Film can tell a lot about a place and time, but not many film industries have gone through as much change as China’s. Not only has the Chinese film industry transformed as the politics of the country have changed from the years of silent movies to the Communist era, but records of the pre-Mao era largely succumbed  to political movements like the Cultural Revolution, which outlawed everything old and western. It’s a miracle that film advertisements and movie magazines from the period survived at all, and in his new book, film critic and historian Paul Fonoroff presents a stunning collection of 590 illustrations, mainly movie magazine covers, that he found in Hong Kong and in flea markets around Southeast Asia.