香港電影的發展歷史，我要英文！！急！！

1909 to World War II
During its early history, Hong Kong's cinema played second fiddle to that of the mainland, particularly the city of Shanghai, which was then the movie capital of the Chinese-speaking world. Very little of this work is extant: one count finds only four films remaining out of over 500 produced in Hong Kong before World War II (Fonoroff, 1997). Detailed accounts of this period, especially those by non-Chinese speakers, therefore have inherent limitations and uncertainties.
Pioneers from the stage
As in most of China, the development of early films was tightly bound to Chinese opera, for centuries the dominant form of dramatic entertainment. Opera scenes were the source for what are generally credited as the first movies made in Hong Kong, two 1909 short comedies entitled Stealing a Roasted Duck and Right a Wrong with Earthenware Dish. The director was stage actor and director Liang Shaobo. The producer was an American, Benjamin Brodsky (sometimes transliterated 'Polaski'), one of a number of Westerners who helped jumpstart Chinese film through their efforts to crack China's vast potential market.

圖片參考：http://tw.yimg.com/i/tw/ugc/rte/smiley_1.gif


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Credit for the first Hong Kong feature film is usually given to Zhuangzi Tests His Wife (1913), which also took its story from the opera stage, was helmed by a stage director and featured Brodsky's involvement.

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Director Lai Man-Wai (Li Ming Wei or Li Minwei in Mandarin) was a theatrical colleague of Liang Shaobo's who would become known as the "Father of Hong Kong Cinema".

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In another borrowing from opera, Lai played the role of wife himself. His brother played the role of husband, and his wife a supporting role as a maid, making her the first Chinese woman to act in a Chinese film, a milestone delayed by longstanding taboos regarding female performers (Leyda, 1972).

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Zhuangzhi was the only film made by Chinese American Film, founded by Lai and Brodsky as the first movie studio in Hong Kong, and was never actually shown in the territory (Stokes and Hoover, 1999).

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The following year, the outbreak of World War I put a large crimp in the development of cinema in Hong Kong, as Germany was the source of the colony's film stock (Yang, 2003). It was not until 1923 that Lai, his brother and their cousin joined with Liang Shaobo to form Hong Kong's first entirely

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Chinese-owned-and-operated production company, the Minxin (or China Sun) Company. In 1924, they moved their operation to the Mainland after government red tape blocked their plans to build a studio. (Teo, 1997)

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The advent of sound
With the popularity of talkies in the early 1930s, China's many, mutually unintelligible, spoken dialects had to be grappled with. Hong Kong was a major center for Cantonese, one of the most widely spoken, and political factors on the Mainland provided other opportunities.

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The government of the Kuomintang or Nationalist Party wanted to enforce a "Mandarin-only" policy and was hostile to Cantonese filmmaking in China. It also banned the wildly popular wuxia genre of martial arts swordplay and fantasy, accusing it of promoting superstition and violent anarchy.

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Cantonese film and wuxia film remained popular despite government hostility, and the British colony of Hong Kong became a place where both of these trends could be freely served. The name (粵語長片, Jyutping: jyut6 jyu5 coeng4 pin3*2) soon became the standard name for black and white Cantonese movies.

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Filmed Cantonese operas proved even more successful than wuxia and constituted the leading genre of the 1930s. Major studios that thrived in this period were Grandview, Universal, Nanyue and Tianyi

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(the last an early incarnation of the Shaw family dynasty that would become the most enduring and influential in Chinese film). (Teo, 1997)

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The advent of war
Another important factor in the '30s was the Sino-Japanese War. "National defense" films - patriotic war stories about Chinese resisting the Japanese invasion - became one of Hong Kong's major genres;

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notable titles included Kwan Man Ching's Lifeline (1935), Chiu Shu Sun's Hand to Hand Combat (1937) and Situ Huimin's March of the Partisans (1938). The genre and the film industry were further boosted by emigre film artists and companies when Shanghai was taken by the Japanese in 1937.

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This of course came to an end when Hong Kong itself fell to the Japanese in December 1941. But unlike on the Mainland, the occupiers were not able to put together a collaborationist film industry. They managed to complete just one propaganda movie,

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The Attack on Hong Kong (1942; aka The Day of England's Collapse) before the British returned in 1945 (Teo, 1997). A more important move by the Japanese may have been to melt down many of Hong Kong's pre-war films to extract their silver nitrate for military use (Fonoroff, 1997).

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The 1940s-1960s
Postwar Hong Kong cinema, like postwar Hong Kong industries in general, was catalyzed by the continuing influx of capital and talents from Mainland China.

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This became a flood with the 1946 resumption of the Chinese Civil War (which had been on hold during the fight against Japan) and then the 1949 Communist victory.

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These events definitively shifted the center of Chinese-language cinema to Hong Kong. The colony also did big business exporting films to Southeast Asian countries (especially but not exclusively their large Chinese expatriate communities) and to Chinatowns in Western countries (Bordwell, 2000).

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Competing languages
The postwar era also cemented the bifurcation of the industry into two parallel cinemas, one in Mandarin, the dominant dialect of the Mainland emigres, and one in Cantonese, the dialect of most Hong Kong natives.

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Mandarin movies had much higher budgets and more lavish production. Reasons included their enormous export market; the expertise, capital and prestige of the Shanghai filmmakers;

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and the cultural prestige of Mandarin, the official language of China and the tongue of the Chinese cultural and political elite. For decades to come, Cantonese films, though sometimes more numerous, were relegated to second-tier status (Leyda, 1972).

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Another language-related milestone occurred in 1963: the British authorities passed a law requiring the subtitling of all films in English, supposedly to enable a watch on political content.

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Making a virtue of necessity, studios included Chinese subtitles as well, enabling easier access to their movies for speakers of other dialects. (Yang, 2003) Subtitling later had the unintended consequence of facilitating the movies' popularity in the West.

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Years of transformation (1970s)
Mandarin-dialect film in general and the Shaw Brothers studio in particular began the 1970s in apparent positions of unassailable strength. Cantonese cinema virtually vanished in the face of Mandarin studios and Cantonese television,

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which became available to the general population in 1967; in 1972 no films in the local dialect were made (Bordwell, 2000).

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The Shaws saw their longtime rival Cathay ceasing film production, leaving themselves the only megastudio. The martial arts subgenre of the kung fu movie exploded into popularity internationally,

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with the Shaws driving and dominating the wave. But changes were beginning that would greatly alter the industry by the end of the decade.

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1980s-early 1990s: the boom years
The 1980s and early '90s saw seeds planted in the '70s come to full flower: the triumph of Cantonese, the birth of a new and modern cinema, superpower status in the East Asian market, and the turning of the West's attention to Hong Kong film.

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A cinema of greater technical polish and more sophisticated visual style, including the first forays into up-to-date special effects technology, sprang up quickly. To this surface dazzle, the new cinema added an eclectic mixing and matching of genres,

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and a penchant for pushing the boundaries of sensationalistic content. Slapstick comedy, sex, the supernatural, and above all action (of both the martial arts and cops-and-criminals varieties) ruled, occasionally all in the same film.

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Stephen Chow, the most consistently popular screen star of the '90s, directed and starred in Shaolin Soccer (2001) and Kung Fu Hustle (2004); these used digital special effects to push his

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distinctive humor into new realms of the surreal and became the territory's two highest-grossing films to date, garnering numerous awards locally and internationally.

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http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/CulturalService/HKFA/chinese/publication.html