UCLA Film & Television Archive Archive Research and Study Center (ARSC) Student Research Award 2013 Capturing the Place: Location Shooting, Medium and Politics in Shaw Brothers’ Moonlight Serenade (1967) Kathy Yim-king MAK Doctoral Student Department of Art History University of California, Los Angeles (
[email protected]) In memory of Sir Run Run Shaw (1907-2014) and Yen Chun (1917-1980) For the Shaw Brothers (Hong Kong) Limited 邵氏兄弟 (香港 )有限公司 ,1 the 1960s marks as a decade of the exploration of location shooting overseas. Location shooting refers the practice of filming on an existing locale. Unlike filming in studio in which soundstages or back lots are used, such a filming practice takes place in a less controllable environment in exchange for a physically and environmentally more genuine setting. Some scholars have noted how Shaw Brothers had invested much money to construct the Movietown in the 1960s, where film sets such as historic towns and villages were built for the shooting of film categories such as huangmeidiao 黃梅調 (opera drama) and wuxia pian 武俠片 (martial art).2 A relatively less discussed practice is the studio’s active exploration of different locations abroad for shooting in the late 1950s and the 1960s.3 In this paper, I would like to investigate Shaw Brothers’ practice of location shooting in Taiwan in the mid-1960s by focusing on one of its films called Moonlight 1 For the industrial history and relevant discussions of the studio, see Wong Ain-ling ed., Shao shi dianying chutan 邵氏電影初探 (The Shaw screen: a preliminary study; Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2003), available in both English and Chinese; Liao Jinfeng et al.