among scholars of early cinema in
Hong Kong, China, and Japan.1 The Chinese Taipei Film Archive’s acquisition
1
Generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Humanities Research Board and Department of
English measurably facilitated this essay’s research and writing. A number of documents presented here have come to me from researchers including, besides Frank Bren and Law Kar,
Masako and Kazuo Okada of Tokyo, who initiated research on Brodsky’s Yokohama-based
activities during the 1910s; Liao Gene-fon, producer of the recently released documentary film
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011
DOI 10.1163/187656111X582090
R. Curry / Journal of American-East Asian Relations 18 (2011) 58–94
59
two decades ago of a feature-length ethnographic documentary produced by
Brodsky entitled A Trip Thru China (1916) has helped spark and sustain scholarly historical interest in the subject. Shot between late 1912 and 1915 in
Hong Kong and seven cities and their environs in China, the film took its own
trip across the United States between 1916 and 1918, generating extensive
publicity and attracting thousands of viewers in the Bay Area, Los Angeles,
and New York City. The production in China and American promotion and
reception of that film (abbreviated Trip) is this two-part essay’s overarching
focus, which responds in part to Law Kar and Frank Bren’s 2004 call to scholars to consider Brodsky’s contributions to American cinema history.2
Law and Bren’s ground-breaking book substantially enriched the historical
record of Brodsky’s efforts in trans-Pacific film distribution and production
between about 1909 and 1920. While Brodsky’s name, in variant transliterations from the original Russian, has never disappeared from film history, new
research has revealed that authoritative statements long circulated in both
Chinese and English about Brodsky’s early engagement in Hong Kong and
Shanghai film production are mostly sketchy assertions offered without clear
evidence. One such assertion is that Brodsky initiated Hong Kong cinema in
1909 by forming a company that involved local Chinese in making short
films, including a comedy called A Roast Duck.3
Law and Bren have recently presented compelling evidence that Brodsky’s
film work with Hong Kong intellectuals and artists got underway only in early
Searching for Brodsky; Kim Fahlstedt, who probed into Brodsky’s activities in Shanghai for his
University of Stockholm master’s thesis, and Eric Pascarelli, who has researched Brodsky’s contributions to 1920s-30s Los Angeles real estate development and other phases of his life in the
United States. Other materials were adeptly procured for me by Teresa Huang at the Chinese
Taipei Film Archive and John L. Moore, Sarah Sahn, and Lawrence Chang of the University of
Illinois.
2
Law Kar and Frank Bren, with the collaboration of Sam Ho, Hong Kong Cinema: A CrossCultural View (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 30.
3
Such assertions sometimes cite Cheng Shuren, ed., Zhonghua ying ye nianjian (Chinese film
industry yearbook) (Shanghai: China Film Industry Yearbook Editorial Department, 1927),
which does not document the claim. Reference is also made to the encyclopedic work edited by
Cheng Jihua, Li Shaobai, and Xing Zuwen, Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi (History of the development of Chinese cinema) (Beijing: China Film Press, 1963), which in turn cites secondary
undocumented sources. The earliest book in English on Chinese cinema, Jay Leyda’s Dianying:
An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Press, 1972), draws on translations from these Chinese sources gathered during the
author’s 1959-64 sojourn in Beijing, so it is unsurprising to read (unsourced) that “Another
pioneer effort … [was] organized in Hong Kong by an enterprising American named Benjamin
Polaski [sic]. He is known to have made four short films there … in 1909” (10-11). However,
Bren, Law, and others have recently productively researched documentation which Leyda tentatively referred to in a supplement to the paperback version of his book (also 1972).
60
1914, placing the origins of Hong Kong cinema five years later than previously claimed. They have also demonstrated that it was Roland Van Velzer, a
cinematographer and technician Brodsky had brought from the United States
to help establish production facilities in Hong Kong, who largely managed the
local collaborations.4 Other assertions about Brodsky’s early endeavors in
Chinese cinema have also proven unsustainable under recent follow-up by
film scholars from Hong Kong, China, Japan, Taiwan, Sweden, and the
United States. The new findings reframe rather than diminish Brodsky’s historical significance, however, as other innovative facets of his operations have
emerged. One notable contribution was Brodsky’s establishing a trans-Pacific
distribution network under the company name Variety Film Exchange, which
around 1911-13 helped to forge a film industrial infrastructure in China. My
research also points to Brodsky’s unexpected engagement in Chinese political
and cultural history through his acquaintance and business collaboration with
recently returned Chinese students from the United States and national
republican government officials.
This essay is published in two parts: “Making A Trip Thru China” and
“Taking A Trip Thru China to America.” Part One offers a carefully sourced
overview of what I have been able – thanks in part to generously shared materials from other “Brodskyites” internationally – to recover of the man’s early
life and enterprises. It also addresses the circumstances of Trip’s production,
including the evident involvement of Chinese elites in the work. Part Two will
focus on Trip’s inscription within the commercial, cultural and film critical
and exhibition contexts of the United States in the mid-1910s.5 I aim in this
4
Frank Bren and Law Kar, “Ben Brodsky & the real dawn of Hong Kong cinema,” China
Daily (HK edition, 13 Mar. 2010), 3. Law recounted Van Velzer’s contributions and relations to
the key Chinese figures who worked with Brodsky’s Hong Kong-based production company, the
subsequent Chinese cinema pioneers Luo Mingyou and Li (Lai) brothers Minwei and Beihai, in
his presentation at the 15-17 December 2009 History of Chinese Cinema conference at the
Hong Kong Film Archive, “Jiekai Xianggang dianying qiyuan di yituan tanyan Bulasiji,Wanweisha,
Li shi xiongdi yijizao Xianggang dianying yanjiu di ixie wenti” (De-mystifying the origins of Hong
Kong cinema, In quest of Ben Brodsky, R. F. Van Velzer, The Lai Brothers and resolving problems of research in early Hong Kong cinema). See also Sam Ho, “Report on the History of
Chinese Cinema(s) Revisited Conference,” Hong Kong Film Archive Newsletter 51 (February
2010), 8-10, available on the Archive’s website <http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/CulturalService/
HKFA/en/4-4-51.php>.
5
The Chinese Taipei Film Archive holds probably the most complete version of Trip
(about 80 minutes long in viewing time), having in the early 1990s acquired from the family a
print of the film along with a number of photographs and a synopsis in eulogy form of Brodsky’s
autobiography. The original circulated as ten reels of 35mm film, about two hours’ length when
projected at silent film speed. The U.S. Library of Congress possesses only one reel (400 feet in
a 16mm copy, about 11 minutes in projection time), which shows sites around Shanghai.
61
essay to help correct and augment the historical record of Brodsky’s transPacific work in early cinema in China. I aim also to demonstrate the benefits
of transnational collaboration in efforts to reconstruct the impact of figures
whom standard national histories have marginalized or mythologized or both,
as in the case of Benjamin Brodsky.
Benjamin Brodsky and the Challenges of His Storiography
A detective-scholar can now compile a much fuller historical portrait of a figure like Brodsky than previously believed recoverable. Rapid expansion of
digital databases has enabled electronic access to extensive library holdings,
newspapers, and national and state government archives (including, for example, United States census and ships’ arrival records and city and college directories). All have proven valuable in my historiographic project both as original
sources and as a means of assessing the claims of Brodsky’s unpublished autobiography, “God’s Country.” The book-length manuscript, dictated at his
home in Los Angeles around 1956, colorfully elaborates incidents in the man’s
remarkable life that are documented in the public record, while also suggesting additional business and historical connections to pursue in research.
For example, the autobiography relates a lively tale of Brodsky’s playing
friendly poker during a Pacific crossing to Shanghai with a fellow passenger,
“Mr. Beamis,” identified as “vice president and general manager of the
Standard Oil Company of the whole world.”6 The episode’s rich detail describes
the cards dealt, the size of bets, and the banter exchanged. Brodsky continues
that several weeks after docking, he and William Edward Bemis (as the man
turns out to be) met again by chance in Beijing, where Brodsky was setting up
See <http://lccn.loc.gov/mp73126200>. Some scenes have been preserved in Chinese archives,
for example, shots of Shanghai at that city’s Audio and Video Archive. That some of the footage
has been archived in China emerges from Searching for Brodsky (Hsieh Chia-kuen director,
Taiwan, 2010), a documentary produced by film historian Liao Gene-fon in collaboration with
the National Taiwan University of Arts. Based on research Liao conducted in 2002-2003, and
itself a meditation on the wearisome but gratifying work of historiography, Searching for Brodsky
contains numerous excerpts from Trip, as well as a few from Beautiful Japan, Brodsky’s 1918
travelogue of that country, which I discuss in Part Two of this essay.
6
“God’s Country” (hereafter cited as “GC”), as related to Nathan Abkin by Benjamin
Brodsky (unpublished manuscript, 256 pages), 164. Although Brodsky legally changed his family name (and that of his second wife and two sons) to “Borden” around 1945, he related his
memoirs under his original name. The typescript in its entirety is available only in a few copies
privately circulated by Brodsky’s descendents, to whom I owe gratitude for exceptional research
access.
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an office. Because he was well acquainted with members of the Chinese government, Brodsky offered to help Bemis negotiate his company’s stalemated
deal to secure petroleum-drilling rights. Brodsky reports that Bemis successfully deployed his advice to invite key government ministers for a convivial
but high-stakes night of poker and let them win. Brodsky lists the invited
participants by title rather than individual names: the “Secretary of the
Interior” [Brodsky considered him “the big stick”], “Secretary of Education,
Secretary of State, and brother-in-law of the president of China.”7
The San Francisco Chronicle of 1 May 1915 indeed mentions in “Harbor
News” on page 17 both Bemis and Brodsky among the distinguished passengers of the Japanese liner Chiyo Maru departing for China that day, under the
command of the captain correctly named in Brodsky’s autobiography.
Brodsky’s claim to know cabinet ministers of the time also bears out, those
connections proving significant in the production of A Trip Thru China.
