Introduction: Relocations and Reimaginations Free

The pairing of the term “cinephilia” with “Hong Kong” might evoke, for many readers, the far-reaching impact of the martial-arts action films and urban crime thrillers that, late in the twentieth century, brought global cult status to the cinema of Hong Kong. The rise of a dedicated viewership for these genres was supported by a proliferation of print, web, and distribution resources specializing in films from Hong Kong. Anticipating the wave of fan magazines published in the 1990s in Europe, Japan, and North America was a 1984 special double issue of Cahiers du cinéma entitled “Made in Hong-Kong.”¹ Filmic homages by Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, along with the crossover stardom of a host of performers from Bruce Lee to Michelle Yeoh, further confirm—and commercially exploit—Hong Kong cinema’s position in contemporary cultures of cinephilia. Its corporeal-sensory intensities traverse the distance between popular action genres and arthouse films. If such responses gesture toward the flourishing of the Hong Kong film industry during the golden decades of the 1980s and 1990s, they also continue through new global channels in the present period of the industry’s decline. In recent years, restorations and retrospective programs abound, along with a steady stream of Criterion Collection releases of films by Wong Kar-wai, Ann Hui, John Woo, and Johnnie To, among others. Viewed from this angle, cinephilia frames the status of Hong Kong cinema in a transnational arena of reception, as an enduring object of love by audiences near and far.

Yet far less is known about Hong Kong as a location of cine-lovers. Who are and were Hong Kong’s cinephiles? What are the forms, networks, and topoi of cinephilia that have shaped reception, audience formation, and sociocultural contexts of cinema viewing throughout the history of this region? How do they lead to a greater understanding of not only local and regional film culture but also of cinephilia itself as a multi-situated and non-singular phenomenon? And how do they expand the scope of the definition and practice of cinephilia? Answers to these questions are beginning to take shape in a recent wave of scholarship by writers who include Emilie Sin-yi Choi, Lu Pan, Tom Cunliffe, Ella Mei Ting Li, Enoch Yee-lok Tam, and Victor Fan.² Their research often draws on overlooked archives, newly available private materials, digitized sources, oral histories, ethnography, and autoethnography. Thus, despite the challenges of incomplete documentation, a clearer picture of Hong Kong cinephilia throughout the twentieth century is beginning to emerge. This Special Focus section contributes to this larger project while also offering a close view of three of its specific chapters. Timmy Chih-Ting Chen’s essay “Michael Rogge, Amateur Expatriate Cinema, and Hong Kong Cinephilia of the 1950s” centers on a Dutch bank employee whose leisure activities shed light on the landscape of cinephilia in the postwar years. Emilie Sin-yi Choi’s “Cinephile Culture as Infrastructure: Relations and Networks in Hong Kong 1960s–80s” explores the remarkable film-cultural transformations of this period through a media-studies lens focused on infrastructure. Delaney Chieyen Holton’s “Towards a History of Early Experimental Video Practices in Hong Kong” investigates the cinephilic roots of the video art and performance culture that flourished during the 1980s and 90s.

A brief historical overview serves to contextualize these essays and fills in the gaps between them. The earliest Chinese cinephiles, writes Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, were the authors and translators who crossed over to film from the sphere of letters in the 1920s. Cinephilia in the Sinosphere came into being through networks of textual production linking urban cultural centers such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Chongqing.³ As Enoch Tam and Ella Li have shown, members of the literati class (novelists, translators, journalists, and educators) were responsible for the earliest film journals established in Hong Kong. They approached these pursuits in dialogue, and in competition, with their counterparts in Shanghai. A good case study is Hong Kong’s first dedicated film magazine, 銀光 (Silver Screen, founded in 1926), whose content was informed by priorities of pedagogy and moral uplift.⁴ Print media continued to serve as important conduits of cinephilia in subsequent decades. At the same time, the shifting profile of those who took up the cause of cinema, from later generations of cultural elites to non-elites, reflects the complex migration histories, social divisions, and demographic developments of the colonial entrepot of Hong Kong.

