Testing the canon: Digital scholarship and early cinema in Hong Kong

A History of Film Exhibition and Reception in Colonial Hong Kong (1897–1925) and Early Chinese Film Database are two digital humanities projects made to share new historical data on early cinema in Hong Kong and China. Information held in these two databases is pivotal to animating local film histories and can be utilized to form a new understanding of the incipient shape of cinema trade. This article seeks to aggregate the receptions of twenty canonical texts in Hong Kong from the late 1890s to mid 1920s by extracting relevant data from these two digital archives. A list of ‘classic’ films from Europe, America, and China was compiled to test the canon by looking at their receptions in Hong Kong. My findings show that early films exhibited in Hong Kong did not match, to a large extent, the canonical history of either global or Chinese cinemas. Instead, other factors might affect the local exhibition and reception of foreign and Chinese films. These factors include stars, the track records of directors and studios, exhibitors, and distributors. In closing, the article considers the likely gaps in digital archives and the limitations of digital historiography.