Yakov Bliokh’s Shanghai Document (1928), which, according to an early intertitle, resulted from “a Sovkino expedition to Shanghai in 1927,” is a most unusual document. Although Bliokh (1895–1957) was credited as the film’s director and co-scenarist, he apparently never strayed beyond Moscow in order to do so. Instead, it was V.L. Stepanov, Bliokh’s co-scenarist, who led the “expedition” to Shanghai at a time when the Soviets were backing an uprising that sought to unseat the Beijing government, and Sovkino thought a nonfiction film about Shanghai would help.
At the time, the Soviets were hoping that a full-fledged revolution would transform China into a sprawling, friendly Socialist ally in Asia, but the uprising was the product of an uneasy alliance between the Nationalists and the communists. Instead of being there to document a triumphant socialist revolution, as they had hoped, Stepanov and his fellow filmmakers ended up playing witness to the bloody Shanghai Massacre of 12 April 1927, the event that crushed the communists, and signaled the ascendance of Chiang Kai-Shek. By June 1928, a little over a year later, the Nationalists were in control of mainland China, the beginning of a reign that would last 21 years.
Bliokh’s film is not a city symphony in the strict sense, it is primarily a combination of a travelogue and an ethnographic film, but as the film progresses, its political analysis comes to the fore and becomes increasingly sharp, leading to some withering ironies reminiscent of Esfir Shub’s Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927). This analysis is made possible, in part, through the extensive use of descriptive and fact-based intertitles. In other words, the film is primarily an expository work of nonfiction, and not a poetic one, and therefore highly atypical of the city symphony genre, although Mikhail Kaufman’s Moscow (1926) stands as an exception to this rule, and may well have been an influence on Bliokh.
Though the film is first and foremost a work of political propaganda, one that was intended to critique the colonial presence of British and the Western powers controlling Shanghai’s industrial and financial sectors, as well as the city’s highly hierarchical and exploitative class system and the complacency and obsequiousness of the Chinese bourgeoisie, Shanghai Document does contain a number of passages that are consistent with the concerns and the techniques of the city symphony movement. These include a long sequence having to do with street performers that calls to mind Vertov’s fascination with Chinese magicians in Kino-Eye (1924) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a striking series of travelling shots capturing automobiles and rickshaws hurtling at top speed which recalls the automobile and horse and buggy scenes in Man with a Movie Camera, and a series of extreme high-angle shots of busy streets and long shadows in Shanghai’s modern Western sector that are reminiscent of similar sequences in Kino-Eye and Man with a Movie Camera, as well as the avant-garde photographs of László Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Rodchenko, and Otto Umbehr (a.k.a. Umbo).
That said, the film is most notable for its scathing socio-political critique, and its gruesome footage of some of the assassinations that took place during the Shanghai Massacre, as well as the corpses that littered the city streets in its aftermath.
Anthony Kinik
further reading
Cull, Nicholas and Waldron, Arthur, “Shanghai Document—‘Shankhaiskii Dokument’ (1928): Soviet Film Propaganda and the Shanghai Rising of 1927,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 16, 3 (1996): 309–31.
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