RetroClips

Laborer's Love is the oldest surviving complete Chinese film; nearly everything made before it was lost when Japanese bombing destroyed the Mingxing studio's library in 1932. Its entire plot turns on a fruit peddler rigging a staircase to drum up business for his love interest's doctor father, a Rube Goldberg-style gag that plays as pure physical comedy in the same register as Keaton and Chaplin, even though the two traditions barely knew each other in 1922. It was released with bilingual Chinese-English intertitles, aimed at Shanghai's international audiences from the start.