UCLA Film & Television Archive's Research and Study Center (ARSC) is pleased to announce the recipient of the ARSC Student Research Award for the 2012-2013 academic year. This award is made possible by a grant from the Myra Reinhard Family Foundation.
"Capturing the Place: Location Shooting, Medium and Politics in Shaw Brothers’ Moonlight Serenade (1967)”
By Kathy Yim-king Mak. View a PDF of the essay.
Abstract
This paper investigates Shaw Brothers (Hong Kong)’ practice of location shooting in Taiwan in the mid-1960s. By investigating the cinematic articulation of place in one of its film, Moonlight Serenade (1967), directed by Yen Chun (1917-1980), it argues that the location used in this film has functioned as a medium as it instructs the approaches of acting, shooting, and editing in the production process. Through further situating the reception of this film in the triangulated geopolitical relations between the colonial city of Hong Kong, the Republic of China retreated to Taiwan, and the socialist People’s Republic of China on the mainland in the 1960s, it illuminates the political powers of location in mediating people’s conception of place and nation. Ultimately, it seeks to argue that location shooting, especially those that have crossed with geographical and political boundaries, should not be considered as a simple industrial practice. However, a location can indeed function as a powerful medium in renewing the filmic language of an existing story as well as mediating people’s conception of place and nation in the 1960s.
About the Author
Kathy Mak was a Ph.D. student at the Department of Art History at UCLA when she was awarded the ARSC Student Research Award in 2012-2013. At the time, she was beginning her dissertation research on the depiction of places in different visual media, including ink painting, oil painting, print and film, in the People’s Republic of China in contexts of spatial translation and nation imagination in the 1950s and the early 1960s. Mak is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chinese Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Learn more about the Archive's Shaw Brothers Collection in our online catalog.
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