Cinema Before Nation: Historiographical Journeys into ‘Transnational Cinema’ in Pre-war Southeast Asia
Felicia Chan (University of Manchester)
This paper takes the city-state of Singapore as a starting point from which to extrapolate broader questions for national cinemas, film historiographies and comparative histories. Singapore achieved self-governance, then full independence from the British between 1959 and 1965 and its post 1990 ‘new wave’ cinema has tended to locate 1965 as the starting point when conceptualising both its national history and the history of its national cinema production. However, prior to 1965, Singapore had a thriving film industry both in production and exhibition. It was the centre of Malay-language film production in the region for decades, as well as a lucrative market for Hong Kong and Chinese films due to its large Chinese diaspora. Many Hollywood films were also screened there. In addition, colonial Singapore (1819-1959) also provided the exotic backdrop for a number of Hollywood, Bollywood, European, and Chinese films from the 1920s through the 1950s. In other words, there was a thriving film culture that belies the rhetoric of a ‘cultural desert’ postulated by cultural critics in the post-independence era. Through a selection of early films made in and about Singapore in the pre-war period, my paper contends that to think productively about ‘national cinemas’, or even a ‘transnational cinema’ in Southeast Asia, a region shaped by postcolonial, postwar and Cold War geopolitics, is to not only think comparatively of the larger transnational regional and global flows within and without the nation, but also to consider what I call a cinema before nation.
Crazy Bumpkins and City Slickers: Sowing Seeds for the Hong Kong New Wave in Shaw Brothers’ 1970s Comedies
Fraser Elliott (University of Edinburgh)
The arrival of the Hong Kong New Wave in 1978 is understood as a significant evolution of the region’s cinema of earlier eras. Incorporating their experience from television production, New Wave directors introduced ways of creatively developing the region’s commercial, genre productions while centering Hong Kong and its residents’ experiences: prioritising urban, on-location shooting and Cantonese-language, localised narratives. While English-language scholarship has noted the movements precedents – from the locally-focussed political filmmaking of Lung Kong or the innovative genre work of King Hu’s wuxia films – the Shaw Brothers studio is generally understood as the antithesis of the New Wave.
Shaw Brothers is best remembered for its transnational, Mandarin-language, studio-shot, martial arts productions but it did, perhaps surprisingly, produce a number of films in the early 1970s that carry many of the formal and topical hallmarks of the New Wave, while predating that movement by a few years. In this paper I will detail this trend through a focus on the collaborations of director John Lo Mar and Singaporean comedians Yau Feng and Wang Sha: the Crazy Bumpkins trilogy (1974 – 1976) and The Happy Trio (1975). These films – dubbed in Cantonese, shot on-location in urban Hong Kong – focus on hyper-local themes affecting Hong Kong’s working classes, from police corruption to the contemporary housing crisis, depicted formally in ways generally attributed to those working later in the decade. I suggest in this paper that these films prompt a reassessment of the contexts out of which the New Wave emerged and their relationship to earlier, transnational production. Because such reassessment is only possible thanks to the restoration and release of lesser-known Shaw Brothers films by Celestial Pictures the paper will also consider the role of circulation in the historical processes through which the histories of Hong Kong’s popular cinema are remembered and codified in English-language academia.
Ebola Syndrome (1996) and the Marginalisation of Popular Tastes
Andy Willis (University of Salford)
Violent and sexually charged, Hong Kong’s Category III films are the stuff of cult movie fans dreams and serious critics nightmares. In this paper I will explore the encroaching marginalisation of Category III films in the contemporary writing about Hong Kong film histories. Given the particular context of Hong Kong film production, one that saw many category III works find success at the box-office, it is therefore necessary to revisit and examine again some of the key works of this era. In this regard filmmaker Herman Yau offers a useful case study. Today, Yau is a filmmaker whose work today exists in what I would describe as a liminal space between the unacceptable low brow taste of category III film production and the on-going assimilation of such popular filmmaking via credibility that comes with the bestowing of awards, such as that of Best Actor for Anthony Wong’s performance in category III film The Untold Story (1993) at the Hong Kong film awards, and through the application of middlebrow critical approaches such as authorship. In Yau’s case this is perhaps best reflected in the Hong Kong film festival’s 2007 retrospective, which saw David Bordwell describe him as ‘a unique and energizing presence on the Hong Kong scene’. Through a consideration of Yau’s Ebola Syndrome, I will discuss the shifting, and often contradictory, positions of such violent and transgressive works.