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This article is one outcome of research into primary documents held in national archives in Malaysia, Singapore, the United Kingdom and, in Hong Kong, the archives of Radio Television Hong Kong and Hong Kong Public Records Office.1 These documents indicate how the territories of Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong responded to calls to develop television broadcasting systems which embodied public service broadcasting (PSB). That response was conditioned by the reality that all three territories were authoritarian entities, and that PSB was, in contradistinction, a liberal-democratic concept. This article will chart the problems involved in establishing television PSB in these territories, beginning with Malaysia and Singapore during the 1960s, and then Hong Kong, 1970–2020. The article will begin with a brief account of the notion of PSB, and the role played by western broadcasting companies during the Cold War, in colonial British South East Asia, during the 1950s and 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hong Kong's two terrestrial broadcasters, Asia Television (ATV) and Television Broadcasts Ltd. (TVB), are uncharacteristic of other broadcasters in a number of respects, and this influences the documentary films that they produce. This unusual aspect is largely due to Hong Kong's almost unique situation as a Western non-democratic British colony in the East which went on under duress to become a component entity of an Eastern totalitarian communist State. Though this colonial and post-colonial totalitarian context rarely affected documentary film-makers at ATV and TVB in a blatant manner, and broadcasting staff within the organisations also resisted political encroachment when it arrived, that context nevertheless ensured that restrictions were placed upon the ability of the film-makers to produce critical, impactful films. This article will first explore how these two broadcasters can be associated with models of relations between the media and the state. The relationship to mainland China will then be referred to. Following this, an outline of the television documentary films of these broadcasters will be given, before a more in-depth account of particular films is provided. The article will conclude via reference to Habermas’ notion of the public sphere, and by offering proposals for change and improvement to this broadcasting output. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the immediate post-war period, crucial historical changes took place which influenced the use of the British official film in Malaya and Singapore. The most important of these were the emergence of Singapore as a strategic outpost at the outset of the Cold War, and Malaya as a vital component of the post-war British economic Sterling-zone system. This article investigates how this context influenced the development of British propaganda policy and official film-making in Malaya and Singapore, and, more specifically, how a group of British governmental institutions, including the Foreign Office Information Research Department, Colonial Office Information Department, and the Regional Information Office in Singapore, reacted to that context, and were involved in that development. The article attempts to establish how these institutions, and specifically the Regional Information Office in Singapore, were active in the use of official British information services and the official film in the region, and over the period from 1948 to 1961, that is, from the consolidation of British official information services in response to the establishment of the unified and anti-colonial Soviet propaganda organisation Cominform in 1948, to the closure of the Regional Information Office in Singapore in 1961. This period also marks the duration of the ‘Malayan Emergency,’ and a particular phase in the propaganda campaign aimed at Singapore and Malaya during which the chief imperative was to slow down the process of decolonisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is widely known that Georg Lukács was a literary theorist. It is less well known – in the English-speaking world – that he was a film theorist. The reason for this lack of anglophone attentiveness is that Lukács' writings on film were not published in English. His early article ‘Thoughts Towards an Aesthetic of the Cinema’ (1913) has now appeared in English at least five times. However, the long chapter entitled ‘Film’ in hisThe Specificity of the Aesthetichas only recently appeared in English. This paper will explore the chapter on film in theAesthetic, and will also make reference to both Lukács' 1913 piece and his early works on literary theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a historical overview of British government-run filmmaking in the colony of Hong Kong during the 1930s and 1940s. Particular focus is given to the struggle between the Colonial Office (CO) of the British Colonial Film Unit (CFU) and the documentary film movement in Great Britain known as Griersonian tradition, after the filmmaker John Grierson. Additional topics include World War II propaganda films produced by the CFU and the British Ministry of Information (MoI) to promote British aims in its colonies during the conflict and differences in film production in large and small British colonies.

Organizations without vision struggle to find hope and remain mere organizations, surviving but not living, hitting temporary targets, but not moving toward their potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores conceptions of empirical filmic representation in the film theories of Grierson, Bazin, Kracauer and Lukacs. The article begins by exploring the concept of 'intuitionist cinematic realism', then turns to Kracauer's analysis of documentary films by Paul Rotha, and Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. Following this, the article looks at Bazin's analysis of Dreyer's the Passion of Joan of Arc, and Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki. The article doses with an exploration of the thought of Georg Lukacs in relation to questions of empirical representation and filmic realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the development of the realist tradition from its origins in the nineteenth-century through its appropriation by Lukács, to the ideas of the ‘classical’ realist film theorists. It will be argued that this realist tradition is best understood as a form of reflexive practice which arose to resist an aestheticization of art and an intensifying specialization of the aesthetic sphere within capitalist modernity. It will also be argued that this tradition was based in an intuitionist model of knowledge, and was characterized by a rejection of the provenance of rule-governed systems and the a priori formulaic. The paper relates the ideas of Grierson, Kracauer and Bazin to a paradigm of ‘intuitionist cinematic realism, and then relates this realist tradition to the broader spectrum of contemporary film theory, and, in particular, to a ‘pragmatist’ school which emerged during the 1990s. It will be argued that the realist tradition is superior to this school, because of its fruitful synthesis of idealist aesthetics, phenomenology and Marxism, and ability to engage with abstract theoretical models. This argument is developed by applying Kracaurian and Bazinian ideas to an analysis of Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d' Arc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that a shared concern with indeterminacy and the concrete links German film theory with avant-garde movements such as French surrealism. This relationship will be examined through an analysis of the film theory of Siegfried Kracauer, concentrating on Kracauer's interpretation of surrealism, and developing a cinematic model which integrates elements of surrealism with Kracauerian phenomenology and naturalism. It will start with an overview of Kracauer's theory of reality and representation, and will then examine Kracauer's position on surrealism.

In the British Journalism Review Volume 6 No. 2 in the middle of last year we published Ian Aitken's memorial service tribute to Louis Heren, the former deputy editor of The Times. It is not ourpolicy to make a habit of publishing such tributes; the tolling of the bell, sadly, is all too frequent, and journalism is losing some of its finest people too early. However we are publishing this tribute, again from Ian Aitken, to Gordon Greig the former political editor of the Daily Mail. It was delivered at a memorial service on November 1 st 1995 at St. Margaret's, Westminster. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This is the tribute paid to Louis Heren, former deputy editor of The Times by Ian Aitken, former political editor and columnist of The Guardian. It was delivered at a memorial service for Louis Heren at St. Bride's, Fleet Street, on March 28. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]