The Hong Kong International Film Festival has celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. This year’s special programme, “Revisiting Chinese Cinema: The Beginning of a New Journey,” features a curated selection of Chinese-language films for which HKIFF served as a gateway to international recognition for both the films and their filmmakers. The 1980s were a golden era for Chinese-language cinema to emerge at international film festivals. Directors of the Fifth Generation, Hong Kong New Wave, and Taiwan New Cinema converged at HKIFF to exchange their artistic visions. This year, HKIFF invited Chen Kaige, Huang Jianxin, and Tian Zhuangzhuang to screen their seminal films and discuss them.
Huang Jianxin brought his debut feature film The Black Cannon Incident (1985) to HKIFF audiences this year; it was also previously selected for the 11th Hong Kong Film Festival. The film tells the tale of engineer-interpreter Zhao Shuxin (Liu Zifeng), who draws the authorities’ attention over an ambiguous telegram. This leads to an investigation, after which he is transferred from his original position and prevented from participating in an ongoing German cooperation project. The rigorous investigation over a trivial matter leads to a faulty test run in the project and financial loss. An engineer is just a screw in the big machine.
The Fifth Generation is known for prioritising expressive and bold visual styles over conventional narrative structures. Most of those directors capture the beautiful and vast landscapes of China’s rural countryside. Huang Jianxin, on the other hand, sets his film in an urban city and adopts a distinctive, pioneering modernist style that differs from his contemporaries, while balancing the narrative to sharply satirise bureaucratic oppression and reveal the naivety and fragility of intellectuals at that time. Modernism and symbolism are represented in the film through devices such as the huge black-and-white clock face on the conference room wall, satirising the futility of long meetings; the enormous sunset beside the cable, hinting at the endless cycle of bureaucracy; and the oversized black chess pieces, suggesting that time and effort are wasted on what was originally a small matter.
Filmmaking in China from the 1970s through the mid-1980s was entirely state-subsidised. The lack of profit-driven pressure allowed greater creative freedom for directors. Yet this daring dark comedy was revised dozens of times to pass censorship.
In the masterclass after the screening, Huang Jianxin shared his views on the use of AI in filmmaking. He explained that film, although a “popular art” that can be enjoyed by a wide audience, is made by only a small, exclusive group of people within the industry. He believes AI could return the power of filmmaking to ordinary people. Perhaps, in the future, everyone will be capable of making their own “little films.” If this is the case, what distinguishes good work from bad will still be aesthetics, philosophy, imagination, and the ability to tell a compelling story. That brings us back to the very starting point of filmmaking. In The Black Cannon Incident, Huang had already demonstrated such a view.
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Written by Jade Wong
View of the Arts is an online publication dedicated to film, music, and the arts, with a strong focus on the Asian entertainment industry. As we continue to grow, we aim to deepen our coverage of Asian music while remaining committed to exploring and celebrating creativity across the global arts landscape.
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