Getting in the Festival Spirit: Studying and Organising Film Festivals

Film festivals have proliferated in recent years. A quick check with Wikipedia shows there are now more than 400 major film festivals around the world, from heavyweights like Cannes, Sundance and Toronto to more obscure gatherings such as the Camp Cult Classics Film Festival and Pyongyang International Film Festival. This year, HKU pitched in.

Professor Gina Marchetti organised a credit-bearing course in which students not only studied film festivals, but organised their own. There was much academic insight to be gained from the exercise, she said.

“Film festivals are important not only because they focus attention on a neglected aspect of film or highlight the need for a particular community to see itself on the screen, but also because they provide a discourse beyond the screen. That discourse is sometimes lost as more and more people watch films at home or on portable devices – they don’t have that big screen experience and so they lose the community experience, too.

“At film festival screenings, you are forced to recreate the communal screening and extend it to engage in discussion and interaction. There’s also this idea of levelling the playing field between audience and filmmaker by allowing the audience to question the filmmaker, which they normally cannot do.”

The whole shebang

The students were required to curate their own festival – to decide on a theme, select films, contact filmmakers to negotiate permission to screen the films for free (they had no budget), find a venue, advertise the festival, prepare questions for Q&A sessions after the screening, and survey audiences on their response to the festival.

They worked in small groups and organised five festivals that were screened around HKU campus on the themes of the Umbrella Movement, the immigrant experience, animated documentaries, horror documentaries and road movies. The first two in particular generated a lot of discussion because the audiences had direct experience of the topics.

Nora Lam Tze-wing, now a third-year student majoring in Comparative Literature and French, was in the group that organised the Umbrella Movement festival, to which students and independent filmmakers contributed films. She learned much from the process.

“We received a lot of short films, more than we had time to screen, and choices had to be made. My groupmates and I spent a lot of time discussing what directions and styles to screen – journalistic versus theatrical, clearly-narrated versus experimental, documentary versus drama and so on. I had thought that for such a political topic, only documentaries could fully present the themes, but I was surprised by the diverse genres and the broad styles that could be used to present one single topic,” she said.

A student-curated screening on the Umbrella Movement

Film culture beyond the screen

The students were also exposed to the organisation and wheeling and dealing that go on around professional film festivals. Professor Marchetti arranged for them to attend the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) and the trade fair Hong Kong Filmart, using funding support from HKU’s Experiential Learning Fund. She also brought in such guest speakers as Roger Garcia, HKIFF Executive Director, and the organisers of several smaller, specialised local film festivals.

“It’s really important for students who want to go into film in some sort of professional capacity as programmers, critics, policymakers, as well as people working in the industry, to have some idea of how film festivals work in this kind of climate,” she said.

“It’s taught them that there’s more to film culture than what you simply see on the screen. And that what you see is very much dependent on what happens off-screen in terms of not only production but what comes after that – exhibitions, distribution, critical reception, audience reception, the way in which festivals and other special events shape the screening environment and screening context.”

The festival project follows on from the well-received student work last year under Dr Esther Yau to create films about Pokfulam village and screen them in the village.

“I wanted to do something a bit different than the creative end,” Professor Marchetti said. “What do you do when you’ve got a lot of creative material and viewers hungry for something that they cannot normally get in the Cineplex? We came at it from that angle.”

The AniDox Animated Documentaries Festival can be viewed at
http://anidox2015.tumblr.com/

Horror Animation Festival at
http://hkuanimationfestival.weebly.com/

Road Movie Festival at
http://theroadstakenff.weebly.com/

Umbrella through Lens at
http://utl.mylife.hk/

United Cinemas – Hong Kong International Film Festival for Immigrants at
https://hkiffimmigrants.wordpress.com/

See original article at: http://www4.hku.hk/pubunit/Bulletin/2015_Oct_Vol.17_No.1/teaching_learning/

Cultural Musings on the Dinner Table: Isaac Yue on Chinese Food Culture

Dr Isaac Yue uses food as a vehicle to travel to the past and bring ancient times back to life. Ironically, it would have been difficult for him to openly pursue this interest in times past because of the Confucian precept that men of virtue should steer clear of the kitchen.

“That saying was misinterpreted over time [it originally applied only to the slaughterhouse], but it became so widely accepted, that if men wrote down recipes they did it in private, in secret, because they didn’t want people to know,” Dr Yue said.

