Call for Papers: ReFocus: The Films of Chor Yuen
Editors: Jessica Siu-yin Yeung, Tom Cunliffe, and Raymond Tsang
The veteran film cultural worker Law Kar called Chor Yuen 楚原 (b. Cheung Po-kin, 1934–2022) “a stylist without an intrinsic style and an auteur without an eternal obsession”. Another veteran film cultural worker Shu Kei called Chor Yuen “The Last Guardian of Cantonese cinema” in relation to the Cantonese cinema’s decline in the late-1960s to early-1970s. These critical perspectives on Chor Yuen situate him in the producer-driven Hong Kong film industry and its studio system, contextualising his works within the industrial conditions and the seismic changes that took place at various crucial points between the late 1950s and the early 1990s. These commentaries also confirm Chor Yuen’s pivotal role in bridging the Hong Kong Cantonese cinema in the 1950s–1960s and more contemporary Hong Kong cinema.
Chor Yuen is one of the few filmmakers to have successfully transitioned from making films in the 1950s all the way up to his last in 1990, excelling in directing, writing, and producing films in most popular genres. His career encompasses and, in some cases, has instigated many of the most important trends and shifts over these decades. His agility in moving to and succeeding at different studios with different house styles and different genres is unmatched. In the “100 Must-See Hong Kong Movies” list compiled by the Hong Kong Film Archive Selection Panel, Chor Yuen’s works took up five places. Despite his illustrious status and copious works, there is little academic research on Chor Yuen. As such, this anthology will rectify this wrong, and assess Chor Yuen through the studios he worked for and the many genres he was involved in to demonstrate the central position he has in Hong Kong film history and the wider world of Chinese cinemas. It will also provide a much more comprehensive overview of his entire career to redress his image outside of Hong Kong as being known primarily as a director of aesthetically lush wuxia films.
This anthology will be under contract with the Edinburgh University Press’ ReFocus: The International Directors series. It will be the first collection in Anglophone academia that evaluates Chor Yuen’s stellar contributions to Hong Kong and Chinese-language cinemas and offer a comprehensive overview of his career and artistry.
Suggested topics:
- Chor Yuen’s social-realist melodramas
- Chor Yuen’s genre films, including family melodramas, crime films, comedies, and wuxia films
- Chor Yuen’s genre films and transmedia adaptation including airwave fiction (radio drama), literary world classics, or local drama production
- Comparison between Chor Yuen and other Cantonese/Chinese/East Asian/Asian/Western film auteurs
- Chor Yuen’s works at a particular studio, such as Kong Ngee and the Shaw Brothers
- Chor Yuen’s works and their relationships with Cantonese film networks in Nanyang
- Chor Yuen’s work with particular stars
- Chor Yuen’s works as an actor
- Chor Yuen’s works with reference to his father’s (Cheung Wood-yau) works and/or the left-wing film culture
- The influences of and connections between Hollywood cinema, Italian Neorealism and other transnational cinemas on Chor Yuen’s works
- Rethinking film and media culture in Cold War Hong Kong through Chor Yuen
- Chor Yuen’s works and their relationship with documentary film
- The relationship of Chor Yuen’s works and print cultures such as Chinese Student Weekly
- Chor Yuen’s films and the traffic, mutual influences, and/or reception of Cantonese film in Sinophone regions/Sinosphere outside Hong Kong
- Other lines of inquiry
Please send an abstract of no more than 400 words and a biographical note of no more than 200 words to Jessica Siu-yin Yeung (Lingnan University), Tom Cunliffe (University College London), and Raymond Tsang (University of Southern California) to choryuen@hotmail.com by 31 July, 2024. Contributors of accepted abstracts will be notified by 31 August, 2024. Essays inclusive of the bibliography in approximately 7,000 words will be due by 31 May, 2025. Please also send your questions, if any, to the above email address.
Posted by: Jessica Siu-yin Yeung <jessicayeung@LN.edu.hk>