Public Reel

Phantom of Chinatown · Beat 12 · permalink

Theatre

2:49–3:00 Registered 1940

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks passed (partial). 3 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; 2 of 3 visible events checked against a frame. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 2:522:52Frame at 2:562:56Frame at 2:582:58

Play from 2:49 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 11 · shots 17–19. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
theatre (theatre, interior) evidence: frame:2
People
  • audience member, wearing formal attire, seated visible
  • actor in martial arts costume, mid-motion, on film screen visible
  • actor in martial arts costume, crouching, on film screen visible
Seen happening
  • A martial arts scene is shown on a film screen. [frame:1]
  • An audience watches the film in a theater. [frame:2]
  • The martial arts scene continues on the film screen. [frame:3]
Seen
film screen [frame:1], theater seats [frame:2], martial arts costumes [frame:1]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: neutral, observational; themes: cinema within cinema, audience reception; style notes: black-and-white, medium shots, static framing, theatrical lighting on audience

A film within a film shows a martial arts scene in a courtyard while an audience watches in a theater. No names or specific time of day are established from the frames or transcript.

The record

No renewal found An automated finding, not a verdict. A renewal would have appeared in the Copyright Office's renewal registrations 27 to 29 years after the term began. Those volumes are loaded and our parse of them found no matching renewal. If that is right, a work published 1931–1963 that was not renewed entered the public domain at the end of its 28th year; the volumes are OCR of old print, and the method page reports how often the parse has been found to miss one. Evidence dossier. The finding concerns the US copyright record for the film; it is not clearance for any use, and this page's annotation is machine output.

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Frame from Phantom of Chinatown (1940) at 2:52 (passage 2:49–3:00); US record: No renewal found

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always the current cut
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warns if the beats are recut later
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