Investigating Hong Kong Alternative Cinema: The Formation of Cinephilias in the late 1960s

Cinephilia is generally known as the feverish love of cinema.[1] In Hong Kong during the 1960s, such affection towards cinema was entangled with the complex sensation and sentiments revolving around Chinese nationalism (“Cultural China”), the British colonial rule and locality during the contesting ideologies in the Cultural Cold War and demonstrated in wide ranging practices. As Thomas Elsaesser proposed, cinephilia began with “topographically site-specific” and “a detour of place and space, a shift in register and a delay in time.”[2] It is corresponding to the rise of popular media, urban development (moviehouse in the public space) and the formation of the intellectuals (cine club clusters) in post-war modernity. The cinephilia in Hong Kong alternative cinema has been invented in several ways: political aesthetics, cultural diplomacy and the identity configuration. One is the fancy for the European arthouse cinema which referred to the notion of “film as art” at the promise of modernism. Another thread is the reaction to the social reality with the reception of film art, which testified as the “film as social practice.” The latter can be found in the conjuncture of cinephilia with the making of the intellectual via the film section of The Chinese Student Weekly (CSW), cine clubs and the production of alternative cinema. My key inquiry in this article, therefore, shall be: how can we historicize and contextualize cinephilia with the praxis of the intellectual and cine clubs in the structure of the Cultural Cold War?  

The context of Hong Kong cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, indeed, was inextricably intertwined with the sociopolitical structure of colonial rule and the cultural production of Cold War, which influenced not only the film industry, but also cinephile culture and the emergence of alternative cinema. Hong Liu and Michael Szonyi have stressed the importance of regional diversity during the Cold War, arguing that a “shift away from diplomacy toward culture allows for the exploration of the Cold War history from a transnational as well as a comparative perspective,” challenging the bipolar (US vs. USSR) framework of many existing studies.[3] Recent scholarship on the “Cultural cold war” (wenhua lengzhan) has explored the complexities of the conflict’s cultural production and reproduction in various contextualized regions, in particular to the area of Global South.[4] While Hong Kong existed within the cultural and sociopolitical spheres of British colonial rule, US cultural diplomacy, and Chinese nationalist legacy during the Cold War era, its cultural production cannot be adequately framed through the conventional dichotomy that dominated discourse around the Cultural Cold War with its liminal geopolitical position. According to the historian Poshek Fu, he stated that the case of Hong Kong was different from other regions in Asia like Vietnam and Malaysia—there were not any “hot war” in Hong Kong including armed conflicts or anti-colonialist movement during the period of the Cold War.[5] He explained,

“The Cold War and the Chinese civil war converged in the crossroads of British Hong Kong. It became a base for the opposing powers’ cultural and propaganda war to win the hearts and minds of members of the Chinese diaspora scattered across Asia, especially Southeast Asia.”[6] (Fu, East Meets West, 2).

Such peculiar specificity of the Cultural Cold War in Hong Kong has been operated throughout the trans-border cultural and economic exchange, and the cultural production in accordance with the entanglement of locality and the historical contingencies. While most scholarly studies focus on the correlation of the Cultural Cold War with the film industry. For instance, the role of the right-leaning Shaw Brothers and Cathay Studio or the leftwing studios, such as Great Wall, Feng Huang and Sun Luen, within Cold War cultural production. Poshek Fu, for example, investigated the Mandarin film industry in British Hong Kong and “its entanglement of film and media production, contents, and distribution constituted a key agent in Asia’s cultural Cold War.”[7] Another critical study of articulating cinephilia with the Cultural Cold War in Asian context falls into Sangjoon Lee’s research of the Asian Cinema Network. He suggested that the transnational collaboration of Asian film cultures in Cold War time was highly conditioned by the support of US institutions, such as Asian Foundation.[8] He further proposed the “anticommunist motion picture producers’ alliance” under the “US-designed ‘free Asia’ motion picture network in Cold War Asia.”[9]

Hong Kong is undeniably one of the vital and active agents in such a framework. However, the discursive position of alternative cinema and the reshaping of modernity within this context has been neglected due to the dispersed documentation and misrecognition of the alternative narratives of Hong Kong culture. The formation of alternative cinema can offer a new agency to delineate the heterogenous senses of historical narratives, by excavating the community rooted in such cultural specificity. Furthermore, re-assessing the regional history and the contextual cultural production can challenge the colonial perspective towards the Cultural Cold War with a new scope of scholarship in the Global South. In this study, therefore, I shall contextualize the formation of the alternative cinema and its cinephilia in the structure of Cultural Cold War of Hong Kong, by articulating the negotiation among US cultural diplomacy, modernity, the making of intellectuals, colonial governance, and the film industry in order to reframe the discursive proposition of the alternative cinema and the cinephilia.  

