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Fragmented Visions: Civil War China In Lost Films By American Jesuit Missionaries, 1947–1948

February 14 @ 12:00 am - 2:00 am

The Hoover Institution Library & Archives and the Program on the US, China, and the World invite you to a film screening Fragmented Visions: Civil War China in Lost Films by American Jesuit Missionaries, 1947–1948 on Thursday, February 13, 2025 from 4:00pm – 6:00pm PT.
This film screening and talk brings to light recently-recovered color documentary films of China made by American Jesuit missionaries between 1947 and 1948, representing ground-level views of life during the Chinese Civil War, shortly before the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Drawing from footage he discovered and digitized with the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, speaker Joseph W. Ho explores how these films captured perceptions of both missionary filmmakers and Chinese participants, representing hopes for the survival of communities soon torn apart by regional and global conflict. Religious, cultural, and political imagery were framed by participants’ locally-embedded experiences before 1949, including shifting temporalities and transnational spaces mediated by visual technologies. Ho traces the films – unseen for three-quarters of a century – from their moments of creation to reinterpretations in later Sino-US relationships and chance rediscovery. The films’ evolving meanings emerge as images of loss, hope, and futurity, projected onto Chinese, American, and Catholic communities through vernacular filmmaking in a time of historical fragmentation.

Venue

George P. Shultz Building, Shultz Auditorium