Figure 11 Figure 12
gap between the two buildings (Fig. 12). Without pause, they then race into the distance (Fig. 13). Why their sudden retreat? As their figures dwindle, a monk in blue appears at the upper center of the frame, barely visible in a doorway of the building they have just left (Fig. 14).
Hu makes the action even more opaque through shrewd tactics of framing. Surely no director has been more in love with the oddly decentered action shot. His soaring combatants often scrape the top of the image, while his divers sink along the frame edge, as Peony does when she plummets from the balcony in The Fate of Lee Khan. The finalfight of Dragon Gate Inn ex-presses Cao's power through a weirdly vacant shot: he leaps down (Fig. 15) and goes out of the frame (Fig. 16) before springing back in to somersault over his adversary (Fig. 17). It is as if he moved too suddenly and swiftly for the camera to frame him properly. At the climax of The Fate of Lee Khan, male and female fighters are paralleled in their attack method not only by symmetrical cutting patterns but by comparable edge framing.
Figure 13 Figure 14
Such moments remind us that the frame excludes as well as includes, and Hu is masterful in holding action outside the frame edge until it can burst in with maximum impact. In the opaque combat between Yang and the stranger in A Touch of Zen, the fighters swerve unexpectedly in and out of the shots, and Yang's scarf is slashed by an offscreen stroke. When combined with editing, this sort of exit/entry pattern can be powerfully abrupt. For example, in A Touch of Zen's long final battle in the glade, Shi (Bai Ying) falls back and starts to struggle up to the left (Fig. 18). An enemy swordsman descends upon him (Fig. 19). In the next shot, the swordsman is leaping rightward out of the frame (Fig. 20). Into the blank frame Shi rises (Fig. 21) and slashes right (Fig. 22). In an instant the fighters have traded places, while the cuts reveal images that cannot hold them for very long.
A more subdued use of offscreen space occurs in one scene of The Fate of Lee Khan, when the disguised beggar Sha (Han Yingjie) kills the three thieves. Each one is dispatched in a way that blocks our vision of the moment
Figure 15 Figure 16
of death. The first is strangled down below the frame line; the next is fatally thrown, landing and dying offscreen. Sha breaks the third one's neck, with the victim's straw hat tipping forward and shielding the action from our view. One could argue that such relatively muted treatment of the killings -at least as compared to how Zhang Che would have handled them -maintains the audience's allegiance to the heroes' team.
The Valiant Ones offers a striking use of framing to suggest heroic prow-ess. Wu Zhiyuan (Bai Ying) is the "whirlwind" swordsman, and Hu lets him demonstrate his technique in a powerful, purely cinematic way -and one which depends on not giving the viewer a full view of the combat situation. Wu and his wife are in the pirates' lair and are undergoing a series of martial tests. A stout Chinese challenges him and they begin to fight. At first King Hu uses long-shots to establish Wu's bobbing, ducking style of swordplay, but as the fight intensifies, Hu cuts to closer views. This prepares for an
Figure 17 Figure 18
astonishing effect. Wu rises into the right foreground and slides to the left frame edge, back still to us as the Chinese slashes at him. Wu ducks out of the foreground and immediately, in the very next frame, he springs into the left background and is now behind the Chinese, who is stupefied by his sudden disappearance.
The rest of the fight continues to display Wu's ability to transport himself instantly between foreground and background by ducking out of the frame. (See Figs. 23-26 for a particularly vivid instance in which Wu dodges out the left foreground and miraculously reemerges in the right background.) In the next trial against a Japanese swordsman, Wu employs the same tactic. His whirlwind technique will be on still splashier display in the finalfight with the Japanese leader Hakatatsu (Samo Hung), and Wu's wife Ruoshi (Xu Feng) gets a chance to demonstrate it, too.
Of course, these scenes depend on artifice -an actor's double who, back to us, can slip in and out of the foreground -but it is a brilliantly cinematic
Figure 19 Figure 20
way to present a swordsman who can "attack from all sides." The solution is more fluid and integral than constructive editing because it does not break the action into separate shots. Hu's innovation also exploits the principle of the glimpse. The medium-shot framing, as in the one-by-one traveling shot, shows us everything relevant, but Wu's whirlwind tactic seems simply to defeat the camera. The framing cannot keep up with him. Like Wu's opponents, we can only gape at his agility.
CUTS AND SLASHES
Above all, it is editing that creates the "imperfections" that make Hu's action scenes so distinctive. At the same time, a study of his editing principles reveals that the aesthetic of the glimpse demands a context of clear, cogent presentation. It is the dynamic between stability and momentary indiscernibil-ity that yields Hu's most original effects.
Figure 21 Figure 22
He was from the start a cutting-based director: Sons of the Good Earth (1965), though it employs some ensemble long takes, still ends up with an average shot length of 6.3 seconds. His action films are cut significantly faster. In Come Drink with Me, Dragon Gate Inn, the "Anger" episode of Four Moods (1970), and Painted Skin (1993) the average shot runs between 5.4 and 6 seconds. In A Touch of Zen, The Fate of Lee Khan, and Raining in the Mountain, it is around 4.5 seconds. Not surprisingly, The Valiant Ones and Part I of The Wheel of Life (1983) are the fastest paced, each with an average shot length of around 3.3 seconds. Contrast these norms with Zhang Che's style; The One-Armed Swordsman averages 6.35 seconds per shot, and The New One-Armed Swordsman has increased that a bit to 6.8 seconds.
Even Hu's most static dialogue scenes rely on restless editing. He some-times breaks up scenes according to optical point-of-view structures reminis-cent of Hitchcock; scene by scene, A Touch of Zen and Raining in the Mountain are cut on the basis of shifting viewpoints. Hu creates a nervous
Figure 23 Figure 24
rhythm for such simple actions as allies assembling at an outpost {The Valiant Ones) or rivals greeting each other in rapidly intercut close-ups {Raining in the Mountain). He sometimes interrupts a longish take with a peremptory shot; at the very beginning of Come Drink with Me, a shot of a horseman dismounting is broken by a one-second shot of the villain advancing before we return to the horseman striding off. The editing can formalize even transi-tional moments, as when in quick succession, each conspirator in The Fate of Lee Khan rushes rightward through a curtained doorway, every shot framed and timed to create a symmetry among them.
Although cuts like these sometimes jolt, most of Hu's dramatic scenes strictly obey conventions of continuity cutting -eyeline matching, shot/re-verse shots, smooth matches on action, and all the rest. When Hu resorts to constructive editing, he sometimes takes what we might call the "American" option: scenes like Xiao pitching the bowl of noodles across Dragon Gate Inn succeed thanks to precise continuity. Hu's combat scenes, however, seem
Figure 25 Figure 26
closer to the tradition of the Soviet montage filmmakers, who made construc-tive editing more dynamic by accentuating discontinuities. Like other Hong Kong filmmakers, Hu revived and refined Russian montage principles for the demands of an action-based popular cinema.10 It is as if his orthodox, smoothly cut passages provide a ground or foil for the innovative, decidedly disjunctive action sequences.
It is here, for example, that the already quick editing tempo intensifies. The average shot in the final reel of Lee Khan runs 2.4 seconds, and the climactic fight on the beach in The Valiant Ones averages 1.6 seconds per shot (the same as the opening firefight in Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch). In Part I of The Wheel of Life, the opening attack of the rebel archers on the corrupt government leader is even faster, with each shot averaging almost exactly one second. Hu told interviewers that he experimented with shots of eight frames or less, and his fight scenes have become known for his bursts of brief images.11
Still, comparably short shots can be found in films of Hu's contemporaries. Zhang Xinyan and Fu Qi's Jade Bow (1966) contains much rapid cutting, including a shot only four frames long, and the opening of Tu Quangqi's First Sword (1967) has a very swiftly cut leap. For this reason, just calling Hu a rapid cutter takes us only so far. What qualities of his quick cutting set him apart? I suggest that in the action sequences, the visual blockages in the setting and the tactics of oblique framing work with fast editing to suggest the awesome and mysterious power of the fighters.
Virtually by definition, a brief shot offers only a glimpse of the action. Our sense that the fortress skirmish between Yang and the stranger in A Touch of Zen develops faster than we can follow stems partly from the fact that some shots last only about half a second. When, in The Fate of Lee Khan, the serving girls turn cartwheels over the table, the shot takes only 14 frames. But we should distinguish between "legible" brief shots and more "illegible" ones. In Raining in the Mountain, a dynamic sequence presents monks beating temple drums from several angles and distances, and it preserves the same information from shot to shot. The passage builds up excitement in a conven-tional way. Similar is a rhythmically ' 'geometricized" passage in Come Drink with Me. During the attack on Chang's palanquin, three villains lunge at Golden Swallow, each moving in the same direction and each one's thrust allotted exactly ten frames.
In such passages Hu, like most directors who employ fast cutting, takes care to ensure that information is displayed and repeated clearly so that the cutting does not hamper our understanding. But unlike his colleagues, Hu is willing to tolerate a degree of illegibility in certain cuts for the sake of rendering the action only partly discernible and hence more miraculous. For example, some of his brief shots are whip-pans that blur the scene. In the tumultuous finale of Dragon Gate Inn, the whip-pans disturb the conventional constructive-editing pattern: characters launch, leap, and land, but disconcert-ing pans make the action seem harder to capture.
The studio editor's rule is that long-shots must be left onscreen for a longer time than closer views because the viewer needs more time to scan a long-shot. But one of the most distinctive qualities of Hu's editing style is his very brief long-shots. What other director would accompany the voice-over expo-sition that introduces The Valiant Ones with thirty shots of documents and landscapes flashing by in about seventy seconds? In Come Drink with Me, Golden Swallow leaps up to a window in a twenty-five-frame long-shot; cut to an eighteen-frame long-shot showing her passing through the window and landing. The celebrated battle that closes the first part of A Touch of Zen includes a string of long-shots of Yang Huizhen soaring, spinning, and bounc-ing through the bamboo forest, each shot lasting between eight and sixteen frames. Such brief long-shots deny us the leisure to browse over the image, ensuring that we catch only part of a dense, often busy scene.12
Hu tends to combine indiscernibility devices like the whip-pan and the long-shot with others I have already mentioned. Opaque settings and less than fully informative compositions cooperate with the editing to make the action seem miraculously fleeting. The parallel diving attacks that Wang Shih-cheng and Peach visit upon Lee Khan and Wan-erh are at once decentered long-shots and very short shots. Cao's leap and bounce in Dragon Gate Inn (Figs. 15-17) is made obscure not only by edge-framing but by virtue of its being a long-shot that is quite brief.
Directors who rely on fast cutting often expand screen time. This can be accomplished by overlapping shots, that is, repeating the same bit of action; Eisenstein's films provide some famous examples, such as the raising of the bridges in October (1928). The director can also use cutaways to stretch out time, as do Peckinpah and John Woo. We see a fighter hit and start to fall; cut away to another part of the battle; cut back to the firstfighter, continuing to fall; cut away to another skirmish; back to the firstfighter, still falling; and so on. (Howard Hawks criticized Peckinpah, complaining: "I can kill and bury ten guys in the time it takes him to kill one."13) But just as Hu seldom uses slow motion to draw out his fighters' feats, he rarely resorts to time-stretching cuts. Instead, in accordance with his insistence on the glimpse, he favors elliptical editing.
Flagrant ellipses in quickly-cut passages have been a defining feature of Hu's style from the start of his career, as a beautiful moment in Come Drink with Me shows. Golden Swallow attacks Tiao Ching-tang with a dagger several times, and each time we see him smack her backward in a close shot, followed by a shot of her falling away, now several feet off. The cut from medium-shot to long-shot has skipped over the time it took her to reel backward. In Raining in the Mountain, Hu creates weird matches on action by showing White Fox and Jin leaping up in one spot and landing in quite a different part of the monastery. At the climax of The Fate of Lee Khan, Cao Yukun (Roy Chiao) turns; we see the princess on the balcony (a seven-frame shot). In the next shot, she is already leaping downward toward him (sixteen frames), but she is not shown landing. In the next shot of him, her sword is already in the frame, jabbing at his hand (eight frames).
Typically, then, Hu shaves moments off the most flamboyant action. Some-times he can use ellipsis for grimly humorous effect. In The Valiant Ones Wu and his young pupil return from a lesson to see, in extreme long-shot, pirates flail and fall dead as Wu's wife settles back down to her embroidery. The aesthetic of the glimpse could hardly go further; trim any more from the scene and we would have no fight at all.
Hu is seldom this laconic. Most often, elliptical cutting mimics the blinding speed of the protagonists' movements. Instead of floating or rocketing end-lessly, as do the heroes of Swordsman II, King Hu's warriors are usually up and down before you realize it. When they stay airborne for an extended period, it is usually because they find clever ways to cheat gravity for a few more instants. That is, instead of using cutting, slow motion, or wire-work to extend fleeting actions, Hu prolongs a flight simply by adding more fleeting actions -a foot striking a tree trunk, the flash of a body twisting and spinning to keep aloft a split-second longer.
The interplay of clear presentation and patchy indiscernibility allows Hu to keep some stylistic elements stable and treat others elliptically. Take the canonical way of handling high jumps, seen in our One-Armed Swordsman instance: a shot of the hero starting to leap, followed by a low-angle shot of the leap itself, concluded by a shot showing the fighter landing. Hu sharpens this schema in two ways. He often trims a bit off each phase, as in Hsiao's counterattack on Cao at the end of Dragon Gate Inn. At other moments Hu simply deletes one or two phases. So in the balcony scene of Lee Khan and the final sequence of Raining in the Mountain, he can capture women warriors in mid-leap, without showing them launching or landing. He can also, as in the inn scenes of Come Drink with Me, delete the flying shot but preserve the departure and landing. In the testing sequence of The Valiant Ones, the second Japanese swordsman jumps toward Wu's back, but Hu elides the moment of touchdown; at the cut, Wu is already turned and whacking the Japanese aside. In such passages, the three-stage schema tacitly guides our comprehension, but Hu's condensed treatment suggests action too quick for the orthodox pattern to catch.
Hu measures degrees and kinds of ellipsis very subtly. During the martial test of The Valiant Ones, a Japanese swordsman leaps down from a second-story room, and the movement is handled in straightforward, continuous duration. In reply, Wu leaps toward him, but this jump is treated in highly elliptical fashion, as if already marking him as superior to his foe. But when the renegade Chinese master Xu Lian (Han Yingjie) hurries to confront Wu, his rush is presented in dazzling ellipses, announcing him as Wu's equal. A Touch of Zen conveys the force of Xu Xianchun (Han Yingjie) through a bold jump-cut carrying him from the background (Fig. 27) to a confrontation with the monk Hui Yan (Roy Chiao) (Fig. 28). Hui counters in an unnervingly powerful way, and the director obliges with a fresh presentational option: Hui smites Xu in the forehead (Fig. 29) and knocks him back several feet -no ellipsis now -to where he had started (Fig. 30).
In sequences like these, Hu moves toward a kind of pure cinema, in which the pattern and pacing of the images command attention as much as the story action.14 Whereas his contemporaries carefully preserve screen direction and match movement across the cut, he often pilots his players through an erratic trajectory. "For the combat scenes, I always shoot a lot of material, some without regard for continuity, in order to be able to choose later."15 A character soaring leftward may suddenly plunge down rightward or somersault
Figure 27 Figure 28
clockwise. The discontinuities accentuate the fact that this film will provide mere glimpses of the action.
