Abstract Referring to existing theories on Hollywood’s runaway productions, this article examines the motivations, characteristics, and influences of Hong Kong’s runaway practices in the 1950s and 1960s, analyzing the trend’s relationships with politics, economics, and film aesthetics and revealing its contribution to cross-border flows of people and ideas. It demonstrates that by strategically navigating the Cold War media landscape, Hong Kong’s runaway productions unlocked the economic potential of authentic locations, demonstrated a capacity to gain an advantage by leveraging political campaigns between competing powers, and built bridges across Asia, sparking a subtle exchange of talent, techniques, and aesthetics – even among rivals. This article focuses on two such productions and their on-location activities – Phoenix’s Golden Eagle (Jinying 1964) in Inner Mongolia and the Shaw Brothers’ The Songfest ( Shange yinyuan 1965) in Taiwan – revealing that runaway filming enabled crews to engage with different production cultures, thereby triggering the transcultural exchange of filmmaking customs and craft practices. The two crews’ on-location shoots imbued their films with visual intrigue, refreshed Hong Kong film aesthetics and repertoire, and revealed the underlying cross-Asia communications within the Cold War context.

ABSTRACT This article asks, ‘What do we mean when we say “early Hong Kong screen culture and cinema?” It answers this question with a threefold response. Against the scholarship that has been focusing on Shanghai-Hong Kong connections, this article emphasises the overlooked Canton-Hong Kong connections. It highlights the separationist government Chen Jitang’s contribution to preventing Cantonese filmmaking from being banned by the Kuomintang government in the 1930s when the Nanking government promoted Mandarin as the national language. Also, existing studies have overemphasised ‘The Father of Hong Kong Cinema’, Lai Man-wai and his family as important personages in early Hong Kong cinema for making the first fiction film and some national defence films. Yet this article argues that it was the Shaw Brothers’ Tianyi Hong Kong Studio that inaugurated the era of quality Cantonese filmmaking. Lastly, this article periodises early Hong Kong cinema (1914–41) into three stages: the silent film and the partially-sound Cantonese film age (1914–32), the talkies, the boom, and the censorship of Cantonese filmmaking (1933–36); and the peak and decline of Cantonese filmmaking (1937–41). Hong Kong’s status as a colony paradoxically endowed it with the criteria to preserve Cantonese filmmaking, as this article shall explicate such serendipity with Barbara Ward’s framework of ‘colonial paradox’. In other words, it was the nonchalance of the British Hong Kong government towards Cantonese filmmaking that preserved this endangered indigenous art through the Kuomintang censorship and the wartime, so that Cantonese filmmaking could be continued in the post-war period.

ABSTRACT Colonial Hong Kong was a transregional hub of Cold War ideological confrontation. The United States and its Chinese ally, Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan, struggled with Beijing for the hearts of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and around the world. Pro-Communist émigré cinema in the mid-twentieth century was a prime cultural manifestation of this Cold War contest. After an initial period of radicalization and antagonism, the pro-Communist studios in Hong Kong gradually shifted to a moderate approach whose goal was not to undermine British colonial rule or espouse revolutionary ideologies. Rather, the new strategy was one of flexibility and restraint that aimed to maintain a strategic presence in the local film industry and serve as a point of contact for overseas Chinese. Later, with the emergence of two pro-Free China giant studios, Motion Pictures & General Investment Co. Ltd. and Shaw Brothers, the cinematic ecosystem in Hong Kong was significantly altered. In order to hold on to their market presence in an increasingly more competitive environment, pro-Communist film companies embraced a more entertainment-oriented ethos and experimented with various popular genres, while struggling to remain truthful to their ideal of “guiding people to do good.” With in-depth analysis of two popular films by Zhu Shilin, The Dividing Wall (Yibang zhi ge) and Sweet as Honey (Tiantian mimi), this essay seeks to historicize the ways in which the Beijing-sponsored film establishment in 1950s Hong Kong negotiated and balanced a changing set of political, ideological, and commercial interests in pursuit of its strategic mission.

