GIS Through The Years

Chapter 5: Tales of Mystery and Imagination

With government's policy on information already under review back in 1957, Murray started thinking ahead and pushing for staff expansion, particularly through the creation of more senior personnel. Among the officers he acquired that year were specialists in features writing, visual publicity and films.

The last of these posts was intended primarily to oversee the production of documentaries and short educational films that might be shown between the commercials and before the main feature presentation in Hong Kong's 68 cinemas. Although Governor Sir Alexander Grantham had just inaugurated the first television service made available to any British colony - courtesy of Rediffusion Ltd - its 2.5 million yards of installation cabling fed into the homes of only 2,000 subscribers. And the latter were unlikely to be found in the squatter areas and resettlement estates.

The vast majority of the populace continued to confine their hard-earned leisure hours to the restaurants and the cinemas, where they might enjoy brief air-conditioned comfort and escape into the unreality of ancient court intrigues and melodramas featuring sorrowful heroines battling to preserve their virginity against desperate odds.

The Hong Kong Annual Report 1957 announced that "The demand of Overseas Chinese cinema audiences for films of Chinese theme told in their own language is insatiable, but the total possible market is not numerically large enough to guarantee an economic return unless production costs are kept at a minimum. This results in the majority of Hong Kong films being produced on what is by Western standards a 'shoe-string budget', and quantity rather than quality is the general trend of Hong Kong production."

With the annual report under his overall supervision, it is easy to envisage Murray dictating this particular paragraph, seeking to justify his high expectations for the department's embryonic film unit. By the following year he could claim: "During 1958 there was considerable expansion of the government's general publicity programme, particularly in the field of visual publicity."

Not only did he have his film unit, but it had taken on additional staff. and over the next three years was to make rapid strides, enabling Murray to recount that: "The short film has proved an invaluable medium for reaching large sections of Hong Kong's population, and an excellent vehicle for projecting Hong Kong overseas. For this reason the film unit of the department concentrated upon the production of newsreel shorts during 1961."

In addition to these newsreels, six short black and white 'comedy' films were made in connection with that year's road safety campaign, together with six colour films for the Fire Services. These were intended for local cinema screenings, and would later become the staple fare of the mobile cinema that entered service in the mid-'60s, touring resettlement estates to set up its collapsible screen on playgrounds and other open spaces.

Distribution prints were processed for the department in the commercial studio of T C Wang, whose son Charles joined the GIS film unit to learn production techniques that would later stand him in good stead when he replaced his father as head of Salon Films.

No longer would it be possible for local cinemagoers to escape reality in their palaces of dreams. Reality would pursue them there, either in the form of 'dramatically simple but important fire prevention precautions' or through the explicit detail of a 15-minute film on anti-tuberculosis measures, also distributed to cinemas in 1961.

With an eye to the future of television as an increasingly useful medium of communication, Murray assigned his newly-arrived deputy, Nigel Watt, to draw up a plan for the future of that medium, together with its related medium of sound radio.

"That particular obligation influenced the course of my future career," recalls Watt, "for I was placed in the unusual situation of laying down ground rules that I would later come to enforce as Commissioner of Television and Entertainment Licensing."

Aside from labouring over this blueprint with the help of the then Director of Broadcasting, Donald Brooks, Watt became involved with some of the early GIS film productions directed by the first head of the unit, Ben Hart.

Hart's successor, Brian Salt, had more ambitious goals. Having cut his teeth in the production of feature films, Salt had romance in his soul. Documentaries, he believed, were best served spiced with an element of drama. If the objective was to report on Hong Kong's achievements, why not bring the humble wooden kitchen god to life so he could deliver the report in person to the celestial deities? Hence Report to the Gods, as conveyed by well-known Cantonese comedian Leung Sing Bor in the role of the kitchen god.

Much more grandiose was Salt's historical costume drama The Magic Stone, filmed at the little fishing village of Lung Suen Wan, or Dragon Boat Bay. For this he managed to persuade actress Nancy Kwan, newly-returned from Hollywood and the success of such films as The World of Suzie Wong, to play a humble fisherwoman.

This wasn't to be just any fisherwoman. Salt's script called for her to be married to the inventor of the compass. Defending this enormous historical liberty, he argued, in a handsomely produced book which GIS published to accompany the film: "It is a fact that magnetic compasses - pointing south instead of north - were being used by Chinese mariners in these same waters a thousand years ago."

Sensing that the invention of the compass wasn't enough to engage movie enthusiasts for long, leave alone Nancy Kwan's dramatic talents, Salt decided that the real drama should focus on the latter. As the faithful consort who scaled the heights every day, with her child strapped to her back, to keep vigil for her husband's return, refusing to believe that he is lost at sea, she would be rewarded for her fidelity by being turned to stone - together with the child.

The shipwreck in which the doomed inventor of the compass meets his untimely end was less easily devised. Salt persuaded the Government Supplies Department to purchase a suitably elderly sailing junk and then proceeded to wreck it on the rocky headlands of the Sai Kung peninsula. Supplies Department was appalled. Deliberately contrived shipwrecks were not acceptable means of writing off government equipment.

The completed film aroused great interest but some bewilderment among overseas audiences unused to seeing loving spouses turned to stone for their loyalty. The last time they had heard of such a thing was when Lot's wife gave the literal origin to the word petrified by flouting celestial prohibition and turning to look back on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra.

Salt's quest for the unusual led to the production of the first GIS announcement of public interest - a brief black and white forerunner of the APIs (Announcement of Public Interest) which the department would later produce at the rate of one a week - to be banned by the government film censor operating under its own departmental jurisdiction.

Produced as an appeal to conserve water, the shortage of which was to haunt Hong Kong throughout the '60s, this depicted four adults of mixed sexes and racial origins bathing together in the same tub. 'Save water - share a bath' was the motto. The film censor did not agree.


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