However, Brodsky’s self-aggrandizing story about poker diplomacy proves
largely a fanciful yarn, for the negotiations between Zhou Ziqi as minister of
commerce and agriculture (which Brodsky may have conflated with “interior”) and Bemis as a vice president of Standard Oil Company of New York
(not “the whole world”) ultimately failed.8
The account nonetheless reveals factors that helped to shape Trip, which
Brodsky’s autobiography does not mention (nor does he give titles or dates for
the films he does allude to producing). Combined with visual documentation
from the film, the story suggests the timing (June 1915) and means for
Brodsky’s arranging to film Trip’s impressive Beijing scenes several months
later (see Figure 1). The tale also offers a crucial test of the historiographic
usefulness of “God’s Country,” which proves regularly to intertwine partially
verifiable and imaginatively elaborated experiences and events. Constructing a
persuasive account of Brodsky’s life and career entails a healthy degree of skepticism toward the literal truth-value not only of oral histories but also of the
7
“GC,” 169. The secretary of the interior during summer 1915 was Zhu Qiqian, an ally of
then-President Yuan Shikai, also in Yuan’s quest to make himself emperor. “Chu Chi-chien,”
Who’s Who in China, 3rd ed. (Shanghai: China Weekly Review, 1925), 217-18. The secretary of
education was Tang Hualong and the secretary of state (premier) Xu Shichang, while “the
brother-in-law” may have been the important military and political figure Li Yuanhong, whose
daughter was married to one of Yuan’s sons.
8
Noel H. Pugach, “Standard Oil and Petroleum Development in Early Republican China,”
Business History Review 45 (Winter 1971). Zhou (1871-1923) held a range of national positions
in early Republican China and, like Zhu Qiqian, was closely allied with Yuan Shikai. “Chou
Tzu-ch’i,” Howard L. Boorman, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, 5 vols. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1967-79), 1:429-31.
63
Figure 1. Chinese government pass allowing Brodsky access to regulated sites
in Beijing, dated 28 November 1915. The Chinese imperial settings were
among the last filmed before the footage was taken to the United States in
February 1916.
uncorroborated printed word, along with a willingness to accept that despite
recently much broadened access to historical resources, some knowledge gaps
must remain unfilled.
The Making of Benjamin Brodsky as an American Trans-Pacific Film
Entrepreneur
Like many immigrants to the United States, but graced with an exceptionally adventuresome spirit, Benjamin Brodsky built a solid identity and career
across diverse geographic, cultural, and linguistic communities. Although census and ships’ records give years of birth as late as 1886, Brodsky testified to a
15 August 1877 birth date on most signed documents (including passport
applications and a required U.S. military draft registration in 1918). His autobiography opens, however, with the statement that he was born on 1 August
1875. The certificate of his death, in Los Angeles on 15 February 1960,
64
compromises on 1 August 1877. “God’s Country,” which Brodsky dictated as
an octogenarian (a life phase in which early experiences often become most
vivid in recollection), also attests in its opening pages that he was born in “a
small town in Russia near Tektarin,” a city name more formally transliterated
as Ekaterinoslav and quite different from Odessa, the cosmopolitan port on
the Black Sea that Brodsky consistently had given as his birthplace.
Documented family members’ U.S. draft registration and immigration
records corroborate Brodsky’s origins in the Pale of Settlement to the northwest of the East Central Ukrainian industrial city Ekaterinoslav, originally
named, like its surrounding province, to honor Catherine the Great, but since
1926 called Dnepropetrovsk, with reference to its site on the Dnieper River.
Odessa – a city better known and more readily pronounceable among nonRussian speakers – lies 300 miles (500 kilometers) overland to the southwest.
That is an impressive distance given Brodsky’s claim to have run away riding
bareback on a stolen horse to that port city and thence to sea at about age
fourteen, to escape a harsh life as one of thirteen children of an impoverished,
widowed rabbi. The late-life revelation of Brodsky’s specific place of origin
aptly illustrates his personal narrative style, already suggested by the poker
episode recounted above: to engage through colorful turn-of-phrase and tight
focus on the docudramatic impact of individual episodes, giving sparse chronology or broader geographic or political contexts. His tendency to leave
aside, simplify or even demonstrably confuse names, dates, and locales, while
elaborating visual and aural detail, was at least partially rooted in his lifelong
inability to read or to write much more than the spiky signature visible on a
number of documents.9
According to the autobiography, the teenaged Brodsky worked on British
freighters traveling westward to Europe and the Americas before eventually
“jumping ship” on the East Coast of the United States and joining a circus
sometime before the mid-1890s. Family lore and his gymnastic abilities even
in old age support the detailed accounts of his years of working in a circus,
which by the end of a few years he came to own. Brodsky then went back to
the Ukraine with the considerable wealth he had amassed, but returned to the
United States empty-handed. He undertook to rebuild his fortune by staging
theatrical productions before venturing to Manila around the end of the
Spanish-American War, where he set himself up as a ship supplier. Brodsky
9
Brodsky mentions several times in “GC” that he could not read; his son Ronald Borden
sustains the observation. In 1923-24, that circumstance, juxtaposed with Brodsky’s ownership of
a Venice, California newspaper, became through nationwide press syndication a “human interest” item in a number of small-town newspapers across the United States.
65
landed in Hong Kong in 1901 en route to San Francisco and by 1904 was
trading in ship supplies and other commodities in Shanghai, where an older
brother named Motel (a form of the name Mordecai) had settled with his family, then immigrated to the United States in 1921.10
More than thirty records assuredly document Benjamin Brodsky’s Pacific
port arrivals and departures. The earliest shows him (as “Mr. Brodzy”) departing from Yokohama on 1 July 1905 on a French ship bound for Marseilles. He
was almost certainly a passenger for the first port of call, Shanghai, based on
September 1905 departure and arrival records (a “Mr. and Mrs. Beosdky”
arrived in and a “Mr. and Mrs. Brodoky” departed from that city).11 The timing of his documented trips to Japan lends credence to Brodsky’s claims to
have served as an interpreter working with Russian prisoners of the Japanese
Army during the Russo-Japanese War, which came to a ceasefire in early
September 1905. A passenger manifest for the Japanese liner Hong Kong Maru
when it arrived in San Francisco from Yokohama on 1 March 1906 provides
the first certain documentation of Brodsky’s landing in the United States.12
10
Passenger lists and other records document the emigration to Shanghai (and later to the
United States) of the family of Motel Brodsky (born ca. 1871), and also a younger Brodsky
brother Naum or Nohim (later Norman, born in 1884), who soon left China to assist Brodsky’s
father and his second young family in initial emigration to Turkey. Records for the family’s presence in Shanghai include the passenger list for the ship Mongolia in the North China Herald, 12
Feb. 1904, 301, and an item to which Kim Fahlstedt drew my attention in the same newspaper
from 24 March 1905, 612, which reveals that a Mrs. Brodsky operated a boarding house in the
International Settlement at 777 Broadway (now the Dong Daming Lu). Research into Shanghaibased records for Motel Brodsky could reveal further evidence of Benjamin’s activities in that city.
The close family relationship between Motel and Benjamin Brodsky arises from city directories,
census records, and a detailed 21 June 1921 ship’s manifest listing Motel (who worked in the
clothing trade) and his wife Mina and four children as immigrants through Seattle, Washington,
en route to Detroit, Michigan, where the family settled with other known relatives.
11
“Passengers,” Japan Daily Advertiser, 3 July 1905, 8. Masako Okada discovered the record
in a Tokyo archive; the Japan Weekly Mail, another Yokohama periodical, did not record that
ship’s departing passengers. Frank Bren first alerted me to Brodsky’s numerous arrivals and
departures documented in ships’ passenger lists published in English-language newspapers in
Yokohama, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, in this instance the North China Herald. Bren has compiled his travel data research, including Brodsky’s 9 September 1905 departure from Yokohama
and 2 October 1905 return from Shanghai, into an overview in table form on behalf of the Hong
Kong Film Archive (this source thus hereafter designated “Courtesy of HKFA”).
12
See National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)/Ancestry.com. The database
lists the compiled sources for arriving ship information that I draw most on in this essay as
California Passenger and Crew Lists, 1893-1957 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.
com Operations Inc, 2008; Honolulu, Hawaii, Passenger Lists, 1900-1953 [database on-line].
Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2009; and Seattle Passenger and Crew Lists,
1882-1957 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2006. Unless
otherwise stated, the evidence I cite for ship travel derives from those three sources.
66
He traveled in steerage, as an unmarried man of Russian citizenship, along
with two American women: Miss Mamie (born Mary Esther) Friedman and
Miss Ray Friedman (Mamie’s teenaged sister Rachael). Two weeks later,
Benjamin Brodsky and Mamie married, although they may have previously
wed in Shanghai or Yokohama under Jewish or local law.13 Until her death,
not yet fifty years old, of cancer in Los Angeles in 1929, Mamie Brodsky frequently acted as secretary and partner in her husband’s businesses and often
accompanied him on his trans-Pacific journeys; the couple had no children.
On 18 April 1906, six weeks after their landing, the Great San Francisco
Earthquake and Fire destroyed much of the city. The Brodskys escaped from
their hotel just before it collapsed. Brodsky reports that the disaster destroyed
the imported silk cargo in which he had invested all his available funds and
everything else to their names except Mamie’s jewels.14
Brodsky’s verbal self-portrait attests to a primary identification as a scrappy
entrepreneur wherever he found himself. In the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, Brodsky began dealing in San Francisco real estate, initially establishing a grocery store in the southern reaches of the city that he turned over to
his aging father and his second young family to operate following their 1907
immigration.15 Probably by late 1908, Brodsky started making business investments in the Pacific Northwest states of Oregon and Washington. He seems
to have distributed films out of Seattle for a period around 1909-10, in addition to having, according to “God’s Country,” established a lucrative “Oriental
13
San Francisco Call, 14 Mar. 1906, 14, announced the filing of their marriage license the day
before, giving Mamie’s legal family name as Lebowitz (indicating that she had been married
previously). Available on the Library of Congress-affiliated “Chronicling America” database
<http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/>.
14
Besides descriptions in “GC” of Mamie’s contributions to the Brodsky enterprises,
photographs and other records amply illustrate her engagement. Benjamin Brodsky’s passport
applications (which then encompassed accompanying family members and often include
pictures) (NARA/Ancestry.com) and U.S. census records also available through the genealogical
site provide the identifying information for Mamie and Ray Friedman. They were two of nine
children of Charles Friedman (a New York City clothing merchant whose business initially lay
on Catherine Street, now near Manhattan’s Chinatown), and his wife Fanny Simon, both of
whom had as children emigrated from Germany.
15
San Francisco Call, 18 Oct. 1906, 13; 18 Apr. 1907, 10; and 15 May 1907, 7. The 1907
and 1908 San Francisco city directories list Benjamin Brodsky as a grocer and show his father
and family subsequently assuming the business and residing in San Francisco through 1920,
whereas Benjamin appears after 1908 only in the 1917 and 1920 San Francisco city directories.
Evidence exists for the emigration to the United States of at least three (including Motel and
Norman), possibly more of Brodsky’s reported eleven brothers and one sister born in the
Ukraine, as well as his father, stepmother and two half-brothers, a third being born in San
Francisco in December 1908.