Pontianak Trouble:Gender and Postcolonial Identities in the Malay Vampire Film Rosalind Galt (bio) The pontianak is one of the most popular supernatural creatures in Malay cinema: a female vampire who has died as a result of male violence or childbirth and who returns to haunt patriarchy. She first came to cinematic prominence in the late colonial studio cinema of Singapore. This article argues that the pontianak is a complexly expressive figure: a female vampire or ghost who troubles both normativities of gender and presiding narratives of postcolonial and global identity in Malaysia and Singapore. The pontianak is one of the most popular supernatural creatures in Malay cultures and is featured in a number of films, but she does not easily travel the world in the manner of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean ghosts. Instead, there's something stickily local about her, and in getting at the specifics of the pontianak, I want to think about how the popular mediates globality in this particular cultural context. Malaysia and Singapore as nations have been distinctively constituted in relation to the global flows of colonialism and capitalism, with highly racialized social structures, and folkloric horror films stage at once a desire for the local and the transnational circuits of its undoing. In the pontianak film, gender becomes the central term with which to negotiate what kinds of identity and social power are possible, and I argue that the pontianak disrupts both traditional and global forms of being. To begin, then, what is a pontianak? In Malay folklore, she is one of many hantu, or ghosts, and is a childbirth spirit. Walter Skeat, the British colonial civil servant who wrote the first major Anglophone account of Malay folklore, writes of [End Page 40] the spirits which are believed to attack both women and children at childbirth. . . . the Langsuir, which takes the form of an owl with long claws, which sits and hoots upon the roof-tree, the pontianak which is also a night-owl and is supposed to be the child of the langsuir. (325) Colonial anthropologists were not always entirely accurate, and the pontianak is more usually viewed as the spirit of a woman who dies in childbirth, rather than the child. Moreover, in transition from folk mythology to cinema, the pontianak has been revised: although she is sometimes still represented as an owl and can often be found in trees, she is more often represented as a beautiful woman with flowing black hair. Andrew Hock Soon Ng complains that characteristics such as fangs and rising from the grave are drawn from Western vampire stories (2009, 217), and we might equally link her to other international figures of female vampirism and undead vengeance, such as the Thai Mae Nak and the Indian churel. The pathways of these generic influences are complex, but as a distinctly Malay figure, the pontianak has become a mainstay of Malaysian popular cinema. We first see the pontianak in a series of hugely popular films in late colonial Singapore. Cathay Keris studio made five pontianak films: Pontianak (B. N. Rao, 1957), Dendam Pontianak/Pontianak's Revenge (B. N. Rao, 1957), Sumpah Pontianak/Curse of the Pontianak (B. N. Rao, 1958), Pontianak Kembali/Pontianak Returns (Ramon Estella, 1963), and Pontianak Gua Musang (B. N. Rao, 1964). In an effort to copy the success of the series, rival studio Shaw Brothers made their own series, with Anak Pontianak/Son of Pontianak (Ramon A. Estella, 1958), Gergasi (Dhiresh Ghosh, 1958), and Pusaka Pontianak/Pontianak Legacy (1965). After the studio system crashes in the wake of Malaysian and Singaporean independence, there were almost no pontianak films for decades. In 1975, an Australian filmmaker, Roger Sutton, made a low-budget film titled simply Pontianak in Singapore. Twenty-five years later, Djinn's Voodoo Nightmare: Return to Pontianak (2001) attempted a modern revision of the genre, more influenced by The Blair Witch Project (Sánchez and Myrick, 1998) than by Malay hantu films. The pontianak really returns in Malaysia after 2002, when the government relaxed censorship rules that had banned horror films and supernatural themes, and the second horror film to be made was Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam/Fragrant Night Vampire (Shuhaimi Baba, 2004). Since...

This article is a general introduction to the cultural impact of Jin Yong’s works beyond original serialization as they contribute to the construction of the “kungfu industrial complex”—a complicated, multi-dimensional cultural/business matrix related to the production and consumption of Jin Yong’s (and other martial arts writers’) works and legacy. Three selected overlapping areas of impact of Jin Yong’s novels introduced in this article include: kungfu cultural literacy; rhetorical kungfu; and kungfu star power. Kungfu cultural literacy presents a broad look at the cultural content of Jin Yong’s works. Examples highlight Jin Yong’s contributions in each of these areas. Rhetorical kungfu is demonstrated through analysis of Jin Yong’s humorously subversive language in The Deer and the Cauldron and The Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils. Analysis of kungfu star power sketches the role of Shaw Brothers Studios and their TVB actors training program with particular attention to the careers of “The Five Tigers of TVB.”

Shaw Brothers (Hong Kong) Limited and its films have a wide range of influence around the world. In the contemporary era, the communication of the Shaw costume films, emphasises the humanity's classical appeal and invisible revival motivation. Also, it puts great emphasis on the trend from heroic monologue to discourse equality.

