Screening Communities uses multi-media archival sources, including government archives, memoirs, fan magazines, newspaper reports, and films to narrate the complexity of social change and political turmoil, both screened and lived, in postwar Hong Kong. In particular, Screening Communities explores the political, ideological, and cultural work of Hong Kong film culture and its role in the building of a postwar Hong Kong community during the 1950s and 1960s, which was as much defined by lived experiences as by a cinematic construction, forged through negotiations between narratives of empire, nation, and the Cold War in and beyond Hong Kong. As such, in order to appreciate the complex formation of colonial Hong Kong society, Screening Communities situates the analysis of the “poetics” of postwar Hong Kong film culture within the larger global processes of colonialism, nationalism, industrialization, and Cold War. It argues that postwar Hong Kong cinema is a three-pronged process of “screening community” that takes into account the factors of colonial governance, filmic expression of left-leaning Cantonese filmmakers, and the social makeup of audiences as discursive agents. Through a close study of genre conventions, characterization, and modes of filmic narration across select Cantonese films and government documentaries, I contend that 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong cinema, broadly construed, became a site par excellence for the construction and translation (on the ground and onscreen) of a postwar Hong Kong community, whose context was continually shifting—at once indigenous and hybrid, postcolonial and global.
CHANG, Jing Jing. 2019. Screening Communities: Negotiating Narratives of Empire, Nation, and the Cold War in Hong Kong Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