67
export and import business” (p. 91). The 1910 United States census, taken in
April of that year, documents that the Brodskys (married for four years,
according to this record) were living in an apartment building on Seattle’s
Yesler Way, a broad street leading to the docks that lay just north of the city’s
historic Chinatown area. The census record gives Brodsky’s occupation as
“merchant, own store.” The couple had probably settled there by early 1909,
for Brodsky’s autobiography asserts that he participated in the Pacific
Exposition, which opened in Seattle on 1 June 1909. That claim is made
believable in part by his admission that the enterprise lost considerable money
on various concessions and wares.
The year 1909 was a financially and professionally challenging one for
Brodsky. Even before the Exposition’s opening, he experienced a business failure in undertaking to present a variety program of music, comedy and “moving pictures” at a previously closed Shanghai theater. Brodsky promoted in
local foreign-language newspapers the Saturday, 27 March 1909 grand opening of The Orpheum, a theater located in Shanghai’s French concession and
previously named The Casino. Tickets could be procured at a shop run by
M. Haimovitch at 17 Nanking Road, adjacent to the Palace Hotel, then just a
few years old. The promotional strategy, the relatively pricey tickets, the proposed program’s composition (including dramatic sketches and contralto and
cornet solos), as well as the location indicate that Brodsky aimed to reach
Shanghai’s European residents.16 The theater opened as scheduled, but could
offer only the new films from America (“never before produced in the
Empire”), for the American performers had not yet arrived. Two newspapers
announced that the theater would play only moving pictures, but the North
China Daily News soon put paid to the proposition: “The Orpheum Theatre
will be closed until further notice.”17
Kim Fahlstedt suggests that Brodsky’s connection with the Haimovitch
brothers may in part have doomed the new enterprise, for that family was at
the time distinctly “scandal-ridden.” Within the preceding month alone, one
brother, Daniel, had been accused in court of consorting with gamblers and
allowing opium use on the family’s hotel premises, and the Haimovitch brothers had in fact jointly declared bankruptcy just a few days prior to the
16
Kim Fahlstedt discovered announcements of the event in Ostasiatische Lloyd–Shanghaier
Nachtrichten, 26 Mar. 1909, 97; L’Echo de Chine, 26 Mar. 1909, 5, and 27 Mar. 1909, 2; and
North China Daily, 27 Mar. 1909, 1. The Haimovitch family, which had roots in Bombay, India
and identified as British, may have operated a cigar store as well as, according to Fahlstedt’s
research, a European travelers’ hotel.
17
L’Echo de Chine, 30 Mar. 1909, 2; North China Daily, 30 Mar. 1909, 4, and 31 Mar.
1909, 4.
68
Orpheum’s opening.18 Whether for that reason or lack of capital and proper
connections with the French authorities, Brodsky seems to have rapidly
chalked up the excursion as a loss and booked second-class passage on the
Tenyo Maru, leaving Shanghai on 10 April and arriving in San Francisco on 3
May 1909. The incident at once underscores that Brodsky’s early primary
business investments and identity were as a (variably successful) “showman”
and supports the recent revisions to the timeline for Brodsky’s contributions
to early Chinese cinema.
Clearly, Brodsky had not yet in 1909 established a basis for engaging in any
film production in Shanghai or Hong Kong. From 1909 through 1913, he
appears to have focused largely on developing a Pacific Rim film exhibition
and distribution network, initially based in Seattle but by early 1911 centered
in San Francisco, as we know from newspaper reports of a fire that on 7 March
1911 destroyed his Variety Film Exchange facilities at 51-53 McAllister
Street.19 Despite the loss (evidently compensated by insurance policies), by fall
of 1911 Brodsky was deeply engaged in building business contacts, staff, and
modes of operations to establish Variety Film Exchange branch offices. The
first two branches to open and which probably remained the most active of his
distribution centers were in Honolulu and Yokohama, the latter officially documented as opening in late summer 1911.20 Although no definite travel
records for 1911 have yet surfaced, based on a documented travel cycle for his
business from 1912 to 1915, Brodsky probably purchased films in New York
City in April or May 1911 and a week or so later sailed from San Francisco to
Honolulu, Yokohama, or Shanghai.21
18
The Curious Case of Benjamin Brodsky: Early Shanghai Film Culture Revisited (Master’s
thesis, University of Stockholm, 2010), 52-53.
19
San Francisco Chronicle, “The Fire Record,” 8 Mar. 1911, 18; a more detailed account
appears in the San Francisco Call under the headline “While Men Flee, Girl Faces Fire,” 8 Mar.
1911, 18. The Chronicle item reveals that the business was held in Brodsky’s father’s name, the
story in the Call that Brodsky employed a staff of at least three and was himself in the city, but
not on the premises, at the time of the fire.
20
A record of the Variety Exchange Film Company’s business registration in Yokohama written in Japanese is dated 15 September 1911 (personal email communication from Masako Okada,
20 July 2009). Ms. Okada further advises (personal email, 25 Feb. 2011) that the company’s
opening is dated as August 1911 in an official letter of 1 May 1917 from Mr. Ariyoshi, the governor of Kanagawa prefect, in which Yokohama is located, to the secretary of state, Mr. Nagata.
21
An interview with Brodsky by Hugh Hoffman, “Photoplay in China,” Moving Picture
World (hereafter cited as MPW), 10 Apr. 1915, 224, opens with the declaration: “Every year, for
the past six years, there has come to America from far off China a most interesting little man by
the name of Ben Brodsky.” Besides communicating the author’s presumably greater height than
Brodsky’s own 5 ft. 6 in. (1.68 meters) recorded on his passport applications, the observation
embeds assertions about Brodsky’s trans-Pacific (and trans-continental) travel patterns that may
yield useful research hints.
69
Brodsky likely spent summer 1911 in China or Japan, arriving in Yokohama
by August or September, when as noted he registered the new Variety branch
office, and returning, probably with a layover in Honolulu, to San Francisco
by late November 1911. Six weeks later, Brodsky traveled with Mamie back to
Honolulu. The mention of their names in a San Francisco newspaper passenger list indicates that they traveled first class, doing so probably for the first
time from that port.22 Clearly, Brodsky’s business fortunes were rapidly
improving. By mid-May 1912, Brodsky was again in New York City, where he
gave a detailed interview to the trade journal Moving Picture World that speaks
vividly, if not entirely kindly, of his experiences in showing films in China,
Japan, and Hawaii.
Brodsky claimed in that article, with his characteristic flair for hyperbole,
already to have established Variety Film Exchange offices, besides in Honolulu
and Yokohama, in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, Vladivostok, and Harbin,
and projected additional outlets in “Manila, Singapore, Java and Calcutta.”23
Very probably, the Russian operations and anticipated outposts in Southeast
Asia and India never materialized. That Brodsky says nothing in the May 1912
interview about making films himself strongly suggests – since he tended to
thoroughly promote his businesses immediately at hand – that he had not yet
begun any film production. Without a doubt, the phase of the film industry
in which Brodsky initially made his mark was his distribution of American
and European-made films to far-flung markets.
Yet the 1912 interview does suggest changes afoot that soon led Brodsky
into film production. His first undertaking, I will demonstrate, was A Trip
Thru China, a mammoth project of two hours finished length, realized in locations over a thousand miles apart and within less than three years’ time. The
precise timing and means of Brodsky’s producing Trip and probably a few
Chinese-themed short films in Shanghai are not fully conclusive, yet evidence
suffices to warrant presenting the material here as a stimulus for further
research. It appears likely that the initiative and support for Brodsky’s filmmaking came from among the Chinese elite of the period, returned overseas
students as well as cabinet ministers. Brodsky’s acquaintance with the latter
22
An item that Kim Fahlstedt located about Brodsky’s law suit to collect on insurance policies
for the fire damages, “Brodsky Proves He Can Carry $4000 in Pockets,” Oakland Tribune,
29 Nov. 1911, 2, situates him in late 1911 in San Francisco. On Brodskys’ early 1912 trip to
Hawaii, see “Wilhelmina Sails for Honolulu,“ San Francisco Call, 18 Jan. 1912, 7, and
“Passengers Arrived,” Hawaiian Gazette, 26 Jan. 1912, 8.
23
H.F.H. (Hugh F. Hoffman), “A Visitor from the Orient,” MPW, 18 May 1912, 620.
The author states that he had seen Brodsky “last week,” thus one can derive that the interview
occurred around 11 or 12 May 1912.
70
certainly won him greater rewards than the occasional poker game. At minimum, it gave him access not only to Yuan Shikai and his family but also to the
opportunity to film the powerful Beiyang Army, the Forbidden City, and even
a strange execution which has particularly puzzled and disturbed contemporary viewers of the film. Ministerial support may also have provided Brodsky
with special train transport.24
The personal or business connections that gave Brodsky entrée to the circle
of politicians close to Yuan may also have fostered his setting up facilities to
produce Chinese-themed films. He may have established such a facility in
Shanghai as early as mid-1913 and definitely did so in Hong Kong in early
1914. Brodsky’s reported engagement in local filmmaking has led some contemporary film scholars to dub Brodsky an “uncle” or a “grandfather” to early
Chinese cinema for having enabled the early film training of future “fathers of
Chinese cinema” like Li Minwei, Zheng Zhengqiu, and Zhang Shichuan.25
Paradoxically, Brodsky’s own involvement in Chinese filmmaking was likely
engendered by leaders of the young Chinese republic, themselves arguably
metaphorically fathers not only of the nation, but also of its realization of modern cultural forms including cinema. Emerging revelations about support for
Brodsky’s filmmaking projects by Chinese cultural leaders, wealthy merchants,
and influential politicians point to a complex trans-Pacific genealogy indeed.
Making Trans-Pacific Business Connections
Partial evidence for how Brodsky gained access to political and probably also
financial support for making films in China comes from the American film
trade press. Following its May 1912 account of Brodsky’s expanding distribution network, the Motion Picture World published another interview-based
report in April 1915 about his founding a collaborative American-Chinese
filmmaking enterprise, the China Cinema Company. A valuable visual record
illustrates the 1915 article, a formal portrait of Brodsky surrounded by nine
mostly young but august-looking Chinese men said to be directors of the
new firm, which Brodsky had registered on 27 November 1914 in Hong Kong
(see Figure 2).26 Author Hugh Hoffman has this to say of the assemblage,
24
Bren and Law, “Real Dawn,” citing Ronald Borden’s recollection of his father’s stories.
