L’erupció d’un volcà

As we have seen in the previous chapter, television documentaries began to reach larger audiences in the 1980s, with different stations featuring social issues with a greater emphasis on criticism and analysis than had been evident hitherto. In many ways the period could be regarded as the golden age of television documentaries, a context in which a number of unexplored social and cultural topics in Hong Kong could be investigated in half- or one-hour programmes. As regards theatrical releases, a handful of alternatives to the predominant travel and festival recording documentaries made by left-wing mainland-oriented film companies, keen to promote the People’s Republic of China, began to be screened more widely. Also, forty years after the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, the critical historical documentary had become a topic of interest both in mainland China and in Hong Kong. One film in particular, produced at the beginning of the decade in 1980, epitomised this sudden trend: Hong Kong-born but educated in the United States, Edwin Kong made his 1980 film Rising Sun entirely from archival footage resourced in the National Archive in Washington, DC while he was studying in the United States.

The film, which will be discussed in greater detail in the following chapter, dealt with Japan’s imperialist expansion and decline in the Second World War. Inspired by the British Thames Television documentary series, The World at War (1973), Kong searched for material among obscure war archives and obtained film prints primarily from the National Archive in Washington, DC to assemble a historically-based piece covering the Japanese invasion of East and South-East Asia and its eventual surrender following the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. Clearly, Rising Sun – a remarkable success at the box office, running for six continuous weeks – resonated with local audiences, and picked up on growing public sentiment related to the Diaoyu Islands affair. Significantly, what had hitherto been a small-circle activist and film club topic of interest to limited sections of the community was now capable of engaging a wider population. The film’s success was due to the fact that it resonated widely with the Hong Kong population at large, rather than solely with the activist and left-wing patriotic segments of it. Its timing was also a relevant factor, both in terms of Japan’s past and present involvement in geo-politically sensitive contexts. Following this success, Kong produced and directed Wonders of Life in 1983, again using archival footage from the United States for a nature documentary film, an unusual cinema release, and one that can now be regarded as ahead of its time.

The Edko Group, as the company came to be known, taking its name from

Kong himself, can be regarded as the first to produce non-left-wing documen-tary films that gained a general release in Hong Kong cinemas.

While Edwin Kong was getting his films released commercially, other film-makers were also creating documentary films independently. Stephen Teo, important both as a practitioner and critic and subsequently a film academic, was one of the most significant film-makers in Hong Kong during this period.

He produced four documentary films in the course of the decade in Hong Kong and abroad with a number of them being selected for international film festivals. Teo collaborated with Lo King-wah, another major contributor to independent film-making. In his article, published in the special catalogue for the Hong Kong International Film Festival, Changes in Hong Kong Society through Cinema, Teo describes their collaboration on the super 8 local politics documentary, War of Positions (1983), thus:

Hong Kong’s first direct-cinema documentary . . . In War of Positions, the camera followed two social workers as they campaigned, and won the 1983 Urban Council elections, the first time that such direct elections had been held on a wide-spread franchise in the territory. The film shows a political process at work and two people participating in the system.⁷ After their collaboration on War of Positions, Teo and Lo made My Filipina (1984), a 50–minute film shot in super 8 about the conditions of Filipina domestic helpers in Hong Kong. This film was selected as a part of the Hawaii International Film Festival in 1985.

As the Sino-British negotiations related to Hong Kong’s future status took place in the first half of the 1980s, a strong local identity on the part of the educated middle class began to emerge in the contemporary art scene in areas such as installation, performance and video art. The broad idea of an art col-lective took concrete shape when Videotage, a non-profit organisation focus-ing on the development of video and new media art in the city, was founded in 1986 by Ellen Pau and May Fung. Dedicated to activities such as cultural exchange, visual education, publication, distribution, screenings and film/

media festivals, Videotage (a portmanteau term conflating the words ‘video’

and ‘montage’) had a consciousness-raising purpose, promoting the use of film and video for self-expression and artistic creation, and generally making visual creativity less inaccessible and more viable for local cultural expression.

Even today, the organisation remains one of the most important promoters of independent videos in the city.

