Between Idealism and Pragmatism

Chapter 2 traces the development of Hong Kong’s official film culture during the 1950s and 1960s within the contexts of the documentary film movement, the imperial legacy of the British Colonial Film Unit, and the colonial rhetoric of film literacy. In particular, it uses such Hong Kong Film Unit-produced short features as Report to the Gods (Dir. Brian Salt, 1967), starring local opera talent Leung Sing-por, as archival sources to argue that the colonial regime’s relationship with Hong Kong’s population was not a static vertical imposition of the “culture of depoliticization,” but one that was shifting and characterized by manipulation, misunderstanding, and negotiation amid bipolarized Cold War tension. I argue here that British Hong Kong’s involvement in filmmaking activities expose the top-down imposition of a colonial regime as well as the transformative nature of colonial rule during the Cold War period of the 1950s through 1960s. Official film culture should not be seen merely as tools of colonial governance or a means of indoctrinating subject audiences, but rather was part of an overall “strategy for survival” as well as an integral component in the process of screening the local Hong Kong “colonial” citizenry during the Cold War.

The Nanyang Ethos and Engendering the Chinese Overseas Experience

Chapter 5 argues that Chinese overseas is a privileged narrative focus providing a vantage point from which to explore the importance of Southeast Asia or Nanyang as ethos and imaginary in 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong films. As a border-crossing process and imaginary, Nanyang not only contributed to the survival of Hong Kong’s film industry between the 1950s and 1960s, but it also fuelled the transformation and construction of the colony as a nodal site amid 1960s industrialization. In order to explore Nanyang’s role in Hong Kong’s narrative path toward industrial modernity, this chapter first examines the shifting colonial, statist and cinematic conceptions of Cold War citizenship, allegiance, nationality, and gendered labor. Second, this chapter discusses two politically-driven filmic projections of the Nanyang ethos, arguing that both films continue to conceal contentious ideological and bipolarized conceptions of Chinese national subjectivity. The chapter ends with an analysis on The Story between Hong Kong and Macau (Yishui ge tianya, dir. Cho Kei, 1966), which moves beyond a paternalistic studio-centered approach to reveal how narratives about the travelling Chinese woman and the Nanyang continue to negotiate with narratives of gendered work and gendered economy in the process of screening Hong Kong’s modern industrial community.

May Fourth and Postwar Hong Kong’s Leftist Cantonese Cinema

Chapter 3 examines the legacy of the May Fourth Movement in the context of postwar Hong Kong’s golden age of cinema. It argues that the May Fourth project was an unfinished one and was carried forward by progressive Cantonese filmmakers who were the torchbearers of its ideology. This chapter focuses on the careers of left-leaning filmmakers such as Ng Cho-fan, one of the founders of the Union Film Enterprise Ltd., and their emergence as postwar Hong Kong’s new cultural elites. Through a close reading of Union’s film adaptations of the Ba Jin trilogy, Family (Jia, dir. Ng Wu, 1953), Spring (Chun, dir. Lee Sun-fung, 1953), and Autumn (Qiu, dir. Chun Kim, 1954), this chapter demonstrates the transformative nature of the moral message of postwar Hong Kong’s cultural elites. Not only did left-leaning film talent repurpose core tenets of May Fourth, they also sought to reinterpret the spirit of vernacular modernism for the colony’s audiences through their film productions. Although May Fourth precepts were brought to Hong Kong by China’s nanlai cultural elites and leftwing film talents, the May Fourth spirit underwent a creative translingual appropriation during the 1950s as local Hong Kong leftwing companies such as the Union and Xinlian emerged.

