Book Published Recently
'Documentary cinema and related forms of state-produced film framed and facilitated the colonisation of South and South-East Asia, and this important new volume explores that history across the region and the twentieth century By doing so it makes a significant and singular contribution to the burgeoning scholarly work on the political uses of cinema, particularly in sustaining imperialism and across the partial, halting, transition to "post-colonial" states.'
With a particular emphasis on how these films address the historico-political dimension of their time, Hong Kong Documentary Film introduces students and scholars in Film Studies to this fascinating and largely unexplored cinematic tradition.
Lee Grieveson, University College London
Based on rare archival documents and films, this anthology is the first to focus primarily on the use of official and colonial documentary films in the South and South-East Asian regions. Drawing together a range of international scholars, the book sheds new light on historical, theoretical and empirical issues pertaining to the documentary film in order to better comprehend the significant transformations of the form in the colonial, late colonial and immediate postcolonial/postcolonial period. Covering diverse geographical and colonial contexts in countries like Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia, and focusing on underresearched or little-known films, it demonstrates the complex set of relations between the colonisers and the colonised throughout the region.
Ian Aitken is Professor of Film Studies and Camille Deprez is Research Assistant Professor, both at the Academy of Film, School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University.
This book explores the ways in which the British official film was used in Malaya/Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong from 1945 to the 1970s. Aitken uncovers how the British official film, and British official information agencies, adapted to the epochal contexts of the Cold War and end of empire.
In addition to an extensive introduction, which touches on a number of critical issues related to the post-war British official film, the book provides an account of how the tradition of film-making associated with the British documentary film movement spread into the region during the post-war period, and how that tradition was contested by a 'Colonial Office' tradition of film-making. The volume concludes by covering the rise of television in the region within the context of developing post-colonial authoritarian states in Singapore and Malaysia, and the continuation of colonial authoritarianism in Hong Kong.
Ian Aitken is Professor of Film Studies at the School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University. His most recent book publications include Hong Kong Documentary Film (2014), Lukácsian Film Theory and Cinema: An Analysis of Ceorg Lukács' Writings on Film 7973-7977 (2012), and The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, (ed.) (2012).
Does Hong Kong have a significant tradition of documentary film-making?
Until recently, many film scholars believed not. Yet, when Ian Aitken and Michael Ingham challenged this assumption, they discovered a rich cinematic tradition dating back to the 1890s.
Under-researched and often forgotten, documentary film-making in Hong Kong includes a thriving independent documentary film movement, television documentaries, a large archive of documentaries made by the colonial film units, and a number of classic British official films. Case studies from all three categories are examined in this book, including The Battle of Shanghai, The Sea and the Sky, Rising Sun and The Hong Kong Case. In-depth discussion and analysis of more recent Hong Kong independent documentaries focuses on works such as Cheung King-wai's KJ: Music and Life and films by Tammy Cheung and Evans Chan.
With a particular emphasis on how these films address the historico-political dimension of their time, Hong Kong Documentary Film introduces students and scholars in Film Studies to this fascinating and largely unexplored cinematic tradition.
Ian Aitken is a Professor at the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University.
Michael Ingham is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.
Publications
- Aitken, Ian, and Deprez, Camille (eds), Colonial Documentary Film in South and South-East Asia (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, contracted)
- Aitken, Ian (ed.), ‘Grierson’s Core Intellectual Model, and the British Sponsored Documentary Film, Tradition’, book chapter in ‘The Major Realist Film Theorists: An Anthology’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) Edited anthology
- Aitken, Ian (eds.), ‘The Hong Kong Film Unit, and The Sea and the Sky (1972)’, book chapter in ‘The Colonial Documentary Film in South and South-East Asia’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) Edited anthology.
- Aitken, Ian (ed.), ‘The Major Realist Film Theorists: An Anthology’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) Edited anthology.
- Aitken, Ian, ‘The Television Documentary Films of Hong Kong’s Two Terrestrial Broadcasters’, Studies in Documentary Film, 2015) Journal article
- Aitken, Ian, ‘The British Official Film in Malay(si)a, Singapore and Hong Kong (1945-73)’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Research monograph
- Aitken, Ian, ‘The Griersonian Influence and its Challenges: Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore’, in Williams and Druick (eds.) ‘The Grierson Effect: The Worldwide Influence of John Grierson on the Development of Educational and Documentary Cinema’ (BFI, April 2014) Book chapter.
- Aitken, Ian, and Ingham, Michael (eds.), Documentary Film Hong Kong (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
- Aitken, Ian, and Ingham, Michael, 'Official, Public-Broadcast and Independent Documentary Film in Hong Kong', in Marchetti, Cheung and Yao (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Hong Kong Cinema(London: Blackwell, 2014) (Pagination unknown at this point in time).
- Aitken, Ian, 'John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement’, in Winston, Brian (ed.), The Documentary Film Book (London: British Film Institute; Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 129-137.
- Aitken, Ian, 'Documentary Film: An Introduction' (9,000 words), in Aitken (ed.) The Routledge Concise Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 1-16.
- Aitken, Ian, ‘Introduction’, in Aitken (ed.), Routledge Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies: Documentary Film vols. 1-4 (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 1-17.
- Deprez, Camille and Pernin, Judith (eds), Post-1990 Documentary: Reconfiguring Independence (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).
- Deprez, Camille, 'A Space in Between: The Legacy of the Activist Documentary Film in India’, in C. Deprez and J. Pernin (eds), Post-1990 Documentary: Reconfiguring Independence (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming) (Pagination unknown at this point in time).
- Deprez, Camille, ‘Colonial Discourse and Documentary Film at the Margins: The Case of Delhi grande ville de l'Inde supérieure and Dans l'État du Cachemire, two Early Pathé Frères Films Shot in India’, in Studies in European Cinema (Spring 2014), DOI: 10.1080/17411548.2014.903095, pp. 1-14.
- Deprez, Camille, 'John Grierson in India: The Films Division under the Influence?', in Williams and Druick (eds.), The Grierson Effect: Tracing Documentary's International Movement (London: BFI/Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014), pp. 153-158.
- Deprez, Camille, 'The Films Division of India (1948-1964): The Early Days and the Influence of the British Film Tradition', in Film History (Fall 2013), Vol. 25 (3), pp. 149-173.
- Deprez, Camille, entry on 'India', in Aitken (ed.), The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 400-406.
- Deprez, Camille, 'Pour un panorama du cinéma documentaire indien', in Le Temps des Médias n°17 (Fall 2011), pp. 223-235.
- Ingham, Mike, 'Sound and Vision: The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan and Evans Chan in Sorceress of the New Piano' in Tony Williams (ed.), The Films of Evans Chan (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013) (Pagination unknown at this point in time).
- Ingham, Mike, 'Twenty Years on: Hong Kong Dissident Documentarians and the Tiananmen Factor', in Studies in Documentary Film, (2012), pp. 81-98.
- Ingham, Mike, 'Hong Kong Cinema and the Film Essay: A Matter of Perception', in Esther M.K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti, Tan See-Kam (eds.), Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier, (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), pp. 175-193.
- Ingham, Mike, Johnnie To's PTU (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009).
- Ingham, Mike, 'Crossings': Documentary elements and essayistic devices in the fiction and non-fiction films of Evans Chan', in Studies in Documentary Film, Vol. 1, no. 1 (2007), pp. 21-34.
- Ingham, Mike, Hong Kong as a City of the Imagination (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007).
- Ingham, Mike, 'Evans Chan: Film Essayist', in Aitken (ed.) Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, (London & New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 199-201. Re-published in Aitken (ed.), The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, pp. 153-154.