Yet in Hu's hands, principles of quite orthodox cutting can yield abstract pattern-making. During the forest combat near the end of The Valiant Ones Xu Lian delivers ten thunderous kicks to the chest of Yu Dayou (Roy Chiao). Nothing in the passage violates any rules of continuity editing, but it remains richly experimental. Hu gives the sequence its aching force by adjusting the ellipses. A few simple movements -Xu running, leaping, kicking Yu, Yu falling back and recovering -are shown again and again, but each kick is cut differently. One of Xu's attacks is rendered in four shots, another in three, another in five, another in two. On each cycle, a phase may be prolonged, accelerated, dwelt on, or skipped over. Whereas kung-fu films routinely repeat a crucial action in an "instant replay" shot, Hu gives us, in a mere forty-five seconds and thirty-two shots, a set of ten variations on how constructive
Figure 29
Figure 30
editing can create ellipsis. At the same time, the style is fully expressive: The rhythmic repetitions capture the pitiless efficiency of Xu's onslaughts.
GLIMPSES OF MARVELS
The one-by-one tracking shot and the canons of standard editing stabilize King Hu's scenes, but the opacities of setting, the play with the bounding frame, the overinformative long shots, the disorienting whip-pans, and the elliptical cutting create a teasing degree of indiscernibility. In trying to under-stand this dynamic, I have pulled these devices apart and spread them out. But, of course, they are often combined in particular sequences, as we have seen in the start of A Touch of Zen's goldenrod duel between Yang and the stranger. A typical Hu combat scene will use one-by-one tracking shots and orthodox constructive cutting to establish or reestablish the fighters in the location, while the tactics of imperfection will be used to build the excitement and express abruptness and power. Hu's "richness of stylistic delivery" comes from a dynamic of stability and instability.
I have also had to ignore how each film distinctively develops a cluster of techniques. For example, in A Touch of Zen the duel in the fortress ruins seems to mark a phase in the film's overall progress toward a full and awesome revelation of the warriors' powers. In The Fate of Lee Khan, early fights are shown with great clarity, using long-takes and depth, while later combats become markedly more elliptical until the final burst of kinetic abstraction. Raining in the Mountain moves from a leisurely opening to games of hide-and-seek in the monastery before climaxing in an orgy of wildly elliptical cutting as concubines rain down from the rocks. A complete analysis of Hu's technique would have to take into account such stylistic progressions within each film.
Nonetheless, we have gone far enough to appraise his originality. From today's vantage point, it seems apparent that he had no disciples. The future belonged to a style that made constructive editing ever more crisp, legible, and expressive.16 Lau Karleung, Yuen Woo-ping, Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, Ching Siu-tung, Yuen Kuei, Tsui Hark, and many other filmmakers ingen-iously refined and sharpened the norms laid down in the 1960s and 1970s. These were norms that Hu partly assimilated and partly rejected, the better to experiment with an aesthetic of the glimpse. The mainstream style has given us many beautiful and stirring films, but Hu's eccentric explorations evoke something that these contemporary directors' works seldom arouse: a sense that extraordinary physical achievement, if caught in a skillfully imperfect way, becomes marvelous.
NOTES
1.
Quoted in Stephen Teo, "The Dao of King Hu," in A Study of Hong Kong Cinema in the Seventies, Li Cheuk-to, ed. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong International Film Festival/Hong Kong Urban Council, 1984), 34. This essay is available in revised form in Stephen Teo, Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 87-96.
2.
Michel Ciment. "Entretien avec King Hu," Positif 169 (May 1975): 34-35.
3.
Quoted in Charles Tesson, "Calligraphic et simulacres," Cahiers du cinema 360-61 (September 1984): 24.
4.
Tony Rayns, "Director: King Hu," Sight and Sound 45, 1 (Winter 1975-6): 10.
5.
See his remarks in Tesson, "Calligraphic," 21.
6.
I specify the period because this chapter focuses on Come Drink with Me, Dragon Gate Inn, A Touch of Zen, The Fate of Lee Khan, The Valiant Ones, and Raining in the Mountain. These are by common consent Hu's major works. I have seen all of them in projection situations, and I have been able to study all but Come Drink with Me in 35 mm copies on editing tables. I have seen Legend of the Mountain and All the King's Men in projection, but only once, and I have had no opportunity to study them intensively. I have seen Sons of the Good Earth and Anger on non-letter-boxed video, and The Wheel of Life and Painted Skin on letter-boxed video. Because of the limitations of video in the sort of analysis I perform here, I have not undertaken detailed study of these titles.
7.
For a broader survey of stylistic norms in Hong Kong cinema, see Chapters 5-8 of my Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
8.
See Ciment, "Entretien," 34.
9.
He commented that whereas Western art often strongly separated the imitation of nature from the expression of other worlds, Chinese art lived between these poles, showing things that are not real in realistic ways (Tesson, "Calligraphic," 21).
10.
See my essay "Aesthetics in Action: Kung Fu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressiv-ity," in Fifty Years of Electric Shadows, Law Kar, ed. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong International Film Festival/Hong Kong Urban Council, 1997), 81-89.
11.
Cited in Teo, "The Dao of King Hu," 34. Ann Hui recalled that Shu Shuen told
her that with his eight-frame shots "King Hu invented editing for Chinese movies" (interview with the author 12 February 1997).
12.
Perhaps this is why Hu called the forest battle "a stylistic breakthrough in cinema" (quoted in Teo, "Dao of King Hu," 34).
13.
Quoted in Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It (New York: Knopf, 1997), 250.
14.
Commentators have long noted this tendency toward abstraction in Hu's work. The Valiant Ones, Tony Rayns observes, constitutes "a suite of highly formalized action scenes which move progressively toward abstraction" (Rayns, "Director: King Hu": 105). See also Tony Rayns, "King Hu: Shall We Dance?" in A Study of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Film, Lau Shing-hon, ed. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Inter-national Film Festival/Urban Council, 1980), 103-6; and Olivier Assayas, "King Hu: Geant Exile," Cahiers du cinema 360-61 (September 1984): 17-19.
15.
Quoted in Tesson, "Calligraphie," 22.
16.
See my "Aesthetics in Action," 82-6.
SPACE, PLACE, AND SPECTACLE: THE CRISIS CINEMA OF JOHN WOO
Tony Williams
So I wanted to make a film that would emphasize traditional values: loyalty, honesty, passion for justice, commitment to your family. Things I felt were being lost.1
Like most national cultures today, Hong Kong cinema is undergoing a process of transformation influenced by historical, political, and geographical factors that are forcing its practitioners to question its very identity. The most domi-nant factor is the handover of the former British colony to the Chinese government. Although Hong Kong's hybrid nature has long been obvious to students of this cinema, the last decade has seen the emergence of a particular apocalyptic and highly cinematic body of work that is responsive to a future historical situation that emerged during the 1990s.
Certain features of Hong Kong cinema are by no means new to those who remember the martial arts boom of the 1970s. While Bruce Lee's The Big Boss (1971) and Fist of Fury (1972), respectively, dealt with contemporary and historical themes of industrial exploitation and outside (Japanese/Russian) involvement in 1920s Chinese politics, Enter the Dragon (1973), Return of the Dragon (a.k.a. Way of the Dragon (1973), and the posthumous Game of Death (1974) contained more Western-oriented treatments with frequent hom-ages to Hollywood (the "Lady from Shanghai" mirror sequence in Enter the Dragon) and contemporary cinematic genres (as seen in Chuck Norris's cow-boy persona "Colt" and accompanying Ennio Morricone "Frank" theme from Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time in the West featured in Return).2 Wang Yu's Ten Fingers of Steel (1973) employs incessant zoom-ins to the hero's eyes, a familiar trademark of many Italian Westerns. Hong Kong cinema has always shown a familiarity with Western models making any
I wish to thank Ching-Jung Li, Eiren Chong, Ivan Muricy, Mike Robins, John Roffman, Vincent Wong, and the anonymous reviewers for Cinema Journal for contributing vari-ous insights into this material.
study that attempts exclusive emphasis upon Chinese cultural roots highly problematic. Tsui Hark's Zu:Warriors of the Magic Mountain (1983) (and his role as producer of the Chinese Ghost Story series) owed as much to the influence of Lucasfilm Industrial Light and Magic techniques as it did to Chinese cultural traditions. Furthermore, of all Hong Kong directors to date, John Woo has been the most successful in transferring his talents to the Hollywood arena. Whereas Jackie Chan made several unsuccessful attempts to break into the Hollywood market ranging from the ignominious The Big Brawl (1980) and Cannonball Run 2 (1984) to The Protector (1985), John Woo achieved American box-office success with Universal's Hard Target (1993) enabling him to move on to his next American-financed project Broken Arrow (1996) starring John Travolta and Christian Slater. Woo's next project, Face Off (1997), not only revealed a return of those personal authorship traits sadly lacking from Broken Arrow but also revealed his familiarity with the stylistic influence of Alfred Hitchcock, most notably in the "wrong man" thematics signified by the carousel motif from Strangers on a Train (1951) appearing in the credit sequence. Due to the support of Travolta and executive producer Michael Douglas, Woo was allowed the hard-earned privilege of a director's cut on this film. Hopefully, Woo may gain more control over his next American films after showing the studios he can make money! He may also revitalize the tired Mission Impossible formula in the sequel he may be working on. Woo has also worked on what is probably the most distinguishing feature of the entire PBS American Cinema series -the introductory credits! Woo's transition echoes Bruce Lee's initial success more than twenty years earlier in combining Western techniques with Eastern motifs easily under-standable to non-Asian audiences. Most Hong Kong films echo Western cinematic models, the only exceptions being the art movies of Taiwanese director King Hu and certain examples in the contemporary historical cycle of films such as the Once Upon a Time in China (1991-1997) series comparing Western indifference to the 1997 return of Hong Kong to mainland China with similar acts of betrayal committed by both America and Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although producer-director Tsui Hark lucidly adapts Hollywood-derived strategies of mise-en-scene into the narratives, the Once Upon a Time in China series strongly relies upon knowl-edge of Chinese historical events not generally available to Western viewers. Similarly, Corey Yuen's Fong Sai Yuk (1993) also relies upon the viewer's understanding of linguistic and cultural barriers dividing Jet Li's hero from the heroine (Michelle Reiss) and her family. Fong Sai Yuk also contains several knowing references to the star persona of the actress playing Jet Li's mother, Josephine Siao (Siao Fong-Fong), known for her roles in an earlier phase of Hong Kong cinema but largely unknown to Western audiences. Woo directed her in one of the worst of his prt-Better Tomorrow films, Plain Jane to the Rescue (1982). Fong Sai Yuk 2 (1993) begins with the non-Han Manchu
Emperor dreaming of his death at the hands of the underground Red Flower Society. Part of the plot revolves around the fact that both the leader of the Red Flower Society and the Emperor are actually brothers, a fact the former conceals until its discovery leads to his expulsion from the society and its takeover by a more corrupt rival. The opening dream sequence is actually a displaced representation of violence envisaged in 1997 when the two Chinas once more reunite.
If Enter the Dragon (1973) was a film designed to introduce Lee to American audiences by placing a James Bond story within a martial context culminating in a climactic duel influenced by Orson Welles's The Lady From Shanghai (1948), Lee's next film as director - Return of the Dragon (1974) -combined traditional Chinese and Western notions of knightly conflict in its final martial arts duel between Lee's Tang Lung and Colt in the Roman Coliseum. Actor-director Wang Yu borrowed Italian Western motifs in Ten Fingers of Steel and Beach of the War Gods (1972), the former film conclud-ing a martial arts fight on a freight train accompanied by Morricone's The Good, The Bad and the Ugly theme, while the latter featured Wang Yu's appropriation of Clint Eastwood's Leone trilogy stubble in a film set at the end of China's Ming Dynasty in 1556.3 Tsui Hark's political-feminist heroines in Peking Opera Blues (1986) are new versions of 1970s characters played by actresses such as Angela Mao Ying, whose Hap-Ki-Do (1972) ads in England contained the line "Don't let your girlfriend see this film!"4 Hong Kong movies combining erotic motifs within traditional formulas such as the 1980s series Erotic Ghost Story originated in 1970s works like Intimate Confessions of A Chinese Courtesan (1973), described by Tony Rayns as a Jacobean revenge melodramatic "genuine Z movie equivalent to Sternberg while lack-ing its compression, resonance and subversively decadent vision."5 David Chiang and Ti Lung's star collaborative efforts -The New One-Armed Swordsman (1971), Blood Brothers (a.k.a. Chinese Vengeance/Dynasty of Blood, 1973), and The Chinese Connection (1973) featured fascination with China's medieval past in the first two films and 1970s designer clothes in the last.
Recent works of Hong Kong cinema by John Woo, Tsui Hark, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Ringo Lam, Ching Siu Tung, and many others reveal a highly professional competence in both style and theme far outshadowing Hollywood's current mediocre output. They are also far better than the cruder forms of earlier Hong Kong films such as King Boxer (1971) and King of Kung Fu (1973). However, in a cinema deserving far greater investigation as well as Western dissemination of its diverse output, the works of John Woo have recently received wider commercial and critical attention. While recog-nizing that he represents the tip of a fascinating national cinema, his 1986�X 1992 works are fascinating examples of a cinema experiencing a particular crisis.
Whether phrased according to a postmodernist discourse or not, the current decade exhibits a crisis situation politically, historically, and artistically. With-out entirely embracing the conclusions of Baudrillard and Lyotard, it is im-possible to ignore a contemporary situation expressing lack of confidence, despair, artistic uncertainty, lack of faith in progress, and the lack of old "master narrative" securities. Although these fin de siecle features character-ized previous decades, the present era definitely reflects crisis-ridden apoca-lyptic scenarios acutely expressed within cinema.6
Despite its doom-laden overtones, the apocalyptic is never totally nihilistic. As Lois Parkinson Zamora notes, the concept is dialectical balancing crisis and renewal, tribulation and triumph, chaos and order, death and rebirth. This creative tension has roots within prophetic and eschatological religious dis-courses strongly inherent within cultural productions.7 Although an apocalyp-tic climate may breed moods of nihilism influenced by updatings of Daniel Bell's 1960 "end of ideology" thesis stimulated by capitalism's supposed "victory" over communism, it may also exhibit creative tensions containing seeds awaiting a positive environment, or better tomorrow. As Christopher Sharrett notes, despite the current, pessimistic situation, crisis is a better term than catastrophe, especially when it involves "holding out for the resistance of difference and human intervention, not the inevitable ethos of apocalypti-cism with which bourgeois consciousness has always attempted to reduce humanity."8
Hong Kong now confronts its own sense of crisis. In 1997, this British colony returns to mainland China, a return causing deep concern to both citizens and artistic community. Already shocked by the 1989 events in Tiananmen Square, 1997 represents an apocalyptic "end of the world" for most Hong Kong residents.9 Noting this deep preoccupation Esther Yau com-ments that the Hong Kong film industry now operates according to a dreaded future anterior narrative mode.10 Hong Kong critic Ackbar Abbas defines this new type of cinema as containing a feeling of deja disparu. Because Hong Kong is such an elusive subject, a temptation arises to believe in established forms of (mis)representation.
