Title: Lung Kong’s The Call Girls: Clashes with the Hong Kong censors amid a
decade of “fists and pillows”
Date: 22 April 2024 (Monday)
Time: 1000-1200
Venue: Room 322, Zhi Xing Building Yang Ming Campus, NYCU
Online: http://meet.google.com/oim-hypr-kbv
Speaker: Dr. Tom Cunliffe (Lecturer in Film Studies, University College London)
Moderator: Dr. Klavier Wong (Assistant Professor, Institute of Visual Studies,
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University)
Abstract
In December 1972, newspapers in Hong Kong reported that The Board of Film
Censors had banned Lung Kong’s latest film The Call Girls (1973). Lung’s film is
often grouped together as part of a wave of Hong Kong soft-core sex/erotic films in
the early-mid 1970s, but it also questions the illegalization and stigmatisation of sex
work. To demonstrate how Lung’s film and authorship clashed with the censors in
relation to how contemporary Hong Kong society was depicted, this talk will situate
Lung’s film within the industrial and historical context it emerged in. Within the
commercial norms that favoured sex and violence in imported and local films in the
early 1970s, the sex and violence in The Call Girls is not explicit or extreme, and far
less so than many of the locally produced Hong Kong or foreign films released in
Hong Kong around this time. It is more the way the film depicts contemporary Hong
Kong that the censors found problematic. The complex reasons for why it was banned
relates to how the censors wanted specific images of Hong Kong on-screen that did
not match up to the lived reality; the censors charged Lung’s film with smearing the
image of Hong Kong and painting a great part of it as “a sink of iniquity”. It was the
Board of Appeal that took a different approach since they argued that it was because
the film attempted social comment that it should be released. This talk will explore
the censors’ reasons for initially banning the film and also at how the ban being
overturned after appeal and the release of The Call Girls after only several cuts was
one of several key precedents that marked a shift in how cinema could represent Hong
Kong society in the 1970s.
Bio
Tom Cunliffe is a lecturer in Film Studies at University College London. His essays
have appeared in journals including Film History, Framework, Journal of Chinese
Cinemas, and Screen. He is currently working on a book about the filmmaker Lung
Kong and Hong Kong film history between the 1960s and 1970s.