The First Generation of Hong Kong Cinephiles: Yinguang

Introduction

Hong Kong has enjoyed a long film history, which dates back to as early as the invention of film. Recent scholarship has begun to pay attention to the early screen culture of Hong Kong cinema.[1] These findings paved the way for exploring the cinephilic culture in Hong Kong that has taken shape since the mid-1920s, when local critics and movie lovers began to group themselves to form cine clubs and unions and published film magazines. Yinguang (銀光) was considered to be the first of this kind. In a way that differed from its Shanghai counterpart, this first group of cinephiles in Hong Kong embraced cinema as a means to negotiate the arrival of religious modernity with the idea of what we call “secular modernism.” In the following sections, we will (1) introduce the magazine and its contributors; (2) outline its writers’ conceptualization of film as art; and (3) delineate the dispute between Yinguang and its Shanghai competitor about receiving cinema as an instantiation of secular modernism.

Yinguang and its Cinephilic Contributors

In 1926, Wei Chunqiu (衛春秋, 1906–1963) founded the film magazine Yinguang with Pan Qingzhong (潘慶螽) and Yang Weiwen (楊蔚文) in Hong Kong and established it under the cine club Dianying wenyi hujinshe (電影文藝互進社).[2] With Wei as the magazine’s editor–in–chief, local artist Chen Jiwen (陳緝文) served as the art director, Mo Hanmei (莫寒梅) as the manager, and Xu Guanyu (徐觀餘) and Wu Baling (吳灞陵, 1904–1976) as the major contributors.[3] Its topics covered the Hong Kong and Shanghai film industries, film history, stardom, film and education, and film as art. To build a broader connection beyond the local circulation, the magazine sent free copies to the editors of Shanghai’s newspapers and magazines (fig. 1).[4]

Yinguang was Wei’s very first stepping stone in his publication career. As a journalist, Wei contributed to Butterfly Pictorial (蝴蝶畫報) as a film critic in 1929; he then became a novelist and wrote for The Sky Light Daily (天光報) in the early 1930s.[5] In his later career, Wei became a well-known Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School writer and the founder of many literary magazines and newspapers under the pseudonym Ling Siusang (靈簫生). His famous novel The Red House by the Sea (海角紅樓) was adapted into a film directed by Wong Toi (黃岱) in 1947. In addition, he founded newspapers such as Chunqiu (春秋) and Lingxiao (靈簫) during the 1940s–1960s. During his time with Yinguang, Wei devotedly promoted film as a means of social education and reform. Another major contributor, Xu Guanyu (徐觀餘), was a literature lover while studying in college.[6] Later, in the early 1920s, he advanced his study at Yenching University and served as a member of the editorial board of Yenching Weekly (燕大周刊). Yinguang was the magazine where he often talked about the importance of personality for an actress or actor to develop into a great artist.[7] In 1928, he was appointed as Secretary of the Chinese Boy Scout Command by the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party). He continued his educational career in the party and moved to Taiwan after 1949.

Wu Baling was a famous media personality. He was the editor of and writer for several Hong Kong newspapers, such as The Great Light Daily (大光報) and the Xianggang Evening Post (香江晚報), and literary magazines, such as The Novel Weekly (小說星期刊) and Mo Hua (墨花). As someone who complained about the lack of an independent film criticism platform in the 1920s, Wu considered Yinguang an ideal platform for promoting film culture in Hong Kong.[8] According to him, film was a form of art embodied in the power of motivation.[9] In addition to being a film critic and theorist, Wu worked closely with a group of young local modernist writers such as Xie Chenguang (謝晨光), Lu Lun (侶倫, 1911–1988) and Zhang Wenbing (張吻冰, 1910–1959) and later formed Hong Kong’s first literary society, the Daoshang Society (島上社), with assistance from The Great Light Daily.[10] Many Daoshang Society members were movie lovers. Similar to Wu, Xie considered himself a cinephile and frequently described his movie–going experiences in his writings.[11] Under the pen name Xinghe (星河), Xie published an essay on the movie The Silk Bouquet (1926) in Yinguang.[12]

The composition of the major contributors of Yinguang and its connections to the Daoshang Society illustrate that the cinephilic culture that emerged in 1920s Hong Kong thrived among journalists, educators, novelists, and literary lovers—a phenomenon that was common in early Chinese film history. Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School novelists–turned–film practitioners such as Bao Tianxiao (包天笑), Chen Diexian (陳蝶仙), Wang Dungen (王鈍根), and Zhou Shoujuan (周瘦鵑) were considered to be the first generation of cinephiles in Shanghai, as they were sufficiently affluent in financial and cultural capital to enjoy and appreciate movies. They participated extensively in literary and film enterprises to promote modern Chinese urban culture.[13] Zhou was the most important novelist–turned film critic who promoted this modern imported visual medium.[14] Ostensibly, the development of Hong Kong’s early cinephilic culture followed the same path. However, Yinguang writers considered the magazines run by Shanghai’s cinephiles to be the mouthpiece of the film industry and distanced themselves from their Shanghai counterparts. In the following sections, we explain Yinguang writers’ conceptualization of film to demonstrate how they distinguished themselves from their Shanghai competitors.

