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Over 100 International Scholars Participated in the 2-day Symposium – The Film Scene: Cinema, the Arts, and Social Change

25 Apr 2006

 

The two-day symposium, The Film Scene: Cinema, the Arts, and Social Change, was held at the University of Hong Kong, April 21-22, 2006, by the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Music, and the Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong; with support from The University of Hong Kong Foundation and HKU Culture and Humanities Fund.

This interdisciplinary symposium brought together over 100 distinguished scholars from Hong Kong and abroad to explore the connections between the cinema and the other arts within the context of social change. Since its birth, the cinema has been at the crossroads of the connections among the plastic and performing arts, and, today, film continues to question the borders separating various aesthetic practices and media. Within this complex matrix, the film "scene" emerges as a meeting ground of artists working in various forms on the cutting edge of aesthetic exploration and social change.

Keynote Evening

Entitled "The Seen, the Unseen, the Obscene: Space and Affect in Hong Kong Cinema", the keynote address was delivered at 7:30 on Friday, April 21 2006, at the Convocation Room, the Main Building, HKU with over 100 guests participating. Professor Ackbar Abbas, author of Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minnesota, 1997), of the Department of Comparative Literature, delivered the keynote address. Professor Kam Louie, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and author of Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge, 2002), offered opening remarks. Professor Leo Ou-fan Lee, Professor of Humanities, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, author of Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 (Harvard, 1999), responded to the keynote address.

Professor Abbas juxtaposed five films (Fruit Chan's Durian Durian, Zhang Yuan's Crazy English, Wong Kar-Wai's 2046, Alan Mak and Andrew Lau's Infernal Affairs Ι, and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain). His address posed this question: What happens to social and personal experience when "space" and "affect" can no longer be kept separate?

Film Scene Panels

The Symposium included 16 parallel sessions in 2 rooms:

The Scene as Site: space, place, and the film scene
The Queer Scene
King Hu (胡金銓)
History Seen: The Past on the Screen
Bodies Seen and Unseen: Religion, Sex, and Disease
The Asian Scene: National/Transnational
Women and Activism: Screening of "Her Anti-WTO"
The Arts Scene: Music, Adaptations, Remakes, Citations
The Asian Cinema Scene
The Horror Scene, Myth, and the Supernatural
Hong Kong Seen on the World Scene
The Arts Scene: In and out of the Gallery
The Fighting Scene
Music and Accented Cinema
Alternative Scenes
Sex Environments Online and Network Imaginaries

The Symposium attracted over 100 local and overseas scholars working in different academic disciplines from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Asia, and also institutions from Hong Kong including The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University, Lingnan University, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

For details please visit:
http://www.hku.hk/complit/seminar/filmscene.htm
http://www.hku.hk/complit/seminar/filmsceneschedule.pdf

Photos of the symposium can be downloaded at:
http://static.flickr.com/52/132480774_e6280efa07_o.jpg
http://static.flickr.com/52/132480135_00b73c7e51_o.jpg

For enquiries, please contact Ms Luna Ngai, Project Coordinator, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU, at lunangai@hku.hk.