Between 1908 and 1913, as Max Linder emerged as a major international film star for Pathe, he made a specialty of combining film projections with live theatre performances. In these ‘cinematographi...

From Screen to Stage and Back: Max Linder and the ‘Cinematographic Sketch’, 1908–1913:

The case of Hong Kong – acquired by the British under treaty, and restored to Chinese sovereignty in what some perceived as merely a shift from colonial to neo-colonial rule – always seemed a special case in the debate over post-colonialism. In NTQ53 (February 1998) Frank Bren looked primarily from an artistic and administrative viewpoint at the connections between film and theatre in the former colony: in the article which follows, Yun Tong Luk explores the social and cultural significance of two influential local productions, staged almost a decade apart – one, We're Hong Kong, shortly after the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, the other; Tales of the Walled City, coinciding with the moment of Hong Kong's reversion to Chinese rule. He points out the uniqueness of post-colonial experience in the territory, and examines the ambivalent attitudes of the Hong Kong people before and after the change of sovereignty.

Post-Colonialism and Contemporary Hong Kong Theatre: Two Case Studies

From the run-up to its return to Chinese rule in July 1997 to the stock-market crash in October, Hong Kong has seldom been out of the news during the past year. But the attention paid to its political and economic provenance has not been matched by much interest in its cultural output – despite the existence in Hong Kong of a cinema industry with a prodigious output now approaching ten thousand films. Although a professional theatre has been a relatively more recent development, the connections between film and theatre in Hong Kong have always been close – from the film adaptations of Cantonese opera in the 1930s, through the ‘female’ films of the post-war period and the western following for Bruce Lee's kung fu movies, to the present dominance of the cross-generic production company, Springtime, in the 1990s, with a creative interest in its own past which verges on the metatheatrical. Frank Bren, who is presently living and working in Hong Kong, here captures something of the history and the distinctive flavour of the overlapping movie and theatre industries, and assesses why the relationship remains mutually profitable in artistic as well as economic terms.

Connections and Crossovers: Cinema and Theatre in Hong Kong

By 1909 the French actor, playwright, and director Max Linder was probably the most popular male film star of his time, and his success as an innovative writer-actor of variety and revue continued until the outbreak of the First World War. But this followed five years of frustration in stage-ornament roles on the professional, ‘legitimate’ stage, and only after success in the cinema did his playlets, integrating filmed and live action, further enhance his fame in variety venues across Europe. After the war, and Linder's stints in Hollywood, his long descent into bouts of manic depression tragically began. But his theatrical spirit survives in the cine-stage works of the Prague theatre, Laterna Magika, and Frank Bren also discusses here his possible influence on the work of Erwin Piscator, and more surely on the spectacular Paris music-hall production, Jour de fete a l'Olympia, created by and starring Jacques Tati in 1961. This was plainly modelled on Linder's cinema-theatre creations of 1910–1914, with Tati and Pierre Etaix the outstanding successors to Max in French film comedy. Australian actor-author Frank Bren is currently writing a biography of Pierre Etaix, whose classic film comedies of the sixties are now being restored for international re-release – two of them paying discreet homage to Max Linder. Bren has written or co-written histories of Polish and Chinese cinema and theatre as well as articles for diverse international periodicals.

Frank Bren

Papers

Connections and Crossovers: Cinema and Theatre in Hong Kong

Ripple Effect: the Theatrical Life of Max Linder