Ibid. Bren and Law use the term “Western uncle” to describe Brodsky, while several
Chinese film scholars suggest during interviews recorded in Searching for Brodsky that Brodsky
could qualify metaphorically as “grandfather” or “great-grandfather” to Chinese cinema.
26
Frank Bren located the record of the company’s founding through the Hong Kong government business registry office, on-line at <http://www.icris.cr.gov.hk/csci/>.
25
71
Figure 2. “Directors of the China Cinema Company” is the caption to this
photograph illustrating an article in the Moving Picture World of 10 April
1915. Seven of the nine men arrayed around the central figure of Benjamin
Brodsky had studied in the United States. Photo courtesy of Ron and Lauren
Borden.
doubtless prompted by Brodsky: “Everyone of them is a college bred man and
all but two of them have been through English American colleges. Some of
them speak better English than native Americans. They are all men of means
and a few of them are very wealthy.”27
Another U.S.-based journal, the Chinese Students’ Monthly, published
between 1905 and 1931 by the Chinese Students’ Alliance of the United
States, enables identification of some of those men. The Alliance was at once a
democratic activist organization and a professional fraternity that fostered
27
Hugh Hoffman, “The Photoplay in China,” MPW, 10 Apr. 1915, 224. This photograph
also illustrates the 2010 China Daily article by Bren and Law, “Real Dawn.” On the day of its
publication in MPW, a Philadelphia daily reprinted most of the Hoffman feature (but not the
photograph) under the title “Celestial ‘Movies’ Now Stir the Chinese,” Philadelphia Evening
Ledger, 10 Apr. 1915, 7. Available on the Chronicling America website.
72
connections among its members after their return to China. The Englishlanguage journal, entirely written and edited by the students, contains numerous accounts of activities and also group photographs of Chinese university
club and Alliance members. The journal usually identified individuals by
given name initials and family name, such as Y. C. Ma for Ma Yinchu (see
Figure 3). Combining those two resources with the hint-laden autobiography
and supplementing them with biographical reference works, newspaper
reports, and ships’ records yields enough verifiable detail to offer the beginnings of a fresh history.
Brodsky’s autobiography refers in two passages to circumstances that led
to his undertaking film production in China. The book-length manuscript
Figure 3. Portrait of the Yale Chinese Students’ Club published in the March
1909 issue of the Chinese Students’ Monthly (CSM). Four of the figures pictured six years later as “Directors of the China Cinema Company” appear.
Back row: S. C. Chu (Zhu Chengzhang) (fourth from left). Middle row:
Y. C. Ma (Ma Yinchu) (second from left), Y. T. Lou (Lou Yudao) (fourth from
left). Front row: Ponson Chu (Zhu Sifu) (far right). Two further men that
Brodsky may have met through his company affiliates are seated in the middle
row: C. T. Wang (Wang Zhengting) (second from right) and C. W. S. Afong
(Chun Wing Sen) (far right).
73
contains the following story, told in Brodsky’s distinctive voice (with all phrasing quoted verbatim from the manuscript):
On the way to China I met a young fellow, his father is the brother-in-law of the
Chinese President. Nobody wanted this young fellow at the table and the purser
asked me and I said “Yes” and I became friendly with this young Chinese boy.
After we come into China I was not interested. I didn’t know who he is. He told
me he is going to an American college called Yale University and graduated from
studying law. He was a smart boy. I became friendly to him and I got off at
Shanghai, China (pp. 77-78).
When he failed to secure a permit to erect a tent cinema on centrally located
city grounds in Shanghai, Brodsky proceeded to different city (smaller, but
still “a big city down there”), probably, based on other accounts, Tianjin,
where he “could get ground in the heart of the town” (p. 78). Still, he found
that to build an audience, he initially needed to pay a core of Chinese viewers
to come.28 His promotional strategy gradually proved successful; within six
weeks he was drawing paying crowds, but he had not yet found the right films:
I [showed] the type of pictures they don’t like, love story, history…don’t
understand, but the talk was of, at that time, revolution in China to overthrow
the empress dowager. … In the meantime, they come out with pictures here,
cowboys, rough riders, Indian wars, Post Telegrapher, that is the names that strike
me, and I made a hurried trip to America and bought a couple of cowboy pictures
and run right back on the next boat to China.
Then comes Brodsky’s oft-repeated apocryphal claim that the whole audience
scrambled out of the tent in panic when the film showed cowboys shooting
“and then the Chinese came back and set fire to the whole business, maybe a
thousand or two thousand, burned up the whole thing, and I and my operator
we were just lucky to run away from there because they thought the white
devils come in there” (pp. 79-81).
After reiterating that “it was talk the revolution all the time in China” [sic],
thereby linking the attack on his tent show to anti-foreign political fervor
rather than to a dislike of the Western film genre, Brodsky delivers the punch
line to the story: “that fellow reads in the Chinese paper what happens, the
young fellow, and he saw my name and he come up to the hotel looking for
me and … offers me help.” Specifically, Brodsky recalls the “young fellow” he
had met on the ship as saying, upon learning that Brodsky had no insurance
or even return passage for himself and his assistant, that his own relatives had
28
This oft-cited tale in Brodsky’s repertoire first appears in print on p. 620 of the May 1912
MPW interview.
74
lots of money and could lend Brodsky $25,000 to return to the United States
to replace the equipment and films and come back to build an even bigger
business. “If I am behind you, China is behind you,” the young man reportedly assured Brodsky, explaining that his father was an important government
official and that he himself was a “legal adviser to the Chinese government,”
being a “Yale graduate, university graduate [and] full-fledged lawyer” who was
also responsible for official Chinese-English document translation (pp. 80-81).
Brodsky says he then sought the younger man’s affirmation that they could
work as partners, with Brodsky receiving an exclusive twenty-five-year franchise “for China, for moving pictures,” even though the memoirs immediately
acknowledge that the franchise didn’t hold (pp. 81-83). In the midst of that
report, Brodsky observes that he had concluded,
If I go back to China, I go back to make Chinese films, with Chinese title; if I
come back here, I buy no films. I buy raw films and I buy machines, cameras, and
I take photographer with me. I am pretty good photographer myself. But in the
meantime I wanted somebody else to do the work. I come back and make a
Chinese film. I was the biggest success I ever been in my life. That film run for six
months. Every house I open up, it run for six months…[It was] the biggest success
I ever made in China in the show business, and after that I opened up eighty-two
theaters in China and in all the big cities (p. 82).
In the absence of corroboration, most of Brodsky’s claims in the autobiography and in his various interviews would seem at best well-told tall tales – as
would also, for example, Brodsky’s sworn statement on a passport application
from 25 April 1919 that he had within the previous fourteen years made “27
trips to the Orient.”29 As incredible as that assertion initially appears at a time
when each San Francisco-to-Shanghai passage took three to four weeks, scholars have in recent years cooperatively accumulated reliable records of Brodsky’s
Pacific crossings which do approach that number of separate arrivals and
departures. Similarly, with regard to the circumstances for Trip’s production,
we have ample visual proof of the key feature of the story: Brodsky was in fact
acquainted with and as a filmmaker visibly enjoyed the cooperation of powerful national politicians in mid-1910s China. Trip not only includes long
sequences of the Forbidden City and the close-up shot of an official pass
authorizing Brodsky’s access to Beijing locations, but also a scene of Brodsky
interacting with four of President Yuan’s younger sons (see Figure 4). It also
29
NARA/Ancestry.com. The specific source, as noted on the Ancestry.com-derived record,
is NARA, Passport Applications, January 2, 1906 - March 31, 1925; Microfilm Serial: M1490,
Roll #764.
75
Figure 4. Brodsky (far right) with four sons of President Yuan Shikai and
their tutor (third from right), whose name a Trip intertitle gives as Yat-sen Yen.
Still frame courtesy of the Chinese Taipei Film Archive.
contains a sustained shot of Paul S. Reinsch, the United States minister to
China from 1913 to 1919, who had actively participated in the negotiations
between Standard Oil and the Chinese government mentioned above. The
close-in camera shot shows Reinsch emerge from a grand residence along with
scholar, missionary, and government consultant Charles D. Tenney, both
identified by a title card, as they bid farewell to three distinguished-looking
Chinese visitors. Brodsky is not himself in the shot, but clearly all of the figures had agreed to the filming (see Figure 5).30
Did Brodsky actually set up a high-stakes poker game in June 1915 in
Beijing in which W. E. Bemis, Zhu Qiqian, and Zhou Ziqi, among others
participated? Perhaps, although any such occasion certainly fell short of the
outcome that Brodsky claims for it. More important for film history, did
Brodsky sometime prior to starting to film Trip befriend a returning Chinese
30
On Reinsch, see Pugach, “Standard Oil and Petroleum Development,” 458. I have not yet
been able to identify the three unnamed Chinese officials.
76
Figure 5. Paul S. Reinsch (far left) and Charles D. Tenney (far right) in
Beijing in 1915. An intertitle in Trip identifies the two Americans but does
not give the names of the visiting Chinese officials. Still frame courtesy of the
Chinese Taipei Film Archive.
Yale graduate whose father by June 1915 was serving as “Secretary of the
Interior” (as Brodsky augments the young man’s identity in the Bemis episode
of the memoirs)? Evidently, something of the sort did occur, even if documented circumstances do not match Brodsky’s recollections some four decades
later. The historiographic value of the story turns on its hints about the timing
of such an event and the young man’s identity and subsequent engagement in
Brodsky’s film enterprises.
Taking Brodsky’s account as the point of departure, I turned to the 1920
Yale University alumni directory. Doing so reduces to a handful the hundreds
of young Chinese men studying in the United States between 1905 and 1915,
any number of whom Brodsky might have met on a Pacific crossing before he
filmed scenes of Trip in Beijing. The probe reveals several law graduates,
among them the later republican leader and diplomat C. T. Wang (Wang
Zhengting). Although Wang does not fit the profile of Brodsky’s purported
fellow traveler in key ways, three graduates between 1909 and 1911 generally
77
do: Ponson C. Chu, Shunsan C. Chu, and Luching Y.T. Lou, as their names
are given in the Yale directory.31
Ponson C. Chu (Zhu Sifu, whose courtesy name Bangsheng yielded
the Anglicized moniker) was born in 1885 in Shanghai. He studied political
science and law as a Yale College student, graduating in June 1909 and returning to China by September “by way of Europe.”32 His status as a privately
(not government) funded student and that homeward route, which many
wealthy Chinese students took upon graduation from American Ivy League
universities, point to ample family means. After passing official examinations
in China and serving in the waning Qing dynasty as “senior secretary” in the
Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce, Zhu Sifu qualified in 1913
as a lawyer and took up legal practice in Shanghai.33 Shunsan C. Chu (Zhu
Chengzhang) was born a year earlier, in 1884 in Hangzhou. S. C. Chu,
as he was also known in the States, graduated from Yale in June 1910 with a
post-graduate degree in law. Returning to China by September (probably also
taking the European route home), he immediately began work in the railway
administration in Yichang, Hubei. In 1913, he took up a position as secretary
and translator for the managing director of the Shanghai-Nanking Railway,
headquartered in Shanghai.34
The Zhus were probably close cousins, even brothers, for besides the
similarities in their biographical circumstances, the 1909 group portrait of the
Yale University Chinese Students’ Club reveals their marked physical resemblance. The two may have been related to Shanghai capitalists Zhu Paosan
(1848-1926) or Zhu Zhiyao (1863-1955). The former, considered “the veteran merchant of Shanghai,” was a leading developer of banking, insurance,
transportation, and utilities systems in Eastern China and also deeply invested
31
Wang was a Methodist minister’s son from Ningbo who received Christian-affiliated private support for his study at Yale (B.A. 1910) and extended sojourn as a Christian student leader.
