The Other Side of Glamour: The Left-wing Studio Network in Hong Kong Cinema in the Cold War Era and Beyond (Global Film Studios)

Since its inception more than a century ago, Hong Kong cinema has been a pre-eminent form of local entertainment and a site of ideological contentions propelled by colonial, national and international politics at different historical junctures. The Other Side of Glamour is a study of the historical development of the left-wing film establishment in Hong Kong. In particular, it seeks to reconstruct a more dynamic picture of left-wing film production through closer attention to the entwinement of ideological, artistic, institutional and corporate agendas that informed the practices of filmmakers on both sides of the political divide. The inquiry is informed by the following questions: What does it mean to be on the “left” of the Hong Kong film industry during the Cold War era? How did the left-wing studios balance their artistic, ideological, and commercial agendas in their production and exhibition strategies? What makes a film “left-wing” or “right-wing”? How did national, colonial, and international politics intervene in the ‘making of’ the popular left-wing cinema in Hong Kong? How did the left-wing film establishment in Hong Kong reinvent itself in the post-Cold War, post-Cultural Revolution era? What are the nuanced legacies of the classical left-wing in Hong Kong cinema today? It argues that the left-wing’s institutional character and corporate strategies in the making of a ‘popular left-wing cinema’ are indispensable to an understanding of their nuanced (and often overlooked) legacy in Hong Kong cinema today. Since its inception more than a century ago, Hong Kong cinema has been a pre-eminent form of local entertainment and a site of ideological contentions propelled by colonial, national and international politics at different historical junctures. The Other Side of Glamour is a study of the historical development of the left-wing film establishment in Hong Kong. The interplay between the macro-politics of the Cold War and the micro-politics of a regionalised/localised ideological warfare lends itself to a critical mapping of the general contours of the ‘cultural Cold War’ between the KMT and the CCP as it materialised in the so-called ‘left–right divide’ in the filmmaking world. Using the major studios as the main axis of analysis, this study traces the footprints of the other collaborating cultural agents which made up the left-wing film network in Hong Kong. It argues that the left-wing’s institutional character and corporate strategies in the making of a ‘popular left-wing cinema’ are indispensable to an understanding of their nuanced legacy in Hong Kong cinema today. List of figures 7 Acknowledgments 8 A note on the timeline 10 Timeline 11 Introduction 20 1 The left-wing film apparatus in postwar Hong Kong 39 2 Left in the right way: corporate strategy and the making of a popular left-wing 57 3 Remaking Cantonese film culture: Union and Sun Luen 78 4 Class, gender, and modern womanhood: Feng Huang and Great Wall 96 5 Corporate repositioning, transnational cultural brokerage, and soft power: Sil-Metropole 115 6 Critical transitions on the non-left: Patrick Lung and Cecile Tang 134 7 From political alibis to creative incubators: the left-wing fi lm network since the 1980s 151 Epilogue 169 Bibliography 176 Filmography 184 Index 188