Film societies were also critical to the formation of cinephilia. Chen discusses two of the earliest documented cine clubs in Hong Kong: 中英學會電影組 (Sino-British Club Film Group, 1951–55), a private colonial club dedicated to the promotion of cultural and social relations; and香港業餘電影學會 (Hong Kong Amateur Cine Club, or HKACC, 1952–90), founded for the encouragement of “Amateur Cinematography.” The two organizations demonstrate the role of international expatriate communities in cultivating a colonial cosmopolitan film culture in Hong Kong. The Sino-British Club Film Group exhibited fiction films and documentaries to appeal to the Western-centric tastes of its subscribing members. Its declared aim was “to put before its members a number of good films which might not otherwise be exhibited,” making use of venues like the China Fleet Club Theatre, which served members of the Royal Navy.⁵ The HKACC held amateur filmmaking competitions that were open to all, but nonetheless, economic barriers to 8mm and 16mm film production drastically limited participation from the local community, with the exception of the wealthy and civil-servant class. (The group’s leadership reflects its basis in the Anglo-European expat population.) The activities of these two groups, which were linked together by the figure of Michael Rogge, anticipate later developments in Hong Kong film culture in the 1960s and 70s.

Choi’s essay delves into the energetic culture of cinephilia that took shape during these years. Film societies and cine clubs proliferated, such as Studio One, a revival of the Sino-British Club Film Group that continued its mandate to exhibit high-quality European cinema. Also launched were a host of film societies organized by young members of the Hong Kong’s Chinese community, such as 大影會 (College Cine Club, founded 1967), 火鳥電影會 (Phoenix Cine Club, founded 1973), 衛影會 (Film Guard Association, founded 1971), and 土佬電影會 (DWARF Film Society, founded 1974), to name a few.⁶ Several of them had affiliations with print publications, like the College Cine Club, which was operated by the student newspaper 大學生活 (College Life). Another student paper, 中國學生周報 (Chinese Student Weekly), one of the most widely read in 1960s Hong Kong, was a galvanizing force in the formation of postwar cinephilia. The writers who contributed to its highly popular film column and the column’s editor, Law Kar, were involved in numerous film societies and, in many cases, would later enter into academia, professional criticism, and the film industry.

This new generation came from the intellectual milieu of an emerging local middle class and displayed an awareness of their participation in a global culture of cinephilia. They read and translated English-language film magazines like Film Culture and Sight and Sound, which were stocked in Hong Kong’s independent bookstores, and they screened Japanese, American, Third Cinema, French New Wave, Italian neorealist, and documentary films, along with local productions. Another journal, 70 年代雙週刊 (The 70’s Biweekly), reveals a strand of cinephilia that flowed from political activism. An autonomous, collectively-run, anarchist journal launched in 1970, The 70’s Biweekly published film reviews and translations, and organized screenings of films that reflected its anti-colonial, internationalist, and countercultural values.⁷

Cinephilia in this period burgeoned as an extension of dynamic developments in Hong Kong’s public sphere, part and parcel of new avenues for cultural agency and social participation that were seized upon by a young generation. Its participants shifted fluidly between the activities of writing, programming, movement organizing, and filmmaking, thereby forging alternative spaces in which an independent and experimental culture of cinema—and other moving-image practices—came into existence. As in the case of 1950s expatriate film culture, cine clubs provided a vital platform of support for amateur practices of filmmaking. Choi situates the emergence of Hong Kong experimental cinema in this milieu. Cine clubs encouraged their members to try their hand at filmmaking and held screenings to promote their efforts to the public, as in the case of the First Amateur Film Exhibition, organized in 1969 by the College Cine Club. The Phoenix Cine Club went further by collectivizing filmmaking equipment and hosting workshops for its members, in addition to hosting screenings of experimental and amateur work. The activities of these groups, as Choi demonstrates, aimed to “solidify” experimentalism as a legible mode of image-making. To invoke a useful distinction made by Nico Baumbach in a different cinematic and cultural context, this was a cinephilia that flew under the banner of la politique d’amateur rather than la politique des auteurs.⁸

Film societies were, in the recollection of filmmaker Yau Ching, “the only way to see non-commercial films” on a weekly basis.⁹ As crucial as the print outlets in which film criticism thrived were public facilities newly available for independent film programming, such as the concert hall and theater in Hong Kong’s City Hall and its Art Centre (built in 1962 and 1977 respectively as part of a push by the colonial government to improve urban infrastructure).¹⁰ For their screening events, cine clubs turned to these spaces, along with schools and universities, during these crucial decades. Such facilities provided the basis for a film culture characterized by a high degree of collaboration and crossover, giving rise to porous and shifting collectives; differences of viewpoint on matters of politics and aesthetics were not an obstacle to their exchanges. An illustration of these dynamics can be found in the example of renowned Hong Kong director John Woo, who as a student participated in this culture of cinephilia. Woo was affiliated with both the radical The 70’s Biweekly and the liberal Chinese Student Weekly, and a devoted attendee of the College Cine Club. His first forays into filmmaking consisted of 8mm and 16mm experimental films produced in collaboration with fellow cinephiles. For instance, 死結 (Dead Knot, 1970) was made with Sek Kei, a film critic who would eventually co-found the Hong Kong International Film Festival.¹¹

