1. Hong Kong-Malay film connections (1960s-1980s)
- Author
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Yeo, MH and Hillenbrand, M
- Abstract
This dissertation maps the Hong Kong-Malay film connections forged during the immediate post-studio era of the late 1960s to the 1980s. Hoping to allay the problem of a “Chinese preoccupation” in Hong Kong and Asian film network studies, as well as the prevalent tendency in Malay film studies to territorialize Malay film history narratives, this dissertation investigates how, and why, these transborder connections were being made during this time, extending inquiry into three key sets of films: the made-in-Hong Kong Malay James Bond films (1967-1968), Merdeka Film Productions’ “new-style” Malay films (1975-1980) and Hong Kong-produced Nanyang gong tau horror films (1975-1980s). Through examining the different kinds of border-crossings that underpin these films, the dissertation illustrates how sociopolitical and industrial changes in Hong Kong and the Malay Peninsula during this highly fluctuating times provided the essential impetuses for these crossovers, and contends that the cultural and political distances therein were crucially bridged, though certainly not without conflict and contestation, through a reworking of the Malay body, an act of passing and the suturing together of the tourist and cinematic gaze. Putting shape to this particular dynamic of Asian cinema network history, this dissertation ultimately demonstrates that even beyond the relatively well-studied studio era, the histories of Hong Kong and Malay cinemas in fact remained entwined with one another, to some degree implicating each other’s processes of localization/nationalization and restructuration in the late twentieth century.
- Published
- 2021