THE CINEMA OF HONG KONG
The Cinema of Hong Kong examines one of the most popular and dynamic and important cinema traditions in the history of film. Providing an overview of major directors, genres, and stars, from its origins to the present, this volume examines Hong Kong cinema in historical, transnational, cultural, and political contexts. Individual chapters focus on Hong Kong cinema before and during World War II, the cinema of the turbulent 1960s, its rise to world prominence in the 1970s and its reception in the United States, and the revival of Cantonese cinema, among other topics. Including contributions from a diverse roster of scholars, archivists, and film programmers, this book provides a wealth of new information and new conceptual frameworks, enabling a greater appreciation of the variety, range, and depth of Hong Kong film.
Poshek Fu is Associate Professor of History and Cinema Studies at the Univer-sity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Passivity, Resistance,and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937-1945 and a frequent contributor to the Hong Kong International Film Festival Retrospec-tive series.
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David Desser is Professor of Cinema Studies and Speech Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa and Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema and editor of Ozu 's ' 'Tokyo Story.''
THE CINEMA OF HONG KONG
HISTORY, ARTS, IDENTITY
Edited by POSHEK FU, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign DAVID DESSER, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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CONTENTS
List o f Contributors page vii Acknowledgments xi POSHEK FU AND DAVID DESSER
Introduction 1
POSHEK FU AND DAVID DESSER
Chronology o f Hong Kong Cinema 13 DAVID DESSER AND POSHEK FU
PART I. HISTORY
1.
The Kung Fu Craze: Hong Kong Cinema��s First American Reception 19 DAVID DESSER
2.
The American Connection in Early Hong Kong Cinema 44 LAW KAR
3.
The 1960s: Modernity, Youth Culture, and Hong Kong Cantonese Cinema 71 POSHEK FU
4.
The 1970s: Movement and Transition 90 STEPHEN TEO
PART II. ARTS
5.
Richness through Imperfection: King Hu and the Glimpse 113 DAVID BORDWELL
6.
Space, Place, and Spectacle: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo 137 TONY WILLIAMS
7.
Besides Fists and Blood: Michael Hui and Cantonese Comedy 158 JENNY KWOK WAH LAU
CONTENTS
8. The Film Work of Ann Hui 176
PATRICIA BRETT ERENS
PAR T III. IDENTITY
9. Betw een N ationalism and Colonialism : M ainland m igrs, M arginal C ulture, and Hong Kong Cinem a 1937-1941 POSHEK FU 199
10. Urban Cinema and the Cultural Identity of Hong Kong LEUNG PIN G -KW AN 227
11. Rewriting History: Hong Kong Nostalgia Cinema and Its Social Practice 252
N A TA LIA CHAN SUI HUNG
12. Filming Diaspora and Identity: Hong Kong and 1997 SH ELDON LU 273
13. Buying American, Consuming Hong Kong: Cultural Commerce, Fantasies of Identity, and the Cinema GINA MARCHETTI 289
14. Hong Kong Electric Shadows: A Selected Bibliography of Studies in English H .C. LI 314
Index 327
CONTRIBUTORS
David Bordwell is Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies at the Depart-ment of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has written book-length critical studies of Carl Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu, and Sergei Eisenstein, as well as The Classical Hollywood Cinema (with Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson), Film Art: An Introduction and Film History: An Introduction (both with Kristin Thompson), and On the History of Film Style. His most recent book is Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment.
Natalia Chan Sui Hung is a Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego. She currently teaches Hong Kong cinema and culture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of poetry, fiction, and critical essays. Recent publications include The Decadent City: Hong Kong Popular Culture Distance (1988), Dislocation (1997), and The Last Fairy Tale (1998).
David Desser, who received his Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from the University of Southern California, is Professor of Cinema Studies and Speech Commu-nication at the University of Illinois. He has authored The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa and Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema; coauthored American-Jewish Filmmakers: Traditions and Trends', edited Ozu's "Tokyo Story," and coedited Reframing Japanese Cin-ema: Authorship, Genre, History, Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston andthe American Experience, and Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan.
Patricia Brett Erens is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She has written on the films of Ann Hui for Cinema Journal and the Taipei International Film Festival. She is the editor of Issues in Feminist Film Criticism and serves as the general editor of the Contemporary Film and Television series for Wayne State Uni-versity Press.
Poshek Fu was born in Hong Kong and educated there, in Canada, and in the United States. Currently he teaches history and film culture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shangahi, 1937-1945,
and is a regular contributor to the Hong Kong International Film Festival Retrospective Series.
Jenny Kwok Wah Lau received her Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from North-western University. She has taught at Hong Kong Baptist University as a Visiting Assistant Professor and at Northwestern University, and is currently Associate Professor of Film at the School of Film at Ohio University. She has published articles on pan-Chinese cinema in Wide Angle, Film Quarterly, and Cinema Journal in the United States and Breakthrough (a cultural magazine) and Ming Pao (a newspaper) in Hong Kong. She is coauthor of a forthcoming book on Chinese cinema from Praeger Press.
Law Kar is a veteran critic and researcher on the history of Hong Kong cinema. He has been programmer and editor of the Hong Kong Cinema Retrospective in the Hong Kong International Film Festival since 1990. His publications (in Chinese) include A Cinematic Voyage (1986), Chan Ph-chu vs. Josephine Siao (1996) and Li Minwei: The Man, The Times, Cinema (1999). He is cowriting a book on Hong Kong cinema to be published in the United States.
Leung Ping-kwan teaches cultural studies and film studies at the Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He is also a columnist, novelist, scriptwriter, and well-known poet. His numerous publications include two books on Hong Kong popular film culture.
H. C. Li, Serials Librarian at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, has published articles on Asian cinema in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, and the United States. His three extensive bibliographies of English publications on Chinese cinema (1993, 1994, and 1998) were published in Modern Chinese Literature. His book, Riben dianying fengmao (1995), is a pioneering study in Chinese on postwar Japanese cinema.
Sheldon H. Lu is Associate Professor of Chinese and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of From Historicity to Fictionality:The Chinese Poetics of Narrative (1994) and editor of Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (1997). He is completing a book tentatively titled China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity.
Gina Marchetti is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College. In 1995 her book, Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction, won the award for best book in the area of cultural studies from the Association of Asian American Studies. She has published articles in Journal of Film and
CONTRIBUTORS
Video, Genders, Journal of Communication Inquiry, and others, as well as Jump Cut (where she serves on the editorial board). Her current research involves transnationalism and screen culture in Hollywood and Asia.
Stephen Teo was born in Malaysia in 1954. After an educational stint in the United Kingdom, he returned to Malaysia to work as a journalist and came to Hong Kong in 1982. Since 1987, Teo has worked as English Editor of the Hong Kong Retrospective catalogue published by the Hong Kong Interna-tional Film Festival, and he has contributed many articles to the catalogue, as well as writing most of the program notes. Teo has also contributed articles to other publications, including Asiaweek, Far Eastern Economic Review, and Kinema Jumpo (Japan). He is the author of Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions.
Tony Williams is Professor of Film Studies in the Department of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Educated at Manchester Univer-sity and Warwick University (United Kingdom), he has coauthored Italian Western: Opera of Violence (1975), coedited Vietnam War Films (1994), and authored Jack London: The Movies (1992), Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (1996), and Larry Cohen: Radical Allegories of an Independent Filmmaker (1997). He has written articles on John Woo for cineAction! and Cinema Journal. He is also a frequent contributor to the popular magazine Asian Cult Cinema.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project grew out of a conference held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in the fall of 1997. We would like to thank the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies for a generous grant in support of the conference. The Department of History and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures also provided valuable funding for the conference. We would also like to thank the conference participants in addition to those represented in this book: Nancy Abelmann, Ramona Curry, James Hay, Theo-dore Huters, John Lie, Isabel Wong, and Yingjin Zhang. We would also like to thank Richard Leskosky and Debbie Beeson of the Unit for Cinema Studies for their help in many of the details of the conference and in putting this book together. We are grateful to Frances Gateward and Jin Qiang for support during the conference and during the production of this book. We would, finally, like to thank Beatrice Rehl and the editorial and production staff at Cambridge University Press for their help and professionalism at every stage in the process of production.
The following essays appeared previously in slightly different form:
David Bordwell, "Richness Through Imperfection: King Hu and the Glimpse" Transcending the Times: King Hu & Eileen Chang. The 22nd Hong Kong International Film Festival (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1998). Reprinted by permission.
Tony Williams, "Space, Place and Spectacle: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo" Cinema Journal 36, no. 2 (1997). Reprinted by permission, Uni-versity of Texas Press.
Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, "Besides Fists and Blood: Hong Kong Comedy and Its Master of the Eighties." Cinema Journal 37, no. 2 (1998). Reprinted by permission, University of Texas Press.
INTRODUCTION
Since its inception in the 1900s, the cinema of Hong Kong has been a significant part of Chinese film, which encompasses a multiplicity of cine-matic sites and traditions. This connection was marked as much by artistic and financial interactions as by business rivalries. Movie producers, directors, actors, and technicians constantly traveled between Hong Kong and Shanghai, then the "Hollywood of the East," to make films. For example, the giant Lianhua (United China) Productions, cofounded in Shanghai in 1931 by Luo Mingyou and Hong Kong filmmaker Li Minwei, and financed by such Hong Kong business tycoons as Sir Robert Ho Tung, had production studios and distribution offices in both cities. Tianyi (First) Film Company, on the other hand, moved its production arm to the colony in 1932 in the wake of the Japanese attack on Shanghai. After the outbreak of World War II in China in 1937, the whole company relocated to Hong Kong under the name of Nan-yang (South Sea) Studio, which was to develop into the Asian media empire of the Shaw Brothers Studio.
At the same time, reflecting the city's position as a British colony situated at the periphery of the mainland, Hong Kong cinema is rooted in its local cultural tradition. Contrary to the stereotype that equates Hong Kong films to "making for money," the industry has a complex history of contestation among various political and ideological-linguistic positions and aesthetic ori-entations. For example, a city of mainly Cantonese speakers, Hong Kong has since the 1920s been a major center for dialect filmmaking. Until the 1970s, the city itself was too small to sustain a film industry; it was almost exclu-sively export oriented, but its products appealed mainly to the Cantonese-speaking communities along the southern coast of China and in Vietnam, the Philippines, Singapore, and the Americas. This market structure imposed a host of material constraints on local film productions.
Since the 1930s, Mandarin-language films have also been made in Hong Kong by Shanghai emigres, but these filmmakers aimed -particularly after the founding of the People's Republic of China, which effectively closed the
POSHEK FU AND DAVID DESSER
Chinese film market -to appeal to diasporic Chinese throughout the world (including, especially, Taiwan). The often cut-throat business competition, cultural conflicts, and artistic interflow between Cantonese-speaking and Mandarin-speaking filmmaking created an especially rich and complex tradi-tion in Hong Kong cinema. Because of its deep local roots and linguistic affinity with the colonial audience, Cantonese cinema has lent itself since the 1930s to the exploration, articulation, and projection of a Hong Kong identity vis-a-vis the mainland mentality.
The cinema of Hong Kong has until recently been a neglected area of scholarly attention in the West. Except for pioneering works by Leo Lee and Rey Chow, Hong Kong cinema had long been marginal to the research agenda of China scholars.1 In the first wave of Hong Kong film appreciation in the 1970s, scholarly attention was minimal.2 When Hong Kong cinema returned to international attention in the late 1980s, scholarship still lagged. Perhaps it was the splash made by the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers of the People's Republic of China (PRC) that diverted scholarly attention from Hong Kong. The films of Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Huang Jianxin, and others could be assimilated into the existing scholarly discourse on art cinema and political cinema. The greater attention focused on films of the PRC compared to Hong Kong seems in keeping with a traditional lack of scholarly attention devoted to Hong Kong.3 Always marginalized both within and without China, the Hong Kong cinema, like Hong Kong itself, seemed to suffer from the same malaise, what Poshek Fu has termed "the Central Plains syndrome." Only recently has scholarly attention been more focused on Hong Kong. The 1997 handover and the transnational appeal of filmmakers like Jackie Chan, John Woo, and Wong Kar-wai have combined to propel Hong Kong cinema into a significant field of research. But, like the studies of Leo Lee and Rey Chow, much of the recent research focuses on the periods that were directly related to the cultural-political crisis of handover and the rise of the New Wave cinema -the 1980s and 1990s.4 It was not until 1997, when Stephen Teo (represented in this volume) published his Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimension, that there was finallya reasonable survey of the Hong Kong cinema in English. But as Teo himself admits, it will take more than one book to fill in the gaps of historical and critical perspective that will lead to a greater appreciation of Hong Kong cinema.5 This volume attempts to address this temporal/chronological imbalance.
Fan appreciation, as often happens, preceded scholarly attention.6 In March 1973, mainstream American audiences caught a glimpse of a cinema at once familiar yet strangely and wonderfully new when Warner Brothers released the Shaw Brothers' production Five Fingers of Death. Fans of action cinema were treated to some of the most stylish and fantastic fight scenes they had ever seen. Though perhaps familiar from many an American Western, here was something that was also different. Dubbed into English for widespread
INTRODUCTION
American theatrical distribution, Five Fingers of Death was not only a sub-stantial box-office hit, it unleashed a veritable tidal wave of films from Hong Kong. Exotic yet accessible, Hong Kong cinema created a stir throughout the rest of that year and for many years to come on America's theatrical and living-room screens.
Though before the wide release of Five Fingers Hong King films had routinely played in Chinatown theaters in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Honolulu, they were strictly the province of Chinese-(mostly Cantonese-) speaking audiences. Following the commercial success of Five Fingers, Hong Kong producers and American distributors scrambled to get their hands on Hong Kong imports for wide release. Bruce Lee's Hong Kong films, The Big Boss (a.k.a. Fists of Fury) and Fist of Fury
(a.k.a. The Chinese Connection), both made before Five Fingers of Death, soon made their American debuts, and before long a steady stream of dubbed kung fu films began showing on American movie screens. But these films arrived without context, so to speak. To Chinese audiences, Five Fingers of Death would have seemed a competent, perhaps better-than-average film, but it was hardly unique. Films featuring Chinese martial arts had been a staple of the Hong Kong cinema for at least two decades before Five Fingers was produced; and for half a decade already, graphic violence, stylized fight scenes, and gravity-defying feats of acrobatic derring-do were de rigueur for the genre that had come to dominate the commercial screens of Hong Kong. American audiences had little basis to understand the generic components of the genre, much less its significance for Hong Kong and for Chinese cinema more generally. Unfortunately, the often hurried and inexpert dubbing of the films into English and the crassly commercial way they were marketed tainted the genre, contributing to its undervaluing, both as cinema and as cultural artifact. Even today, the martial arts genre seems mired in a critical and scholarly backwater. Certainly, in its box-office heyday, it was largely ignored or denigrated by scholars and critics alike.
Whatever its critical reception, the kung fu craze of the 1970s brought the Hong Kong cinema to international attention and created, however tenuously, an interested overseas audience of non-Chinese-speaking film fans. Bruce Lee became a Hollywood superstar, the first man of Chinese descent to achieve that status. Lee's untimely death hurt not only the martial arts craze he helped create in the United States but adversely affected the Hong Kong film industry as well. When Jackie Chan emerged as a superstar in Hong Kong and the rest of Asia in the late 1970s, American producers tried to make him into a Hollywood star with films like The Big Brawl and Cannonball Run in the early 1980s. Fortunately, their attempt failed, as Chan made some of his finest films in Hong Kong in the late 1980s, carrying on the kung fu tradition made famous by Lee. The art-house success of King Hu's Touch of Zen in the late 1970s showcased the cinematic artistry the genre was capable of producing
POSHEK FU AND DAVID DESSER
and helped prepare overseas audiences for a renaissance of martial arts films in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Knowledgeable audiences doubtless were a bit dismayed, however, by the image of Hong Kong cinema created by kung fu films in the 1970s. Hong Kong cinema, they might rightly have complained, consists of more than chop-socky mayhem, however stylish and entertaining it might be. Melodra-mas and social-problem films had also been staples of Hong Kong cinema and, in the 1970s a new generation of comic films emerged. But, like martial arts films before 1973, these were strictly the province of local audiences and the overseas Chinese circuit. Cineastes finally saw this other side of the Hong Kong cinema when the early films of Ann Hui were released on the festival circuit in the early 1980s. In particular, The Boat People (1982) showed the world that there was more to Hong Kong cinema than stylish mayhem and that it had a politically engaged and deeply humanistic sensibility as well. But it would be an action-oriented cinema that returned Hong Kong to the filmic forefront, this time without the sloppy dubbing and taint of kung fu. The films of Tsui Hark, and especially those of John Woo, created for the Hong Kong cinema a cult audience of cinematically sophisticated, mostly younger, film-goers scrambling to see the films on video -often initially in pirated, hastily copied, but at least subtitled, formats. With the commercial distribution of The Killer (1989) in the United States and mainstream pay-TV play, Hong Kong returned to international cinematic prominence, this time with a greater critical respect to go with an enviable commercial clout. In the wake of "Woo-mania," Jackie Chan, denied stardom in the United States in the 1980s would finallyfind it in the 1990s. Tsui Hark would achieve his own promi-nence, as well, with the monumental Once Upon a Time in China series, begun in 1991. Hong Kong cinema had arrived.
The cult discovery of John Woo and Tsui Hark, the festival successes of Ann Hui (who solidified her international standing with Song of the Exile, 1990), and the belated recognition of Jackie Chan as a genuine international superstar led, finally, to the widespread availability of a greater range of Hong Kong films. Clearly, here was a cinema that had much to offer beyond kung fu thrills, even beyond the mind-boggling gunplay of John Woo. Ann Hui, it was revealed, was not alone in tackling politically engaged and psychologi-cally probing issues. There was more to Tsui Hark than flying warriors. There was a rich tradition of cinematic comedy, of musicals, of moving romantic and familial melodramas. In short, Hong Kong's cinema was as rich and varied as any in the world. It is the purpose of the present volume to shed light on this varied cinema, including, as it happens, the very kung fu films that so disgraced yet were so crucial to Hong Kong's emergence in world cinema.
One problem that has plagued scholars and fans of the Hong Kong cinema has been access to the cinematic past. Until recently there was no archive to
INTRODUCTION
store and screen older films. Lack of archives and a lack of a dedicated film organization specializing in archival screenings also meant that festival and touring retrospectives were rarely if ever mounted. (It is instructive here to think of how many important Japanese directors have been "discovered" through festivals and retrospectives as compared to first-run theatrical release.) Through the tireless efforts of Yu Mo-wen, Law Kar, and Li Cheuk-to in programming the all-important Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF), especially its retrospective screenings and catalogues begun in 1978, Hong Kong's past was introduced to its fans of the present. A lack of subtitled prints of older films was a bit off-putting to Western scholars as well. Though shown in the retrospective sections of the annual festivals, such films re-mained the province of local audiences and specialized scholars. Also critical in this process of reconstructing and exploring Hong Kong's cinematic past is the Hong Kong Film Archive. Founded in 1992, it promises future scholars an easier time of things. Even today, when so much is seen on video, the availability of Hong Kong's filmic past, subtitled or not, remains fragmentary, at best. All told, Hong Kong's cinematic past is rarely shown beyond the shores of the island, thus the importance of local critics to begin the process of expounding on the history, traditions, and specifics of the Hong Kong cinema. The lack of access to Hong Kong's filmic past has been further complicated by the fact that most China scholars don't know Cantonese, the main language of Hong Kong cinema. We are fortunate indeed in the present volume to be able to rely on local critics and Chinese Cantonese speakers for so many of the chapters.
Another problem plaguing scholars and critics of the Hong Kong cinema is the very place, the very situation, of Hong Kong itself. Caught between East and West, between China and Britain, a crown colony with a hybrid culture, and now once again part of China but under "one government, two systems," Hong Kong presents a theoretical conundrum. The accepted model of a national cinema seems hardly to apply to the Hong Kong situation -a Chinese community under British rule, a cinema without a nation, a local cinema with international appeal. Perhaps a postmodern model is more appro-priate -a transnational cinema, a cinema of pastiche, a commercial cinema, a genre cinema, a self-conscious, self-reflexive cinema, ungrounded in a nation, multiple in its identities. The third most active film industry in the world (be-hind India and the United States), Hong Kong cinema is per capita the most active in the world by far. Dependent on strong local support, it has always been heavily reliant on overseas markets as well -ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia in particular but also the Chinatown markets in North America, Europe, and Australia. Subject to censorship by British rule and sensitive to the behemoth that is the mainland, Hong Kong cinema has always found itself in a precarious state of flux, of crisis, of being a cinema in search of an identity.
Organized around the concept of "history, arts, identity," the chapters in
POSHEK FU AND DAVID DESSER
this volume attempt to account for many of the issues that have plagued both fans and scholars attempting to come to terms with the complexities and heterogeneity of the Hong Kong cinema. In the first section, the chapters take a primarily historical approach. This section begins, much as the world's interest began, with the introduction of Hong Kong cinema into mainstream overseas markets. If the late 1960s and early 1970s were crucial to the internal development of the Hong Kong industry, as we will see, this period also marked the spectacular arrival of Hong Kong cinema in the international film world. David Desser, in "The Kung Fu Craze: Hong Kong Cinema's First American Reception," details the unprecedented success of Hong Kong im-ports in the American market. Desser details the centrality of Warner Brothers studios to the kung fu craze: the TV series Kung Fu, blaxploitation films, the distribution of Five Fingers of Death, and the production of Enter the Dragon. He traces the appearance of Asian martial arts in pre-1973 American cinema and attempts to account for the increasing interest in both martial arts and Hong Kong cinema due to the Vietnam War and its aftermath. He also discusses some of the internal developments of martial arts films within both Cantonese-and Mandarin-language production in Hong Kong.
If Hong Kong films made a big splash on American screens in the early 1970s, it was not the first time Hong Kong and the United States had been in cinematic contact. Law Kar, in "The American Connection in Early Hong Kong Cinema," discusses the crucial importance of cultural "interflow" between Hong Kong and the United States during the first Golden Age of Hong Kong film: 1937-1941. The American experiences of these early film-makers contributed to this fertile period as did the popularity of Cantonese opera. Law discusses in detail the formation of the first major film companies in Hong Kong, especially Grandview, which originated in San Francisco. He then goes on to discuss the significance of Cantonese opera to the early film style and popularity of Hong Kong cinema, and relates the careers of many of the important stars of stage and screen, including Kwan Tak-hing, the most important Hong Kong star of the 1950s.
The 1960s were a volatile time in most major industrialized nations and generated among other things, considerable excitement in world cinema. The various "new waves" in France, Japan, Britain, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Germany produced some of the most vibrant, engaged cinema the world had ever seen. Much of this political turmoil and cinematic vibrancy were spawned by the emergence of postwar youth culture. Poshek Fu, in "The 1960s: Modernity, Youth Culture, and Hong Kong Cantonese Cinema," shows how many of these same sociocultural forces led to a vibrant but heretofore overlooked period within Hong Kong cinema. Fu reconstructs the cultural and sociopolitical context of the period, which was a time of intense turmoil and dislocation accompanying the processes of industrial moderniza-tion, leading to an often-violent confrontation between traditional values and
INTRODUCTION
emerging lifestyles and intense intergenerational conflicts, creating what was then known as the "youth problem." A detailed discussion of the organization of the Hong Kong cinema shows the tremendous decline in Cantonese-language production due to competition with Shaw Brothers' Mandarin-language output and the declining market for dialect films. In 1966-1968, however, Cantonese filmmakers reacted to the local situation, creating the genre of "youth film." Works like The Teddy Girls brought fresh voices to the Hong Kong cinema and dealt with difficult sociopolitical issues and concerns confronting the colony under the pressures of rapid industrialization, such as juvenile delinquency and social inequality, in ways that the Mandarin-language films completely avoided.
The 1970s was a crucial decade for the Hong Kong cinema; it achieved an international recognition that was unknown to it before, while it experienced something like a boom, a bust, and a renaissance. Stephen Teo, in "The 1970s: Movement and Transition," details the highs, lows, and rebirth of filmmaking in the territory. While Cantonese production, formerly the driving force of the Hong Kong industry, dwindled to virtually nothing by 1972, Mandarin-language movies opened Hong Kong to the world. These Mandarin films, of course, were mostly kung fu and martial arts spectaculars, but Teo notes how dependent these films were on earlier Cantonese-language genres. Teo details how Mandarin was driven by business concerns of overseas markets and how Hong Kong/Taiwan competition and interaction spurred both industries. Teo details the overproduction of Mandarin films in the 1970s and the manner in which Cantonese staged a comeback through the help of television and a new wave of filmmakers. Along the way he discusses the career of Bruce Lee in Hong Kong, and the significance of the kung fu genre in modernizing and internationalizing Hong Kong cinema. He concludes with an overview of the Hong Kong New Wave and the importance of Cantonese-language television to its origins.
Hong Kong cinema aesthetics are often constrained by the relatively low budgets mandated for its productions, a factor influenced by the small market for its cinema: Hong Kong films are distributed only within the Cantonese-speaking community, a tiny market when compared with the Mandarin-speaking cinema. Perhaps the need to churn out films rather quickly to capi-talize on the latest trend or fad, or the generic nature of Hong Kong production itself influences the particular characteristics of Hong Kong's cinematic im-agery; or perhaps it has something to do with the landscape of Hong Kong itself: resolutely urban, crowded, the constant rumble of buildings being torn down and new ones almost immediately put in their place. The picturesque seems absent both from Hong Kong and its cinema. Nevertheless, Hong Kong has produced a number of filmmakers who can hold their own with virtually anyone in cinema history. The second section of the book, "Arts," centers on the work of some of Hong Kong's premier filmmakers.
POSHEK FU AND DAVID DESSER
David Bordwell, in "Richness through Imperfection: King Hu and the Glimpse," focuses on Hu's visual style. By examining H_. of the 1960s and 1970s, especially Dragon Gate Inn, A Touch of Zen, The Fate of Lee Khan, and The Valiant Ones, Bordwell analyzes Hu's handling of fight scenes in an especially detailed manner. Hu inherited a reliance on tracking shots, staging in depth, and constructive editing techniques from previous martial arts cinema, but, like Akira Kurosawa, he recast these devices in distinctive, original ways. In particular, Hu seems to rely on providing mere glimpses of the action or features of the set that partially obscure our view. While later directors, especially Tsui Hark, would go to great lengths to show us the impossible, Hu seemed always concerned with making his fights, however fantastic, seem probable, if not possible.
Another of Hong Kong's most renowned filmmakers is John Woo. Tony Williams, in "Space, Place, and Spectacle: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo," situates Woo's works within the context of a "crisis" -Hong Kong's im-pending return to Chinese rule and the general malaise, if you will, of the postmodern condition. Williams relies on some biographical criticism, as well, accounting for Woo's religiosity, his sense of loss, his hopes for the future. Williams, unlike most critics writing on Woo, recounts his early, pre-A Better Tomorrow, career, finding, if not stylistic precursors, many of the thematic concerns of his more famous films. In his post-1986 films, Woo reveals an eclectic range of references and influences from Hollywood, Japan, and France, along with many classical Chinese motifs. We might say that Woo is both emblematic and paradigmatic of the Hong Kong cinema itself.
Perhaps not a world-class filmmaker, Michael Hui is nevertheless a crucial and successful one within the complex and varied world of the Hong Kong cinema. Jenny Lau, in "Besides Fists and Blood: Michael Hui and Cantonese Comedy," rejects the predominant focus of Western critics on Hong Kong's kung fu and gangster films and makes the case not only for a greater range of Hong Kong films than is generally acknowledged, but for the centrality of Michael Hui to the artistic and commercial revival of Cantonese cinema in the 1970s. Situating Hui within the popular tradition of Cantonese comedy and reading his films not only within this context but in connection to Hong Kong's relationship to the mainland, Lau provides close readings of a number of Hui's biggest hits.
Rounding out the section, Patricia Erens discusses one of Hong Kong's New Wave auteurs and one of the most productive and influential women filmmakers in the territory, Ann Hui. Director of fifteen feature films spanning two decades, Hui has established herself as an influential and significant filmmaker not only in Hong Kong but throughout the world. Unlike many other women filmmakers,Hui has not concentrated solely on "women's" films, but has undertaken a wide range of subject matter across a variety of cinematic modes. We may divide her work into three main motifs: the politi-
INTRODUCTION
cal works, the genre films, and the personal dramas. However, as Erens points out, Hui tends to blur the boundaries between these categories, making her cinema deceptively complex and, usually, commercially successful.
Hong Kong: East or West, Chinese or British, traditional or modern, colo-nial or postcolonial? Issues of identity continue to plague the territory and have been especially poignant since the announcement in 1984 of the Sino-British Joint Declaration announcing the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Identity thus is the focus of the third section of this volume. This section begins with Poshek Fu's "Between Nationalism and Colonialism: Mainland Emigres, Marginal Culture, Hong Kong Cinema 1937-1941." Fu focuses on the cultural politics of identity formation in HK film during the war, between 1937 and 1941. By reconstructing the little-known history of film production and commercial practice of Hong Kong cinema, Fu discovers the sort of hybridity and ambiguity that still plagues contemporary Hong Kong. The British colonizers saw them as racial Others and excluded them from war efforts, whereas the emigre intellectuals, through the lens of what Fu calls Central Plains syndrome, condemned the local film culture as slavish and unpatriotic. Fu discusses the ambiguity of Hong Kong identity through a close reading of major "patriotic films" made by Shanghai emigre directors and local filmmakers.
Leung Ping-kwan looks specifically at city films in "Urban Cinema and the Cultural Identity of Hong Kong." Tracing the image, use, and significance of films set in the specifically urban environs of Hong Kong, Leung notes how these city films reveal the shifting cultural relations between Hong Kong and China, Hong Kong and the West, and Hong Kong as a distinct locality with its own culture. Leung calls attention to films like A Hymn to Mother, A Purple Stormy Night, Dangerous Encounter of the First Kind, Father and Son, among others.
Natalia Chan Sui Hung, in "Rewriting History: Hong Kong Nostalgia Cinema and Its Social Practice," takes up the issue of identity as seen in a series of nostalgia films produced in the 1980s and 1990s. Distinguishing the nostalgia genre from the historical film, Chan defines the former as presenting history in a stylized or allegorical form. In the nostalgia film, history is rewritten to the needs of the imagination and identity formation. Chan sees four groups of nostalgia films:films that recast Chinese history into a new sort of historical epic, such as Once Upon a Time in China; films that represent 1930s Hong Kong or China, such as Rouge and Centre Stage; 1980s and 1990s films that remake or rework 1950s or 1960s Hong Kong films, such as He Ain't Heavy, He's My Father; and films set in the 1960s, like Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild. Chan labels most of these films "post-modern" and relates them to the postcolonial and late capitalist situation of Hong Kong itself.
Another film by Wong Kar-wai, Happy Together, is part of the focus of Sheldon Lu in his essay "Filming Diaspora and Identity: Hong Kong and 1997." This film, along with Comrades, Almost a Love Story, provides the opportunity for Lu to question Hong Kong identity in the wake of the 1997 handover and the ongoing sense of Hong Kong Chinese as a diasporic com-munity. Lu sees Comrades, at least indirectly, as an allegory of the relation-ship between Hong Kong and China, while Happy Together ambivalently holds out the hope for a new beginning after 1997. Lu also notes that Com-rades and Happy Together belong to a tradition of Hong Kong films about Chinese in diaspora, and he concludes his essay with a look at a number of films made a few years before these two, which, along with them, partake in discussions and questions revolving around "Chineseness" made poignant by 1997.
Wong Kar-wai's films, especially Chungking Express, and the issue of diaspora form the basis of Gina Marchetti's essay, "Buying American, Con-suming Hong Kong: Cultural Commerce, Fantasies of Identity, and the Cin-ema." The characters and situations in Chungking Express represent the perfect paradigm of Hong Kong's "bricolage of American pop culture, British colonialism, and Asian commerce." A close reading of the film reveals its focus on the commodity, on shifting identities, and a keen concern with time as allegories of 1997 and Hong Kong's status as a kind of transnational, global site. Comparisons to Xie Jin's Mainland film, The Opium War, and to other Hong Kong films like Peter Chan's Comrades, Almost a Love Story, reveal that the commodity as a source of identification, especially revolving around women, is a key to understanding the situation of Hong Kong as a postcolonial, postcapitalist, postmodern environment.
The volume concludes with what we think is the most comprehensive bibliography yet compiled on English-language Hong Kong film criticism,
H. C. Li's "Hong Kong Electric Shadows: A Selected Bibliography of Studies in English."
NOTES
1.
These exceptions include Rey Chow, "A Souvenir of Love," Modern Chinese Literature 12 (1993): 59-78, and Leo Ou-fan Lee, "Two Films from Hong Kong: Parody and Allegory," in Nick Browne, et al., eds., New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also the essays by Li Cheuk-to and Esther Yau in the same volume.
2.
There was only a single scholarly book in English, Ian C. Jarvie's Window on Hong Kong (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong, 1977), whose origins lie with the University of Hong Kong press itself, perhaps because despite all the apparent interest in Hong Kong cinema, few scholars in the West were paying attention.
3.
When Chris Berry's invaluable anthology Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (Lon-don: BFI, 1991) was first published in 1985, no chapter was devoted to Hong Kong cinema. Even when the second expanded edition appeared, Hong Kong cinema was
still neglected, cast in comparison to mainland and to Taiwanese cinema. Similarly,
the majority of the very fine New Chinese Cinemas is devoted to the PRC and to
Taiwan, and its explicit focus, in any case, is on 1980s cinema.
4. A typical, but influential, example of both the "crisis" and "postmodern" context driving recent research on Hong Kong and its cinema is Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). See also the chapters on Hong Kong cinema in Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997).
5.
Stephen Teo, Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimension. (London: BFI, 1997), x-xi.
6.
See for example, Verina Glaessner, Kung Fu: Cinema of Vengeance (New York: Bounty Books, 1974); Marilyn D. Mintz, The Martial Arts Film (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1983); Richard Meyers, Amy Harlib, and Bill and Karen Palmer, From Bruce Lee to the Ninjas: Martial Arts Movies (New York and Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1985). In the 1990s, fanzines like Hong Kong Film Connection and Asian Cult Cinema (originally Asian Trash Cinema) appeared, along with books like Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins, Sex and Zen & A Bullet in the Head (New York: Fireside, 1996) and Bey Logan, Hong Kong Action Cinema (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1996), among others.
CHRONOLOGY OF HONG KONG CINEMA
1842. The signing of Treaty of Nanjing, which cedes Hong Kong to the British as a result of China's defeat in the Opium War.
