Friday, 29 October 2021, 8:00p.m. on Zoom (Zoom ID: 92846225930, Passcode: 317114)
After 1949, Hong Kong Cinema became a battleground for ideological combats between Communist China and Guomindang-controlled Taiwan, the American-led ‘liberal camps’ and Soviet-centered Communist blocs. Realizing the strategic geopolitical position of Hong Kong, the British government stealthily introduced and vigorously exercised stringent measures in censoring film and print culture. It sneakily interfered with the production and dissemination of undesirable images and messages on silver screens. Ng’s monograph Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Hong Kong Cinema with Sino-link in Politics, Art, and Tradition (2021) highlights controversial cases of Hollywood, British, and Chinese-language film productions that were subject to strict official surveillance when the British Hong Kong authorities were resolved to quarantine the visuality of politics in the shadow of Cold War paranoia.
KENNY K.K.NG is Associate Professor at the Academy of Film. After studying comparative literature at the University of Washington and earning a doctorate in East Asian languages and civilisation from Harvard University he forayed into cinema and literary studies early in his academic career. He won the Hong Kong University Grants Committee’s Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship in 2019/20 for his research project, “The Cultural Cold War and Contested Chineseness in Hong Kong Cinema” which produced his latest monograph. He has received the General Research Fund (GRF) grants from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, and grants from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, for his research work, multiple times.