Dubbese fu recuperates the dismissal of the ‘poorly dubbed’ English-language voice tracks in the Hong Kong kung fu films that became globally popular and profitable starting in 1973 as a position that improperly valorizes only the perfect lip synchronization version of the audiovisual contract. Instead of one, there is a total of three possibilities with Italy representing a looser version and the films of Hong Kong’s kung fu wave representing the imperfect version. The internationalization strategy adopted by Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest identified the necessity of voice dubbings into the target market’s language, which in the case of the United States, required English dubbings since the goal was to become appealing to mainstream rather than art cinema audiences. The history of English dubbing studios in Hong Kong, the key individuals who made it happen, and the working conditions of the dubbing process are recreated to uncover how imperfect lip synchronization became a new aesthetic norm.

This article aims to examine the representation of Japanese occupation of Malaya in films produced by Shaw Brothers during the Golden Era of Malay cinema, namely “Sergeant Hassan” (1958) and “Matahari” (1958). Currently, films depicting the past are relatively less prevalent in Malaysia, and scholarly analysis is comparatively less conducted on such films. Hence, the authors try to analyse how the films, in a given context, which reconstruct and reflect the historical past are experienced by the society at large. Bearing in mind that the films are based on a similar subject (Japanese occupation as its backdrop), it is important to determine why different receptions were registered from the audiences on both films. This prompted the authors to examine the reasons why these two films received a different level of popularity from their contemporary audiences (in the late 1950s). In this article, both the textual and contextual analysis will be employed: the former method is used to interpret the meanings constructed through the film’s text and promotional materials for both films. The latter would explore the historical circumstances that shaped both the production and reception of the films. This is mainly through promotional materials as well as secondary sources through interviews conducted by third party researchers who had interviewed Shaw Brothers and those who had experience working with them. The findings of this article indicate that the Shaw Brothers were ambitious with their films projects about the Japanese Occupation by widening the promotion of “Sergeant Hassan” to a wider audience and not limited it solely to the Malays1. By capitalising on the historical pasts that the contemporary audiences (in the late 1950s) had personally experienced, Shaw Brothers had embarked on the complex relationship of socio-political and economic conditions which had also shaped different receptions towards these films.

The focus of this essay are Shaw Brothers’ <it>bangpian</it>: Mandarin action movies largely inspired by James Bond (<it>bang</it>) movies (<it>pian</it>). I argue that it is better to think of <it>bangpian</it> not simply as passive and disengaged imitations of Bond movies but as Hong Kong films manifesting a cosmopolitan yet localized, active and interested participation in global Bondmania. Further to this ‘cosmo-localization’ thesis, the essay explores the social and cultural significance of <it>bangpian</it> in the context of the cosmopolitan dreaming and cultural nationalism of the Shaw Brothers’ studio-driven ‘go global’ push in the 1960s. It further posits that despite the Bond movies’ influences, <it>bangpian</it>, while rooted in the localized imaginaries of cultural China, aspires to a cosmopolitan mongrelization, creolization and hybridization, promising a cosmo-localized individual heroism and upward mobility to consumers of such films. Finally it suggests that this genre of crime thrillers represents a contemporary update of <it>wuxiapian</it> (martial chivalry films), holding a particular appeal for ‘third-culture kids’. ‘Third-culture kids’ marked a generational break in the erstwhile British colony of Hong Kong: they grew up away from their parent's birth culture, but were in contact with varied local and cosmopolitan cultures that flowed in, and through, that territory during the postwar era.

P. RAMLEE AND NEOREALISM P. Ramlee was one of the legendary filmmakers of Southeast Asia a multifaceted artist considered to be the most important creative asset of the "golden age" of cinema of Singapore and Malaysia in the 1950s and 60s. Born Teuku Zakaria bin Teuku Nyak Puteh in Penang, the Straits Settlements (now Malaysia) in 1929, he spent most of his professional career in Singapore, then a regional film production centre, working for the Shaw Brothers' Malay Film Productions. In 1964 he returned to Malaysia to work for its fledgling Merdeka (Independence) Film Productions in Kuala Lumpur. During his lifetime, P.Ramlee directed 34 features and acted in more than 60 films. The singular contribution of P. Ramlee to the development of cinema and other art forms of Singapore and Malaysia is unquestioned. In his time, he was tremendously popular and today, four decades after his premature death in...

Abstract This interview covers the long career of veteran actress Lisa Lu Yan in American media and Chinese cinema. Lisa Lu began acting a decade after she relocated to America following the change of government in china. Thanks to Frank Borzage, she began her prolific career in American television and became the second Chinese actress in post-war cinema to co-star in The Mountain Road (1960) with James Stewart. Among the many well-known American television series she appeared in during the 1960s were Bonanza, Cimarron City, Checkmate, and Yancy Derringer. She also appeared alongside Richard Boone in the opening segements of Have Gun Will Travel for one season in the role of “Hey Girl”, one she made her own. She returned to Hong Kong to star in The Arch (1969), the first film directed by female director Tan Shu-shuan in 1969 and later appeared in The Shaw Brothers’ 14 Amazons (1971). Run Run Shaw then offered her the title role in Li Han-hsiang’s The Empress Dowager and its sequel. She later played the same role in the opening sequences of Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor. Since then, she has continued her prolific career working in film, screen, and stage in America, China, and Taiwan.