This is dis-appearance, then, in a very specific sense in that it gives us a reality that is not so much hidden as purloined. In the same way, the binarisms used to represent Hong Kong as subject give us not so much a sense of deja vu as an uncanny feeling of what we might call the deja disparu: the feeling that what is new and unique about the situation is always already gone, and we are left holding a handful of cliches. It is only from this point of view that we can query a remark often made about Hong Kong cinema: that it is the least contemplative cinema in the world. If it is not a contemplative cinema, it is because there is no time for contemplation. Things move too fast. The problem that the new Hong Kong cinema faces, therefore, is how to keep pace with a subject that is always on the verge of disappearing.1'
Abbas defines some interesting features of a cinema that represents the most dynamic examples of visual and narrative styles currently unequalled elsewhere. However, the features he describes may be less novel than he suggests, particularly when we consider a cinema facing a particular historical crisis involving past, present, and anticipated futures within certain narratives belonging to the work of John Woo.
In any case, this current cinematic mood differs from 1970s works, which were highly preoccupied with China's national past and themes involving Japanese invasion or economic mainland infiltration.12 Recent films read the past in terms of an anticipated troubled future as the unresolved political conditions at the end of Peking Opera Blues (1986) show. Three examples may suffice here. In Stephen Chin's Black Cat (1991), starring Simon Yam (a Hong Kong actor who combined the Eastern equivalents of the charm of Cary Grant with the menacing persona of Charles Bronson in many of his roles), an official tells a Hong Kong citizen that she had better start practicing her Mandarin (Mainland Chinese) rather than her Hong Kong (Cantonese) dialect. Mak Yai Kit and Tsui Hark's Wicked City (1992), based on the Japanese animated cartoon Supernatural Beast City, hints that the removal of capital from Hong Kong in anticipation of 1997 will lead to the invasion of the supernatural Rapter forces. Finally, in Jackie Chan's Project A: Part 2 (1988), set around 1911, coast guard Chan gently warns a mainland Chinese agent about respecting Hong Kong's integrity. In addition to recent cinematic inves-tigations of China's historical past in Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China now in its sixth part, a flourishing gangster genre has developed. As Hong Kong critic Li Cheuk-To notes, "People have a feeling of foreboding over 1997 . .. These heroes from the lawless days show that people can survive and even succeed in a bad situation."13
Yau notes that Hong Kong is a colony fully aware of its complicity with the colonial era and contemporary Western capitalism. It views 1997 as a threat to its quintessential hybrid and heterogenous nature. Cinematically, this dilemma reveals itself within a culturally split subjectivity characterized by struggle and complicity with Western traditions. Many films reveal contesting identifications, rooted within past and contemporary Chinese traditions as well as current Western values. Threatened with the loss of this "contestation" aura in 1997, most Hong King films depict a survival myth to counter a gloomily envisaged historical and cultural apocalypse.
John Woo's various Hong Kong narrative and thematic worlds deal in various ways with things the director feels are in danger of being lost. They deal with the uneasy tensions between past, present, and future by a director born in mainland China whose family emigrated to Hong Kong in 1948 to escape political turmoil. After living in extreme poverty and being rescued by Roman Catholic missions, Woo studied at Matteo Ricci College in 1967, where he joined a student drama troupe and made 8 mm short films. Woo is a Catholic but one influenced by national historical and religious traditions, which he interweaves in his various films. The knightly hero who became a deity -Kwan Yu -features in many of his films such as A Better Tomorrow (1986) and Hard Boiled (1992). Uncle Douvee (Wilford Brimley in Hard Target) rides away on his horse after firing an arrow and causing an explosion. The slow-motion imagery equates him with a Chinese medieval knight, his quiver of arrows on his back resembling martial objects worn by heroes in old paintings and performers in the Peking opera. Religion is a part of everyday life. It is both a background material aspect and a moral force influencing characters. These Chinese and Catholic religious associations be-long to a twentieth-century hybrid world and are as much a part of Woo's films as the cultural references he cites. In several interviews, Woo acknowl-edges the influence of 1960s movements in cinema and music. Like Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and Francois Truffaut, Woo was a film critic before he became a filmmaker. In 1969 he joined the Cathay Organization as a production assistant, but his most formative experience was working with veteran swordsman director, Chang Che, at Shaw Brothers. As assistant director, he worked on Che films such as Boxer from Shantung (1972) and Blood Brothers starring two actors he would later work with, David Chiang and Ti Lung. In 1986, he would revive Ti Lung's career in the box-office success A Better Tomorrow. According to Li Cheuk-To, part of the plot and some of the characters from A Better Tomorrow derive from an earlier film, The Essence of Heroes (1967) directed by Lung Kong. Both films deal with the clash of past and present values in a changing society. Li Cheuk-To makes the following observations:
The romantic-hero ideology of A Better Tomorrow, its use of slow-motion to accentuate violence, the bloodbaths, and the description of male friendships all have antecedents in Chang Che's martial arts gong fu films. The influence of another strand of martial arts movies made in the 1970s -the sword-fighting series of romantic knights-errant directed by Chu Yuan and written by Gu Long -must also be mentioned. These films attempt to update the settings and the ideology of the characters, to incorporate the passing of romantic heroes and keep up with modern notions of bravery and heroism.14
Similarly, on the Criterion laser-disc version of The Killer, Woo speaks about his hazy knowledge of a yakuza-eiga film starring Takakura Ken he saw in the 1960s that had the same plot as The Killer. The Japanese yakuza-eiga films also deal with similar conflicts involving ancient loyalty and mod-ern values, which appear in Woo's films. Like A Better Tomorrow, many yakuza-eiga themes derive from historical traditions. The genre became popular following the cultural and historical crisis that faced Japan after World War II.15
Before the success of A Better Tomorrow, Woo directed several films ranging from average kung fu movies, satires, comedies, and a Vietnam mercenary film, Heroes Shed No Tears (1983) (containing references to Jean-Pierre Melville and the six-part Japanese film series Sword of Vengeance, nicknamed the "Baby Cart" series), which was drastically reedited by the distributor.16 Many of Woo's earlier films reveal little evidence of the distinc-tive talent that would emerge with A Better Tomorrow, but several reveal Woo's interest in the clash of past and present traditions. In 1976, he directed a remake of the Cantonese opera film Tragedy of the Emperor's Daughter (1959) called Princess Chang Ping, in which he attempted to apply cinematic techniques to historical and theatrical subject matter. Other films such as The Young Dragons (1973), The Hand of Death (1975), and The Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979) reveal little evidence of distinctive cinematic technique. But The Last Hurrah for Chivalry did present an interesting world of doomed heroes who (as the notes for the Criterion laser-disc version of The Killer suggest) may be the only people who believe in a code of chivalry that was already becoming obsolete in the historical period in which the film is set. Woo's past and contemporary heroes (played by actors such as Chow Yun-Fat and Ti Lung as well as others associated with the earlier wave of martial arts cinema such as Danny Lee and Chu Kong) are really avatars of a fallen group of knightly heroes. Their modern counterparts are really avatars of that old tradition now existing in inhospitable capitalist hells in a world about to be dominated by the bloody specter of Tiananman Square.
According to James J. Y. Liu, the figure of the Chinese knight-errant differs from Western aristocratic concepts in being a mainly classless figure often acting out of altruistic motives redressing wrongs and fighting for the poor and distressed. Unlike their western counterparts, they often aided victims of a lower-class background rather than aristocratic ladies in distress. This partic-ular altruism (variously defined as wuxia or yi hsia, the latter term combining aspects of "altruism" with "knightly" values) involved "supermoral" stan-dards combining concepts of justice, individual freedom, personal loyalty, courage, truthfulness, honor, generosity and contempt for wealth.17 Tracing the influence of this concept throughout Chinese history and cultural represen-tations, Liu concludes that although "knight-errantry as such has ceased to exist, its spirit has not vanished completely. Even now, though we no longer encounter anyone actually called a knight-errant, we may still hear of men being described as having the spirit of knight-errantry or behaving in a chivalrous fashion."18 It is a feature common to both men and women in Woo's cinema. Although his Hong Kong and American heroes such as Chance Boudreaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and Uncle Douvee (Wilford Brimley) in Hard Target fit this category, women are not always excluded. Although Woo failed in making Josephine Siao an acceptable knightly her-oine in Plain Jane to the Rescue (1984), he did succeed with the figure of Carmine Mitchell (Kasi Lemmons) in Hard Target. She never joins her colleagues during the New Orleans police strike, allowing Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) and Pick (Arnold Vosloo) unlimited territory for their "most dangerous game," but remains on duty. When Fouchon later asks Pick, "Can we buy her?" the latter replies negatively. Like Mark and Kit in the Better Tomorrow films, she dies heroically and honorably in the line of duty.
Woo's historical influences are evident. His work involves parallels be-tween vanishing traditions confronting pressing realities of the modern world and a colony in danger of losing its very identity. These themes are often expressed visually in films that deal with dynamic components of space and place within spectacular backgrounds, a cinema counterpointing the very architectural nature of the colony itself.
Woo's post-1986 Hong Kong movies are part of a cinematic "legitimation crisis." As a director familiar with both Eastern and Western filmic traditions, his self-reflexive references are by no means equivalent to the pastiche struc-tures of contemporary Hollywood cinema or derivative fans such as Quentin Tarantino. They are more appropriately understood as part of this crisis. Woo engages in visual clashes involving space, place, and spectacle influenced both by classical Hollywood, French New Wave, and Italian Western traditions within a particular historical and cultural situation. Far from being read as a contemporary version of a Sam Peckinpah "Master of Violence," Woo's work necessitates understanding within particular theoretical dis-courses.
Although there are problems in using Western postmodernist-oriented ideas, the approach is relevant as long as we consider intrinsic cultural factors. Hong Kong is both Chinese and capitalist. It is a contradictory entity. As Linda Hutcheon states, postmodern art does not choose sides but lives out contradictions. It is "both intensively self-reflexive and parodic, yet it also attempts to root itself in that which both reflexivity and parody appear to short-circuit: the historical world." Furthermore, there can be no final resolu-tion because postmodernism contains no dialectic -"the self-reflexive re-mains distinct from its traditionally accepted contrary -the historico-political context in which it is embedded."19 However, Hutcheon has also pointed out the possibility for an oppositional and contestatory mode of postmodernist parody to exist in certain instances of national cinemas foregrounding aspects of the historical and political.20 In these specific instances, it is possible for certain cinematic practices to combine a productive merger of interrogative postmodernist practices with an apocalyptic dimension. As noted earlier, the apocalypse may contain elements of both crisis and renewal. It can be inter-rogative as well as pessimistic. The postmodern dimension can lead toward nullity and bankruptcy. But as Christopher Sharrett notes, negative meanings tend to predominate in popular discourse as opposed to certain possibilities that reveal a highly productive ' 'resistance of difference and human interven-tion."21 In certain instances, postmodernism may belong within a context defined by Andrew Britton as "the bourgeois intelligentsia in the age of Reagan.22 In others it may involve an ironic contest with dominant discourses. Similarly oppositional figuresmay attempt to challenge dehumanizing devel-opments moving toward retrieval and renewal of important cultural and his-torical traditions in danger of "being lost."23 Particular cultural representa-tions may emerge combining a specific use of postmodernist tendencies stressing irony and opposition with an apocalyptic current stressing ultimate triumph, renewal, restoration of important traditional values, and rebirth. Such possibilities exist in Woo's cinema, a cinema that contains a merger of certain aspects common to both the postmodernist and apocalyptic traditions.24 Space, place, spectacle, and the historical are essential components of this type of cultural representation.
History is inescapable within various Hong Kong cinematic genres. If the former 1970s martial arts genre emphasized the historical past, current works dwell upon the "future past," whether in gangster films or historical works such as the Once Upon a Time in China series and Peking Opera Blues. Woo's post-1986 films deal with issues of space and place as contrasts to Hong Kong's postcapitalist society of the spectacle. In many ways, Woo's films have important associations with postmodernist populist and historicist traits, querying modernist desires to start anew, and often finding oppositional ideas in nature, local traditions, and popular tastes.
In A Better Tomorrow's opening scenes, Ho (Ti Lung) awakes from a nightmare of his brother Kit (Leslie Cheung) shot in the back. The dream is in black and white. Driving through Hong Kong's modernist skyscraper dis-trict with his friend Mark (Chow Yun-Fat), Ho arrives at the counterfeiting headquarters. A series of intercut shots juxtapose the monochromatic dollar-bill counterfeiting process and their faces seen in black and white through a surveillance camera. They then meet their American counterparts exchanging banal "organization man platitudes" in English (an irony lost in the dubbed version). As well as replaying the real-life friendship of Woo and Tsui Hark (who helped each other during difficult times in the film industry) both Ho and Mark represent traditional Chinese values of loyalty and friendship under threat from contemporary consumer capitalism. Both outside and inside this Americanized high-capitalist world, Ho and Mark are trapped within a world of modernist architecture. In his fascinating study of Raymond Williams's novels Tony Pinckney states that "the ideal of modernist architecture. . . sweeps away every last trace of local history or tradition in favor of its own gleaming, rectilinear white facades. For the postmodernist, however, the local qualities of space are to be respected and reactivated."25 A "bad space" involves a spatial fetishism whenever history becomes oppressed by alienating tendencies. For Woo, these tendencies involve both multinational capitalism and totalitarian communism because they equally attempt to destroy valuable cultural traditions in favor of a "brave new world."
Woo's Hong Kong urban films reflect an aesthetic of density skin to the architectural landscape of Hong Kong itself, a landscape containing several conflicting elements. Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani describes Hong Kong as a geographical entity wrested from the sea at the very beginning of its exis-tence, an environment packing buildings and people closely together to make the best possible use of each particular site. Naturally, the environmental pressures would emerge in a different form more than a century later on that "enormous monument to the transitory."
In this artificial setting, at once both unconscious and epic, all the contradictions of our age are enhanced as their opposed elements continue to exist alongside each other, disarmingly self-evident, as symbols of themselves. Even more: in this setting the most irreconcilable forms of life can also exist side by side, huddled together. The imploding city with a new, unintended beauty is also the city of a robust urbanity, in which mildness and severity, openness and secrecy, the supervised and the unpreventable, order and chaos, luxury and misery, eman-cipation and oppression, radiance and shadows share an unrelieved co-existence. It is a city in which the vast number of people living in extremely close proximity offers a breathtaking spectacle, at once fascinating and distressing.26
Within such a world the "good" and "bad" spaces conflict with each other, counterpoising historical clashes of traditional and contemporary alien-ating forces threatening to engulf Woo's heroes in cinematic worlds hurtling toward destruction and disappearance. However, the spectacularly apocalyptic images of Woo's films are not mere copies of Hollywood's of Industrial Light and Magic. They have more serious undertones. According to Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong's spatial perspective (one also influencing its particular type of national cinema) involves "a spatial perspective that takes into consideration social, political, and cultural factors, and does not reduce architecture to questions of art or technique on the one hand, or to economics on the other."27 As far as architecture is concerned, Akbas sees the city as embodying histori-cally specific instances of appearances and disappearances challenging tradi-tional definitions of representations in which premodern and postmodern join hands without having to acknowledge each other:
These examples suggest that the space of Hong Kong is a space of uneven development in a specific sense: a space traversed by different times and speeds, where change has no clear direction but is experienced as a series of anticipations and residues jostling for position. These are examples of anachronisms, as anach-ronisms are perceived as chronology violated. Rather, they are examples of ach-ronicites, where past and present disappear in each other.28
The cinematic spaces within Woo's cinema do not exhibit these tendencies. Although influenced by these urban environmental tensions, Woo's Hong Kong films use the cinematic screen to contrast historical clashes rather than dissolve them into each other. This is particularly so in an era where the nature of these contrasts is particularly evident. Woo's 1989 masterpiece, A Bullet in the Head, represents one particular example.
