Victor Fan
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781474440424
- eISBN:
- 9781474476614
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440424.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter is about the critical debate on what it meant by Hong Kong cinema after the 1967 Riots, and the historical context––both in the film industry and in politics––that shaped the contour and ...
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This chapter is about the critical debate on what it meant by Hong Kong cinema after the 1967 Riots, and the historical context––both in the film industry and in politics––that shaped the contour and topos of this debate. In this discourse, the question ‘What is Hong Kong cinema?’ was never raised or addressed directly. Very often, it was asked under the disguise of finding out what Chinese cinema was. Film critics between 1966 and 1978 worked through this problem by understanding how Hong Kong left-wing Cantonese filmmakers in the 1950s grappled with this question, and the anxieties such question had generated, both narratively and stylistically. Through their retrospective investigation, these critics retroactively theorised how Hong Kong cinema gradually individuated itself from Chinese cinema out of its long history of being politically ostracised, linguistically marginalised, and culturally despised by their Mainland counterparts.Less
This chapter is about the critical debate on what it meant by Hong Kong cinema after the 1967 Riots, and the historical context––both in the film industry and in politics––that shaped the contour and topos of this debate. In this discourse, the question ‘What is Hong Kong cinema?’ was never raised or addressed directly. Very often, it was asked under the disguise of finding out what Chinese cinema was. Film critics between 1966 and 1978 worked through this problem by understanding how Hong Kong left-wing Cantonese filmmakers in the 1950s grappled with this question, and the anxieties such question had generated, both narratively and stylistically. Through their retrospective investigation, these critics retroactively theorised how Hong Kong cinema gradually individuated itself from Chinese cinema out of its long history of being politically ostracised, linguistically marginalised, and culturally despised by their Mainland counterparts.