Intellectuals, cine clubs and alternative cinema

The importance for us to revisit alternative cinema and its cinephilia is to re-examine the shaping of film history by reversing the point-of-view towards the spectatorship and the community forming around the audience and practitioner. The origins of cinephilic intellectual discourse in Hong Kong can be traced to editorial networks like the CSW, composed of “southbound Chinese intellectuals” who migrated after 1949. Steeped in cultural nationalism inherited from the May Fourth Movement, these diasporic thinkers saw cultivating Chinese traditions as their duty. However, the 1967 riots challenging British rule, led in part by communists, revealed divisions between the intellectual community and social realities on the ground. As unrest showed both the nationalist ideals and the colonial violence lacked resonance, cinephilia too began transforming beyond cultural propaganda. As Victor Fan examined, the post-1967 stage, CSW has become “a public sphere where Hong Kong’s relationship with China and Chineseness could be negotiated.”[10] With the mistrust to the colonial governance and the CCP after the 1967 riots, Fan further interrogated: “Hong Kong filmmakers and critics had to confront the question: What if both capitalism and socialism have already failed?” (Fan, “Rhetoric,” 331).  

In the aftermath of the riot, the younger editors of CSW redirected energies toward cultivating local culture and identity. Actively participating in groups like the 1969 Chong Kin Experimental College poetry workshop, they cultivated community amid societal divisions. [11] Distinguishing themselves from predecessors through bottom-up models of engagement with both colonial rule and emergent Chinese nationalism, this post-war generation navigated complex conditions of the Cultural Cold War from the grassroots. Born to diasporic intellectual families yet coming of age under dual colonial-Chinese cultural currents in Hong Kong, the editors related uniquely to their environment. Cultivating manifold bonds in these formative years enabled adopting a collaborative approach when representing locals to governing forces unlike older generations' estrangement. Their practices negotiated socio-political fragmentation and dissent on the ground, building cultural infrastructure that embraced hybridity and community-led solutions. This demonstrated evolving articulations of cinephilia able to adapt discourse for changing circumstances through dynamic, localized expressions of identification.

The arrival of inexpensive 16mm and 8mm cameras introduced CSW editors to novel modes of cultural production and representation. Experimenting formally with these new media, they initiated an alternative, artisanal cinephilia.[12] These experimental creations conveyed personal artistic visions while also serving collective cultural functions. Responding contextually through artistic innovation across mediums, they negotiated prevailing sociopolitical conditions and entrenched power structures. CSW intellectuals' engagement with local experiences expressed sentiments toward social reality, attributing rebellious motivations to their works. Challenging dominant film industry conventions and modes of production through creative re-appropriation of technologies, they subverted mass media orthodoxies. Immersing themselves in the resources, potentials, and politics of new media afforded fertile ground for formal play and oblique commentary upon pressing issues. This pivot demonstrated cinephilia's adaptive prowess and ability to nurture discourse amid shifting circumstances through nimble artistic re-envisioning.[13] Law Kar, who was the editor-in-charge of the film section at that time, shot Accident (Yi Wai) with Shek Kei (who was a major writer for the journal’s film section) in 1966. This was one of the earliest experimental and alternative cinematic works made in Hong Kong.[14] This group of editors who created experimental film works were strongly influenced by Western modernisms, especially the cinematic art of French New Wave (Law, “Gang Tai dianying,” 21–22). They embraced a new sensibility and temporality of art cinematic language by borrowing techniques and narrative strategies from the French New Wave such as the jump cut, the long take, and juxtaposition of images, which were vastly different from the traditional cinematic forms of the local film industry.

Other significant alternative cinematic works including Routine (quanxian, 1969) which shed light on the sense of impotent of the youngsters by adopting a single long take, and The Beggar (qichi, 1970) which invited a political criminal Su Sou-chung to play a role of the blind beggar wandering on the street (expressing the anger towards the colonial government). These works turned the cinephilia into a social critique with an intellectual perspective. The flowering of experimental films, although they were regarded as elementary works with limited circulation and audience, still enriched the discussion and imagination of what alternative cinema could be.