He served in the new Chinese government before returning to an established position as secretary of the Shanghai Y.M.C.A., but had no politically powerful relatives or in-laws. “Wang
Cheng-t’ing,” Boorman, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, 3:362-64; “Wang,
Chengting Thomas,” Who’s Who of American Returned Students (Peking: Tsinghua College, 1917)
5; Chinese Students’ Monthly, (hereafter cited as CSM) 1908-12, passim.
32
“Mr. Ponson C. Chu,” Who’s Who in China, 2d ed. (Shanghai: Millard’s Review, 1920),
39-40; Alumni Directory of Yale University: Graduates and Non-Graduates (New Haven, CT: Yale
University, 1920), 136, 803.
33
“Chu, Ponson C.,” Who’s Who of American Returned Students (Peking: Tsinghua College,
1917), 20; Who’s Who in China, 3rd ed., 235-36.
34
“Chu, S.C.,” Who’s Who of American Returned Students, 21; Alumni Directory of Yale
University, 521, 734, 803. Zhu Chengzhang does not appear in any edition of Who’s Who in
China.
78
in mining, cement manufacture, and textile and flour mills. Zhu Zhiyao also
ran utility works and manufactured textiles, foodstuffs, and bricks as well as
machinery and ships.35 Certainly, any member of those men’s extended families could rightly have assured Brodsky of ready access to exceptional financial
support!
A well-connected law graduate who returned to China around the time of
the first revolution beginning in October 1911 was Luching Y. T. Lou (Lou
Yudao). Born in 1881 in Shaoxing, Lou completed his Yale degree in June
1911 and like the Zhus arrived back in China by September after graduation.
Lou’s father was a national government official under the Qing dynasty, and
Lou received his initial education in Beijing and Tianjin. Upon returning
from the United States, he became a secretary for the Kailan Mining
Administration in Tianjin and in 1912-13 was also legal adviser to the local
governor. In November 1914, he traveled as a Zhili provincial delegate to the
Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.36 The ship’s record
documenting Lou’s diplomatic mission helps to pinpoint when and where the
photograph of the China Cinema Company directors was made. Close comparison to photographs in the Chinese Students’ Monthly reveals notwithstanding changes in their demeanor, apparel, and girth, that Lou Yudao as well
as Zhu Chengzhang and Zhu Sifu appear in the portrait with Brodsky (see
Figures 6, 7, and 8).37
35
“Chu Pao-San,” Who’s Who in China, 3rd ed., 225-26; “Zhu Zhiyao,” Minguo renwu da
cidian (Biographical dictionary of Republican China) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe,
1991), 192; and Zhongguo renming da cidian: Dangdai renwu juan (Biographical dictionary of
Chinese people: Contemporary) (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 1992), 420.
36
With a wife and two young sons with him in New Haven, Lou did not likely tour Europe
en route home. Although Brodsky’s story does not refer to a family traveling together, overall
Lou’s profile and the timing of his return in summer 1911 best fit the account of the returning
student on the ship, if events did play out close to Brodsky’s recollections. “Lou, Luching Y.T.,”
Who’s Who of American Returned Students, 144; Alumni Directory of Yale University, 535, 734,
857; 1910 U.S. Census; and Who’s Who in China, 4th ed. (Shanghai: China Weekly Review,
1931), 295-96. A ship’s record shows Lou sailing with diplomatic status on the Manchuria from
Shanghai on 7 November 1914, arriving in San Francisco on 30 November 1914.
37
Lou appears in the interval to have gained, P. C. Chu to have lost weight since their
Yale portraits were taken, although the costuming complicates the comparison. Brodsky may
have requested the somewhat orientalist staging, marking difference from himself, or the men
might have chosen to dress formally as traditional Chinese scholars. The contrast to their CSM
photographs makes evident that the cosmopolitan Chinese men were themselves thoroughly
trans-Pacific subjects. Yalies who had elected P. C. Chu to Psi Upsilon fraternity membership and
as “best dressed man in the senior class” would have been shocked to recognize him in this photograph when it was published in New York City six years after the announcement of those
honors. See “Chinese Win Yale Honors,” New York Sun, 21 Feb. 1909, sec. 2, 15.
Figure 6. Lou Yudao (Y. T. Lou) in a
group photograph of the Yale Chinese
Students’ Club, CSM, February
1910.
79
Figure 7. Zhu Chengzhang (S. C.
Chu) in a group photograph of the
Yale Chinese Students’ Club, CSM,
February 1910.
Figure 8. Zhu Sifu (Ponson Chu) as pictured in the 2nd and 3rd editions of
Who’s Who in China (published in Shanghai in 1920 and 1925, respectively).
80
Turning to other hints in Brodsky’s tale, we might consider whether any of
the depicted men was the son of a cabinet member. That Zhu Chengzhang
worked briefly in 1912 as a clerk in the Ministry of Communications (also
translated “Transportation”) that was headed by Zhu Qiqian, who in 1913
became secretary of the interior, suggests possible personal acquaintance
but not necessarily family relation, which in any case could not have been
paternal.38 But Brodsky’s primary acquaintance among cabinet members was
likely Zhou Ziqi, who through professional and personal connections knew
many returning Chinese students around 1909-14.39 Brodsky, relying on oral
communications, may well have confused similar names, titles, and affilial
connections among his acquaintances. Brodsky’s partially verifiable tale was
indubitably constructed through the common storytelling – and memorymaking – techniques of displacement, elision, elaboration, and compression
of events, characters, and experiences.
Even in the absence of ships’ records documenting Brodsky’s travel with
known returning Chinese students, we can reasonably assume that he became
acquainted with several such individuals on his many journeys across the
Pacific.40 He might even have met C. T. Wang on his homeward passage to
Shanghai in June 1911, although the well spoken, urbane, and politically
astute Wang would unlikely have needed or suffered any kindly rescue from
loneliness while dining. Two other relevant returning law graduates went in
38
“Chu S.C.,” Who’s Who of American Returned Students, 21; and “Chu Chien.” Not only the
year of Zhu Qiqian’s birth (1871) makes such a close family relationship improbable, but also his
being a native of Guizhou province, over 1,000 miles (1,700 kilometers) to the southwest of
Zhejiang province and Shanghai, the ancestral region and primary residences of Zhu Chengzhang
and Zhu Sifu as well as Zhu Paosan and Zhu Ziyao.
39
After studying at Columbia University, Zhou spent a decade in the foreign service
in North America and around 1904-1907 had oversight of Chinese students in the United
States. He then served among other roles as superintendent of Tsinghua School after its February
1911 founding in Beijing to prepare students for study abroad (Tsinghua University website).
Zhou may have had at least one son studying in the United States in the mid-1910s. On Zhou’s
associations with returned Chinese students, see Noel H. Pugach, Paul S. Reinsch: Open Door
Diplomat in Action (Millwood, NY: KTO Press, 1979), 68.
40
The absence of ships’ records or of a name on published passenger lists does not prove
who did not travel. Official archives are incomplete and for American ports document only
arrivals, not departures. Biweekly or weekly newspapers did not detail every ship’s passengers
and the English-language dailies in Shanghai and Hong Kong listed the names only of “white”
passengers traveling first class, not of Chinese or Japanese travelers, regardless of class of travel.
In principle, however, when Brodsky traveled first class, his name would have appeared on one
or another available published list. To date, no record of his ships’ passages has yet appeared for
the period between June 1909 and December 1911. From other evidence, we know that Brodsky
made several trips to China and Japan but faced repeated financial setbacks throughout that
period, making it probable that he traveled primarily, even exclusively, second class.
81
the United States by the names William T. H. Chow and E. M. Ho. Born in
Huzhou in 1884, T. H. (Tsung Hua) Chow (Zhou Zonghua) was a government-supported student who graduated from Yale in 1908 with a degree in
civil engineering and from the University of Chicago with a Doctorate of Law
degree in early 1912.41 E. M. (En Ming) Ho, a 1910 graduate of Harvard
College who was born in 1880 in the Channel Islands near Macau, joined
Chow as a University of Chicago law student in October 1911. He immediately became president of the Chicago Chinese Students’ Club for 1911-12
with Chow as vice president. Ho had not completed his law studies when he
left in February 1912, eager to participate in building the new China. By
1919, he was working in government service in Hong Kong.42
Passenger records that put Chow, Ho, and Brodsky simultaneously in the
same small port city, if not on the same ship, provide circumstantial evidence
of their meeting in February 1912. The two young men departed from San
Francisco together on 13 February 1912, traveling first class on the British
S.S. Persia en route to Hong Kong. The ship arrived at its first port of call,
Honolulu, on 20 February, where Ho disembarked to rejoin his wife, a
Hawaiian-Anglo-Chinese woman he had met as a fellow student on the East
Coast.43 Brodsky was then in Honolulu, having arrived a month earlier to
develop his Variety Exchange branch there. Brodsky might have embarked
on the Persia as it continued toward Yokohama and Shanghai, T. H. Chow
aboard, thereby perhaps realizing the scenario in his anecdote, but no record
exists that Brodsky did so. More likely, he could have met Ho and possibly
Chow, while ashore during the overnight anchoring, through mutual acquaintances among local young educated Chinese in the small downtown Honolulu
business district.44
41
Alumni Directory of Yale University, 803, 274; “William T.H. Chow,” Who’s Who of American
Returned Students, 57. Zhou Zonghua, no apparent relation to Zhou Ziqi, began government
service with the Salt Administration in Hangzhou in 1913.
