A Critical Study of The 70's Biweekly and Its Political Cinematic Practices

The 70s Bi-weekly, as a profound magazine that responded to the local and global socio-political context in the 1970s, has promoted not only political radicalism and their left-wing spectrum, but also cultural activism in various senses. Apart from publishing a vast amount of avant-garde literary works and also essays with strong political opinion, the magazine also reproduced a wide variety of cultural practices and action. While most scholarship have focused on theatre and performance art that the editorial members, such as Mok Chiu Yu have participated in, yet the cinematic practices which were derived from the magazine tended to be neglected.

This study, in this sense, aims to examine the cinematic practices that were related to The 70s Bi-weekly and articulate with the political ideology of the magazine. The key research subject “cinematic practices” includes two aspects: one is the major cinematic creation such as Letter to the Young Intellectuals of Hong Kong (1978) directed by Mok Chiu Yu; another one is the forms of circulation and reception — how the magazine collaborated with the Cine clubs like Phoenix Cine Club and engaging in the public. Therefore, this study shall explore how the magazine’s cultural reproduction performed as cultural activism through cinematic practices, drawing on its peculiar ideological imagination. To broaden the vision of a wider picture in the 1970s, the research subject shall be located in the context of coloniality and “the Cultural Cold War” in this study as well.