Alum-Professor Film & Media Studies Duo Explore Hollywood Influences on 1930s Shanghai Cinema in the 'Quarterly Review of Film and Video'
"Garbo's Queen Christina as Both Lesbian and Chinese," co-authored by Professor Jane Gaines and Film and Media Studies MA alum Yumo Yan '20, along with visiting scholar Junlei Yang, was recently published as part of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video's 50th anniversary special issue, vol.43, no.3, 2026, to commemorate Professor Gaines's seminal article on the enigmatic silent-era film star Greta Garbo and her titular role in Queen Christina (1933), published in the same journal in 1989.
Yan—now a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle—and Gaines reconnected at the Women and the Silent Screen conference in Brussels in 2025. Over lunch, they discovered the connections between Yang and Gaines's research on the reception of Garbo's gender-subverting role as Queen Christina in 1930s Shanghai and Yan's own work on 1930s Shanghai cinema and Chinese queer cinema. Gaines then invited Yan to collaborate with them on the article.
"The collaboration process was really smooth," said Yan, "mostly because we were all working on silent cinema, and we all approached silent-era female stardom with a transnational lens."
Between New York, Seattle, and Shanghai, the three women divided the work into three sections. Professor Gaines covered the state of the past and present research on Greta Garbo, while Yang analyzed the popular comparison between Garbo and 1930s Shanghai film star Ruan Lingyu. Yan's contribution expanded toward the wider effects Garbo's role had on Shanghai cinema, including Chinese actresses that were called "Yellow Garbos" in the 1930s Shanghai press and a 1936 Chinese film called Tomboy that might be inspired by Garbo's celebrated cross-dressing performance in Queen Christina.
"The revival of scholarship on Garbo really has to do with the publication of Lois W. Banner's 2023 book, Ideal Beauty: The Life and Times of Greta Garbo (Rutgers University Press), in which she looked at Garbo's private letters which provided more clues on Garbo's bisexuality," explained Yan, who had attended Banner's talk at Columbia during her MA—before she was working on silent film or Garbo. That was not the only Columbia coincidence Yan shared: the only DVD copy of the Chinese film Tomboy (1936) outside of the China Film Archive is in Butler Library. In fact, while writing the article, Yan returned to Butler to rewatch Tomboy, which she had previously seen at the China Film Archive. The article, which brings a transnational analysis to Garbo's stardom, is available to read online through Taylor & Francis or your institution.
Jane Gaines is Professor of Film at Columbia University, Professor Emerita of Literature and English at Duke University, and the author of Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industry? (University of Illinois, 2018). In 2018, Prof. Gaines received the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Distinguished Career Award and in 2022 was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Stockholm, Sweden. She is now writing What Happened?: Documentary Media and Historical Time.
Yumo Yan is a PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, specializing in Sinophone cinema, feminist film history, and material culture. Her other works have been published in Film History and Journal of Chinese Cinemas.