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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.

This chapter focuses on the Hong Kong film industry, which has been guided by the principle of positive non-interventionism. It describes the Shaw Brothers, which was built under the Hong Kong version of laissez-faire economic policy in the 1960s. It also discusses the flexibility and relaxed atmosphere that led studios to experiment with the Hong Kong film industry's unique need to satisfy transnational Chinese communities in East and Southeast Asia, which helped it quickly gain global currency. The chapter emphasizes Hong Kong as one of the competing media capitals due to its status as a nexus for economic and cultural flows within and between Chinese societies through the twentieth century. It explores how the unprecedented growth of the Shaw Brothers in the 1960s paralleled Hong Kong's rising status as a financial center in the region.

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.

The formation and consolidation of the left-wing film apparatus in Hong Kong coincided with the foundation of the People’s Republic of China and increasingly proactive steps undertaken by the US and Taiwan governments in strengthening their positions in the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong. Beginning with an overview of the cultural landscape against the backdrop of intensifying KMT-CCP rivalry, the discussion will bring to light the systematic eff orts of the CCP in mobilizing the left-wing film community in Hong Kong as a branch of the Party’s “cultural brigade.” Th e formation and further extension of this network alongside the local and regional advancement of the right-wing’s film and cultural enterprises would have a far-reaching impact on the structure and practices of the Hong Kong film industry in years to come.

The Introduction contextualizes Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues both in the light of the many struggles for democracy in modern China since Republican times, and in the light of his own filmmaking career. It suggests that politically committed youth, and so-called revolutionaries, seeking social transformations in the post-imperial China depicted in this film, may well have parallels in contemporary Hong Kong especially post 1997. In addition to highlighting Tsui’s specific, and well-received, contributions in cinema, some social, political and cultural contexts, particularly related to questions of Chinese identity, culturation, citizenship and colonialism, together with some of the issues specific to contemporary Hong Kong and Sinophonic filmmaking, are raised in order to prepare the ground for situating five different acts of reading film (through multiple theoretical and analytical lenses) in the chapters to follow.

This chapter discusses significant trends in contemporary Hong Kong horror film including the growing importance of transnational co-productions, export markets, and a fertile cross-breeding of popular genres native to both Hong Kong and other East Asian cinema. It reveals how the Hong Kong film industry, previously threatened by such Hollywood blockbusters as Jurassic Park (1993) and The Matrix (1999), has attempted to move toward more regionally driven film production through the successful efforts of Filmko Pictures and its supernatural thriller Inner Senses (2002). It also describes how regional film industries such as Hong Kong's have successfully crafted self-consciously pan-Asian films via the horror genre, and have helped transform production strategies.

This chapter recounts how Chinese cinema developed rapidly in the new era and how filmmakers were able to denounce the brutality of the Gang of Four during the Cultural Revolution. It details the beginning of China's Fifth Generation cinema as the first postwar film movement in China to place Chinese cinema on the map of world cinema. It also discusses how the late 1970s brought major transformations in the regional film cultures and industries, such as the Hong Kong International Film Festival, which was launched at the City Hall in in June 1977. The chapter refers to The Man from Hong Kong as the Australian film industry's first attempt to collaborate with its Asian counterparts in the early 1970s. It explains how the entire Filipino film industry had to struggle with the Philippines's first lady, Imelda Marcos, and her ambitious project, the First Manila International Film Festival.

The “Introduction” describes the theoretical and practical understanding of what metacinema is and does in the context of Chinese filmmaking. Metacinema is a kind of textual reflexivity that foregrounds the mechanisms involved in the creation or reception of a film. Consideration of metacinema reveals a discourse on film arising from the films themselves. A key, but often overlooked, metacinematic category is genre: collective semiotic codes adopted, adapted, updated, or subverted that allow another vantage on the ways films influence each other. In the context of Chinese cinemas, this discourse ricochets amongst and between the industries of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the PRC. Further, focus on film audiences within films allows us to theorize the personal and social effects film watching has on viewers. The films provide models for ways of being in the world that characters within the films, and by analogy audiences in the real world, adopt, update, and subvert in their own lives.

Acclaimed New Wave director Ann Hui held a preview screening of her film, The Way We Are, at the University of Hong Kong shortly after its premiere at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in April 2008. This low-budget feature deals with the quotidian lives of the residents of Tin Shui Wai, a satellite town in Hong Kong's New Territories near the border with the People's Republic of China. Ann Hui, however, takes an interest in the trials faced by the ordinary members of the community. This new film prompts a look back at Ann Hui's career, her interest in social issues, and her choice to work within Hong Kong commercial genres while attempting to remain true to a more personal approach to subjects often shunned by the mainstream film industry.

This chapter examines the hybrid origins of Hong Kong's Huangmei opera film. It shows how the Chinese Communist Party's demand for a cinema showcasing the national cultural past paradoxically facilitated the cross-border circulation of an indigenous, vernacular operatic tradition—featuring feisty rural women, female voice-over chanting, and frequent cross-dressing—into the modernizing idioms of Hong Kong's film industry. Under colonial suppression of local nationalist objectives, the resulting hybridized genre carried a vital female imaginary in nostalgic Chinese wrappings. In contrast to Indian cinema's culture of emotion, female performativity contests Chinese conventions of restraint, opening up imaginary female power. This is supported by the impact of the female voice on point-of-view shooting, spatial organization, and narrative structure, foregrounding, against Western feminism's focus on the male gaze, a female counter-gaze within a patriarchal drama of conflicting desires.

The Killer and other Hong Kong films directed by John Woo are frequently cited as important inspirations for certain filmmakers from the West. Quentin Tarantino heads this list, but among those influenced by Woo, Robert Rodriguez, Tony Scott, and Jim Jarmusch are sometimes mentioned. Much of the borrowing from Woo is superficial—two-handed gunning, doves flying—but in some cases, true homages are made, with Woo becoming a model much as Melville was for Woo himself. The question of influence becomes particularly vexed when considering work by more recent Hong Kong or Korean directors, including Kang Je-gyu and Park Chan-wook, arguably influenced by Woo, who may also react to films by Woo epigones like Tarantino Closer to home, Woo's film inspired some easy imitation, but it also seeded intriguing new growth in the form of several films by Johnnie To.

This chapter examines how the growth of specialised Asian film festivals (e.g. Busan, Hong Kong, Udine) participates in the development of a regional Asian cinema. It also considers the rise of digital distribution and exhibition of Asian cinema through online streaming models such as Viddsee. The chapter explores how alternative circuits of distribution respond to and in turn precipitate different audience consumption practices as filmmakers continue to seek ways of making films that will cross national markets.