RESEARCH General Arts

FILM
Students to study Hong Kong film industry in monthlong visit to Asia

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

6/1/2001

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Consider a college student who majors in art history but whose passion is current movies – especially the wildly creative ones from Hong Kong. The student may wonder what it would be like to study Hong Kong's film industry up close, to rub elbows with its stars and creators.

Eight University of Illinois students needn't wonder much longer. This summer (June 9-July 9) they will travel to Hong Kong to take a UI course that will steep them in a great many aspects of the East Asian film world that has become a cult phenomenon.

Under the tutelage of Poshek Fu, a history and cinema studies professor at the UI, and based on the campus of the Hong Kong Baptist University, the students will be immersed in the industry.

They will visit film studios in Hong Kong and China, and meet with film directors, including Tsui Hark and Ann Hui, and with actors, studio executives, television producers, film critics and scholars. They also will have access to the new state-of-the-art Hong Kong Film Archive and the Hong Kong Institute of Fine Arts, and have regular seminars with graduate students at HKBU.

One of the things they already know, Fu said, is that while Hong Kong has a population of 6.5 million, its export of films is second only to the United States. Indeed, Hong Kong’s films "dominate the East Asian market and reach a pan-Chinese audience across the world," he said.

Fu, who was born in Hong Kong, is co-editor with David Desser, also a UI professor of cinema studies, of "The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity," published last year. The book discusses Hong Kong cinema from its origins to the present in historical, social and cultural contexts.

Primarily appealing to mass audiences, Hong Kong cinema "relies on creativity and energy to compete with the bigger budgets and effects-driven films of Hollywood," Fu said. Hong Kong film genres include police action; comedy; social and family melodramas; martial arts films; and "art" movies for the international film festival circuit and specialized theaters.
"With its craft-centered production, proliferating plot twists and swift pace, Hong Kong is the world’s most energetic, extravagant and imaginative popular cinema," Fu said.

To prepare his students for their course, Fu put them in a seminar last fall on transnational culture and local identity in order to give them an "analytical framework and theoretical vocabularies to explore the issues of globalization," he said. They also took a seminar this semester on the cinema of Hong Kong, studying film production, distribution and identity formation. Fu and Pak-tong Chuek, a filmmaker and professor of cinema studies at HKBU in residence at the UI this semester, co-taught the course. In addition, their students studied Cantonese – the dialect spoken by the majority in Hong Kong.

The course, which is the first for the UI and one of the first in the United States, was funded by the Ford Foundation and organized by the UI’s International Studies and Programs and the colleges of Fine and Applied Arts and Liberal Arts and Sciences.