Fortunately for Dr Yue, enough Chinese sages were secretly interested in food that there are written recipes dating back to the Tang Dynasty. Recipes have even crept into classical literary texts. Taken together, these snippets provide insights into the status and preparation of food over time.

For example, pork was shunned at one point during the Song Dynasty, despite its centrality to Chinese cuisine before and after. Lamb had come into favour instead under the influence of the north and because it was more difficult and costly to obtain.

“In one particular menu from that period, we know the emperor was a guest at a general’s household. Pork was not served on the emperor’s table, but it was served on the other tables. They were ranking food,” he said.

“Anywhere in the world you will notice this pattern in which people don’t eat specific foods not because of the taste, but because of the ideas associated with them.”

The Night Revels of Han Xizai by 10th-century Chinese artist Gu Hongzhong

Tastes of long ago

Dr Yue is also interested in the elaborate preparations of certain dishes. In The Golden Lotus there is a detailed description about a pig’s head cooked using one log to control the fire and keep it at a low temperature, and in Dream of the Red Chamber of fetching mountain snow to make tea.

Dr Yue’s interest in food is not confined to ancient China. He has also been studying the first Western recipe book written in China, by the missionary Martha Crawford of Alabama in the mid-19th century. It instructed servants how to make beef stew, carrot cake and other foods for their Western employers, and also found an audience among Chinese readers interested in these new foods.

“Usually when we study history, we look at dead people. But food is something that can be brought back to life. I am asking, is what we eat today the same as what we ate 100 years ago?” said Dr Yue. Apart from reading about food, he has also tested some of the recipes in his modern kitchen and found they stand up. Men can cook.

See the original article at: http://www4.hku.hk/pubunit/bulletin/cover_story/page5.html

Robert Peckham on Epidemics, Panic and History

Hong Kong is more familiar with epidemics than most cities, having lived through SARS and avian influenza in recent years. What better place, then, to consider the far-reaching impacts of epidemics on society.

Dr Robert Peckham, Founder and Co-Director of HKU’s Centre for the Humanities and Medicine which recently marked its fifth anniversary, is applying a fresh approach to epidemics and their effects. His new edited book, Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties, explores the different kinds of panic produced by outbreaks of infectious disease.

“Managing panic is integral to disease control,” he said. “An epidemic poses a multi-faceted security challenge: Health concerns can easily become entangled with anxieties about social order and economic stability. There is a loop-back effect as epidemics produce panic, triggering an emergency response that induces further panic that may drive infection.”

Outbreaks of bubonic plague in late 19th-century India and Hong Kong caused widespread panic. Draconian measures imposed by the panicky colonial state – such as enforced isolation and quarantine – served to exacerbate panic in the local population, which then spilled over into violent protest that called forth even harsher interventions by the state.

“In Hong Kong, the colonial administration was forced to back down. In the end, it couldn’t control cross-border movements,” Dr Peckham said.

An agent of change

The experience of epidemics led Europeans to rethink how they organised their colonies. Initially, they had sought to distance themselves from the threat of disease at large by establishing enclaves. Legislation was passed in Hong Kong at the beginning of the 20th century, for example, that reserved the Peak District exclusively for colonials. It soon became apparent, however, that exclusionary policies would not work.

Epidemics provided a stimulus for infrastructural projects designed to sanitise the city, including the construction of waterworks and a system of reservoirs, as well as new types of housing. More recently, SARS resulted in far-reaching institutional changes, from the provision of hand-sanitizers at the entrances of many public buildings, to the arrangement of the city’s public services, including hospital operations and morgue facilities.

“In this sense,” Dr Peckham said, “panic can be harnessed by the government to effect change. It can serve, often inadvertently, as a tool for pushing through policies that might have been difficult or impossible to implement at a time of non-crisis.”

Curiously, some diseases have sparked panic while others have not. In India, the plague is estimated to have killed about as many people as the influenza of 1918–1919, but there was no widespread panic with the latter. Dr Peckham pointed out that responses can be shaped by the nature of the disease and its particular cultural associations in a given community, as well as government action (or inaction). Panic may also be produced by the spectre of disease, even when there are no cases of infection.

