昨天今天明天: 內地與香港電影的政治、藝術與傳統

“Confucius never talked about strange phenomena, physical violence, social chaos, or spirits” (子不語怪力亂神). In the 1930s the Nationalist government implemented film censorship which resonated with the Confucian teachings intended to maintain social harmony and political stability. Cantonese pictures, ghost and fantasy genres, racy and racially insulting Hollywood images were baleful weeds that threatened to disrupt national security. After 1949, British officials in Hong Kong exercised clandestine measures to quarantine Communist movies, pro-Taiwan pictures, and politically provocative Hollywood productions to stabilize colonial rule; meanwhile the mainland Communist authorities continued to exorcise the demonic and undesirable spirits from their state-owned screens.

The book recasts censorship from a repressive-inhibiting force to a productive drive that regenerates new symbolism, audiovisual sensuality, figures of speech, and betrayal of norms in cinematic representation. Combining archival research, historical contextualization, and textual exegesis, it probes the interplay of film form, state ideology, and cultural agency, examining how filmmakers could get around the rules to unveil forbidden messages or sentiments. The study covers spy warfare and conspiracies, gods and monsters, repression and eros, revolution and violence, articulated in opera film, lyrical cinema, melodrama, ghost story, espionage, romantic comedy, realist drama, and revolutionary documentary. It charts the uneven paths of artists like Sit Kok-sin, Cai Chusheng, Fei Mu, Lee Sun-fung, Lee Tit, Ng Cho-fan, Bai Jingrui, Wang Tong, Tang Shu-shuen, Lee Bik-wah, Tsui Hark, Eileen Chang, and Michelangelo Antonioni, who contested the identity of Chineseness through engaging in the cinema of offense.