Melancholic Nostalgia, Identity Crisis, and Adaptation in 1950s Hong Kong: Ba Jin’s Family on Screen

Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-333
Author(s):  
Yi Li
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Film Version ◽  
Hong Kong Cinema ◽  
Political Alignment

Abstract The communist takeover of mainland China in 1949 created physical, cultural, and political segregation between the mainland and Hong Kong, thus fostering a sense of dislocation and alienation among filmmakers who had migrated to Hong Kong from the mainland. The aim of this study is to explore the symbiosis between nostalgia and adaptation in Hong Kong cinema within the cultural landscape of 1950s Hong Kong, when Cold War politics was operating. With a detailed analysis of the 1953 Hong Kong film adaptation of mainland writer Ba Jin’s novel Family, and a comparative reading with the mainland film version produced in 1956, this study illustrates the cultural and historical significance of nostalgia in the development of Hong Kong cinema. This article further argues that nostalgic sentiment was expressed effectively through adaptations, while simultaneously improving these adaptations artistically and strengthening their political alignment with the mainland.

scholarly journals The rupture in Hong Kong cinema: Post-2000 Hong Kong cinema(s) as both a transnational cinema and a national cinema

Lumina ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-83
Author(s):  
Fangyu Chen
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
Young Generation ◽  
Transnational Cinema ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
Hong Kong Cinema ◽  
Economic Boom ◽  
Film Market

This paper traces artistic and ideological discrepancies between the young generation of Hong Kong filmmakers and their predecessors – the established generation who contributed to the glory days of Hong Kong cinema during its economic boom. By tracing studies of national cinema and transnational cinema in the last three decades, the author argues that current Hong Kong cinema has split into two: a transnational cinema represented by the established generation of filmmakers; and a national cinema that is driven by the emerging generation who struggles for better preservation of Hong Kong local culture and their own cultural identities. To conduct the research, 47 people were interviewed including13 established filmmakers, 16 young filmmakers and18 film students from 3 universities in Hong Kong. The three groups of respondents generally represent three perspectives: that of the established film practitioners, who have a vested interest in the current co-production era; that of the emerging young film practitioners, who above all crave a flourishing local film market and whose productions exhibit stronger Hong Kong cultural identities; lastly, that of the, who were predominantly born in the 1990s and have the most extreme views against mainland China and whose filmmaking ideologies and practices foreshadow the future of the industry.

Mapping Modern Beijing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Weijie Song
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Urban Planning ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Urban Transition ◽  
Liang Shiqiu ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
Imperial Capital ◽  
Private And Public

Mapping Modern Beijing investigates five methods of representing Beijing- a warped hometown, a city of snapshots and manners, an aesthetic city, an imperial capital in comparative and cross-cultural perspective, and a displaced city on the Sinophone and diasporic postmemory—by authors traveling across mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Sinophone and non-Chinese communities. The metamorphosis of Beijing’s everyday spaces and the structural transformation of private and public emotions unfold Manchu writer Lao She’s Beijing complex about a warped native city. Zhang Henshui’s popular snapshots of fleeting shocks and everlasting sorrows illustrate his affective mapping of urban transition and human manners in Republican Beijing. Female poet and architect Lin Huiyin captures an aesthetic and picturesque city vis-à-vis the political and ideological urban planning. The imagined imperial capital constructed in bilingual, transcultural, and comparative works by Lin Yutang, Princess Der Ling, and Victor Segalen highlights the pleasures and pitfalls of collecting local knowledge and presenting Orientalist and Cosmopolitan visions. In the shadow of World Wars and Cold War, a multilayered displaced Beijing appears in the Sinophone postmemory by diasporic Beijing natives Liang Shiqiu, Taiwan sojourners Zhong Lihe and Lin Haiyin, and émigré martial-arts novelist Jin Yong in Hong Kong. Weijie Song situates Beijing in a larger context of modern Chinese-language urban imaginations, and charts the emotional topography of the city against the backdrop of the downfall of the Manchu Empire, the rise of modern nation-state, the 1949 great divide, and the formation of Cold War and globalizing world. Drawing from literary canons to exotic narratives, from modernist poetry to chivalric fantasy, from popular culture to urban planning, this book explores the complex nexus of urban spaces, archives of emotions, and literary topography of Beijing in its long journey from imperial capital to Republican city and to socialist metropolis.