1861. The Treaty of Beijing extends British rule to Kowloon Peninsula.
1898. During the "Scramble for Concession", Britain obtains a 99-year lease of the New Territories. The Edison Company's cameramen shot scenes in Hong Kong that included Hong Kong Government House, The Sikh Artillery, street scenes, the harbor, and Hong Kong Merchant House.
1909. Shanghai's Yaxiya (Asia) Film Company makes a short fictionalfilm in Hong Kong, Liang Shaobo's Tou shaoya {Stealing the Roast Duck) produced by American emigre businessman Benjamin Brodsky.
1912. The completion of Kowloon-Canton Railway, which links Hong Kong to the mainland.
1913. The founding of the Huamei (Sino-American) Film Company by Liang Shaobo, Li Minwei, Li Beihai, and Benjamin Brodsky, which pro-duced Zhuangzi shi qi (Zhuangzi Tests His Wife), directed by Li Beihai, starring Li Minwei and Yan Shanshan.
1922. The Minxin (New People) Motion Picture Company founded by Li Minwei, Li Haishan, and Li Beihai. 1924. Minxin produces the feature film Yanzhi (Rouge), directed by Li Beihai, starring Li Minwei and Lin Chuchu.
1925. Canton-Hong Kong General Strike against foreign imperialism; more than 30 percent of the locals return to the mainland. Hong Kong's budding film industry folds.
1930. The founding of Lianhua (United China) Production and Printing Company by Luo Minyou and Li Minwei. Funded by several Hong Kong businessmen, including Ho Tung, Lianhua is headquartered in the colony but moved to Shanghai next year.
1933. Nanyue film studios established by Zhu Qingxian in Hong Kong. Tianyi (First) Studio moved part of its operation to Hong Kong from Shanghai after the success of Tang Xioadan's Baijin long {PlatinumDragon), the first Cantonese talkie.
1934. Daguan (Grandview) Co., founded by Guan Wenqing and Zhao Shu-sen, moves from the United States to Hong Kong.
1936. Production of talkies in Hong Kong. Fire destroys Tianyi Studios.
1937. Tianyi Studio reorganized into Nanyang (South Sea) Studio and man-aged by Rende Shaw. The film industry joins in producing Zuihou guantou {The Critical Moment) to raise funds for the defense of China.
1941. Japan occupies Hong Kong in December. Hong Kong film production ceases completely during the entire Japanese occupation. 1945. British reoccupies Hong Kong following Japanese surrender ending the Pacific War.
1947. The first 16 mm color film made for Hong Kong, Jinfen nishang, released by Daguan Film Company, made in the United States during the war.
1948. Yonghua (Forever China) Studio is founded by Li Zuyong and pro-duces its firstfilm, Bu Wancang's Guohun {Nation's Soul). 1949. The founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC). First film of the long-running Wong Fei-hung series starring Kwan Tak-hing, Hu Peng's
Wong Fei-hung zhuan {The True Story of Wong Fei-hung).
1950. Nanyang Studio renamed Shaws Father and Sons Film Company under Rende Shaw. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese, including many Shanghai filmmakers, come to Hong Kong to escape Communist rule, increasing the colony's population to 2.3 million.
1953. Fire in Shek Kip Mei leaves thousands homeless; the Hong Kong government starts a massive resettlement housing project. 1957. Run Run Shaw forms Shaw Brothers studio.
1965. Shaw Brothers release King Hu's first martial arts film, Da zui xia {Come Drink with Me), along with Chang Che's Huxia jianchou {TigerBoy), inaugurating the wuxia (martial arts) cycle of Mandarin-language releases.
1966. Protest against Star Ferry's fare increase leads to a riot. 1967. Following the Cultural Revolution on the mainland, a series of Communist-instigated riots against British colonialism causes social turmoil and many innocent deaths. Chang Che's Dubi dao {The One-Armed Swordsman), starring Wang Yu, and Lung Kong's Yingxiong bense {Story of a Discharged Prisoner, a.k.a., A Better Tomorrow) are released.
1968. 1968 King Hu's Longmen kezhan (Dragon Inn) breaks Hong Kong's box-office record by grossing $2.2 million.
1969. Lung Kong's Feinu zhengzhuan (The Teddy Girls) starring Josephine Siao Fong-Fong.
1970. Former Shaw Brothers executive Raymond Chow forms Golden Har-vest Studio.
1971. Hong Kong moves into a new era of "social reform" under the governorship of Sir Murray MacLehose. Bruce Lee returns from the United States to star in Golden Harvest's Tangshan daxiong (The Big Boss), bring-ing a new level of success and sophistication to Hong Kong kung-fu films. King Hu releases Xia nu (A Touch of Zen)
1973. Shaw Brothers' Tianxia di yi quan (Five Fingers of Death,
a.k.a. King Boxer, 1972) released in the United States by Warner Brothers. Bruce Lee dies in July, just as he attains genuine superstar status; Enter the Dragon released in August. The success of Chor Yuen's Qishier jia fangke (The House of 72 Tenants) reinvigorates the Cantonese film industry.
1974. Michael Hui's debut film as writer-director-star, Guima shuangxin(Games Gamblers Play). 1976. Jackie Chan stars in Xin Jingwu men (New Fist of Fury), a remake of the Bruce Lee film. 1978. Shexing diaoshou (Snake in the Eagle's Shadow) and Zui quan(Drunken Master) make Hong Kong superstar of Jackie Chan.
1979. Ann Hui's Feng jie (The Secret) and Alex Cheung's Dianzhi bing-bing (Cops and Robbers) inaugurate the Hong Kong New Wave. Tsui Hark makes his directorial debut with Die Man (The Butterfly Murders).
1981. Allen Fong's Fuzi qing (Father and Son) released. 1982. British Prime Minister Margret Thatcher visits China and begins the Sino-British negotiations on the future of Hong Kong. 1984. The signing of Sino-British Joint Declaration in Beijing; Hong Kong will return to China in July 1997.
1986. Yingxiong bense (A Better Tomorrow) establishes John Woo's repu-tation as a major director and starts the "hero film" cycle in the eighties. 1987. Qiannu youhun (A Chinese Ghost Story) is the breakthrough film for
Ching Siu-tong. Ringo Lam directs Longhu fengyun (City on Fire). 1988. New censorship ordinance passed, leading to a ratings system (Cate-gories I, II, and III) and a new form of censorship on politically sensitive films. 1989. About one million people in the colony take to the streets to show
solidarity with the pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square. John Woo directs Diexou shuangxiong (The Killer).
1990. The Basic Law, Hong Kong's future constitution, is enacted in Bei-jing.
1991. Success of Tsui Hark's Naner dang ziqiang (Once Upon A Time in China), starts a new Wong Fei-hung series.
1992. The new Governor, Christopher Patten, announces his proposal for election reform, provoking strong opposition from the PRC and beginning a long series of Sino-British conflicts and negotiations.
1994. Chongqing senlin (Chungking Express) brings Wong Kar-wai to in-ternational attention. 1997. Hong Kong becomes the Special Administration Region after the handover to China on July 1.
THE KUNG FU CRAZE: HONG KONG CINEMA'S FIRST AMERICAN RECEPTION
David Desser
A SUDDEN STORM
When Jackie Chan's Rumble in the Bronx opened in February 1996 and quickly became the top box-office draw of the month, film fans over forty may have been forgiven for a nagging, if not ironic, sense of deja vu. This was not the first time the American box-office had been taken by storm by a Hong Kong superstar; and not the first time a formulaic film, the product of an internationally popular and powerful foreign film industry heretofore under appreciated by U.S. audiences, caught most critics and audiences unawares. Twenty-three years earlier, in 1973, American audiences thrilled to the ex-ploits of Bruce Lee -and Bruce Lee's films were not alone at the top of the charts. That May, perhaps for the first and only time in the history of the American cinema, not one, not two, but three foreign-made films took home the week's top box-office grosses. This unprecedented accomplishment seems to have gone unremarked at the time.'
Jackie Chan's popularity among mainstream U.S. audiences waned quickly. In a sad but consistent manner, each film released subsequent to Rumble in the Bronx performed less well: Super cop did less business than Rumble (Rumble grossed $32.3 million; Supercop, $16.25); Jackie Chan's First Strike earned less than Supercop ($14.5 million), and Operation Condor earned even less than First Strike ($10.4 million). Many factors might ac-count for this, but it is not this chapter's intention to try.2 Rather, I would like to examine the altogether more extraordinary success of Hong Kong films at the U.S. box office in the period starting in 1973. Bruce Lee's pop-ularity is well remembered (and hardly tainted with the passage of time since his death). Comparisons between Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee are more than warranted. But while Chan's status as an international superstar (whose
I would like to thank Madeline Desser for helping with the research for this chapter and for forcing me to explain what I was doing and why.
celebrity in the United States is rather more late in coming than elsewhere) can help account for whatever box-office clout his films have managed, it wasn't Bruce Lee alone who represented Hong Kong cinema at the top of the United States charts in 1973. Indeed, Lee's ascension to superstardom was enabled by his films being part of a veritable wave of Hong Kong action movies. Although Hong Kong cinema would never again dominate U.S. ticket sales as it did in the summer and fall of 1973, for a number of years afterward dubbed action films from Hong Kong maintained a powerful pres-ence on U.S. screens.
To a large extent, the kung fu craze seems to have come out of nowhere. Where never before had a single Hong Kong film shown on mainstream commercial screens, suddenly in 1973 a large handful of films simultaneously appeared. And, indeed, in thinking about the kung fu craze one is left with the impression that it did come out of nowhere. Obviously, the success of one film led to the release of another; the success of these first few led to the hurried dubbing and release of many more, often by fly-by-night companies hoping to capitalize on a craze that wouldn't, couldn't, last much longer. Obviously, Bruce Lee's stardom accounts for the spectacular ascension of kung fu, and, luckily for U.S. distributors, there was a huge backlog of films that could be brought into overseas distribution immediately, along with an industry able to produce, no less hurriedly, films to cater to this sudden fad. Still, it was a strange phenomenon, and as I try to trace its roots and thus try to prove that it didn't really just come out of nowhere, I am always left with the feeling that it came and went like a brief, but to me welcome, summer storm. First, though, the storm.
THE HONG KONG CONNECTION
On May 16, 1973, Fists of Fury, Deep Thrust - the Hand of Death, and Five Fingers of Death were ranked 1, 2 and 3 respectively, on Variety's list of the week's top box-office draws. Both Fists of Fury and Deep Thrust were on the charts for the first time. Five Fingers of Death, however, was in its seventh week on the chart; it would stay on the charts for yet another few weeks (Fig. 1). On May 23, it was still in the top ten at 9; on May 30 it had dropped to 26; by June 13, it was finally gone. But from its opening in March, Five Fingers of Death had stayed on the charts for almost three months. The box-office performance of both Fists of Fury and Deep Thrust is no less impres-sive. After opening at 1 and 2 in their first week, both remained on the charts for the next few weeks. Distribution patterns and the vagaries of the charting procedure lead to some anomalies: Deep Thrust had fallen to 31 for the week of May 30, but a wider release in New York City on June 6 pushed the film back to 3 on June 13 -that is, one month after it debuted at 2, it was back at
3. Meanwhile, for the week of June 13, Fists of Fury was still on the charts at
THE KUNG FU CRAZE
THE MARTIAL ARTS MASTERPIECE!
Sights and sounds like never before!
SEC one incredible Onslaught after another' PALE before the forbidden MIii:ii of the steel palm!
CHEER the younrj warrior who alone takes on the evil COME PREPARED for r-lords ot martial aits! Ihethniiof nhfotinMi'
OffffflTH
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Figure 1. Original movie poster, 5 Fingers of Death (Warner Brothers, 1973). Author's personal collection.
31. On July 4, Deep Thrust was hanging in the top 50 at 49; Fists of Fury had fallen off the charts by then. Yet, almost without precedent, Fists of Fury was back on the charts at an impressive 21 during the week of August 29! There is an explanation for this, as we'll see in a moment, one that shows just how powerful a draw kung fu had become at the U.S. box office.
As I noted before, the presence of three foreign films at the top of the U.S. box-office charts in May of 1973 was left unremarked. Indeed, the whole kung fu phenomenon certainly caught that industry-insider, Variety, by sur-prise. Its review of Five Fingers of Death was prescient as regards its box-office appeal, stating the film had "Good prospects in U.S. action" and that it is "glossed with all the explosive trappings that make for a hit in its intended market." The review is, in fact, extremely positive, the reviewer duly impressed with the fights and the film's production values. It would be too much to expect the critic to predict the success of other kung fu films, of course, but aside from noting that the film was the first time its distributor, Warner Brothers, had "picked up one of these Oriental confections ... " the review has nothing to say about the significance of such distribution in the first place.3 A week later, when the film had reached the top of the box-office charts, Variety noted, "Appeal of the violent 'martial arts' meller seems to cut across all lines, getting the action-oriented fans, black and white, as well as camp followers who find the dubbing and excessive mayhem food for giggles . . . Warner's gets lucky with pick-up and success of Five Fingers is recalling last year's Super Fly phenomenon."4 This is astute analysis, ac-knowledging the appeal of the film to black audiences and noting Warner's success not only with this Hong Kong import, but the studio's success a year earlier with another pick up, Super Fly. As I will show, these factors are intimately related to the kung fu craze.
Yet if Variety understood the success of Five Fingers in March 1973, in November 1972, the reviewer of Fist of Fury (i.e., the film that would be released in the United States as The Chinese Connection) missed the boat completely. The review's prognosis was that Fist of Fury is a "Naive Hong Kong-made meller, of little U.S. commercial potential, despite charm of Bruce Lee's invincible heroics." The reviewer felt the film to be little more than an "exuberant novelty act" unlikely to find occidental appeal, though Bruce Lee, with his "aggressive boyish charm. . . could prove appealing to U.S. femmes." As it happens, the film's box-office appeal was somewhat greater than the reviewer anticipated -and it wasn't just "U.S. femmes" who made it a hit. But this success was not apparent until June 13 when The Chinese Connection was finally released in the United States. It debuted at thirty-nine on the Variety charts, joining Deep Thrust and Fists of Fury. But it went wide that week; on June 20 it was number one. On July 4, it was still in the top twenty-five, and on August 29 it was back in the top fifteen. On October 3, its last week on the charts, it was at forty-five. Though it had fallen off the charts for a couple of weeks in September, the film Variety felt had little U.S. commercial potential was on the charts for a total of twelve weeks.
Of course, before The Chinese Connection proved Variety's reviewer wrong, U.S. audiences had seen Bruce Lee in Fists of Fury (a.k.a. The Big Boss), which performed as well as The Chinese Connection at the box office. Yet here, too, Variety had missed the boat, and missed it in such spectacular fashion as to seem positively conspiratorial. For although Fists of Fury had debuted at 1 on Variety's box-office chart on May 16, the publication didn't even review the film until June 27. Its review then was "strictly for the record, since the National General pickup has already scored reasonably well in cross-country saturation bookings." By that point the reviewer could only attribute the film's success to "the current U.S. craze for kung fu," not recognizing that in some sense, along with Five Fingers of Death and DeepThrust, the kung fu craze had been initiated by this Bruce Lee film. Interest-ingly, the review also claims that Fists of Fury is better than Bruce Lee's "first slaughter-ridden epic" The Chinese Connection. In fact, Fists of Fury (The Big Boss) was made before The Chinese Connection, so the Variety reviewer got it all wrong.5
This inability, which seems like a genuine unwillingness, to see the appeal of Hong Kong films may be witnessed most clearly in Variety's review of Deep Thrust - The Hand of Death. As we saw earlier, Deep Thrust was 2on the U.S. box-office charts for the week ending May 16. On May 23, however, it was 1. That was the week the review appeared; the prognosis was that the box-office response "should be standard for this type of Kung-Fu action." Two things about this prediction are interesting: Since both Five Fingers of Death and Fists of Fury had reached 1 on the box-office chart (at least for one week), the review's prediction of the "standard" box-office performance should have been more upbeat than the notion of "standard" for "this type of Kung-Fu action." More to the point, what exactly was "this type of Kung-Fu action" when only two other films of that "type" had previously been released, and only two had been reviewed in Variety? The review goes on to place Deep Thrust within the "recent rash of Kung-Fu-karate imports ... " but names no other films and has nothing good to say about this film or, indeed, the genre as a whole. For the irked reviewer, this recent rash of films indicated "that sheer violence remains as potent at the b.o. as ... sheer sex."6 But for all the dismissal of the genre in its review pages, Variety could not ignore the genre's box-office clout. Indeed by June 13, when The Chinese Connection went wide, the industry analysis of the film's success prompted the paper to ask: "Are you listening Paul, Steve, Barbra, Sidney and Dus-tin?"7
The week of June 20, 1973 marks the high-point of the martial arts' dominance of the U.S. box-office charts. That week no fewer than five Hong Kong kung fu films appeared in the Top 50. The Chinese Connection, Deep Thrust, and Fists of Fury were joined on the charts by Duel of the Iron Fist and Kung Fu, The Invisible Fist. That same week The Hammer of God, yet another Hong Kong film, opened; it was #1 for the week of June 27. Since the quiet release of Five Fingers of Death at the end of March, seven Hong Kong films had hit the US box-office charts. By the middle of August, two more films from Hong Kong, Shanghai Killers and Fearless Fighters, found box-office success. How much longer would it be until Hollywood -though not necessarily Paul, Steve, Barbra, Sidney and Dustin -would take notice?
Actually Hollywood had taken some slight notice. The success of Fists of Fury and The Chinese Connection in Hong Kong had led Warner Brothers to distribute Five Fingers of Death in Europe before releasing it in the States. Shortly thereafter the studio put Enter the Dragon into production. The suc-cess of Fists of Fury and The Chinese Connection in the United States could only mean good things for Hollywood's first-ever martial arts production and the stardom of Bruce Lee. But, as we have seen, even before Dragon entered, almost a dozen Hong Kong films had already made their mark.
WARNER BROTHERS
The sudden storm, which seemed to come out of nowhere, and which took the industry by surprise (though this surprise was never acknowledged) did have some roots, the most important being Warner Brothers. Although many other studios would distribute kung fu films (National General, American International, and a host of smaller companies) no other U.S. studio was as intimately involved in production and distribution of martial arts movies as Warner Brothers. Interest in the martial arts in American films and at Warner Brothers was already apparent before Five Fingers of Death started the wave. Rescued from near-bankruptcy by the success of Super Fly (thus putting the studio in the forefront of blaxploitation as well), Warner Brothers had si-multaneously produced the television series Kung Fu. First as a network made-for-TV movie that aired in August, 1972, then in an a once-monthly airing of new hour-long episodes in the fall of 1972 (interspersed with the TV western Alias Smith and Jones), and then finally as a weekly series, Kung Fu, starring David Carradine as a half-Chinese, half-American Shaolin priest wandering the Old West, brought the Asian martial arts to home screens on a regular and high-quality basis. It was at this time, in the spring of 1973, that Fred Weintraub was producing Enter the Dragon for Warner Brothers. The success of both the television series and the dubbed Five Fingers of Death showed how the martial arts genre could be marketed in the United States.
The first and most important factor was, of course, Bruce Lee, the biggest star in Hong Kong and on the Mandarin-language movie circuit. Lee's Hong Kong success had attracted attention back in the United States. His popularity from his previous Hollywood appearances certainly didn't hurt Warner Broth-ers' belief in his potential stardom, though this belief was belied the previous year when the studio was reluctant to cast Lee in Kung Fu. According to some sources it was this slight that caused Lee to return to Hong Kong in 1971. There are numerous and conflicting tales about Bruce Lee's involve-ment with Kung Fu, however. One story has it that Lee was sent the script of Kung Fu while shooting Enter the Dragon. According to Weintraub, the TV series was designed for Bruce Lee. When he didn't get the part he was stunned and upset. Warner Brothers, this source claimed, wanted an American actor for the leading role.8
Indeed, Warner Brothers did want an American actor for TV's Kung Fu and, for many of the same reasons, cast American actor John Saxon in the major supporting role in Enter the Dragon, aiming for crossover appeal. By the same token, Warner Brothers had recognized the powerful appeal of kung fu films for black audiences and so cast an up-and-coming black action star, Jim Kelly, in another major supporting role. Warner Brothers realized with particular clarity that the blaxploitation audience and the emerging martial arts audience were rather consonant. Super Fly had already introduced Asian martial arts into its narrative; we will see later how blaxploitation met the martial arts in consistent fashion after 1974, with Jim Kelly's movie career following the success of Enter the Dragon and the short-lived career of Tamara Dobson.
The martial arts' appeal to black youth audiences in the inner city and in the rural South, as well as to drive-in audiences, was a major factor both in keeping the kung fu craze alive as well as leading to its rather precipitous decline. Warner Brothers placed its films in downtown theatres, double-billed many of its martial arts offerings after 1973 with blaxploitation films (includ-ing re-releases), and advertised its product along familiar generic and exploi-tation lines. Other distributors followed suit. It was this audience-appeal/ distribution pattern that I would argue led to the genre's almost immediate critical dismissal, especially by mainstream film critics who, aside from Bruce Lee's star power and phenomenal martial arts' skills, could see little of value in these films. The hastily dubbed versions of sometimes second-rate produc-tions contributed to an image of shoddy production qualities, which was further exacerbated by the veritable saturation of kung fu films by fly-by-night distribution companies hoping to capitalize on the craze. Films were often shortened for distribution purposes, especially for drive-in theatres, thus ren-dering story and characterization almost meaningless, and certainly not help-ing the critical image of these films. Too, the situation of declining quality and the increasingly generic nature of the films produced in Hong Kong in the 1970s did not help the image and appeal of kung fu films, especially after 1974.
In producing and distributing kung fu and other martial arts films, Warner Brothers was prescient not only in noting the potential appeal of Bruce Lee to mainstream audiences and the consonance of the blaxploitation market with the emerging martial arts craze, but also in positioning the kung fu genre with already familiar patterns of American action films. The satisfying relationship between the kung fu film and the Western had already been demonstrated by TV's Kung Fu. Almost immediately after the success of Hong Kong films in American and European markets in 1973, a short-lived penchant for overseas coproductions between HK and Euro-American film producers became appar-ent. The Italian-Spanish-Hong Kong The Stranger and the Gunfighter (1974) with Five Fingers of Death's Lo Lieh costarring with Lee Van Cleef, familiar to audiences from numerous spaghetti Westerns, was only one such offering. This film and others found U.S. distribution as part and parcel of the kung fu craze. A precedent for this sort of thing may be found in Hollywood's penchant for remaking Japanese martial arts films (i.e., Samurai films) as early as 1960 with The Magnificent Seven, adapted, of course, from Kurosawa Akira's Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954). Perhaps the pattern for multinational coproductions with a martial arts bent was set in 1971 with the Franco-American production of Red Sun, featuring American, Japanese, French, and Italian stars, with a British director and an Old West setting.9 The Hollywood Western was in decline in the 1970s, but other action/exploitation forms could put its patterns and setting to good and sometimes new use, including the blaxploitation film and its black-themed Westerns (e.g., The Legend of Nigger Charley, Buck and the Preacher, both 1972). It is no surprise to find kung fu films double-billed with Spaghetti Westerns, for instance, in downtown theatres during this period.
Another genre with which the kung fu film was felt to be consonant was the horror film.A dreadful Hammer-Shaw Brothers coproduction, The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974), testifies to this, but more particularly was the frequent double-billing of low-budget horror films and kung fu films. Obviously this was a matter of a distribution company having the rights to films that they could pair, but more particularly was the belief that the same audience was there for these films.10 Although I can never remember a horror film being paired with a Western, I saw more than my fair share of mediocre Westerns and terrible horror films paired with the latest dubbed kung fu release.
Kung fu films also attempted to position themselves within the genres of the police or spy thriller, which provide obvious motivation for action, vio-lence, stunts, and good guy/bad guy pairings. Enter the Dragon has obvious connections to James Bond films, themselves having used Asian martial arts, judo in particular, as well as Asian villains (Dr. No in the film of the same title) and heroes (Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice). The spy thriller was initially a more popular way for the kung fu films to be positioned, given the largely fantasy elements of many plots. The police or crime thriller, however, did make an appearance with the marketing of Bruce Lee's The Chinese Connection, which was an obvious tie-in attempt with the wildly popular, Oscar-winning The French Connection. Ironically, however, it was Lee's Fists of Fury (a.k.a. The Big Boss) that was supposed to be called The Chinese Connection, given its tale of drug-smuggling and a hero who cracks a dope ring, but somehow Lee's Golden Harvest films had their titles switched.11 Eventually, the force and popularity of the kung fu films themselves would lead to a genre we might call "martial arts," a genre that arose in the United States only after the kung fu craze had passed. And it was Warner Brothers in the final analysis, that had preceded, initiated, and developed the craze, and helped shift the whole thing toward more American productions and orienta-tion. If Warner Brothers was on the cutting edge with Kung Fu and SuperFly, inaugurated the whole thing with Five Fingers of Death, produced the first major martial arts film, Enter the Dragon, and helped shift the genre with the likes of Black Belt Jones, yet one more film, in its way, had something to say in starting the whole thing. And here, too, Warner Brothers was in the thick of it.
OF BRUCE LEE AND BILLY JACK; OR "ME JUJITSU"
The Asian martial arts were no stranger to American films before Five Fingers of Death found its way from the Brothers Shaw to the Brothers Warner. As early as 1937, in The Awful Truth, of all places, Cary Grant, as Jerry Warriner, confronts his ex-wife's Filipino houseboy. Attempting to enter a room barred to him, Jerry is thrown onto the ground. The houseboy looks at him and says, "Me jujitsu." Jerry stands up, brushes himself off, and proceeds to execute a throw on the houseboy. He says, "Me jujitsu, too." It's an odd moment and nothing else in the film refers to jujitsu or indeed any other notion of the martial arts. Why Jerry Warriner would be familiar with an obscure Japanese martial art remains a bit of a mystery.
A decade later, a more sustained and more explicable application of the martial arts may be found in a Hollywood film. Edmond O'Brien, costarring in White Heat (1949; produced, coincidentally or not, at Warner Brothers) applies a number of judo throws to James Cagney's gang about three-quarters of the way into the film. It's an important moment in the movie, which, all along, is working toward a kind of implicit reconceptualization of postwar American masculinity. O'Brien, as Hank Fallon, has infiltrated the notorious Cody Jarrett gang. Hank's a cop, a new kind of Fed, familiar with the latest in electronic equipment and armed with an understanding of the latest thinking in psychology -and judo. In this respect, he's the kind of technocratic hero that would arise in the post-Vietnam era, special-forces-meets-the-computer-nerd. Fallon, we know, is a World War II veteran, but we know little else of his combat experience. Yet implicit in his use of an obscure but interesting martial art is that it was specifically his war-time experience, and thereby, his encounter with Asia, that led to his special knowledge.
Perhaps the most famous appearance of the martial arts early in the postwar era is to be found in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). Here, what I am calling the "encounter with Asia" is specific and crucial to the plot. Spencer Tracy portrays John Macreedy, a wounded war veteran who comes to the dusty town of Black Rock in search of a Japanese farmer whose son Macreedy befriended during the war. The farmer had been murdered by a gang of local racist thugs who similarly try to dispense with Macreedy. But his knowledge of judo saves him time and again. That Tracy, a man of average size, could defeat the likes of Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, and Ernest Borgnine, together and separately, was a good trick for the martial arts to demonstrate. That Macreedy had only one arm was the capper. It's hard to know whether Tracy got his Oscar-nomination for his performance, for the film's attempts to come to terms with the United States' shameful behavior toward Japanese Americans during the war years, or for this demonstration of the mystery and mayhem of the Asian martial arts.12
While it would be impossible to trace, even perhaps to find, every instance of the Asian martial arts appearing on American screens, it is nevertheless important to continue to note some highlights, not only to demonstrate that the kung fu craze didn't quite come out of nowhere but to lay the foundation of an attempt to understand why Asian martial arts films had the impact they did at the time they did. Although I won't be able to explore that issue here (I think it is better the province of a separate essay), the predecessors to the kung fu craze should be noted now.
A few years following Bad Day at Black Rock, Sam Fuller released The Crimson Kimono (1959). A film perhaps little-known to contemporary audi-ences (though Sam Fuller's death in 1997 might help remedy that) it repre-sents a continuation of the encounter with Asia and the imaging of Asian Americans begun in Bad Day at Black Rock. Fuller himself, of course, had filmed literal encounters with Asia is his famous Korean War combat films, Fixed Bayonets (1951) and The Steel Helmet (1951), and made one of the earliest Vietnam War films, China Gate (1957).13 The Crimson Kimono plays out its vision of Asian America as, literally, part Asian/part American. Scenes filmed in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo section show this combination of Asian and American as quaint: people eating with chopsticks at a diner, little girls dressed in kimonos marching to a brass band.14 A good deal of Japanese martial arts is on view in the film, karate and kendo in particular. To my knowledge, The Crimson Kimono boasts by far the most detailed imaging of both karate and kendo yet seen in American cinema. These things are pre-sented as both exotic and deadly; mysterious weapons of the Orient, associ-ated at one point in the film with geisha, thus linking the exotic with the erotic. In many ways, Fuller's film of 1959 looks ahead to the beginnings of the American martial arts genre that would solidify, by my reckoning, exactly twenty years later.
The 1960s saw a veritable explosion of interest in the martial arts as witnessed by the rise, for instance, of judo and karate schools in cities and towns, gyms, and Ys all across the country. Bruce Lee himself, before enter-ing the world of film and television, had started martial arts schools on the West Coast, first at the University of Washington and, later, in Oakland, California. By 1965, karate had become popular enough for entrepreneurs to stage karate demonstrations at large exhibition halls. Lee participated in one such event in Long Beach, California, in 1965 where he came to the attention of at least one Hollywood producer. Hollywood's continued interest in remak-ing Japanese samurai cinema, begun in 1960 with The Magnificent Seven, saw the spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars (1964), which made a star of Clint Eastwood, and the ill-conceived remake of Rashomon in the form of The Outrage (1964). The martial arts more directly made their way most memo-rably in the James Bond films; one remembers the cult popularity, for in-stance, of the character of Odd Job in Goldfinger (1964). Bond-style spoofs, especially the "Our Man Flint" series {Our Man Flint, 1966, and In Like Flint, 1967), focused more strongly on the martial arts as part of the super-spy's repertoire.15 Even the venerable gangster film found martial arts wend-ing its way through the techniques of the always-popular hitman figure. Charles Bronson as The Mechanic (1972) added kung fu to his repertoire of sniper-scopes, plastique explosives, and old-fashioned handguns in perform-ing his duties for the Mafia. But surely it was Lee himself who demonstrated the increasing appeal, if not overwhelming commercial clout, of the martial arts with his well-remembered supporting role as Kato on TV's The Green Hornet.
Though it lasted only one season (26 episodes), The Green Hornet was important for a number of reasons. It was the first time an Asian man had been given a significant, ongoing supporting role in a dramatic television series in the United States. Lee's martial arts outshone the gadgets and gizmos of the Green Hornet himself and introduced the martial arts on a weekly, if not realistic, basis. The cancellation of The Green Hornet was, in retrospect, a positive thing for Lee and for the development of martial arts films, though in the immediate aftermath it might not have seemed so. To be sure, Lee worked consistently in Hollywood for the next few years. In 1969, he worked as technical advisor on The Wrecking Crew, latest in a long, if forgettable, line of Matt Helm movies inspired by the James Bond cycle starring Dean Martin.16 Also in 1969, he appeared on screen in Marlowe, with James Garner as Raymond Chandler's popular private eye. Most memorably of all, he appeared in three episodes of Longstreet, the made-for-TV pilot entitled ' 'The Way of the Fist" (1971; a partial translation of Lee's own martial arts style, Jeet Kune Do), and in two of the hour-long episodes.17 The pilot, in essence, introduced Jeet Kune Do not only to Mike Longstreet (James Franciscus) but to American television audiences. It provided Lee with a genuinely dramatic role in addition to a role as a serious martial artist. The cancellation of Longstreet in 1972 after one year and Lee's disappointment at not getting the lead in Kung Fu sent him back to Hong Kong, scene of his childhood stardom and his subsequent rise to a stardom unknown by any Asian man before him in the West. Although Lee had made an impact on American audiences with his televisual and filmic appearances before he returned to Hong Kong in 1971, another movie featuring martial arts, among other things, had the kind of impact in the United States that Lee's Hong Kong films would have there.
If we don't remember Tom Laughlin as a martial artist comparable to Lee, we do remember him as Billy Jack. The character, modestly introduced in 1967's Born Losers, part of the "motorcycle cycle" of the mid-1960s (e.g., The Wild Angels, Hell's Angels on Wheels), returned in Laughlin's indepen-dently produced Billy Jack in 1972. It was, by any standard, the most success-ful independent production of the era. After it was self-distributed (four-walled) by Laughlin to great success in the South (oddly enough given its counterculture themes), it was picked up by Warner Brothers, fittingly enough, which turned it into a bigger hit even than sister-studio Columbia Pictures had been able to do with the motorcycle-themed Easy Rider three years earlier. Billy Jack struck a nerve with less-sophisticated younger audiences with its combination of the action-film formula (crusading loner with special skills fights for the underdog) and its counterculture trappings, including the use of Native American culture, the New Left, and anti-Vietnam War sentiments. Laughlin also presaged the cycle of Hollywood films focusing on Vietnam Vets as dangerously alienated but sympathetic loners taught to kill in an amoral war (a direct line can be traced from Billy Jack to Martin Scorcese's Travis Bickle). Among the special skills Billy Jack had learned in that unpop-ular overseas excursion was karate -Billy Jack, the special forces killer as direct antecedent of everyone's favorite Vietnam Vet, Rambo. Billy Jack wielded a particularly effective karate style known as hapkido, whose impor-tance to the filmmay be gauged by the fact that its opening credits list Bong Soo Han as technical advisor for the fight scenes.18 Billy's special-forces hapkido and the film's superficial but effective counterculture politics proved a potent force at the box office and paved the way for a genuine martial arts superstar: Bruce Lee.
MANDARIN MOVIES TO THE WORLD
When Bruce Lee returned to Hong Kong in 1971 he found a film industry in the midst of an incredible period of productivity. This island state, a colony of Great Britain, with a population of only five million, had a film industry more active and successful than the colonial power's own. Indeed, it was at that time the fourth most active film industry in the world behind India, the United States, and Japan. Per capita, Hong Kong had the most active film industry in the world by far. It was an industry in the throes of some signifi-cant changes, to be sure, but it had solidified into the most dominant film exporter in Asia and had three decades of direct filmmaking experience behind it and two more decades before that of influence and struggle.