In A Bullet in the Head, a film heavily influenced by Tiananmen Square, the three heroes are forced to leave their homeland in 1967 and arrive in Vietnam. Discovering that their Hong Kong passports offer no protection from South or North Vietnamese brutality, they undergo torment and tempta-tion in a Gothic space of terror, enclosure, and entrapment that strongly resembles one Pinkney sees operating in Raymond Williams's 1985 novel Loyalties. If Williams's Welsh novels search for a world of positive space so, too, do Woo's films. To adequately understand the different, yet similar, connections, it is necessary to examine issues of space and place within these Hong Kong films.
As Pinckney points out, space can never be separated from power.29 This is relevant to any national community struggling to define an identity against alien forces of late-capitalism or demonic visions of Chinese communism. Working in a highly concentrated geographic and cinematic community, ques-tions of space, history, and identity are natural elements within these films. Like Gaston Bachelard, Woo searches for images of felicitous space within "topophiliac" investigatory images. For Bachelard, these investigations ' 'seek to determine the human value of the sorts of space that may be grasped, that may be defended against adverse forces, the space we love. For diverse reasons, this is eulogized space. Attached to its protective value, which can be a positive one, are also imagined values, which soon become dominant."30 Opposing this realm is a spectacular space of hatred and combat that ' 'can only be studied in the context of impassioned subject matter and apocalyptic images."31 The latter elements feature prominently in Woo's later works A Bullet in the Head and Hard Boiled, the former made in the shadow of Tiananmen Square and the latter beginning with a police raid using the code "the invasion's about to begin."
If Williams's usage of Bachelard's positive spaces contains more complex and disturbing overtones seeing vulnerability before oppressive forces, the same is true of Woo's spaces. His space and place motifs contain precarious historical and geographical elements liable to disruption at any time by violent situations initiated by alien, nontraditional forces whether from the West or East. Despite their spectacularly violent nature, every Woo film contains some quiet moments, which resemble Eisenstein's lyrical tonal montage sequences and provide his heroes with moments of reflection.32 These moments often occur in a geographic location where characters contemplate issues of space and place threatened by impending events.
After his brutal beating by Shing's men under a prominent Japan Air Lines sign, Mark speaks to Ho on a promontory overlooking Hong Kong at night. Defeated both personally and professionally, he muses, "I never realized Hong Kong looked so good at night. Like most things it won't last. That's for sure." This scene parallels a similar moment in The Killer when Jeff (Chow Yun-Fat) and Sydney Fung (Chu Kong) discuss changes in their lives. "Our world is changing too fast. It never used to be like this. We're getting too nostalgic." The scene also occurs overlooking the Hong Kong landscape. It is also a "good space" because it witnesses the reconciliation of these two friends after alienation caused by corporate concerns. In A Better Tomorrow II, Lung (Dean Shek) talks to Ken (Chow Yun-Fat) against a misty "New York'' (though obviously Hong Kong) landscape before they return to Hong Kong. "This is, after all, not our own place." Ken replies, "Many try to leave home at any cost. Many want to go home. Some can not finda temporary home to rest. One's home is always better." Ironically they talk about a world they are soon to lose, a felicitous space threatened by a future historical apocalypse. Prior to their departure for Vietnam, the three heroes in A Bullet in the Head look down upon a Hong Kong landscape they will soon leave. In the lighter Once A Thief (1991), Woo's Chinese versions of Truffaut's eternal triangle in Jules et Jim (1961) yearn for Hong Kong in the French Riviera before finally relocating to America. Tequila (Chow Yun-Fat) talks with his friend during an undercover operation in Hard Boiled''s opening sequence, "Have you ever considered emigrating?" His friend replies, "No. This is my home. I'm going to die. I want to be buried here. I won't get used to living abroad. How'd I get dim sum for breakfast?" In A Better Tomorrow, the young girls' choir sing a song with the lines, "How can they leave their homeland and forget their childhood?"
Regarding his heroes as twentieth-century versions of Chinese knights with traditional codes of loyalty and friendship yet still relevant to the contempo-rary world, Woo often films them in spaces that represent a temporary, but vulnerable, shelter from the forces of chaos. A Better Tomorrow shows Mark in a temple dedicated to the god Kwan-Yu, who also appears in particular shrines within police departments in The Killer and Hard Boiled. Occupying a different world thousands of years ago, he was known for qualities of loyalty and friendship. After death, he became a god as a reward for his humanitarian qualities. When Ho asks Mark, "Do you believe in God?" he replies, "I'm the god. Anyone can be a god if he can control his life." The final scene in A Better Tomorrow II shows the mortally wounded Ho, Lung, and Ken seated in chairs identically resembling portraits showing Kwan-Yu at the Emperor's right with sword (Ho), the Emperor (Lung) in the center, and a friend (Ken) at his left.33 In the final scenes of A Better Tomorrow, Mark acts as reconciler between Ho and Kit. Kwan-Yu functions as a traditional counterpart to the Madonna imagery within Woo's films. In The Killer, she signifies Jeff's other qualities of compassion and tenderness.
If Woo mixes traditional Chinese religion with Catholicism, he also con-flates resurrection and karma. As a reward for his "good deeds" and heroism in A Better Tomorrow, Mark becomes reincarnated as his twin brother, Ken, in the sequel. The same film sees Kit's death synchronized with the birth of a daughter he names "Spirit of Righteousness." Ho also experiences Kit's resurrection when he looks into the face of the policeman who prevents him from walking into the path of a fast-moving vehicle as he grieves for his brother. He sees Kit in his police graduation uniform before the image changes to that of the caring policeman. The final scenes of The Killer and Hard Boiled, show Jeff and Tony (Tony Leung) resurrected beyond the temporal boundaries of space and history.34 They now inhabit a felicitous topophilia as a reward for their knightly deeds.
Historical, traditional, and local moments in Woo's films are best under-stood as cultural motifs that merge boundaries and stress space as an active component of meaning. Reacting against twentieth-century dehumanization, Woo's heroes attempt to reclaim threatened spaces for redundant values highly relevant to Hong Kong society. This project resembles postmodernist geographic strategies within a work such as Edward Soja's Postmodern Ge-ographies. Resisting twentieth-century time-bound ontologies, Soja empha-sizes the spatial as a component Tony Pinckney describes as involving "the fundamental experience of what it means to be human."35
According to Soja:
The first of these spatializations is rooted in a fundamental reformulation of the nature and conceptualization of social being, an essentially ontological struggle to rebalance the interpretable interplay between history, geography and society. Here the reassertion of space arises against the grain of an ontological historicism that has privileged the separate constitution of being in time for the past century.36
Although Woo's transcendent places and peaceful Catholic churches may lend themselves to metaphysical interpretations, this notion is mistaken. The areas are both spiritual and social. If the missionary church of The Killer allows Jeff to reveal his personal, feminized side in contrast to his masculine corporate murderous persona, it also appears as a felicitous social space. It anticipates the Catholic mission in Hard Target, the only body caring for New Orleans' fallen military knights (Chance Boudreaux, Elijah Roper) and vul-nerable families. In many ways, Woo's spaces resemble those contained in Michel Foucault's definition of a "crisis heterotopia": "privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis."37 This is particularly relevant to Woo's cinematic Hong Kong.
Referring to Bachelard, Foucault points out that space is a heterogeneous element that contains qualities both real and fantasmatic involving "a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and abso-lutely not superimposable on one another."38 These heterotopias offer up unreal, virtual spaces that reveal things beneath the surface as countersites contesting everyday real sites. By seeing Woo's films as offering traditional and spiritual values as countersites to both capitalist and communist influ-ences, we may understand them as special contributions to the particular nature of Hong Kong cinema as a site of contestation. Woo merges past and present, transcendence and reality, death and resurrection, real movement and unreal movement (slow/stop-motion), violence and choreographed ballet (his ritual bloodbaths) as both stylistic and thematic aspects of a particular contes-tation now future-historically motivated. Foucault also notes that heterotopias take different forms within particular societies, "capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompat-ible,"39 an interpretation relevant to both Woo's merging of past and present as it is to postmodernist definitions of crisis. Heterotopias are closely linked to slices in time opening themselves out to heterochronies structured and distributed in a relatively complex fashion. But, for Foucault, far from being "orientated toward the eternal, they are rather absolutely temporal (chro-niques)."40
The struggle is precarious and dangerous, involving the conflation of sev-eral traditions, past and present, within a cinematic project designed to bring together several opposites. As Woo's films develop beyond The Killer, several exhibit dark apocalyptic overtones in which both historical past and immediate present become overwhelmed by visions of a dark spectacular ontological future. A Bullet in the Head's Vietnam envisages the brutal nightmares of 1997, while Hard Boiled witnesses the infernoesque decimation of most of the colony's population and future (the babies trapped within the hospital). However, Tequila unconsciously performs an action ascribed to an earlier hero Chao Yun in rescuing the last surviving baby from the hospital. Tequila protects the baby inside his jacket swinging away from the flames, much as his earlier counterpart saves Lady Mi's baby in a similar manner.41 Woo's characters face the violent embodiments of different forms of twentieth-century societies of spectacle threatening "things I felt were being lost." For him these things are what it means to be human in a world whose very history, society, and space are threatened with extinction. All his films present an intense struggle for space within the now-threatened geographical place of Hong Kong. Woo's spectacular violent confrontations depict the end of his-tory for this former colony. But within the very nature of the struggles, he contrasts desolate worlds of present and future with visions of China's heroic past as a means for survival. Neither escapist nor metaphysical, his slow-and stop-motion visual images of heroes transcending the normal temporal bound-aries of time and space represent tentative possibilities for a community struggling to survive a problematic future. Recovering from memories of past Japanese occupation and contemporary economic competition in the 1970s, Hong Kong cinema presents models of past heroic conduct. In Woo's more cinematically advanced films, conflating many genres and traditions, worlds of the historic past and transcendent realms appear as brief hopes for a ' 'better tomorrow."
It is a hope shared not just by Woo but by certain other directors within Hong Kong Cinema as well. One particular example illustrates a different survival strategy in which the shadow of 1997 never appears. Alex Law's Painted Faces (1988) is a poignant and emotional biographical drama dealing with the early lives of three figures who were to become major stars in Hong Kong Cinema -Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao, and Samo Hung. They train in a Hong Kong-based version of the Peking opera from a very early age. Starring actor-director Samo Hung in the role of the trio's strict teacher, Master Yu Yim Juen, Painted Faces depicts the decline of the Peking opera as a tradi-tional form of entertainment and its replacement by the movie industry. Despite the undoubtedly nostalgic imagery characterizing Painted Faces, the film is by no means as inaccurate as Jackie Chan and Samo Hung believe.42 As a Golden Harvest/Shaw Brothers coproduction, Painted Faces represents a retrospective cinematic farewell to a lost world of Hong Kong culture, both operatic and cinematic. The opening credits list Leonard Ho and Mona Fong as coproducers. Leonard Ho represents Golden Harvest, and Mona Fong now heads Shaw Brothers studio, which came to a complete halt in 1985.43 Painted Faces is a self-reflexive work in more ways than one. It not only features the return of Shaw Brothers screen heroine Cheng Pei Pei, well-known for her starring roles in earlier Shaw productions such as Come Drink With Me (1965), Golden Swallow (1966), and The Shadow Whip (1970) but also Lam Ching Ying, the beloved sifu of the Mr. Vampire series. Cheng Pei Pei plays Master Ching, sifu of a Cantonese female opera company, loosely based on real-life Peking opera sifu, Madame Fan Fok Fa. King Hu chose Cheng to play the heroine in Come Drink With Me because of her training in Shanghai ballet after she completed a six-months acting course at Shaw Brothers studio.44 Although Lam Ching Ying plays Uncle Wah, a former compatriot of Master Yu, who has now fallen on hard times and become a Shaw Brothers stunt man, the actor actually studied under Madame Fan Fok Fa in real life. These casting associations would be readily familiar to Hong Kong audiences.
Although the film ends with the sad departure of Master Yu for America and the eventual success of his three famous pupils as movie stars, Painted Faces does not depict the fall of one entertainment and the rise of another as a disappearing dissolution of conflicting tendencies. The pupils succeed in the industry because they successfully apply their rigorous Peking opera training to the new medium of cinema and outpace their movie extra contemporaries when they begin to work in a studio obviously based on the Shaw Brothers. During a lunch break, the three sit outside and recognize locations used in such Shaw Brothers classics as One Armed Swordsman (1967). Furthermore, they exchange one particular space and place -the theatrical -for the more limited but universally accessible territory of the cinema screen. Traditions live on in a new form adapting to particular historical, spatial, and geograph-ical circumstances. The most poignant scene in the film involves the ageing, kindly Uncle Wah striving to prove his declining Peking opera abilities as a stuntman and lapsing into madness. However, Master Yu saves his old friend from an apocalyptic descent into suicide by accompanying the traditionally operatic performance the demented man undertakes as his last act of theatrical glory. The sequence ends with both the pupils and the formerly cynical studio personnel united in applauding his performance. Both worlds unite in this act, but it is a unity of equally valid traditions, not a case of both dissolving into each other. The climax of Painted Faces implies that both traditional theater and modern cinema will coexist as a result of the former's benevolent and respected influence in newly defined spaces and places. Thus Painted Faces moves toward its poignant climax when seven of Master Yu's students see him leaving for America after Hong Kong authorities decide to tear down his school. These seven students (Yuen Tak, Yuen Kwai, Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao, Yuen Mao, and Yuen Bing) represent the Seven Little Fortunes. All would eventually work in Hong Kong cinema, but only three would gain stardom.45
A dialectical move toward a better tomorrow also characterizes Woo's major achievements in Hong Kong Cinema. In A Better Tomorrow II Kit lives again in his daughter, "Spirit of Righteousness," Mark becomes Ken, and Jeff and Tony live after death in concluding scenes of The Killer and Hard Boiled. Their cinematic survival within different realms of body, space, and place, present one possible solution for a community facing a possible loss of identity and future physical and cinematic diaspora.
NOTES
Maitland McDonagh, "Things I Felt Were Being Lost," (interview) Film Comment 29.5 (1993): 50. Hong Kong studios often bought the rights to Italian Western soundtracks featuring them within kung fu movies. Italy was not slow to mine this developing genre. Relevant examples include Anthony Dawson's The Stranger and the Gunfighter (1973), with Lee Van Cleef and King Boxer's Lo Lieh; The Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe (1973) and its sequel The Return of Shanghai Joe (1974), both starring Chen Lee and Klaus Kinski; Yeo Ban Yee's Kung Fu Brothers in the Wild West (1973). Luigi Vanzi's Stranger in Japan (1969) preceded the "Samurai meets Gunfighter" theme in Terence Young's Red Sun (1971) by two years. In Sergio Corbucci's The White, The Yellow and the Black (1973), Cuban actor Tomas Milian (a stalwart of many Italian Westerns) played the Samurai of the title. Anthony Ascott's Have A Good Funeral, My Friend (1973) in Gianni Garko's Sartana series, featured a martial arts theme and borrowed Bruno Nicolai's score for The Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe.
For the influence of medieval courtly values in Chinese culture see James J. Y. Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967).
These motifs certainly were prominent features of Hong Kong movies released in
the West following the success of Bruce Lee's films. See particularly, Tony Rayns,
"Threads Through the Labyrinth," Sight and Sound 43.3 (1974), 138-41 and
"Director King Hu," Sight and Sound 45.1 (1975-1976), 8-13. However, Rayns
also notes the importance of the dramatic models found in the Italian Western on
these earlier films, a feature paralleling Woo's borrowings from directors such as
Jean-Pierre Melville, Martin Scorsese, and Sam Peckinpah in his post-1986 films.
