Andy Willis

Articulating British Chinese experiences on-screen: Soursweet and Ping Pong

ABSTRACT The notion of the Sinophone according to Shu-mei Shih attempts takes the delineation of Chinese identities out of ethno-geographic boundaries into linguistic communities. In the case of Chinese cinemas, the emphasis on linguistic communities fails to address Chinese diasporic cinemas that do not necessarily employ any Chinese language, yet speak to the tensions inherent in articulating Chinese identities on foreign shores. This article will explore these issues through a study of the British Chinese films Ping Pong (Po-Chih Leong, 1986) and Soursweet (Mike Newell, 1988) and argue that an emphasis on Sinophone cinemas, as a stand-in for the polyvalencies of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Chineseness’, risks silencing non-Chinese-language Chinese cinemas such as British Chinese cinema. However marginalized it may be, the example of British Chinese cinema calls into question the political usefulness of a definition of Chinese identity that silences those who for artistic, cultural or economic reasons choose to work in non-Chinese languages.

British Chinese Short Films: Challenging the Limits of the Sinophone

In an article published in a special issue of the Journal for Chinese Cinemas, considering the possibility of shifting transnational Chinese film studies from a diasporic framework to a Sinophonic one, we argued for the retention of the former against the latter on grounds that the notion of diaspora continues to speak to the historical and geographical dimensions of Chinese cinemas outside of China, whereas the notion of the Sinophone, delineated according to linguistic communities, may further marginalise non-Chinese-language Chinese film-making, such as films addressing the British-born Chinese experience (Chan and Willis, 2012). In that article we discussed two relatively unknown, but nevertheless significant, feature films made by or about British Chinese people: Ping Pong (dir. Po-chih Leong, 1986) and Soursweet (dir. Mike Newell, 1988). In this chapter, we extend the argument further by offering an analysis of four short films produced in the UK: Chinese Whispers (dir. David Yip, 2000), Blue Funnel (dir. Paul Mayeda Berges, 1997), Red (dir. Rosa Fong, 1995), and Granny’s Ghost (dir. Lab Ky Mo, 2008). Each of these works, despite their limited exposure at film festivals and occasionally on television, clearly speak to the challenges of minority cultural representation in British film-making.

Jim Allen: Radical Drama Beyond Days of Hope

Due to a desire to establish television as a serious medium, television drama has often been seen as a forum for writers, with names such as David Mercer, Dennis Potter and Trevor Griffiths identified by critics as the driving force, or auteur, behind the works that bear their names rather than, as in much writing about film, the director. However, while this has been so, there are also many examples of writers whose contribution to television writing has been much less celebrated, often due to their close collaboration with a high-profile director who in many critics’ view remains the most influential contributor to the final piece of work. One practitioner who arguably has failed to get the critical credit he is due is Jim Allen, a writer still perhaps best known for his work with one such high-profile director, Ken Loach.

Manchester’s Chinese Arts Centre: A Case Study in Strategic Cultural Intervention

From its initial inception as a focus for arts and culture within the Chinese community of Manchester and the Northwest, to its recent rebranding as the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, the Chinese Arts Centre’s history has intersected with a number of shifts and changes within the arts in the United Kingdom. Here we ask: What can looking at an institution such as the Chinese Arts Centre tell us about the shifting debates and arguments about the place and role of (Chinese) culture within society and the cultural geography of a city? What can such a case study tell us about what artists, styles, and taste formations are dominant at particular historical moments, and what insights can it offer into the political economy of arts funding at these junctures?

British Chinese Cinema and the Struggle for Recognition, Even on the Margins

British Chinese films have struggled to find a significant presence in the writings of British cinema history, even within debates on minority cinemas, such as Black British or British Asian cinema, which have since the 1980s established a canon of margins of sorts. This chapter argues for an inclusive historiography that places British Chinese filmmaking within these wider debates, through the analysis of films such as Ping Pong (1986), Soursweet (1988), Peggy Su (1997), and Cut Sleeve Boys (2006), which not only intersect with issues of representation and various film funding initiatives that have encouraged new voices but also highlight questions of distribution and exhibition for small films in the construction of national cinemas.

North Square, New Street Law and Outlaws: Class and Race in Recent Northern Legal Television Drama

Legal drama series have been a mainstay of British television for many years, their format often allowing for the exploration of a range of social, cultural and political issues. In many instances the legal settings of these series allow writers to investigate moments when those who are socially marginalised interact with one of British society’s major institutions. At the heart of these interactions is a representation of class and more recently race. Through a genre-based (the legal drama) analysis of the Leeds-set North Square (2000) and the Manchester-based New Street Law (2006–2007), this chapter considers how representations of class operate through the regional and workplace settings of these legal dramas. It concludes by discussing Outlaws (2004), a series set in a small northern town and which, rarely for British television, had a black legal professional at its centre, providing the opportunity to explore social issues around race and class.

The Lost World of Twemlow and Kent-Watson: Mancunian Exploitation Film in the 1980s and 1990s

Films which have been exclusively distributed and exhibited outside the traditional conception of the film theatre or cinema have gained very little critical attention within film and media studies. In the case of domestic formats such as VHS this can be partly explained by the fact that, as Barbara Klinger notes, ‘film exhibition via television in the casual setting of the home still appears to constitute a break with the quality and mesmerizing power of cinema in the motion picture theatre’ (2006: 63). While this attitude to domestic exhibition may be slowly changing, largely due to HD formats and digital cinema projection bringing the two spheres closer together in the twenty-first century, in the 1980s the terms ‘straight to video’ and ‘direct to video’ were, when it came to mainstream films, widely accepted to indicate low-budget, poor-quality products not worthy of theatrical distribution. The negative connotations of the term ‘direct to video’ have meant that the work of a number of innovative film-makers, producing what might be described as broadly mainstream work and designed to be consumed domestically on video, has been omitted from the various histories of cinema. Indeed, the only really sustained attempts to explore video film production and distribution in Britain during the 1980s have focused on organisations and film-makers associated with alternative and avant-garde practice. In this article we want to redress this imbalance by focusing on the almost forgotten video film-making of Manchester-based Cliff Twemlow and David Kent-Watson. Between 1982 and 1992 this enthusiastic duo took notice of the newly available video technology and used it to build an unlikely career within, or rather on the outer fringes of, the British film industry. These two men were musician, actor, writer and one-time nightclub bouncer Cliff Twemlow and recording studio owner, soundman, cameraman and, latterly, film director David Kent-Watson. In this