e-wave: The TV films of Patrick Tam

In the mid-1970s when competition among the television stations was heating up, new talent were recruited in droves to make exciting programmes. TVB set up a new film division to produce television films in the style of their big-screen cousins. Patrick Tam was among the crop of passionate young talent drawn to the creative freedom and was the most outstanding of the lot. He made over 20 half-hour to hour-long television films for TVB between 1975 and 1977, including the drama Seven Women, the plot-driven CID and the thriller 13, trying his hand in scriptwriting, directing, editing and scoring. He soon mastered it all and began to develop a personal style.

The 1970s were an era of political and economic turmoil worldwide. Under the influence of the Cultural Revolution and the new trend of thought from the West, Hong Kong’s society, culture and media underwent fundamental change. Newly fashionable, television took the lead in bringing in the world’s latest trends. Patrick Tam and others attempted to create works by planting modern Western ideas in local soil. Tam was a pioneer in his use of modern visual and audio language to express his thoughts on contemporary society. He strove to break free from the formulae of conventional popular drama, borrowing from literary genres such as essays, poetry or even diary and opting for images and sound/music over dramatic language to convey feelings and ideas. For this, he was often misunderstood as too oblique, too highbrow for most palates, or too focused on style and form at the expense of content. Viewing his works again today, one cannot but notice his concern for the integration of content and form, and his endeavours at expressing and communicating through visual language, sound and music. He was an artist on the frontier of media.

Television culture reaped its harvest in the years 1975 – 1979. The works that came out were innovative and vivacious, leading to the period known as the ‘New Wave of Television’, or e-wave (electronic wave) as termed here. The stars of that illustrious times included directors Patrick Tam, Ann Hui, Yim Ho, Alex Cheung, Tsui Hark, Allen Fong, Lawrence Ah Mon, and Johnny Mak; scriptwriters Shu Kei, Joyce Chan, Lilian Lee, Wong Chi, Manfred Wong, and Siu Yeuk-yuen; photographers Bill Wong, David Chung and George Chang, who all went on to join the film industry and fuel the modernisation of Hong Kong cinema. The process is worthy of study.

I hope Patrick Tam’s films will be a starting point for studying the works of other New Wave filmmakers. I wish to thank the organisations, writers and friends who have lent a hand to this exhibition, in particular Ms Sabrina Baracetti and Mr Alberto Pezzotta of the Udine Far East Film Festival, TVB, Dr Mary Wong, and Mr Ben Wong.

Law Kar, Guest Programmer