Meanwhile, another theatrical release, Warlords of the Golden Triangle (1987), garnered box-office receipts of HK$1.9 million, an impressive achieve-ment for this time. The film was produced by the political democracy activ-ist John Sham through his company D&B Films. The narrative background

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relates how units of the Kuomintang army escaped to a remote forest area of present-day Myanmar, in Shan State, after their defeat by the Chinese com-munists, and how the KMT and the communists integrated with the ethnic insurgent groups. Directed by Adrian Cowell and shot by Chris Menges, a cinematographer who worked closely with Cowell, Lindsay Anderson and Ken Loach in the 1960s, the film was a sister product of the documentary The Heroin Wars for which Cowell and Menges spent sixteen months in a remote region of eastern Burma, investigating how the small-scale domesticated opium business had created powerful warlords such as Law Sit-han and Khun Sha. The second part of the three-part film depicting Hong Kong’s thirty years anti-drug campaign is entitled ‘Smack City’, and focuses on the illegal drug trade via Hong Kong as well as in the notorious Walled City in Kowloon, a lawless area of Kowloon that remained an anomaly in the colonial period prior to its eventual demolition, not being subject to British rule and nominally still part of mainland China

By sharp contrast, legal trade and business also continued to flourish in Hong Kong from the 1960s onwards, and by the 1980s the city had started to become affluent. Cultural life was also enriched by a renaissance in film, music and visual art. However, the mood of nascent optimism that had developed regarding Hong Kong’s future under Chinese sovereignty, prompted by the more pragmatic and reformist political climate of the mainland, was rudely dispelled by the defining event of the immediate pre-handover period, the Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing. Despite the obvious potential of this mate-rial for full-length documentary coverage, and despite Hong Kong people being actively involved in escape lines and support networks, very little inde-pendent film directly on the subject of the events came out of Hong Kong.

Numerous videos were shots during the protests, rallies and demonstrations, but they tended to be small-scale and not widely distributed.

The best-known feature-length film on the Tiananmen events was the critically lauded three-hour The Gate of Heavenly Peace by the American doc-umentary-makers Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon, which was five years in the making and appeared in 1995. Mainstream distribution of the film was belatedly suppressed in Hong Kong following shrill complaints from across the border, but not before its initial release in commercial cinemas. However, one independent Hong Kong film on the subject does stand out. Kenneth Ip (also known by his artistic pseudonym, Shu Kei), a film lecturer at the Academy for Performing Arts, ventured a personal response with his full-length docu-mentary Sunless Days (1990). The film, based mostly on his own voice-over interviews with friends and family together with selected news footage of the events, explores the pertinent subject of the post-1989 Hong Kong diaspora.

Sunless Days reveals the fear and insecurity of the interviewees and, like the RTHK documentary The Hong Kong Case, opened with arresting shots of

street violence and bloodied students and workers fleeing the bullets and clubs of the military. It conveys the helpless feeling of Hong Kong residents, mainly people known to the film-maker, with the handover to mainland Chinese rule now a mere six years away. Shu Kei’s interest in the interface between local and national politics had been demonstrated by his script for TVB’s 1977 film under the direction of Yim Ho, entitled simply ‘1977’ in which, to quote Teo, he attempted to ‘pose a dialectic of politics as a purely ideological process and as a process in which practice makes perfect’.⁸ Sunless Days, financed and broadcast by the Hong Kong branch of Japanese Television and generally shunned by major distributors on account of its subject-matter as well as its technical format, was produced as a 16 mm print and only shown in one or two venues such as the Hong Kong Arts Centre.

One major reason for this phenomenon is that the film, with its contempla-tive voice-over complementing the interviews, constitutes more of a personal essay partly on the events and on Hong Kong people’s future than an ana-lytical exegesis. Its narrative thread is provided by the situation of a family in transition, as the mother is left behind by sons who have migrated overseas in response to the mood of pessimism that prevailed in Hong Kong as a result of the 4 June events. The narrator’s disembodied voice-over reminds us that the injunction to forget such an atrocity is in itself a further act of violence against the memory of the dead. Over the opening shots the director himself reads an anonymous poem found posted on a wall near the square, recounting an old father who kills his sons and rapes his daughter, another apt and haunt-ing image, albeit non-visual. He wonders whether the writer is now in prison, in hiding, in exile or dead. This strategy of emotional response and eloquent commentary is what drives the film, rather than any measured analysis of what happened and why. Since then, Shu Kei has been a tireless advocate of film as a medium for self-expression and has worked in a number of advisory and pedagogical capacities. Sunless Days is an important film in spite of its some-what rambling, discursive style. More than anything else, it encapsulates a general feeling or zeitgeist.

