Cinema of Hong Kong
The cinema of Hong Kong is one of the three major threads in the history of Chinese-language cinema, alongside the cinema of China and the cinema of Taiwan. As a former Crown colony, Hong Kong had a greater degree of artistic freedom than mainland China and Taiwan, and developed into a filmmaking hub for the Chinese-speaking world.
Hong Kong became the leading film exporter in East Asia in the 1960s, with its film output surpassing Hollywood, and remained the second-largest exporter from the 1970s through the 1990s. It also had the third-largest film industry in the world during the 1980s and 1990s, behind Hollywood and Bollywood. Despite an industry crisis starting in the mid-1990s and Hong Kong's transfer to Chinese sovereignty in July 1997, Hong Kong film has retained much of its distinctive identity and continues to play a prominent part on the world cinema stage. In the West, Hong Kong's vigorous pop cinema has long had a strong cult following, which is now a part of the cultural mainstream, widely available and imitated.
Economically, the film industry together with the value added of cultural and creative industries represents 5 per cent of Hong Kong's economy.
The Hong Kong industry
Unlike many film industries, Hong Kong has enjoyed little or no direct government support, through either subsidies or import quotas. It is a thoroughly commercial cinema: highly corporate, concentrating on crowd-pleasing genres like comedy and action, and relying heavily on formulas, sequels and remakes.Hong Kong film derives a number of elements from Hollywood, such as certain genre parameters, a "thrill-a-minute" philosophy and fast pacing and film editing. But the borrowings are filtered through elements from traditional Chinese drama and art, particularly a penchant for stylisation and a disregard for Western standards of realism. This, combined with a fast and loose approach to the filmmaking process, contributes to the energy and surreal imagination that foreign audiences note in Hong Kong cinema.
In 2010, the box office gross in Hong Kong was HK$1.339 billion and in 2011 it was HK$1.379 billion. There were 56 Hong Kong films and 220 foreign films released in 2011.
In 2017, the box office gross was HK$1.85 billion compared with HK$1.95 billion in 2016. 331 films were released in 2017, dropped from 348 the year before.
The star system
According to Paul McDonald, a star system emerged in Hollywood as talent scouts, coaches, and publicists were involved with finding performers and making them into stars. In the vertically integrated Hollywood film industry of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, these responsibilities were all undertaken by the studios themselves. The studios made the stars and, due to notoriously restrictive terms imposed by exclusive services contracts, the studios also owned the stars. As is common in commercial cinema, the industry's heart is a highly developed star system. In earlier days, beloved performers from the Chinese opera stage often brought their audiences with them to the screen. For the past three or four decades, television has been a major launching pad for movie stardom, through acting courses and widely watched drama, comedy and variety series offered by the two major stations. Possibly even more important is the overlap with the Cantonese pop music industry. Many, if not most, movie stars have recording sidelines, and vice versa; this has been a key marketing strategy in an entertainment industry where American-style, multimedia advertising campaigns have until recently been little used. In the current commercially troubled climate, the casting of young Cantopop idols to attract the all-important youth audience is endemic.In the small and tightly knit industry, actors are kept very busy. During previous boom periods, the number of movies made by a successful figure in a single year could routinely reach double digits.
Budgets
Films are typically low-budget when compared with American films. A major release with a big star, aimed at "hit" status, will typically cost around US$5 million. A low-budget feature can go well below US$1 million. Occasional blockbuster projects by the very biggest stars or international co-productions aimed at the global market, can go as high as US$20 million or more, but these are rare exceptions. Hong Kong productions can nevertheless achieve a level of gloss and lavishness greater than these numbers might suggest, given factors such as lower wages and value of the Hong Kong dollar.Language and sound
Films in the Cantonese language have been made in Hong Kong since the beginning. In the 1950s, it also became a center of Mandarin-language filmmaking after the Communist takeover in mainland China and the entertainment industry shifted from Shanghai to Hong Kong. From the 1960s to mid-1970s, Mandarin film productions became dominant, especially those made by the Shaw Brothers studio in Hong Kong. There was also a short-lived period whereby Hokkien films were produced in Hong Kong, and there were also films made in the Teochew dialect. Cantonese films made a comeback in the 1970s, and since the 1980s, films have been made mostly in Cantonese.For decades, films were typically shot silent, with dialogue and all other sound dubbed afterwards. In the hectic and low-budget industry, this method was faster and more cost-efficient than recording live sound, particularly when using performers from different dialect regions; it also helped facilitate dubbing into other languages for the vital export market. Many busy stars would not even record their own dialogue, but would be dubbed by a lesser-known performer. Shooting without sound also contributed to an improvisatory filmmaking approach. Movies often went into production without finished scripts, with scenes and dialogue concocted on the set; especially low-budget productions on tight schedules might even have actors mouth silently or simply count numbers, with actual dialogue created only in the editing process.