Another key motivation for these moving image art creations is the formation of cultural clusters connected to the cultural Cold War context that nurtured the culture and formation of the alternative cinephilia. The Union Press (youlian chubanshe) and CSW have initiated a wide variety of cultural events and organizations in order to fight for its cultural position and capacity to exercise the discursive power over the ideological contest.[15] One of the affiliated publications, College Life Monthly (daxue shenhuo), started the College Cine Club (dayinghui) in 1967, and promoted the alternative film culture through regular screenings and publications, and motivated young people to create cinematic works with the new camera. Another important cine club, Studio One (diyi yingshi) was formed in 1962. Holding its meetings in City Hall, the club screened Western arthouse cinema regularly and nurtured young intellectuals’ fundamental notions of modernist art forms and avant-garde cinema (Law, “Zao Qi,” 20–21). These cine clubs served as a cultural cluster and collective of young intellectuals who became creators and producers with a cinephilic sensibility. More vitally, in 1968, the cine club launched its first “Presentation of Works by Members of College Cine Club” (dayinghui huiyuan zuopin fabiaohui), which showcased experimental works by the cine club members.

The formation of cine club culture was facilitated by the conditions of the cultural Cold War since cultural clusters or collectives were valuable in promoting specific ideologies and wielding discursive power in a colonial and Cold War context. Although little information about the beginnings of this cine club is available, it could be deduced that College Life Monthly and its associated cine club were expected to reinforce the appreciation of modernist aesthetic values stemming from Western cultural influence within the discourse of youth cultural groups by screening the arthouse cinema that were rarely showed in Hong Kong at that time. The significance of cine clubs—dismantling, circulating and receiving the cinematic experience in a collective sense—subverted the dominated hegemonic model of film production and institution. In the context of the Cultural Cold War in Hong Kong, the cine clubs can be regarded as the collective cultural actions that were led by the intellectual groups.  

US cultural diplomacy, modernity, and geopolitics

The publisher The Union Press and its vital publication CSW, supported by “US dollar culture” (meiyuan wenhua) as generally recognized which refers to the monetary support offered by the Asia Foundation collaborating with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and US government in order to promote and sustain the rightwing of the political spectrum among the strategic regions, circulated rightwing ideology through a range of cultural forms and practices such as literary writings and cine clubs.[16] The prominence of CSW, which was started in 1952 (and ceased in 1974), as a key site of Cold War-era cultural production which combined the belief in and imagination of “Cultural China” or the notion that the diaspora Chinese all shared a utopian Chinese cultural imagination and legacy despite their distinct governments, with the ideology of anti-Communism, circulated their political beliefs and criteria of cultural value through a series of cultural actions after the constitution of Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1949.[17] CSW has become a widespread and notable publication among the young generation particularly—in its peak time, the number of readership has reached to thirty thousands.[18]  

Hong Kong was regarded as one of the key strategic frontiers for resistance against the communist power in the Far East region.[19] As a key circulation and outlet of US cultural diplomacy, CSW has played a role of configuring a distinct sense of “Cultural Nationalism” with the dissemination of modernity in the context of Hong Kong in two different layers. First, performing as a continuum for developing a pioneer model of the public sphere from the perspective of the youngsters, CSW gathered a cluster of young intellectuals and created a site for public opinion and thus publics making. One example is the account of the film section that has shaped the notion of cinema and formulated the cinephilia. The film section of CSW was instrumental for fostering film appreciation and the field of film criticism.[20] These practices have shaped a sense of modernist aesthetic value by defining the quality of film following the standard of Western notions of film as art, introducing classical or recent arthouse cinema to local audiences, and translating Western film criticism in the early days of the publication.[21] While film was conventionally classified as “entertainment” or “education” in public discourse, this particular judgement of the film section reconfigured the notion of cinema as entertainment to cinema as art with the sense of modernity and the Western cultural influence through the cultural diplomacy.[22] Second, the media-technological advance as a key manifestation about how modernity has shaped the cinephilia is remarkable in the case of Hong Kong.