“Last year’s Ebola outbreak in West Africa provides useful insights into why history matters,” he said. Political, social and cultural contexts were crucial in determining how the epidemic played out. Moreover, Ebola erupted at a moment when Europe was dealing with two other concurrent crises: one economic, the other over mass migration from Sub-Sahara Africa. Fears about the spread of disease coalesced with these other anxieties, each fuelling the other.

Panics not panic

Dr Peckham suggested that it would be more helpful if ‘panics’ were referred to in the plural, rather than a singular panic. Epidemics are compounded events that involve many different kinds of panic that pivot on fears about health, the economy, political stability, and social coherence.

“MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) in Korea provides the latest example of a situation where an epidemic became intertwined with anxieties about a faltering economy and public concerns about political transparency and government accountability. Our research focusses on the entanglement of these panics and their consequences,” he said. He explores these themes further in his forthcoming book, Epidemics in Modern Asia, to be published next year.

On a related note, Dr Peckham is also interested in how military surveillance technologies have been co-opted for epidemic control. While unmanned aerial vehicles or drones are being used for combat, they are also being deployed for monitoring potential epidemics. Viral activity in emerging disease ‘hot-spots’ is increasingly tracked using military-style intelligence-gathering techniques that aim to anticipate spill-over events.

“What happens,” he asked, “when we import a military operational modality into public health and implicitly equate biological phenomena with an insurgent terror?” Microorganisms responsible for infectious disease exist as part of complex and little understood ecologies. The military model, he argued, diminished this complexity and created a false expectation that pathogenic threats could be blitzed.

Meanwhile, Dr Peckham and the members of the Centre will continue to build a bridge between the humanities and medicine. “Our aim is to develop a novel transdisciplinary approach to infectious disease, in order to better understand how biological and social ecologies interact,” he said. He suggested the humanities could provide critical insights into the social, cultural and political dimensions of epidemics and in so doing, help to forge a more integrated response to future threats.

Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties is published by Hong Kong University Press. Epidemics in Modern Asia will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2016.

See original article at: http://www4.hku.hk/pubunit/Bulletin/2015_Oct_Vol.17_No.1/books/page1.html

For the publisher's page: http://www.hkupress.org/Common/Reader/Products/ShowProduct.jsp?Pid=1&Version=0&Cid=16&Charset=iso-8859-1&page=-1&key=9789888208449

A Saucy Take on History: John Wong on Bottled Sauces and Drinks in Hong Kong

Dr John Wong has an unusual background for an historian. He spent more than a decade working in investment banking and hedge funds before deciding he wanted a more intellectually stimulating career – something that would help people see relevance in the past. What better topic to filter history through than food?

He has brought the business angle into this research, too, starting with his PhD at Harvard on Wu Bingjian (Houqua), who leveraged China’s geopolitical situation in the early 19th century to become the world’s foremost tea supplier. Houqua’s achievements challenged the notion that China was not engaged in international trade and finance at the time.

Now, Dr Wong is launching a project on bottled sauces and drinks, inspired by the way in which food in general is a distinguishing aspect of Hong Kong’s identity as a result of the Cold War divide and subsequent material prosperity compared to Mainland China.

“We could fly lobster in from Vancouver or abalone from Australia and develop Cantonese cuisine in a way that to this day would be considered quite distinct from what you see in Guangzhou,” he said. “The availability of foodstuffs here versus across the border was one of the ways that we constructed our identity and I think it is worth investigating these food products and the recipes they inspired.”

He is particularly interested in bottled products because their portability and long shelf life meant that ‘Hong Kong’ flavours could be packaged for local and overseas consumption. Lee Kum Kee, for example, has successfully produced and marketed sauces to Hong Kong and Chinese communities around the world.

“If you go to Toronto and lose your Filipina maid or Chinese amah, you can buy a bottle of Lee Kum Kee soy sauce chicken or curry chicken Hong Kong-style, put it in a pot, and produce that dish,” he said. “That situation reflects the configuration of Hong Kong families not just in the city, but beyond.”

Reflecting the economic life of the city
Sauce companies also reflect the city’s economic development. The Amoy brand was started by a manufacturing company that later moved into property and was bought out by the French company Danone, then Ajinomoto of Japan.

“You can see how the company started with a certain sales proposition of modernity, food, taste, and then evolved into real estate and other aspects that would be different representations of the economic life of Hong Kong in the later decades.”

