Birth of the activiSt documentary
By the 1960s and 1970s Hong Kong’s old left-wing patriotic cinema and social-realist school of the pre-war years and the 1950s had fallen into decline as a result of institutional restructuring, accompanying the rapid develop-ment of large-scale capitalist enterprise in the city. In consequence, many of the local independent Cantonese film companies were superseded by better-financed and more technologically advanced Mandarin-language film studios, notably the Shaw Brothers from Shanghai and the Cathay Company from South-East Asia. Inspired by the commercialism of Hollywood, these com-panies produced entertaining films on a lavish budget, mixing martial arts with historical or contemporary romance and generally eschewing sensitive social image issues. Instead of portraying sentimental or tragic scenes of social hardship, as in previous decades, they conveyed modern energy, glamour and excitement in their films.
One of the first western academics to write on Hong Kong cinema, I. C.
Jarvie, described this as a period of ‘Mandarinisation of Hong Kong cinema’;
for him it represented a crossover phenomenon that succeeded in creating a robust market among both the traditional audience and the younger gen-eration.1 This new cinema became enormously popular and successful at the box office, eclipsing the old independent Cantonese film companies. In 1970 former Shaw Brothers executive Raymond Chow formed his own company Golden Harvest, producing the internationally popular Bruce Lee Kung Fu
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films, the Hui Brothers comedies, and later the films of local Kung Fu star Jackie Chan. Bruce Lee’s iconic status as Kung Fu superstar, and his own widely publicised ‘Jeet Kune Do’ martial arts school, transformed the local film industry into the major worldwide exporter of Kung Fu movies. Lee rose to international prominence after the release of The Big Boss (1971), Fist of Fury (1972) and Enter the Dragon (1973). Despite the untimely death of the martial artist at the height of his fame, his films continued to boost his reputa-tion and spawn imitators, many of them paying tribute to Lee’s acting and phi-losophy alike. Furthermore, as a consequence of the enormous popularity of Hong Kong-born martial arts stars and also the local taste for comedy movies, the pendulum began to swing back towards Cantonese language after a period of Mandarin-language domination.
The first major international documentary to explore Lee’s work and short life was The Real Bruce Lee, directed and edited by Jim Markovic in 1973.
Interesting as the film may be for the Bruce Lee fan on account of its inclusion of rare archival footage of the young Lee acting with his father in Kid Cheung (1947) and as a small child in San Francisco and Hong Kong, it cannot be described as a genuine Hong Kong documentary. Indeed, its principal motiva-tion seems to have been related to attempts to launch the careers of now long-forgotten Bruce Lee imitators. Four Hong Kong biopics of uneven quality were also released over the following few years to exploit the insatiable interest in Lee’s sadly abbreviated career. These were Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story, directed by Shut Dik, and Bruce Lee: The Man, the Myth, directed by Ng See-yuen, both made in 1976; Leonard Ho’s more balanced, in-depth retro-spective, Bruce Lee, the Legend (1977), which incorporated extensive footage of Lee’s life and even rare shots taken at his funeral; and Wong Sing-lui’s 1978 documentary, He’s a Legend, He’s a Hero, which concentrates on investigating lesser-known details of the star’s life and enigmatic death.
During this period conventional film distribution channels, and thus access to public screening, were not open to independent film-makers, and inde-pendent documentary-makers were conspicuous by their absence. As Stephen Teo has pointed out, the movie business and local productions were largely influenced by the decisions of film distributors and exhibitors, and not by movie producers.2 Producers and directors generally found it hard to secure finance for film-making unless the projects had the backing of major studios.
Close integration between the Cantonese film companies and the distributors was lacking, and the result was a lack of adventurous or genuinely alternative films in this era, since such films stood very little chance of getting a main-stream release. Thus, as regards the documentary mode, travel documentaries designed to promote tourism in China remained dominant in terms of cinema exhibition, although the production of these had stalled during the upheaval caused by the Cultural Revolution.
Independent local film-making during this period can, therefore, be regarded as a niche activity, and most keen amateur interest was focused on European art cinema, particularly on French film-makers from the Nouvelle Vague such as Godard. While most films were made in 16 mm format, a relatively portable and inexpensive alternative to 35 mm film, filming was still considered an expensive project for those who had little or no financial backing. Another result of this lack of finance was that films were shot and then were often discarded or remained undeveloped. In most cases, film-makers simply did not value what they had shot as sufficiently important to keep. However, film-friendly new publications targeting a younger generation of film aficionados, such as Chinese Student Weekly and College Life, began to provide Hong Kong-born intellectuals with new insights into art films, and encouraged the creation of alternative and more diversified cultural products.
While documentary productions were still very uncommon in this era, the increasing awareness of film criticism and appreciation of European art films helped to forge an alternative film culture, and consequently stirred interest in engaging in a contemporary realist social discourse. The ideological positions adopted and expressed in these and other publications became important in the thematic study of independent film-makers’ ideas and cinematic practices in Hong Kong.