The model of US cultural diplomacy, however, has been operated differently in other regions. For example, the United States Information Services (USIS) has set up a film division in Taiwan in 1946 and has been hosting film screenings regularly.[23] Taiwan, as another important region in the geopolitical structure during the Cold War, has developed a cinephilia of alternative cinema and influenced Hong Kong in a way as well. According to Law Kar, the influential cultural magazine that embraced modernism and avant-garde in Taiwan—Theatre (juqiang) has presented experimental films in 1966 which had made a big impact on Hong Kong.[24] Even in the 1960s and the early 1970s, there were screenings of experimental student films by the United States Information Agency (USIA) in Taiwan which blossomed the scene of alternative cinema culture and cinephilia.[25] Interestingly, there were no specific film screenings held by US cultural diplomacy directly due to the balancing role of the colonial government. In other words, the relationship among the cinephilia, US cultural diplomacy and modernity in Hong Kong were incorporated with the negotiation with the (collaborative) colonial rule and the cultural nationalism towards China.

Film industry and the amateur filmmaking

Even though cinephilia was deeply rooted in the emergence of alternative cinema, interestingly, it also led to transgressive engagements with the local film industry. The filmmakers themselves and most of the critics framed these alternative cinematic works as “amateur films” as they were “non-professional” and “not up to standard.”[26] Adopting the sense of “film as art” and embracing the film industry model, the alternative works were therefore seen as only “practice works” and not legitimized as the categorization of “experimental cinema” or “alternative cinema” by these filmmakers and critics in such context. However, like Jonathan Walley mentioned, “amateur films,” as alternative filmmaking, “breaks with other filmmaking traditions in which production is organized according to a hierarchical division of labour.”[27] As breaking the hegemonic sense of auteurism and other conventional perception that dominated in film study and film theory, the study of cinephilia can offer a new capacity to revisit the underrated practices and other connected threats that are crucial for us to expand the understanding of film culture.

There was a close connection with the film industry embedded in these “amateur practices” which shaped the alternative cinephilia in such a context. As many studies of the development of the Hong Kong film industry during the Cold War have shown, studios were divided into a rightwing bloc (including the Shaw Brothers Studios and Cathay/MP & GI) and a leftwing bloc (including Great Wall, Feng Huang and Sun Luen).[28] Beyond the independent amateur creations and practices, these young practitioners have engaged in the local film industry to various extents. They did not regard the relationship between experimental film and the local industry as a binary opposition, but rather seized the opportunities to create film or moving image works in both contexts. For instance, the local writer Xixi described how passionate cinephiles were committed in various roles in the 1960s:

A motivation to participate in the film sector emerged after immersing into arthouse cinema. There were various ways of participation. For example, Lam Lin-tung and Kam Ping-hing travelled to Italy and joined film production directly. Tam Ka-ming and Ku Cong-ng wrote film criticism and submitted it to The Chinese Student Weekly. Luk Lei and I helped Xianggang yinghua to interview the film actress in the film studio, and we could visit the film set as well. Shek Kei, John Woo and Law Kar created experimental works with a camera on the street, imitating Jean-Luc Godard (the leading figure of French New Wave).[29]

In this period, young intellectuals and creators developed a close relationship with the local film industry and even with broadcasters. John Woo joined Shaw Brothers in the early 1970s and later became an internationally known film director; Charles Ng Cheng-huan, who made The Righteousness of Rebellion (zaofan youl) in 1970, worked at Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB), reusing TVB newsreel footage in experimental moving-image works.[30] Law Kar recalled that a screenwriter for Shaw Brothers, Song Qi, noticed this group of young intellectuals and invited them to his home. He even invited them to be the screen playwright and Xixi has written the screenplay of Four Sisters (dailu nianhua) in 1967 (Law, “Jiang Tai,” 12). Moreover, as a competitor of Shaw Brothers, Cathay/MP & GI even more actively invited this group of young intellectuals, like Lam Lin-tung and Kam Ping-hing to work for them. The local film industry absorbed the young filmmakers of alternative film practices and offered resources for them to create on a larger scale. As some studies suggested, filmmakers moved between studios, creating fluidity even in a context of intense ideological conflict (Li, “Zuo You,” 94–95). For the young creators, alternative cinephilia served as a liminal space of film culture beyond a static film industry, and to reconcile the conflict between the industry’s ideological blocs. Thus, the boundaries between alternative cinephilia and film studio system and between experimental form and standard narrative were blurred under the regime of Cultural Cold War uncannily. In this regard, the relationship between alternative cinephilia and the film industry became dialectical, with each helping to cultivate the other, and configure a heterogenous sense of film histories that have been rarely told.