The Paul Kendel Fonoroff Collection for Chinese Film Studies

“As a film critic, movie fan, and avid collector, I realized some time ago that in order to research Hong Kong film history, I would have to amass the primary source materials myself.”

— Paul Kendel Fonoroff, Silver Light

UC Berkeley acquired the Paul Kendel Fonoroff Collection in 2015. The C. V. Starr East Asian Library now holds the largest and most comprehensive Chinese film studies collection in North America. The over-70,000 periodicals, posters, photographs, and ephemera contained in the collection document the development of the film and entertainment industry of greater China from its inception in the early decades of the twentieth century to the 1990s, while offering a fresh perspective on the history of Chinese popular culture, media, society and social life.

The collection includes:

• 436 pre-1950 periodicals in 5,901 issues

• 239 post-1950 periodicals in 4,638 issues

• 4,195 posters

• 21,233 lobby cards, in 2,194 sets

• 3,332 theater flyers

• 4,370 scripts, novels, and books

• 5,976 pieces of ephemera

• 9,214 photographic negatives and slides

• 4,145 stills and publicity photos

• 837 tapes and CDs

• 5,637 Mao badges

• 2,450 articles and columns by and about Fonoroff