[2009 was celebrated as the 100th anniversary of Hong Kong movies, although as the following discussion points out, there was some controversy about that. On the occasion of the centennial, the Shanghai magazine "Xinmin Weekly" (新民周刊) convened a panel of experts for a free-ranging roundtable discussion of Hong Kong's film industry, to assess its glorious past and current state of decline, and speculate on its future. The following is a translation of the transcript of that discussion. The original was published in the Xinmin Weekly, June 3, 2009, and the original is online. Any further use of this translation should cite the original as well as The Chinese Mirror. For readers who want further data on specific films or filmmakers discussed, I have provided links to their Internet Movie Database entries, if contained there. Parenthetical comments were added to the transcript by the original Chinese editor, while bracketed comments like this paragraph have been added by the translator when he thought further explanation was desirable. Because of the length of the transcript, it will be posted here in five parts.]
At the centennial of Hong Kong films, is creativity dead?
Moderator's Introduction: What is up with Hong Kong cinema? What led its past glory to its present decline? Will there still be a purely "Hong Kong cinema" 20 years from now? On the occasion of the centennial of Hong Kong films, "Xinmin Weekly" brought in experts to take the pulse of Hong Kong cinema in a free-ranging round-table discussion of its pluses and minuses.
Our Guest Panel:
Lie Fu 列孚 (Hong Kong veteran film critic, film journal editor, author)
Sun Ganlu 孙甘露 (famous author)
Mao Jian 毛尖 (columnist, film scholar, East China Normal University Professor of Chinese as a Foreign Language)
Luo Gang 罗岗 (East China Normal University Professor of Chinese literature)
The Moderator: Qian Yijiao 钱亦蕉 (journalist); final editing by Wang Qian 王倩 (journalist)
The Origins of the "Hong Kong Film"
Moderator: This year, the movie centennial is being marked everywhere in Hong Kong; does Hong Kong film really have so long a history?
Lie Fu: Whether Hong Kong films do have a 100 year history is still controversial. "Stealing the Roast Duck"《偷烧鸭》(1909), which was funded by American Jew Benjamin Brodsky (the owner of the Shanghai "Asia Film Company"), and filmed by Hong Kong people, is generally accepted as the original Hong Kong film; but strictly speaking, it was "Rouge" [aka "Love is Dangerous"]《胭脂》(1925).
Mao Jian: To our way of thinking, Hong Kong movies didn't really emerge until after the 1950s. Hong Kong had been making movies, but until then there had not been an explicity "Hong Kong movie" concept.
Lie Fu: From the mainland perspective, the idea of "Hong Kong film" was indeed a post-1950s idea. Prior to that there had been no talk of Hong Kong film or non-Hong Kong film. The Nationalist government prohibited dialect movies for a time, but after Hong Kong and Guangdong filmmakers resisted this, they laid that policy to rest, especially in the Guangdong region where Hong Kong movies were being released constantly. Contacts between those two places were still very frequent at that time, with no talk of Hong Kong-Guangdong entry or exit, and contacts were the same as they were between Shanghai and Nanjing.
Mao Jian: For me, Hong Kong's earliest [movie] era consisted of Cantonese films and Huangmei. [黄梅戏: one of China's five major opera schools; also called "tea-picking opera"] And when Kwan Tak Hing (关德兴) began the "Wong Fei Hung" series in 1949, the "Hong Kong film" concept appeared clearly.
Luo Gang: Most of those early Hong Kong movies had little influence on the mainland because of the restrictions of the Cantonese dialect. At the end of the 1940s, many mainland filmmakers went to Hong Kong, and by taking their previous professions with them they established a mainland-Hong Kong relationship.
Lie Fu: The filmmakers who went to Hong Kong back then fell into two subsets. One group went there during the Anti-Japanese War, and most of them went back when the war ended. During the Nationalist-Communist civil war, another group went to Hong Kong, that would have been around 1947-1948. Later, some filmmakers were deported back to mainland China by the British authorities in Hong Kong due to their being "pro-Communist," for example, Cen Fan (岑范), who was sent back after he filmed his Shaoxing opera version of "Hong Lou Meng"《红楼梦》[Dream of Red Mansions].
Moderator: Why were they expelled from Hong Kong?
Lie Fu: It was during the Korean War, so the British government took this action.
Luo Gang: They were all left-wingers.
Twin Cities: Hong Kong-Shanghai exchanges
Moderator: Before liberation, Shanghai was China's movie center, and then in the 1950s a lot of Shanghai filmmakers remained in Hong Kong.
