Abstract: The film poster generates public desire for watching the film, but its pictorial cues often exceed its intended ideological or thematic message. The excess information contained in graphic composition, star texts, and visual citations (e.g., to current fashions and other intertexts) makes the film poster an alterative para-text in the sense that it sets in motion a dynamic of circulating multilayered meanings in a medium that resonates with other media and genres of art (e.g., drawing, painting, calligraphy, photography, design, literature, drama, opera, and music). Film posters are therefore enmeshed in intermediality or crossmediality and inevitably gesture toward something outside themselves — something shadowy, alterative, alternative, something out of sync with itself in place and time. This article cites Paul Fonoroff's Silver Light: A Pictorial History of Hong Kong Cinema, 1920-1970 (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1997) as example and argues that film posters constitute a largely unexplored, underutilized archive for Chinese film historiography. Fonoroff's pictorial history offers an alternative way of approaching the history of Hong Kong cinema, one that resembles postmodern literary historiography in its emphasis on discontinuity, fragmentation, juxtaposition, and heterogeneity. The article goes on to examine film posters in Hong Kong, mainland China, and Taiwan in the 1950-1970s and illustrates the ways film posters constitute an alterative/alternative archive for Chinese film history and visual culture, an archive that calls for speculative reading to construct an open, multivalent system of visual signification.

Key words: film poster;alternative archive, alteration, postmodern historiography, speculative reading