This year marks the 120th anniversary of Chinese film, and the Shanghai International Film Festival is honoring the occasion with a retrospective of one of the titans of Chinese leftist cinema: Yuan Muzhi.

A central figure in early Chinese motion pictures, Yuan was born in the eastern port city of Ningbo, Zhejiang province, in 1909. After taking up acting as a young adult, he joined Hong Shen’s Shanghai Dramatic Society, where he specialized in the then-popular genre of “civilized dramas” — a new kind of play that drew from Western sources and was driven by dialogue rather than music.

Yuan later joined the Xinyou Drama Society while a law student at Soochow University, appearing in Russian and Japanese plays such as Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” It was during this time that he earned his nickname: “the man with a thousand faces.”

Beginning in the 1930s, Yuan joined a number of former civilized drama players in making the switch to film. With China under threat of invasion by Japan and riven with civil conflict, many members of this group — Yuan included — gravitated toward left-wing politics and resistance movements like “Roar, China!”

Yuan eventually joined the Communist Party of China-run Diantong Film Company, a short-lived venture that nevertheless produced some of the most important left-wing films of the Republic of China (1911–1949). The first of these, 1934’s “Plunder of Peach and Plum,” was co-written by and starred Yuan together with his future wife, Chen Bo’er, as a young couple struggling against social injustice and rampant corruption.

Yuan’s second appearance in a Diantong feature was 1935’s “Children of Troubled Times,” in which he portrays a young poet who becomes a resistance fighter. Even less subtle than “Plunder,” the film is perhaps best remembered today for its theme song, “March of the Volunteers,” later adopted as China’s national anthem.

In both films, Yuan delivers a deliberately exaggerated performance, but never quite loses touch with the real anxieties of young Chinese in the 1930s.

Yuan moved into the director’s chair for Diantong’s final film, “Scenes of City Life.” Considered the first Chinese musical comedy, Yuan mixed borrowed techniques from Hollywood with Chinese storytelling elements to satirize the country’s social ills in a remarkably self-assured directorial debut. He followed it with arguably the definitive onscreen depiction of Shanghai: 1937’s “Street Angel.” Starring up-and-coming actors Zhao Dan and Zhou Xuan, the film recreated the city’s distinct lane home architecture as a backdrop to its story of neighbors navigating tough times with humor and song.

Not long after the release of “Street Angel,” Yuan was forced to leave Shanghai ahead of the city’s capture by Japanese troops. His next film, 1938’s “800 Heroes,” was shot in the central city of Wuhan, Hubei province, and tells the real-life story of a Chinese detachment that fought a rearguard action in Shanghai. Yuan, here reunited with “Plunder” director Ying Yunwei, delivers a much more well-rounded performance as Lieutenant Colonel Xie Jinyuan than in his early work.

The completion of “800 Heroes” marked a turning point in Yuan’s career. In the fall of 1938, he traveled to the northwestern Shaanxi province’s Yan’an, the primary base of the CPC, where he founded the Yan’an Film Troupe and directed a documentary about the Chinese Communist movement. He later traveled to the Soviet Union to complete post-production, only to be caught in the middle of another war zone. After a stint assisting Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, Yuan returned to China in 1946 to help rebuild the film industry. Rising through the ranks, he became the first head of the Northeast Film Studio, then director of China’s Film Bureau after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

Despite leaving the directing business behind, Yuan continued to wield significant power as a respected elder statesman in the film industry. Zheng Junli’s influential 1947 treatise on acting, “The Birth of a Role,” heavily featured Yuan as well as other top actors from the era, like the aforementioned Zhao Dan and Hebei province’s Zhang Ruifang. It’s just another way the “man with a thousand faces” helped shape what we think of as Chinese cinema.

Translator: David Ball; editor: Wu Haiyun; portrait artist: Wang Zhenhao.

(Header image: Visuals from Sean Gladwell/Moment/VCG and Douban, reedited by Sixth Tone)