Appropriating CinemaScope’s Screens: <i>The Love of Susan</i> ( <i>Xin Yutangchun</i> , 1954) and Hong Kong Widescreen Cinema’s ‘Ersatz’ Beginnings in the 1950s

Prior scholarship has long debated whether The Love of Susan (Xin Yutangchun, the Grandview Film Company, 1954) was Hong Kong’s first widescreen production, as well as the widescreen process that the film used. This paper presents new evidence from Grandview’s obscure in-house journal, Grandview Movieland, to argue that the film was indeed Hong Kong’s first widescreen feature, but it was not shot in an anamorphic process like CinemaScope, rather was projected in ersatz widescreen. I further theorize how the ‘ersatz’ was collectively used by Hong Kong producers and exhibitors as a creative response and a survival strategy to combat technological disparities with Hollywood in the early widescreen era, when producers did not have access to anamorphic equipment due to Hollywood’s firm monopoly of the technology, and exhibitors did not have CinemaScope films to put on their screens because Hong Kong was at the end of the global distribution line. Through contextualizing Grandview’s The Love of Susan in local industrial practices and within global widescreen history, I theorize how Hong Kong’s case presents an alternative genealogy of widescreen cinema, one that celebrates the creative and political possibilities of the ersatz.