The Missing Period in Cantonese Cinema, 1949-1969

This project is a continuation of a special issue series entitled ‘The Missing Period inChinese cinemas, 1949-1979’, published by the Journal of Chinese Cinemas between2010 and 2011. The Principal Investigator (Dr. Vivian Lee) of the current project guest-editedthe volume on Hong Kong cinema. The series was well-received as it filled animportant gap in Chinese cinema research, since existing English-language scholarshippredominantly focuses on the early 1980s and beyond.The present study surveys the historical development of Cantonese cinema in HongKong during the period 1949-1969, when Cantonese cinema went through cycles of rapidgrowth and decline before its eventual ‘revival’ in the early seventies. As a regionalcinema heavily reliant on overseas revenue, Cantonese cinema during this period wassubject to the (trans)national cultural politics in different reception contexts. A workingpremise of this study is that the twenty years before the dramatic comeback ofCantonese-language films in the 1970s can be considered as the ‘classical period’ ofCantonese cinema, and the films from this period exhibit important stylistic, linguistic,and generic distinctions from later works. The Cantonese cinema during this periodtherefore 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 (andChinese cinema as a whole) during this period is its distinctiveness and importance asan influential cinema in Cantonese as a regional language. The relationship between thetransnational circulation of Cantonese-language films and culture across Southeast Asiais another ‘missing link’ that this study aims to recover. The existing literature has beenoverwhelmingly focused on Chinese cinema as a topic area that presupposes Mandarinas the preeminent screen language. Cantonese cinema as a distinctive cinema in its ownright is regarded as a “dialect cinema”, and as an inferior cinema of interest only to localaudiences within the dialect community. This project seeks to redress the critical neglectthat has resulted from the stereotypical and derogatory view of pre-1970s Cantonesecinema as a topic of research. The main components of this project include a digitalarchive that will serve as a resource base for future research, and two research articles.