42
Ho’s studies were almost certainly privately funded and he otherwise appeared to enjoy
family wealth. Inconclusive evidence suggests that he was a brother-in-law or nephew by marriage to the important diplomat Wu Tingfang. A 1908 ship manifest names his father as Ho
Hong Bai of Canton. For more on Ho, see CSM for the years 1909-12, esp. “University of
Chicago,” December 1911, 146, “Chicago,” January 1912, 310, and the picture of Ho in the
group portrait of the Harvard Chinese Students’ Club, April 1909, 374. On Mrs. E. M. (Frances)
Ho, see the 1910 U.S. Census, photographs and text in CSM, 1909-11, passim, and ships’
passenger lists noting her return to from San Francisco to Hawaii in July 1911.
43
1910 U.S. Census and CSM. “Sailing of Persia Delayed by Cargo,” San Francisco Call,
14 Feb. 1912), 4; “Passengers Arrived,” Evening Bulletin (Honolulu), 20 Feb. 1912, 3:30 ed., 10.
Another article entitled “Personalities” on p. 3 of the same issue of the Bulletin identifies Ho as
a student of law and a “prominent Chinese.”
44
The possibility of such a meeting is not predicated merely on coincidence. Brodsky was
involved – if too peripherally for his liking – in a newly completed Honolulu theater called
82
The presence of Yale law graduates Zhu Chengzhang, Zhu Sifu, and Lou
Yudao in the China Cinema Company portrait suggests their cooperation
to some extent in Brodsky’s business endeavors in China. E. M. Ho’s younger
brother C. M. (Chung Ming) Ho, a June 1913 liberal arts graduate of the
University of Illinois, also appears in the portrait (but not E. M. Ho himself )
(see Figure 9). Two further young men in the company picture are former Columbia University students C. S. Huang and C. M. Huang (see
Figure 10).45 In addition, the man in the Western suit seated beside Brodsky
is very likely the recently returned Ma Yinchu (1882-1982), subsequently
the most famous among those depicted (see Figure 11). The future rector
of Beijing University and an influential economic theorist who became
embroiled in government policy debates in the 1950s, Ma graduated in 1910
from Yale College and in 1914 from Columbia University with a Ph.D. dissertation on the finances of New York City. Like C. T. Wang, his roommate
in New Haven while the two were earning their Yale degrees, Ma was active
in the eastern section of the Chinese Students’ Alliance as an elected representative and in outreach activities like chairing fundraising committees for
disaster relief in China. As a government-funded student, he would have
returned to China via the shortest Pacific route immediately after he deposited the dissertation, which is dated 5 August 1914. Ma was from Zhejiang
province but estranged from his family and likely spent time in Shanghai
in October-November 1914 among his college friends while adjusting to life
in China after nine years abroad.46 Supplementing the identification of his
somewhat changed appearance here compared to his student pictures: an
Ye Liberty, located on the edge of (and named with respect to) Honolulu’s small Chinatown, that
was set to open on 22 February 1912. The theater’s first manager, whom Brodsky certainly and
Ho probably knew, was Goo Tai Chong, a young banking clerk born in Honolulu of Cantonese
parents.
45
These two men, who were probably brothers, returned to China in winter 1913 or later.
C. S. Huang studied for an M.A. degree at Columbia University, was president of his Chinese
Students’ Club in 1911-12, active in relation to home political developments, and known as a
good singer, as was C. M. Huang. C. S. Huang returned to China through Europe in October
1912, traveling with Macau-born Yale graduate C. W. S. Afong (Chun Wing Sen), grandson of
the wealthy Cantonese merchant and Hawaiian plantation owner Chun Afong. On C. S. Huang,
see CSM, 1910-12, passim.
46
1910 U.S. Census; “Dr. Ma Yin-ch’u,” Who’s Who in China, 3rd ed., 593-94; “Ma Yinch’u,” Boorman, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, 2:476-78. Ma was an outstanding student and active leader in the Chinese Students’ Alliance who was much respected by
his peers (CSM, 1908-14, and “Chinese Win Yale Honors”). Ma needed to request a four-month
extension in his Chinese government funding to finish his dissertation (stated in the Introduction,
dissertation available at <http://books.google.com>). His Columbia Chinese club portraits
through early fall 1914 show him gaining girth compared to his Yale pictures.
Figure 9. Ho Chungming (C. M.
Ho) in a group photograph of the
University of Illinois Chinese
Students’ Club, CSM, February
1913.
83
Figure 11. Ma Yinchu (Dr.
Ma Yin-ch’u) as pictured in
the 3rd and 4th editions of
Who’s Who in China
(Shanghai, 1925 and 1931).
Figure 10. C. S. Huang (left) and C. M. Huang in a group photograph of the
Columbia University Chinese Students’ Club, CSM, April 1911.
84
August 1916 New York Tribune article based on an interview with Brodsky by
George S. Kaufman, an American theater critic and later comic dramatist,
explicitly names Ma Yinchu (as “Ma Yat Chiu”) among three “sterling
Chinamen” who constituted Brodsky’s “consulting committee” in his Shanghai
production studio.47
Ma could not have known Brodsky long nor been an investor, and the
connection to Brodsky may have been tenuous for many of the men beyond
the moment of the photograph. But several of the enterprising students
returning to China evidently had come to know and regard Brodsky as a
potential collaborator with whom they might work toward achieving shared
aims. The photograph, which Brodsky must have commissioned in Shanghai
by the first week of November 1914 before traveling to Hong Kong to register
the company, does visually affix aspects of his autobiographical tale. Even
without such an illustration, however, the Moving Picture World business profiles of Brodsky’s enterprises by Hugh Hoffman in May 1912 and April 1915,
another from July 1914 featuring Van Velzer, and the 1916 article by Kaufman
clearly document aspects of Brodsky’s shift into filmmaking.
The first Hoffman article about Brodsky offers compelling evidence that in
late 1911 or early 1912 Brodsky had conversed in depth with at least one
articulate American-educated Chinese intellectual. A passage in that piece
stands out from its overall colonialist-minded, even racist tone (particularly in
interviewer-author Hoffmann’s references to the Japanese), as it expresses
Brodsky’s views of “progressive Chinese” “who have been to America and
learned its ways and ideas” (p. 620). Further, the May 1912 feature reveals that
at a time of widely reported post-revolutionary social and political upheaval in
China, against which the article warned other would-be investors, Brodsky
expressed exceptionally strong confidence in his own business footing there.
The closing paragraph reports that on that trip to New York, Brodsky had
purchased “twelve 8-horsepower electric light plants … to be shipped to cities
in China where there is no electric light” (p. 621). If true, such a concerted
investment indicates that Brodsky had both access to ample funds (despite
difficulties he was having gaining a foothold for Variety Film Exchange in
Honolulu), as well as assurance of the cooperation of local authorities across
China in expanding his exhibition business.
47
George S. Kaufman, “Bret Harte Said It, The Heathen Chinee is Peculiar,” New York
Tribune, 27 Aug. 1916, 37. Kaufman formulates the trans-cultural business relationship and
even the other consultants’ names (“Kim Louie O’Hoy” and “Fong Fu Gam”) satirically, but the
article remains a rich source of leads for discovering more about early Chinese film history as well
as Brodsky’s operations. The full-page article (available in the Chronicling America database)
includes several photographs.
85
According to Hoffmann’s April 1915 interview with Brodsky, and in
keeping with attitudes that the Chinese Students’ Alliance expressed in its
journal, the China Cinema Company planned “to produce Chinese subjects
exclusively, but these subjects will be so treated that they will be understandable in all parts of the world.” Hoffman explains in his familiar condescending turn of phrase that the company’s directors aimed to create “Chinese
stories in the skillful hands of natives who have the broad cosmopolitan experience” and “to interpret the Mongolian mind through motion pictures so that
the world will understand the Chinese people.”48 After noting that the Chinese
productions would aim for international distribution (that is, also in the
United States), the balance of the article addresses Brodsky’s contributions
toward developing conditions for American films to reach the Chinese market.
The shift in focus points to a persistent and thorny issue in the historical
analysis of trans-Pacific cinema enterprises, namely the question of the substance and consequences for the Chinese of collaborations with the American
Brodsky.
The Making of A Trip Thru China
On 18 May 1912, the very day the first Moving Picture World interview was
published in New York City, Brodsky embarked again in San Francisco for
Honolulu. On this journey, Brodsky was accompanied not by Mamie, but by
a new Variety Film Exchange company associate, Henry J. Bredhoff. A wellconnected San Francisco broker more than a decade older than Brodsky,
Bredhoff appears to have been a substantial new investor, if not quite a partner, in the business. Perhaps enticed by the promise of new opportunities then
rapidly unfolding for Brodsky, Bredhoff settled his family in Hawaii later in
1912, and along with his son Carl Henry worked in the Variety Exchange
offices there and in Yokohama, then bought out the Honolulu branch in
1915.49 After introducing Henry Bredhoff to the business in late May 1912,
Brodsky again remained some weeks in Honolulu before continuing to Japan
48
Hugh Hoffman, “The Photoplay in China,” MPW, 10 Apr. 1915, 224.
“Shinyo Maru Sails for the Far East,” San Francisco Call, 19 May 1912, 65. On Henry J.
Bredhoff, see George F. Nellist, ed., The Story of Hawaii and Its Builders, Volume III: Men of
Modern Hawaii (Territory of Hawaii: Honolulu Star Bulletin, 1925). A transcription appears
at <http://www.usgwarchives.net/hi/builders.htm>. The Call makes numerous references to
Bredhoff’s professional and social activities before his emigration to Hawaii.
49
86
or China likely in late July 1912 after he filed a lawsuit against a Honolulu
film exhibitor who had refused to return a film print.50
His next business moves in China also strongly imply that Brodsky had
secured access to new investment monies and other local resources, for by the
end of 1912, he had shot his first documentary footage there. Evidence that
Brodsky had begun to film footage by December 1912 that within three years
became A Trip Thru China derives from two items in the San Francisco Call.
The first announced that Bredhoff would in Honolulu join the passengers of
the Nippon Maru that had departed on 7 December 1912 from San Francisco.
The ship stopped over for only a few hours in Honolulu on 13 December and
arrived in Hong Kong on 3 January 1913, returning then to San Francisco –
with Bredhoff aboard – on 6 February 1913.51 The purpose of the hurried
excursion emerges from a short interview in the Call the next day with
Bredhoff (who was not only a well-to-do former Bay area resident but also –
perhaps key to his ready access to publicity – the brother of a local political
figure). The item warrants citing in its entirety:
Henry Bredhoff, the agent for a film manufacturing company in the orient, arrived
here yesterday and registered at the Stewart. Mr. Bredhoff has seen sights in the
interior of China which he said “would make a nervous person lose his hair. If the
public knew what hardships are often necessary to obtain pictures of life in
the interior of China or Japan, or in most any oriental land, it would be more
appreciative of the profession. Often the photographers are called on to risk life or
limb, and they do so cheerfully because of the fascination of the game. People are
getting educated to the real life scenes, and the old regime of ‘make believe’ or acted
pictures are becoming passe. The public wants to see things as they actually are
and nothing is so popular as a picture of foreign life and human accomplishments.