Although the Hong Kong cinema is a varied and interesting one, there is no question that it remains best-known for its martial arts movies (and, after 1985, its gangster films). Invented as a genre in Shanghai in the 1920s, martial arts cinema has a long pedigree.19 It grows out of the historical existence of the martial arts, especially the famed Shaolin Temple, and out of a popular martial arts literature. It is fair to characterize the genre as possessing two main strands: kung fu and swordplay. The latter, almost without exception, are period films, historical epics, mythological tales of magic, or action-spectaculars with colorful costumes. Indeed, fantastic, magical swordplay films are credited with the genre's appearance. Swordplay films appeared as early as 1926 and 1927. The genre's first masterpiece is generally regarded as the Burning of the Red Lotus Monastery (1928). Adapted from a martial arts novel, Legend of Strange Heroes, the film produced eighteen sequels within three years.
From 1928 to 1931, about 250 sword fantasies were made, or about 60 percent of the total production of films in Shanghai in that period (400 films total). Film censorship codes passed in 1931 saw the decline of these movies in the claim that they were promoting superstition and the supernatural. In addition, the political situation in Manchuria and increasing Japanese en-croachment generally led to the rise of patriotic and left-wing filmmaking, which saw these types of films as worse than useless.
In 1938, due to emigration of filmmakers and the different situation in Hong Kong, the Cantonese industry took up martial arts movies. This is to say, Hong Kong martial arts productions were made in the Cantonese dialect (as opposed to the Mandarin dialect of mainland films), and their popularity outshone every other Cantonese genre from 1938 to 1970. It was Mandarin-speaking emigres who made many of these martial arts films, however, bring-ing skills and technical know-how to the fledgling, second-rate Hong Kong industry. Apparently, thirty-six martial arts films were produced during this period, the majority of them literary adaptations or adaptations of previously popular Shanghai productions.20 Of course, local production all but ceased when Japan occupied Hong Kong in 1941.
Cantonese-language production resumed in 1949, and in the next decade 145 martial arts movies were made. A burgeoning overseas market in Singa-pore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the United States (in Chinatown theatres) led to almost risk-free production with preproduction budgets often supplied by overseas buyers. At this same time, a shift away from the swordplay film was detectable with a specifically Hong-Kong, Cantonese twist. The introduction of the Wong Fei-hung series, which featured unarmed combat and was based on the exploits of an actual historical figure who was a martial artist and doctor, lent specificity to the Hong Kong cinema and in its own way planted the seeds for the kung fu craze that hit the United States in the 1970s. In 1949, star Kwan Tak-hing appeared in The True Story of Wong Fei-hung. Sixty-seven films followed over the next decade.
If Wong Fei-hung dominated the Cantonese cinema of the 1950s, the 1960s nevertheless was something of a golden age for Cantonese sword films. With the overseas markets of Singapore and Malaysia going great guns (and the PRC cinema almost entirely moribund), more than 300 Cantonese martial arts films were made in the 1960s, the majority of them sword films. Many of the technical innovations and plot formulae we associate with the masterpieces of the martial arts films of the 1970s arose in the Cantonese cinema of this period, including and especially the use of trampolines to produce those magical mid-air fights and flights.21 But there was a fly in the ointment. A new force in the Hong Kong cinema was beginning to be felt, under the impetus of a powerful studio using a different dialect.
By the middle of the 1960s, though the health of Cantonese-language production was decent, the powerful Shaw Brothers studio began to assert itself with the production of Mandarin-language films. The films seen in America and in Europe during the kung fu craze were all dubbed into the language of the distributor. To Euro-American audiences, therefore, there might seem to be a fine distinction between whether a Hong Kong film was made in Cantonese or in Mandarin, but it made a world of difference to actors, directors, writers, producers, and, most of all, distributors. The overseas Chi-nese audience in Vietnam, which spoke Cantonese, was cut off from Hong Kong distributors by the escalation of the Vietnam War and the support lent to Vietnam by the PRC. Similarly, North American Chinatowns, though still largely Cantonese speaking, continued to experience an influx of emigres from the mainland as China's disastrous economic and political policies proved fruitless and, starting with the Cultural Revolution, dangerous. More to the point, the Shaw Brothers were the dominant distributor to Asian mar-kets, and once they entered Mandarin-language production, they closed their distribution arm to the Cantonese cinema produced by other studios. More-over, and perhaps most significantly, the Mandarin-language films produced by the burgeoning Shaw studios were by all accounts superior to the Canton-ese films. With directors like Chang Che and King Hu under contract, how could it be otherwise?
The death knell of the Cantonese martial arts film was sounded in 1965 as King Hu began his martial arts career with Shaw Brothers and made the influential Come Drink With Me. A year later saw the release of The One-Armed Swordsman, which solidified the career of a major director, Chang Che, and launched the career of a major star, Wang Yu. In 1970, thirty-five Cantonese-dialect films were released in Hong Kong, many of them martial arts films. In 1971, only one film was made in Cantonese; in 1972, not a single Cantonese film was released in Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong.
But if the Cantonese dialect was seldom heard on movie sets, Mandarin was everywhere with Shaw Brothers cranking out films at a pace not seen before in Hong Kong and not seen in the film world since the glory days of Warner Brothers. Shaw Brothers released about a filma week, the majority of them martial arts. Although the production of neo-mythological or vaguely historical sword films continued (with their relatively high budgets and stand-ing sets, the Shaw Brothers could, and often did, produce spectacular period films with glorious costumes and well-groomed fighters), Shaw Brothers did begin to shift from magical sword films to films featuring unarmed combat in more contemporary settings. Although it is possible to see the influence of the Cantonese Wong Fei-hung series at work here, most critics insist that these new-style films were very different in style and tone from the more strictly Confucian values of the earlier films.22
In 1970, the island nation of Hong Kong produced 118 films. As we have seen only 35 of those were in Cantonese. In 1971, with Cantonese production virtually at a halt, the local industry released 86 films, and virtually the same number were released in 1972. Throughout the 1970s, in fact, Mandarin-language production was markedly stable; the small growth of the industry in the late 1970s is attributable to the slow but steady return of Cantonese films to the local production scene. (By 1979, the industry released 109 films, with a distinctive shift back toward Cantonese.23 By this time, however, overseas distribution patterns saw Hong Kong films released in Hong Kong in Canton-ese, with export films dubbed into Mandarin, the situation that obtains today.) Martial arts films dominated the Mandarin-language cinema in the early 1970s; indeed from 1970 until 1972 every film in the year's Top Ten Grossing Hong Kong films was martial-arts related. It was into this volatile, successful, martial-arts dominated cinema that Bruce Lee came.
Lee was already something of a celebrity when he returned to Hong Kong following his disappointments in Hollywood in 1971. He had been a child star in postwar Cantonese cinema, but, more important, he was a celebrity in Hong Kong based on the popularity of The Green Hornet, which in Hong Kong was known as The Kato Show. Lee had been approached late in 1970 by Run Run Shaw to star in Hong Kong movies, but apparently Sir Run Run offered only the standard contract of $200 per week for seven years. (In this respect, too, Shaw Brothers has much in common with the Warners of old.) When Bruce returned to Hong Kong in 1971, he worked out a more favorable deal with Raymond Chow and his Golden Harvest Productions. Chow, a former executive at Shaw Brothers, was a new-style producer, with greater flexibility than the more rigid, assembly-line Shaw Brothers and a better eye and ear for the local and international market.24 With lower budgets than the Shaws could muster, Chow relied on star power. And with Bruce Lee he had found the most powerful star of all. The Big Boss (Tangshan da xiong\ 1971) was an immediate smash and became the biggest grossing Hong Kong film of 1971, more than doubling the take of its nearest competitor. In 1972, Lee made Fist of Fury (Jing wu men), another smash, and followed it up with his directorial debut, Way of the Dragon (Meng long guojiang), which performed even better. Way of the Dragon and Fist of Fury placed 1 and 2 at the box office, each of them outgrossing Lee's The Big Boss of the year before. He began work on Game of Death at this time, but when the call came from Warner's to start work on Enter the Dragon, Lee returned to Hollywood and entered the pages of American film history.
THE STORM SUBSIDES
Enter the Dragon opened to mixed reviews on August 22, 1973. Variety understood the film as the culmination of the "rising popularity of the Chinese martial arts as screen entertainment." The show-biz bible believed that "there's still enough novelty and excitement attached to films dealing with the martial arts to entice enthusiastic reception. ... " However, in its survey of the New York film critics' opinions, Variety noted only one favorable and four unfavorable reviews of Lee's first starring role in a Hollywood film. Of course, martial arts was a critic-proof genre, and Enter the Dragon proved the most commercially successful martial arts film of them all. In limited release starting on August 22, it placed 17 for the week ending August 29. In wide release that week, it hit 1 on September 5 and stayed at 1 on September 12 (where its grosses were higher than the previous week). On September 19 it was at 3; on September 26 it was still in the Top 5. On October 3, it had fallen to 10; for the week of October 10, it was back at 9. For six weeks, then, it had stayed in the Top 10. Then on October 17 it hit 1 again, and on October 24 it was still doing big business at 2. By November 7 it was still in the Top
20. In all, Enter the Dragon spent eleven weeks in the Top 20, nine of those weeks in the Top 10. The fact that the film was an American production with high production values, a decent supporting cast, and Warner's solidly behind it (as both producer and distributor) surely accounts for the film's popularity.
For all the success of Enter the Dragon, imports from Hong Kong contin-ued to make their presence known. When Enter the Dragon was 3 for the week of September 19, Lady Kung Fu held the top spot. As Dragon clung to the 5 spot for the week of September 26, Shanghai Killers (which had first hit the chart on August 29) was at 1. As Dragon held onto 9 the week of October 10, Deadly China Doll held the top spot. Hong Kong imports such as Fists of the Double K, Seven Blows of the Dragon, The Thunder Kick, and Queen Boxer also found their way onto the Top 50 charts, while Enter the Dragon dominated the grosses. Thus, from late March 1973 until mid-October of that same year, an incredible six films from Hong Kong had reached 1, at least for one week; during the same period, no less than fifteen dubbed imports had hit the Top 50. That is to say, that during the height of U.S. movie-going, the spring and summer season, Hong Kong imports performed not only far better than films from any other country by far, but for about one-fifth of the season Hong Kong films outperformed Hollywood's own product. If you factor in Enter the Dragon, half the time during this peak season a kung fu film was 1 at the U.S. box-office.
It didn't last. The death knell of kung fu had sounded by late November 1973 when Variety, reviewing The Sacred Knives of Vengeance, wondered if "the cycle may well be on its way out."25 It was. Although throughout the rest of 1973, one could typically findfive Hong Kong films in the weekly Top 50 (though rarely near the top), on January 2, 1974, there was only one such film. A month later, in mid-February, no Hong Kong films could be found on the charts. By the time Lee's Hong-Kong made Return of the Dragon (a.k.a. Way of the Dragon) was released almost one year to the day after the release of Enter the Dragon, its powerful box-office performance (more than $1 million in New York City alone in its firstfive days) was unique among Hong Kong imports.
Though Hong Kong films continued to be released in the United States throughout the rest of the 1970s, it was almost always through minor distrib-utors. By this time martial arts movies were exclusively the province of inner-city theatres, second-run houses, small-town double-bills, and drive-ins.26 To attract inner-city audiences in Los Angeles, it was not uncommon to find English-dubbed kung fu films with Spanish subtitles in neighborhood or downtown theatres. If Variety wondered if the kung fu craze was on its way out in November of 1973, by November of 1975 it wondered whether there was a market at all for The One-Armed Boxer vs. The Flying Guillotine, which was, according to the review, "one of the better Kung fu films."27
Martial arts films did not die, however, as American producers, including Warner Brothers, began adapting the genre for American formulae. But Hong Kong imports had certainly faded. This fading of the genre by 1975 had some unfortunate consequences. When Touch of Zen showed at the Cannes Film Festival to great acclaim, there were no takers for overseas distribution. Indeed, it would be two years before the film would be shown in the United States, but even with resultant festival acclaim here it never found a U.S. distributor, showing up only occasionally over the next few years at art houses for single showings.28 Of course, if kung fu films lost their theatrical clout, they maintained a presence on American television screens, with both local channels and at least one national satellite service (the USA network) devoting at least once-weekly showings under the rubric "Martial Arts Theatre" or some similar title.29 This continued presence on television screens eventually worked its way into such hybrid shows as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (and a series of feature films spun off from that) and The Power Rangers, subjects left for others to decode.30
EVOLUTION/DEVOLUTION
The major commercial impact of the kung fu genre on theatrical screens would be felt again, after 1973, only when Hollywood discovered an accept-able formula for more mainstream American audiences. This was done in two phases. The first was in the mid-1970s, when the genre migrated to the blaxploitation film (notwithstanding the occasional Hong Kong release and the two remaining Bruce Lee films, Return of the Dragon and Game of Death.) Blaxploitation, which reached an apotheosis in 1972, began to level off in terms of ticket sales in 1973. Also contributing to a decline in blaxploi-tation was the rising tide of black voices against the perceived overly violent, sex-driven narratives. Mainstream, high-budget films of this period sought "crossover" audiences and shied away from all-black casts.31 Those which worked more closely within blaxploitation and lower budgets sought refuge in the kung fu genre. Back Belt Jones (1974, directed by Robert Clouse, who had helmed Enter the Dragon) was the first of these kung fu/karate blaxploi-tation films, felt by Variety to be "minor exploitation .. . for what's left of the kung-fu market."32 More forgettable entries in this genre included films like Black Karate and Black Kung-Fu. Jim Kelley, still wielding his karate, took third billing in the last big-budget blaxploitation action film, Three the Hard Way, released in June 1974. Even the women stars of blaxploitation participated in the kung fu craze, as Ed Guerrero notes vis-a-vis the short-lived career of Tamara Dobson: "As an indication of a shift of Blaxploita-tion's youth audience toward Kung-Fu action movies, in .. . Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold 1975), Cleopatra Jones travels to Hong Kong to team up with Mi Ling (Tammy) and shares much of the camera and action with her Chinese counterpart."33 In fact, the first Cleopatra Jones film (1973) had already featured martial arts, with Bong Soo Han listed as action choreogra-pher. Although Variety liked the original in the two-film series, they had less use for the sequel, claiming it "[ran] the gamut of cliches in both chop socky and blaxploitation . . ,"34 Perhaps Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold was the death knell of both kung fu and blaxploitation, at least for a few years, as the film never rose above 25 on Variety's weekly box-office charts (though it stayed on the charts for two months, between mid-July and mid-September 1975). The Man from Hong Kong, an Australian-Hong Kong coproduction featuring Wang Yu and George Lazenby, released in the sum-mer of 1975, never even made Variety's Top 50 for a single week. Truly, Hong Kong had had it, at least until Jackie Chan and John Woo came along. Blaxploitation, too, was over.
But the martial arts was not. In 1977, Chuck Norris, memorable in his own way in Lee's Return of the Dragon, appeared in Breaker, Breaker, part of the short-lived cycle of trucker/CB films. Variety recognized that Norris was "the latest to lay claim to the title of martial arts king vacated by the late Bruce Lee" and that the film should do all right if the distributor "pitches the chop-socky elements as heavily as the trucking..."35 In fact, the film didn't do particularly well at the box-office (rising no higher than 26 the week of May 4), but in 1978, Norris found the right combination of martial arts and mise-en scene in Good Guys Wear Black. Variety wondered about this "late-in-the-cycle attempt to cash in on the audience appeal for karate champion and former Bruce Lee film star" but concluded that the film is in fact "a well-made yarn of government corruption."36 Here, playing a Special Forces veteran of the Vietnam War, Norris found a persona he would essentially maintain over the course of his career, including many films in which he again played a Vietnam vet (A Force of One, 1979, and the Missing in Action cycle, 1984-1988). The Octagon (1980) proved the viability of a less politi-cally charged kung fu saga and thus solidified the place of a martial arts genre in the American cinema, a genre which is obviously owed to the kung fu craze that preceded it.
CONCLUSION
The legend of Bruce Lee lingered on well after his death in the summer of 1973; so, too, did Hong Kong martial arts movies. Numerous Bruce-Lee look-alikes and sound-alikes (Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bruce Rhe (!), etc.) were trum-peted forth from low-budget filmmakers in Hong Kong and fly-by-night dis-tributors in the United States. As we have seen, Lee's Return of the Dragon
(a.k.a. Way of the Dragon) was released a year after his death; Game of Death appeared five years later. In 1979, a film Lee cowrote with Stirling Silliphant achieved some minor success, The Silent Flute (a.k.a. Circle of Steel. Ironi-cally it starred David Carradine in the roles Lee envisioned for himself). Films about Lee appeared both in Hong Kong and the United States. At least one serious, respected film emerged out of that genre, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993), starring the perhaps coincidentally named Jason Scott Lee. It did respectable box-office business, showing that twenty years after his death, Lee maintains a real presence still.
Hong Kong film stars like Lo Lieh, Wang Yu, and David Chiang became involved in international coproductions, but none achieved a stardom outside of Hong Kong even remotely comparable to Lee, and none could match Lee in Hong Kong. Even the biggest star after Lee in Hong Kong, Alexander Fu Sheng, could not find an overseas audience. Only in the 1980s would the Hong Kong cinema find an action star who could match Lee's appeal and that, of course, would be Jackie Chan. But we should recall that 1980s attempts to introduce Chan as a U.S. star failed, and failed rather dismally.37
Meanwhile, as the 1970s wore on, and Hollywood studios began adapting the martial arts genre for American movies, such as the previously mentioned Black Belt Jones and the successful slew of Chuck Norris films starting in the late 1970s and since. Hong Kong imports also made their way to television where, interestingly, they would in some instances replace other sorts of exploitation films, like horror, in weekly, daytime or late-night slots. If noth-ing else, this enabled the genre to maintain a hold, however slight, on the youth audience, for it was always the youth audience that had been the heart of kung fu's fandom, white working-class and middle-class boys, side-by-side with black urban and rural audiences.
The appeal of the genre for black audiences is not hard to gauge. Outside of the blaxploitation genre it largely replaced, kung fu films offered the only nonwhite heroes, men and women, to audiences alienated by mainstream film and often by mainstream culture. This was the genre of the underdog, the underdog of color, often fighting against colonialist enemies, white culture, or the Japanese.38 The lone, often unarmed combatant fightinga foe with greater economic clout who represented the status quo provides an obvious but nonetheless real connection between kung fu films and black audiences. The same may be said, more generally, for young audiences, a characteristic of youth being alienated from the mainstream, seeking images of rebels with or without causes. Many kung fu films portrayed a rather anarchic world view, routinely a nihilistic one, with violent death a way of life and continued and continual trial-by-combat the typical narrative drive. Such filmicvalues and motifs clearly mirror the psychosociological states of young people. And the sheer kinetics of the films-rapid-fire editing, trick photography, and the unbridled athleticism of the young stars -mirrored the states, physical and psychological, of its audience.
But something else is occurring here, a particular moment in U.S. social history when the time is ripe, for multiple reasons, for the kung fu craze. It might be coincidental that the kung fu craze of 1973 is the year that the United States withdrew its troops from Vietnam, but surely it is not coinciden-tal that interest in the Asian martial arts increased with continued, ongoing, and intense exposure to Asia, what I termed the "encounter with Asia" earlier. From the Pacific War to the Korean War to ongoing and shifting U.S. attitudes toward and struggles with the PRC; from the American occupation of Japan, the use of Japan for R&R for American soldiers in Korea and Vietnam, the stationing of U.S. Army and Navy troops in Japan, and, most particularly, the problematic and troubling Vietnam war itself forced the United States into veritable encounters with Asian cultures and societies that offered sometimes different, troubling, challenging, or intriguing (usually all at the same time) alternatives to American culture and values. Increased immigration of Asians to the United States (from Japan, Korea, China, and later, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) along with the assimilation of long-standing Japanese and Chinese communities into the middle class also meant that Americans at home were becoming both more exposed to and familiar with Asian and Asian-American cultures. Thus the kung fu craze is consonant with and comes just after a long-standing and increasing encounter with Asia, especially the traumatic, seemingly inexplicable debacle of the Vietnam war.
P. Flanigan, in a rather tendentious attempt to understand the Kung fu craze, makes the good point that the cinematic aspect of the craze was not a singular event. Flanigan writes: "What must be understood is that any analy-sis we make of the Kung fu craze is at best superficial if we attempt to constrain it only to the cinema. The meteoric rise of the martial arts madness is a classic example of the 'total propaganda' concept, for it was not film alone that caused the boom. It was capitalist opportunism and marketing." Examples of this dastardly capitalist conspiracy include, kung fu comics, TV shows (Flanigan notes Men of the Dragon, a 1974 made-for-TV movie, in addition to Kung Fu), magazines, martial arts schools, and cheap paperback novels.39 If this is the best the international capitalist conspiracy could muster, it's a miracle that capitalism survived. Rather, what Flanigan is noting is, on the one hand, the rather more innocent interest in things Asian. Martial arts schools, novels, comic books, magazines, films, and television shows were part of the same phenomenon, the same undercurrent. On the other hand, however, something less innocent is afoot. It is not the capitalist conspiracy that is responsible for the kung fu craze, but rather the traumatic stock-taking that the Vietnam War engendered. The kung fu craze is just one cinematic signifier of a post-Vietnam stress disorder on the cultural level. Other signifi-ers include the spate of films focusing on troubled returning Vietnam vets (of which Billy Jack was the martial-arts paradigm), the Vietnam War films themselves of the late 1970s and, more precisely, the rise of white male martial arts stars who, in a sense, co-opt the Asian martial arts for the American action hero, for the American movie star, for the American man.40 It is no coincidence that the kung fu craze could be critically dismissed as long as it consisted of badly dubbed foreign films, remained the province of black and youth audiences, and as long as it was confined, afterward, to blaxploitation. But it is no coincidence that the genre takes hold in American cinema precisely when a white star not only enters the genre but situates his persona within an Asian context: Vietnam and the Vietnam War. The kung fu craze of the 1970s is a deceptively complex moment in American cultural history, when a foreign cinema grabs hold of the box-office as never before and eventually gives rise to a new and significant genre in American cinema.
NOTES
1.
One possible reason for the lack of attention focused on this first wave of Hong Kong action films may very well have been the attention focused on an exploitation genre of a different sort: hard core pornography. Consonant with the release of Bruce Lee's films and others to be discussed, Deep Throat appeared, and the U.S. box office and the U.S. courts were never quite the same again.
2.
In speculating briefly one might imagine that the U.S. setting of Rumble (though it is clearly not the Bronx where the film was shot!) might help account for this. Sadly, too, Supercop, First Strike, and Operation Condor do not represent Chan at
his best. This changed with the Hollywood-produced, U.S.-set Rush Hour (1998). Box office figures are taken from the Internet Movie Database (http://us.imdb.com/ search.html).
3. Variety (March 21, 1973). 4. Variety (March 28, 1973), 8.
5.
The Big Boss was released at the end of 1971; Fist of Fury early in 1972. Indeed, Fist of Fury was already in production when The Big Boss was released to tremen-dous commercial success in Hong Kong. See Richard Meyers, Amy Harlib, and Bill and Karen Palmer, From Bruce Lee to the Ninjas: Martial Arts Movies (New York and Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1985), 20. To my eye, the production values of Fist of Fury (a.k.a. The Chinese Connection) do seem inferior to Fists of Fury (a.k.a. The Big Boss), and so I can see why the Variety critic felt as he did. To Meyers, Harlib, and the Palmers, however, ' 'the production values of [Fist of Fury] make the first look ever tackier than it was."
6.
If the sudden emergence of pornography diverted attention from the kung fu craze, the kung fu craze also benefited, to a small extent, from the porno craze. Variety notes that Deep Thrust relied on an "obvious title play on Deep Throat."
7.
Variety (June 13, 1973), 18. Presumably, the journal is talking to Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Barbra Streisand, Sidney Poitier, and Dustin Hoffman. The news-paper itself seems willfully to have ignored its own reporting about the popularity of kung fu films at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1973. Art Murphy noted about the festival: "An amusing yet fiscally serious slant on international films is the current world 'boomlet' in Hong Kong-made 'chop-socky' or Kung Fu action, an outsider in the winners' circle of showmanship as the year's global film market convenes at Cannes" (May 9, 1973), 1. A boomlet in early May was certainly at least a boom by mid-June.
8.
Richard Meyers et al, From Bruce Lee to the Ninjas, 31-32. They quote Weintraub as saying, "Once we started Enter the Dragon .. . everybody thought Bruce was going to be something and started sending me scripts in the middle of shooting. There was a man at Warner Brothers named Dick Moore who understood the market, so we worked up a script. . . and showed it to Bruce." That this script could have been Kung Fu is impossible, given that Kung Fu aired in 1972 while Enter the Dragon was in production in the spring of 1973. More reliable sources note that Lee did work on the story that was to become Kung Fu before leaving for Hong Kong and his work with Raymond Chow in 1971. Neither the made-for-TV movie nor the credits for the weekly series give any screen or story credit to Lee.
9.
See Tony Williams, "Space, Place, and Spectacle: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo" (Chapter 6 in this volume) for a further list of many of these coproductions and their significance for the rise of Hong Kong cinema's international popularity. Interestingly, Red Sun director Terence Young was born in Shanghai. A lengthy, if not particularly distinguished, directorial career included three of the early, and among the best, James Bond films: Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Thunder-ball.
10.
For instance, AIP (American International Pictures) distributed Deep Thrust -The Hand of Death and double-billed it in New York with an earlier AIP horror film, Blood and Lace (1911).
11.
See Meyers, et al., From Bruce Lee to the Ninjas, 34. This pattern of integrating Hong Kong movies into U.S. distribution patterns by recourse to already-familiar
genres plays itself out with Jackie Chan's films, with Rumble in the Bronx related to the urban vigilante genre, Supercop as, obviously, a police thriller, and First Strike & James Bond throwback.
12.
Naturally, I am not insensitive to the irony of a one-armed judo expert appearing in American films some dozen years before a one-armed swordsman would revolution-ize Hong Kong martial arts movies.
13.
For a thorough discussion of China Gate as orientalist text in keeping with many later Vietnam War films, see Gina Marchetti, Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 91-99.
14.
Marchetti, Romance and the "Yellow Peril," 150. The following discussion of Crimson Kimono draws heavily on Marchetti's discussion of the film (pp. 143-57).
15.
Flint-star James Coburn was among the handful of Hollywood stars, directors, and writers who became students of Lee in the mid-1960s as he began developing his own, unique style of martial arts: Jeet Kune Do. Others included superstar Steve McQueen and writer-producer Stirling Silliphant. At this same time, Lee, who had moved to California in 1964, met American karate practitioners Chuck Norris, Bob Wall, and Mike Stone, all of whom would work with Lee in his films, of course. See Meyers et al., From Bruce Lee to the Ninjas, 16.
16.
The series began in 1966 with The Silencers, followed by Murderer's Row (1966) and The Ambushers (1967).
17.
The pilot was written by Stirling Silliphant who specifically created the role of Longstreet's martial arts instructor for Lee. Significantly, Longstreet was blind, perhaps a tribute to Japan's wildly popular blind swordsman, Zatoichi, introduced to the Japanese film audience in 1963 and a staple of Japanese film and television for the next decade.
18.
Meyers, et al., From Bruce Lee to the Ninjas, 204, point out that Bong Soo Han had possibly doubled for Laughlin in some of the fight scenes in Billy Jack. In tribute to this or out of friendship or to participate in the kung fu craze such as it still was, Laughlin gave Han an important on-screen role in the sequel, The Trial of Billy Jack (1974), also an enormous hit. That Laughlin was aware of the Asian roots of Billy Jack's fighting skills could hardly be denied, but that Laughlin himself was influ-enced by Asian cinema may be gauged by the fact that he directed, wrote, and starred in an adaptation of Gosha Hideo's Goyokin (1969) entitled The Master Gunfighter (1975), perhaps the last Hollywood Western to be made from a samurai film. (Laughlin's film was a flop.)
19.
There is no way I can do justice to the martial arts film or the Hong Kong cinema itself in the space of this chapter. Interested readers are directed to the fascinating and crucial retrospective catalogues put together annually by the Hong Kong Inter-national Film Festival. In particular I am drawing from A Study of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Film (1980); A Study of the Hong Kong Swordplay Film (1945-1980) (revised edition 1996); and A Study of Hong Kong Cinema in the Seventies (1984).
20.
This specific information and other information about the Cantonese martial arts cinema is adapted from Yu Mo-wan, "Swords, Chivalry and Palm Power: A Brief Survey of the Cantonese Martial Arts Cinema, 1938-1970" in A Study of the HongKong Swordplay Film (1945-1980), 99-106.
21.
Yu Mo-wan, "Swords, Chivalry and Palm Power," 105. Yu also notes the influence of Kurosawa's films on editing patterns, and the Zatoichi series on swordfight
choreography. Intriguingly, he also notes the influence of Robert Wise's The Sand Pebbles (1966), which was shot in Hong Kong and provided Hollywood-style models of fight choreography and cinematography.
22.
Almost all critics and historians of Hong Kong cinema make this case, and a look at any of the Kwan Tak-hing Wong Fei-hung films shows this clearly. For an example of this take on the new-style martial arts films see Sek Kei, "The Devel-opment of 'Martial Arts' in Hong Kong Cinema" in A Study of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Film, 27-38.
23. These figures are drawn from A Study of Hong Kong Cinema in the Seventies, 163�X 81.
24.
It is no surprise that Chow was instrumental in the career of Bruce Lee, considering that it was Chow, and not the Shaw brothers, who helped produce the only star in Hong Kong who could match Lee's stardom, locally and internationally: Jackie Chan.
25.
Variety (November 28, 1973). The film was another Shaw Brothers production released by Warner's, showing the U.S. studio's continued faith in the market. The poor performance of this film convinced Warner's to shift to home-grown martial arts films, such as Black Belt Jones (1974). Variety's continuing lack of respect for the genre may be gauged by the astonishing claim in the review of Sacred Knives that "Run Run Shaw . .. produced the [Bruce] Lee pix ... "
26.
Films like Five Fingers of Death and Bruce Lee's Hong Kong imports showed in first-run theatres on their initial release, claiming top admission prices at the time ($3.50 in NYC), which helps account for their top box-office earnings. However, many other kung fu films were released as part of a double-bill to begin with. For instance, Sacred Knives of Vengeance was shown in South Florida mainly at drive-ins, paired with Warner's Freebie and the Bean (a police action film that featured a villainous martial artist -a young transvestite hit man). Kung fu films had a long shelf life, however, with movies like Fearless Fighters, released initially in 1973, still showing up on double-bills the spring of 1975.
27.
Variety (November 26, 1975). The critic noted the film "will have no difficulty finding a market if the market still exists."
28.
The vagaries of the Hong Kong and Taiwan film industry are also to blame for the sad state of affairs as regards Touch of Zen, surely one of the finest martial arts films ever made and certainly the finest such film of the 1970s. Still, U.S. insularity is more to blame than any other factor for the absence of Touch of Zen in theatrical or home video distribution.
29.
The kung fu craze netted some oddities, as well, such as the animated series HongKong Phooey, and Carl Douglas's novelty pop hit, "Kung Fu Fighting." (The latter was brought back at the end credits of Jackie Chan's Rumble in the Bronx, in an obvious attempt to rework and remind us of the kung fu craze.)
30.
The relationship between these television shows, the martial arts/kung fu craze, and video games is worth remembering, as well. See, among other works, Marsha Kinder, Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games from Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
31.
See Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Phila-delphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 69-111, for a solid discussion of the rise and fall of blaxploitation
32. Variety (January 30, 1974).
33. Guerrero, Framing Blackness, 99. 34. Variety (June 18, 1975). 35. Variety (April 27, 1977). 36. Variety (June 28, 1978).
37.
This sad litany of failure includes forgettable films like The Big Brawl (a.k.a Battle Creek Brawl, 1980), Cannonball Run (1981), and The Protector (1985). The film that made Chan a star in Hong Kong was deliberately patterned to make him the new Bruce Lee: New Fist of Fury (1976)
38.
It is perhaps not coincidental that black audiences responded to films like Five Fingers of Death and The Chinese Connection, seeing in their explicit anti-Japanese sentiments a corollary to their own situation as oppressed, second-class citizens to a dominant (in this case, white) culture; and to Deep Thrust for its featuring of a female martial artist. See Tony Williams, "Space, Place, and Spectacle: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo," Chapter 6 in this volume, for a listing of Hong Kong films with anti-Japanese motifs.
39.
P. Flanigan, "Kung Fu Crazy: or, The Invasion of the 'Chop Suey Easterns' " Cineaste, 6. 3 (1974): 10.
40.
For an interesting look at how Asian martial arts have been co-opted, often in problematic and troubling ways, see Joseph D. Won, Yellowface Minstrelsy: Asian Martial Arts and the American Popular Imaginary. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1996.
THE AMERICAN CONNECTION IN EARLY HONG KONG CINEMA
Law Kar
Cinema activities in Hong Kong may be traced back to the late 1890s. However, primary materials related to those early activities, particularly be-fore the 1920s, are extremely scarce. As elsewhere in China, the early film industry in Hong Kong was generated by Western businessmen who either came to the Far East for that purpose or seized their opportunities to establish theatres and make films.
As cinema was an imported art form, and technically a new one, it took some time for Hong Kong artists to adjust to the new medium. When a film industry eventually emerged in the 1920s, it turned to the live theatre for material and personnel because theatre had been the traditional form of mass entertainment in China for centuries. It continued as such for far longer than in the West.
Hong Kong cinema would have its first "golden age" between 1937 and 1941, quite suddenly achieving a very high output -peaking at the 125 films produced in 1939 -and a diversity of genres that had never appeared before. This extremely fertile period is important to researchers of the earliest devel-opments in the industry, as stimulated by two key factors, which are examined in this chapter.
The first factor was the "American experience" of the film pioneers -not so much in their exposure to Hollywood films as in their having worked with Americans or lived in the United States. Many early filmmakers had moved to the United States in their youth for study, work, or family reasons before returning to Hong Kong to embark on film careers. Undoubtedly, that expo-sure touched their psyches and, indirectly, the cinema in its earliest formation.
The second key factor was Cantonese opera, which, since the mid-nineteenth century, had been the most popular entertainment and performing art form in southern China. Cantonese opera assimilated both Chinese and
Thanks to Frank Bren for his collaboration on preparing this manuscript in English.