Most of Woo's earlier work prior to his involvement with Tsui Hark and the Film
Workshop was undistinguished. See John A. Lent, The Asian Film Industry (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1990), 110-11. Several Hong Kong critics noted A Better
Tomorrow as involving the return of the romantic hero in a melodramatic, sentimen-
tal story providing ' 'young people with the message of sticking together and fight-
ing, probably against the 1997 takeover of Hong Kong by China." See Lent, Asian
Film, 114. Woo's gangster movies differ from the bleaker, more nihilistic visions
presented by fellow-director Ringo Lam, who also developed his creative vision
during the same period as Woo in films such as City on Fire, Prison on Fire (both
1987), Prison on Fire 2 (1991), and Full Contact (1992), all featuring Woo's leading
actor Chow Yun-Fat. The last fifteen minutes of City on Fire were ' 'borrowed'' by
Quentin Tarantino for his highly derivative Reservoir Dogs (1992). Hong Kong
cinema's indebtedness to European and Hollywood models prove no problem for
either its directors or critics, unlike Western critics, who seem to be preoccupied
with questions of "cultural imperialism." I wish to thank Professor Ping-Kwan
Leung of the University of Hong Kong for his comments on this matter during a
discussion on October 23, 1993. For recent information on other trends in contem-
porary Hong Kong cinema, see Steve Fore, "Tales of Recombinant Femininity: The
Reincarnation of Golden Lotus, The Chin P'Ing Mei, and The Politics of Melodrama
in Hong Kong," Journal of Film and Video 45.4 (1993), 56-70; "Golden Harvest
Films and the Hong Kong Movie Industry in the Realm of Globalization," The
Velvet Light Trap 34 (1994), 40-58.
3.
Wang Yu directed Beach of the War Gods, One Armed Boxer (1972) but not Ten Fingers of Steel (directed by Kien Lun). According to Tony Rayns, Wang Yu was the first Chinese star to begin directing films at this time, a pattern followed by Bruce Lee. See Monthly Film Bulletin 41.483 (April 1974), 68. According to certain sources, he also directed scenes in the Hong Kong/Australian coproduction, The Man from Hong Kong (1975), officially ascribed to Brian Trenchard-Smith accord-ing to Western release credits, in which he starred (as Jimmy Wang Yu) with former James Bond George Lazenby. This was one of several coproductions at the time. Others included the Hong Kong/West German Enter the Seven Virgins (1974) and the Hammer coproductions The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires and Shatter (both 1974). The latter two films featured the then-popular starring duo David Chiang and Ti Lung in different films. Legend teamed Chiang with Peter Cushing's Dr. Van Helsing in search of a transformed Chinese Count Dracula, and Shatter associated Lung with Stuart Whitman's titular American private eye.
4.
Angela Mao Ying also featured in other films such as Deadly China Doll (1971) Back Alley Princes (1972), When Taekwondo Strikes (1973), The Association, and The Fate of Lee Khan (all 1973). Other female stars included Helen Ma in The Deaf and Mute Heroine (1970) and Cheng Pei Pei in Kung Fu Girl Fighter and The Girl with the Thunderbolt Kick (1973).
5.
"Intimate Confessions of A Chinese Courtesan," Monthly Film Bulletin 40.478 (November 1973): 228.
6.
For an excellent definition of crisis and apocalypse by the leading theoretician in this area, see Christopher Sharrett, Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmod-ern Narrative Film (Washington D.C.: Maissoneuve Press, 1993), 1-9.
7.
Lois Parkinson Zamora, ed., The Apocalyptic Vision in America (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1982), 4.
8. Sharrett, Crisis Cinema, 9.
9. See "The Shadow of the Square," The Economist, May 12 (1990): 93-4; Lester Goldsmith, "Chopsockys in the Rockies?" Variety (June 17, 1991), 3, 92; Peter Bart, "Here's Looking at H. K." Variety (October 14, 1991), 5,8; Stacy Mosher, "Shot by the Mob," Far Eastern Economic Review (January 30, 1992), 40-42; and Tony Rayns, "Hard Boiled," Sight and Sound 4 (1992): 20-3. I wish to thank undergraduate student Eiren Chong for bringing these references to my attention. Hong Kong has also undergone several types of crisis situations since the very beginning of its history as several works note. However, the current crisis differs from those of earlier eras due to the more complex and identity-threatening nature in which the present inhabitants feel particularly vulnerable because of the arrogant nature of the 1984 negotiations between mainland China and a Britain dominated by the right-wing elective dictatorship of Margaret Thatcher. These negotiatons represent what one writer terms a "transfer without consent." For example, during 1966 and 1967 the Communist demonstrations (the 1967 version of which is briefly referred to in Woo's A Bullet in the Head) also represented a particular type of legitimacy crisis situation for the colony. Although Maoists played a major role in the 1967 demonstrations, unlike the 1966 riots, the initial cause was poor social and economic conditions in the colony, which the administration addressed in the fol-lowing years. For relevant information concerning past and present legitimation crises, see Ian Scott, Political Change and the Crisis of Legitimacy in Hong Kong (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 81-121, 322-25; Jung-Fang Tsai, Hong Kong in Chinese History: Community and Social Unrest in the British Colony,1842-1913 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Frank Welsh, A Bor-rowed Place: The History of Hong Kong (New York: Kodansha International Press, 1993) 466-69; Robert Cottrell, The End of Hong Kong : The Secret Diplomacy of Imperial Retreat (London: John Murray, 1993), 28-30; Gerald Segal, The Fate of Hong Kong (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993); Mark Roberti, The Fall of Hong Kong: China's Triumph and Britain's Betrayal (New York: John Wiley, 1994); John D. Young, "The Building Years: Maintaining a China-Hong Kong-Britain Equilibrium 1950-1971," Precarious Balance: Hong Kong Between Britain and China, Ming K. Chan, ed. (London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 131-48; and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the United States, 1945-1992 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994), 192-233. Tucker expresses a more general sense of Hong Kong's legitimation crisis than most authors. "Hong Kong has lived on borrowed time since the British wrested it from Chinese hands in 1841 and con-firmed possession of it in an unequal treaty ending the Opium War the following year," (192) Conversely, Ronald Skelton takes a much less negative view of the migration from Hong Kong seeing it as not merely defensive but more resulting from the expansion of the global world economy. See Reluctant Exiles? Migration from Hong Kong and the New Overseas Chinese, Ronald Skelton, ed. (London:
M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 12. However, the previous arrogant attitude of the governor of Hong Kong, Thatcherite Chris Patton, toward the delicate nature of negotiations with mainland China did not help matters. It is more than coincidental that the normally apolitical Jackie Chan humiliates this figure in Thunderbolt (1995). In a brief comic scene, Chan represents Patton as being more interested in appearing in newspaper headlines than helping the precarious situation of Hong Kong.
10.
Esther Yau, "Survival and the Post-Colonial Dilemma," a paper presented at The Society for Cinema Studies Conference, New Orleans, February 13, 1993.
11.
Ackbar Abbas, "The New Hong Kong Cinema and the Deja Disparu," Discourse 16.3 (1994): 67.
12.
Anti-Japanese motifs appear in many 1970s Hong Kong movies set in different historical eras from the medieval era to the early twentieth century, such as Beach of the War Gods, Ten Fingers of Steel, Hap-Ki-Do, Fists of Vengeance (1972), Kingof Kung Fu, Kung Fu Girl Fighter, The Girl with the Thunderbolt Kick, When Taekwondo Strikes, Fist of Fury, and Deadly China Doll. King Hu's The Fate of Lee Khan is set in 1366 at the time of the Yuan Dynasty's invasions by the Mongols. See also Erik Sulev, "Once Upon a Time in China," Asian Trash Cinema 1.2 (1992), 16-18; Travis Crawford, "What's Tsui Hark Been Doing Lately?" Asian Trash Cinema 1.4 (1993), 27-9. David Desser has noted that the U.S. release title of King Boxer was Five Fingers of Death, a change that may have helped the distribution of Ten Fingers of Death. King Boxer also contains several anti-Japanese references. A Shaw Brothers/Japanese coproduction featured both Wang Yu (in his famous One-Armed Boxer role) and Shintaru Katsu as Zatoichi in The Blind Swords-man Meets His Equal (1971). Two versions were filmed featuring either Katsu or Wang Yu as the winner depending on Japanese or Chinese release. Because Wang Yu speaks in Chinese in the Japanese version, cultural lack of communication leads to the climactic swordfight. I am grateful to David Desser for these references. Wang Yu's earlier One-Armed Boxer (1970) featured several villains of different nationalities including Thai Boxer, a Sikh, and a dangerous long-haired Japanese with fangs obviously indebted to Hong Kong audience interest in "hammer horror" vampires!
13.
Mosher, "Shot," 29.
14.
See Li Cheuk-To, "Hong Kong New Wave," New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Iden-tities, Politics, Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau, eds, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 176.
15.
See Tadao Sato, Currents in Japanese Cinema, translated by Gregory Barrett, New York: Kodansha International, 1982), 41-42, 49-72, 234-35, 237, 242-44; David Desser, Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 52-55. For a listing of some major examples of this genre see three-part article in Asian Trash Cinema: "Yakuza: Losers on Parade (Part One)," Asian Trash Cinema 1.3 (1992) 28-38: "Yakuza: Losers on Parade 2," Asian Trash Cinema 1.4 (1993), 38-40; "Yakuza: Losers on Parade 3," Asian Trash Cinema 1.5 (1993), 36-38.
16.
Woo was not the first director to be influenced by French cinema. According to a contemporary review of Chu Yuen's The Killer, a Shaw Brothers 1973 production, the hero is described as "a cross between Melville's samurai and Bresson's country priest in his black fedora and clerical styling." See Tom Milne, "The Killer," Monthly Film Bulletin 40.476 (September 1973): 192. Other factors deserve consid-eration in view of Hong Kong cinema's often-forgotten history. The first martial arts film released in Britain - King Boxer -was directed by Korean Chang Cheng. Furthermore, the now sadly neglected "art/action movie" director King Hu also shot films in Taiwan such as Dragon Gate Inn (1966) and A Touch of Zen (1969).
17.
Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant, 1-7.
18.
Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant, 54. In the Chinese epic The Romance of the Three
Kingdoms, the action really begins when three young men respond to the call of the emperor and take an oath of loyalty. They are Liu Pei, a remote relative of the ruling clan; Kwan-Yu, a fugitive; and Chang Pei, a pig butcher. These three lower-class characters take the famous Peach Garden Oath. It is not hard to see them as early version of Mark, Kit, and Ho in A Better Tomorrow. Prior to Mark's "resurrection" as Ken in A Better Tomorrow II, the cartoonist who records their exploits speaks of their heroic status as three friends. Ken soon appears to take Mark's place in the sequel. Furthermore, after Kwan-Yu's death and deification, Three Kingdoms re-cords that ' 'he frequently manifested his divine presence on the Jade Springs Moun-tain to afford protection to the common people" (italics mine). See Lo Kuan-chung, Three Kingdoms, Moss Roberts, ed. and trans. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 244.
19.
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1988), x.
20.
See Hutcheon, "An Epilogue: Postmodern Parody: History, Subjectivity, and Ide-ology," Quarterly Review of Film & Video 12 (1990): 129.
21.
Sharrett, Crisis Cinema, 4, 9.
22.
Andrew Britton, "Postmodernism or the Bourgeois Intelligentsia in the Age of Reagan," cineACTION 13-14 (1986): 3-17.
23.
Hutcheon cites relevant examples of historical retrievals by groups such as black and feminist scholars and filmmakers. See "An Epilogue," 130.
24.
For an introduction to certain of these features in Woo's work see Tony Williams, "To Live and Die in Hong Kong," cineACTION 36 (1995) 42-52.
25.
Tony Pinckney, Raymond Williams (Bridgend, Wales: Seren Books, 1991) 119. The urban city landscape also represent a hypercapitalist "bad space," which Border Country identifies as "a spatial fetishism which sets in when history is indeed repressed" (37).
26.
Hong Kong Architecture: The Aesthetics of Density, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, ed. (New York: Prestel Verlag, 1993), 11.
27.
Ackbar Abbas, "Building on Disappearance: Hong Kong Architecture and the City," Public Culture 6 (1994): 442.
28.
Abbas, "Building," 449.
29.
Pinckney, Raymond Williams, 29.
30.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, tr. Maria Jolas (New York: The Orion Press, 1964), xxxi-xxxii.
31.
Bachelard, Poetics, xxxii.
32.
See Sergei Eisenstein, "The Structure of the Film," Film Form (New York: Har-court, Brace and Jovanovich, 1977), 165, where he refers to the "Appeal from the Dead" sequence as providing the dead halt of a caesura; the stormy action of the beginning is completely halted in order to make a fresh start for the second half of the film.
33.
I wish to thank Ching Jung-Li for this information.
34.
According to the commentaries by Woo and producer Terence Chang on the Crite-rion laser-disc version of Hard Boiled, the final scene was meant as a happy ending with Tony sailing away into the distance after somehow miraculously surviving his injuries. However, the scene may also be read in this other-worldly sense because it has precedents in Chinese tradition. According to the Chinese epic drama Three Kingdoms, after his death at the age of fifty-eight in A.D. 220, Kwan-Yu's soul joined the gods on the Mountain of Jade Springs. See Lo Kuan-chung, Three Kingdoms, 242-44. As Mike Robins noted in an essay, Tequila achieves an ironic rebirth by emerging from the morgue in Hard Boiled. He also conceals his identity,
ironically referring to himself as "Jeff Woo." Jeff Costello is the name of Jean-Pierre Melville's assassin in he Samourai (1966). This figure reappears under a different guise in A Better Tomorrow II as the brutal but honorable killer who does not take the money and run in the final battle but remains to fight an honorable duel with Chow Yun-Fat's Ken. "Mad Dog" in Hard Boiled is another version of this character. For an excellent overview of Woo's work, which appeared just as this chapter was completed, see Ken Hall, John Woo: The Films (Jefferson, N.C.,: McFarland and Co., 1999).
35.
Pinckney, Raymond Williams, 42.
36. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 61.
37.
Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 24.
38.
Foucault, 23. Pinckney also applies Foucault's concepts to social relations within Raymond Williams's novels such as Border Country seeing space as a fundamental structuring force (49-50).
39.
Foucault, "of other spaces," 25.
40.
Foucault, "of other spaces," 26.
41.
"Chao Yun realized that the woman was dead. He pushed over the wall to cover the well; then he loosened his armor straps and placed the child inside the gleaming plate guarding his breast. And in this way the child was restored to Liu Pei." See Lo Kuan-chung, Three Kingdoms, 149. I wish to express my thanks to an anony-mous Cinema Journal reviewer for pointing this out based on a student's reading. Woo's gloss on this narrative thread represents another example of his knowledge of earlier heroic traditions.
42.
See Bey Logan, Hong Kong Action Cinema (New York: The Overlook Press, 1996), 10, 59. Jackie Chan has mentioned that the conditions he underwent in his earlier training resembled the conditions depicted in the early scenes of Farewell My Concubine (1992). Sammo Hung has commented on the differences between the real and fictional Master Yu. "Actually, my sifu was much tougher that I portrayed him in Painted Faces, but if I'd played him as he really was he might have come back to Hong Kong to beat me up!" (10).
43.