One of the independent film-makers from this period, Jimmy Choi, sub-sequently founded the independent collective ‘Videopower’, with the aim of gathering socially committed video-makers to share resources and ideas, and use video as a tool in the struggle for democracy. Moreover, the era of digital video in the 1990s led to increasing numbers of film-makers participating in a wider range of genres in documentary film-making. Professional film-makers, ones that were active in commercial film-making, also participated in making personal documentaries in the low-budget format. In addition, some had the opportunity to have their films distributed in VCD (Video Compact Disc) format, even if they were not screened in art-house cinemas.

Meanwhile, the government began to offer more financial subventions for

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alternative media and arts. The creation of the Independent Film and Video Awards (IFVA) by the Hong Kong Art Centre in 1995 provided an encour-aging platform for amateurs, academics and professionals alike to create an alternative voice distinct from the media-policy-makers from the television broadcasting industry. In order to stimulate greater creative imagination among film-makers, the IFVA rewarded experimental stylistic features in the works of both established film-makers and newly emerging talents. Short documentaries have won the top prizes, including the Grand Prize in 1995 awarded to A Tragedy Ahead by Cheng Chi-hung, and subsequently the fol-lowing year for Neon Goddesses by Yu Lik-wai. In 1998 there was a special mention for Joanne Shen’s and Martin Egan’s half-hour biopic of the life of local rebel and graffiti artist Tsang Tsou-choi, entitled King of Kowloon. Their film was the first documentary about the self-dubbed ‘King of Kowloon’, who defied both colonial and post-colonial authority to share his caustic views in the form of calligraphic inscriptions on walls, postboxes and other public utili-ties. The latter gave frank interviews about his unusual life’s work to the film-makers in this whimsical and insightful piece.

During the 1990s independent collectives such as Videopower produced a number of independent activist documentaries, sometimes with financial help from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and other agencies. The government-run Arts Development Council, founded in 1995 with the aim of promoting creativity and innovation in a wide range of art forms, became a con-sistent source of subventions for film art, including documentaries. Other non-profit-making collectives were formed around this time; these included Ying e Chi – meaning literally ‘the will to create cinema’ – an independent group formed by enterprising independent filmmaker Vincent Chui Wan-shun and friends in 1996. The financial and logistical backing from entrepreneur Alan Zeman’s Media Centre was a decisive factor, and, as David Bordwell has noted,

‘By the spring of 1999 Ying e Chi was distributing several 35mm shorts and features, and Hong Kong seemed to have laid the foundations for a lively sector of independent film-making’.⁹ Over time this film-maker alliance has also provided new distribution channels for independent film-makers, and helped to disseminate the works of local film-makers. In 1997, Ying e Chi organised the first of its annual screenings at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, and, two years later, it collaborated with the Hong Kong International Film Festival. Another important contribution to independent film in the city has been the Ying e Chi series of independent releases on VCD and DVD.

This period also saw the emergence of a new media platform enabling the direct uploading and web-streaming of videos on free web-broadcasters such as Youtube. As a consequence, television documentary no longer enjoyed the dominance it had formerly possessed in the documentary field, and independ-ent creativity on a modest, home-grown scale began to flourish. A further

creative initiative was introduced by a group of film-makers of more experi-mental and abstract documentaries, such as those produced by film and local culture academics Kenneth Ip (Shu Kei), Makin Fung and Yau Ching. The last-named’s 1997 work Diasporama: Dead Air, one of the first documentaries to be funded by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, is a composite video-shot, semi-experimental documentary comprising several interviews with people who have left Hong Kong (hence the ‘diaspora’ part of ‘diaspo-rama’), including a former Legislative Councillor, Christine Loh, who has British citizenship. During Loh’s long interview, she talks about how she came to be involved in politics and why she became an ardent supporter of democracy in Hong Kong. Visually, the interviews themselves are intrigu-ingly framed, never placing the interviewees in the centre of the frame, and starting out with a wide shot to emphasise their environment. At the same time, previously discouraged subjects, such as sexuality, feminism and homo-sexuality, were also further explored in films such as Yang and Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema (Stanley Kwan, 1996), which presented a survey of 100 years of Chinese cinema, focusing on issues of sexuality, including the homoerotic imagery in films made since the 1930s, and forms of ‘male bonding’ observable in the Hong Kong action cinema of today.

indePendent documentary film-makerS and