This chapter contextualises the conditions that restrained filmmakers’ political expression, setting the stage for the proceeding chapters. 36) to help stabilise its shaky grasp on power. Hence, Chang’s methodological approach of “screening communities” sheds light on how certain strands of Hong Kong cinema operated in the colony, which both elucidates and revises assumptions about the historical development of Hong Kong cinema.Ģ Chapter One assesses how the colonial government kept the rules and regulations of its censorship system in the 1950s and 1960s shrouded in mystery, so that it could “maintain its façade of apolitical unity during the Cold War” (p. She posits that what was screened and what was screened out were equally important in the role films played in building Hong Kong’s post-war community. Rather than a top-down enterprise from colonial authorities to subjects, Chang argues this situation was born out of a complex triangular relationship between colonial state, local filmmakers, and audiences.

For Chang, Hong Kong cinema of this period simultaneously imagined communities while constructing apolitical images that obscured the volatile political situation in post-war Hong Kong. 1 Jing Jing Chang’s book focuses on how post-war Hong Kong cinema’s fate and fortunes, circa 1950s-late 1960s, were inextricably bound up with the context of the Cold War.

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