Yinguang’s Conceptualization of Film

Since its founding issue, Yinguang received criticism, especially from its Shanghai competitor Yinxing (Silver Star, 1926–1928, 18 issues). In response, Yinguang’s contributor Zuixingsheng (醉星生) affirmed: “We [Yinguang writers] have our spirit; we have our principle; we have our struggle.”[15] The pronoun “we” here unequivocally expresses Yinguang writers’ collective identity and vision. In response to the phenomenon of the rise of female stars, Zuixingsheng marked the differences between Shanghai and Hong Kong cinephilic writers. Yinxing writers celebrated Shanghai’s booming film industry, which made actresses more visible to the public, and embraced this as a positive sign of elevating female status in society and endorsing female liberation. They attacked Hong Kong writers for despising actresses as prostitutes and thus criticized Hong Kong film critics for their backward attitudes toward female liberation. The debate was seemingly about female liberation: Shanghai writers welcomed the visibility of female stars on screen and praised their social fluidity in the industry; Hong Kong writers, on the other hand, sought to suppress this visibility, dismissed it as improper, and imposed moral principles to discipline actresses’ behaviors in public. However, in his defense of his fellow writers, Zuixingsheng argued that stars’ personality (人格) was indeed the core of their conceptualization of cinema. The film industry might help actresses attain a certain degree of visibility. However, this visibility contributed nothing to the art. To him, the crucial question was how a star’s personality “contributes to the artistic value [of the screen performance]” (Zui Xingsheng, “Reply to Mr. Xianjiao”). Following Zuixingsheng’s argument, Xu Guanyu’s affirmation of film as art and the performers as “artists” or “art workers” attempted to elevate the status of actresses and actors in society (Xu Guanyu, “On the Personality of the Film Performer”). At the time, the public often dismissed actors as hooligans and actresses as prostitutes because their everyday behaviors looked alike: actresses/actors and prostitutes/hooligans paid close attention to their appearance (“putting on heavy makeup”), visited entertainment sites (“garden and dance hall”), and behaved similarly in public (“flirting with the eyes, hugging with love”) (Xu Guanyu, “On the Personality of the Film Performer”). By elevating the actors’ and actresses’ social status, Xu attempted to differentiate between the two. The actresses/actors’ “romantic” way of living might look similar to prostitutes’ and hooligans’ decadent lives, but their “personality” and “good manners” (修養) might save them from sinking to the bottom of society (Xu Guanyu, “The Mission of Film in Social Education). According to Xu, film’s aim to convey the beauty of the arts compelled the performer to maintain a wholesome personality with good manners to convey as the artistic value of her or his performance.

Bettering one’s personality not only benefited the performer themselves but also, by extension, the well–being of society at large. In this vein, Wei Chunqiu, Wu Baling, and Tai Susheng (太素生) argued for the strong relationship between spectatorship, performance, and personality. To them, only a performer with a good personality could present a good performance, and only this type of performer was able to be a conduit to move and educate the audience “imperceptibly.”[16] Wu told a story of a moviegoer who was “imperceptibly influenced” by Douglas Fairbanks’ virility. After watching the actor’s performance in The Mark of Zorro (1920) and Robin Hood (1922), the spectator decided to train his weak and frail body (Wu Baling, “How to Use Film to Affect the Audiences?”). In this case, personality was not only understood in moral terms but also perceived as the degree of authenticity between the real–life person and the onscreen persona. Thus, according to the Yinguang writers, on–screen performance was the extension of real life. Understanding cinema as an apparatus projecting performers’ lives onto the silver screen, Yinguang writers contended that only good personality contributed to good acting. Actresses/actors with good personalities, then, were able to positively affect and reform individual and collective lives at the receiving end. If anything could be called Yinguang’s spirit, principle, and struggle, it would be the spirit of having a good personality, the principle of a good personality leading to a good performance, and the struggle to harness film’s influential power to educate society. However, this spirit became the point of attack from Yinxing. The following section will discuss the dispute between the two groups of cinephiles and illustrate how Yinguang writers perceived and received the novel technology through secular modernism.

The Yinguang–Yinxing Dispute

The dispute can be traced back to Jiaoxin (嚼馨), Huaiji (懷吉), Linxun (嶙峋) and Wei Chunqiu’s articles, which illustrated the differences between the two magazines in their industrial and discursive positionings.[17] Jiaoxin, Linxun and Wei Chunqiu accused Yinxing of lacking independence from the business of the film industry (Jiaoxin, “Happy New Year”; Chunqiu, “Weird Thinking”; Linxun, “Refute”). They noted that since it was operated by one of Shanghai’s leading presses, Liangyou (良友), Yinxing maintained a close relationship with the Shanghai film industry, and its writers failed to provide fair judgments on the film industry and individual film productions. Linxun denounced the magazine by condemning its role in promoting film companies associated with Liangyou (Linxun, “Refute”). In response, Liangyou issued an official letter to Yinguang’s editorial board, expressing their strong dissatisfaction and urging them to apologize for the false accusation and defamation. Yinguang’s editorial board replied to Liangyou by publishing their response along with Liangyou’s letter in their fifth issue.[18] To ensure that Liangyou’s team read their response, those at Yinguang sent free copies to them.[19] In this exchange of letters and responses, Yinguang repeatedly attacked Yinxing’s deep connection to the film industry and companies and, thus, its lack of independence.

