The Missing Period in Cantonese Cinema : 1949-1969

This project is a continuation of a special issue series entitled ‘The Missing Period in Chinese cinemas, 1949-1979’, published by the Journal of Chinese Cinemas between 2010 and 2011. The Principal Investigator (Dr. Vivian Lee) of the current project guest-edited the volume on Hong Kong cinema. The series was well-received as it filled an important gap in Chinese cinema research, since existing English-language scholarship predominantly focuses on the early 1980s and beyond. The present study surveys the historical development of Cantonese cinema in Hong Kong during the period 1949-1969, when Cantonese cinema went through cycles of rapid growth and decline before its eventual ‘revival’ in the early seventies. As a regional cinema heavily reliant on overseas revenue, Cantonese cinema during this period was subject to the (trans)national cultural politics in different reception contexts. A working premise of this study is that the twenty years before the dramatic comeback of Cantonese-language films in the 1970s can be considered as the ‘classical period’ of Cantonese cinema, and the films from this period exhibit important stylistic, linguistic, and generic distinctions from later works. The Cantonese cinema during this period therefore constitutes a distinct cinematic tradition that came to an end in around 1969. The generally perceived revival of Hong Kong Cantonese films in the early 1970s, arguably, is a completely different kind of cinema in terms of visual style, genre types, subject matter, and conventions. Another under-researched area in existing scholarship on Cantonese cinema (and Chinese cinema as a whole) during this period is its distinctiveness and importance as an influential cinema in Cantonese as a regional language. The relationship between the transnational circulation of Cantonese-language films and culture across Southeast Asia is another ‘missing link’ that this study aims to recover. The existing literature has been overwhelmingly focused on Chinese cinema as a topic area that presupposes Mandarin as the preeminent screen language. Cantonese cinema as a distinctive cinema in its own right is regarded as a “dialect cinema”, and as an inferior cinema of interest only to local audiences within the dialect community. This project seeks to redress the critical neglect that has resulted from the stereotypical and derogatory view of pre-1970s Cantonese cinema as a topic of research. The main components of this project include a digital archive that will serve as a resource base for future research, and two research articles.