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WITH HOLLYWOOD'S GLOBAL CASH FLOWING EAST, CHINA IS NEARER THAN EVER, THOUGH THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MOVIE SUPERPOWERS IS IN FLUX. NICK PINKERTON REPORTS FROM BEIJING
Flipping through the newfangled ticket kiosk at the venerable Da Guan Lou cinema in central Beijing, the thumbnail poster graphics showed off a diverse bill of fare. On one day early last summer, alongside native products-Special Encounter, a romance funded by the monolithic Wanda Group corporation, and Wtne Wars, an actioner directed by Cantopop star Leon Lai-I could buy a ticket to Passengers, Guardians of the Galaxy VoL 2, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, and Dangal, an Aamir Khan movie about a young female wrestler and the first Indian production to be number one at the box office since the Chinese joined in the international sport of obsessing over such figures.
Opened on Qianmen Street in in 1903, the Da Guan Lou is on the books as the world's oldest operating movie theater, and bills itself as the birthplace of Chinese cinema. A 2005 renovation gave it an appearance commensurate with its historical status, the lobby a shrine to native motion picture art. The walls were decorated with pictures of movie stars stretching back to the pre-Revolutionary period, including the doomed Ruan Lingyu, who consumed a fatal barbiturate cocktail in 1935; a statue inside depicts two men with queue pigtails operating an early projection apparatus, while another out front commemorates founder Ren Qingtai. In addition to being China's first exhibitor, Ren, who had studied photography in Japan, was the country's first filmmaker. Anticipating waning audience interest in imported foreign short subjects, in 1905 he shot Dingjunshan, a 10-minute film of opera star Tan Xinpei performing a fragment of Beijing opera piece Battle of Mount Dingjun in his photo studio, and in the process launched a national industry.
Chinese studios vied with Hollywood at first, but then the Revolution came and cleared the field of foreign competition for close to half a century. When a gradually opening China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, it was with the understanding that it would at least partially provide access to its media markets- something that was achieved only through lengthy negotiation. The result has been one of...