See Toby Russell, "What Makes Run Run Run?" Eastern Heroes, 2 (1994): 25. Although releases of Shaw Brothers films on video are extremely popular in En-gland, the studio has now been acquired by TVB, which is owned by Run Run Shaw. Russell traces the decline of Shaw Brothers to the death of Runme Shaw in 1977 and the role of executives such as Mona Fong and Chua Lam. Rumors persist concerning a huge Shaw Brothers library that Run Run Shaw plans to sell to cable television stations in the future.
44.
See Logan, 153-4; Rick Baker and Toby Russell, The Essential Guide to Deadly China Dolls (London: Eastern Heroes Publications 1996): 17-18.
45.
The Seven Little Fortunes later reunited when they appeared on stage together during the 1993 Hong Kong Film Awards. See Rick Baker, "Hollywood East," Eastern Heroes 2 (1994): 14-15.
BESIDES FISTS AND BLOOD: MICHAEL HUI AND CANTONESE COMEDY
Jenny Kwok Wah Lau
THE IMAGE OF HONG KONG CINEMA IN THE UNITED STATES
Hong Kong cinema began to gain popularity in the United States in the 1970s primarily through the English dubbed-versions of kung fu films. Before that time, kung fu films appealed only to a relatively small audience of martial arts fans and Chinatown immigrants, who managed to provide a stable market for these inexpensive films. Even though by 1979 the genres of kung fu (and wuxia)1 had been largely replaced by comedy in Hong Kong, they continued to be the Hong Kong cinema best known to the general audience of the United States up to this date.
During the early 1980s, several film festivals in the West, including the Edinburgh Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, discovered a few interesting films from Hong Kong. In 1982, Boat People (directed by Ann Hui), which was already a box-office hit in Hong Kong, was screened at the New York Film Festival and elicited unusual attention from critics for its (perceived) political content and its production quality.2 The film is the story of a Japanese journalist's unsuccessful attempt to rescue a South Vietnamese Chinese woman on the eve of the Communist takeover of South Vietnam. By taking on a wartime melodrama, the film exhibited a non-kung fu version of Hong Kong cinema that was unfamiliar to Western spectators.
Subsequent to the "discovery" of director Ann Hui (and director Allen Fong in Edinburgh through his work Father and Son), critics suddenly rec-ognized a Hong Kong cinema quite distinct from their earlier impression, one which its local critics have named the Hong Kong New Wave since 1979. In the years that followed, early New Wave films, characterized by modern techniques and social realism, such as The Secret (Ann Hui, 1979), The Story of Woo Viet (Ann Hui, 1981), Father and Son (Allen Fong, 1981), Ah Ying (Allen Fong, 1982), Nomad (Patrick Tarn, 1982), Last Affair (Tony Au, 1983), and Home Coming (Yim Ho, 1984), became fixtures of the festival/center circuits in the United States.
Almost all of the New Wave directors learned their basic craft in the West. Their ease with modern production equipment and their interest in modern special effects (versus traditional special effects) created such innovative films as Butterfly Murders (Tsui Hark, 1979), The Sword (Patrick Tarn, 1980), and Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain (Tsui Hark, 1981). On the whole, the works of New Wave directors were more sophisticated with mise-en-scene and visual effects. The result can be seen in areas as simple as lighting, color, the use of visual motifs, composition, and editing, or as complex as "high-tech" postproduction manipulation, of which Zu is the best example. In fact, art direction, a position that organizes the overall visual impact of a film, gained importance in the New Wave. (This position, which sometimes enjoys a full screen credit, had been practiced in the West for a number of years by then.)
Another significant aspect of the New Wave films is their realignment of the Hong Kong cinema with its older tradition of social realism -that cinema is not about glamorized fictions made up of stereotypical characters but the concrete retelling of real-life experiences and a reinterpretation of the meaning of such experiences. A few examples of some of the earliest New Wave films best illustrate the point. The Secret, a. film that was more appreciated than Boat People by both its director, Ann Hui, and the local critics of the time, is a social drama based in part on a local news story. It deals with the taboo issue of premarital pregnancy and how society forces a pregnant woman into insanity; she then ends up brutally killing the father of her child. Up until that point, with the exception of director Michael Hui, such candid social realism was rare in the cinema of Hong Kong.
Another New Wave film, Man on the Brink (1981), by Alex Cheung Kwok Ming, was an unusually honest portrayal of the life of an undercover cop. Unlike most cop movies, the film neither entertains by cliche chase scenes nor glorifies male chauvinism. The drama of having to live two lives, which results in serious misunderstanding even by one's family, was later taken up by Jackie Chan in his much glamorized Police Story (1985).
The quintessential New Wave film, Father and Son, is a nostalgic bio-graphical reflection on growing up in the 1960s in one of the government-built, low-income residential areas of Hong Kong. The highly congested buildings, each consisting of seven to eight stories, provide only basic accom-modation, with no elevators to aid the elderly or the disabled. The film begins with a slow crane up from the outside of one of these buildings and cuts to the protagonist's father gasping for air as he climbs the stairs. At the end of the film, the father dies of a heart attack while climbing the same set of stairs. This social space of poverty, which was rarely shown on the screen during the 1970s became a key motif of the film, which succinctly portrays the hardship suffered by a working-class family and the conflict between a father and son. The father's dream is to send his son to study abroad. This works against the son's wish to be a local filmmaker,a career not appreciated in a traditional family. Unlike earlier cinema, which romanticized intergenerational conflicts, Father and Son reflects on the reality of the pain caused by tradi-tional filial piety and affirms the rebellious nature of the younger generations.
Indeed, the greatest achievement of the Hong Kong New Wave lay in its resurrecting realism on a screen that had been dominated by fantasy images of rich mansions, parties, beautiful women, and handsome men. It was also a cinema that did not build on the star and genre system that had permeated the industry for decades.3 Although the New Wave created works such as Butter-fly and Zu, which belong to the kung fu/wuxia genre, it also showed the West, at least for a while, that there was more to Hong Kong cinema than action dramas.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how one perceives it), after the mid-1980s the Hong Kong New Wave was basically absorbed into the commercial studio system. Soon a so-called Second Wave appeared. During the 1980s and early 1990s directors such as Mabel Cheung (An Illegal Immi-grant, 1985; An Autumn's Tale, 1987; Eight Tales of Gold, 1989), Clara Law (The Reincarnation of the Golden Lotus, 1989; Autumn Moon, 1991; Tempta-tion of a Monk, 1993), Stanley Kwan (Love unto Waste, 1986; Rouge, 1988, The Actress, or Center Stage, 1991; Red Rose White Rose, 1994), Lawrence Ah Mon (Gangs, 1988; Queen of Temple Street, 1990), and Wong Kar-wai (As Tears Go By, 1988; Days of Being Wild, 1990; Ashes of Time, 1994; Chungking Express, 1994) were part of a slightly younger group that inherited the New Wave's technological competence as well as some of its social sensitivity. Most of these directors (together with some First Wave directors) were quite successful working within the commercial confines of the studio/ star system while still being able to impart some creative personal elements into their films. Although their works are, by comparison, neither as daring nor as idiosyncratic as the New Wave films (with the notable exception of Wong Kar-wai), they constituted a significant aspect of the non-action-oriented contemporary Hong Kong cinema. Some of their films succeeded in reaching a broader U.S. audience beyond museums and festivals, generating critical interest.4
Yet the burgeoning new U.S. perception of Hong Kong cinema was quickly eclipsed by the publicity needs of both the festival circuits and the commercial distributors. As might be expected, kung fu superstars (actors and/or directors) provided an easier selling point in the West. Examples are Jackie Chan (PoliceStory), Tsui Hark (Once Upon a Time in China and its sequels), and John Woo (A Better Tomorrow, 1986, and its sequels). Most of these artists were introduced to the United States during the late 1980s by film magazines and by appearing as guests in film festivals and at centers as part of the Hong Kong New Wave. Some of their films were soon taken up by major commer-cial distributors.5 The "New Wave" label served publicity needs but with the exception of Tsui Hark, few of these artists, including Jackie Chan and John Woo, could be considered as part of the New Wave per se. Being established showmen in the business even before the New Wave, their clever incorpora-tion of the young production talents in the 1980s benefited both sides, by providing more modern visuals for the former and production opportunities for the latter. By the time the Second Wave arrived (roughly in 1984 with Mabel Cheung's Illegal Immigrants) John Woo, who was an assistant director for the old-time famous kung fu director Chang Che and who had directed a few comedies on his own, was considered a veteran director of the old cinema. But in 1985 he regained recognition through his now-renowned work A Better Tomorrow, which was more a product of the studio and star system, albeit a good one, than of the New Wave.
Although some of the Second Wave non-kung fu directors such as Wong Kar-wai and Stanley Kwan were also taken up by commercial distributors, the majority of the U.S. releases of Hong Kong films were more of the Jackie Chan or John Woo type.6 Obviously, the strategy of these distributors was to capitalize on the preexisting kung fu image of Hong Kong cinema and further expand the market to include the art film audience, which previously gener-ated by the Hong Kong New Wave. The publicity for these films usually took on a more "artsy" tone compared to the low-profile, "cheap" image of the 1970s kung fu movies.
Soon the reports on Hong Kong cinema were loaded with descriptions of "its hyper energy," "its poetics of violence," and "its vengeance."7 Big-budget publicity campaigns for such films as The Killer and Bullet in the Head drew attention away from the Second Wave non-action-oriented films, although the latter are still shown in film festivals and centers to this day. In exaggerating the blood and violence from Hong Kong, U.S. commercial distributors have managed to pigeonhole the cinema of Hong Kong back into its preconceived kung fu corner, only this time it was further mystified by some "high taste" rhetoric.8
To fixate on the violence of kung fu or its modern weaponized mutation yields a far from complete picture of the very creative and the most dramatic era of the cinema of Hong Kong -that of the 1980s. In fact, the excessive violence found in some films that the West now so savors9 is not always the most attractive element for the local audience. Even the film A Better Tomor-row (a more accurate translation would be Essence of a Hero), which sold extremely well in both Hong Kong and the United States and launched Woo's career in Hollywood, was complimented by local critics not so much for its blood and fists but for its revival of the spirit of wuxia, its transformation (or "weaponization," a term used by local critics) of wuxia action into gun-fights,10 and its modernization of the romantic wuxia hero. The filmfits well with Woo's experience in making wuxia films. Among the subsequent large number of films that imitated the action of the "brother-hero" genre (of which A Better Tomorrow is the prototype) only a few were box-office successes. In fact, the genre died a quick death. By the time A Better Tomor-row III (1989) appeared in the local market, the attraction of action movies had slipped considerably. Only Jackie Chan's Miracle was among the top five best sellers of the year. Both A Better Tomorrow III and The Killer were considered box-office flops.11 The local cinema of Hong Kong had been recaptured by comedy, a genre that has dominated Hong Kong cinema for most of the 1980s and the 1990s.
The U.S. translation of Essence of a Hero into A Better Tomorrow draws audience attention to the Hong Kong 1997 issue, which is an obviously good selling point in the West. Unfortunately, to some critics the merits of the film were then largely attributed to its metaphorical interpretation of the 1997 Hong Kong annexation to China.12 This "1997 reading" for every contem-porary film coming from Hong Kong ran the risk of reducing the understand-ing of Hong Kong culture in general, and film in particular, to the narrow spheres of economics and politics. Unquestionably, the 1997 issue is one of the strongest factors shaping the current life of Hong Kong. Yet the cultural tradition of Hong Kong extends well beyond the Sino-British Joint Declara-tion (1984) and the Western recognition of the imminence of the 1997 project. Reductionistic reading of the cinema neglects the tradition of the local (Can-tonese) cinema, which has always been vibrant and dynamic in addressing multifaceted interests and concerns of daily life.
Worse still, some critics, somewhat condescendingly and without looking deeply into the history of local popular cinema, simplistically linked 1997 with the success of Hong Kong cinema (of the 1980s) and claimed that because of the former the latter had "awakened" and finally found itself (Hong Kong) as a "subject" (and hence was making itself more interesting). Such a generalization of the 1997 effects on Hong Kong cinema tends to erase the concrete details of cultural experiences and covers up the complex social and psychological realities of life in Hong Kong in the early 1980s, a life which, though overshadowed by the two-headed monster of colonialism and "China-ism," was still capable, in certain instances, of reconnecting itself. As mentioned earlier, the contribution of the New Wave was indeed to reestablish (the temporarily Mandarin-dominated) local Hong Kong as its subject within the cinematic discourse through its portrayal of poverty, social prejudice, modernization, and other issues. Because this happened in 1979, it was at least three years before 1997 became an issue.13 It is only fair to say that after 1982, 1997 became one (but not the only) issue in some (but not all) of the best films coming out of Hong Kong.
In the past, it may have been true that Hong Kong was marginalized by some China-centered and/or Eurocentric cultural scholars who were engaged in literature, fine arts, or other "high-art" circles. To them, Hong Kong was a cultural desert, which implied that Hong Kong had no culture of its own.
The high or proper culture of Hong Kong was but a weak extension of mainland China culture and/or Britain, and the indigenous culture, if there was any, was of low level and even base. These scholars tended to link such a "lack of culture" to Hong Kong's detachment from its root (i.e., mainland China) and related its baseness to its commercialism.14 It was not uncommon, then, that many cultural elites hardly watched or wrote about local films. In fact, some of them attended only European films screened in Studio One, a "high taste" film club in Hong Kong. But in the popular art of movie-making itself, for which the audience was mostly made up of the middle and lower classes, elitist arrogance was not prevalent. Many of the popular films of the 1950s and 1960s, including those that featured the Cantonese super-stars Cheung Ying (Zhang Ying) and Ng Chor-fan (Wu Chufan), were quite Hong Kong conscious, although some of them did not fail to be escapist.15 Another prime example is Chor Yuen's The House of 72 Tenants (1973), a definitive work of Cantonese social satire. Obviously, this part of popular culture history is easily left out of elitist historiography because it is the domain in which, using Ranajit Guha's terms, "the principal actors are the subaltern classes."16
In hindsight, it is not surprising that the New Wave directors (First or Second) were Hong Kong-centered even though their technical training was mostly Western. Most of the directors of the New Wave were born and raised in Hong Kong in contrast to their parents' midlife immigration from mainland China. By the time they began their careers in local TV in the 1970s the industry had turned completely to Hong Kong for its programming. Major prime-time programs included variety shows such as Happiness Tonight and serial dramas such as Family Change, Tears of a Crocodile, and HeavenlySilkworm. All of these programs were focused on issues directly related to Hong Kong. It is therefore not accidental that these directors, after switching to film production, also identified Hong Kong as the center of their subject.
Whether there is a 1997 issue or not, China has always been a factor in Hong Kong cinema for obvious historical and geographical reasons.17 Never-theless, the 1997 consciousness did further sensitize China-related issues in a large number of films made between 1982 and 1986. Furthermore, ever since mainland China opened itself up in 1979, the commercial and cultural exchange between the PRC and Hong Kong made a more open discourse possible. Films that were considered politically sensitive and were censored by the colonial government in the past, such as The Last Winter in Beijing and China Behind, were rereleased. Even icons that were prohibited, such as the flags of communist and nationalist China, were permitted to be shown on the big screen. The reopening of China to the rest of the world, including Britain, prompted certain regulatory changes that facilitated the curiosity of the younger generation, most of whom had long been fascinated by their parents' China stories, real or imaginary.
