Outtakes and Lost Film: The Fragmentary Encounter between "Newsreel" Wong and the "Chinese Colleen Moore"

Outtakes and Lost Film:The Fragmentary Encounter between "Newsreel" Wong and the "Chinese Colleen Moore" Xin Peng (bio) The newsreel archive, as with archives of mass media broadly writ, is by default "incomplete, only partially accessible, and often arbitrary in what remains."1 The footage itself reveals little about the history it represents. Instead, as Joseph Clark argues, "the power and meaning of newsreels lay largely in how they circulated among the publics they addressed and helped to create."2 My study takes up this insight to consider the newsreel as a system. But it deals with the distinct challenge of approaching footage that was not publicly distributed and therefore, to follow Jaimie Baron, did not contribute to the formation of historical discourse because, from a reception-centered perspective, undistributed footage was never experienced by a historical End Page 170 audience to be historically meaningful.3 Newsreel outtakes, in their fragmentary and uncompleted forms, provide important venues for media scholars to interrogate both the historiographical and ethnographical value of moving images while challenging dominant methodologies for studying mass media and visual culture that assume and rely on the production-distribution-exhibition circuit of completed work. This essay examines the unedited and historically undistributed Fox Movietone newsreel footage titled "Chinese Motion Picture Studio—outtakes" preserved at the Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC) at the University of South Carolina.4 Among the large amount of China-related Fox Movietone footage available for streaming in the collection, this five-minute, unedited black-and-white sound newsfilm shot on January 23, 1934, records a presumably silent film production of a nightclub scene, probably taken at the Shanghai Tianyi Studio. The footage is an invaluable filmic record of the making of a Chinese film in an era of which the majority of films are lost. The footage is also curious for its paratext available in the online database identifying the actress as the "Chinese Colleen Moore," making her the Chinese equivalent of one of the most iconic flappers and American stars of the 1920s. More curious still, among the crew who shot the film was the legendary cameraman H. S. "Newsreel" Wong (a.k.a. Wang Haisheng or Wang Xiaoting). Most famous for his photograph Bloody Saturday (1937) shot during the Battle of Shanghai in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), Wong's work was so sensational that Hearst Metrotone produced and released a news story about the "ace movie photographer" himself, titled "Chinese Cameraman Proves War Hero."5 Wong contributed a vast array of images to both the US and Chinese mass media in the 1920s and 1930s, yet there remains a dearth of information and scholarship regarding this transpacific media worker. To understand "Chinese Motion Picture Studio—outtakes" as the fragment of an encounter between the "Chinese Colleen Moore" and H. S. End Page 171 "Newsreel" Wong, I navigate two methodological conundrums: the problematic status of newsreel outtakes that were never seen by a historical audience and the potentials and pitfalls of using digital archives to identify and track historical figures. My attempt to excavate the backstory of the five-minute outtakes resulted in a fragmentary tale, one that is reflective of the miscellaneous materials that I was able to gather. The problematic status of outtakes has been discussed and debated in recent scholarship. According to Dan Streible, outtakes is a broad and not always accurate "catchall."6 Yet, as Mark Garrett Cooper contends, the term is useful and necessary firstly because "modern cataloging schemes consider titles indispensable."7 As an archival marker appended to the descriptive title, the term outtakes helps researchers distinguish materials that had not reached historical audiences from the ones that were included in released prints and exhibited.8 But this overly general distinction can be misleading, not only because the status of circulation isn't always certain. Outtakes can also give the inaccurate impression of the actual existence of a finished work, with the outtakes consisting of materials that were taken out. As Cooper notes, "most of the material that survives in their archives cannot be 'outtakes' in the strict sense of the term. In the most likely scenario, there never was a completed, 'cut,' or manifest...