Western influences, which in turn touched Cantonese cinema from the 1920s on.
Few of the films produced in the 1920s and 1930s have survived, so it is hard to estimate the level of Western influence on the artistic or qualitative side. But the recent discovery of documents on these early films along with a rising interest in the subject has led to the discovery of more primary materi-als.
However, owing to the scarcity of prints, we can at best examine and acknowledge the documentary sources that exist as a basis for further re-search.
FIRST ENCOUNTERS
In 1898, James Ricalton, a photographer for the Thomas Edison Company, came to the colony to shoot some shorts, including Hong Kong Government House, Hong Kong Street Scenes, Hong Kong Harbour, Hong Kong Regi-ment, and The Sikh Artillery. All are travelogues of less than 30 feet and they are now preserved in the U.S. Library of Congress. There is no way to confirm whether these shorts were released locally, but turn-of-the century advertise-ments in local newspapers confirm that American films were increasingly exhibited in open-air sites and, later, in theatres.
Of the American businessmen who came to work in the Hong Kong film industry, Benjamin Brodsky is the most important in terms of inspiring locals to make their own films. Unlike the others, Brodsky proved to be far more than a mere trader.
BENJAMIN BRODSKY AND R. F. VAN VELZER
Benjamin Brodsky was a Jew who, at 14, emigrated from his native Russia to the United States where he traveled extensively as a circus employee. He eventually ended up running his own nickelodeon in San Francisco. Brodsky first came to the Far East as a businessman and to visit his hometown during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. He traveled in China, visiting Tianjin and Peking before returning to San Francisco and selling his nickelodeon, having decided to try film trading and production in China. He established the Asia Film Company, one of the first such entities to be based in both Shanghai and Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, he produced two shorts -Stealing a Roast Duck (1909) and The Haunted Pot -followed by two Shanghai productions, Widowed Empress-Dowager and Unlucky Fellow (both 1910).1
No prints of these films are known to have survived, but there is evidence that Stealing a Roast Duck had public screenings in Los Angeles. The film, directed by Leung Siu-bo (Liang Xiaobo), is now acknowledged as Hong Kong cinema's first commercially made film. Leung also starred as the thief who steals the roast duck from a fat street hawker, Wong Chung-man (Huang Zongmin), before he is caught by a policeman played by Lai Buk-hoi (Li Beihai).
Next came The Chinese Revolution (1912), perhaps the earliest dramatized version of China's 1911 revolution. Produced by the Oriental Film Company (registered in Hong Kong), it was advertised in the Moving Picture World magazine (March 3, 1912). The 300-foot long film was credited to Brodsky by film historian. Jay Leyda2 and is preserved in the U.S. Library of Congress.
In 1912, Brodsky befriended three young men then active in stage produc-tions known as Wenming Shi -literally, "civilized drama" or "new drama." These were original or translated plays (nonoperatic) that were very popular with Chinese audiences from the 1910s until the 1920s. The three men were Lai Buk-hoi, who had acted in Stealing a Roast Duck, his brother Lai Man-wei (Li Minwei), and Lo Wing-cheong (Luo Yungxiang).
The three collaborated with Brodsky to produce Chuang Tsi Tests His Wife (Zhuangzi shi qi, 1913), a short feature financed by Brodsky, who also pro-vided the shooting facilities; the others provided script, performers, settings, and costumes. Brodsky's associate R. F. Van Velzer was the head cameraman, Lo was his assistant and, according to one source, Lai Man-wei was the writer/director although another source credits Lai Buk-hoi as the director.3 Man-wei himself played the wife, and his own wife, Yim Shan-shan (Yan Shanshan), played the wife's maid; Buk-hoi played Chuang Tsi. This was Hong Kong cinema's first two-reel feature -and its first co-production -under the company name, Huamei (Chinese-American) Film Company. It was shot on the rooftop of a building in West Point.
The story of Chuang Tsi Tests His Wife, taken from a Cantonese opera, included special photographic effects intended to show moving ghosts. This technical innovation so impressed Lo and Lai Man-wei that they became passionately interested in photography, read all of the available books in English on the subject, and set up their own darkrooms. Lai continued using special photographic effects throughout the 1920s.
Prints of Chuang Tsi Tests His Wife and Stealing a Roast Duck were taken back to the United States by Brodsky and screened in Los Angeles in 1917. Film director Moon Kwan Man-ching (Guan Wenqing), who lived in Los Angeles at the time, would later recall seeing the films there.
Benjamin Brodsky came to the Far East to make money out of the film business and may have never been conscious of his pioneering role. He had inspired a group of young Chinese idealists who founded the local film industry. It is said that Brodsky and Van Velzer left their cameras and shooting facilities to the Lai brothers before Brodsky himself returned to the United States. Whether he was aware of his far-reaching acts, Benjamin Brodsky remains an important catalyst in the true beginnings of Hong Kong cinema.
THE LAI BROTHERS: LO WING-CHEONG, LEUNG SIU-BO, AND PAN NIN -PIONEERS OF HONG KONG CINEMA
Lai Man-wei had been one of the earliest members of the Hong Kong branch of the Tungmenghui, Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary movement dedicated to the overthrow of Manchu rule in China.
In 1911, before the October Revolution, the two Lai brothers and Lo Wing-cheong engaged in activist plays for the Ching Ping Lok Theatre Company and openly performed "civilized dramas" in support of Sun's movement. It is said that Man-wei even smuggled guns -buried in theatre props and costumes -to Guangzhou during Sun's aborted uprising there in March. When the trio began their collaboration with Brodsky, their troupe had been renamed Yan Ngoh Kian (Ren Wo Jian -literally, "others serve as my mirror"). As true amateurs, keen to enrich their knowledge and to master professional filmmaking, Lai Buk-hoi and Lo Wing-cheong went to Shanghai to observe the film business close up.
Thus inspired by Brodsky, and with the support of their eldest brother, Lai Hoi-shan (Li Haishan), Man-wei, and Buk-hoi established the firstfilm studio in Hong Kong, The China (Minxiri) Film Company Limited, in 1921.
The whole Lai family ran a successful business of importing and selling rice, so when the time was right, the brothers invested some of the business profits in the construction of the New World Theatre, completed in 1921. Situated in Hong Kong's Central district, it was the first theatre that regularly exhibited both Western and Chinese films (from Shanghai), whereas most theatres showed only Western films. The major shareholders were the entire Lai family.
The brothers then bought a three-story building on Tin Hau Temple Road to house their new China Sun Studio, ordering new cameras and other film equipment from Bell & Howell in the United States. They fully equipped the new studio with development and processing facilities as well as editing rooms and an animation rostrum camera.
The Lais planned to create an open-air studio on a lot adjacent to the building but were refused the appropriate license by the Hong Kong govern-ment. Lai Man-wei and Lo therefore went to Japan to make their first docu-mentaries and, later, to China, where they filmed the progress of Sun Yat-sen's Northern Campaign, the Kuomintang's attempt to smash the power bases of China's provincial warlords. The filmmakers keenly supported Sun and accompanied him on much of the campaign in Canton and farther north in 1924. By the end of that year, they had shot their first feature in an old Guangzhou mansion converted into a studio with full lighting equipment, an office, a dormitory, and a training center. Dailies were rushed back to Hong Kong for development. The result was Rouge (Yanzhi, 1925), the first full-length feature (eight reels) of Hong Kong cinema.
Rouge was adapted from one of the fantasy tales in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai zhiyi) written by revered Qing dynasty author Pu Song-ling but adapted to a contemporary background. It co-starred Lai Man-wei, Lam Cho-cho (Lin Zhozho) -Man-wei's other wife -and Leung Siu-bo under the direction of Lai Buk-hoi with Lo Wing-cheong as the cameraman. Lam Cho-cho was to become one of the most important female stars in both Hong Kong and China, and she eventually worked for Shanghai's China Sun and the Lianhua Film Company.
In 1923, Kwan Man-ching, who had returned from the United States two years before, with some film experience, applied for a job in China Sun. The Lai brothers invited him to become an instructor in their company's training classes, leading to his employment on Rouge as a make-up man.
Kwan pioneered the use of the latest Max Factor techniques in Hong Kong, and, according to his memoirs,4 Lo Wing-cheong, the technical supervisor of China Sun, purchased vast quantities of Max Factor products plus heavy lighting equipment worth HK$50,000. All of it went to waste because China Sun never produced another feature. It seems that Kwan did not approve of the "wasteful" Lo.
Significantly, Lai Man-wei, Lam Cho-cho, Moon Kwan, and Lo Wing-cheong all had Western educations. Lai was born in Japan, educated in Hong Kong from his childhood, notably in King's College and St. Paul's College, both English-language institutions, the latter run by Christian missionaries. Lam, who was born and educated in Canada, came to Hong Kong shortly before marrying Lai Man-wei in 1919. Kwan attended college in California and was apprenticed to Hollywood studios in the late 1910s. Lo was educated in an English college in Hong Kong.
Even so, they used Chinese source material with the traditional aim of edification through entertainment in the spirit of Chinese opera and "civilized drama." Thus Western and Japanese influences were limited to the filmmak-ers' absorption of new techniques and were essentially instruments to make the Chinese body (art) function more efficiently.
Local merchants were always eager to do business with the Americans who were then bringing their films into China. Whereas the Lais had ideals about edifying through entertainment and art, a prominent Hong Kong theatre tycoon, Lo Gun (Lu Gen), understood the commercial possibilities offered by this new technology. He used U.S. movies to make money.
Lo distributed Hollywood films both locally and in Shanghai, a business he monopolized in 1922 and 1923 because the Hollywood majors had not yet established branches in China or Hong Kong. His good fortune was also good for Hong Kong cinema because he spent some of his wealth building several theatres.
The Lai brothers, on the other hand, were idealists. In setting up China Sun, they believed in cinema as something more than entertainment.
They believed films had the power to educate, to criticize, and to improve society as a whole -principles broadly stated in the company's articles of association.
But whereas Rouge broke all box-office records upon its release in early 1925, the company continued to experience financial stress and was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1926 when the general strike erupted in Guangzhou and Hong Kong. At that point, Lai Man-wei decided to move China Sun to Shanghai, while Lai Buk-hoi moved to Guangzhou to take care of the studio there. Man-wei and his wife, Lam Cho-cho, also moved house to Shanghai.
Cinematically, Hong Kong was a dead city until 1929 when the general strike and its aftermath subsided. Lai Buk-hoi then returned to build a new studio in Lee Garden, which was owned by the family of the late Lee Hysan and which was, later, the site of the famous Lee Theatre. This resulted in the launch of Hong Kong Film Company, the first such company in Hong Kong after the end of the general strike. It began operation in January 1930, produc-ing two features released in 1931: The Witty Sorcerer and The Pain of Separation. Both were written and directed by Lai Buk-hoi and shot by cinematographer, Pan Nin (Pan Nian).
But the company faltered, and Lai Buk-hoi had to close it. In December 1930, Law Ming-yau (Luo Mingyou), Lai Man-wei, and others registered Lianhua Film Company (United Photoplay Service Limited) in Hong Kong with Sir Robert Ho Tung as chairman of the board and Law Ming-yau as general manager. The following year, they established Lian Hua's office, with studios, in Shanghai, and then opened Studio 3 in Hong Kong itself, taking over the old Hong Kong Film Company's equipment and facilities. Lai Buk-hoi was the studio head.
Studio 3 folded in 1933, and Lai Buk-hoi started Zhonghua Sound and Silent Film Production Company. Thus, the remaining Lianhua Film Com-pany in Shanghai -so important to the history of Chinese cinema and num-bering among its stars Ruan Lingyu, the "Chinese Garbo" -was in one sense a child of Hong Kong cinema.
Another important pioneer was Pan Nin, who learned cinematography in the United States and returned to Hong Kong to run the studio of Daihan (Giant) Film Production Company in 1924. Daihan did not produce its own films but made them on commission, ranging from home movies to com-mercial cinema -for example, its first short feature, Calamity of Money (1924), followed by the features A Thief Comes Unstuck (1924), and Join the Army and Leave (1926). Daihan generally charged one dollar per foot of film. It enjoyed a good reputation for production quality, and it is said that all of its production facilities were ordered from the United States. But Daihan, like other companies, ceased operations after the eruption of the general strike.
After this experience, Pan Nin worked as a cinematographer, then as a producer/director, and then as a director from 1933 when he directed An Idiot Pays His Respects (released in September of that year) for the Feng Huang (Phoenix) Production Company. Although the story was adapted from Can-tonese folklore, with added songs, we can see from the credits that both the producer and sound recordist were Westerners. It is yet another example of a filmmaker moving back and forth between Hong Kong and the United States, cooperating with Western filmmakers.
FROM AMERICA WITH LOVE
ESTABLISHMENT OF GRANDVIEW
Two personalities clearly stand out in the early formation of Hong Kong cinema: Moon Kwan Man-ching and Joe Chiu (Chiu Shu-sun, or Zhao Shu-sen). They are important because of their initial film training and experience in the United States, where they were also educated -quite rare at the time for HK-based filmmakers. Their commitment to the home industry was solid, running from the early 1930s until the 1950s (Chiu) and 1960s (Kwan). They helped establish Grandview, the first big film studio in Hong Kong modeled along Hollywood lines. The studio raised local technical standards by import-ing the best U.S. equipment and bringing in the latest techniques of sound, color, and even 3D -providing several industry firsts. Chiu, in particular, pushed technical standards to new highs.
Born in Guangzhou in 1896, Kwan emigrated as a child to San Francisco, where he received his university education. In 1915, he moved to Los Ange-les, where he attended a film training college and picked up filming techniques by working as a writer, a cook, and an extra in Hollywood. He soon became recognized as the local expert on Chinese culture and affairs. D. W. Griffith used him as such on the set of Broken Blossoms (1919), a Griffith classic featuring Chinese characters and starring Lilian Gish and Richard Barthel-mess. In 1921, Kwan returned to Guangdong to set up a film company in Nantong. He joined the Lai brothers in 1923, teaching scriptwriting and acting in special classes run by China Sun.
Kwan began several projects of his own as a director. In 1926 he made a film in Guangzhou. Next, he was contracted by a U.S. businessman, Isaac Upham, as an assistant on Upham's film travelogue, Pieces of China (1927), which was shot in China, with postproduction work (Kwan assisting) done in Los Angeles Kwan was commissioned to write a one-act play, which was performed live in tandem with screenings of Pieces of China in a double bill that premiered in San Francisco (four nights) before transferring to Los An-geles for five more shows.5
Kwan made his first two films for Lianhua's Hong Kong studio in 1931 and 1932. The first was Iron Bone and Orchid Heart (1931), scripted by Leung Siu-bo and with Lo Wing-cheong as the cameraman. The second, Gunshot at Midnight (1932), was a detective story starring Ng Chor-fan (Wu Chufan) and Wong Man-lei (Wang Manli).
At the time, Kwan was close to Law Ming-yau, the General Manager of Lianhua (then in financial difficulties) in Shanghai. Law commissioned Kwan to sell the studio's films in the United States and to raise money from the overseas Chinese for the purchase of sound equipment. Kwan sailed for San Francisco in 1933, carrying four Lianhua films in his luggage. Soon after his arrival, Kwan met Joe Chiu in San Francisco -a fateful meeting for the early development of Hong Kong cinema.
Chiu, the son ofa rich businessman, was born in Guangdong province in 1904. He was educated in California and, at the age of 18, worked as an assistant to a French researcher on American film animation. Later, he was hired by a U.S. company as a graphic artist. He turned to cinematography as a natural extension of his passion for photography and sought employment on Hollywood productions.
There are two versions about the beginnings of Chiu's career. According to one, he joined a Chinese production company in 1931, as an assistant director/designer to work on the film Wong Chiu-Kun (Wan Zhaojun -the name of a legendary beauty of the Han dynasty). The film was produced by the Zhonghua (China) Film Company, which was run by an overseas Chinese named Chan Chun Wing (Chen Chunrong) and in which Chiu's father had a stake.6 The second version is that a Hollywood producer wanted to adapt the story of Wan Bo-chuen, (Wang Baochun) a famous woman in Sung dynasty folklore, into an English-speaking filmstarring Anna May Wong.7 Supported by his father, Chiu invested and worked in this film for his ticket into the industry, but it was a depressing experience and the filmflopped.
Chiu was certainly keen to direct a feature when he met Moon Kwan, who encouraged him with the sage advice of making a contemporary film with singing inserts. After all, there was an abundance of talent in the Cantonese opera companies then based in cities like San Francisco or constantly on tour along the West Coast. The film could be profitably exported to Hong Kong and China. Kwan further promised to use his good relations with Lianhua's Law Ming-yau, who might be persuaded to distribute the film.
The two men first offered a contract to Ma Sze-tsang, one of the top opera actors then on tour in the United States, but Ma did not accept. In San Francisco, there was another touring opera troupe whose leading players -actor Kwan Tak-hing (Guan Dexing) and the U.S. born actress Wu Dip-ying (Hu Dieying) -seemed well-suited for the leads.
Thus in 1933, the two men engineered the establishment of the Grandview Film Company at 12 Ross Alley, San Francisco, for the purpose of making this film.A duly constituted board of eleven members -all American-Chinese businessmen -was set up with Chiu's father, Chiu Chun-yu (Zhao Zhongrao), as chairman of the board and Joe Chiu himself as general manager. Their first feature was Romance of the Songsters, starring Kwan Tak-hing and Wu Dip-ying. It was one of the world's first Cantonese talkies; another, White Gold Dragon, was produced simultaneously in Shanghai. It was also one of the first films to depict the lives of overseas American-Chinese. The stories in both of these films were intimately related to Cantonese opera.
Romance of the Songsters is the story of a romance within a Cantonese opera troupe and includes some songs and dances. According to the com-pany's own publicity, the film included famous sites of San Francisco -the living areas, tea houses, and restaurants -the direction was slick, the cinema-tography was unsurpassed, the sound was clear ("no echoes"), and there was no shortage of beautiful dancers and singers. The acting was "sweet and gentle," and all in all, it was healthy entertainment that promoted traditional ethical values of the Chinese people. There was also much comic relief.
The film opened in San Francisco in July 1933 and was a big hit in various Chinese communities in the United States and later in Hong Kong where it was noticed by Law Ming-yau. Moon Kwan persuaded Law to invite Chiu to form a Hong Kong-based film company with Kwan, Chiu, and himself as partners. As Lianhua had already set up a local operation, Law suggested naming the new company Lianhua (Overseas) with access to the existing Lianhua facilities in Hong Kong. Chiu joined them by offering to bring over sound facilities as part of his capital input.
As Moon Kwan later recalled, Chiu was quite excited about the proposal and asked for the consent of the Grandview board, which agreed to order sound and other facilities for Lianhua (Overseas). With the board's further consent, the partners invited a U.S. sounds recordist, a Mr. Skinner, to install the equipment and stay on as an operator/consultant. While they waited, for the new equipment Chiu and Kwan were not idle. Both directed films in Hong Kong for Lianhua under the new Lianhua (Overseas) banner.
From January 15, 1934, films made by Chiu and Kwan began appearing in the territory. The first was Breaking Waves, directed by Kwan and starring Lai Cheuk-cheuk (Li Zhuozhuo), daughter of Lai Hoi-shan, as a swimmer who competes in a championship. There was even a credit, ' 'technical advisor for swimming scenes" (a Mr. Tong). By March, Chiu's firstfilm for Lianhua (Overseas) was released as Brother (a.k.a. The Black-Hearted). In July, his Spoondrift Village hit the screens.
But before the U.S. equipment had even arrived, Law suddenly urged the three of them to decamp to Shanghai. The others refused, so the partnership was dissolved. Chiu urgently telegraphed to Grandview, and the board agreed that the duo could establish their own Grandview Film Company (Hong Kong) with capital injections from San Francisco.
The new Grandview went into production from 1935 until it was inter-rupted by the Pacific war (1941-5), making about 65 films in all. The com-pany became one of Hong Kong ' 'big four'' prewar film companies, along with Tianyi (later Nanyang), Chuen Kou (Global) Film Company, and Nam Yuet (Southern Guangdong). It was located at 83 Pak Tai Street, Kowloon, with a town office at 8A Des Voeux Road in the Central district.
The company's firstfilms included The Modern Bride (1935), directed by Kwan and produced by Chiu. It was a comedy with a modern touch contrast-ing the old and new worlds and satirizing marriage as commerce while invoking the right of freedom in love. It was so popular that a sequel was quickly released the same year. The Modern Bride II featured song inserts and six famous musicians, who played modernized Cantonese music.
The same year, Kwan made the film Yesterday's Song (a.k.a. Voice of the Broken Hearted) starring Kwan Tak-hing and the newly discovered Lee Yee-Lin (Li Yinian), a sexy star whose talent and fame would eventually rank her as one of the leading women of Hong Kong cinema alongside Nancy Chan (Chen Yunchang) and Wong Man-lei.
In November 1935, the New World theater screened Lifeline, a Grandview production that was one of the first patriotic films (resistance to an aggressive Japan) ever produced in Hong Kong or China. It broke box-office records. Produced by Chiu and written and directed by Kwan, Lifeline depicts a group of young men helping to construct a railway in the north in preparation for the anticipated invasion by Japan. Predating even leftist mainland films of the type, it was banned by the Hong Kong government when first submitted for censorship but was later released on appeal.
In 1936, the company produced Queen of the Blue, written and directed by a new director, Fok Yin (He Ran). It concerns a village girl who becomes a swimming champion and is memorable for scenes with the girl's mother (comedian Big Mouth Ho) who comes to town looking for her daughter. In a farcical scene, Big Mouth Ho creates havoc in a swimming pool, barges into a men's changing room, and climbs on top of the pool diving board.
Grandview's other key films included 48 Hours (1937) made soon after the Marco Polo Bridge incident (July 7, 1937), which ignited the "China Incident," the Japanese euphemism for the Sino-Japanese War. Produced and directed by Chiu, it was an immediate response to the invasion.
Chiu himself was a mixture of technician, director, and film businessman. He tried hard to strike a balance between producing quality films and pleasing his audience, while generating a return for the company. Apart from produc-ing patriotic films (Shanghai Behind the Lines, 1938; Little Guangdong, 1940; The Song of Exile, 1941; Little Tiger, 1941) he also made class entertainments that were quite big productions for the time. They included The Golden House of 12 Beauties (1937), a light comedy featuring twelve top actresses and directed by Tang Xiaodan, and the backstage musical, Stage Lights (1938), starring Nancy Chan and featuring a "name" dancing troupe then performing in the colony. There were also melodramas like The Fall of the Pear Flower (1936), The Wandering Father (1938), and At the Parting of the Ways (1938).
GRANDVIEW DURING THE WAR: CINEMA IN EXILE
From 1937 on, more Chiu family members came to Hong Kong to assist Chiu in Grandview's production and administration affairs. From 1937 to 1940, the annual production of Hong Kong films sharply increased to a peak of 125 in 1939, and Grandview itself faced increasingly stiff competition. It made a number of quality productions that failed to generate sufficient returns and thus faced a financial crisis.
From 1939 on, the company's level of production diminished and the studio was rented out to other companies. In 1939, Joe Chiu returned to San Francisco to seek new investors to bolster the company's operations by pur-chasing more modern equipment. Meanwhile, his uncle and brother took care of the business.
Chiu was still in California when war broke out. He had used his time making feature films starring local Cantonese actors and experimenting with color production, mostly in 16 mm. His firstfilm was the 35 mm Light of the Overseas Chinese (1939/1940), partly in color but primarily in black and white and shot entirely on location in San Francisco (Fig. 2). The story concerns a Chinese immigrant who struggles to survive in California for 30 years before settling down in San Francisco to raise his own family. The cast had been touring the West Coast at the time and included Wai Kim-fong (Wei Jianfang), Luk Siu-sin (Lu Xiaoxian), Chiu King-wan (Zhao Jinghun), Yip Fut-yeuk (Ye Feiruo), and others. The film was released in Hong Kong in 1940.
Then came the Pacific War, and Hong Kong cinema effectively went into exile through Chiu and Grandview, who continued their operations in Califor-nia.
Overall, Grandview (U.S.) would make some 20 features from 1939 to 1945, catering to Chinese audiences through the United States. Some were in 16 mm color, others in 35 mm black and white and all of them had Cantonese dialogue. The films were immediately screened in San Francisco and released to other Chinatown outlets in the United States. The Hong Kong screenings were deferred until after the war.
Only several copies of those films are known to exist, yet judging from the available documents and stills, we see that this cinema in exile is worthy of further research. These were the firstfilms made by Chinese filmmakers to depict the lives of Chinese in America. To judge from the extant stills and synopses, most of these films were either family melodramas or love stories set in a contemporary American background -some of them romantic, some of them light comedies, but none use costumes, nor are they fantastical or
Figure 2. One of the two Grandview films about Chinatown made in San Francisco during World War II. Courtesy Hong Kong International Film Festival.
historical. They simply represent the lives of overseas Chinese, using a real-istic approach.
At first sight, it is strange to see the Cantonese actors dressing just like Americans, while their way of life (onscreen) is so traditionally Chinese -stories locked in family relations featuring characters concerned with what is happening in Hong Kong or in China, trying to stay in touch with their homeland. Although their exact production dates are uncertain, we can pin-point their release dates in Hong Kong after the war; see Table 2.1.
Most of the actors in these films, some tourists and some born in the United States came to Hong Kong after the war and worked in Cantonese cinema. They included: Wong Hok-sing (Wang Hesheng), Wong Chiu-mo (Huang Chaowu), Yip Fut-yeuk, Chiu King-wan, Liu Kei-wai (Liao Qiwei), and Tang Pui (Deng Pei), among the men, and Lai Yee (Li Er), Chow Kwun-ling (Zhou Kunling), Leung Bik-yuk (Liang Biyu), and Luk Siu-sin.
The Kowloon-based Grandview facility was deserted after the Japanese occupation, and it is said that they stored all their equipment underground. Right after the war, Grandview was one of the first studios to recommence operations in late 1946, and by 1947, Joe Chiu had been welcomed back, along with his new wife, Lai Yee.
Lai Yee was an American Chinese, college-educated in California, who
Table 2.1 Grandview (U.S.) Films Released in Hong Kong after World War II
Year of
release Film Director
1946 A Smile to Please Chiang Wei-kwong
1947 The Entangling Ones Way to Brightness Vanity Fair Perfect Couple (a.k.a. Money Slave) Eternal Love Chiu Shu-sun unknown Chiu Shu-sun Chiu Shu-sun Chiang Wei-kwong
Happy Wedding Joy and Peace Great Lover Chiang Wei-kwong Chiang Wei-kwong Chiu Shu-sun
Pear Flower in the Storm Wong Kam-yun
Returned Soul Wong Kam-yun
19481949 Lucky Bride Not All the Beautiful Die Young Show Off Your Beauty Romance in the Golden Country The All-Time Beauty Fair Lady by the Blue Lagoon Two Women After One Man unknown Wong Kam-yun Wong Kam-yun Chiu Shu-sun Wong Kam-yun Ng Kam-ha Chiu Shu-sun
Postwar publicity material indicates that Living in Sin was also screened in Hong Kong during this period, but no release date has been confirmed.8
had appeared in Hollywood films as an Asian child star. In 1943, she appeared briefly as a young student in the Paramount's China, starring Alan Ladd. Following that, she appeared in several Grandview (U.S.) films before marry-ing Joe Chiu. The couple returned to Hong Kong in 1947 and began devel-oping a new studio in Diamond Hill, Kowloon, partly with money earned through releasing wartime films made by Grandview in the United States. (These films proved quite popular.) The Diamond Hill studio was fully equipped and occupied a spacious 730,000 square feet.
Chiu Siu-kan (Joe's brother) headed production while Lai Yee managed the dubbing department. Grandview continued film production from 1947 until the late 1950s, when it faded from the scene. Joe Chiu himself helped Grandview to be technically years ahead of its main competitors -the better-known postwar studios like Yonghua (China), Great Wall, and, later, Shaw Brothers. He introduced color films as a continuation of his U.S. work and made several historical epics in color on a grand scale. These films included The Story of Diaochan (one of the four great beauties of China), The Story of the Three Kingdoms, and The Burning of the Linked Battleships, which were all taken from the same historical novel. The Life, Love and Death of Yang Guifei, a romance about the great concubine of the Tang Dynasty's Emperor Ming, was also in color and released in both Cantonese and Mandarin ver-sions.9 In fact, Chiu foresaw the rise of Mandarin cinema and cooperated with Mandarin studios like Great Wall. Lai Yee also organized her own company, Lai Yee Productions, and produced several films in Mandarin.
Though Grandview was very active from 1947 on, film output shrank in the early 1950s because of over-investment in color productions, and Chiu and Lai Yee were forced to work for other film companies. In 1958, they quit the film business and retired to San Francisco, where Chiu was said to have inherited his father's property. Joe Chiu died during the 1980s, briefly sur-vived by his wife, Lai Yee. Kwan Manching, in his 100th year, died in 1995, the centenary year of the cinema.
CONTRIBUTION OF GRANDVIEW TO EARLY HONG KONG CINEMA
The period from the establishment of Grandview in 1935 through the late 1930s ushered in the first golden age of Hong Kong cinema. This was due partly to the tense lead-up to the Sino-Japanese War and to the war itself. After 1935 a number of filmmakers and backers moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong because they sensed the approach of war. Tianyi (later, Shaw Brothers) established a branch in Hong Kong, later renaming it Nanyang. Yihua, another Shanghai major studio, similarly set up a branch after 1935. Sound recordists, script writers, directors, and actors increasingly came to Hong Kong to make films, an influx that intensified after the outbreak of war in 1937. By the late 1930s, four major film companies dominated the Hong Kong cinema scene: Tianyi/Nanyang, Nam Yuet, Chuen Kou, and Grandview, whose technical backup in the United States made it perhaps the best-equipped of the four.
Having lived in the United States as an overseas Chinese, Grandview's Joe Chiu had experienced racial discrimination, and this may have been a factor in his decision to resume film activities in Hong Kong. Hollywood was a tough nut to crack, especially for an Asian. Making patriotic films during the war years while living in the United States, Chiu believed in edification through entertainment, and in the cinema itself as a tool to make the Chinese more aware of the national crisis -and more patriotic. In this, he agreed with his competitors, the emigre filmmakers from Shanghai, keen to intensify a "national defense" mentality in their audiences. At the same time, Chiu's passion for photography, animation, and art drove him to strive for the highest technical standards -which did not come cheap for a cash-strapped Grand-view.
Although Chiu believed that films could have a "missionary" purpose for all Chinese, he was responsible to a board of directors and had to keep the studio afloat by making films that catered to public tastes, which naturally ran to songs, dances, and beautiful girls. His push for high standards cost money, but his showmanship attempted to recoup it without losing sight of the films' more serious aims.
Take, for example, Stage Lights (1938), directed by Tang Xiaodan, who came over from Shanghai after 1935. The film features a girl (Nancy Chan) who comes to the colony on the same ship as a Shanghai dancing troupe. She has many ups and downs in her love life before joining the troupe, which performs patriotic musicals in the colony. The film combines Cantonese opera melodies with Western music and dancing, all infused with a patriotic spirit typical of mainland films to bolster the viewer's desire to defend his or her country against the Japanese. These three elements -from Hong Kong, China, and the West -comprised the special identity of Hong Kong "Defence Cinema."10
In a foreword to Stage Lights, Tang Xiaodan said that he had tried to fuse Cantonese melodies with American jazz as an instrument to excite the patri-otism of the Chinese people. He despised music used only as an expression of passion or sentiment, and felt that Western music could be exploited for something nobler than the release of feeling. Tang said:
American jazz is a combination of primitive African rhythms and a wild American spirit that appeals to the senses and is strongly erotic. Jazz and Big Band music are widely loved by young people all over the world and what I am trying to do is to add the Jazzy element to Cantonese melodies so they can accompany dance and become more lively, more beautiful to the ear and more visually satisfying .. . At the same time, music can be a force that excites audiences -like marching songs for soldiers -and dance can nourish the national spirit.11
Such sentiments could have come out of the mouth of his producer. The interweaving of Cantonese and Western music, American jazz and dance, sexy girls, and high production values was typically Chiu, the first to try this mixture in Cantonese cinema. He created a message-entertainment model -musicals in the service of the country-that was not strictly derived from either Shanghai or Hollywood.
Chiu was a unique renaissance figure in the formation of early Hong Kong cinema. He was the first to link Hong Kong China, and overseas Chinese (at this stage, there were several communities in the United States) using film as bridge. Throughout his life, Chiu promoted Cantonese films to the U.S. Chi-nese communities and brought back the more advanced U.S. techniques. He was the technician, director, and businessman who pioneered the use of sound, color, widescreen (Cinemascope) and 3-D in the local industry; the first color film was Light of the Overseas Chinese (1939/1940); the first wide-screen, New Story of Yutang chun (1954), and the first 3-D, A Woman's Revenge (1955). He and Kwan Man-ching also led a team that produced numerous newsreels and documentaries.
TWO-WAY TRAFFIC
Although the early cinema was nourished by a variety of American contacts and influences, the traffic was not one way. We can describe it as an interflow of people and resources between two geographical locations, beginning in the 1920s and growing in the following decade. For example, Moon Kwan Man-ching returned to Hong Kong and China in the 1920s following an apprentice-ship in Hollywood. After working on Rouge in 1924 and making his directing debut, Kwan returned to Hollywood, where he worked as a consultant on the film Mr. Wu (1927), starring Lon Chaney. He soon returned to Hong Kong.
In his third U.S. visit, in 1932, Kwan took prints of four Lianhua films to show to the Chinese communities in cities along the West Coast and else-where in America. In doing so, he prepared the ground for the first large network of Chinatowns that would comprise an important market for Hong Kong cinema. The films he showed included the feature documentary, ArmyRoute 19 -Fighting the Japanese Enemy (1932) and the dramatic features Spring Dream in the Old Capitol (1930) and Three Modern Girls (1932), both starring the famed actress Ruan Lingyu. Kwan exhibited these films in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Fresno, Sacramento, Portland, Chicago, Cleveland, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Washington DC, Boston, and New York, as well as the Canadian cities of Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria.12 Such visits kept the exiled Hong Kong cinema alive during the Pacific war via Grandview's U.S. operations. To cap this development, the new Grandview Theatre (on Jackson Street in San Fran-cisco) became the very first overseas cinema built (in 1940) for showing Chinese films.