Familial Address and the Aesthetics of Lunli

Chapter 4 examines the didactic message promoted by Hong Kong’s left-leaning Cantonese filmmakers (including the Union, Xinlian, Overseas Chinese and Hualian) through their lunlipian (Family melodrama or social ethics films). In particular, I argue that the pedagogical work of lunlipian was not merely through narratives of a reconfigured Confucian family, but also through the audience-hailing effect of marketing, which constructed cinemagoers as members of a collective family in Hong Kong’s postwar community. The critical intervention of this chapter is to unpack the usage and function of lunlipian from contextual, critical, and textual perspectives, and to theorize the social function of lunlipian as a didactic familial address that contributed to the postwar process of screening community. In theorizing the lunli mode of storytelling, this chapter suggests a new periodization of Cantonese golden age cinema that presents an alternative narrative, from one of aesthetic rupture and commercial decline, to one of moral and didactic continuity and industrial adaptation. Screening community during the 1960s therefore is constituted as a negotiated site of spectatorship as well as a strategy of audience address.

Film Censorship and the Regulatory Context of Postwar Hong Kong

Chapter 1 maps out the contours of the Cold War regulatory context in Hong Kong and examines how Hong Kong’s censorship machinery “screened” the colonial government’s responses to the Cold War within local, colonial, and global contexts. The colonial government’s film censorship machinery comprises not only of printed regulations banning objectionable material, but also a set of activities, practices and discourses that reflected the agendas and assumptions of Hong Kong’s colonial government about audience demographics and characteristics. This chapter argues that censorship was part the discursive strategies mobilized by the colonial state and negotiated by filmmakers, film distributors, audience members, and Cold War watchers, all of whom contributed to the postwar Hong Kong community screening process. To demonstrate that censorship was never unidirectional in terms of imposition, surveillance, or discipline, but was constantly being challenged and negotiated by all stakeholders, this chapter ends with an extended discussion of the September 1965 press battle over British Hong Kong’s censorship legislation. Indeed, British Hong Kong had to exercise a policy of accommodation and neutrality, while creating the illusion of an apolitical community in order for its censorship legislations to function during a period of global decolonization.

Introduction

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.

Coda

The coda summarizes the book’s overarching narrative and goals, and followed by a discussion of the lasting impact of Those 72 Tenants (Qishier jia fangke, dir. Wang Weiyi, 1963) and its remake, The House of 72 Tenants (Qishier jia fangke, dir. Chor Yuen, 1973), on developments in Hong Kong cinema since the 1970s as they intersect with political and social change originating during the mid-1960s disturbances. A comparative analysis of these two films demonstrates the porous boundaries across media formats as well as across social and political realms of experiences. The coda concludes with a discussion of Kung Fu Hustle (Kungfu, dir. Stephen Chow, 2004). Kung Fu Hustle, which was financed and distributed by Columbia Pictures International, can be considered as global and international. However, it is also local in its nostalgic expressions. As the book’s final case study, the film demonstrates the Hong Kong cinema’s persistence of the portrayal of a screened community and local identity. In the final analysis, the unique identity of Hong Kong cinema rests in an ongoing quest to construct and screen its distinctive local community.

Girls in Masquerade

Chapter 6 examines the localization of screening community during Hong Kong’s 1960s industrial modernization. It examines the intersections among gendered labor, the Chinese patriarchal family, celebrity culture and fandom, through films starring 1960s idols, Connie Chan Po-chu and Josephine Siao Fong-fong. While fandom and celebrity culture were created by the real demographics of an increasing number of female workers who became Connie’s and Josephine’s fans, their viewership became discursive sites that contributed to the constructions of a gendered community both within and outside of traditional Confucian familial hierarchies. My analysis of films such as Her Tender Love ((Langru chunri feng, dir. Lui Kei, 1969) and Teddy Girls (Fenü zhengzhuan, dir. Lung Kong, 1969) demonstrates that masquerade not only becomes a point of identification for fans, but also a focusing lens for the convergence of seemingly conflicted experiences of teddy girls and factory girls. As much as they embodied the contradictions of urban industrial modernization, factory girls and teddy girls (both on- and off-screen) and their experiences constructed youth fandom as a discursive site for the creative imagining of freedom and empowerment. And both contributed to making and screening of the industrializing and modernizing city that was 1960s Hong Kong.