The Film Scene: Cinema, The Arts, and Social Change

Date: 21-22 April 2006 (Fri-Sat)
Time: 8:45am-10:00pm

Organized by:
The Department of Comparative Literature
The Department of Music
The Centre of Asian Studies

With Support from:
The University of Hong Kong Foundation
HKU Culture and Humanities Fund
The University of Hong Kong

Statement from the Organizing Committee

This interdisciplinary, two-day symposium brings together scholars from Hong Kong and abroad to explore the connections between the cinema and the other arts within the context of social change. Since its birth, the cinema has been at the crossroads of the connections among the plastic and performing arts, and, today, film continues to question the borders separating various aesthetic practices and media. We chose to call the conference “The Film Scene” to try and honor, first of all, the film and film studies scene here in Hong Kong, the growing relevance and internationalization of Hong Kong cinema, despite the difficulties experienced by the industry, as well as the growing interest from other parts of the world in the critical and scholarly work done on cinema here. Within this complex matrix, the film “scene” emerges as a meeting ground of artists working in various forms on the cutting edge of aesthetic exploration and social change.

Esther Cheung
Hing-Yan Chan
Giorgio Biancorosso
Mirana May Szeto
Ka-Fai Yau
Gina Marchetti

Keynote Address

The Seen, the Unseen, the Obscene: Space and Affect in Hong Kong Cinema

The talk will juxtapose five films (Fruit Chan's Durian Durian, Zhang Yuan's Crazy English, Wong Kar-Wai's 2046, Mak and Lau's Infernal Affairs ?, and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain) which pose, in terms of their different understanding of cinema and the cinematic, the question: What happens to social and personal experience when "space" and "affect" can no longer be kept separate?

Prof. Ackbar Abbas, the Department of Comparative Literature

Moderator: Dr. Esther M.K. Cheung
Esther Cheung is the Acting Head of the Department of Comparative Literature and Co-Director of Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) at the University of Hong Kong. She is interested in Hong Kong cultural studies, contemporary Chinese fiction and film, and visual and urban culture. Her publications include topics on identity in Hong Kong literature, historical writing, film, and pop song lyrics. She is the co-editor of a volume of essays on Hong Kong literature titled Hong Kong Literature as/and Cultural Studies («????@????») (Oxford UP) and another one of Hong Kong cinema called Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema (Oxford UP).

Opening Remarks: Professor Kam Louie
Kam Louie is the Dean of Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong. He was the Professor of Chinese and Head of the China and Korea Centre, Faculty of Asian Studies, The Australian National University. He is a Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy and the International Secretary of the Academy, and also a member of the Australia-China Council. His publications include Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century (with Bonnie McDougall; 1997), The Politics of Chinese Language and Culture (with Bob Hodge; 1998), Theorising Chinese Masculinity (2002), and Culture, Identity, Commodity: Diasporic Chinese Literatures in English (with Tseen Khoo; 2005) He had also co-edited Asian Masculinities (with Morris Low; 2003). He is chief editor of the Asian Studies Review, a prestigious academic journal in the humanities discipline.

Keynote Address: Professor Ackbar Abbas
Ackbar Abbas is Professor of Comparative Literature and Co-Director of Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) at the University of Hong Kong. He has published on modern Chinese painting, Baudrillard and Benjamin, film theory and postmodernism. His book Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance was published by the University of Minnesota Press (1997). He also collaborated in writing Shanghai Reflections: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Search for an Alternative Modernity (with Mario Gandelsonas and M. Christine Boyer; 2002), and co-edited Internationalizing Cultural Studies: an Anthology (with John Nguyet Erni; 2005).

Response: Professor Leo Ou-fan Lee
Leo Ou-fan Lee received his PHD from Harvard University and a Honorary doctorate in Humanities from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He was Professor in Chinese Literature at Harvard University. In addition, he has taught at UCLA, Chicago, Indiana, Princeton and Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include modern Chinese literature and cultural studies, contemporary fiction and cinema in Pan-Chinese regions. His works include Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of Urban Culture in China, Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, and more. He is now Professor of Humanities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.