Luo Gang: During the time of competition between MP&GI and Shaw [mid-1950s to 1960s], Eileen Chang wrote many scripts dealing with the relationships between Shanghai people and Cantonese people. In “The Greatest Civil War on Earth"《南北和》(1961) and "The Greatest Wedding on Earth"《南北一家亲》(1962), it was like Hollywood movies in which white families have a black son-in-law, only these had a Guangdong girl finding a Shanghai guy. Actually, a large number of Shanghai people settled in Hong Kong, and while movies mixed together a lot of Cantonese speakers and Shanghai dialect speakers, they also showed how Shanghai people in Hong Kong looked down on the Cantonese. Why else would Huang Biyun (黄碧云) [Hong Kong woman writer] express so much disgust with Eileen Chang's [novel] "Little Reunion"? Shanghai people who went to Hong Kong at that time all boasted they were "high-level Chinese," while Cantonese speakers were at the bottom level of society. This was a clear psychological advantage, and this kind of advantage led directly up to Huang Biyun. Later, when Wong Kar-wai had characters speaking Shanghai dialect in "Days of Being Wild," it also expressed a kind of identity. At that time Shanghai was still the center, and Hong Kong may not yet have emerged as so lively.
Lie Fu: I don't believe in this comparison of the Shanghai and Cantonese dialects, nor do I think Shanghai people looked down on the Cantonese. There did exist an upper class of Chinese in Hong Kong, such as Ho Tong (何东) (the richest Chinese person at that time, and the largest shareholder in the Xinmin Company, Ltd., the first Hong Kong corporation totally invested by Hong Kong people), and he was a Cantonese speaker. At the end of the 1940s many Shanghai people came to Hong Kong, bringing with them capital and technology. And while the industrial development of Hong Kong was indeed related to the Shanghai people who came south, I don't think there was any "looking down on" situation. It was much like the scene in "The Greatest Wedding on Earth," where a Shanghai boy and Leung Sing-po's [梁醒波] daughter are talking romance, and Leung just has a very provincial attitude: how can a Cantonese girl marry an outsider? And the young man still wants in any way possible to get together with the Cantonese girl.
Sun Ganlu: This was really part of the social background behind the development of Hong Kong cinema. Did social change and mutual exchanges between the mainland and Hong Kong only affect Hong Kong cinema in capital and technology?
Lie Fu: Talent was very important. For instance, the directors at Shaw Brothers and at MP&GI at that time all had filming experience in Shanghai, at least as log keepers or assistant directors. Before their arrival Hong Kong films were still pretty crude, their production unrefined. They brought with them a strict system, and later formed the Shaw Brothers and MP&GI onto a larger scale, and more streamlined. They brought in the industrial concept, the idea that talent is very important to the film industry. Before that, the older generation of Hong Kong filmmakers were more profit-oriented, so they practiced what was called the "seven-day film" (turning out one movie a week).
Moderator: The arrival of Shanghai filmmakers was really a stimulus for the maturation of Hong Kong movies.
Lie Fu: The Shaw Brothers, who had been making movies in Shanghai for some years, [as the Tianyi studio] left the mainland earlier to operate mainly in Southeast Asia as the Nanyang (南洋) Film Company, then changed their name in 1950 to the Shaw Brothers and Sons Film Company for their Hong Kong operations. Shaw Brothers and Sons became a theater operating and film distribution company, with Shaw Brothers providing production, distribution, and film studio "one stop" services. MP&GI had gone into Hong Kong a bit earlier than the Shaw Brothers, with their operations there headed by the Lu family of Malaysia's eldest son Loke Wan-tho (陆运涛), and had nothing to do with Shanghai as far as investment was concerned. Recently the Hong Kong Film Archive held an Evan Yang (易文) film retrospective. Yang was from the start the commanding general at MP&GI, his chief subject matter being middle class urban life. Evan Yang had been educated in Shanghai, went to Taiwan after 1949, then went to Hong Kong to make movies. Other directors who came from Shanghai, like Zhu Shilin and Fei Mu, also made a lot of movies in Hong Kong.
Moderator: In other words, Hong Kong production studios at that time were mainly from Southeast Asia, while the filmmakers were from the mainland.
Mao Jian: Before liberation a lot of Shanghai studios had branch offices in Hong Kong.
Lie Fu: There were also plenty of companies that were first in Hong Kong, then went into Shanghai. For example, the Minxin company was established first in Hong Kong, and Li Minwei opened a Shanghai branch soon after that. Later, his company merged into the Lianhua Film Company in Shanghai, and the Minxin studio in Hong Kong became a Lianhua subsidiary. So the relationship between Hong Kong movies and Shanghai movies was a very close one, right up until Hong Kong Mandarin films disappeared.
[In Part 2: Hong Kong films enter the mainland market]