CANTONESE OPERA -CULTURAL AMBASSADOR
Cantonese opera tours of the United States provide another example of this two-way flow. For many years, Cantonese opera served as a cultural ambas-sador, bringing a community feeling and cultural nourishment from the home-land to Chinese communities abroad, deprived of their own radio (later, television) programs and sometimes even of Chinese newspapers. Cantonese opera had shouldered such a role beginning in the nineteenth century, well before the invention of the cinema. Although these companies provided links to the homeland, they were also influenced by their host environment. They were unwitting ambassadors of cultural influences -most spectacularly from Hollywood -that would remodel Cantonese opera and, in turn, Cantonese films, which were often drawn from those very same operas.
Cantonese opera is intimately related to the development of Cantonese cinema in that many early film artists and writers had their roots in the opera, and opera plays became natural movie fodder. As with Kwan Man-ching, many of these artists traveled frequently between Hong Kong and the United States.
From the late nineteenth century until the 1930s, Cantonese opera grew rapidly in popularity, not only in Guangdong and Hong Kong, but in the United States. The United States tours of Cantonese opera troupes so in-creased their prestige that, upon return, the artists styled themselves as "Golden Mountain" players, signifying that they had performed on the "New Continent" -specifically, to overseas Chinese audiences -on tours lasting from six months to two years.13
It is obvious that the 1930s saw great changes in Cantonese opera, which assimilated various influences from Hollywood films, Western music, and burlesque shows as well as those from the Beijing and other provincial Chinese operas. The same thing happened in the early development of Hong Kong cinema. Conversely, more and more artists who regularly played in the States -including those who were born there -were increasingly keen to perform before audiences back in Hong Kong and Guangzhou. They, too, brought innovations to the traditional home of their art, contributing to its continued prosperity despite stiff competition from Cantonese films.
In their History of Cantonese Opera, Lai Bojiang and Wang Jinming note that one of the earliest touring performances of Cantonese opera in the United States took place on Jackson Street, San Francisco, in 1883. Quoting a "Dr. O'Neill," they add that two companies -the Von Soo Fong Cantonese Opera Troupe (eight members) and the Yellow Dragon Troupe (twenty-one mem-bers) -toured Canada as early as 1870.14 In 1975, in Sacramento, a Mr. Wong discovered more than 700 pictures of Cantonese opera performances. A team of researchers and experts, led by the journalist-writer-cartoonist Jack Chan, scrutinized the stills and verified them as authentic shots of opera perform-ances staged for gold mine workers in California. A 1983 article in the San Francisco Chronicle corroborates this; according to the article, the first Can-tonese troupe came to California during the Gold Rush frenzy of 1852.15
Since the early 1920s, two big theatres had regularly staged Cantonese opera in San Francisco: the Great China Theatre and the Grand Theatre. Opera troupes from Guangzhou and Hong Kong frequently worked in these venues -later performing in a touring belt that included Los Angeles, Mexico, New York, and even Peru. Honolulu was one of the last stops.
Cantonese opera touring in the United States peaked in the 1930s, declining from 1937 following the outbreak of war. The Chinese audience also dwindled because the war years were hard for most people. Many of the actors and actresses stayed on in America to work in films produced by Grandview, returning to Hong Kong at the war's end to resume film careers there.
Ma Sze-tsang (1901-1964). Among those who toured abroad were outstand-ing figures Ma Sze-tsang (Ma Shizheng) and Sit Kok-sin (Xue Juexian), they were not just leading actors; they contributed innumerable innovations and trend-setting ideas over many years. Ma and Sit were the two Giants of Cantonese Opera. Both introduced Western musical instruments into their repertoires from as early as the 1920s. Both brought touches of Hollywood into Cantonese operas, including special effects, makeup techniques, settings, costumes, and mise-en-scene.
Ma was born in Guangzhou and educated in Hong Kong, studying English at King's College. His troupe was one of the most popular and prestigious Cantonese opera companies in southern China, and Ma became its leading player in the 1920s. In 1931, he began a two-year tour of the U.S. West Coast, where he met screen legend Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who invited him on a sightseeing tour of the major film studios. Hollywood and its films so im-pressed Ma that he introduced many colorful innovations to traditional Can-tonese opera back home (as did his major rival, Sit)-notably adapting the film, Thief of Baghdad (1924) into his play Prince of Thieves, which he subsequently readapted as a film.
Back in Hong Kong, Ma assembled Tai Ping, the largest of the local troupes, doing plays with realistic settings and in Western dress. He also established the Chuen Kou (Global)) Film Company, financially supported by overseas Chinese, with Su Yi in charge of production as well as its main director, and Lee Gee-kwong as the principal cinematographer. Ma himself starred in many of the film, and it is said that he bought many props, lighting equipment, and other facilities for both the Tai Ping and Chuen Kou compa-nies. Lee and Su both came from Shanghai.
In 1935, Chuen Kou's firstfilm was the Su Yi-directed Scent of Wild Flowers, a remake of The Blue Angel (1930), the film classic starring Marlene Dietrich and directed by Josef von Sternberg. Next, the company released Opera Stars and Song Girls (1935, directed by Kwan Ting-yam) about a group of Cantonese opera actors and "sing-song girls" struggling with social crises and economic depression and striving to improve the company's pres-tige to draw bigger audiences. The film includes an opera highlight performed in Western dress where a woman courts her male lover. Dancing girls in sexy costumes are also a feature. It was one of the firstfilms to integrate Western dancing into Cantonese opera, reflecting the reforms then underway on stage.
Ma's goal was to modernize Cantonese opera into an internationally ac-ceptable art form. He is quoted as saying, "American movie musicals are a good reference for Cantonese Opera. We can borrow something of the form . . . On the one hand, we should take the good things from foreign arts; on the other, we should preserve the essence of Cantonese Opera if we want to advance more efficiently.16 He greatly admired Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin, particularly for their physical comedy, since Ma himself was a distinctive comic early on in his career. But he also learned from the folk arts of the Cantonese people -songs sung by street vendors, fishermen, and beggars. Ma was a grassroots man and quite willing to project, say, a beggar as hero and, to the dismay of purists, character actors and underground figures often ap-peared as the protagonists instead of the usual pretty leads or aristocrats.
Ma adapted other Hollywood stories into operas and introduced more contemporary costumes. He adapted the story of Madame Butterfly into a Cantonese opera, in which he and Sit Kok-sing acted together for the first time onstage, with Sit as the Marine officer, Ma as the aristocrat, and Madame Butterfly herself played by Hung Sin-nui, later to become Ma's wife. The opera itself was adapted for film three times, once before and twice after the war.
Sit Kok-sin (1904-1956). The son of a prosperous businessman, Sit Kok-sin was born on April 7, 1904 and educated in Hong Kong from childhood. He attended St. Paul's English School and learned Cantonese opera as a boy, becoming apprenticed to a troupe in the early 1920s. He then went to Shang-hai where he learned from a master of Peking opera and became involved in filmmaking. Sit formed his own film company, Fai Fai, in Shanghai and, in 1926, directed his first feature, The Wandering Butterfly.
Back in Hong Kong, he continued his stage activities in the late 1920s and traveled widely in Southeast Asia. With the help of a famous playwright, in the early 1930s, he staged White Gold Dragon, based on the Hollywood film, The Princess and the Servant, starring Adolph Menjou.17 The play, which used Western costumes in a Chinese setting, was extremely popular in Guang-zhou, Hong Kong, and Nanyang.
At the time, Shanghai filmmakers were actively experimenting with sound, which came relatively late to Chinese cinema. One pioneer was Tianyi Stu-dio's C. W. Shaw (Zhao Zuiweng), the eldest Shaw brother, who had already developed an impressive film circuit in Singapore and Malaysia. C. W. was so impressed by the response to White Gold Dragon that he and Sit formed a partnership for the express purpose of adapting it into a Cantonese talkie, with Sit starring. C. W. co-directed the film with Tang Xiaodan. The film proved enormously popular on its release, especially in Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Nanyang. As a result, C. W. decided to open a branch studio in Hong Kong to make Cantonese films for local, Guangdong, and Nanyang markets.
Sit finally returned home to work as an actor on stage and in film. Together with Ma Sze-tsang, he was the first to co-opt U.S. film techniques for the stage (e.g., advanced makeup, sophisticated settings, props, and lighting ef-fects). In addition to adapting Hollywood-style plots as stage plays -such as Romance of the Jade Hall adapted from The Love Parade (1929, starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald) or Why Not Return?, adapted from a Japanese story that borrowed its plot from Camille -they further transformed them into new films.
In 1936, Sit established the Nam Yuet Film Co. as its main financier, producer, and sometimes director and writer. He began to work with sound technician Zhu Qingxian soon after the latter moved to Hong Kong from Shanghai. Together at Nam Yuet they produced mainly Cantonese films with songs, aimed at the Cantonese and Nanyang markets.
In the early 1930s, the Chinese playwright Sung Zhiyi created a sensation with Wang Baochun. He had adapted this famous play of the Song dynasty story into an English-language play that achieved some success in England and on the Continent. The great Peking opera star, Mei Lanfang, staged the original Chinese version of the play in 1938 when he came to Hong Kong. In 1939, inspired by the success of Wang Baochun, Sit began an ambitious Hong Kong "first": converting a tale from the literary classic Romance of the West Chamber into a film of three different versions -Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, using completely different casts for each. He signed Laurence Law to write the English version, which Sit was to direct himself, but because of the imminent rumblings of war he later abandoned the project.18
Three genres influenced Sit's film output. First, there was the ready-made material in his own extensive live repertoire, including several operas with stories wrung from Hollywood films featuring songs and dances in contem-porary settings. Second, the romances or light comedies a la Hollywood reflected his admiration for stars like Adolph Menjou and Maurice Chevalier. Third, the dramas and tragedies based on Chinese folklore or literary classics, notably Romance of the West Chamber, rounded out the list. Sit loved Holly-wood films, particularly the suave high-society comedies of the 1930s. He was the first to promote Hollywood-style storytelling in Cantonese opera. He was sometimes labeled the Clark Gable of Hong Kong -a lady-killer image that he tried to live up to in private life.
Sit was indefatigable. During the 1930s, while he was engaged in hectic opera and film schedules, he hired a private English coach and, together with his wife, took English lessons daily so that he could speak fluent English with his foreign friends. Like Ma, he was concerned with the reform of Cantonese opera and stated this ideal more than once in his writings: "My idea is not just to combine opera from the North and South into one school but also to synthesize operas from the East and West into a whole, yet keeping the original essence while getting rid of its wastes so as to raise Chinese opera into the highest level and make it an internationally recognized art."19 Echoes of Ma Sze-tsang can clearly be heard.
Sit and Ma were reformers and innovators of Cantonese opera. They had much in common -their strong Hollywood influences and their attempts to apply some of them to the stage. At the same time, both were impressed by the popularity of Hollywood films that could touch so many different seg-ments of the audience. They succeeded in making Cantonese opera more popular through these and other stage innovations. In short, they invigorated a traditional form, at a time when Cantonese theatre faced strong competition from the new Cantonese talkies. They both had a vision of cinema as the medium of the future and as a major competitor to opera. Instead of fighting this trend, they embraced it. In so doing, they were condemned by the more conservative critics and their peers for degrading the form and corrupting tradition.
In retrospect, their reforms were premature or half-baked -such as the borrowing of storylines from Hollywood films. The innovations tended to be tidbits of techniques that added little extra in terms of aesthetics or ideas. Because of strong competition at the time, their plays and films became more and more commercial, thus enlarging the audience. However, their achieve-ments did not quite match their stated ideals. In later life, Ma himself criti-cized his own early work. With his wife, Hung, he returned to the mainland in 1955 and moved in a totally different direction, that is, of stripping Western influences, Hollywood gimmicks, and other impurities like Western musical instruments or colloquial language from current performances and to make the lyrics more elegant -that is, to raise Cantonese opera to a level on a par with classical literature. Ma called it the "reformation." He took charge of a newly created opera training school in Guangzhou, where he died in 1964. Sit had died some eight years earlier, at the age of 52, indefatigable no longer.
Kwan Tak-hing (1906-96). Many other artists and performers worked in the United States and brought their experience back to China. One of the most important of these is Kwan Tak-hing. He began his Cantonese opera career under the stage name Sun Liang-chau, traveling widely in Nanyang and around the United States. Kwan performed with his own troupe on the West Coast during the early 1930s and, as we have seen, acted in the first Cantonese talkie, Romances of the Songsters, made by Joe Chiu in San Francisco. Kwan returned to Hong Kong to perform on stage and to make two more films in 1935 for Chiu's Grandview, Yesterday's Song and Song of Sadness. He returned to the United States shortly before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War to tour with the Dai Guang Ming troupe. In his autobiography, Kwan says that he was taught archery and the use of the whip by Native Americans. He adored Westerns and their costumes and remained fond of togging up as a cowboy even into his later years. During his busy touring schedule in the States, Kwan became one of the most patriotic Cantonese opera stars, using his performances to campaign for funds in support of the war against the Japanese. His prowess with the whip and with the bow and arrow were features of his money-raising efforts.
It was this wartime touring experience that helped mold Kwan into an heroic figure. Later, when he returned to Hong Kong, he led a theatrical troupe to entertain the troops fighting the Japanese in Guangdong and Guangxi, which further imprinted his image as a national hero -not as a fighter, but as one willing to support the nation, to promote patriotism among common people, and to bolster the morale of soldiers defending their country.
Kwan had favored playing martial arts roles since his youth, particularly General Kwan, the revered "saint" of martial arts in southern China and as drawn in the literary classic, The Story of the Three Kingdoms. He was also famed for playing Wu Song, a character in The Water Margin, another literary classic. General Kwan and Wu Song were legendary figures-royal, virtuous, and forever upholding justice. During the 1960s, Kwan would later make two color films featuring General Kwan, both directed by Moon Kwan and pro-duced by Joe Chiu.
In 1949, he was cast as yet another legendary figure from the late Qing dynasty, namely, Wong Fei-hung (Huang Feixiong), the sifu of a martial arts school and medicine house in Guangdong. Wong taught his disciples kung fu to defend not only themselves but to protect their communities from local thugs and foreign bullies. The firstfilm featuring the character, The Story of Wong Fei-hung, became so popular that Kwan would reprise the role in seventy-six more films, all carrying "Wong Fei-hung" in their titles.
When he finally retired from stage and screen in 1981, he operated his own medicine house and taught local and foreign students, his life in that sense reprising his role as Wong Fei-hung. Next, he toured Southeast Asia, Austra-lia, and America to promote Chinese medicine and shi kung, a method of breathing to strengthen health. When he died, in 1996, Kwan was remembered as a legendary figure and a virtuous kung fu master.
Wong Hok-sing. Wong Hok-sing was born in Guangdong province and un-derwent opera training in an institute in Guangzhou. He joined the opera troupe led by Sit Kok-sin as a "martial" actor and, later, the Taiping Opera Troupe led by Ma Sze-tsang. In 1940, he appeared in his firstfilms, The Marrying General and The Legend of Wang Zhaojun. The same year he was invited to perform in the United States, where he remained until the end of the Pacific war. From 1941, he directed and acted in several films made by Grandview (U.S.) under the name of Wong Kam-yan. After the war he joined Grandview in Hong Kong as a director and actor. In all, Wong directed more than 160 films for several different companies between 1941 and 1967, among them many Cantonese opera films and some comedies. Together with Chiu he pioneered the use of color in Cantonese cinema. In 1971, he moved to the United States, where he managed a theatre in San Francisco.
Chun Siu-lei. Chun Siu-lei (Qin Xiaoli) learned Cantonese opera and stage fighting during her childhood from a friend of her father. In 1939, she joined
a troupe of Cantonese opera actors and other artists who performed at the Golden Gate International Fair in San Francisco, where Chun performed burlesque and kung fu. The same year, it is said that she befriended an American show dancer called Helena who taught her Western dancing as well as vaudeville-style performance, which she used upon her return to Hong Kong.20 There, she joined a dancing variety troupe that performed in Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
During the war, Chun joined a Cantonese opera troupe and after the war became a leading opera performer. Chun was the first to bring burlesque to Cantonese opera, even elements like semi-nude or bath scenes, along with singing, acrobatics, and special effects in plays like Lady Tangee and the Hill of Flesh and Cave of the Spider Woman. These highly popular plays were later made into films. Chun tested the limits of censorship (and of the tradi-tional moral codes) by further developing those elements of sex, violence, and horror in local films. Chun thereby became a famous postwar sex symbol, starring in supernatural films like Sex to Kill the Devil (1949), Magic Lamp in the Moon Palace (1951), and The Empress is a Devil (1951).
Yum Wu-fa. Yum Wu-fa (Ren Huhua) started as a Cantonese opera playwright in the 1930s, and one of his plays won an award in Guangzhou. He wrote and directed a film called Miss Killer before he traveled with an opera troupe to the United States in 1937. By talking with elderly Chinese-American people in various Chinatowns, he collected material that he later converted into several pulp novels under the series heading "Chinese King of Hired Killers." The protagonist of the series was called Charlie Chiu, a professional tough guy from China, hired as a troubleshooter by the American tongs. Yum used a mixture of languages -old style, colloquial native, and overseas Chinese -in stories so vivid it was almost as if they had been ripped from Hollywood B-movies. (A well-known serial-drama produced by Hong Kong's RTV in the late 1970s was based on these novels.) In 1939 and 1940, Yum wrote a screenplay, Searching for Her Husband, for Hong Kong-based Freedom Film Co. The film was shot on location in New York, San Francisco, and other West Coast cities, using a U.S. crew led by director Jimmy Williams. The film concerns a young Cantonese girl who joins a touring opera troupe in order to search for her missing husband in the United States. As with Ma Sze-tsang, Yum was impressed by his visits to Hollywood studios and theatres, and he was no less impressed by the patriotic spirit of the overseas Chinese.21
In 1941, Yum wrote the screenplay Good Son, Good Daughter for Grand-view (Hong Kong). In the same year he scripted and directed two films: Snow White and Her Seven Friends, a satire about a girl reforming her friends and their various flaws and bad habits, and The Mysterious Woman, a comedy-thriller beginning with the murder of a pretty woman whose corpse causes a lot of trouble. Scenes include a coffin flying through the air, the resurrection of the corpse, and court convened to decide who actually owns the body. After the war, Yum became a popular and prolific writer/director specializing in genre films from comedies to thrillers and horror. His wife, Tsi Po-to, was a Cantonese opera actress with considerable touring experience in the United States and a fine comedienne, who appeared in many of Yum's films.
Ng Kam-ha. Ng Kam-ha (Wu Jinxia), known as Esther Eng in the United States, was Cantonese cinema's first female director. Ng's parents came from Toisan, Guangzhou, and she was born in the United States (although another source says she was born in Hong Kong), where she learned to appreciate Cantonese opera. She was educated in California, where she developed an interest in movies and picked up some filmmaking techniques. In 1935, with financial support from some overseas Chinese, Ng made her first independent feature, Sum Hun {Heartache), in San Francisco. It concerned a female pilot (played by Wai Kim-fong) who joined the Air Corps for the interest of serving her country.
It is said that Ng had been chosen by MGM to play the role of Lotus in The Good Earth (1937), but impatient to take her film back to Hong Kong for distribution, she could not wait for the film to start shooting. Sum Hum was released in Hong Kong as Iron Blood, Beautiful Soul, with Wai Kim-fong and Ng onstage to meet the audience after screenings. Wai and Ng began working together on the film National Heroine, released in 1937, starring Wai and directed by Ng. It was said that Wai, an actress who had toured the States with Cantonese opera troupes on several occasions, and Ng were lovers living together in Hong Kong.
It appears that Ng was a strong feminist because all thirty-six of the cast members of her film The World of Women (1938), codirected by Lo Shee, were women, first in Hong Kong cinema. The same year she finished two more films, The Tragic Love (a.k.a. Switch) and Hundred Thousand Lovers, starring Wai Kim-fong, as sole director. Her last film before the Pacific war, Husband and Wife for One Night (1939) was codirected by Wu Pan and Leung Wai-man.
It is reported that she was offered the main role in Sit Kok-sin's English version of Romance of the West Chamber, but at about this time both of Ng's lovers (Wai and another young woman) left her. Perhaps that was why she abruptly left the territory for the United States. In 1940 and 1941 she directed Golden Gate Girl, produced by Golden Gate Film Productions in San Fran-cisco with support from Grandview (U.S.). The film played at the Grandview Theatre and was given a favorable review by Variety (May 8, 1941). Later reports reveal that she was raising money in the United States to return to Hong Kong to make films but was interrupted by the war.
During the war years, she made a color film, The Fair Lady by the Blue Lagoon, for Grandview (U.S.) with a cast of Cantonese artists, some of whom had stayed on because of the war. Fair Lady was a love story about an emigre engineer and a widowed teacher in a primary school for overseas Chinese children. It is a tragic love story set in a small town by a lake, featuring beautiful California scenery and spanning more than a decade.
After the war in 1946, Ng returned to Hong Kong, bringing back her projects. One was called Guerrilla Fighters, with the cast already set and the shooting schedule arranged, although the film was apparently never finished.22 She then toured with a Cantonese opera troupe in Honolulu, while trying to raise money for a new project. The result was the Chinese film Mad Fire, Mad Love (1948) made with the investment of some Chinese merchants and shot in Hawaii.
Retired from filmmaking thereafter, she managed the BoBo Chinese Res-taurant and Esther Eng Restaurant in New York. In the mid-1960s, she made a brief comeback, acting as location director for a Cantonese film produced in Hong Kong and shot in New York, based on a real murder case in New York's Chinatown. She died in San Francisco in 1970. Although no prints of her films survive, it seems that Ng was an unconventional filmmaker and a pioneering female director who warrants further research.
FORMATION OF HONG KONG IDENTITY
The film industries of Hong Kong and Shanghai began at approximately the same time, but from the mid-1920s both centers struggled to compete with Western cinema for a share of their own local markets and to establish some kind of identity. Then came the general strike, which paralyzed Hong Kong cinema from 1926 until 1929. When production resumed in 1930, it was almost like starting from scratch.
In the 1930s, compared to metropolitan Shanghai, Hong Kong was a small city. Hong Kong theatres showed Chinese films made in Shanghai, but Shang-hai did not reciprocate. The adoption of sound proved to be the turning point, resulting in two films that broke vital new ground -the previously mentioned White Gold Dragon and Romance of the Songsters, both made in 1933. The Cantonese-speakers of Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Nanyang, and the U.S. Chi-natowns were naturally eager to see and hear films in their mother tongue. Sound finally opened new markets for the Cantonese cinema to compete against films from the mainland. With this in mind, Shanghai film companies opened branches in Hong Kong, as had Grandview (U.S.), to make Cantonese films. Tianyi (Shaw Brothers) came from Shanghai in 1935, bringing in new directors like Tang Xiadoan. Sound recordist Zhu Qingxian also came to Hong Kong. So Yi became the supervising director of Ma Sze-tsang's Chuen Kou Film Co., and Shanghai-based Yi Hua also established a branch. They brought in more advanced techniques and cooperated with local filmmakers and actors to make Cantonese films. In addition, as we have seen, Chiu and Kwan brought in their Hollywood experiences, first forming Lianhua (Over-seas) Co., with Law Ming-yau, and then Grandview (Hong Kong).
A second turning point was the Sino-Japanese War which began in 1937, when a great number of intellectuals, filmmakers, technicians, actors, and tycoons took refuge in Hong Kong, whose population doubled to 1.6 million.
In 1937, the Shaw brothers completely moved their operations to the territory under the name of Nanyang Film Co., while China's state-owned film studios moved west from Wuhan to Chungking to Chengdu. The film industry in China broke into three centers, with Hong Kong as a neutral conduit for the films and personnel for the other two, occupied Shanghai and Chungking, both of which poured capital and film talent into the colony for political and commercial reasons. The film population increased in great numbers almost overnight. All of these elements created unprecedented pros-perity. In 1934, annual production was 15 films. In 1935, it was 32. In 1936, it was 49. By 1937 it had almost doubled to 85, while in 1938, production rose to 87. And in 1939, it achieved a record high of 125. Production declined thereafter to 89 films in 1940 and to 80 in 1941.23 In that period, Hong Kong became the largest production center of Chinese-language films catering to Chinese communities abroad.
While Chongqing under the Nationalist government mainly produced prop-aganda films to aid resistance against the Japanese, and Shanghai, in the "orphan island" period (1937-1941), made films that were socially irrelevant to the immediate reality, Hong Kong produced both pure entertainment and socially/politically relevant films that supported the anti-Japanese struggle. Compared to 1939, 1940 and 1941 were recession years; even so, within a greater abundance of pure entertainment films (martial arts, horror, and super-natural), there were about ten films each year of the "defense cinema" genre. Even in wartime, entertainment and patriotic cinema appeared side by side in a Hong Kong cinema that was more pluralistic, more adventurous, and more open to different ideologies than the other two production centers. Hong Kong cinema was not just an extension of mainland Chinese cinema nor was it a prewar wasteland made prosperous by the influx of Shanghai filmmakers at around the time of Liberation. It evidently reached a peak in 1938 and 1939 and began the formation of an identity that imbibed Chinese elements from Shanghai as well as Western elements from Hollywood in an interplay with strong local elements such as Cantonese opera. This interplay can be traced to the very beginnings of Hong Kong cinema, and it is still going on today. This is the ever-changing identity of Hong Kong cinema -open-minded, eager to experiment in various topics and genres, never in a fixed pattern, never stopping.
NOTES
Some Chinese researchers have expressed doubts about the actual existence of two of these shorts, namely, Widowed Empress Dowager and The Haunted Pot. See Li Suyuan and Hu Jubin, Zhangguo wusheng dianying shi (A History of Chinese Silent Film), (Beijing: China Film Press, 1996), 21-3. See also Yu Mo-wan, Xiangang
dianying zhanggu (Old Stories of Hong Kong Cinema), Part 1 (1896-1934), (Hong
Kong: Guan jiao jing, 1985), 22.
2.
Jay Leyda, Dianying - Electric Shadows (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972), 11, 394, 519.
3.
Lai Men-wei is credited as writer/director of this film by Jay Leyda in Dianying (see Note 2); he is also so credited by Cheng Jihua in his Zhongguo dianying fazhanshi (History of the Development of Chinese Cinema) (Beijing: Zhangguo dianying chubanshe, 1963). But Yu Mo-wan argues that Lai Buk-hoi was the director. See his Xinggang dianying shi hua (Story of Hong Kong Cinema) Vol. 1, (Hong Kong: Subculture Pess, 1996), 76.
4.
Kwan Man-ching, Zhongguo yingtan waishi (Unofficial History of Chinese Cinema) (Hong Kong: Guangjiaojing, 1976), 126.
5.
Kwan Man-ching, Zhongguo yingtan waishi, 72-6.
6.
Changes in Hong Kong Society Through Cinema. 12th Hong Kong International Film Fesitval (HKIFF) Catalogue, 1988, 111-12.
7.
Kwan Man-ching, Zhengguo yingtan waishi, 134.
8.
As compiled in "Filmography of Hong Kong Cinema (1946-1959)" in Cantonese Opera Film Retrospective (11th HKIFF Retrospective Catalogue, 1987), with amendments here by the author.
9.
Western film audiences may be familiar with this story through the Japanese film version directed by Kenji Mizoguchi in 1955.
10.
Perhaps the Hollywood film Yankee Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz, 1942) would be something of an equivalent to Stage Lights.
11.
Promotion booklet for Stage Lights, Grandview (Hong Kong), 1938.
12. Kwan Man-ching, Zhongguo yingtan waishi, 143.
13.
Gold Mountain (Gam Saan) was the name given to California by Chinese immigrant laborers.
14.
See Lai Bojiang and Wang Jinming, Zhongguo yueju shi (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1988), 365.
15.
Zhongguo yueju shi, 365.
16.
Lai Bojiang, Xue Juexian yiyuan chunqiu (The Artistic World of Sit Kok-sin) (Shang-hai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1993), 153.
17.
The film referred to is probably The Grand Duchess and the Waiter (1926).
18.
Lai Bojiang, Xue Juexian, 120-21; See also Yilin, nos. 51, 52, 54, 55 (April-May 1939).
19.
Lai, Xue Juexian yiyuan chunqiu, 111.
20.
See Chan Chong-gok, Yuequ yiren zhanggu (Story of Cantonese Opera Artists) (Hong Kong: Ma Kam Gei, n.d.).
21.
"Interview with Mr. and Mrs. Yum Wu-fa," Yilin 24 (1938).
22.
As reported in Zhongguo dianying 4 (January 1947).
23.
Films total calculated from the Hong Kong Filmography, Vol. 1, 1913-1941 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 1997). This important volume (679 pages) is the first-ever compilation of all films made in prewar Hong Kong, devoting one page to each of more than 600 films, including stills, synopses, and credits in both English and Chinese. This is the first of several such volumes being prepared by the Hong Kong Archive (founded in 1993) in chronological order.
THE 1960s: MODERNITY, YOUTH CULTURE, AND HONG KONG CANTONESE CINEMA
Poshek Fu
The 1960s was a period of turbulence around the world. The global capitalist order was challenged in a series of youth-led rebellions extending from Amer-ica to France to Japan and Italy. Raised in middle-class comfort, the romantic postwar generation was estranged from the oppression of the dominant values and declared war against the established order. They claimed to fight for the subalterns (women, minorities, and laborers), striving to build a new world of equality and unfettered liberty. Although this brave new world never came to be, the capitalist world has never been the same.
In the British colony of Hong Kong, which had since the 1950s trans-formed itself from an entreport to an industrial city, the 1960s was also a period of rapid economic growth and social turmoil. The advent of capitalist modernization generated a new web of mass production and mass consump-tion that accelerated the erosion of long-standing sociocultural values. Al-though the colony's political system remained as unresponsive as it had been before the economic boom, generational conflicts became acute as the postwar baby boomers became swept up in the appeal of the modern -liberty, free-dom, democracy. Unlike their more cautious parents, many of whom came to Hong Kong to escape the poverty and political upheavals of the mainland, the younger generation was eager to claim the city as their home (as novelist Xi Xi aptly put it, ''My City"1) and thus articulate their criticsm of the colonial situation. To their seniors, they were spoiled, restless, and dangerously west-ernized, turning their backs on traditional codes of behavior (especially filial piety and discipline) and thereby posing a menace to the social order. "Stu-dent disturbances all over the world," one writer proclaimed, "have given the older generation [in Hong Kong] a cause of alarm and worry. They think young people today are both wrong and extreme." Thus, how to "contain the youth problem?"2
This generational conflict -between rebellion and control -was part of the modernity Hong Kong had experienced. Indeed the Cantonese cinema, the most popular mass entetainment in the colony since the 1930s, became in this decade a social discourse in which the processes of capitalist modernization and the questions of youth culture and generation gaps were projected and debated. This chapter aims to reconstruct the Hong Kong cinema of the 1960s, an important cultural event that is little studied in Western scholarship. Since its inception in the 1910s, the Cantonese film industry (along with Cantonese opera) had dominatd the middle and lower end of the colony's urban culture, where more than 90 percent of the populace was originally from southern China and spoke Cantonese as their mother tongue. In the 1960s, however, it steadily lost its local market, displaced by the better-financed and more cos-mopolitan Mandarin film studios from Shanghai (the Shaw Brothers) and Southeast Asia (the Cathay). This "Mandarinization of Hong Kong cinema" brings to the fore the dilemma of the Cantonese cinema: It needed to catch up with the changing realities of the modernized city and the changing demogra-phies of its audiences, yet it was unable to forsake its traditional audience and tradition of social didactism. To resolve this dilemma, they turned to the sensational themes of generational conflicts and the youth problem. Thus the rise of the "youth film" genre (qingchun plan), which juxtaposed in highly ambivalent ways two contradictory ideas: the way the new generation can be and the way it ought to be. This ambivalent genre failed to stop the decline of the Cantonese cinema.
The dilemma and production strategy of the Cantonese cinema shed light not only on the cultural and social formations of this turbulent decade, but on current debates about the junction between modernity and cinema, media politics, and colonial identity. This chapter attempts to address these issues by situating Cantonese film in a context of multiple social and cultural discourses on modernity and identification. It is not my intention to engage in a detailed analysis of the narrative structures of Cantonese film and how it reflected the social turmoil. Rather, by highlighting the cultural politics of cinema as a social apparatus, I hope to map out the ambivalent ways in which Hong Kong experienced modernity in the 1960s.
In the wake of the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, tens of thousands of Chinese streamed across the border to Hong Kong to escape Communism. In less than a year, the colony's population increased 20 percent. Among these refugees were diasporic entrepeneurs and financiers from Shang-hai who brought capital and business skills to their new home. The Commu-nist victory in the mainland in 1949 drew to a close the entreport trade that had heretofore dominated the local economy. Thanks in part to the Shanghai entrepreneurs' capital and resourcefulness, Hong Kong came through the Korean War in the 1950s to transform itself into an export-oriented manufac-turing economy. An industrial city was born. Although there were only 1,284 factories in Hong Kong in 1957, for example, the number grew to 5,135 in 1960, to 9,002 in 1965, and to 11,793 in 1968.3 Similarly, between 1959 and 1973, gross domestic production (GDP) increased at an annual average of
10.8 percent and a growth rate for manufactured exports of 12 percent.4
Under the watchful eye of the powerful finance secretary, Sir John Cow-perthwaite, who pursued a laissez-faire policy of maximum profit at the expense of social equality (i.e., continued low taxation, low public expendi-ture) throughout the 1960s, Hong Kong's industriial economy boomed.5 This economic prosperity was engineered chiefly by labor-intensive industries such as textiles, wigs, and plastics. For example, among the 559,000 workers employed in the manfacturing sector in 1969, more than one third engaged in textile and plastics industry.6 This continuously expanding manufacturing economy was possible in part because of the huge increase in population, which reached 4 million by 1970 (compared to 600,000 in 1945). This in-crease resulted from the coming of age of the postwar baby boomers and the new influx of mainland refugees in the early 1960s. Both groups provided a constant supply of cheap labor for industry.
