Rethinking Transnational Chinese Cinemas by Jeremy E. Taylor

Author:Jeremy E. Taylor [Taylor, Jeremy E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Media Studies
ISBN: 9780415728324
Google: _lzongEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-25T05:05:13+00:00

‘Hong Kong is heaven’

Even in the midst of such changes, however, certain elements of the ‘new Amoy-dialect films’ suggested continuities with those that had been made earlier in the decade. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the spate of specifically Hong Kong-themed movies made from 1958 onwards.

In much the same vein as ‘semi-colonial’ Shanghai had done in the prewar years, Hong Kong emerged as the single most important site for commercial cultural production and entertainment for many parts of the Chinese-speaking world in the 1950s. Contrary to popular belief, this was not restricted to Cantonese-speaking sections of the Chinese diaspora. It included communities whose historical links with Hong Kong and its Cantonese hinterland had always been minimal. As we saw earlier, Hong Kong emerged as the home of the Amoy-dialect film industry thanks to a unique combination of events and trends: the ‘fall’ of the mainland to communism in 1949 and the influx of a small but significant community of middle-class refugees from Fujian; an existing entertainment, media and financial infrastructure which made it the perfect place for businesspeople from other parts of the Chinese diaspora to invest; and a position at the crossroads between the major sites of Hokkien cultural production and consumption (i.e., South East Asia and Taiwan).

Yet until the re-invigoration of the industry from 1957 onwards one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. In the vast majority of Amoy-dialect films prior to that year, little reference was ever made to Hong Kong itself. Hong Kong’s temples, parks and waterways certainly appeared in Amoy-dialect films, but only as approximations of the landscapes of ‘cultural China’ and imperial Quanzhou, and rarely as twentieth-century Asia. In the ‘new’ Amoy-dialect films, however, Hong Kong became more than just a space within which movies could be shot. The city itself came to star in many of the films. Indeed, despite the fact that its Hokkien-speaking community was demographically tiny in comparison to the Cantonese majority, Britain’s Chinese colony assumed a central place in the ‘new Amoy-dialect films’ as film-makers portrayed it as a vibrant site of modernity for Hokkien speakers. Further, as film-makers made use of Hong Kong studios and streetscapes, and in line with a general sense in the 1950s that Hong Kong offered a ‘unique experience of openness’ unmatched in many other parts of east and South East Asia at the time (Wang 1999: 126), the city came to be reinvented on the Amoy-dialect screen as a paragon of urban modernity.

Ironically, the reasons for this were typically Amoy-dialect. The industry may have benefited from the new influx of Singapore and Philippine money, but the budgetary habits it had developed in earlier years continued to shape Amoy-dialect film-making in the late 1950s. It was cheap and easy to film Hong Kong streetscapes when making a romantic comedy, crime thriller or melodrama about life in modern, urban Asia. And it was for this reason that films of this period would often begin with what might be described as on-screen travelogues of Hong Kong.

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