A trend towards sync sound filming grew in the late 1990s and this method is now the norm, partly because of a widespread public association with higher quality cinema.
History
1909 to World War II
During its early history, Hong Kong's cinema played second fiddle to that of the mainland, particularly the city of Shanghai, which was then the movie capital of the Chinese-speaking world. Very little of this work is extant: one count finds only four films remaining out of over 500 produced in Hong Kong before World War II. Detailed accounts of this period therefore have inherent limitations and uncertainties.Pioneers from the stage
As in most of China, the development of early films was tightly bound to Chinese opera, for centuries the dominant form of dramatic entertainment. Opera scenes were the source for what are generally credited as the first movies made in Hong Kong, two 1909 short comedies entitled Stealing a Roasted Duck and Right a Wrong with Earthenware Dish. The director was stage actor and director Liang Shaobo. The producer was an American, Benjamin Brodsky, one of a number of Westerners who helped jumpstart Chinese film through their efforts to crack China's vast potential market.Credit for the first Hong Kong feature film is usually given to Zhuangzi Tests His Wife, which also took its story from the opera stage, was helmed by a stage director and featured Brodsky's involvement. Director Lai Man-Wai was a theatrical colleague of Liang Shaobo's who would become known as the "Father of Hong Kong Cinema". In another borrowing from opera, Lai played the role of wife himself. His brother played the role of husband, and his wife a supporting role as a maid, making her the first Chinese woman to act in a Chinese film, a milestone delayed by longstanding taboos regarding female performers. Zhuangzhi was the only film made by Chinese American Film, founded by Lai and Brodsky as the first movie studio in Hong Kong, and was never actually shown in the territory.
The following year, the outbreak of World War I put a large crimp in the development of cinema in Hong Kong, as Germany was the source of the colony's film stock. It was not until 1923 that Lai, his brother and their cousin joined with Liang Shaobo to form Hong Kong's first entirely Chinese-owned-and-operated production company, the China Sun Motion Picture Company. In 1924, they moved their operation to the Mainland after government red tape blocked their plans to build a studio.
The advent of sound
With the popularity of talkies in the early 1930s, the problem of China's various spoken dialects had to be grappled with. Hong Kong was a major center for Cantonese, one of the most widely spoken, and political factors on the Mainland provided other opportunities. In 1932, the Shaw brothers, who formed the Tianyi Film Company, teamed up with Cantonese opera singer to make the first Cantonese talkie,, in Shanghai. This film proved to be very successful, and in 1934, they established a branch of the Tianyi Studio in Kowloon to make Cantonese films. The government of the Kuomintang or Nationalist Party wanted to enforce a "Mandarin-only" policy and was hostile to Cantonese filmmaking in China. It also banned the wildly popular wuxia genre of martial arts swordplay and fantasy, accusing it of promoting superstition and violent anarchy. Cantonese film and wuxia film remained popular despite government hostility, and the British colony of Hong Kong became a place where both of these trends could be freely served. Tianyi soon moved the entire film production operation from Shanghai to Hong Kong and reorganised Tianyi into Nanyang Productions. The name 粵語長片 soon became the standard name for black and white Cantonese movies.Filmed Cantonese operas proved even more successful than wuxia and constituted the leading genre of the 1930s. Major studios that thrived in this period were Grandview, Universal, and Nanyang.