In December 1972, newspapers in Hong Kong reported that The Board of Film Censors had banned Lung Kong's latest film The Call Girls 應召女郎(1973). Lung's film is often grouped together as part of a wave of Hong Kong soft-core sex/erotic films in the early-mid 1970s, but it also questions the illegalization and stigmatisation of sex work. To demonstrate how Lung's film and authorship clashed with the censors in relation to how contemporary Hong Kong society was depicted, this talk will situate Lung's film within the industrial and historical context it emerged in.

Within the commercial norms that favoured sex and violence in imported and local films in the early 1970s, the sex and violence in The Call Girls is not explicit or extreme, and far less so than many of the locally produced Hong Kong or foreign films released in Hong Kong around this time. It is more the way the film depicts contemporary Hong Kong that the censors found problematic. The complex reasons for why it was banned relates to how the censors wanted specific images of Hong Kong on-screen that did not match up to the lived reality; the censors charged Lung's film with smearing the image of Hong Kong and painting a great part of it as “a sink of iniquity”.

It was the Board of Appeal that took a different approach since they argued that it was because the film attempted social comment that it should be released. This talk will explore the censors’reasons for initially banning the film and also at how the ban being overturned after appeal and the release of The Call Girls after only several cuts was one of several key precedents that marked a shift in how cinema could represent Hong Kong society in the 1970s.

講題：Lung Kong's The Call Girls: Clashes with the censors amid a decade of “fists and pillows”
講者：Tom Cunliffe (lecturer in Film Studies, University College London)
主持人：王潔瑩 (國立陽明交通大學視覺文化研究所 助理教授)
時間：113年4月22日（一）上午10:00-12:00
地點：知行樓後棟322會議室(陽明校區)
（詳細地圖資訊可參考下方連結：https://ymmap.ga.nycu.edu.tw）

本演講採實體與線上同步進行。歡迎校內外各界人士蒞臨聽講。
線上聽講Google meet會議連結: https://meet.google.com/oim-hypr-kbv

講者資訊：
Tom Cunliffe is a lecturer in Film Studies at University College London. His essays have appeared in journals including Film History, Framework, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and Screen. He is currently working on a book about the filmmaker Lung Kong and Hong Kong film history between the 1960s and 1970s.