According to the official census of 1961, half of the total population was under the age of 21.7 In a period during which the distribution of economic prosperity was glaringly uneven and public service was minimal, most young people, unlike their counterparts in North America and Western Europe, had to support their families by joining the ranks of industrial labor. Before 1967, workers had to put in ten hours a day six days a week but the average monthly salary was between $100 for unskilled laborers and $300 for skilled. As a result, 45 percent of the families in the colony were officially acknowledged to be living below the poverty line (less than $400 per month).8
With the tremendous growth of urban population, the living conditions of the poor were horrendous. As the average density in the colony reached 8,000 people per square mile in the mid-1960s, most people were crowded in slums. A home for a family of eight often meant no more than "a single bed-space sandwiched between two others, one above and one below; or where a bed-space has to be shared by three families in rotation every 24 hours. Or when one has to live in the midst of rubbish heaps and permanent stench in the squatter area; or in a flat where sunlight and fresh air are unknown."9 In fact, most of the colony's apartments were partitioned into many cubicles -and these were often further subdivided into bedspaces -by the landlord or principal tenant. Windows were luxuries.10
During the 1960s, Hong Kong's political structure remained a top-down, authoritarian system in which there was practically no connection between the colonial state and the society. There was no representative democracy and no guaranteed political rights. In the midst of decolonization movements in many parts of the British empire, as Hong Kong Standard editorialized in 1964: "The Government [in Hong Kong] believes not only that there is no need to change, but that change can be indefinitely avoided, that Hong Kong can remain a nineteenth-century type of colony for ever and ever."11 Indeed, except for a small clan of Anglicized Chinese elites, who were all business leaders or lawyers who served as "political compradors" to advise the gov-ernment on local affairs, all the natives were second-class subjects, not citi-zens, excluded from the domain of public life. Similar to how Partha Chatter-jee has described the colonial situation of India, the "public" belonged exclusively to the Europeans in Hong Kong; their opinion was public opinion, and "colonized subjects could never be its equal members." Their racial difference, it was said, made them not "fit subjects for responsible govern-ment."12 This lack of representative democracy and the glaring inequality of wealth in Hong Kong created a political climate in the 1960s that was as oppressive as it was disquieting. Corruption was rampant in the colonial law enforcement, and due to the lack of public service, social problems like gambling, prostitution, opium addiction, organized crime, and juvenile deli-quency seemed uncontrollable.13
Voices of discontent gradually emerged. The advent of industrial capitalism gave rise to a "revolution of expectation" among the masses, who became increasingly captivated by the wider availability and spectacular display (in department stores and advertisments) of consumer goods, by the dazzling circulation of images and bodies in shopping areas, and by the marketplace of new ideas (through the popular press, radio broadcasts, and the new medium of television). Education that privileged English and a Westernized curriculum became more accessible. As a result, the new generation became better in-formed of the world surrounding them. At the same time, the rapid expansion of manufacturing also created more opportunities for young people, and this contributed to the gradual loosening of social values and gender hierarchies. Throughout the 1960s, there was a marked increase of youth and women in the labor force. For example, among the 24,000 new hires in the textile industry by mid-1966, more than 13,800 were women.14 The demand for young workers, especially women, not only narrowed the generation and gender gap in the workplace but also, more significantly, increased the roles and importance of youths and women in family and society.
Amid the global movement of youthful insurrections, the coming of age of the better-educated, "modern" postwar generation, and the increasing erosion of traditional values coalesced into a discourse on the "youth problem" in the public sphere. The public discourse took on a sense of urgency after the 1966 and 1967 "riots." In April 1966, a young worker called So Sou-chung (Su Shouzhong) staged the first hunger strike in the colony's history against the proposed fee hike of the Star Ferry. The hike was widely seen as precipa-tating yet another wave of rising living costs. Probably inspired by So's protest, a mass demonstration soon took place in Kowloon, which was to escalate into a riot when the police intervened, resulting in 1 death and 1,425 arrests.15
A more violent riot broke out a year later. Following a series of labor strikes in Kowloon's industrial section in May 1967, the pro-communist establishment, which was instigated by the ultra-leftist politics in China, stepped in and shifted the protest into a political fight for decolonization. Hong Kong was enmeshed in the political fanaticism of the Cultural Revolu-tion (1966-76). Although many of its footsoldiers were young workers, the decolonization movement ignored local social issues and thus failed to mobi-lize popular support. Instead, the strategies it pursued -violent demonstration, economic stoppages, and random bombings -paralyzed the city and caused many innocent deaths. In the end, the riot only alienated the populace, who supported the colonial government's efforts to suppress the disturbance in the name of preserving "order and prosperity." For example, the Student Union of the elite Hong Kong University proclaimed in May 1967 that: "We abso-lutely oppose the riots in the recent days. . .. We believe that all Hong Kong residents need a stable life.. . . We appeal to all of you, especially young students, to stay firm in your commitment, not to be incited by any clique or its ideas, not to get involved in anything that would disrupt social stability." In the meantime, Beijing quietly withdrew its support of the local leftist group for fear of disrupting the status quo of the colony. The riot died down in December.16 Thus, ironically, the 1967 riot ended up strengthening the colo-nial government. As one observer noted, "it did nothing whatever to alter the existing distribution of power but rather aimed at consolidating the shaken authority of the bureaucracy. . . ,"17
Still, the upheavals forced the colonial authorities to acknowledge the rapidly changing socioeconomic conditions and politics of demographics of Hong Kong. It commissioned two independent investigations, which reported that terrible living conditions, blatant social inequality, and the alienation of the young generation were the underlying causes of the riots, and these issues needed to be dealt with immediately to prevent any further social turmoil. If these social problems remained unsolved, they warned, Hong Kong's afflu-ence would be in jeopardy.18 As a consequence, the colonial government steadily expanded its regulatory role in the economy. The new governor, Sir Murray Maclehose, took office in 1971 with a clear mandate from London to make the colony a "less unequal society" by steadily increasing public expenditures on housing, education, and medical care.19
The British also seemed to have relaxed a little its control of political dissents after the riots. In the name of promoting continuous "prosperity and stability," debates on various social issues pervaded the public realm, and no other issue created as many reverberations as the "youth problem": how to prevent the young generation from violating law and disrupting social order?
As the revered newsman Shum Wai-yau (Shen Weixiu) described, it was the "most pressing problem in Hong Kong" at the time.20 Another journalist concurred: "After the 1966 riot, the youth problem in Hong Kong has become an issue of deep concern among people of every class."21 Echoing this angst, the famous leader of the pro-British elites, Sir Fung Ping-fun (Feng Bingfen), gave a reading of the problem in terms of the "generation gap" subsequent to the city's rapid modernization. With the two riots and the global student insurrections in mind, he outlined in a moralistic tone the various symptoms he found most prevalent among the Hong Kong boomers: Unlike their hard-working, war-weary parents, they were alienated, restless, antisocial, melan-cholic, spoiled, and weak-willed, and thereby easy prey to manipulation by "evils." This explained, he emphasized, the recent surge of ahfei (juvenile delinquents, young rebels) and social disturbances. Also, he pointed out cor-rectly that part of the youth problem stemmed from the lack of career oppor-tunities in a society in which a person was increasingly judged by how much one made not by how good one was.22 (In 1968, for example, there were 10,692 high school graduates, but only one tenth of them could go on to pursue higher education. The rest had to fight for a limited number of white-collar jobs, the largest employer being the government, which could take in no more than 500 from a total pool of more than 5,000 applicants.)23 Clearly, Fung remained in line with the paternal colonialsm and top-down approach of the government (an approach in some ways congruent with Confucian pater-nalism), which enjoyed increased popularity in the wake of the 1967 riot. The colonial government's position was cogently expressed by the secretary of colonial affairs: "Unless middle-aged people provide the young with mean-ingful activities, they will definitely go astray."24 In fact, a few government agencies, social service organizations, and volunteer groups sprang up in the late 1960s to serve and "guide" youths away from disrupting Hong Kong's
"prosperity and stability."25 This widespread anxiety about the youth problem and efforts to contain it became a major structuring theme and marketing strategy of the Cantonese cinema in the 1960s.
In the 1960s, the Cantonese cinema was subjected to a process of displace-ment and marginalization that was associated with the modernity of everyday life in Hong Kong. Coincident with the economic restructuring and the growth of capitalism, the movie industry had undergone a series of reorganizations in response to rapid changes in demographics, market conditions, and social norms. The greatest challenge for local filmmakers was to find ways to maximize profits in a mass market that had become younger and more vola-tile. Unlike their Mardarin counterparts, which was dominated by the Shaw Brothers Studio, the Cantonese film industry failed disastrously to adapt to the new situation. Its top talents fled, and the industry collapsed. The trend was reversed only with the rise of a new generation of filmmakers in the 1970s (e.g., Allen Fong and Ann Hui), who pioneered a new aesthetics of local identification and managed to lure back the audience, which had left en masse in the 1960s.
Hong Kong had been a center for Cantonese filmmaking since the 1920s and 1930s. But due to the limited market and lack of government support (both Chinese and colonial), except for two or three larger production com-panies, the local film industry was filled with small independents lacking studio facilities and major stars under contract. Compared to the pre-1949 Shangahi industry, it was small in capitalization and technologically unsophis-ticated. In fact, although an average of about 200 films were produced every year in the 1950s, most were made on a shoe-string budget, with an average production cost of HK$50,000 to 60,000.26 These films involved little cine-matic innovation and appealed mostly to the semiliterate and illiterate masses. Cantonese films of the 1950s continued the trend begun in the 1930s, stressing traditional values regarding human relations (i.e., filial piety, friendship, com-munity), melodramatic form, and the imperative of social didactism. Best examples were the popular martial arts series Wong Fei-hung (Huang Fei-xiong) and the family melodrama Gar/Jia {Family).21
Cantonese cinema remained very much the same for most of the 1960s. Small companies, a small market (mainly Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malay-sia), and small budgets were the norm. Operating on shoe-string budgets, Cantonese filmmakers had to cut corners every way imaginable. Salaries were generally low, even for the biggest stars of the period, Chan Po-chu (Chen Baozhu) and Josephine Siao Fong-fong (Xiao Fangfang), who rarely got more than HK$ 10,000 for each film. To survive, actors and directors had to work on as many projects at the same time as possible.28 As stars carried the box-office burden, investment in them always took up the largest part of the budget. Thus, little money could be spent on other aspects of production. For example, most screenwriters had to work on a freelance basis, selling their scripts to whomever wanted them for as little as HK$ 1,000 to $2,000.29 What seemed to count most was not creative talent but the ability to meet deadlines and to stay abreast of current fads. Indeed, as in the 1950s, adapting or simply stealing ideas from folktales, Cantonese operas, foreign films, or popular novels were common strategies of scriptwriting. Aside from a few top direc-tors like Chor Yuen (Chu Yuan) and Lung Kong (Long Gang), most directors had little space for creativity as the number of shots and amount of raw film for each production was tightly controlled. Any extra use was deducted from their own salaries.30 Studio facilities were also bad. For example, the poor lighting system and bad sound recording often compromised the artistic integ-rity of productions by creating unnecessary shadows and noises.31
The prevalence of small production encouraged perpetuation of certain precapitalist modes of economic behavior. Nepotism, personal connection, seniority, and conformity were prevalent, as veteran director Chan Wan (Chen Yun) testified, in an industry that was built on a hierarchical system of mentor-apprentice relationships. Thus, most "new" directors and screenwriters in the 1960s, including Chan Wan and Wong Yiu (Wang Yao), actually formed their intellectual outlooks, artistic orientation, and filming approaches in the 1950s. There was little opportunity for young talent to break into prominence without good connections (e.g., Chor Yuen, whose father was the famous actor Cheung Wutyou, or Zhang Huoyou) or without incurring animosity (e.g., Lung Kong).32
There was also no vertical integration of the kind that was favorable to filmmakers in the Cantonese film business. It was instead dominated by exhibitors and distributors who not only took in the largest shares of box-office receipts but exerted strong influence on producers by means of financ-ing. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was not uncommon for small independents to finance their projects by preselling (mai pianhua) or preleasing them to exhib-itors and distributors. To secure financing, filmmakers often had to give up a certain degree of control over their productions (as in casting or in choices of themes). Most producers also had no control over release schedule or publicity strategies. Indeed, in the early 1960s, many producers were enraged by the theatre owners' decision to limit all new releases to one-week showings in order to reduce their financial risks. This exhibition policy, as many filmmak-ers pointed out, discouraged serious production at a time when the industry needed to be more adventurous and aggressive.33 In fact, as discussed earlier, the 1960s was a period of rapid industrialization, social unrest, and changing demographics in Hong Kong. The processes of modernization had begun to affect the everyday lives of the masses. It was in this context that Mandarin cinema edged its way to dominance in the film world, in which more than 90 percent of the spectators were Cantonese, displacing the Cantonese film to the margin. In fact, many important Cantonese independents were, as in the case of Huang Zuohan's Ling Kong (Lingguang) Studio, originally Mandarin pro-ducers who moved to dialect filmmaking to avoid direct confrontation with the Mandarin cinema giant, Shaw Brothers Studio.
In fact, no one was more critical in engineering this complex process of cultural displacement, or what I. C. Jarvie calls the "Mandarinization of Hong Kong cinema," than Run Run Shaw, the founder of Shaw Brothers. The youngest of the four Ningbo brothers who opened the Tianyi Studio in 1930s Shanghai, Shaw was not the first Mandarin filmmaker to try to open the Hong Kong market. Since 1935, Shanghai filmmakers and actors had been coming to Hong Kong to escape war or to search for new career opportunities. But the first major Mandarin film studio did not appear until 1947 when the Shanghai film legend Zhang Shangkun and tycoon Li Zuyong founded Yon-ghua (Eternal China). It went under after producing several critically ac-claimed films (like Bu Wancang's Guohun, or National Spirit) and was taken over in 1956 by the Singapore billionaire Dato Loke Wan Tho's Cathay, which wanted to build an Asian film empire. But instead it was Run Run Shaw who fulfilled this dream. Armed with capital from his family's enor-mous theatre circuits and real estate properties in Southeast Asia, Shaw came to Hong Kong in 1958 to take over the family film production business (from his second brother Runde) and changed its name to Shaw Brothers Studio. To compete with Cathay, the shrewd and tremendously energetic Shaw built a "Movietown" in Clear Water Bay to launch a new era of lavish productions in Chinese cinema. The Movietown was the best studio Hong Kong had ever seen. It boasted eleven stages and fifteen permanent sets with an enormous crew and staff of more than 1,700 people. To ensure absolute control and maximum profits in a modernized economy, Shaw built his studio along the Fordist-Taylorist principle of industrial organization: He stressed not so much artistic innovation as standardization, rationalization, mechanization, and effi-ciency. He created a vertical integration of his enterprise, organized his pro-duction as an assembly line, equipped his dream factory with the newest technology, constantly scouted for creative talents and, once discovered, de-ployed systematic strategies to make them stars. Unlike Cantonese film busi-nessmen who were unwilling to spend money outside of production, Shaw understood the importance of promotion and marketing in a mass consummer economy. He built an office for his publicity team under his chief lieutant Raymond Chow in the Movietown and took his products to the Asian film festivals. With such big-budget debuts as the historical dramas Diaozhan (directed by Li Hanxiang) and Jiangshan meiren (Empire and Beauty, directed by Li Hanxiang) Shaw Brothers distinguished itself with lavish values. Shaw invested an average of HK$800,000 in every one of his pictures, which after 1965, were all made in color and for widescreen projection (Shawscope).34
The professionalism, lavishness, rational management, advanced technol-ogy, and aggressive marketing enabled Shaw Brothers to dominate the Hong Kong (and Southeast Asia) cinema. Its productions often set new trends and established new norms in the industry. For example, its signature identification of modernity with glamorous and opulent lifestyle -scenes of nightclubs, parties, expensive houses, and cars -was widely emulated by its competitors (e.g., Chunjiang huayue ye, or Hong Kong Nocturne, and Bu laio qing, or Eternal Love), and its quick-paced "new styled martial arts film" (pioneered by the great director Zhang Che who, as in Du bei dao, or One-armed Swordsman, reinvigorated this old genre by imbuing his characters with what he calls "strong masculinity" and a certain rebelliousness "typical of modern man")35 created an important genre in Hong Kong -in fact, in Asian -cinema.
By the mid 1960s, Shaw Brothers defeated Cathay, which had been declin-ing steadily after the sudden death of Loke in 1964, it forced most indepen-dents out of the market. The independents either moved to Taiwan (e.g., Tong Yuejuan's Xinhua) or changed to dialect production (e.g., Huang Zuohan's Lingguang).36 Cantonese cinema, which had been the staple of popular enter-tainment since the 1930s, was also increasingly pushed to the margin. Its market share was quickly diminishing. Whereas Mandarin films expanded into such major overseas market as Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, (and Chinatowns in the Americas), Canton-ese films had access only to Singapore and Malaysia.37 Its local market was also rapidly losing ground to Shaw Brothers. Production figures revealed the trend clearly. Between 1964 and 1969, Mandarin films boasted a permanent circuit of six first run theatres, and its productions hovered between 44 and
66. However, 1964 marked the beginning of the trend of Cantonese cinema toward sluggishness (danfeng) or, as some critics claimed, death.38 Indeed new releases fell continuously from 207 in 1963 to 177 in 1964, 173 in 1965, 133 in 1966, 92 in 1967, 80 in 1968, and less than 100 in 1969. Whereas there had been four theatre circuits for Cantonese film in 1964, the number dropped to three in 1966 and then to only two in the late 1960s. Even so, supply of new features was not sufficient to sustain the business. Theatre owners were forced to import cheap movies from Japan and Taiwan and to screen older movies to fill in the gaps. As a writer sadly commented, "Rarely has it been like it is today that film production lags so behind distribution!"39
A comparison of the box-office receipts between the two industries was even more striking. Although foreign (mainly Hollywood) films remained the box-office winner with an average annual gross of HK$ 1,000,000 throughout the 1960s, Mandarin films quickly took over the market. The average annual gross of Mandarin cinema (especially those of Shaw Brothers whose films grossed an average of HK$350,000) jumped from HK$3,600,000 in 1964 to well over $12,000,000 in 1966. Although there are no gross figures after 1966, we know that the big Mandarin smash, Zhang Che's Du bei dao {One-Armed Swordsman) (1967) took in more than HK$ 1,000,000 and King Hu's Long-men kezhan (Dragon Inn, 1968) grossed HK$2,252,000, which for the first time in Hong Kong history topped the most popular Hollywood feature of the year, Where Eagles Dare ($1,142,000). But overall Cantonese films, mostly still in black-and-white, did poorly. Aside from the all-time blockbuster Wong Yiu's Guniang shiba yi duo hua (A Young Girl Is Like A Flower, 1966), which took in HK$500,000, Cantonese hits grossed an average of HK$ 170,000-200,000 (e.g., Chan Wen's 1966 romance Shaonu xin, or A Girls's Heart, and Chor Yuen's 1965 thriller Hei meigui, or The Black Rose). Most grossed less than HK$ 100,000. These figures are more startling (and disappointing to the film industry) in the context of a booming entertainment business "despite the riots," as one writer wryly noted.40
Indeed, although the Shaw Brothers productions had few connections to local life and rarely touched on social issues, their image of a modern city bounding with energy and glamour helped Mandarin films join Hollywood films as the preferred, voguish source of popular entertainment in Hong Kong, especially among the younger generation. It brought to sharp relief the cheap-ness, sloppiness, conservatism, and precapitalist mode of organization and production of the Cantonese cinema. To survive, it would have to appeal to a younger, better-educated, more sophisticated Cantonese-speaking audience.
Ill
Hong Kong cinema of the 1960s, both Mandarin and Cantonese, was a ferocious world of economic rivalaries, sensationalism, and commercialism. The Cantonese industry, in particular, was crowded with what can be called exploitation companies, small production companies seeking to make a quick profit by exploiting a current or sensational subject or by "following the proven box-office record." The industry lacked a coherent production and marketing strategy and a space for creative innovation. In fact, its approach to production in the early part of the 1960s remained within the formulaic framework of the 1950s. Along with many period pieces that were actually documentary re-presentations of Cantonese operas appealing to the older audiences, most Cantonese films were family melodrama and romantic trage-dies characterized by unabashed sentimentality and strong social didactism. To satisfy the emotional needs of their target audience, they all in one way or another celebrated traditional virtues of filial piety, decency, sympathy, and self-sacrifice amid a rapidly changing social context. These themes were evident in big hits of the time: Chor Yuen's Kelian tianxia fumu xin/Ho lin tin hafumo sum (The Great Devotion, 1961), or Ng Chor-fan/Wu Chufan's Renhai guhong/Yan hoi gu hung (Orphan, 1960, starring Bruce Lee).
But by the mid-1960s, particularly after 1966 and 1967, the combined pressures of Mandarin cinema, changing demographics, and widespread anxi-ety about the youth problem forced some Cantonese filmmakers to look for new subjects and approaches. As veteran directors Wong Yiu and Chan Wan testified, they had became painfully aware of the "decline" of the Cantonese movie industry around the mid-1960s and realized that, to survive, they had to reach the young generation, which now made up the major core of local market, especially factory workers, young housewives, and high school stu-dents (they assumed that college students would watch only French or Holly-wood films).41
In 1966, then, Wong Yiu made Guniang shiba yi duo hua (Girls Are Flowers), a romance full of narrative twists and young, energetic characters. It was a huge box-office success. Its star, Chan Po-chu/Chen Baozhu, who played a pure-hearted, strong-willed girl overcoming social snobishness and various adversities to marry the son of a millionaire, won the heart of many young audiences. The success spawned many imitators and thereby launched the "youth film," an important genre in the 1960s, which engaged the theme of youth culture and catered to the young generation. As a genre, youth film embraced different cinematic forms: comedy, tragedy, boy-and-girl romance, social melodrama, and thriller. But common to them all was a seeming determination to capture the modernity of the city and its people, strategic images that had been popularized by Mandarin film-the speed, glamour, energy, crowdedness, overstimulation, and restlessness of the new Hong Kong. Typically featuring Chan Po-chu or Siao Fong-fong (who became a household name after starring in Chan Wen's 1966 romantic drama Xiaonu xin, or Romance of A Teenage Girl), young idols famous for their many talents (dancing, singing, and kung-fu fighting) and their fresh, energetic looks, youth films were filled with the modern trappings middle-aged film-makers thought the young audience would want: dancing parties, nightclubs, bars, campfire dances, B-B-Q outings, scenes from school life, sport cars, extravagant homes and yachts, Western fashions, dating, fighting, and musical scenes.
Underneath these modern trappings were, however, a continued tendency to make didactic statements about social issues, a tendency that put to the fore the ideological contradictions of these films. They allowed the young audi-ences to desire and experience vicariously a fantastic world of dazzling mo-dernity, yet at the same time took this world away by proseltyzing the ' 'right way" the audience ought to follow. Thus, for example, in the climactic scene in Chan Wen's Xiaonu xin, the main character, a poor college student (Wu Fung/Hu Feng), curses the prevalent social inequality that causes so much social suffering, but for most of the film we see him enjoying his life in expensive houses and lavish nightclubs, dating (with the Siao Fong-fong character), and partying. Or, in Ng Tan/Wu Dan's hit Mofu qingchun (Waste Not Our Youth), after displaying a fantastic life of beachside B-B-Q parties, go-go dances, and all sorts of teenage fun, the spoiled girl played by Chan Po-chu realizes her true love is her father's choice, a prudent, boring man with traditional values.
Indeed, one major theme of most youth films was the concern of the day, the so-called youth problem -a catch-all term that included juvenile delin-quency, generation gap, social diasaffection, drug addiction, sex crimes, and the rock 'n' roll craze. Many of the films' narratives centered around the young generation that was either alienated from the social order or simply wanted to have fun. This made possible scene after scene of partying and dating, which ended invariably in a climactic incident through which the children reembraced the patriarchal norm, which, in turn, led to a happy ending in which generational conflicts were resolved and true love found.
The moral didactism of youth films demonstrated the deep anxiety about the social danger of generational conflicts, as articualted at the same time by Shum Wai-yau and Sir Fung Ping-fun among Cantonese filmmakers, even as they sought to save the industry by reaching the young generation. This contradiction was powerfully and subtly played out in Lung Kong/Long Gang's social molodrama, Feinu zhengzhuan {The Teddy Girls). Opening in 1969, two years after the riot, it was an instant hit, grossing more than HK$700,000 and making its stars, Siao Fong-fong and Sit Ka-yin/Xie Jia-yan, more popular than ever. Feinu zhengzhuan also won critical acclaim for its ambitious script, cowritten by film scholars Lam Nin-tung/Lin Niantong and Kum Bing-hing/Jin Bingxin, and its artistic innovation. It was in many respects a youth film classic, reflecting the cinematic potential and ideological limitation of the genre as well as Cantonese cinema of the 1960s.
Set in rapidly changing Hong Kong, Feinu zhengzhuan opens with a fast-paced, realistic fighting scene in a disco (probably inspired by Shaw Brothers martial arts films) involving the strong-willed teenage rebel Josephine Tsui, who in self-defense hurts several young hoodlums. Estranged from her mother (Ha Ping/Xia Ping), who abandoned her bed-ridden millionaire husband to have an affair with an evil-looking man (Lung Kong), Josephine asks to be sent to the Youth Rehabilitation Center. It turns out to be an alternative community of social and personal relations. Under the middle-aged, liberal-minded director Tu Shu-yen (Tseng Kong/Zeng Guang), it is markedly more "Chinese" and stable than the outside world. Indeed, she is now known by her Chinese name, Yuk-jing, rather than her Anglicized name, Josephine. But this community is not without conflicts. Josephine is subjected to repeated harassement by the old-timers, expecially the two former bar girls Ma Bik-san (Sit Ka-yin) and Wong Su-sie (Mang Lei/Wan Li). She reports them to Director Tu, who acts as a surrogate father to the young girls. Symbolically, he is a new kind of patriarch who projects both authority and empathy. So, despite Yuk-jing's rebellious and insolent appearance, her deferrence to male authority establishes her true nature as a "nice girl." To decode this play of characterization is critical in bringing out the social theme of Feinu zheng-zhuan.
Yuk-jing is later accepted by the old-timers, and they escape from the center in an attempt to seek revenge against the men who are responsible for their "degeneration." It is in this quest for revenge that the director reveals his sociological reading of the youth problem. Although Ma and Wong grew up in poverty and Yuk-jing is an upper-middle-class scion, they all come from broken families. The lack of parental care thus exposed them to all kinds of social evils: the sex business, drug addiction, and organized crime. This is reiterated at the ending in which Director Tu tells a group of reporters who ask him about the origin of juvenile delinquents, ahfei: "The youth problem is actually a family problem as well as a social problem. Dance halls, clubs, bars, drugs, pornographic magazines, overly sexy fashions that are part of the
worn
%
i
Figure 3. Director Lung Kong on the set of The Teddy Girls (1969). Courtesy Hong Kong International Film Festival.
social change .. . all have had bad influence on the youth. They must bear a large part of the responsibility . .. [But,] the major cause for juvenile delin-quency is breakup of family. If young people do not find love in their parents and warmth in their families, they will lose confidence and want to leave home. They will then run across bad elements and become ah fei... All of us, middle-aged people, are therefore responsible for [the youth problem]."
The didactic text of Director Tu's lengthy speech borders on propaganda and brings out the theme of Feinu zhengzhuan. Despite its realistic display of youthful alienation and sensationalism, it actually echoed the paternalistic discourse articulated by the Colonial government and its Chinese advisors. By targeting family disorder as the sole cause of the youth problem, the film brushes aside the issue of blatant socioeconomic inequality that had threatened to tear Hong Kong apart. The easy acceptance of the pampered Yuk-jing by the center youths, all of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds, was socially unrealistic and, indeed, fits in with the Cantonese cinematic tradition of downplaying, even erasing, class differences in social-political formations. By focusing on the melodramatic portrayal of Yuk-jing's family problem and her revenge (against the boyfriend who is believed to be responsible for her mother's suicide), the film also fails to explore the process of capitalist modernization and its transformative effects on social structure and human relationships. Finally, although Feinu zhengzhuan begins as an ambitious exploration of the complex sociology of the youth problem, it ends by simpli-fying the issue to an emotive plea for empathetic tolerance and paternal guidance on the part of the older generation, that fell in line with the social reductionism of paternalism championed by the likes of Shum Wai-yau or Sir Fung Ping-fun. This ideological position was particularly evident in the cli-mactic sequence in which, after exacting their revenge in a highly melodrama-tic fashion, Ma Bik-san dies in repentance, Wong Su-sie goes mad, and Yuk-jing (who is unable despite her anger to bring herself to kill her enemy) apologizes to Director Tu for all the "crimes" they have committed. In other words, they realize it is wrong to rebel against the established order. It is at this juncture that the new type of patriarch steps up to make the passionate speech quoted earlier to explain to the young audience the immorality of Oedipal rebellion and to remind the older generation of its responsibility to youths, who need their guidance, support, and love. This didacticism echoed the familiar May Fourth discourse of enlightenment and cultural elitism, aptly articulated by writer Lu Xun, "Save our children!"42
At the same time, the outstanding performance of Siao Fong-fong and Sit Ka-yin, and Lung Kong's skillful use of melodramatic language to project contemporary issues, made Feinu zhengzhuan an effective medium for ex-panding the public discourse on the changes in everyday life associated with the rapid industrialization of the colony.43 This increasing social awareness led, ironically, to a growing sense of Hong Kong as a community among the postwar boomers. For example, one critc of the elitism and careerism of the Hong Kong University students demanded:
You should have the knowledge and wisdom to push the society forward and act to change all its problems.... [What is talent] if you cannot use it to benefit the poor, helpless working class? Our generation of [young] intellectuals should invariably apply our knowledge to social reform.... Hong Kong is not only yours but also ours. The University of Hong Kong does not belong only to you, but also belongs to us and every Hong Kong person, (my emphasis)
In fact, as student rebellions gradually subsided in the West, college students in the colony began to speak out against social injustices and colonial culture
Figure 4. Josephine Siao Fong-fong stars as a young delinquent in The Teddy Girls (1969). Courtesy Hong Kong International Film Festival.
and began to question the ambiguity of their ethnic identity: were they Chi-nese or Xianggang ren (Hong Kongnese). Who were they?44 Many young intellectuals asked themselves: "Have we only concern for the mainland and ignore our four million Hong Kong fellow-patriots?" This questioning and self-reflection brought the identity problem to become a heated debate on the campus of the University of Hong Kong.45
In the 1960s, Cantonese cinema struggled to survive under the twin challenges of rapid social change and the expansion of the modern Mandarin film. As director Lau Fong-kong/Liu Fanggang argued, its moral didactism and attach-ment to traditional film aesthetics and industrial practice alienated the better-educated, more Westernized postwar generation.46 Yet, as evidenced in Feinu zhengzhuan, one important constitutive element in the Cantonese filmic tradi-tion, unlike the Shaw Brothers fantasies, was its deep roots in local culture and its willingness to intervene in social issues. In the changing sociocultural and political context of the 1970s and 1980s, a new generation of more cosmopolitan and better-financed filmmakers, mostly graduates of American film schools, including Ann Hui, Allen Fong, Tsui Hark/Xu Ke, and Michael Hui, emerged to reinvigorate local cinema by articulating an aesthetic of local identification with Western-inspired film language. From this perspective, the 1960s was a painful yet critical transition to the development of a modern Cantonese film culture.
NOTES
1.
Xi Xi, Wo cheng {My City: A Hongkong Story), Eva Hung, trans. (Hong Kong: Renditions Paperbacks, 1993).
2.
Mingbao zhoukan, no. 54 (November 1969), 5.
3.
Xianggang nianjian (Hong Kong Annual), Hong Kong: Huaqiao ribao, 1968, II, 58, and 1969, II, 88-9.
4.
L. C. Chan, "Economic Growth and Income Distribution in Hong Kong," in Ben-jamin Leung and Teresa Wong, eds., 25 Years of Social and Economic Development in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Center of Asian Studies, 1994), 494; Roger Buckley, Hong Kong: The Road to 1997 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 73.
5.
For the economic and financial policies of the "Cowperthwaite years," which spanned the 1960s, see Frank Welsh, History of Hong Kong (London: Harper-Collins, 1993), 458-74.
6. Xianggang nianjian, 1970, II, 78.
7.
See Hong Kong Annual Report, Hong Kong: Government Printer, 1967.
8.
Figures quoted from Xianggang nianjian, 1967, II100; Lu Yan, Xianggang zhanggu (Hong Kong Ancedotes) (Hong Kong: Guangjiaojing, 1981), Vol. 3, 130; and Rosanna Wong, "Youth Development: Reflecting Back and Looking Forward," in Leung and Wong, eds., 380-83
9.
Portia Ho, "The Struggle for Air," quoted from Ming Chan, ed., Precarious Bal-ance: Hong Kong Between China and Britain, 1842-1992 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994), 112.
10.
Buckley, Hong Kong, 56.
11.
Buckley, Hong Kong, 75.
12.
See The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
13.
See, e.g., Xianggang nianjian, 1966 and 1967.
14.
Xianggang nianjian, 1967, II 98-102.
15.
Xianggang nianjian, 1967, II 6.
16.
Quotation is from Xueyun chunqiu: Xianggang xuesheng yundong (A Chronology ofHong Kong Student Movements) (Hong Kong: Yuandong shiwu pinglun, 1982), 18.
17.
Quotation of Ian Scott in Buckley, Hong Kong: 80-1.
18.
Summaries of the two reports can be found in Welsh, History, 458-61.
19. Welsh, History, 476-78. 20. Xianggang nianjian, 1968,1, 1.
21.
Xianggang nianjian, Hong Kong, 1967, II, 122.
22.
Feng Bingfen, "Dangqian de qingnian wenti" (The Present Youth Problem), Xiang-gang nianjian, 1968, II, 1-2.
23.
See Xianggang nianjian, 1969, II, 86-7; 1970, II, 74-6.
24. Xianggang nianjian, 1969, II, 95.
25.
Their activities were mainly recreational and educational, including speech contests, chess contests, summer camps, reading groups, youth centers, and various kinds of sporting events. The most active youth organization in the late 1960s was the Youth Branch of the Hong Kong-Kowloon Neighborhood Association (founded 1967). See Xianggang nianjian, 1969, II, 95-96.
26.
Law Kar and Cindy Chan, "Chen Yun changtan liushi niandai Yueyu pian jie" (Interview with Chen Yun), in Law Kar, ed., The Restless Breed: Cantonese Stars of the Sixties (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1996), 111-12.
27.
For discussions of 1950s cinema, see Cantonese Cinema Retrospective (1950-1959) (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1978).
28.
See "Yijiu liuqi nian yingshi Chen Baozhu de tianxa," (It Is Still Chen Baozhu's World in 1967), Mingxing quwen (February 1967); see also Law Kar and Cindy Chan, "Chen Yun changtan," 107-22.
29.
Law and Chan, "Chen Yun changtan," 109.
30.
Law and Chan, "Chen Yun changtan," 110-11.
31.