Woo’s journey from this milieu of cinema lovers and amateur filmmakers to the mainstream film industries of both Hong Kong and Hollywood reflects the future trajectory of this outgrowth of cinephilia. Once offering an accessible alternative to the commercial institutions of cinema, it came to be absorbed by the latter, as its participants entered into the professional realm, joined major studios such as Shaw Brothers, and took advantage of new opportunities in television production. Thus, the rippling impacts of cinephilia extend to the emergence of the Hong Kong New Wave in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as well as the golden age of Hong Kong cinema that would follow. As young film enthusiasts acquired cultural capital and professional clout, their independent efforts gave way to more deliberate strategies of institution building. This is evident in the inauguration of the Hong Kong International Film Festival in 1977, the establishment of the Hong Kong Film Archive (inspired by the Cinémathèque française) in 1993, and the incorporation of film production and studies into university curricula.¹² The visibility of these achievements has somewhat eclipsed the conditions—and the non-commercial ethos—that enabled them.

At the same time, the experimental spirit and independent orientation that animated this earlier culture of cinephilia persisted by branching into adjacent realms of moving-image practice and exhibition. In their contribution to this section, Holton shines a light on the cinephilic roots of the flourishing video-art and performance culture of the 1980s and 1990s through the case of 錄映太奇 (Videotage). Although it is often namechecked as a driving force in the rise of Hong Kong video art—along with one of its founders, the renowned video artist Ellen Pau—little scrutiny has been given to the connections between cinema and contemporary art that are woven into its history. The compound term “videotage,” combining “video” with “montage,” was first used in the title of a 1986 program dedicated to works on video organized by the Phoenix Cine Club, of which Pau was an active member. The term was subsequently adopted as the name for a new collective devoted to video art, whose founders consisted largely of women and queer artists. Through analysis of Videotage’s activities and specific works by Pau, Holton uncovers a cinephilic lineage of Hong Kong video art, a lineage grounded not in the aesthetics of the moving image per se, but rather in the continuity of artist-led organizational infrastructures that were vital to both film and video.

The essays assembled here intervene in a historiography that has, by and large, focused on the production of films to the exclusion of the environments and contexts in which they were exhibited, experienced, and processed. The conventional focus has been limited to particular films, genres, directors, and performers, at the expense of studies regarding where and how viewers engage with moving-image practices. These studies reframe Hong Kong cinema in a way that brings into view, to quote Chenshu Zhou’s words, “the thick fabrics of social relations, everyday life, spatial practices, economic systems, ideologies, and structures of feelings” in which it was and is embedded.¹³ Local histories of cinephilia offer an important reminder of and entry into all of the ways that, as Erika Balsom writes in another context, “far more than just a support for an incandescent image, the screen is a nucleus around which a complex aggregate of practices, affects, and relations condense.”¹⁴ Studies of the specific sites and practices of Hong Kong cinephilia participate in a broader reorientation toward exhibition and reception as points of entry into Sinosphere cinema history, looking beyond films as objects of analysis in order to explore the “web of cultural and social relations” that surround them.¹⁵