“Taking This from This and That from That”: Examining RZA and Quentin Tarantino’s Use of Pastiche

This paper opens a new chapter to extant studies of fengyuepian by looking closely at <it>Ai Nu</it>/<it>Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan</it> (1972) and <it>Ai Nu xinzhuang</it>/<it>Lust for Love of a Chinese Courtesan</it> (1984) with respect to three main themes, female homoeroticism, memorialization and melancholizing, discussing them in relation to the master–slave imaginary that structures the films’ respective plots. Popularized by Shaw Brothers, <it>fengyuepian</it> are, to put it simply, erotic films in which sexual acts and desires are overtly presented. My essay firstly characterizes the female homoerotic imaginary in the two <it>fengyuepian</it>, or for that matter, the films themselves, as both part of and yet apart from a queer-<it>tongzhi</it> consciousness. In a related way, it then explores two distinct modes of non-depressive melancholias in the films. With regard to the former, it argues that the film's memorial and melancholizing modes of articulation yield analeptic turns that drive affective abreaction, bridging the past and present in symbiotic and transformative ways. Here the film's theme of revenge, an affect of solipsistic melancholia or actional melancholizing, is most telling. There is no revenge theme in the later film which manifests contemplative melancholizing at a communal level. This mode of non-depressive melancholia, I shall argue, prepares the analeptic grounds for allegorical transformation that turns up undercurrents of anxiety about self-identity and self-determination that connect with the political concerns of its time.

A Myth about the Present: The Shaw Brothers’ <i>The Monkey Goes West</i> Series in the 1960s

Reviewed by: The Secret Life of Nora Zulkifli Mohamad The Secret Life of Nora. Produced by Enfiniti Vision Media Productions with story by Raymond Miranda and Malay text by Mamat Khalid, music by Roslan Aziz, lyrics by Alfi an Sa’at, directed by Steven Dexter, choreographed by Pat Ibrahim, 29 September–22 October 2011. The Secret Life of Nora is recent addition to the growing roster of Malay musicals. To understand this particular production one needs to first understand the history and genesis of the new Malay musical, which has been a major trend since the establishment of Istana Budaya (Malaysia’s national theatre, literally, “Palace of Culture”). Istana Budaya launched this new venue in 1999 with a new musical, Keris Sang Puteri (Dagger of the Princess), directed by Rahim Razali (formerly a film director) using the Malay aesthetics borrowed from bangsawan (nineteenth-century Malay opera) with new staging facilities at the theatre. The intention of making Istana Budaya an important performance venue similar to Sydney Opera House had been expressed by the minister of culture and tourism at the time, Dato’ Sabaruddin Chik. He challenged theatre practitioners to start producing musical theatre similar to West End and Broadway productions and to modernize bangsawan to suit modern and urban audiences. For more than a decade now many musicals have been produced, especially ones looking back at Malay historical figures, from fifteenth-century Melaka (Malacca) heroes to present day prime ministers and politicians. These productions are valued since they bring in a large audience, filling the house. Indeed the musical has almost become a new definition of theatre in Malaysia—that is, requiring a big budget, big audience, and long run to break even. Musicals are also are seen now as a new medium for former film and pop stars to continue making new work as they are paid handsomely by the [End Page 461] Ministry of Culture since they have the public attraction quality and at the same time bring private sponsorship and media attention. (Meanwhile, of course, serious theatre practitioners, critics, and playwrights may think that musical is killing the real activity of theatre-making in Malaysia, especially among young activists.) What’s interesting with Enfiniti Productions, the company sponsoring this musical, is the way they have indigenized their productions musically, making the work relevant to both the West End’s and Broadway’s models and local needs. The inclusion of local Malay music producer-composer Roslan Aziz has given their musical a new flavor of Malay pop music, making it relevant to the local music scene. The Secret Life of Nora is inspired by Agent 001—Nora Zain, a 1967 Malay spy movie produced by Shaw Brothers Singapore branch, the top producer of Malay cinema in 1950s and 1960s, which was still producing works of glitz and glamor (though Singapore had exited from Malaysia in 1965). One of the few spy films produced by Shaw Brothers for the Malay market, Agent 001 included Hong Kong personnel, including director Lo Wei, who would in 1971 direct Bruce Lee’s first martial arts feature. Despite the obvious precedent, The Secret Life of Nora claims to be an original script that has nothing to do with the actual character of Nora Zain, the female spy in the original film. The musical plot concerns a female cabaret performer in 1960s Malaya, Nora (Tiara Jacqueline, formerly known as Jacqueline Eu). Farouk (Tony Eusoff), the Malaysian agent, recruits her on the pretext of remaking a “Nora Zain” film. The title character, Nora, who aspires to be a film star, becomes an actress playing a spy. She is trained by a “director” who is actually a spy trainer from Hong Kong named Roger Foss (played by Broadway actor Ryan Silverman, who was seen in the 2010 Turkish/U.S. film Five Minarets). What starts as play acting becomes serious business as the would-be diva finds herself enmeshed in and eventually smashing networks of human trafficking as she falls for this demanding man. This production, drawing on local audiences’ memory of past films, follows a pattern of theatre production at Istana Budaya in the past few years: more and more films are turned into musicals...