One film of a Chinese family washing clothes along the bank of an interior river
is worth more than a dozen cheap imitations by paid employes [sic].”52
Since Bredhoff made an immediate return from Hong Kong on the Nippon
Maru, his mission must surely have been to transport film-related supplies to
Hong Kong and to pick up exposed film from Brodsky for processing in San
Francisco. That purpose would explain Bredhoff’s continuing on the return
trip to California rather than disembarking in Honolulu, to which he sailed
50
“Passenger Narrowly Escapes Sudden End,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 25 May 1912,
12. On the lawsuit, see “Legal Battle Royal Opens in Court over Rental of Moving Picture Film,”
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 20 July 1912, 8; article reprinted in the (affiliated) biweekly
Hawaiian Gazette, 23 July 1912, 7.
51
“Nippon Maru Off for the Orient,” San Francisco Call, 8 Dec. 1912, 61; “Water Front
Notes,” ibid., 4 Jan. 1913, 13; and “Japanese Liner Has Rich Cargo,” ibid., 7 Feb. 1913, 13.
52
“Hotel News,” ibid., 7 Feb. 1913, 4.
87
Figure 12. A scene in Trip of what an intertitle calls “river dwellers” that may
have been among the first footage Brodsky shot, by late 1912 or early January
1913. Still frame courtesy of the Chinese Taipei Film Archive.
again only in April.53 The Nippon’s docking period in Hong Kong Harbor
would not have allowed Bredhoff himself to penetrate far into China’s interior,
if he left the colony at all. Rather, the inventive travel report seems largely
anticipatory publicity for the film, albeit years in advance of its completion as
a feature, for the testimonial’s tone approximates that of interviews and other
material Brodsky himself later provided in the promotion of Trip. The timing
of the Bredhoff item is significant for cinema history because it documents
Brodsky in late 1912 avidly pursuing a new plan for his trans-Pacific operations, which in the speed of its development and timing may well point to
Zhu- or Lou- or Ho-connected investment as an impetus to and ongoing
force in Brodsky’s film production in China. E. M. Ho, who possessed language mastery, ease in social interactions, and the convenience of a Hong
Kong home base, may have facilitated the late 1912-early 1913 undertaking
to film people “along the bank of an interior river,” which probably lay close
by in Guangzhou (see Figure 12). Ho gave Harvard University a Hong Kong
53
“Wilhelmina Off for Island Port,” ibid., 10 Apr. 1913, 13.
88
address care of the German Swiss Protestant-affiliated Basel Mission in West
Point, where he was likely a benefactor or director. An extended sequence in
Trip shows a Hong Kong mission home for blind and deaf children. If that
institution (a large white building atop a hill) is the Basel Mission facility, Ho
could have arranged permission for Brodsky to film.54
Whether or not Ho or other returned Cantonese-speaking student was
involved, Henry Bredhoff’s report in the Call makes clear that Brodsky undertook documentary filming a full year before setting up the Hong Kong studio
that produced four short fiction films with Chinese actors and stories in the
first half of 1914.55 Some Chinese film histories have stated that Brodsky
established such a facility in Shanghai. Given his acquisition of filmmaking equipment by January 1913, he could plausibly have helped aspiring
Shanghai-based filmmakers Zhang Shichuan and Zheng Zhengqiu in 1913 to
produce their 45-minute film entitled The Difficult Couple (Nanfu nanqi),
which counts as the first Chinese feature film. However, Zhang and Zheng’s
affiliation with Brodsky, widely asserted without evidence, has yet to be compellingly documented.56 So, too, ownership and even the sustained existence
of the “Asia Film Company” (Yaxiya yingxi gongsi), a supposed Brodsky
operation to which many histories attribute the 1913 Shanghai production,
has yet to be demonstrated. Pending further research, we cannot assume that
such a company was related to Brodsky or even existed as an organized business entity (rather than as a functional descriptive name for a small collective
that produced a single film). That a formally organized company did exist –
and that Brodsky might have set up (albeit perhaps with Chinese financing)
such an operation in Shanghai in spring 1913 – receives the best (if not yet
54
Harvard University Directory (Boston, MA: Harvard Alumni Association, 1919), 337, lists
Ho’s occupation as “government service.” On a ship’s record in winter 1908, Ho gave an address
in Tientsin. A 1919 ship manifest for his wife lists Ho’s address as 85 High Street, Hong Kong,
located close by the address for the Basel Mission that he had given Harvard.
55
Bren and Law, “Real Dawn” makes clear that Brodsky began the Hong Kong production
facility by filming documentary scenes. Bren has found a trove of evidence about the successful
local exhibition of a film Brodsky made in February 1914 of horse racing at the Hong Kong
Jockey Club, some of which appears in Trip. The most reliable record discovered to date about
the Hong Kong fiction films (and about experiences with Brodsky of employees and local
Chinese men like the Lai brothers) is the interview that Roland Van Velzer gave to Hugh
Hoffman, “Film Conditions in China,” MPW, 25 July 1914, 577.
56
Leyda, Dianying, 15-17, offers an account of Zheng and Zhang (and later Zhang alone)
working with two American representatives of the Nanyang Insurance company that had somehow acquired Brodsky’s “Asian Film Company” equipment, and of Zhang then later working
with A. E. Lauro, an Italian film entrepreneur and cinematographer in Shanghai in the early
twentieth century.
89
conclusive) support in English to date from a Moving Picture News notice
in May 1913 mentioning that a New Jersey company had in April filled a
large order for film developing tanks from the “Asiatic Film Company” in
Shanghai.57 Had Brodsky’s announced capital investment in electric generators in May 1912 extended a year later to film-processing equipment?
Kim Fahlstedt, who recently discovered that item, also located a report in
the Shanghai-based North China Herald of 8 March 1913 (p. 722) that a large
audience at the Chinese Y.M.C.A. had the previous Wednesday enjoyed “a
complimentary entertainment … provided by the American Amusement and
Film Exchange Company, a concern engaged in the rental of moving picture
films … with a circuit embracing in addition to China, Java, the Straits
Settlements, the Philippine Islands and Japan.” Not only the hyperbolic company description but also, paradoxically, its unfamiliar name bespeak Brodsky’s
promotional style. The unwieldy company name may have served only for a
short time in Shanghai in spring 1913, as Brodsky perhaps attempted to differentiate between the previous distribution and exhibition work of the Variety
Film Exchange Company and the fresh undertaking (perhaps legally incorporated in Shanghai by lawyers among the Chinese partners like Ponson Chu)
that included film production. The name of the firm offering the free program
(a business promotional strategy Brodsky favors in his memoirs) tellingly contains the latter half of his established operation’s name while marking the company as “American” and, in the word “Amusement,” echoing the names of
three of Brodsky’s active competitors at that time.58
57
MPW, 17 May 1913, 713. Certainly no “Asia Film Company” associated with Brodsky
could have been founded in 1909, nor, if Brodsky was involved after 1913, does the standard
explanation for the company’s disbanding (that raw film stock was not available in China after
1914) hold: Brodsky was not hampered from importing film stock from the United States for
the filming of Trip during 1914 and 1915. Similarly, the so-called “Huamei” (Sino-American)
film company (frequently mentioned without documentation as a Brodsky production unit)
may never have existed in either Hong Kong or Shanghai. Further, there is no evidence, but
considerable counter-evidence, for the attribution to Brodsky (following Leyda’s tentative suggestion, p. 11) of the staged film The Chinese Revolution (1912) produced by the “Oriental
Film Company” of San Francisco. (On this topic, see <http://kimfahlstedt.wordpress.com/tag/
benjamin-brodsky/>). While the surviving portion of the film held by the Library of Congress
credits Brodsky as producer, archivists could have labeled the print following publication of
Leyda’s book. The film could conceivably have been shot near San Francisco with (or initiated
by) local Chinese residents.
58
The three competitor companies were the Honolulu Amusement Company (with which
Brodsky had ongoing disputes), the Shanghai-based movie theater operator Ramos Amusement
Company, and the Arcade Amusement Company. The latter was a British-affiliated firm that
distributed films and built theaters apparently aiming at the European and American residents
in Tianjin and Beijing. An exchange between a reader and the editor of MPW that Fahlstedt
90
Without a doubt Brodsky’s business undertakings transformed rapidly during 1912-13. Sometime in spring 1913, probably after the March showing at
the Y.M.C.A. (which C.T. Wang could easily have arranged), Brodsky returned
briefly to the United States. He was probably still buying films for an expanding theater circuit developed, perhaps with Zhu or Lou family support, outside the main cities in China. We next see Brodsky and his wife arriving in
Hong Kong on 16 June 1913 as passengers on the Tenyo Maru from San
Francisco. In mid-July they left for home on the luxury liner Shinyo Maru.59
Probably only expert study of the footage in Trip could reveal whether during
his month-long stay Brodsky shot more documentary footage in the Hong
Kong area or the scenes of Guangzhou in the film. He may have been managing Variety Film Exchange distribution business or establishing new exhibition sites (possibly helping to initiate construction of a Chinese film theater
in Kowloon, for which there is some inconclusive evidence). He was surely
making arrangements to open the Hong Kong production facility at 34
Nathan Road, Kowloon. That facility became functional in late December
1913, after he and Mamie next returned, this time accompanied by cinematographer and technician Roland van Velzer of New York, via San Francisco
and Honolulu.60
It is not certain how long the reportedly well-equipped and sizeable Hong
Kong studio facility operated beyond Van Velzer’s departure in mid-May 1914
after only five months’ employment.61 But clearly Brodsky remained very
brought to light (“From Hawaii,” 31 May 1913, 918) gives information about the Arcade
Amusement Company, as do two letters directly from the Arcade Amusement Company manager also printed in MPW that year (MPW, 3 Jan. 1913, 46; and 29 Nov. 1913, 1005). The issues
containing those letters appear via books.google.com. The work of both that company and the
early twentieth-century film Shanghai exhibitor Antonio Ramos are topics ripe for further
research.
59
Record of the Brodskys’ arrival in Hong Kong on 13 June 1913, courtesy of HKFA.