Recent critical discussions address a recognized need, in the words of Sarah Keller, to “broaden our sense of cinephilia in terms of history, geography, audience identities, as well as the nature and practice of cinephilia.”¹⁶ In the decades following Susan Sontag’s notorious declaration of the death of cinephilia, it is, ironically, more alive than ever, as a growing number of critics and scholars push back against generationally myopic and geographically constrained definitions of the term.¹⁷ The case for the continuing existence of cinephilia is often staked upon the proliferation of its objects, voices, and vehicles for expression. Emerging forms of cine-love are associated with an abundant plurality; as Keller observes, contemporary cinephilia, viewed through a utopian lens, can be “democratic, transnational, transgenerational, mixed in its gendering, more at home with various technologies and platforms and screening situations.”¹⁸ For many, they contrast with the more elitist cinephilia of earlier eras, steeped as it was in the cultural authority of European and American male critics. For Girish Shambu, author of the influential essay, “For a New Cinephilia” (FQ, 2019), what Sontag mourned was an old love of cinema fixated myopically on the past (specifically on postwar France as cinephilia’s defining moment) and on the theatrical experience of moving images.¹⁹ For Shambu, the same new media technologies that Sontag viewed as an existential threat to cinema also generate greater access to a diversity of films, new spaces of discourse and dialogue, and, therefore, contribute to the continued life of cinephilia through novel channels and platforms. (This remains true despite the inevitable problems of these technologies, such as limits on access, commercial capture, and censorship.) Across these conversations, the contrast between the old cinephilia as a bad political object and its younger counterpart as a more inclusive alternative has been taken up and repeated to the extent that a rigid linear narrative of decline and progress starts to congeal. This narrative identifies postwar France as the “originary moment” from which cinephilia must move on toward new territories.²⁰ On this point, contemporary debates about cinephilia run the risk of reinscribing the narrow geographical framing that underpins the very same elitist delineations they set out to dispute.

But, as it turns out, “the old cinephilia was far more complex and far-ranging that we ever imagined,” according to Rielle Navitski.²¹ In her introduction to a special journal issue entitled “Global South Cinephilias,” Navitski argues that conceptions of cinephilia must be expanded not only with reference to its transformations in the present but also by way of its histories beyond the North Atlantic. This set of essays attempts such a project, joining a growing body of research on cinephilia in Latin America, Africa, and East and West Asia. As this work shows, to broaden the frame of inquiry is, in Navitski’s words, “to unsettle established historical timelines of cinephilia,” whether by calling into question the singularity of origins or by challenging the teleology of decline; Navitski cites the example of the Cinematógrafo Cine-Club in Mexico City, founded in 1909 and predating the purported first usage of the phrase “cine-club” by the French film critic Louis Delluc in 1920.²² Leaping forward in time and geography, South Korea in the 1980s and 1990s developed a cinephile culture notable for its voracious intensity. In 1996, the same year that Sontag sounded the death knell of cinephilia, film critic Tony Rayns made his own pronouncement after experiencing this culture: he wrote that South Korea “is currently the most cinephile country in the world.”²³

In no uncertain terms, the example of Hong Kong demonstrates that the project of mapping the manifold itineraries of cinephilia also exposes the multiplicity of its forms. Despite the commonplace definition of cinephilia as a love for the moving image that is highly personal and distinct from the industrialized pleasures of film as mass entertainment, most theorists of this term do not invest cinephilia with a capacity to meaningfully disrupt hegemonic systems of production, distribution, and exhibition. The cinephilia invoked by past and present thinkers germinates within the movie theater or by means of a home streaming platform, without necessarily challenging the economic operations that underpin the apparatus of exhibition. In contrast, the history of Hong Kong cinephilia is, at its most striking, a history of endeavors to do precisely that. The pursuit of otherwise unavailable viewing experiences encompassed several factors: the construction of material alternatives to dominant economies of the moving image; the creation of new networks, relations, and organizational forms for the making, screening, and discussion of films; and collaborative and ongoing structures of proximity that bind together acts of production and reception within a communal nexus, extending laterally through outreach and cooperation. Thus, a number of generative loops reinforce connections between viewers and makers who often simultaneously inhabit multiple positions in these networks. In this context, cinephilia means not just engagement with cinema but also, as Holton emphasizes, outward interventions in public structures, initiated at a grassroots level of community organizing, in a spirit of self-making that might be called amateur or DIY. The amateur and the amatory dovetail in an expanded cinephilia that includes alternatives to mainstream commercial film production and distribution—a concept with resonance in present-day cinematic concerns. Within this context, the commonplace distinctions between cinephilia and media activism that are derived from binary Euro-American analyses start to break down, just as the roles of “artist,” “filmmaker,” “viewer,” and “writer” are rendered fluid. For these reasons, and following Choi’s argument, Hong Kong cinephilia is best regarded in terms of an infrastructure of practices, relations, and agencies. In its expanded field of meaning, the question of what was (and what is, and what might be) cinephilia can be approached anew—not by way of an object identified in advance, but with an openness to the shared desires for world-making that are activated by the desire for cinema.