Dr Wong is also investigating Sriracha hot sauce, which has a Hong Kong connection because it was developed by Vietnamese boat people who reached the US via Hong Kong– making it truly a product of the Cold War.

Similar to sauces, bottled drinks from Vitasoy and Dairy Farm were more than ‘protein-in-a-bottle’ – their very consumption was a mirror of society.

“When I was a primary school student in Hong Kong, you could go to the canteen for a cold bottle of Vitasoy in the summer and a warm bottle in winter. That’s a different articulation of class compared to people who had bottled milk delivered to their doorsteps every morning from Dairy Farm. So the delivery process, the form you consumed it in, the price you paid, the different venues where you had it I think tell an interesting story of Hong Kong,” Dr Wong said.

Dr Wong said he hopes to uncover other examples that will deepen his understanding of Hong Kong-linked sauces and beverage companies, and their interplay with the city’s post-war development.

See original article at: http://www4.hku.hk/pubunit/bulletin/cover_story/page4.html

Going Underground: Victor Teo on Asia's Illicit Economy

Ornament stall with Russian imported products at the Sino-Russian border

The China-Myanmar border may not be a financial hub, but it buzzes with illicit economic activity. Truckloads of timber cross from Myanmar to Ruili in Yunnan province, China, and from there to factories on the eastern seaboard, bearing customs papers that wrongly claim the wood is from China. Money is often transmitted well out of sight of the formal banking system, and people take advantage of large gaps between customs checkpoints to transport goods and themselves back and forth across the border.

To Dr Victor Teo of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, the area is a vibrant example of a border economy where the boundaries exist largely in name only. These areas tended to be neglected by scholars, he said, not least because of the difficulty in obtaining data and information.

Dr Teo has stepped into this lacuna with research on the activities and traders along China’s borders with Myanmar, North Korea, Russia, Central Asia and India.

“The idea of a border is an abstract and constructed one. We tend to think of border areas as neglected and economically backwards, but actually they are areas of intense interactions among people. The interactions may be off the books and not recorded, but they are immense, and the borders hold different meanings for different categories of people in China,” he said.

Earning money, moving money

Tibetan selling fake tiger skin in Guangdong

Dr Teo’s informers are traders, residents, drivers, smugglers and other contacts he has cultivated for years in an effort to understand the workings of the economy on the borderlands from the perspectives of both international relations and anthropology.

In North Korea, despite official assertions that markets do not exist in the country, he has found institutionalised spaces where trading takes place. Many products are brought in officially or smuggled in and resold by traders for a profit. Very often, border guards get a piece of the action.

Russia’s border with China is even more fluid. Bear paws, wolf pelts and other animal parts are smuggled out and Dr Teo said in some places customs officials ferry goods across for traders for the right price.

Most important to all these activities is underground banking, which offers lower charges, a faster service and none of the limits on overseas transactions that are found in the legitimate banking system. This phenomenon should not be underestimated, particularly along China’s southern borders where it services legitimate businessmen, corrupt officials, criminals and traders operating in the ‘grey’ market, he said.

The transactions are made by giving cash to a ‘banker’ in China, who will text or call their contact in Hong Kong or Macau to tell them the amount and currency that will be picked up. Money also flows the other way.

“With an electronic text or passcode, the money can be picked up or transferred easily. Thousands of these transactions take place each day and they are undocumented. Physically, the money doesn’t actually cross the border,” Dr Teo said.

Fuel for inflation

Milk powder traders at Shenzhen-Hong Kong border

All of this points to sound economic reasons for studying and understanding the border areas and the underground economy.

“The Chinese Government has such a hard time reining in inflation especially in the southern cities. That has a lot to do with the underground economy. Regardless of the policies instituted, the funds that flow out of the borders often end up coming back into the country into legitimate business and the real estate sector. The Government doesn’t have control over these kinds of activities.

“The remittance system is not new. Generations ago, many Chinese who went overseas to Southeast Asia or the United States had to send money back to their families in China. They made use of the trading houses in China for transmitting money back home.”

In fact, he said: “Many people who partake in the underground economy are not criminals but simply traders who are exploiting differentials in the demand and supply of certain categories of goods.”

Dr Teo is bringing all of these observations together in a forthcoming monograph, tentatively titled Clandestine Globalisation and China’s Borderlands. He also organised a conference last year that looked at China’s underground economy in relation to the illicit industries around fake goods, which run the gamut from fake handbags and watches to fake medicines. The bottom line for all these activities is to turn a profit.