Sek Kei, "Wang Yao tan yuepian" (Wang Yao on Cantonese Movies), in Law Kar, ed., The Restless Breed, 124.
32.
See Law and Chan, "Chen Yun changtan," 112.
33.
See Huang Zhuohan, Dianying rensheng {My Cinematic Life), Taipei: Wanxiang tushu, 1994.
34.
For discussions of the Shaw Brothers, see I. C. Jarvie, Window on Hong Kong: A Sociological Study of the Hong Kong Film Industry and Its Audience, Hong Kong: Center of Asian Studies, 1977; Zhang Che, Huigu Xianggang dianying sanshi nian {Hong Kong Cinema in Thirty Years), Hong Kong: Sanlain shudian, 1989, 21-32; and Huang Zuohan, Dianying rensheng, ch. 2-5.
35.
Zhang Che, Huigu Xianggang dianying sanshi nian, 61.
36.
Huang Zuohan, Dianying rensheng, 105-52.
37.
Huang Zuohan, Dianying rensheng, 124, 145.
38.
See, e.g., Mingbao zhoukan, no. 76 (April 26, 1970) and no. 85 (June 28, 1976).
39.
Gujin Ming, "Yi nian lai de Xianggang yingtan" (Hong Kong Cinema in The Last Year), Yule huabao, January 1967, 2-3.
40.
Xianggang nianjian, Hong Kong, 1968, II, 117-18.
41.
See Law and Chan, "Chen Wen changtan," and Sek Kei, "Wang Yao tan Yue-pian."
42.
For a critical discussion of May Fourth notions of modernity and enlightenment, see
Leo Ou-fan Lee, ' 'Modernity and Its Discontent: The Cultural Agenda of the May
Fourth Movement," in Kenneth Lieberthal et al., eds., Perspectives on Modern
China, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1991, 158-77.
43.
See Mingbao zhoukan, 54 (November 1969), 1.
44.
For a fine documentary collection of major social movements in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s, see Xueyun chunqiu.
45. See Mingbao zhoukan, no. 56 (December 1969), 15; Xueyun chunqiu, 181.
46. Mingbao zhoukan, no. 53 (November 1969), 2.
THE 1970s: MOVEMENT AND TRANSITION
Stephen Teo
In 1970, mainly on the strength of Mandarin-language kung fu films, the Hong Kong cinema was poised to make a spectacular entry into the interna-tional cinema marketplace. By 1979, Mandarin-language cinema was dead, replaced not only by a new form of kung fu cinema, but by a veritable new wave of filmmaking. How did the Hong Kong cinema of the 1970s change so drastically over the course of the decade? How did a cinema so seemingly preoccupied with the production of genre films give rise to the critically acclaimed Hong Kong New Wave?
The links between the New Wave and the rest of Hong Kong cinema are not very obvious. The domination of kung fu films and the superstar status of Bruce Lee seem a far cry from the socially meaningful pictures that reflected contemporary society and were the hallmarks of the New Wave. The almost total critical disparagement of kung fu films, save for the work of King Hu, whose Touch of Zen (actually made in Taiwan for a Taiwanese production company) won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975, made the New Wave seem a unique and far different sort of film than the West had yet seen from Hong Kong. Yet, as we will see, the kung fu genre could not entirely be quarantined from the developments taking place all around it within the film industry. In other words, the shifts within the Hong Kong cinema may be traceable to a series of significant occurrences that continued to have an impact on the vibrancy and dynamism of the industry. The origins of the New Wave are certainly embedded within the industrial changes of the 1970s. The first signs that something new was about to break could be detected right from the start of the decade, with Tang Shuxuan's The Arch (1970), though some New Wave directors would disavow any influence from this key work.1 Tang's China Behind, made in 1974 but not publicly released in the 1970s, seems as truly significant as anything later produced by the younger directors who constituted the official New Wave. Thus, the New Wave by no means sprang out of a vacuum.
The economic foundation of Hong Kong cinema always seemed shaky, as markets grew and shrunk with equal ferocity. This affected the studio system, naturally, paving the way for an independent production system that was nevertheless tied in various ways to the old studios. By the middle of the decade, the industry appeared to be controlled by older veterans, many of whom had been working for fifteen years or more, such as Li Hanxiang, King Hu, Zhang Che, Luo Wei, Wang Tianlin, Chor Yuen, Lung Kong. Yet the industry could find no place for younger talent, many of whom were, in any case, overseas studying in film schools. But even upon their return they were not immediately taken in by the industry. Instead, many younger filmmakers turned to television, which, among other things, used the Cantonese dialect to appeal to the popular imagination of an increasingly economically successful Hong Kong.
One of the historical ironies of Hong Kong entertainment in the early and mid-1970s is that, while Mandarin thoroughly dominated the motion picture screen, Cantonese moved into television, as if biding its time to make a reappearance in film. The Cantonese cinema, for two decades the engine of the Hong Kong film industry, melted down to zero production in 1972. The gap was entirely taken up by the Mandarin cinema, and this reinforced the lack of continuity between the 1970s and the 1960s. Cantonese cinema's link with the rest of its developmental history was only truly taken up by Michael Hui and firmly entrenched by the New Wave directors much later in the 1970s.2
To be sure, Cantonese cinema was already in decline by the waning years of the 1960s, but its interaction with its Mandarin-language competitors still had a certain vibrancy. It was Cantonese martial arts adventure serials, such as Buddha's Palm (1964), Sacred Fire, Heroic Wind (1966), and the long-running Wong Fei-hung kung fu series that laid the foundation for the Man-darin cinema's adoption of the martial arts genre as a viable force in the market in 1967. Thus, in the development of the genre, it was the Cantonese cinema that actually provided a stimulus to the Mandarin cinema. Later, the advanced production standards of the Mandarin cinema injected creative adrenaline into the Cantonese cinema's interpretation of the genre, as in Chan Lit-bun's superb Green-Eyed Demoness (1967) and The One-Armed MagicNun (1969). Such interaction had completely disappeared by the 1970s and was never to be repeated again.
THE YEARS OF SPEAKING MANDARIN
The break between the 1960s and 1970s appeared drastic, as Cantonese cinema became a nonentity with the dialect virtually extinct in Hong Kong pictures. Mandarin ruled the day. Stars and directors of the Cantonese cinema faced up to the new reality either by defecting to television or switching over to Mandarin features. It is clear in retrospect that this development -the tri-umph of Mandarin-language films-led to a surprising and contradictory result. Instead of consolidating the position of Mandarin cinema, its unin-tended effect was to kill it off. Previously, the production of Mandarin pictures was deliberately kept far below the numbers of Cantonese productions be-cause the industry relied on a small pool of talent consisting largely of Shanghai migrants. The Hong Kong industry did not have a way to replenish its Mandarin talent pool, the mainland having cut itself off from the rest of the world. With its limited pool of talent, Mandarin cinema could maintain production levels of about fiftyfilmsa year on average throughout the 1960s, and sustain higher standards than Cantonese pictures. With the decline of the Cantonese cinema in the 1970s, Mandarin cinema was required to fill the production levels vacated by Cantonese talent.
By almost exclusively devoting itself to the making of Mandarin features, the Hong Kong film industry met with a new rival, Taiwan. The competition between the two production centers had begun by the mid-1960s, to the detriment of the Cantonese cinema, but also further limiting the talent pool of Hong Kong's Mandarin movies as Taiwan attracted directors away from the island.3 In Southeast Asia, Cantonese pictures were wiped out by the distri-bution of made-in-Taiwan Mandarin films. Hong Kong cinema was chal-lenged for the first time by an outsider in its home and traditional export markets even though the nature of investments in the movie business was rather incestuous. By replacing, as it were, the Cantonese cinema and by entering into competition with Taiwan, Hong Kong's Mandarin cinema was increasingly forced to overextend itself.
Hong Kong producers ceased to make Cantonese pictures as investors in Southeast Asia forced the production of Mandarin pictures to meet the rising demand. The two major studios in Hong Kong, Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest, took the opportunity to raise their distribution fees. Indonesian buy-ers, for instance, who were mainly ethnic Chinese businessmen, were asked to pay a nearly 60 percent increase in fees.4 These inflated prices prompted Southeast Asian buyers to entertain the idea of entering into production by financing Hong Kong and Taiwan independent films. Thus, competition be-tween the two majors had the effect of diversifying the industry further, although it also stimulated independent production in both territories. Feeling the pulse of the market, the two Hong Kong majors were shrewd enough to get into the act by launching coproductions with Taiwanese companies and their stars and directors.
Coproductions proved a two-way street. The production of Mandarin pic-tures in Taiwan was undertaken through cofinancing, with major creative input by actors, writers, and directors active in Hong Kong's Mandarin cin-ema. Both industries were related through the financial and distribution ar-rangements put in place by business and political interests. The regime in Taiwan had looked upon Hong Kong's Mandarin cinema as an integral part of China's "free" film industry, because it was overseen by the KMT's (Kuomintang [Guomindang]) cultural bureau operating within the Ministry of Education and the government-run film studio, the Central Motion Picture Company. Thus, Hong Kong pictures were regarded as part of the "national cinema" (guopian) and not subject to import quotas imposed on foreign films.
In 1971, the cultural bureau set out to overhaul the quota system with a view to actively supporting the local film industry. The revenues collected from the importation of foreign films would be pumped back into the local industry, half going directly to the film industry, the other half toward building laboratory and processing facilities through public tenders.5 Aided, then, by the government, Taiwan's film industry was shaping up as a major competitor in the markets where Hong Kong cinema had long dominated, but the integra-tionist arrangements of the two industries were such that there was no question of one industry pushing the other out of the market. However, for a period in the early 1970s, Taiwan's Mandarin cinema seemed to seize the momentum. It appeared to have cornered the market in melodrama or light comedies featuring youthful actors performing a pop tune or two against a backdrop of contemporary Taiwan. Directors Lee Hsing, Pai Ching-jui, and Liu Chia-chang were the exemplary practitioners of the genre.
Taiwan did not maintain its lead in the volatile Southeast Asia market. The kung fu phenomenon that hit the West in 1973 gave the Hong Kong film industry an opportunity to sprint ahead in the commercial stakes. Hong Kong cinema at least had a foothold in the international market. The same could not be said of the Taiwan cinema, notwithstanding the success of King Hu's A Touch of Zen at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975. Indeed, by 1975, Mandarin movies were evidently sinking, as an economic crisis took effect around the region. The alarm bell had sounded back in 1973, the year of Bruce Lee's death and the beginning of the international oil crisis, the latter resulting in factory closures, a reduction in working hours, and the soaring of unemploy-ment and inflation rates, all of which ultimately affected box office takings.
Overproduction in the boom period resulted in a large backlog of Mandarin films awaiting release in the crucial Malaysian and Singapore markets and caused a depression in the market for new releases. In Indonesia, the govern-ment imposed an import quota on Mandarin films. In 1973, it drastically cut imports from 300 in the previous years to 100; in 1974, this was further reduced to only 90 films.6 The situation was to worsen toward the late 1970s. The South Vietnam market was lost as a result of the Communist victory in 1975, while countries like Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore raised import duties on films, and Indonesia continued to cut down on Mandarin imports (the figure for 1977 was fifty-sixfilms).7 Clearly, the party was over for Taiwan's Mandarin cinema as far as maintaining a long-term market presence in Southeast Asia. Taiwanese cinema never recovered its lead. Nevertheless, the territory proved a viable competitor for Hong Kong cinema until the end of the 1970s.
CANTONESE COMEBACK
Hong Kong was certainly not immune to the crisis of the "national cinema." The major factor that impeded the growth and development of Mandarin-language productions was the loss of talent due to aging. The veteran Man-darin-language filmmakers-emigres from the Shanghai cinema like Zhang Shankun, Zhu Shilin, Li Pingqian, Yue Feng, Tu Guangqi, Yan Jun, Tao Qin -who had contributed to the rise of the Mandarin cinema in Hong Kong were either dead or well into retirement by the 1970s. This fact undoubtedly aided the corresponding rise of younger Mandarin filmmakers from Taiwan. It also revealed the paucity of new talent in Hong Kong who could take up the mantle of the veteran Mandarin directors and develop a new Mandarin cin-ema. In effect, Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong abrogated such a task and left it to Taiwan to develop Mandarin cinema by training new talent and giving first-time directors a chance to make films.
Hence, the die was cast for the demise of Hong Kong's Mandarin cinema. The new generation of talent who returned to Hong Kong from overseas film schools were given no incentive to make Mandarin films. The question of identity of these young filmmakers, when aligned to the notion of national cinema, seemed purely academic. National cinema applied only to the Man-darin cinema, but it was a spent force. To the younger breed, the question of identity had to be resolved in a local manner. Being Hong Kongers, identity was firstlya matter of speaking one's mother tongue: Cantonese. To Hong Kongers now used to watching television daily and avidly following local drama series like the phenomenally successful Hotel (1976), which made a star out of a young actor named Chow Yun-fat, and A House Is Not a Home (1977), it was obviously the language of the entertainment world. Television was, after all, where the younger generation of filmmakers could find work as opportunities were denied them in the film industry. The fact that Mandarin dominated the film industry might also have been a factor in their alienation from the industry.
In 1973, when the crisis affecting Mandarin cinema was already evident, Hong Kong reacted by a return to the populist values of Cantonese cinema and to the use of the native dialect. In a sense, Cantonese cinema had not really declined; it had just gone into hiding. By 1973, it reappeared. Television was the key factor that brought about both its disappearance from the big screen and its eventual return. Direct broadcast television was introduced in Hong Kong in 1967 with the establishment of Hong Kong Television Broad-cast Ltd. (popularly known as HK-TVB). The station's name in Chinese was Wuxian Dianshi, meaning "wireless television," referring to its noncable transmission capability that stood in contrast to the cable-transmission station, Rediffusion, that had supplied Hong Kong with television programs beginning in 1957. In 1971, HK-TVB broadcast color programs that were "localized" shows, including Enjoy Yourself Tonight, a variety show, and The Hui Broth-ers Show, starring Michael and Samuel Hui. These shows were produced by local talent rather than foreign programs bought for local transmission. HK-TVB's Cantonese-language channel, Jade, quickly became the top televi-sion channel in the territory, its success symbolized by the popularity of EnjoyYourself Tonight, which ran from its inception until the early 1990s.
HK-TVB maintained a strong lead over rival stations, Rediffusion Televi-sion (which had become wireless in 1973; it is the progenitor of today's Asia Television), and Commercial Television (CTV), established in 1975. The rise of television in the early 1970s corresponded with the decline in the produc-tion of Cantonese cinema. In 1972, 72 percent of households had television sets (609,000 sets in use). Compare this with the 1968 figure when only 12.3 percent of households had televisions (97,000 sets).8 The popularity of local-ized television productions featuring comedy, variety, drama, and martial arts was not only instrumental in bringing Cantonese back to the silver screen, it would also pave the way for the emergence of the Hong Kong New Wave.
In 1973, after a year in which no Cantonese pictures were produced, Shaw Brothers, which was still regarded as the king of the Mandarin film studios, took the lead in the revival of Cantonese by making and releasing The House of 72 Tenants. Directed by Chor Yuen, one of the major talents of the Cantonese cinema in the 1960s who was forced into Mandarin-language filmmaking, the filmused the talents of Cantonese-speaking players from HK-TVB's variety show Enjoy Yourself Tonight and the Shaw Brothers rep-ertory of character actors from Mandarin cinema, all of whom were required to speak Cantonese. Shaw Brothers actually had a vested interest in the project because it was the majority shareholder of HK-TVB. Nevertheless, it was prescient of the studio to make the picture as a Cantonese project.9
House of 72 Tenants ostensibly evoked the tradition of neighborhood dramas, imparting a sense of community and identity that made Cantonese pictures so popular in the past. The film was a big hit, grossing HK$5.6 million, a new record and an achievement that eclipsed the new Bruce Lee film, Enter the Dragon. Its popularity was obviously based on the drama's television antecedence and the fact that it featured many familiar stars.10 The record gross confirmed that Hong Kong cinema had a dependable domestic market to fall back upon when the going got rough in the Southeast Asian market. In the matter of setting trends, Hong Kong would call the shots, and once Cantonese was revived in the cinema, other markets, particularly those in Malaysia where its capital city, Kuala Lumpur, was known as a Cantonese-speaking city among the Malaysian Chinese community, would follow suit.
The success of House of 72 Tenants briefly put Shaw Brothers in the forefront ahead of its rival, Golden Harvest. The studio was credited with many of the creative strokes that contributed to the solid fundamentals of the Hong Kong film industry in 1973 at the time of the oil crisis. It raised the stakes in the domestic market and also took the lead in consolidating the Hong Kong industry's position in the international market. On the latter score, Shaw Brothers initiated and made a series of international co-productions with Britain's Hammer Films and with Italian producers. Internally, reforms were implemented by the production chief, Mona Fong, to make the studio more efficient and to streamline the roster of contract players by employing noncon-tract stars on a freelance basis.
But if Shaw Brothers thought that it had a good thing in the Cantonese dialect, it failed to capitalize on it and blundered by letting a major star loose from its grasp. Having brought Michael Hui to the screen with Li Hanxiang's The Warlord in 1972, Shaw Brothers could not keep him under contract when he made his last film for them in 1974. Like Bruce Lee, Michael Hui was attracted to Golden Harvest through a deal that allowed him to be a quasi-independent filmmaker, directing, writing, and starring in his own films. Hui made Games Gamblers Play in Cantonese and the film-which reminded audiences of The Hui Brothers Show -went on to break the box-office record set by House of 72 Tenants. Shaw Brothers never recovered from the blunder. It very quickly lost its hold on the market in the second half of the 1970s and only Li Hanxiang and Lau Kar-leong gave the studio any box-office credibil-ity. Hui went on to become a top star and to break his own box-office records with subsequent films.11
The rise of Michael Hui parallels that of Bruce Lee in the early 1970s. Both men were regarded as native sons who belonged to and were represen-tative of the postwar generation that grew up in the 1950s without being burdened by the cultural and historical baggage carried by mainland Chinese refugees and immigrants who came to Hong Kong after the war. That Shaw Brothers missed the boat on employing their talents was indicative of the studio's old-fashioned sense of audience values and its lack of familiarity with generational developments. However, Run Run Shaw is nothing if not a consummate showman. There was life in the old studio yet, and its role in driving the Hong Kong film industry forward was beyond dispute. Having lost ground to its rival Golden Harvest, the studio was still a major player by virtue of its formidable record in the production and distribution of motion pictures and its vast business interests in real estate and particularly in televi-sion broadcasting. (Shaw Brothers was, as earlier noted, the majority share-holder in HK-TVB, and its studio operations today are entirely given over to it.) Still, the loss of Michael Hui signaled the end of the studio era, just as the failure to secure Bruce Lee four years earlier had signaled the beginning of the end, though Shaw Brothers continued to produce films until the mid-1980s.
KUNG FU AND MODERNIZATION
Bruce Lee's emergence in the early 1970s should by rights be seen as a link to the tradition of Cantonese cinema's kung fu genre. Yet he developed as a kind of neutral-language star who should have spoken Cantonese on the screen but was dubbed into Mandarin. Lee's role is vague in the continuity between the traditions of Hong Kong cinema from past to present, and be-tween the two major language streams of the Hong Kong film industry. Mandarin cinema's adoption of kung fu in the 1970s seemed an opportunistic denial of the importance of Cantonese cinema's contribution to Hong Kong pictures because the kung fu genre was identified as primarily Cantonese, not only because of its long-running Wong Fei-hung series but also because many of its real-life practitioners were Cantonese. Even the term "kung fu" is derived from Cantonese. In Mandarin, there is no pure equivalent. As director King Hu tried to explain in an interview, "Kung fu doesn't mean anything ... wu shu is the traditional Chinese martial art. Kung fu is like Fu Manchu -it doesn't exist anywhere except maybe in San Francisco's Chinatown."12
Although most critics tend to categorize kung fu as a genre unto itself, it properly belongs in a wider genre of the martial arts pictures (including the sword-fighting films known in Chinese as wuxia pian) and by rights should function as a subgenre. But as it developed in Hong Kong cinema, the kung fu picture was a prerogative of the Cantonese cinema whereas its counterpart in Mandarin cinema was the wuxia pian. However, the kung fu genre did come into its own in the 1970s, essentially with Lee, who muffled the histor-ical north-south division of the martial arts by elevating it to national and international prominence.
Lee had begun as a child star in the Cantonese cinema, but before he turned 20, he returned to America, where he was born. After failing to develop a career as a star in Hollywood, Lee returned to Hong Kong, precipitating a rush by the two major studios (Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest) to secure Lee's services. Shaw Brothers' failure to "catch" Lee had dire consequences for the classic studio system mode of production. Lee's return ultimately resulted in the rise of a quasi-independent production mode in which a big studio such as Golden Harvest made deals with big stars to produce mega-hits and share the profits.
It was Golden Harvest, in fact, that finally secured Lee's services. Realizing the repercussions, Shaw Brothers quickly stole a march on their rival by being the first to come out with a kung fu blockbuster, Jimmy Wang Yu's The Chinese Boxer, released in 1970.13 Realizing also that Lee had an international appeal, Shaw Brothers devised a strategy to move into the international market with a spate of kung fu pictures, successfully releasing Chen Chang-ho's KingBoxer (a.k.a. Five Fingers of Death) and Chor Yuen's The Killer (both released in Hong Kong in 1972) in London's West End and other outlets in Europe and America, well before Lee's films were launched. This marked the first significant entry of Hong Kong movies into Western markets.
Lee was a striking innovator in kung fu. He had invented the technique of Jeet Kune Do while in America and had developed quite a following. Thus he brought a stature to kung fu that it had not previously possessed. In Hong Kong cinema, as noted, kung fu was a Cantonese genre that had a vague kind of status, as director King Hu remarked upon. As soon as it was established as a national genre in Hong Kong cinema by the Mandarin productions of the major studios, it quickly took off in terms of generic development. Lee experimented with the epic and the farcical, with parody and tragedy, in The Big Boss (1971), Fist of Fury (1972), and The Way of the Dragon (1973). Though not themselves New Wave pictures, there was a kind of new wave verve and vigor about them, largely because of Lee's presence and his im-provisatory approach to both acting and kung fu. Unlike the Wong Fei-hung films, say, Lee's pictures showed that kung fu could be brought along with the times -they appear to hold up quite well today, more than 25 years after they were made.
By mid-decade, the films of Lau Kar-leong showed how quickly the genre was evolving. Executioners from Shaolin (1977) is a key work that extends the genre from the revanchist cliche and the master-disciple nexus of the wuxia pictures from the late 1960s onward into the greener fields of gender politics, father and son relationships, and explorations of fighting style allied with personality and sexuality, all matters pushed to the hilt, but with genie-like wonderment, in Lau's masterpiece (and probably one of Hong Kong cinema's finestfilms) Dirty Ho (1979). The grand master of the martial arts genre, Zhang Che, also came up with a superior reworking of what was by then the kung fu cliches as laid out in The Big Boss. Zhang's Disciples of Shaolin (1975) is a mature work with narrative consistency conveyed by startling black-and-white images. It is violent with psychodynamic reverbera-tions, replete with sexual desire, romantic melancholia, and a foot fetish translated into kung fu choreography.
Zhang's Disciples of Shaolin and Lau Kar-leong's films reinvigorated the kung fu genre in the mid-1970s at a point when it had reached an impasse. The death of Lee brought forth a host of imitation Bruce Lees who exposed the sheer exploitation of the genre by its keepers. The cheapness of the exploitation devalued the genre and contributed to the revival of Cantonese comedy (as exemplified by Michael Hui's films) and lifted the fortunes of other genre films, such as the softcore sex anthologies (particularly Li Han-
's fengyue films, which have so far remained peculiar to the 1970s).14 The creative bankruptcy of the exploitation kung fu picture also briefly revived the wuxia film with its swordfighting protagonists. King Hu had stayed within the wuxia format combining it with kung fu style in The Fate of Lee Khan (1973) and The Valiant Ones (1975). Hu would alternate swordfighting scenes with kung fu fighting, usually by having his protagonists start fighting with swords, lose them, and then resume fighting with their fists in kung fu style.
However, by 1975, such a combination of forms was no longer thought original. The task of reviving the wuxia swordfighting picture was undertaken by Chor Yuen, who virtually created a subgenre of films adapted from the novels of Gu Long. The films were leaden with Gothic mysticism haunting both its loner heroes (usually played by Ti Lung) and its villains. The series included The Killer Clans (1976), The Magic Blade (1976), Clans of Intrigue (1977), Jade Tiger (1977), and The Sentimental Swordsman (1977). The series also transmitted a quality of New Age-ness with its heroes moving like zombies in the cloistered landscape (the films were, of course, shot inside the soundstages of the Shaw Brothers studio) on some kind of metaphysical quest. They foreshadowed films like Tsui Hark's The Butterfly Murders (1979) and Patrick Tarn's The Sword (1980), two films pivotal to the launching of the New Wave.
The rise of Jackie Chan as a kung fu superstar in 1978 once again put kung fu in the foreground of Hong Kong cinema's development, blotting out the brief resurgence of the wuxia sword films. Chan also transformed the image of the kung fu master purveyed by Lee into a naive buffoon. Chan achieved superstardom in two films released in 1978, Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master. These two films not only presented a new hero archetype in the form of Chan's kung fu clown, they underlined the tractability of the genre itself. Chan's colleague, Samo (a.k.a. Sammo) Hung had actually got into the act of the kung fu clown first with The Iron-Fisted Monk (1977) and consolidated that image with Enter the Fat Dragon and Warriors Two (both released in 1978). All these films were seen as representative of a hybrid combination of kung fu and comedy that was distinct from the rather stolid form that the kung fu picture was at the beginning of the decade. One should also mention Karl Maka, who was the first to establish parody as a subgenre within kung fu cinema with The Good, the Bad, and the Loser (1976) and its sequel, Dirty Tiger, Crazy Frog (1978), the latter starring Samo Hung in the role of Crazy Frog. The success of Chan and Hung as kung fu players led to their becoming their own directors, under the aegis of the personalized deals that Golden Harvest commonly made with rising stars. Karl Maka went on to cofound Cinema City in 1982, the company that administered the coup de grace to the studio system in the 1980s.
The kung fu film ultimately set the tone for the modernization of Hong Kong cinema insofar as the genre reflected the dynamic qualities of Hong Kong society and the fast developing economy itself. The low-wage manufac-turing base of the economy in the 1970s cultivated a populist type of cinema based on a complete identification with working-class values. The developing economy was a barometer of the transformation of the Hong Kong cinema, and this is nowhere more evident than within the kung fu genre itself, as signified by the changing personae of the central hero from the beginning of the decade to its end. Lee played a straight, conscientious hero in his four completed films. Only in The Way of the Dragon, which Lee directed himself, did his persona seem to shift away from the confines of heroic martyrdom into some form of self-parody. Lee, of course, died too soon for his audience to know him as anything but a kung fu master and straitlaced hero. In 1978, Chan had projected the kung fu hero as a naive buffoon but somebody so utterly confident nevertheless that he mirrored the Hong Kong Kong spirit of derring-do and entrepreneurship. Chan's persona would change in the 1980s, acquiring more sophistication as Hong Kong itself moved into an era of prosperity.
In terms of genre, it is true that the 1970s was unbalanced by the tendency of the industry to mass-produce martial arts pictures. The Hong Kong cinema in the 1970s was misunderstood or misperceived as largely a generic cinema producing commercial and inferior kung fu "chop-sockies." Until the New Wave broke in 1979, Hong Kong cinema was virtually synonymous with kung fu. The decade had begun with Lee acting as the catalyst in Hong Kong cinema's entry into the international market. This set off the kung fu trend even though the genre had been around since the 1950s, but it did not overwhelm the industry. Kung fu films topped the box-office lists only four times in the decade. The rest of the time, comedies (e.g., House of 72 Tenants) came out on top, proving the axiom that comedy is king.
What the kung fu genre did was to mark a changeover of styles and traditions. It constituted an obvious break with the tradition of realism found in the old-style melodrama, with its array of romantic heroes given to weeping and inaction, presided over by leading ladies. The rise of the martial arts genre revolutionized the concept of the leading man. He now appeared as the action hero, taking up the sword to do what a man had to do. The leading lady was sidelined in the process. Any female actor who wanted a good leading role would have to adopt the mold of the male action hero (witness the careers of Cheng Peipei, Lily Ho, Shangguan Lingfeng, and Xu Feng). However, given a good director, the female fighter prototype did transcend the male hero mold, and the martial arts genre was a finer one for that: see King Hu's A Touch of Zen or Wu Ma's The Deaf and Mute Heroine (1971). Apart from Zhang Che, who concentrated exclusively on yanggang (qualities of man-hood), other directors quickly adapted to the female fighter prototype, hiring female superstars to play the leads in martial arts pictures featuring a combi-nation of male and female heroes.
SIGNS OF THE DECADE
The rise of kung fu stars from Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan threw the studio system into disarray. Their significance lies here rather than in any claims of high aesthetic achievement. Lee and Chan became their own directors and had financial stakes in their pictures. Golden Harvest's system of quasi-independent production that allowed big stars to own creative and commercial stakes in their films made it the undisputed leader of the Hong Kong film industry in the 1970s. Apart from Lee and Chan, Golden Harvest served as the launch pad for the independent careers of Wang Yu (whose problems as a contract star with Shaw Brothers were well publicized when he became famous and demanded raises in salary and the right to direct himself), Michael Hui, and Samo Hung. As it became evident that the duopoly that had ruled the studio system for two decades was breaking down, established filmmakers also began to set up their own production companies, usually functioning as satellite organizations of the majors, such as Zhang Che's company, Chang-gong, which released its films through the Shaw Brothers network, and King Hu, who engineered a two-film deal with Golden Harvest through his own production company. Producer Ng See-yuen set up the Seasonal production company, making an impact with films such as Anti-Corruption (1975) and the two films that made Chan a superstar, Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master.
In the mid-1970s, Hong Kong's film industry was still regarded as some-what depressed, particularly by young filmmakers who had just returned to the territory after graduating from film schools overseas. Eager to get into the industry, some of these fledglingfilmmakers worked for directors who had an independent status within the system. Ann Hui worked for a brief period in 1975 for King Hu, for example. But the industry itself proved elusive for these young talents. Certainly, studios like Golden Harvest and Shaw Brothers were not hiring new directors who were untested. The film industry at the time still worked on a system of apprenticeship where younger talent had to move up the ladder by working various jobs, from production assistant to assistant director -the path taken by John Woo, for instance, who worked as an assistant to Zhang Che at Shaw Brothers and later moved to Golden Harvest, where he was given a chance to make his first feature in 1972. Woo was an exception at this time. His grounding as a New Wave auteur was established within the film industry where he worked his way up. Not so the corps of new talent waiting in the wings who hoped to find jobs in the film industry between 1975 and 1978 when they returned to Hong Kong from overseas. Not finding the jobs, they moved into the television industry, among them Ann Hui, Tsui Hark, Yim Ho, Dennis Yu, Ronny Yu, Cheuk Pak-tong, Clifford Choi, Lau Shing-hon, and Allen Fong. Other young filmmakers who had not gone overseas were already working in television, among them, Alex Cheung, Patrick Tarn, Terry Tong, Stephen Shin, Johnny Mak, and Clifton Ko.
The influx of new talent into the television industry was purely a result of the localization policy that matured in the early 1970s. As the ratings war be-tween the three stations intensified, the opportunities for the production of local programs grew. From the mid-1970s on, returning film students were virtually lapped up by the commercial television stations, particularly HK-TVB, where its head of programming, Leong Suk-yi, took an innovative and progressive approach, giving writers and directors the freedom to create. Under her re-gime, single drama episodes in the series CID (1976), Wonderful, and Seven Women (both 1977) became popular. All of the episodes were filmed on 16 mm stock, thus giving the young writers and directors under her management the valuable experience they sought. Leong defected from HK-TVB to rival station CTV in 1978, taking more than 200 artists with her, a sign of her influence and power in the industry.15
By the late 1970s, the television filmmakers were at last given a chance to break into feature films when a host of independent companies began to change the face of the industry. Where television once lapped up young talent, it was now the film companies' turn. According to Cheuk Pak-tong, a director who was then working in television, film producers were calling up directors in their television stations and offering them jobs. This was made possible by the appearance of numerous independent companies, many of which were established by businessmen who knew little, if anything, about the film busi-ness and were merely seeking diversification of their holdings. The TV direc-tors were offered minimal budgets to make films, but they were favored because they could work fast and were eager to break into features. It was an ideal situation that occurred at the right time for the young directors, some of whom even formed their own companies. Yim Ho and Dennis Yu established the New Force Company to make The Extras (1978). In 1979, Ann Hui released The Secret, Tsui Hark, The Butterfly Murders, Alex Cheung, Copsand Robbers, and Peter Yung, The System. Though not great commercial successes by any means, all were firstfilms that conveyed the feeling that the territory's baby boom was coming into its own and that a new age had already begun. Released in the last months of 1979, these New Wave films marked the beginning of the 1980s. The great works of the New Wave properly belong to the 1980s: Tsui's Dangerous Encounter - 1st Kind (1980), Hui's The Boat People (1982), Allen Fong's Father and Son (1981) and Ah Ying (1982), and Patrick Tarn's Nomad (1982). As such, the New Wave seemed cut off from the 1970s. Even the themes were different: crime and corruption in 1979, as opposed to the youth culture and the question of identity (political or social) in the works of the early 1980s. Perhaps this is another indication of why the 1970s has yet to gel in the critical consciousness.
The 1970s provided haphazard signs that things were happening. One could refer to the establishment of a production company like Bang Bang (which produced Jumping Ash (1976), codirected by Leong Po-chih and actress Jo-sephine Siao), film magazines like Da Texie (Close Up), founded by the film director Tang Shuxuan in 1975, and institutions like the Hong Kong Interna-tional Film Festival (inaugurated in 1977), to suggest that new vistas were opening up in the territory's film culture. More important was the influence of television culture. The second half of the 1970s was the golden era of Hong Kong's economic development. The middle class grew in number and confidence and called for more democracy and local consciousness. Television was an important medium for communication and for determining social trends. Television programs would influence society through trends, fashion, and messages imparted by the actors. Television and society clearly had an interlocking relationship.