Some frequently cited "1997" films such as Stanley Kwan's Rouge and Center Stage are good examples of works that mix history and imagination into the relationship between China, Hong Kong, the past, and the present. According to the director himself, the inspiration for these films came from his own childhood experience with his Shanghai family. He had always wanted to seek out the relationship between the two places, one of which is real and concrete, whereas the other seems fascinating but elusive. By not reducing the films to a simplistic 1997 political metaphor, one can better comprehend how they portray the contradictions involved in having to live through a history of dislocation and relocation, rejection and identification, and other particular aspects of an exile/colonial culture.
Despite the many social and political changes of the 1980s, three clear lines of development can still be delineated: comedy, kung fu or martial arts, and social drama. While none ever disappeared completely, each had its own period of prominence. Comedy was most popular from 1980 to 1984 and again from 1988 to 1993. Even during its decline between 1985 and 1987, the comic element never totally disappeared. Thus vampire comedies, kung fu comedies, detective comedies, and others rampaged the markets of both Hong Kong and Taiwan. Along with comedy were the ever-present genres of mod-ern martial arts films (climaxing in 1985 with A Better Tomorrow) and the social dramas of the New Wave. Currently, the martial arts and the art films are popular in the United States, with the former leading the commercial front, leaving behind the most dominant genre of comedy, a genre which generated nine out of the top ten best sellers of the past two decades.18
It is not difficult to understand why the West has ignored comedy in the cinema of Hong Kong. First, as discussed in Comedy/Cinema/Theory, the genre of comedy has traditionally not received much attention or respect in the cultural history of the West (or in that of the East for that matter).19 Second, the analysis of comedy is exceptionally difficult because the recog-nition of humor depends heavily upon the understanding of the complex dynamics involved in the interaction of the symbolics, such as gestures, icons, linguistics, and so on, which are defined by their own social and cultural traditions. The difficulty is especially pronounced in the scrutiny of social or political comedy, which depends on a fairly specific contextual relationship between the text and the viewer and whose unfinalizing game-like form calls for what deconstructionists describe as "a state of conspiratorial irony." That is, a comic moment is appreciated when the audience recognizes that it could or should be "read against the grain."
Finally, the reading of Hong Kong comedy is further complicated by its heavy dependence on Cantonese dialogical gags. Although comedies of the 1980s tended to stage the chase scenes, fights, sex, and slapstick action common in Western films, whimsical slang and even nonsense verse and puns still remained major ingredients of the humor. At times they tended to be bizarre or even ridiculous. Popular examples included Wrong Kind of Love (1983) by Cheung Kin Ting, Aces Go Places (1984) by Tsui Hark, and MyLucky Stars (1985) by Samo Hung. Yet if one agrees with Jameson that any general theory of the modern -assuming one to be possible in the first place -would have to register the informing presence of, among others, sign systems and mass culture, of which popular cinema is a major point of convergence,20 then comedy, as an extremely contextualized text and the most popular form of cinematic entertainment, provides a significant entry point for the consid-eration of the culture of modern Hong Kong.
SOME HISTORY
To appreciate the central role of comedy in Hong Kong cinema one should trace its history back to its initial phase of industrialization. This major step, which established Hong Kong as an important film producing city, did not begin until 1949-50, when the refugee waves coming from mainland China brought an influx of artists and film entrepreneurs to the island. These immi-grants, who fled the Chinese communist government, were from northern China and for the most part spoke Mandarin. Soon a fierce competition broke out between Mandarin films produced by the newcomers and Cantonese films made by the locals.
While melodrama and detective fictions were popular genres for both groups, the dream factory of the Mandarin camp excelled in producing Hol-lywood imitations of historical epics and musicals, while the Cantonese camp specialized in martial arts films, which featured popular folk heroes such as Wong Fei-hung's well-known series (modernized in Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China) and social satire, which depicted the suffering of the lower classes.21
From 1950 to 1970, three thousand Cantonese films were made and shown in Hong Kong. Out of this corpus, about 750 films (about 25 percent) were comedy, indicating a steady local preference for jokes and laughter.22 How-ever, when the big-budget Mandarin films carrying extravagant Hollywood glitziness began to gain the upper hand in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the smaller local (Cantonese) cinema deteriorated until it literally ceased produc-tion in 1972. Mandarin films were dominant for much of the 1970s.
But miracles do happen sometimes. In 1974, Games Gamblers Play, a Cantonese comedy scripted, acted, and directed by the now well-known "master of modern Cantonese Comedy," Michael Hui, who then was a popular TV talent, drew a huge audience. The film was the top box office hit of the year, grossing three times as much as its runner-up. Hui's next four films, The Last Message (1975), The Private Eyes (1976), The Contract (1978), and Modern Security Guard {Modern Bo-Biu, 1981), continued to top the box office. Cantonese/local films had finally made their way back via one of their best traditions -social comedy.
MICHAEL HUI -MASTER OF CANTONESE COMEDY
Michael Hui grew up in one of the government-built, low-income residential areas of Hong Kong. As a graduate of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, he had an unusually outstanding educational background in the world of show business before the 1970s. His major in sociology would soon be reflected in his social satirical films.Hui started his career in local television as a cohost with his brother in a highly successful game/talk show. Between 1972 and 1974 he starred in four films directed by the then major director Li Han Hsiang (Li Hanxiang). In 1974 he made his writer-director debut with Games Gamblers Play. The rest is history.
As Hong Kong film critic Law Kar has pointed out, "Michael Hui is to Comedy what Bruce Lee is to the Martial Arts: they both reign supreme."23 Yet the latter wasa catch name in the West, and the former is still almost unknown. Between 1974 and 1992, Michael Hui scripted and acted in fourteen films, half of which he also directed. It is clear that by occupying key positions in production Hui had the luxury of almost total control of his films. He was one of the few auteurs who not only survived but prospered even in the cutthroat commercial setting of Hong Kong cinema. Unlike many directors of his generation who turned cinema into an unsuccessful dream factory, Hui managed to be consistent in enriching his films with social messages. Some of these films have been quite successful, such as The Private Eyes, the story of a private detective; The Contract, the struggle of a minor TV talent to advance his career; Modern Security Guards, which satirizes an egotistical security worker; Teppanyaki (1984), a food-fixated sex comedy; Chicken and Duck Talk (1988), which details a competition between a traditional roast duck restaurant and a Western fast-food store; Mr. Coconut (1989), which is about a mainland Chinese rural bumpkin's visit to his metropolitan Hong Kong city relatives; Front Page (1990), a satire on yellow journalism; and Magic Touch (1992), a critique on superstition. Others have not been as successful, such as Happy Ding Dong (1985), a Hong Kong version of Some Like It Hot.
Hui's success in combining entertainment with local social concern was also a factor that indirectly ushered in the Hong Kong New Wave (1979-84). Between 1978 and 1979, the Hong Kong film industry suffered from both an internal creative block and the popularization of television. It seemed that the cinema could no longer attract an audience even with sex or violence. While the studios were desperate to find some kind of solution, Hui's outstanding success in tackling social issues obviously challenged the dream factory's escapism. It seemed that, at least for once, investors and theater exhibitors were convinced by Hui's films that social realism and money making could sometimes go together. With the financial boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s, some investors began to take advantage of the crisis in the movie industry. Instead of depending on established directors to grind out new films, which had proven to be of little success, money was given to a group of young directors whose films would be different from those of the past. Be-tween 1979 and 1980 about thirty to forty directors made their debuts. A New Wave was born.
The old Cantonese cinema had died out partly because it lacked a new perspective on the changing society of Hong Kong, but Hui succeeded exactly where the old approach failed. His sensitivity in capturing the unique transi-tions that Hong Kong was experiencing during the 1970s provided him with plenty of fresh material for dramas. At the same time, as local critics soon realized, Hui was capable of retaining the strength of the Cantonese comic cinema of the 1950s and 1960s -the comedy of the everyday man versus the Mandarin cinema of the upper class fairyland from Shanghai. Although Hui's characters are strongly based on traditional Chinese social and moral norms, his concern is with how his protagonist uses these values in interacting with the modern environment of Hong Kong. It is Hui's genius to be among the first in local cinema to capture the nuances of this encounter and to comment on it in a comic forms.24
Hui's classic story is of the everyday person who is caught in the reality of a fast-paced society, moving more and more toward Westernization and me-tropolitanization. In some films his characters are unaware of the change and hence get caught in impossible situations. In others, they try to fight against the encroaching reality of progress, while others try to compromise without actually grasping what is taking place around them. The variations are numer-ous, but Hui's sometimes humorous, sometimes sarcastic, but usually sympa-thetic treatment of the major character, which he himself performs very well, elicits both laughter and tears from his audience.
Although even up until his last film (Magic Touch, 1992) Hui's productions continue to be among the best sellers in Hong Kong, I choose to introduce one of his earlier works, Modern Security Guards (Modern Bo Biu), which was considered by both the director himself and his critics to be an unusually significant film. According to Hui, Modern Security Guards represented the beginning of a new phase of Hui's filmmaking in which effort was shifted from creating the purely comic, which he had mastered in previous films, to a sophisticated integration of his humor with a more refined story that carried a deeper social message. Critics saw the film as a forerunner of the ' 'high-tech comedies," especially those from Cinema City (the major comedy studio for the first half of the eighties) that were to follow. In retrospect, one can see that as an early-1980s film Modern Security Guards was the first to fully capture and explore the unique moment of the transformation of modern Hong Kong, a transformation that involved not only industrial technology and eco-nomic growth but the official political reconsideration of the relationship between Hong Kong and China. In the reading of the filmI delineate two major structuring themes, old/new and China/Hong Kong. These pairs of antinomies, which continued to play the most significant role in many impor-tant films to come, first appeared in Modern Security Guards.25
MODERN SECURITY GUARDS
Modern Security Guards satirizes technology's penetration into contemporary Hong Kong daily life and the increasingly inseparable relationship between Hong Kong and China. In the film,Hui renegotiates traditional values and at the same time mediates a dialogue of social transition with an audience that would soon be in search of a cultural and political repositioning.
The story is about an arrogant captain Chow (played by Hui) who works in a security company. Despite his exploitative attitude, his subordinates, Sam and Ying, work hard and cooperate with him. Consequently, they end up doing the hard work while Chow gets the credit. This works out to Chow's advantage until the son of the owner of the company returns from his studies in the United States. He soon takes over his ailing father's business. The young boss discovers Chow's incompetence and demotes him while raising the assistant Sam to the position of captain.
Although Sam is now Chow's superior, he exercises no retribution for past injustices. He is considerate and well-liked by his colleagues. Three major crimes occur after Sam becomes the captain, which he and his team success-fully solve. After undergoing a lot of difficulties, Chow finally learns to be a responsible, helpful, and generous teammate.
THE OLD AND THE MODERN/WEST
The Chinese title of the film, Bo-Biu, is an old term for security guard. It is also strongly associated with the wuxia (martial arts) film/fiction genre of which it is one of the major generic characters. Putting Modern and Bo-Biu together already indicates an attempt to heighten the contrast of the old (as connoted by wuxia) and the new, the cross-cutting between the two eras during which rapid changes are taking place.
In Modern Security Guards the new, which is also Western, is represented by the metropolitan outlook of the city with its skyscrapers, shopping malls, banks, automobiles, and high-tech environment. In Hui's film, this new form of living is in the process of integrating itself with tradition while the old way of life is also trying to adjust and adapt to the input of the new. The weaving together of these two trends creates numerous comic moments. For instance, in one scene electronic sensors are put under a doormat to illustrate a modern theft prevention mechanism. But the old "Chinese" problem with punctuality generates conflicts with the new device. While Chow is boasting about his "theft prevention doormat," Ying, one of his crew members, rushes in late to class. The latter, not knowing that Chow is demonstrating the new gadget, steps on it and accidentally discharges an electric current. Chow, who is at the other end of the circuit, is jolted by the strong electric shock as his class roars in laughter. In another scene, the technology of parachuting to escape a high-rise fire does not seem to work without the aid of human intuition as to when to open the parachute during the fall. Thus when Chow's crew test-flies a mannequin it falls to the ground and breaks on impact, creating fear as well as laughter. Even a sophisticated computer-controlled door lock, used in an antique exhibition, depends on the human (Hui's) voice to be activated. Thus, the superiority of the New and the Western is not always apparent. The new both challenges and relies on the old.
Alternately, neither can new wine be kept in an old bottle. In one scene, Chow attempts to conduct a driver's class. In the late 1970s the automobile, another sign of "foreignness," began to gain popularity in Hong Kong, and driving became a common, necessary skill. But Chow's teaching technique of forcing his class to memorize a driving rhythm (composed by him) while practicing on models made of domestic cleaning tools such as toilet brushes and so forth is absurd. Such a ludicrous pedagogy parodied a learning experi-ence common among Hui's audience, namely, that of forced memorization and coerced acceptance of outdated teaching. Chow's way of driving does not work. Not only does his student Ying fail the driving test, but Chow himself is bumped into the harbor by Ying's car. At the very end of the film Ying still cannot drive his car and finishes off his wedding by crashing his bridal carriage into a little yellow Porsche.
A new environment requires a new approach. The old boss of the security company has to retire due to illness, and the company is taken over by his son. The young man's new knowledge, acquired from the United States (the West), helps him approach the management of his company differently. An interesting scene occurs when the young man's parents receive their son at the airport. Instead of the typical Cantonese drama of a son's homecoming, with its involved oversentimentalism, we witness the Hong Kong spirit of no-nonsense, business-like mannerisms between the parents and the son.
The relation of the old and the new is also one of conflict. Chow is demoted after fifteen years of service in the company because he is found to be inefficient and his techniques outdated. Here, Hui captures the common prob-lem of a generation of Hong Kong workers who suddenly find themselves losing competitiveness due to modernization.26 Chow angrily stomps out of the office after hearing of his demotion. He stands right in front of a new yellow Porsche, which happens to be parked in that spot and has two gamblers hiding inside. To let off steam, Chow yells and pounds on the car. The Porsche is automated to respond to push and touch. Thus each time Chow pounds the car it opens its doors, windows, sky roof, and so forth. By the end of the scene, the boiling Chow leaves the Porsche flapping and swinging every one of its parts with the two gamblers inside wondering what is going on. The scene depicts not only the sometimes violent war between the old (boss and Chow) and the new (young boss) but also contrasts the rich (boss and Porsche's owner) and the poor (Chow).
Hui's questioning of modernization and his comic evaluation of the much-celebrated economic accomplishments of Hong Kong were not totally new subjects on the screen. Yet, here one discovers a new sense of ambivalence that did not exist in the Cantonese social satires of the 1950s and the 1960s. In the previous era, theater audiences, many members of whom were refugees from China, were generally China-centered. That is, they identified more with the (romanticized) China than with Hong Kong and were quite willing to position Hong Kong as the "other." Some of the older films, although they exposed problems such as greed and exploitation as Hong Kong's capitalistic faults, also implied that social virtues were to be found in China. The criti-cisms made in Modern Security Guards, however, do not favor the Chinese. This cinematic role shift between Hong Kong and China reflects a major change in the perception of identity of the Hong Kong people as they experi-enced important social changes in the 1970s and early 1980s.
CHINA AND HONG KONG
Monetary transactions between banks, bank robberies, ma-jong, and gambling were the daily routine of the booming business city of Hong Kong in the 1970s. But looming in the background of this effervescent society was the "China Shadow," which became increasingly prominent after China re-opened itself to the Western world. The reconsideration of the relationship between China and Hong Kong is carried out in Modern Security Guards by the drama of the terra cotta soldiers exhibition and the subplot of the gamblers.
