Activism

Activism refers to taking direct action in support of, or in opposition to, a social or political policy. The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the roots of the word back to 1915 when Swedish ‘activists’ petitioned for the end of that country’s neutrality in World War I (WWI). However, film activism may predate the use of this nomenclature. Suffragettes, for example, appeared on film as early as 1899, and they continued to agitate for their cause in silent features, such as What 80 Million Women Want (Will Lewis, 1913). Putative understandings of activist films, as opposed to other types of political filmmaking, place them outside journalistic reportage or specific government propaganda programs in the realm of revolutionary movements, reform initiatives and struggles for social justice. Fiction and non-fiction filmmakers around the world take up the camera now more likely digital than not in order to agitate for political or social causes. Others use the motion picture medium to record these movements for posterity as narrative features, documentaries or hybrid forms. The 1919 May Fourth Movement in China nourished a generation of activists advocating for action against Japanese aggression, colonialism, capitalist greed and patriarchal excesses on the silent screen. Many were inspired by the ‘agit-prop’ films made in the Soviet Union by filmmakers, such as Dziga Vertov, V. I. Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein. At the conclusion of the Pacific War, filmmakers migrated from their leftwing roots in Republican era critical realism to government-sanctioned socialist realism and revolutionary romanticism in the People’s Republic, and to ‘healthy’ realism in the Republic of China on Taiwan. With this, films became less ‘activist’ in the original sense and more accurately films ‘about’ political heroes used as propaganda for government programs. However, amateur, underground and sundry oppositional cinematic practices continued, particularly on the margins of the Chinese-speaking world. In the cinema clubs that sprang up in Hong Kong to support small-gauge production, filmmakers took a decidedly political turn in the wake of the 1967 riots. As Ian Aitken and Mike Ingham point out in their research on Hong Kong documentary films (Hong Kong Documentary Film, Edinburgh, 2014), key figures, such as Clifford Choi, Lau Fung-kut, Law Kar, Stephen Teo and Lo King-wah made films in support of specific protest movements, such as the campaign to reclaim the Diaoyu Islands, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. New Wave director Tsui Hark began his filmmaking career at Newsreel in New York (later California and Third