For my media project midterm, I decided to chose the topic of the impact of historical events on martial arts cinema. I specifically focused on the 1960’s and 1970’s in Hong Kong. During the early 1960’s, there was social distress and labor conflicts among the poorly paid working class. In 1967, Leftist riots broke out starting at a factory and the spirit spread throughout Hong Kong, lasting several months. These riots were violent and led mostly by Mao’s Cultural Revolution Followers who were pro-communist. By the late 60’s, living conditions improved and unrest eased. As the 1970’s progressed, Hong Kong was established as one of the region’s most powerful economies. With all of this going on, there was also a major martial arts cinema shift. This era marked a key turning point in martial arts cinema as the Shaw Brothers started to take over. Initially in Shanghai, they moved to Hong Kong and established themselves there. Bruce Lee gained popularity during this time and his movies pushed a new generation of martial arts films and was followed by Jackie Chan through the 80’s as well. While Hong Kong’s economy started to grow, so did the cinema market.

    I chose this topic because I have not seen martial arts films before but I am very interested in movies and popular culture. I have only been exposed to pop culture from here and after watching multiple martial arts films for this class, I became interested in them. Even in popular culture products and films I am used to watching, I can see parallels and influences from the martial arts movies that originated in East Asia. Through my project, I am showing the cinema shift and the historical events of that time. My medium is a digital collage made on photoshop that shows the historical events in the background in black and white (moving from the 1960’s to the 1970’s moving down) and popular martial arts films in the foreground in color (also moving from the 1960’s to 1970’s). I chose these movies because they all had themes of conflict resolution and power. Although it’s more cinematic through the films, this parallels with the violence in the streets and problems that Hong Kong was facing and how they tried to resolve them through the violent riots though it doesn’t reflect each other perfectly.

    I chose this media because I think it was an effective way to showcase the two worlds and have a very loose timeline of both. A digital collage instead of another kind of media was more effective than other kinds of media because through a digital collage it is more effective when inserting all kinds of images. This is necessary when trying to portray the chaos that went on in this time period. When first looking at the digital collage, it is a lot to take in at first and this goes along with the theme of chaos within the historical context. It isn’t until I break down the reason I placed the images and why I place them that it is more understandable. This was also a media I was comfortable working with and felt like I could make visually pleasing. Playing around with images, both digital and physical is something I enjoy. One problem I actually ran into is the idea of “life imitating art or art imitating life”. Through making the media, I think I started to realize that maybe things aren’t always connected, which is why I eventually decided to do the history in black and white and the film captures in color. These two worlds-- historical and cinematic-- were both under great changes but nothing lines up perfectly. These martial arts films represent power and conflict resolution, which have similarities with the historical events-- especially with the riots-- although in the films, it is cinematic and clean. As Hong Kong’s economy started to grow, so did the cinema market. Hong Kong became known as an “Asian Tiger” in the 1970s and this was a time of great production and a new wave of martial arts cinema, both of which became staples of nationalism in Hong Kong and shaped it into what it is today.