“People don’t think of it as an underground economy but a way to build better lives. For them the state and governance are abstract concepts,” he said.

See original article at: http://www4.hku.hk/pubunit/Bulletin/2014_Dec_Vol.16_No.1/cover_story/page4.html

文學院傳媒報道：朱耀偉教授出席「講述城市的身世」作對談嘉賓

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相片來源：明報

編按：浪人劇場為配合「《雕刻城市》——劇場與香港文學連結計劃」及新作《裸「言泳」無邪》（改編自陳冠中《香港三部曲》）的上演，上月二十六日下午五時於香港文化中心劇場舉辦了「講述城市的身世」對談，分別邀請了香港城市書寫者陳冠中、學者朱耀偉及作家鄧小樺三人就主題作交流。撰稿人參與了該場對談，並撰寫了報道。

瀏覽全文: http://news.mingpao.com/pns/dailynews/web_tc/article/20151031/s00005/1446228619341

文學院傳媒報道：樂讀村上春樹 陳慶恩教授訪問

（節錄自星島日報） 

香港大學音樂系系主任陳慶恩教授，本身是作曲家，又是村上春樹讀者，是次音樂會當然很合他的脾胃，他覺得能令村上春樹讀者和樂迷，得到多一種趣味。看到選曲名單，他如數家珍，這邊說貝多芬的《第七號鋼琴三重奏》（第一樂章）出名，那邊說舒曼的《入口》、《埋伏的獵人》、《不祥的地方》、《預言鳥》屬於他的鋼琴小品，卻不是其鋼琴組曲最流行曲目，至於李斯特的《鄉愁》，他告訴筆者，許多作曲家認為李斯特只愛炫耀技巧，而對他嗤之以鼻，「但村上春樹講過，李斯特當然有技巧，但能夠把那些高難度樂章彈得有深度，達致靈性層次，就不是所有人都辦得到。」

陳慶恩的閱讀村上春樹經驗，起點是《尋羊冒險記》、《舞，舞，舞》，後來才看處子作《聽風的歌》，這也是他早期很喜歡的一本，「《聽風的歌》的主角，便經常在收音機聽到上世紀六十年代的西方音樂，那種頹廢氣息所營造出來的氛圍，配搭得十分完美，寫出了我的成長年代。」村上的文字與音樂關係千絲萬縷，他不諱言看書時會特意找那些樂章來讀，「不是看了《沒有色彩的多崎作和他的巡禮之年》，我不會重聽李斯特的《鄉愁》。」他又說，看了村上春樹，猶如打通任督二脈，得以明白後現代藝術是甚麼一回事。

閱讀全文：

http://std.stheadline.com/yesterday/sup/1020mo01.html

Faculty of Arts in the Media: Xu Guoqi on the History of Chinese Graduates at US Military Academy

Professor Xu Guoqi from the Department of History was recently interviewed by the SCMP for an article about the first Chinese graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point. Ying Hsing Wen, the grandfather of ex-chief executive Tung Chee-hwa's sister-in-law Harriet Tung, attended West Point between 1905 and 1909...

When Theodore Roosevelt became US president in 1901, he made it a priority to pursue active policies with Asian countries, said Xu Guoqi, professor of history at the University of Hong Kong.

Roosevelt's administration supported the establishment of the Boxer Scholarship in 1908, which enabled Chinese students to study in the US.

"To cultivate good relations with Chinese youth was very important," Xu said. "Mr Wen, like many Chinese boy students prior to him and many Boxer scholar students after him, was a very important part of the shared history between Chinese and Americans. They functioned as messengers between both nations and cultures."

The last time China sent a cadet to the United States Military Academy at West Point was in 1937.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, China was in the midst of transforming itself into a modern nation. The country was weak in terms of its economy, diplomacy and military - and the desire to bolster its armed forces motivated leaders to send young men to train abroad in the hope that they would return with the skills to strengthen the nation.

"The nation was sick and desperate to be a rich country with a strong military," said Xu Guoqi, professor of history at the University of Hong Kong. "To learn from the developed countries was a major theme in modern China from the late 19th century."

Please click on the link below for the full article: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1863863/grandfather-was-first-chinese-graduate-west-point-says