Law Kar and Tang Shuxuan were among the most critically respected writers who emerged from this period, involving themselves in numerous independent film projects. Tang’s films of the 1960s and early 1970s were the focus of Law’s critical analysis, while in 1976 Tang founded Close Up, an intel-lectual periodical devoted to film and television criticism. The inter-relations between literary products and films, for instance, and the relationship between Tang, Law and the critic Lau Shing-hon, have been explored by Hector Rodriguez, in whose estimation these very diverse film-related cultural activi-ties fed into the discourses that led to the ‘New Wave’ in Hong Kong’s late 1970s and early 1980s film culture.3
As a vigorous advocate of the independent film-making scene, Law Kar demonstrated that the act of engaging in independent projects could be regarded as a declaration of creative independence from the mainstream film industry. Law Kar’s films include works that set him apart from those involved in the old-fashioned, mainstream film companies. His contribution to film criticism was followed by his participation in a milestone short activ-ist documentary in 1971, both as cameraman and editor. Law, along with two other cameramen, was invited by political activist Mok Chiu-yu to film the Diaoyu Islands protest organised by the Hong Kong Federation of Students.
The purpose of the demonstration was to urge the Chinese government to take action in reclaiming the islands that were historically claimed as Chinese terri-tory, yet ceded to Japan in 1895 under the treaty of Shimonoseki. The islands
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were officially ‘handed over’ to Japan by the United States in 1970 when it was thought they could be of strategic importance to a now pro-western government.
The documentary footage appears to have been intended as no more than a record of popular protest by young Hongkongers, expressing solidarity with what they saw as China’s legitimate claims to sovereignty. Indeed, this issue has never been satisfactorily resolved, and grievances over the Diaoyu Islands continue to affect China–Japan relations. The eventual moving-image docu-ment, funded by the Student Union of Hong Kong University, was entitled Protect Diaoyutai [Diaoyu Islands] Movement, a black and white silent film shot in 16 mm. It recorded the details of the protest on 10 April 1971, the conflicts between students and policemen, the dispersal by police officers using tear gas, and eventually the arrests of some of the protestors. The 15–minute film was screened under the title Changes in Hong Kong Society Through Cinema, and was included in the 12th Hong Kong International Film Festival in 1988. In the programme catalogue critic Stephen Teo comments on the qualities of this piece of activist film-making:
Seen today, the footage constitutes celluloid evidence of a students’
movement in Hong Kong which directly parallels those popularly seen in the West. Although the movement was largely inspired by the nation-alistic features of Mao Zedong-thought (which reflected the dominance of Maoist-inclined students in the movement), the political thrust of Diaoyutai was also a filtrated mixture of radical sentiments which expressed solidarity with student movements in the Western world opposing the Vietnam War and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, for example.4
The latter-day independent documentary film genre re-emerged in Hong Kong in the aftermath of these activist initiatives. Typically these films were necessarily rudimentary, but they shared common approaches with the direct cinema of Frederick Wiseman, and were also influenced by ‘situationist’
film-makers active in the west in the 1960s and 1970s, especially those who employed a sense of immediacy and spontaneity in their treatment of anar-chic individuals and large-scale anti-establishment actions. More film-makers participated in various kinds of film-making with the more affordable super 8 format, and more cinephiles could afford to buy equipment for production, post-production and exhibition, including a camera, editor, splicer, viewer and projector.5 Active film-makers and cameramen of this period include Cheung Kwok-ming, Cheung Kin and George Chang. The first-named of these created a studio with his own money and that of a few friends, and directed eight docu-mentary shorts during 1972–5, but unfortunately most of his films were lost.
Documentary enthusiast Lau Fung-kut was one of the few that consistently filmed short documentaries, later preserved in VHS format by the Hong Kong Film Archive, with titles such as Hong Kong’s Housing (1973), Protest (date not available), Eighty Seven Gods on the Wall (1973) and Diaries of Five Men (1973).
The 1970s, therefore, saw a considerable expansion in the number of would-be documentary film-makers from the younger generation, includ-ing many who had received a westernised education and aspired to express modern political ideas. The influence of local literary and cinematic institu-tions and the increasing number of events provided by such organisainstitu-tions proved both practical and theoretical. Starting from 1973 the Phoenix Cine Club offered competitions, regular screenings, equipment rental services, and small-scale film-making training. In the late 1970s, Law Kar, Tsui Hark and Clifford Choi Kai-kwong formed the Hong Kong Film Cultural Centre, which offered film appreciation and production classes, with ‘New Wave’ directors Ann Hui, Tsui Hark and Allen Fong as their associate speakers.6
Perhaps the most significant development of this period was the found-ing of the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) in 1976, which has since blossomed into one of the key film festivals in Asia, and has, from the very beginning, represented an important showcase for local independ-ent film-makers. This festival has established a reputation for programming important international films as well as showcasing local Hong Kong films.
Since its inception, the festival was organised under the umbrella of various governmental departments up until 2004 when the Hong Kong International Film Festival Society was officially established as an independent, charitable organisation to manage the development of the HKIFF. Crucially for the longer-term development of Hong Kong documentary cinema, the HKIFF among its various categories for international awards now includes a Best Documentary Category.
For the most part, though, independent documentary film during this decade, with the exception of very limited exercises in independent newsreel activity, represented more of a potential genre, predicated on the efforts of amateur film buffs and activists, than a real presence in cinemas. Prominent film-makers of the period produced significant work in fictional forms, but nothing of note in the documentary mode. At the same time, the social and political issues of the period fostered an activist and strongly independent spirit that, in hindsight, came to define the documentary style of succeeding decades. Thus, a small number of critical and experimental talents emerged at this time, some of whom adopted socially and politically radical positions; the amateur documentary documented this radical spirit in a complete departure from the more politically responsible positions adopted by institutional docu-mentary producers – specifically the by-now-defunct Hong Kong Film Unit and its successors, RTHK and the commercial television stations.
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