The making of ‘the Hollywood of China’: A preliminary social network analysis of the early Hong Kong film industry (1914–1941)

Abstract

This study conducts a digital social network analysis (SNA) of the early Hong Kong film industry from 1914 to 1941, focusing on the connections between directors and actors in different periods. Using Gephi and the online ‘Hong Kong Film Search System’ launched by the Hong Kong Film Archive, it attempts to identify, visualize, and analyze the different structural features of the industry, including nodes, connections, and communities. This structural analysis also helps reflect on the existing historical writing about the early Hong Kong film industry, especially the notable discourse on the Shanghai–Hong Kong connection.

Keywords:

• Digital SNA
• early Hong Kong film industry
• digital humanities

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and constructive suggestions. They also thank the Hong Kong Film Archive for its online open resources that make this research possible, as well as Chandler Qianjun Shan and Jamie J. Zhao for their help in archive collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As outlined by Law and Bren (2004, 113), the early Hong Kong film industry was generally regarded as being influenced by four waves of filmmakers from Shanghai to Hong Kong in 1933, 1937, 1946, and 1949.

2 According to Law (2019, 58), there were two ways to periodize early Hong Kong film history: one by the end of 1941, and the other by 1949. We agree that the period from 1942 to 1948 contains more historical variants and should be treated independently.

3 The two excluded films were Luohua feixu 落花飞絮 (Flowers Fall and Catkins Fly, 1933), which was made and released in Vietnam, and Shilin jita 仕林祭塔 (Memorial at the Pagoda, 1934) in Shanghai. The 23 newly added films are listed in the revised edition of Hong Kong Filmography Volume II (Chi 2022, 33–37).

4 The year 1933 witnessed a radical expansion of the Hong Kong film industry due to the commercial success of the first Cantonese film Baijin long 白金龙 made in that year. The outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japan in 1937 marked a new political era and another round of industrial expansion in Hong Kong because of its temporary state of peace.

5 In SNA, edges can be marked as directed or undirected. Our study models the social networks of the early Hong Kong film industry as a directed graph to better reveal how which information and influence were propagated through social connections. The directors/scriptwriters in each film are labeled as sources, and the actors as targets.

6 A more comprehensive picture requires us to fully consider the attribute labels of all the nodes. However, we still lack the knowledge of many filmmakers, especially a large number of actors (there were 891 actors in 1914–1941). Therefore, most interpretations are only preliminary and provisional.

7 More information about Hung Chung-ho and other directors mentioned in this paper can be seen on the website ‘The Ultimate Guide to Hong Kong Film Directors, 1914–1978’, http://www.hkfilmdirectors.com/1914-1978/index.php. Accessed March 27, 2024.

8 To present the structures more clearly, we have removed the name tags of all the nodes in the figures and only labeled a few nodes discussed in the article. Full figures labeled with the names of all the nodes can be obtained in: https://github.com/jwc19890114/DigitalHumanityVisualization/tree/main.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Foundation of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China under Grant 23YJC760060.

Notes on contributors

Pin Li

Pin LI is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication of the NingboTech University. He got his PhD in Cultural Studies from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include early Chinese film history and visual culture.

Weichen Jia

Weichen JIA is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication of the NingboTech University. He got his PhD in Education from The City University of Macau. His research interests include natural language processing and computational communication.