A Shanghai Document

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A Shanghai Document (Russian: Шанхайский документ) is an early documentary film. This silent film was directed by Yakov Blyokh (Яков Блиох,1895-1957) and was released in the USSR in 1928.

In the early 1920s, there were two worlds in Shanghai of China. One is the world that western people (including Britons, Americans, New Zealanders, Australians, and Danes) live in the lap of luxury in Shanghai International Settlement, and another is the world that Chinese people spend their days on inhuman labor. Chinese laborers eventually walked out or revolted frequently in Shanghai, the Shanghai Municipal Police then started cracking down on proletariats and communists and slaughtered them.

This interpretation is clearly inflected by its politics. The actual events which inspired the film revolve around the Chinese nationalist revolution (1925-27), including the May Thirtieth Movement, and the First United Front of the Chinese Communist Party, and the Nationalists (the Kuomintang), and its collapse in February 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek ordered a purge of the Communists in Shanghai and in other cities held by the revolutionaries. Other notable portrayals of this period include André Malraux's La condition humaine (The Human Condition, or originally translated as Man's Fate. An early documentary account was Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (1938).

(35mm/black and white/silent/54min)