Periodising early Hong Kong cinema (1914–41): Tianyi Hong Kong Studio, Cantonese resistance, and colonial paradox

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.