60
“Passengers Arrived,” Hawaiian Gazette, 7 Nov. 1913, 3. The Brodskys and Roland Van
Velvzer (1877-1934), along with Van Velzer’s wife and stepdaughter, arrived in Honolulu on
5 November 1913 as first-class passengers on the luxurious Shinyo Maru. The Brodskys remained
through the departure of the Chiyo Maru on 28 November (according to a local newspaper),
arriving in Hong Kong (according to a ship’s list, courtesy of HFKA) on 16 December 1913.
Presumably the Van Velzers accompanied the Brodskys also on the Chiyo Maru, but the former
do not appear on the passengers’ list; they may have traveled second class from Honolulu.
61
A richly detailed photograph taken during the spring 1914 of the Variety Exchange and
Film Manufacturing establishment in Hong Kong shows a broad double-arched portico storefront, before which stand eight Chinese individuals, presumably Variety staff members, along
with Roland Van Velzer and Benjamin and (possibly) Mamie Brodsky. The Van Velzers left Hong
Kong on 16 May 1914, traveling second class on the Siberia and arriving in San Francisco on
14 June 1914.
91
interested in producing films aimed, like Trip, primarily at the U.S. market.
An early January 1914 newspaper report in the San Francisco Chronicle
obliquely documents that development, suggesting that Brodsky was beginning to emphasize his work on Trip even as he departed with Van Velzer and
their wives in November 1913 to produce the short Chinese fiction films in
Hong Kong. A full-page feature in the San Francisco Chronicle about film distribution and production firms in the Bay area mentions Variety Film
Exchange Company’s affiliation with the Independent Film Exchange network concentrated along the West Coast. Besides listing Variety Film
Exchange’s supposed outposts in the “Far East” and describing exhibition
practices in Japan, China, and Hawaii, the piece notes that the company was
then “perfecting plans to release special films of its own manufacture depicting
life in the Orient.” The statement could have referred to the short Chinese
films soon to emerge in Hong Kong, but the promise that immediately follows
points to an American rather than a potential Chinese movie market: “These
pictures will be out of the ordinary and will be a new attraction to the ‘movie’
world when put on the market by this enterprising firm.”62
As we have seen, Brodsky’s ambition to film documentary scenes of China
had arisen a year before the opening of studio facilities in Hong Kong. Ships’
records suggest that Brodsky remained continuously in Hong Kong or southern China from December 1913 through July 1914, when he sailed to
Shanghai following Van Velzer’s departure.63 The Hong Kong Variety cinematographer was obviously discontented, as he spells out (without explicitly
naming Brodsky) in the July 1914 Moving Picture World interview. One plaint
he makes is that Brodsky was only marginally engaged in the Chinese fictional
film production. If that criticism has a basis, the circumstance may have followed upon another fateful onboard meeting that occurred as the Brodskys set
off in mid-July 1913 from Hong Kong for San Francisco. During the Shinyo
Maru’s four-day passage to Shanghai, as Frank Bren has well documented,
Brodsky met and swapped stories with fellow passenger E. Burton Holmes,
the renowned American travel photographer and lecturer. Holmes had previously visited Hong Kong and urban locations in China (including the
Forbidden City in Beijing) and gathered material for his annual tours throughout the United States of illustrated lectures, which he called “travelogues.”
He had delivered programs on aspects of China between 1900 and 1902,
62
“Independent Film Exchange Has Novel Plans,” San Francisco Chronicle, 6 Jan. 1914, 27.
Independent Film Exchange proprietor George E. Chamberlain provided the account of exhibition in Hawaii and further East; the information must have come from Brodsky.
63
Evidence of Brodsky’s travel to Shanghai on 8 July 1914, courtesy HKFA.
92
and in 1913 was compiling material for an updated (post-revolutionary
China) presentation for the next lecture season.64
Without the knowledge that Brodsky had begun documentary filming in
China six months earlier, we might conclude that meeting Holmes influenced
him to take up such a project. Instead, it seems more likely that Brodsky’s
acquaintance with an energetic and well-connected Chinese liaison like Zhu
Sifu, Lou Yudao, or Ho En Ming may have stimulated and initially facilitated
that undertaking. But the idea that Brodsky might systematically depict a
trip through the whole of China, edited as a full evening’s entertainment to
distribute to educated audiences in the United States, might have emerged
from the chance meeting with Holmes. However and whenever Brodsky
arrived at the decision to produce the film as a full-length feature release, he
evidently spent much of his time in 1914 and 1915 traveling within China,
producing, shooting, and transporting the footage that became Trip.65
The production of an ethnographic documentary like Trip may not really
have entailed “risk to life and limb,” as Bredhoff asserted to the Call. But it
certainly required a large investment of many people’s strenuous work as well
as considerable funds. The question of Trip’s financing is a matter of historical
import, although one answerable only with difficulty. So is the outcome of the
China Cinema Company proposal, announced in April 1915, to produce
Chinese films. There is some inconclusive evidence that several such films were
produced in Shanghai. When Brodsky was in New York City in August 1916,
primarily to try to sell Trip to a distributor, he spoke at length about his
Shanghai-based Chinese productions to New York Tribune reporter George
Kaufman. Much of Kaufman’s piece focuses on Brodsky’s experiences in film
exhibition, repeating exaggerated tales and essentially rewriting Hoffman’s
1912 Moving Picture World feature. But Kaufman does name some actors and
64
Genoa Caldwell, ed., The Man Who Photographed the World: Burton Holmes, Travelogues
1886-1938 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977), 132-33, includes two tinted photographs of
the inner sanctum of the Forbidden City taken in 1901. Bren discovered an informative article,
“Famous Traveler Interviewed,” South China Morning Post, 4 July 1913, which correlates with
the list of Holmes’s lecture topics available at <http://www.burtonholmes.org>.
65
Available records, some courtesy of HKFA, show Brodsky as spending mid-July to midAugust 1914 in Shanghai and fall 1914 in Hong Kong, before departing in December for
Shanghai and thence Yokohama, where Mamie Brodsky had apparently been helping to oversee
the Variety facility. NARA/Ancestry.com. The Brodskys arrived in San Francisco together on
1 February 1915. On 1 May, they left for Shanghai and Beijing (the poker trip); Brodsky arrived
in Hong Kong by himself on 3 September 1915 and went in early November to Shanghai and
then Yokohama (HKFA). In February 1916, he returned to San Francisco along with his
Shanghai-based assistant manager R. E. (Roe Erroll) Hasbrook and the reels of Trip.
93
other supposed Chinese participants in the venture (like “Ma Yat Chiu”) as
well as some purported film titles. The piece deploys a doubly hyperbolic style
that is hard to sort through, for Kaufman, who later wrote dialogue for
Groucho Marx, could outmatch even Brodsky as a quick-witted Jewish raconteur. The Tribune account, taken with care, could lead to discovery of Chinese
filmmaking events and individual investors (which Ma Yinchu most likely was
not, despite appearing in the November 1914 company photograph).
Kaufman’s full-page feature has in any case enduring value for including several stills that Brodsky provided as examples of his Shanghai studio films.66
Regrettably, the envisioned Chinese films may never have been made or
released in China or Hong Kong – to say nothing of the United States – by the
China Cinema Company, which was dissolved in 1918, almost six months to
the day after Brodsky departed the colony for the last time.67 It is possible that
A Trip Thru China was the China Cinema Company’s only production. If that
is the case, did the Zhu or Lou or Ho family or other Chinese investors help
to underwrite the cost of transport, crew, and film equipment and supplies
over the three-year span of Trip’s making? Did Brodsky plow into Trip’s production most of the profits made by the Chinese-themed films Van Velzer
helped generate in Hong Kong in 1914 (and possibly also of any films made
in Shanghai)? In short: did a collaborative initiative to produce films featuring
Chinese cast, crews, and stories and to distribute them widely in China or
even abroad fall by the wayside due to Brodsky’s enthusiasm for making Trip?
Another perspective might ask: did Brodsky earnestly plan to “carry on the
general business of manufacturing and exhibiting moving pictures” in China
after arranging for North American distribution of Trip (as a letter from a
China Cinema Company associate asserts in June 1916) only to see those aims
run aground along with the political fortunes of his Chinese benefactors?68
Certainly Zhou Ziqi at least temporarily lost influence in mid-1916 due to his
unwavering support of President Yuan Shikai, who seized dictatorial powers in
66
“Bret Harte Said It.” The illustrating film stills offer incontrovertible evidence of some
image production in Shanghai before 1916, if not necessarily proof of Brodsky-produced titles.
A careful comparison of the stills and verbal descriptions Kaufman gives with the titles of short
films that Leyda reports (p. 16) Zhang Sichuan made in 1913-14 might reveal some overlap.
67
The company was dissolved on 6 June 1918 by “other means” than deregistration by the
owner. According to available ships’ records, Brodsky left Hong Kong for the final time on 4
January 1918, departing on the Siberia Maru.
68
Henry H. McPike, “Letter to Robert Lansing” (United States Secretary of State), 28 June
1916. NARA/Ancestry.com. McPike, who acted as the China Cinema Company’s San Francisco
attorney and local agent, wrote the letter in support of a passport application Brodsky made in
June 1916.
94
December 1915 and attempted to restore the monarchy with himself as
emperor in March 1916, before unexpectedly dying in June 1916.
It seems tempting to conclude that the collaboration between moneyed
and visionary Chinese and Brodsky may have failed to produce a number of
Chinese-themed fiction films because the clever American businessman pursued only his own advantage. Before drawing such a conclusion, however,
cinema scholars need to research the output of any possible Brodsky-affiliated
operations in Shanghai and to trace Trip’s and China Cinema Company’s
financing, as well as the degree of involvement of the China Cinema Company
directors and identification of those not yet named. Further study of the film,
such as the recent documentary Searching for Brodsky undertakes, could also
lead to additional identification and more precise dating of its locales and
practices and thereby greater knowledge of the film’s production, if not necessarily its financing. For example, Trip includes shots of the aftermath of the
devastating typhoon that struck Shanghai on 27-28 July 1915, as well as footage of a floating city of sampans taken before that disaster. Trip offers a rare
visual record of urban geographies, labor techniques, and technologies in the
early republican period as well as the exercise of colonialist power in Hong
Kong and foreign concessions. While acknowledging both the film’s historical value and its status as a problematic ethnographic travelogue, I will
focus in Part Two of this essay on the meanings and impact of A Trip Thru
China within its own historical contexts: its promotion and reception in the
United States between 1916 and 1918, and its standing as one of the cinematic contributions Brodsky made as an early trans-Pacific American film
entrepreneur.

zhou-xuexi-JAER_018_..

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