Cinema Censorship and Media Citizenship
The following is a blog post from Prof. Karen Fang, author of Arresting Cinema: Surveillance in Hong Kong Film. Her article “Cinema Censorship and Media Citizenship in the Hong Kong Film Ten Years” kicks off the latest issue of Surveillance & Society.
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World politics today can sometimes seem an anachronistic mix of McCarthyite orientalism with twenty-first century digital sophistication. With every new headline about Chinese corporate spying, Russian social media meddling, and President Trump’s movie trailer-like promo video for his recent meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, western political imaginations are flooded with anxieties regarding authoritarian eastern states and media technology’s vulnerability and power against them.
Among these media technologies, movies are not usually accorded the same diffuse political agency as digital and social media, but given film’s transformations along with the same economic and technological innovations enacted by social media it should not be surprising that movies are also both vulnerable to state cooptation and capable of being mobilized for popular resistance. Whatever one thinks of the content and execution of Trump’s political promo reel, for example, the administration drew on well-documented knowledge of the Kim family’s deep love of movies as well as the American president’s own identification with media power to use film grammar to communicate a message that the tv star-come-state leader might not be quite so articulate at himself. Similarly, in my current essay for Surveillance and Society, I look at recent Chinese-language filmmaking in Hong Kong and China, both to show how movie censorship and self-censorship manifests Chinese state power as well as how some current filmmakers are resisting such conditions. Focusing particularly on Ten Years, a controversial 2015 Hong Kong independent film that sparked grassroots activism reminiscent of the 2014 Umbrella protests against Chinese power that captivated Hong Kong the year before, my article places movies alongside social media and other contemporary digital technologies in being at the forefront of contemporary political contest.
As a scholarly discipline surveillance studies often explores nonwestern media in terms of censorship and authoritarian control — issues with obvious relevance to Chinese media, but not a context in which cinema is typically included. Film studies, by contrast, may be deeply aware of cinema’s currency in enacting Chinese power — but like surveillance studies’ neglect of cinema’s relevance within media geopolitics, film studies’ previous treatments of Chinese-language cinema tend to overlook its similarities with global developments in media activism, such as Black Lives Matter and the Arab Spring. My essay on the content, censorship and civic activism surrounding Ten Years offers a correction to this oversight. By bringing together cinema, surveillance and media studies, I aim to show how this fascinating episode in Chinese-language film culture illuminates the increasingly fraught geopolitics of contemporary global media.