Taken together, all these elements constituted defining moments of transi-tion toward a new, enlightened era. On a narrower basis, the genesis of the New Wave, as I have implied, could be traced back to the cinema of the early 1970s -to the work of Tang Shuxuan, Lung Kong, and Chor Yuen. Lung and Chor built up their credentials in the Cantonese cinema and cultivated a sense of aestheticism in their Mandarin films (particularly in the case of Chor as exemplified in his New Age martial arts discussed earlier). Looking back on the work of these filmmakers,a sense of transition is palpable not least for the fact that their careers, particularly those of Tang and Lung, were cut short too early. Tang's China Behind (completed in 1974 but not released officially until 1987), Lung's Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1970), and Hiroshima 28 (1974) were deeply flawed works with political content that was controver-sial and powerful enough to mark them as misfits. Tang made only two more films before quitting the Hong Kong industry, and Lung has often spoken bitterly of the criticism that greeted him when he released Hiroshima 28. He made only three more films as director, films that retreated from the high social principles that marked his best works.
Hiroshima 28 tells of the suffering of post-atomic bomb victims in Hiro-shima, focusing on a middle-class Japanese family, played by Hong Kong and Taiwanese actors. It was revived at the 1997 Hong Kong International Film Festival, where Lung was finally applauded for his courageous vision and for daring to defy convention (which at the time was biased against a sympathetic portrayal of Japanese protagonists).
Critical ambivalence also greeted Lung's earlier Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, which was subjected to censorship for its story of a plague -adapted from Albert Camus' The Plague -befalling Hong Kong, causing the apocalyptic breakdown of society. This pessimistic view of Hong Kong was reportedly frowned upon by the New China News Agency (Xinhua), which had been set up by the Beijing government ostensibly as a news agency but really as a diplomatic outpost to protect China's political interests in the territory.16 After viewing a prerelease version of the film, Xinhua demanded cuts. The political atmosphere at the time was so highly charged that Lung, apparently, even feared for his life.17 The film was cut and reshot, and a much tamer version was released to the public, probably the first instance of political censorship in the Hong Kong cinema up to that time.
Though Tang's and Lung's films were ultimately flawed by naive depic-tions and expectations, they are best seen as forerunners of the New Wave works that transformed genre styles into allegories and subpolitical tracts, such as the early films of Ann Hui and Tsui Hark, along with Leong Po-chih's Hong Kong 1941 (1984) and Clara Law's Farewell China (1990). But it was the New Wave and not Tang Shuxuan or Lung Kong that the West discovered. Upon this discovery, the Hong Kong cinema acquired an artistic respectability that eluded it during the kung fu boom. There were obvious differences in these two periods that accounted for the different reactions. The kung fu boom was driven by the studios themselves. Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest saturated the international market with kung fu films in a deliberate move to open up new markets as the traditional Southeast Asian market appeared to shrink. The two Hong Kong majors were also reacting to the competition from Taiwan cinema. The later discovery of the New Wave was predicated on artistic success, not on market forces driven by competition between studios.
The directors of the New Wave were mostly educated in the West or were influenced by a Western-style education in Hong Kong. As part of this edu-cation, the films of Hollywood and other aspects of Western culture (either directly conveyed or filtered through Japanese styles) were definitive in form-ing the character of Hong Kong artists and filmmakers. Familiar with the art cinema tradition of Europe and America, they addressed themes that were more critical of their own society and were more in tune with Western norms and ways of thinking. The New Wave filmmakers were a more articulate breed of young Hong Kongers who could speak more naturally -and in English -with Western critics. This created more empathy for New Wave directors than for older, established filmmakers (of whom only King Hu secured an international reputation). Thus the perception grew that modern Hong Kong cinema developed only with the New Wave.
Despite its Western veneer, the New Wave's real significance was its exploitation of local themes and subjects -crime and corruption in the spate of early films and of youth culture and its problems in the films that followed. The local aspect of the New Wave's foundations is a direct influence of the localization policy adopted by the television stations, but it was also a natural process of turnover: a younger generation had grown up, and new blood was needed in the industry. The overseas education of the young talent might have clouded Western critical understanding of the effect of their direct local influences. Although Western critics have tended to see the influences of Western cinema aesthetics (the French and German New Waves, Italian neo-realism, East European cinema, the work of British directors like Lindsay Anderson and Nicolas Roeg), the local influences derived from the directors' television experience and their evocation of social melodramas from Canton-ese cinema revived in late-night programming on TV, are barely touched upon. The tradition of Cantonese cinema links contemporary filmmakers with the golden age of the 1950s, the era of didactic melodramas of the Chung-luen Company (Union Film Company) and beyond that, with the left-wing Mandarin pictures of Li Pingqian and Zhu Shilin. Then, there is the later Mandarin cinema of the two studios, the MP and GI Company, and the Shaw Brothers Studio, which gave rise to another golden era of Hong Kong cinema. With this rich tradition to fall back on, the New Wave directors were certainly much more sophisticated and literate in both foreign and local film cultures than any of their predecessors.
NEW WAVE STREAMLINING
That the New Wave revolutionized the presentation of local genres with their new narrative styles is taken for granted. How they did so is not something often remarked upon. To take the example of the martial arts genre, its evolution in the 1970s contained within it the seeds of both the strains of fantasy and realism, rollicking comedy and serious drama. Such hybridism was given expression in the screen personae of Jackie Chan and Samo Hung, who for all intents and purposes should be considered part of the New Wave, being the same age as the directors who emerged in 1979. Chan and Hung might have been kung fu buffoons, but they were just as capable of serious drama when the occasion called for it, often within the space of a single film (a trait often remarked upon by Western critics as being peculiar to Hong Kong cinema).
When the New Wave burst onto the scene, the films expressed the elements of fantasy and realism, comedy and drama, embedded within the kung fu genre at the time, but not necessarily in the space of single films. The New Wave refined the qualities of Hong Kong's genre cinema by reacting to them and coming up with more consistent works, narratively all of a piece. The New Wave relaunched the thriller-as-social-conscience drama, with a hard-nosed core of realism and an emphasis on crime and corruption, the two scourges of Hong Kong society in the 1970s. Ann Hui's The Secret, Alex Cheung's Cops and Robbers, and Peter Yung's The System films revealed a mature realism that reflected Hong Kong's own approach to crime and corrup-tion in the 1970s.18 In other genres, Tsui Hark's Butterfly Murders was pure fantasy with a touch of parody, meant as a tribute both to the martial arts genre and Hollywood. Later, Tsui was instrumental in metamorphosing the comedy genre into kinetic postmodern form with All the Wrong Clues (For the Right Solution) (1981). Directors like Yim Ho and Allen Fong explored the pains of growing up with melodramatic realism in The Happenings (1980) and Father and Son. The latter film evoked the family melodrama of old Cantonese cinema that unabashedly purveyed the line of realism and didacti-cism and is thus a perfect example of how the New Wave has revealed its classic roots through this direct line to an antecedent cinema.
The streamlining of the genres perpetuated by the New Wave directors was of course a result of their Western training, a mark of their film "literacy," as opposed to the somewhat haphazard combination of genres and styles that marked directors of the 1970s, like Lau Kar-leong, Yuen Woo-ping, and Karl Maka, and even older veterans like Li Hanxiang (who combined both period and contemporary styles in some of his fengyue films). No doubt, as the New Wave directors became more established, they took a freer creative hand with genres (Tsui Hark being the most representative example), but they had succeeded in raising the narrative standards at least by a consistent technical approach. As part of this approach, they also stuck to the tenet of stark realism, which was almost documentary in style, and some directors even took an uncompromising attitude toward handling politically sensitive mate-rial. The principle of documentary realism was itself a reaction against the fantasy-entertainment mind-set of the Hong Kong film industry in general.
The antifantasy mind-set was a legacy of the New Wave filmmakers from their work in television. Specifically, the RTHK (Radio Television Hong Kong) series Below the Lion Rock became a kind of training ground, where Ann Hui made her controversial The Bridge (1978) and the firstfilm of her Vietnam trilogy, The Boy from Vietnam (1978), and where Allen Fong began propounding his principles of "docu-drama" with The Song of Yuen Chau Chai (1977) and Old Lai (1978). A government-sponsored station, though without its own channel, RTHK offered the best conditions for production. Its Below the Lion Rock series was shot on film. The original principle behind the series was to promote government policy to the public. However, this propaganda objective remained very much in the background in the hands of directors with personal styles. Similarly, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), established in 1974, started its own film unit to publicize its work. It produced a television series, simply titled ICAC, hiring Hui in 1977 to direct six one-hour episodes, two of which were banned for their controversial nature.
Meanwhile, the commercial stations gave directors like Johnny Mak, Tsui Hark, Yim Ho, among others the appropriate space for expressing their young talents in genre series (martial arts in the case of Mak and Tsui, and crime drama in the case of Yim as well as Mak). Mak's Ten Sensational Cases (1975-76), produced for Rediffusion Television, was an example of a realist action drama derived from actual crime cases. The series, plus other sequels made on videotape rather than film, influenced a spate of films such as The Discharged (1977), The Rascal Billionaire (1978), and Law Don (1979) not to mention those New Wave films that basically took their cue from the televisual realism of crime dramas: The Secret, The System, Cops and Rob-bers. Mak entered the film industry in 1982, and he eventually directed LongArm of the Law (1984), a violent gangster thriller with echoes of his sensa-tional television style. When the television stations discarded the use of film stock in the 1980s, they effectively lost their usefulness as training grounds for younger filmmakers, which may explain the dearth of new cinematic talent in the 1990s.19
The television careers of the New Wave directors are not adequately appre-ciated and is the least understood aspect of the development of the movement. These television works are seldom revived and may not carry the same weight in analytical significance in all cases. Yet, the New Wave would be nothing if television had not given the movement sustenance and the valuable experience of work. The mainstream Hong Kong film industry in the 1970s was not a progressive system in terms of forging new talent who would make aesthetic breakthroughs. It had no avant-garde, and the system was not partial to creating such a movement. But by 1979, a wave of new young talent had made their first feature films and had done so at the invitation of independent companies that had sprouted in the wake of an economic boom in the latter half of the 1970s, bringing about attendant changes in social behavior and attitudes. The genesis of the New Wave is, by implication, a complicated process, perhaps even a bewildering one. The impact of foreign film cultures seems to be the least of its influences. Certainly the 1970s was a key decade, and this chapter has acknowledged it as such, though perhaps it is better characterized as a decade of transition, because although the links between major events do not appear continuous, the lack of continuity is deceptive. There is an obvious lapse between the early 1970s works of Tang Shuxuan and Lung Kong and the emergence of the New Wave directors, but as I hope I have shown, there are indeed aesthetic and historical links between them.
To compete the process of change and transition, the New Wave filmmak-ers put the final nail in the coffin of the Mandarin cinema. The New Wave represented the first truly generational change in Hong Kong cinema. The rise of Mandarin cinema in the 1950s linked the Shanghai cinematic tradition with the Hong Kong film industry. This link continued into the 1970s, modulated by the competition of Taiwan's own tradition of Mandarin cinema. But by the late 1970s, Mandarin was seldom heard in Hong Kong cinema. This was the logical end of Mandarin cinema as the process of generational change was carried forward by Hong Kong's baby boomers, a Cantonese-speaking gener-ation that was eager to assert its own identity and the fact that it belonged to Hong Kong. The Mandarin filmmakers could not perpetuate Mandarin speech through this new generation, though not for lack of trying. Michael Hui was brought to the screen in 1972 through a Mandarin-speaking role, The Warlord, directed by Li Hanxian^. (Hui actually spoke in a northern regionally accented Mandarin that is stereotypical of warlord characters.) He starred in other Mandarin films directed by Li, but when he took charge of his own career, he spoke in Cantonese. He was the harbinger of things to come. Cantonese was welcomed back in the region. It proved to be such a novelty that audiences in Malaysia and Singapore actually had a choice of seeing Hui's films either in its original Cantonese or dubbed into Mandarin -a practice still prevalent today throughout the Chinese-speaking world, with CDs and VCDs containing soundtracks in both dialects.
Thus by 1979, the crisis of the national cinema had played itself out. Mandarin was dead in Hong Kong, killed off by the industry itself as the talent pool diminished and overproduction made it impossible to continue. Cantonese was revived as a younger generation came onto the scene, aware of its own identity as Hong Kong filmmakers. Cantonese would be recognized throughout the 1980s as the lingua franca of Hong Kong cinema. The New Wave gave birth to a separate Hong Kong identity, though the notion of national cinema as defined by Taiwan continued to be inclusive of the Hong Kong film industry (in Taiwan, Hong Kong films produced in Cantonese were dubbed into Mandarin). In truth, the "national cinema" could not be sustained in Taiwan itself, and the industry there underwent a generational change of its own with the Taiwanese dialect making itself felt in the new Taiwan cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Chen Ken-hou. This occurred in the 1980s, when Hong Kong cinema was well into its age of prosperity, shared as never before by a generation of filmmakers who oversaw the demise of the studio system and made the world sit up and take notice.
NOTES
1.
As an example, Cheuk Pak-tong, one of the extended members of the New Wave who worked as an assistant to Tang Shuxuan before going to film school overseas, is ambivalent about the thesis of "pre-New Wave" filmmaking. According to Cheuk, who now lectures at the Hong Kong Baptist University, the New Wave really began around 1976-77. Unofficially, Jumping Ash (1976) codirected by ac-tress Josephine Siao and Leong Po-chih, is the first New Wave film; officially, Yim Ho's The Extras (1978) is given credit for the actual starting point of the New Wave.
2.
This is not to ignore Chor Yuen's The House of 72 Tenants, a Cantonese-language film released in 1973. For many Hong Kong critics, including Cheuk Pak-tong, Yuen's film is properly understood as a television movie. Televisual aesthetics would certainly characterize much New Wave cinema, but a more properly filmic style would emerge in the early 1980s with Allen Fong's Father and Son (1981), returning the Cantonese-language cinema to its 1960s filmic roots.
3.
Li Hanxiang was the most famous example. He was Shaw Brothers' most saleable Mandarin director, but by 1963 he had already planned to move to Taiwan to establish his own studio, the Grand Motion Picture Company (Guolian). Though the
development of Guolian ultimately proved to be a financial disaster for its founders, it provided the creative momentum for Taiwan's own domestic industry and consol-idated the financial and distributive links between Taiwan and Hong Kong filmmak-ers.
4.
Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest raised their normal asking price for distribution rights to individual films from HK$ 170,000 to a range of HK$260,000 to $280,000. See Cinemart (Yinse Shijie), October, 1971, p. 17.
5.
See "The Debate on the Japanese Film Quota in Taiwan" {Taiwan 'Riben Yingpian' Pei'e zhi Zheng), Cinemart, October, 1971, 64-65.
6.
An official of the Indonesian government appointed to oversee the importation of Mandarin films was quoted as saying, ' 'The problem of importing Mandarin films, from the perspective of Indonesia, could possibly produce adverse influences on the country's culture and politics. It certainly has an influence on Indonesia's film industry." See Cinemart, January, 1975, 34-35. (In Chinese, translation by author.)
7.
This figure according to director Joseph Kuo Nam-hung. Cinemart, January, 1978, 28.
8.
Cheuk Pak-tong. "The Beginning of the Hong Kong New Wave: The Interactive Relationship between Television and the Film Industry." Paper presented at the Forum on Chinese Cinema, Hong Kong Baptist University, 1996.
9.
Based on a popular play originally performed in Shanghai and adapted into Canton-ese, House was first made into a film by Wang Weiyi in 1963 in Guangzhou, a coproduction by the Pearl River Studio and a Hong Kong production company. The play was also performed by the Hong Kong Drama Troupe in 1964, and it was also performed as a television play. Hence, the play had enjoyed wide currency as a Cantonese piece.
10.
Hong Kong 73, a sequel of sorts, was produced by Shaw Brothers and directed by Chor Yuen. Released in 1974, it featured much of the same cast of television and screen actors speaking Cantonese.
11.
For more on the films of Michael Hui, see Jenny Lau, "Besides Fists and Blood," Chapter 7 in this volume.
12.
Mary Blume, "Kung Fu has come to Paris -but It Doesn't Mean a Thing." Los Angeles Times, December 16, 1974.
13.
Cathay actually released the first of the kung fu strain of martial arts films, From the Highway, in February 1970. But it was released well before expectations had been built up by Bruce Lee's imminent return to Hong Kong to make kung fu films. Once such expectations were built up by publicity surrounding Lee and Shaw Brothers could not sign the star, it released The Chinese Boxer as akung fu blockbuster in November 1970, before Bruce Lee's The Big Boss opened. Lee's film was released nearly a year later in October 1971.
14.
For a study of Li's fengyue films, please see my essay "Li Hanxiang's Asethetics of the Cynical" in A Study of Hong Kong Cinema in the Seventies. HKIFF cata-logue, Hong Kong Urban Council, 1984.
15.
Cheuk Pak-tong, "The Beginning of the Hong Kong New Wave." See also my essay "Hong Kong's New Wave in Retrospect" HKIFF Catalogue. Hong Kong Urban Council, 1999.
16.
The British Colonial government had proscribed political parties from operating in the colony in the 1950s following a riot, and this led to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) setting up Xinhua's Hong Kong Branch. The Kuomintang Nationalist Party (KMT) set up the Chung Hwa Travel Agency to oversee its political and dilpomatic interests in the territory.
17.
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow was actually completed in 1968 but its release was held back by its distributors, who were concerned about the political fallout emanating from Xinhua. At the time, the film was perceived as a response to the 1967 riots instigated by local followers of the Cultural Revolution. Lung Kong was well aware of the case of Lam Ban, actor, radio personality, and playwright (known for his popular radio play Diary of a Chauvinistic Husband, which was made into a film by Chor Yuen in 1964) who was killed by unknown assailants in 1967. Lam was well known for his anticommunist political views.
18.
The 1970s was a climactic period in crime and police corruption as signified by the sensational trials of the drug baron Ng Sik-ho (a.k.a. "Limpy" Ho) and the corrupt chief superintendent of the traffic division of the Hong Kong Royal Police, Joseph Godber, in 1975. The Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) was established in 1974 and was considered to be effective in eliminating triad (gang) infiltration of the police force.
19.
For a more thorough account of the New Wave's television work, see Law Kar, "The 'Shaolin Temple' of the New Hong Kong Cinema," HKIFF catalogue, A Study of Hong Kong Cinema in the Seventies. See also Shu Kei, "The Television Work of Ann Hui," and Zhang Tao's account of Radio Television Hong Kong, "RTHK .. . Its Rise and Decline," HKIFF catalogue, Changes in Hong Kong So-ciety Through Cinema, Hong Kong Urban Council, 1988.
Part II ARTS
RICHNESS THROUGH IMPERFECTION: KING HU AND THE GLIMPSE
David Bordwell
As one of Asia's finest directors, King Hu (Hu Jinquan) deserves study from many angles: his treatment of historical periods, his thematic preoccupations, his stratagems of plotting, his handling of character point of view. In what follows, I hope to clarify an aspect of his work over which he labored patiently -visual style. Working on Come Drink with Me (1965), he realized that "if the plots are simple, the stylistic delivery will be even richer."1 Visual design was very important to him; he drew every shot in advance and supplied the cast and crew with photocopies.2 Declaring himself ignorant of the martial arts ("Kung fu, Shaolin tales -I don't understand anything about that"),3 he derived his combat techniques from Beijing opera and compared his fight scenes to dances. He lavished attention on his set-pieces, spending twenty-five days shooting the confrontation in the bamboo forest in A Touch of Zen (1970).4 Whatever his other preoccupations -Zen, China's history -Hu is an unabashed aesthete, and an aesthetic approach to his style seems natural.
Just as naturally, the most inviting objects of stylistic inquiry are his magnificent fight scenes. True, Hu might discourage critics from concentrating wholly on them. Legend of the Mountain (1979) and All the King's Men (1983) pointedly avoid the frenzied fights that made his reputation. He told one interviewer that The Fate of Lee Khan (1974) was initially conceived as a theatre-like piece centering on interweaving intrigues, but happily for us the distributors and exhibitors insisted on fights.5 And Hu's dramatic and exposi-tory scenes are not without stylistic interest. There are picturesquely decen-tered widescreen framings, elegant tracking shots, an occasional striking depth
Preparation of this chapter was aided by the Cinematheque Royale of Brussels, particu-larly its director, Gabrielle Claes; the National Film Archive of London, particularly Elaine Burrows, chief archivist; and the staff of the Hong Kong International Film Festival. I am also grateful to Michael Campi and Stephen Teo for providing me access to valuable material, and to Kristin Thompson for many discussions of King Hu and Hong Kong cinema.
Figure 5
image (as in the famous shot of Lee Khan pondering in the foreground as Wang Shih-cheng is interrogated in the background, seen through a doorway; Fig. 5). At times Hu looks even old-fashioned, as in his penchant for ending a scene by having a character come up to the camera and blot out the image, before another character is seen moving away from the camera and initiating a new scene. In all, his films display an effortless, polished professionalism that seldom becomes academic.
Undeniably, though, Hu's continuing renown derives largely from the superb treatment of physical action, particularly in his films of the 1960s and 1970s.6 Whatever his other virtues, he will be remembered as a director of running, jumping, and ferocious combat. How do his action scenes deliver the stylistic richness he sought? We can start to answer this question by examin-ing some of the traditions he embraced and transformed.7
INHERITED NORMS
There are many ways to stage and shoot a martial arts combat scene. Some say that the most felicitous method is to present the fight in fairly distant shots and in longish takes. That way, the argument runs, the totality of the action is preserved. The protracted long-shot is common in Japanese jidai-geki (the Zatoichi films offer notable instances), and can be found in some kung-fu films, like Ng See-Yuen's Secret Rivals (1976) and Jackie Chan's YoungMaster (1980). But much Asian action cinema relies heavily on two other stylistic norms.
One of these norms can be easily visualized. Instead of fighting in one spot, the hero or heroine advances toward a string of attackers. Framed in medium-shot, the warrior moves laterally, the camera tracking alongside and revealing a string of opponents one by one. Each luckless enemy moves into the frame, fights, and is slain. Sometimes the fight is staged so that the action shifts diagonally toward the camera or into depth, and sometimes the protag-onist will break with the shot's overall trajectory, step back, and counter an attack from the rear. I am not sure when this sort of sustained, action-packed tracking shot emerges, but early examples can be found in Japanese films of the 1930s, and certainly by the 1960s it was common in jidai-geki. A vivid example is the grueling swordfight in a rice paddy that climaxes Uchida Tomu's Musashi Part 4 (1964). Here Musashi takes on dozens of men seria-tim in a remarkably lengthy moving shot.
The "one-by-one tracking shot" shows the advantages of not staging a fight scene in a full long-shot. A medium-shot framing allows us to concen-trate on the essential action -the encounter of the hero with each adversary -and to see the thrusts and parries clearly. Moreover, because the scene de-pends on a series of attackers, the closer framing allows each one to shift into prominence at the proper moment; our attention is not distracted by idle opponents awaiting their turn at the hero. Indeed, the relatively tight framing of the medium-shot frees the filmmaker from specifying how many attackers there are, or where they are lurking.
From the start of his career, Hu's combat scenes seem strongly influenced by Japanese techniques. He uses the convention of mortally wounded victims freezing in place before toppling over, as well as judicious cuts back from a swordstroke to an extreme long-shot that shows several victims falling at once. In a similar way, Hu borrows the one-by-one tracking shot. The fight scenes in Come Drink with Me use long traveling takes into which fighters burst unpredictably. Near the climax of Dragon Gate Inn (1967), Zhu Hui wades into an attack from Cao's minions (Fig. 6). The camera tracks leftward as she swivels to drive two men back (Fig. 7) and dispatches one in the foreground, who freezes momentarily (Fig. 8) before falling away to reveal the decisive blow Zhu deals his partner (Fig. 9). The one-by-one tracking shot is central to A Touch of Zen, The Fate of Lee Khan (with strong use of sudden
Figure 6 Figure 7
attacks from the foreground), and The Valiant Ones (1975; a brilliant shot of Xu Feng moving rightward, zigzagging into the foreground and ending in a close view at the extreme right frame edge). Raining in the Mountain (1979) largely avoids the device, but its principle of dynamic displacement within medium-shot framings governs the games of grab-the-scroll that shift charac-ters around abruptly and demand sudden thrusts to and from the camera.
A second stylistic norm that Hu exploits reaches farther back into film history than the one-by-one tracking shot. It is a form of "constructive editing" pioneered by American filmmakers of the 1910s and recast by Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s. An action is broken up into bits, each one rendered in a separate shot, and the viewer constructs a unified action out of the details.
Constructive editing is ideal for combat scenes. In the Chinese film Heroine White Rose {Nil Xia Bai Meigui, 1929), we get the following passage:
Figure 8
Figure 9
LONG-SHOT: White Rose fires an arrow. MEDIUM-SHOT: Her enemy clutches at the arrow in his chest. LONG-SHOT: He falls to the ground.
Constructive editing proved particularly useful in suggesting the vaulting leaps executed by a powerful swordsman. In Zhang Che's One-Armed Swordsman (1967), Fong Kang (Jimmy Wang Yu) leaps up in medium-shot. Cut to a low-angle shot showing him soaring into the air and starting to descend. A third shot shows him landing. In such ways, the wuxia plan of the 1960s induced the audience to imagine that the hero has mastered all the skills of martial chivalry. Again, this stylistic norm violates the premise that the hero's feat should be executed in a single take; cutting allows the film-maker to suggest what could have been shown only with costly and perhaps unconvincing special effects.
Hu mastered constructive cutting. In Dragon Gate Inn, the hero Xiao Zhaozi tosses a bowl of noodles to a bully at a neighboring table. This action is shown in four easy-to-stage shots:
MEDIUM SHOT: Xiao tosses the bowl to the left. EXTREME LONG-SHOT: The dining room at the inn; the bowl flies leftward across
the room as the bully leaps back. CLOSE-UP: The bowl spins into place on the table and stops. MEDIUM-SHOT: The bully reels back, startled.
Throughout his career Hu would use constructive editing to present similarly amazing feats of discipline and skill.
If Hu had relied only on the one-by-one tracking shot and constructive editing, he would have remained fundamentally like his Asian action-movie contemporaries -more elegant and meticulous than most, but not essentially different. Instead, like Kurosawa Akira in Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962), like Kato Tai in Love for a Mother (Mabuta no haha, 1962) and Stormy Days of the Sanada Clan (Sanada fuunroku, 1963), like Misumi Kenji in the Lone Wolf and Child series (Kozure Ookami, 1971-1973), Hu recast inherited norms in original ways. In the process, he created a distinctive, highly engag-ing approach to presenting physical action.
A PROBLEM AND SOME SOLUTIONS
Hu's combat scenes were obliged to present near-fantastic feats of martial prowess. The chivalric knights in the wuxia plan had to display preternatural speed and agility. They had to strike blows that sent their opponents reeling back many paces. They had to avoid attacks by somersaulting over their enemies. They had to vault into trees, spin, and come diving down at their opponents. Any such acts can be shown quite clearly if the director is able to spend time and money on wires and special effects. But special effects inevi-tably risk looking fake. Today this problem has still not been surmounted: wire-work often makes combatants look like they are being hauled and swung around. Alternatively, such feats can be implied through constructive cutting, but this presents the event in isolated bits rather than as an integral whole, and tends to present extraordinary leaps and thrusts in cutting patterns that are similar to those that convey more normal actions.
It seems to me that Hu wanted to avoid making martial feats look artificial. He was proud of not employing trick photography.8 Instead of trying to put the feats on the same plane as ordinary sequences, as special effects and orthodox constructive cutting tend to do, he sought a stylization that set these extraordinary feats apart from mundane reality.9 Not that he wanted to glorify the warriors as superhuman. The powers they display are not supernatural: they spring from the mastery of chi, or essential energy. Hu's task was to dignify and beautify these feats without tipping them into implausibility and sheer fantasy. How, we might ask, can cinema express the other-worldly grace and strength of these supremely disciplined but still mortal fighters?
The solution he found was to stress certain qualities of these feats -their abruptness, their speed, their mystery. And he chose to do so by treating these feats as only partly visible.
Normally, in the hands of Hu or others, the one-by-one tracking shot and constructive cutting make the action perfectly lucid. But Hu also frequently stages, shoots, and cuts his action so that it becomes too quick, too distant, or too sidelong for us to register fully. Significantly, Hu's films of the 1960s and 1970s almost never employ slow-motion to dissect his fighters' technique. (His most famous use of slow-motion, showing the floating monks in Touch of Zen, serves to indicate that they are drifting toward the confrontation at a serenely unreal pace.) Instead, Hu makes his action faster than the eyes -and even, it seems, the camera -can follow. Often we are allowed only a trace of the warriors' amazing feats. We do not see the action so much as glimpse it.
Of course, the action cannot be completely indeterminate. The fight cannot play out wholly "offstage" or in pitch darkness. The filmmaker must make the action clear enough to be comprehensible and then add "imperfections" that make it partially indiscernible. Consider an example from A Touch of Zen.
The scholar Gu Shengzhai has spent the night in the ruined fortress with the mysterious woman Yang Huizhen. In the morning the sinister stranger enters, and soon he is sparring with Yang. They run outside, and the stranger flees with Yang in pursuit. Gu comes to the window in time to see the stranger in mid-air, leaping over the wall in a very brief shot (13 frames). Here our limited view could be said to be motivated by Gu's act of looking (although what we see isn't from his optical point of view). Yet as the scene goes on, the action becomes indiscernible in ways that can't be explained by Gu's limited perspective.
The stranger lands in a patch of tall goldenrod and starts to run. Yang lunges out to follow him, but instead of showing her vault over the wall in constructive-editing fashion, Hu cuts away to another shot of the stranger fleeing. Cut back to Yang, who has already vaulted the wall and is landing on a rooftop. The editing omitted the stranger's launch but shows his leap and landing; now the editing shows us Yang's launch and landing, but not her leap. As she springs up again, the camera whip-pans left, blurring the image. The next shot shows the stranger fleeing, and Yang hurtling down and slash-ing at him. In the next shot, she lands, but he pops in from offscreen and they begin to struggle, with most of their movements hidden by waving goldenrod.
And so it goes in the rest of the sequence. Shots showing pieces of action are interrupted by cutaways to other actions; by the time we return, the first action is already well advanced. Key moments of the fight are blocked by goldenrod or rendered vague by distance -as when the fight on the distant wall turns the figures into tiny somersaulting silhouettes. Whip-pans try in vain to follow the fighters or their weapons hurled through space. Either fighter may pop into the foreground, especially since the very brief shots have rendered their position uncertain. An attack may take place offscreen, as when the stranger runs furiously rightward, thrusting out his hand suddenly; cut to a symmetrical shot of Yang running leftward and pausing at a doorway, her hair tumbling down her face. Her adversary has somehow, behind the gold-enrod, in the cut, slashed away her scarf.
One could argue that these technical choices simply hide artifice. The walls, long-shots, and goldenrod all conceal the trampolines. The actors and their doubles execute the stunts piecemeal -shot of a leap, shot of flying, shot of landing -naturally the cutting is choppy. Yet other directors, facing the problems of presenting this sort of action, did not resort to King Hu's stylistic solutions. They filmed leaps clearly, centering them and letting low angles keep the trampolines below the frameline. By contrast, Hu used long-shots that allow the actors to vault in and out of blocking material in the foreground. Instead of 1-2-3 constructive editing like Zhang Che's in One-Armed Swords-man, Hu gives us only phase 1 or 2 or 3 -launch or leap or landing, or only two of them. And by making the shots extraordinarily brief, he goes beyond his contemporaries; blink and you miss the stunt.
Working within the same production constraints as other directors, Hu created willed imperfections in the presentation of the action, and one result was to make many maneuvers seem too fast or too powerful for the eye to follow. The indirect handling has the effect of making you unsure whether you really saw what you thought you saw. Did Cao leap over trees at the rapid-fire climax of Dragon Gate Innl Did Yang really keep herself aloft by ricocheting among tree trunks in A Touch of Zen? Whereas fantasy swordplay films since the late 1980s dwell on their aerobatics -recall the end of Swordsman II (1992), when several characters fly and float for what seem to be minutes -Hu teases us with mere glimpses of the action. The recent wuxia plan techniques give us time to savor the outrageousness of the stunts, but Hu's glimpses tantalize rather than satisfy our appetite for action.
Consider, for instance, how features of the setting often obscure the com-bat. Fights and flights can be partially concealed by fog or mist (the climax of Raining in the Mountain), boulders (the closing of The Valiant Ones), dark-ness (the ambush on the fortress in A Touch of Zen), and especially, furniture and foliage. Hu is adept at hiding his trampolines behind inn tables and foreground bushes, but this artifice becomes less evident when the entire frame is cluttered up. We have already seen how tall goldenrod masks essen-tial moments of the Touch of Zen duel between Yang and the stranger. Likewise, many of Hu's forest-glade fightsfill the frame with far more tree trunks and branches than would be necessary to camouflage the trampolines. Whereas the backlot and studio-interior forests of many Shaw Brothers vehi-cles are designed to make the action maximally readable (e.g., the firstfight in Zhang Che's The New One-Armed Swordsman, 1970), Hu's exterior scenes, shot on location, motivate a naturalistic density of detail.
Hu is not alone in using bits of setting to hide his stunts; one thinks of the way in which a foreground roof-edge in The Jade Bow (1966) conceals one phase of a series of leaps (which also involve in-camera reverse-motion). But whereas other directors' blocking foregrounds favor clarity, a single center of attention, and full visibility, Hu pushes toward a denser, multicentered, and strategically opaque composition. Very often, a stupendous leap will be glimpsed through a patch of light filtered through shadowy branches. Fore-ground elements can be used in more flamboyant ways as well. In DragonGate Inn, when Mao (Han Yingjie) flees from Zhu (Shangguan Lingfeng) in
Figure 10
the skirmish in front of the inn, he ducks behind a wall and instantly reemer-ges far away, with superhuman speed (thanks to a double).
Sometimes Hu lets the audience enjoy the humor of blocked views, as in the Tom-and-Jerry evasions in Anger. When Ren and Jiao are on opposite sides of the door, neither realizes his opponent is actually his ally. Hu's composition, which lets Jaio's silhouetted head peek out in the distance, makes a joke of Ren's limited perspective. Raining in the Mountain turns the monastery from a solid, symmetrical mass into a booby-trapped maze of walls and jutting rooftops that obscure and then reveal the characters. The transfor-mation is initiated in one witty sequence. White Fox (Xu Feng) and the boy Jin are furtively exploring the monastery, dodging passing monks. The camera travels with them as they sneak from an austere, rectilinear room (Fig. 10) to a dazzlingly intricate diagonal space defined by a roof-edge plunging along frame left (Fig. 11). Suddenly, they leap over a stone wall and down into the
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