Jimmy Wang Yu has suffered neglect in the past few decades due to attention given to other martial arts stars such as Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. This article seeks to remedy this by concentrating on the Taiwan films that Wang Yu made after breaking his contract with Shaw Brothers in 1970 after his pioneering actor-director performance in Longhu Dou/The Chinese Boxer (Wang Yu 1970). These involve not just the continuation of his role as director but also appearances in a number of Taiwanese cinematic genres not exclusively confined to martial arts as well as his failed international breakthrough Australian co-production The Man From Hong Kong. The article concludes with his return to the screen after seventeen years in Wu Xia and Let's Go! where he portrays a much older character.

ABSTRACTIn the wake of the new millennium, the South Korean film industry began to get involved with ‘mega-budget’ transnational co-production projects such as The Promise (2005), Red Cliff (2008) and Reign of Assassins (2010). Generating such epic films, i.e. ‘South Korea's global project’, has been the South Korean film industry's mandate for years, and would ultimately help to export South Korean cultural products to the Asian and global media marketplace. Most scholars in the field have interpreted the logic that gave rise to these ambitious productions as South Korea's political and economic redirection towards Asia in the new millennium. Therefore, it is essentially a new phenomenon. Yet, this article reconstructs the untold genealogy of South Korea's transnational projects by arguing that it has early and late moments in film history. The South Korean film industry has tried to penetrate geographically and culturally adjacent markets for many decades, although the practice has been virtually erased from the country's collective memories. This article will scrutinize the 1960s Shaw Brothers—Shin Films co-produced epic films Last Woman of Shang (1964), That Man in Chang-An (1966) and The Goddess of Mercy (1966) vis-à-vis their contemporary counterparts.

This piece reviews the historical accounts of Shaw Brothers Studio, targeting its presentation as a diaspora company whose commercialism was enhanced by political pragmatism, frugality, and agility. The studio's activities were constrained by twentieth-century geopolitics, but its behavior was also shaped by its show business competitors, new technologies, and emergent popular forms. Existing historical accounts tend to overstate the studio's diasporic qualities, especially compared to other firms. This essay argues that there are limits to the diaspora model and proposes a more complex understanding of the firm. Alternative factors are considered in the company's colonial stratagems, in both its earlier and later phases, and in its dealings with Hong Kong's left-wing studios and subsequent business in Taiwan. Finally, Shaw Brothers Studio's appropriation of Japanese and other Asian talent is significant to the diaspora model of Shaw Brothers Studio.

During the 1970s, Shaw Brothers and Hammer Films sought to blend kung fu spectacle with traditional genres. The fruits of this endeavor The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires and Shatter, both 1974 were castigated by mainstream critics as idiosyncratic and incoherent. The films’ appropriation by cult audiences, however, is predicated on precisely their purported incoherence. This essay argues that incoherence constitutes a tacit and under-theorized criterion for cult movies, and insofar as it is conceived as a homogenous phenomenon, tends to offer an uninformative barometer of a cult film’s value. In contrast, I propose several levels of coherence, the better to specify the cult film’s unities and disunities across a range of dimensions. Centrally, I explore the alleged incoherence forged by fusing kung fu with the norms of horror (Legend) and crime thriller (Shatter). Arguing that both films obey canonized principles of storytelling, I go on to examine the effects that their apparent incoherence has upon the viewer’s experience. The paper also points toward the relevance of transnational coproduction for grasping both the viewer’s activity and the critical neglect of coherence in the Shaws-Hammer movies.

China forever : The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema : [book review