Ghostly Returns: the Politics of Horror in Hong Kong Cinema

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivian Lee
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Foreseeable Future ◽  
Hong Kong Cinema ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
The City

This chapter examines the trend towards Hong Kong-China co-productions, during which Hong Kong horror films have been in decline due to censorship restrictions in Mainland China. While this mega-market direction is likely to continue in the foreseeable future, Hong Kong filmmakers have made fresh attempts to revitalize this popular genre and inject it with new meanings in the changed and changing context of cultural production and cultural politics in the city. Between 2012-2014, several low to medium budget horror films were released. Local audiences responded enthusiastically and many saw these as a sign of the resilience of the local popular culture to counter or at least deflate the hegemony of the Mainland market. This chapter traces the trajectory of Hong Kong horror through the pre- and post-handover decades, situating horror within the evolving discourse of identity and the issues of local histories and collective memory. It also elaborates on the politics of horror as seem from horror films produced and released in the midst of escalating social and political tensions attributable to a popular/populist “anti-China localism”. The chapter further reflects on the cultural politics of delocalization and relocalization in the context of “re-occupying Hong Kong screens.”

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Jing Jing Chang
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Documentary Films ◽  
Chinese Cinema ◽  
Hong Kong Cinema ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Film Reception ◽  
Youth Films ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Colonial Government

This introduction chapter outlines the theoretical framework of the book, and the methodological potential of the act of “screening,” when exploring the interplay between image and idea, politics and culture, film talent and audience in postwar Hong Kong film culture. While concepts of reflecting and viewing imply a unidirectional relationship between film and subject, the author argues that “screening” focuses more on the processes through which cinema contributed to the building of Hong Kong’s postwar community and identity. By using the double meaning of “screening” as both revealing and concealing, the author argues that postwar Hong Kong cinema—which in this book include 1950s and 1960s official documentary films, leftist family melodrama, and youth films— both conceals the anxieties of the British colonial government during the Cold War, and exposes the different narratives constructed by local filmmakers about what it means to be Chinese citizens during the postwar period. This introduction also takes into consideration the importance of postwar Hong Kong audiences, both real and implied, whose spectatorship was negotiated at the intersection colonialist and nationalist “address” and a familial and localized “reception.” This study has implication for the fields of Hong Kong, Chinese cinema, Cold War, and film reception studies.

Screening Communities

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing Jing Chang
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
Hong Kong Cinema ◽  
Close Study ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Turmoil

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.

scholarly journals "Chinesenesses" Outside Mainland China: Macao and Taiwan through Post-1997 Hong Kong Cinema

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Hongjin He
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Greater China ◽  
Plural Form ◽  
Hong Kong Cinema ◽  
Special Part ◽  
Chinese Societies ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Changing Role

By examining the filmic representation of Macao and Taiwan in Hong Kong films, mostly released after the 1997 sovereignty transfer, this paper will address the notion of Chineseness in its plural form as associated with different Chinese societies. The purpose is to bring attention to the cosmopolitan side of Chineseness in Hong Kong cinema rather than the mere influence from the Mainland (PRC). I will argue that it is this pluralised, composite Chineseness reflected in Hong Kong cinema that has reinforced its very “Hong Kong-ness” against the impact from the “orthodox” Chineseness of the Mainland. Through a combination of textual and contextual analyses of selected Hong Kong diaspora films respectively set in Macao and Taiwan, this paper aims to provide a general understanding of the imbrications of various Chinese societies within Greater China and, most importantly, the changing role and position of Hong Kong (cinema) within this conceptual China as “one country” before and after it became a special part of the PRC.

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