Conserved in celluloid: an approach to the contextual understanding of urban Hong Kong through post-war movies

Abstract

This dissertation shows the way in which movies, as a form of popular culture and contemporary medium, can be used as a tool for facilitating an alternatively impressionable approach in understanding social history in context, which can be complementary to the purely historical approach in conducting research in the field of heritage conservation.

6 representative post-war Hong Kong movies from the 1950’s to 2000’s are selected for discussion through textual analysis of key cinematic frames based on 5 specific criteria. The ‘cinematic reality’ of each is discussed against the ‘historical reality’ of the year of its release, so as to facilitate a contextual understanding of the social-economic, architectural-geographical and ideological-political conditions of Hong Kong for the past 5 decades.