Shanghai Document (1928)
Youtube.
The 50-minute movie «Шанхайский документ» - a Soviet factographic film rather than a documentary - is still a must-see testimony of Shanghai in 1927. Those who read Stella Dong’s Shanghai will recognize some of the visuals, such as babies put to sleep on the factory floor while the mothers are working.
From Eurasia Without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons, 1919-1943, by Katerina Clark (2021):
Shanghai Document is set, as an inter-title proclaims, in “the biggest port and biggest industrial city” of then China. The film, like many documentaries on Asia from the late 1920s and early 1930s, has a distinct ethnographic element and shows street life in Shanghai - the artisans, the food stalls and market, street performers, and a funeral. In several scenes, the film draws a pointed contrast between the backbreaking toil of the workers, laboring in execrable conditions, and the idle languor of the fat-cat foreign bourgeoisie (their Chinese counterparts enjoy the good life, too, but are treated by the Europeans as second-class citizens).
But Shanghai Document goes beyond the ethnographic, anticolonialist film and shows scenes of revolution. It includes shots of an insurgency by the Chinese and the military preparations of the foreigners to counter it. Even more dramatically, the film includes footage that shows the actual executions of the revolutionaries by a Nationalist firing squad, and scenes of streets littered with the bodies and banners of the fallen workers (this footage was actually obtained from a foreign newsreel crew and had been shot two to three days after the April uprising in Shanghai was crushed in the “debacle”. Thus it depicts revolutionary failure quite graphically. And even though the film’s scenario was conceived the year before the debacle, and even though most of it shows Shanghai before it occurred in that it was put together after the uprising was put down, like the other texts I am discussing it represents a post-debacle version of events.”
Google Books.