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.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Joseph W. Ho is Associate Professor of History at Albion College, Michigan, and a Center Associate at the University of Michigan’s Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies. He is a historian of modern East Asia, Sino-US encounters, and transnational visual culture and media. Ho is the author of Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2022). He is also the co-editor of War and Occupation in China: The Letters of an American Missionary from Hangzhou, 1937–1938 (Lehigh University Press, 2017) and has published essays on his research in several edited volumes as well as the UCLA Historical Journal, U.S. Catholic Historian, and Education About Asia, among others. In 2024–2025, Ho will hold a Residency Research Fellowship at the University of Michigan and the EDS-Stewart Distinguished Research Fellowship at Boston College. He is currently preparing two new books: Time Exposures: Catholic Photography and the Evolution of Modern China (Hong Kong University Press) and his next monograph, Bamboo Wireless: Mediating the Cold War in Asia.
Glenn Tiffert is a distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a historian of modern China. He co-chairs Hoover’s program on the US, China, and the World, and also leads Stanford’s participation in the National Science Foundation’s SECURE program, a $67 million effort authorized by the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 to enhance the security and integrity of the US research enterprise. He works extensively on the security and integrity of ecosystems of knowledge, particularly academic, corporate, and government research; science and technology policy; and malign foreign interference.