In addition, the discrepancy between their discursive positionings can be observed in Huaiji’s article for the fourth issue of Yinguang.[20] Huaiji criticized Yinxing’s editor–in–chief Lu Mengshu (盧夢殊) for his xenophilia. Huaiji condemned Lu for his appreciation of American productions over Chinese local movies, which he observed in Lu’s preface for the fourth issue of Yinxing. By pointing to the indulgence and licentiousness he found in The Big Parade (1925), The Merry Widow (1925), and La Bohème (1926), Huaiji challenged that Lu’s appraisal might negatively influence society. Responding in Art World (藝術界), an art magazine also published by Liangyou, Lu lambasted Huaiji for “discussing the film with the dreadful and corrupted traditional Chinese thinking.”[21] The polemic between Huaiji and Lu illuminated divergent understandings of modernity between Yinguang’s and Yinxing’s groups. Scholars have already pointed out that Yinxing followed the May Fourth tradition of enlightenment and understood film as a modern art form that could serve enlightening purposes. To them, cinema’s mission was to inflame the fire of life and make neo–heroic movies to reinvigorate the nation in crisis.[22] Their understanding of cinema was closely related to the modernizing project of building a strong nation to defend itself from the threats of foreign countries. This mission of nation building was absent from Yinguang. Yinguang’s idea of creating a new personality on screen for social education seems far from the model of modernity embraced by its Shanghai counterpart.

By promoting personality, Yinguang’s writers fostered a cultural reform to create a new social morality that could cope with a changing social milieu in modern times. This belief in a good personality originated from Christianity as explained in Zhang Zhuling’s (張祝齡, 1877–1961) writings. Zhang was a pastor and one of the founders of The Great Light Daily. He passionately advocated for the Christian notion of “complete personality” (完全之人格) in his media and education enterprises in Hong Kong.[23] By completing and perfecting personality, a human being, as Zhang suggested, could truly reflect the image of God as a human being and get closer to God. To Zhang, developing “good manners”—conquering the decadency and corruption of modern life—was essential to completing personality. In other words, pursuing a complete personality was an active rejection of materialistic desires (Zhang Zhuling, “The Complete Personality”, 8). In this light, Yinguang’s conceptualization of cinema not only represented their cinephilic enthusiasm toward possible social education through performance but also revealed their adsorption and secularization of the Christian idea of the human person/personality as “being–as–the–image–of–God.” Yinguang writers’ endorsement of the Christian idea brings us back to the long debate on religious modernity brought under the influence of European imperialism by Western missionaries and secularized by Chinese intellectuals as wenming (文明/civilization) in the Late Qing and the Early Republic.[24]

Situating this religious modernity in 1920s Hong Kong, the notion of “complete personality” that circulated among Yinguang writers was a product of the complex relationship between the colonial government and collaborative colonialism. Unlike the Christians in mainland China under severe attack by the Chinese nationalists, the Hong Kong Christians in the 1920s were long regarded as the model of “Anglo–Chinese,” whose social status was approved by colonial governance as part of collaborative colonialism. [25]  Although the members of and contributors to Yinguang were not necessarily Christians, the Christian rhetoric of “personality” did indeed influence them.[26] Instead of viewing film as a form of vernacular modernism, Yinguang writers emphasized the affective power of the film by secularizing the religious vocabulary—a process we call “secular modernism.” Unlike Miriam Hansen’s vernacular modernism, a matrix of articulation of fantasies, uncertainties, and anxieties experienced in modernity and modernization, Yinguang’s secular modernism was a discourse of religious modernity that engendered an articulation of personality as “being–as–the–image–of–God.”[27] This personality reflected on the silver screen can be understood as a manifestation of a secularized incarnation of God through the embodied performance of the actress/actor and thus a means to conquer the decadence of society and hope for a brighter urban culture.

Conclusion

Like most film magazines published in Hong Kong and China in the 1920s, Yinguang was short-lived. However, it constituted an essential part of understanding early Hong Kong film culture, particularly cinephilic culture. From the magazine’s articles, one can perceive the conceptualization of film that Yinguang hoped to present to society at that time. They argued that the crucial basis of a good movie was a performer with a good personality—a critical aspect that linked together acting and living. To harness the film’s influential power to educate society, a performer should have a good personality with good manners. The Christian undertone inherent in the idea of personality should not be overlooked. This personality was the reflection of the “being-as-the-image-of-God.” In contrast to their Shanghai competitor Yinxing and its dream of producing passionate, neo–heroic films that imagined the creation of a strong nation, Yinguang promoted a cultural reform that created a new social morality by embracing the Christian idea of personality originating from the religious modernity endorsed by colonialism—a “secular modernism” that might shed new light on our understanding of the cinephilic culture of early Hong Kong film history.