Water on cross-border screens, Hong Kong water tales from the 1960s
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21788568 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Zimu Zhang (0000-0002-8811-9246, Education University of Hong Kong, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 6-24 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Chinese Cinemas (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1750-8061 • E-ISSN: 1750-807X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17508061.2025.2510066 |
| OpenAlex | W4411466544 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 24 |
This paper examines the massive engineering of water, mediated through screen practices, in the 1960s Hong Kong-Guangdong borderscape. Facing severe water scarcity, both the communist Chinese government and the British Hong Kong colonial government launched large-scale water infrastructures as civil remedies and political tools, leaving lasting ecological, political, and cultural impacts on Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta. Focusing on two 1960s documentaries with competing ideologies—Water Comes over the Hills from the East (1965, pro-Beijing leftist studios) and Plover Cove Reservoir (1967, British colonial newsreels)—I explore how film mechanisms serve as political, cultural, and aesthetic practices of ‘environing’ during the water crisis. I analyze how water infrastructures are (re)constructed on screen, how water narratives intersect with social metabolism and collective identities, and how water is reimagined alongside the control of more-than-human elements in cinematic environing. While both films are often dismissed as propaganda, this article argues that a reading of cinematic environing, contextualized within Cold War dynamics, offers new insights into the energy narratives of southern China during this pivotal period. It also highlights how vital water resources are mediated on screen, revealing the interplay between ideology, technology and film aesthetics
Art · Media studies · Sociology · Visual arts · Water infrastructure · Water supply · Engineering · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Socioeconomic Development in Asia · Environmental Engineering
The Great Difference
The British Official Film in South-East Asia
The Human–Machine Continuum in Maoism
Introduction to special issue on Hong Kong left-wing cinema 1950s-1970s, Journal of Chinese Cinemas
Denaturalizing natural tropes
Catchwater colonialism
Thinking Relationships Through Water
The Changing Nature of Border, Scale and the Production of H ong K ong's Water Supply System since 1959
Colony in Crisis
Bad Weather and State-Building
Mapping Common Ground
When Taylorism Met Revolutionary Romanticism
| Highly cited | No |
|---|