Ever since Deng Xiao Ping uttered his promise that in Hong Kong after 1997 "horses will keep racing, and dancers will keep dancing," horse racing, which has traditionally been a symbol of bustling Hong Kong, has inevitably carried unmistakable political overtones. The two gamblers who hide in their yellow Porsche conniving to win big money, epitomize the Hong Kong money-making mentality. The fact that they are always hiding and squeezing inside tiny spaces is another metaphor for the physical environment of Hong Kong, a city that has the highest population density in the world. Space or, rather, lack of space, is virtually symbolic of the place. On the level of its sociopolitical environment, the lack of space is symbolic of the city. The fact is that Hong Kong has little space in which to maneuver in world politics, and its existence is totally dependent on the outside world. In the film, the yellow car always gets caught in the crossfire of the outside world just as Hong Kong gets caught in the struggle between world powers, especially those between China and Britain.
The scene of the exhibition of the golden jade suit from the terra cotta soldiers' tomb in China refers to a real exhibition of this Chinese wonder, which took place in Hong Kong earlier on. Here, the China-Hong Kong-Western complex worked well into the humor. First, the gangsters who at-tempt to steal this masterpiece do not look like Hong Kong criminal stereo-types. From their crude outlook, manner, and weapons, they are more like robbers from mainland China (as perceived by Hong Kong). That they are ignorant, backward bumblers during their robbery attempt is sarcastically highlighted in a few comic incidents. For example, while the gangsters try to activate the computer-controlled door lock of the exhibition hall, one of the members, following Chow's method, sings a tune. But he gets a quick retort from his leader, who says, "You don't know how to sing. How can you be a thief?" Then, after they finally break into the exhibition hall and take a close look at the golden jade suits, the leader discovers that there is a "made in Hong Kong" label on the bottom of one shoe. (This is due to the fact that Chow and his colleague who are fleeing the gangsters are now cornered and forced into hiding in the golden jade suits. Unfortunately, one of their shoes becomes exposed.) When a gangster suggests that maybe the ancient Chinese had come to Hong Kong to purchase shoes, he is slapped by the leader, who angrily scolds him, saying, "Not knowing history, how can you be a thief."
Although the Chinese thieves are bumpkins, the Hong Kong protection offered for the China display is both modern and Western. The computer sensors, which are the major component of the security system for the exhi-bition, represent the sophistication of the arrangement. These sensors work in coordination with two coded tunes, that of the happy birthday song, which makes the Western link to the instrument, and the horse neighing, which again is a reminder of Hong Kong.
The two Hong Kong security guards, wearing shoes that are made in Hong Kong, are protecting China and its treasure from loss. In the final episode of the chase between the guards and the thieves, Chow and Sam are wearing the golden jade suits with parachutes on their backs. The contradiction between China and the West, the old and the new, cannot be more extreme or ludicrous by the juxtaposition of the thousand-year-old golden jade suits and the modern parachute. With the gangsters right at their backs, Chow and Sam are forced to parachute from the top of a high-rise building. Interestingly enough, they are blown off course to the horse-racing tracks and land on the back of a racing jockey, ruining a race. Although the horse race, which is also Hong Kong, saves China, which is represented by the golden jade suits, the Hong Kong people, as represented by the two gamblers and the crowd, have lost their game. The gamblers have worked hard to finally design a way to win the game only to be destroyed by the parachutists, who accidentally sabotage the Hong Kong money dream.
Although in the last ten minutes of the film the audience is exhausted with laughter, the message conveyed is particularly serious. To fully appreciate the issue one has to return to the context again. The economic boom of the 1970s in Hong Kong had created an expanding, well-educated middle class who became interested in political participation in the colonial government. This desire was further facilitated by a government-sponsored "localization pro-ject," which sought (limited) transferral of political power (from the British) to the local elites.27 These ecopolitical changes had a decentering effect on the Chinese identity of the Hong Kong community.
The decentering of (the cultural/romantic/mythical) China did not necessar-ily imply an automatic identification with the colonial. As Seamus Deane pointed out in the introduction of Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (a seminal collection of three essays by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said), "at the extreme, colonialism is dispossession."28 In the colo-nial history of Hong Kong the most radical dispossessions have been lan-guage, history, and political autonomy. Although 99 percent of the population is Chinese, English was regarded as the colony's official language. The mate-rial and psychological deprivation resulting from such a silencing policy has yet to be exposed.29 Likewise, because contemporary Chinese and Hong Kong history are not included in basic discourse channels such as school curricula, there is a loss or dispossession of collective memory, a fundamental criterion for building identity. It is no surprise that the denial of political autonomy is but the ultimate dispossession of self-determination. My observation is that these dispossessions have created splits in all major spheres of self-identification, namely, in the political, the traditional/cultural, and the eco-nomic. The consequence is an almost schizophrenic triple split of the subject into (1) a political nonidentity with neither China nor Britain nor Hong Kong,
(2)
a "confused" cultural identity mix of Hong Kong and China, which provides only precarious references insufficient for serious self-reflection, and
(3)
an economic identification with capitalism, which has proven to be "suc-cessful" but unsatisfying. This period of the pre-1997 debate (the 1970s and the very early 1980s), which is often criticized by many local scholar elites as a period of "money-making, mindless merry seeking," is in fact the period of the traumatic triple split of the center.
Although the parachutists smash the money-making dream of the people of Hong Kong and thus end the "merry seeking" epoch of the 1970s, because it is China that shatters such a dream, the trauma of identity crisis continues. That is, the reawakening of the colonial state of Hong Kong has not ushered in a post-colonial condition. Neither nationalism nor colonial imperialism has
gained much trust from the populace.30 Instead, by the mid-1980s, the 1997 anxiety had finally wiped out the "new Hong Kong center," which the society had been trying to build over the past decade. It was replaced by a strong sense of ambivalence or even cynicism. As cinema participates in the articu-lation of the new experience, Modern Security Guards is among the firstfilms to forecast and express the trauma of an ambivalent identity. The Hong Kong/ China-Old/New theme remained prominent through the 1980s creating such interesting films as Hong Kong Hong Kong (1982), Home At Hong Kong (1983), Home Coming, Long Arm of the Law (1984), Rouge, The Reincarna-tion of the Golden Lotus, and Mr. Coconut. These works continued to repre-sent an evolving society unique in its cultural condition.
NOTES
1.
Kung fu is the term used mostly in the West. The Chinese called the genre wudar, which means unarmed martial arts or wuxia, which means armed (mostly with swords) martial arts.
2.
See reviews in Sight and Sound 51 (Autumn, 1982): 227, New York Times reviews by Janet Maslin September 27, 1983, III, 17: 5, and November 13, 1983, I, 78: 1. Also, Ann Hui did not see her films as being political. See the interview in Film Biweekly 96 (October 7, 1982): 19-23.
3.
Such an achievement was sometimes more a result of circumstances than a con-scious redefinition of what the new cinema should be.
4.
The first Hong Kong film festival held in the United States in 1988, which became an annual event and was instrumental in reintroducing Hong Kong cinema into the United States, was "The Cinema Explodes," organized by the Film Center of The Art Institute of Chicago. A few years later, Hong Kong film festivals began touring major U.S. cities and were sometimes sponsored by the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office and the Hong Kong Picture Industry Association. One example is "Hong Kong Forever" (1994), which toured ten cities in the United States, includ-ing Chicago, Washington, D.C., New York, and San Francisco.
5.
In 1993 Golden Harvest and AMC arranged a two-week release of Hong Kong films in Southern California outside of Chinatown. Soon, similar commercial releases of subtitled Hong Kong films followed in different cities.
6.
Based on research reported by Linda Lai during the Sixteenth Ohio University Film Conference (1994) in her paper "The Hong Kong Cinema 1990 As (Post-) Colonial Resistance: Identity Politics and Subversive History Via 'Enigmatization,' " the current U.S. version of Hong Kong cinema is comprised of about thirty, mostly action-oriented, films.
7.
There are numerous examples of such writings ranging from the publicity release of Kino International Corp. on The Killer to the LA. Weekly and LA. Times reports on the opening of The Killer in the United States. An early writing, which is indicative of the trend of portraying Hong Kong cinema, is found in "Made In Hong Kong," (Film Comment 24. 3 (May-June 1988): 33-56, in which the four major films introduced are: Zu, A Better Tomorrow, Peking Opera Blues, and Police Story. Major stars featured in these articles are Jackie Chan, Samo Hung, Tsui Hark, and Chow Yun-fat. In short, this lengthy report is rather action-movie oriented.
8.
Jackie Chan's Rumble in the Bronx and John Woo's Broken Arrow were the U.S. national top box-office hits during their first weekend release in February 1996. After the success of Rumble in the Bronx, Miramax announced it would release five more Jackie Chan films. This chapter, which was initially written before the release of Rumble in the Bronx, already predicted such a popular trend.
9.
The fact that Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs was inspired by the Hong Kong film City On Fire (directed by Ringo Lam) and that Tarantino acknowledged his debt to John Woo in creating cinematic violence was repeatedly reported in a number of film magazines. One recent example would be Cineaste 3. xxi (1995): 58.
10.
The transformation of wuxia into modernized gun fights can be traced back to Ann Hui's Story of Woo Viet (1981, also starring Chow Yun-fat), a fact that was hardly recognized by western writers. For comments of local critics see Film Biweekly, 231 (January 21, 1988): 28.
11.
Each sold about HK$18 million, half of the top-seller record of the year.
12.
In the 1990s (five years after the first release of A Better Tomorrow) a popular discussion on the issues of masculinity and homoeroticism in John Woo's films began in the United States. The latest example includes "Reinventing Masculinity: The Spectacle of Male Intimacy in the Films of John Woo" by Jillian Sandell in Film Quarterly 49. 4 (Summer 1996): 23-34.
13.
Hong Kong residents were not actively conscious of the 1997 problem until after Margaret Thatcher visited Beijing in 1982.
14.
A detailed scholarly discussion of this thought was presented by professor Yau Si-man of Hong Kong Baptist University in the "Conference on Hong Kong Culture" jointly organized by the University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist Univer-sity in June 1995. In his presentation, professor Yau traced literary sources back to the 1800s written by prominent Chinese scholars such as Lun Shun. But since the 1990s, this China-centered cultural hierarchy has been strongly criticized by contem-porary scholars such as Rey Chow, and some scholars began to replace the notion of desert with the idea of marginality, a term that resonates with contemporary multicultural discourse.
15.
For further analysis of the subject position of Hong Kong cinema, see "The Chang-ing Power Relationship Between China and Hong Kong: An Examination of the Concept of 'home' and its function in Hong Kong movies in the '40s and '50s," by Leung Noong-kong in The Twelfth Hong Kong International Film Festival. Changesin Hong Kong Society Through Cinema. Hong Kong Urban Council, 1988, 21-28.
16.
Ranajit Guha, "Historiography of Colonial India," in Subaltern Studies I. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982): 3-4.
17.
See The Sixteenth Hong Kong International Film Festival. The China Factor in Hong Kong Cinema. Hong Kong Urban Council. 1992.
18.
For the record of the ten top sellers of the past two decades see Film Biweekly, 256 (January 12, 1989): 8-9. In the United States, the only organized introduction of comedy occurred at the Film Center of the Chicago Art Institute in 1989, which featured Michael Hui's works along with a personal appearance.
19.
Andrew Horton, Comedy/Cinema/Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
20.
Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1990).
21.
Note that in recent years a number of these old films were remade by the Second Wave directors. This is seen by some critics as a sign of postmodern nostalgia and an attempt to rethink the history of Hong Kong. Wong Fei-Hung is recorded as
being the most repeated character played by a single actor (Kwan Tak-Hing) in the history of world cinema. He is the protagonist in seventy-seven films. See Patrick Robertson, Guinness Film Facts and Feats (Britain: Guinness Superlatives Limited, 1985): 103.
22.
The Ninth Hong Kong International Film Festival. Tradition of Hong Kong Comedy. Hong Kong Urban Council, 1985, 36.
23.
The Eighth Hong Kong International Film Festival. A Study of Hong Kong Cinema in the Seventies. Hong Kong Urban Council. 1984, 6, and "More Michael Hui Than Michael Hui: An Interview with the Comedy Master of the Generation," Film Biweekly 298 (August 30, 1990): 10-14.
24.
Other comedy directors such as Chan Yau and Cheung Kin Ting are virtually unknown to the West.
25.
This author has written another analysis of Modern Security Guards in her disserta-tion from a very different point of interest, that of Hong Kong-China cultural tradition. The two writings are complementary to each other.
26.
In Father and Son this problem is enacted in great detail.
27.
The localization project was initiated after the 1968 anti-British riot as the govern-ment realized a new strategy for the colonial rule. For more information, read J. Cooper, Colony in Conflict: The Hong Kong Disturbances, May 1967-January 1968 (Hong Kong: Swindon Book Company, 1970); I. C. Jarvie, "A Postscript on Riots and the Future of Hong Kong." In Hong Kong: A Society in Transition, ed. I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi, eds. (London: Frederick Praeger, 1969); and Yuan Bang-jian Xianggang shilue (A Brief History of Hong Kong) (Hong Kong: Zhongliu Publishers, 1987).
28.
Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said. Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
29.
The film Father and Son has pointed at some of these problems.
30.
For more details, read Decolonization without Independence. Lau Siu Kai (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1990); and John Walden, "Toward the Democratization of Hong Kong: The Grand Illusion," in Excellency, Your Gap is Growing: Six Talks on a Chinese Takeaway, John Walden, ed. (Hong Kong: All Noble, 1987).
THE FILM WORK OF ANN HUI
Patricia Brett Erens
"The past is another country."1
As the director of fifteen feature films spanning a period of two decades, Ann Hui has established herself as one of Hong Kong's foremost directors. In the late 1970s, she was a founding member of the Hong Kong New Wave cinema. More impressive is the fact that as a woman, hers is one of the largest bodies of work, not solely in Asia, but worldwide.
Although she does not identify herself as a "woman director," she no longer disparages the term, either. Unlike so many other female directors, Hui has not concentrated on the "woman's picture." Rather, she has undertaken a wide range of subject matter and worked in various cinematic modes, including narrative fiction and documentary. More recently, she has also taken up the role of producer.
Hui On-wah, Ann (a.k.a. Xu Anhua) was born in Northeastern China (Manchuria) in 1947. She moved to Hong Kong with her family in 1952. There she received a Catholic education and earned her baccalaureate from the prestigious Hong Kong University, majoring in English and comparative literature. She continued on for a master's degree with a focus on Robbe-Grillet.
This was followed by two years at the London Film School. When she returned to Hong Kong in 1975, she did a brief stint as an assistant to the Hong Kong director King Hu and then began work for TVB. This was the heyday of independent television production in Hong Kong. At TVB she directed twenty-six documentaries and learned how to work fast and cheaply. She also developed a political consciousness. In 1977, she moved to the film unit of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) where she worked on six hour-long dramas, several of which were never aired because
My thanks to Eliza Walsh and Regine Fang for their translations.
they were considered too controversial.2 In 1978, she joined RTHK, where she made three films, including Boy from Vietnam. The film critic Shu Kei, summing up this period, sees her strengths as the ability to portray delicate and complex emotional and human relationships with an economy of means. He also notes that she was prone to use fewer shots than any of her contem-poraries.3 For Shu Kei, these characteristics prefigure her later career.
In 1979 Hui moved into feature filmmaking. Her films fall into three major categories: political works, genre films, and personal dramas. However, to categorize the films in this manner is misleading, as Hui tends to blur the boundaries, creating genre films with political overtones and turning political endeavors into personal statements. This approach is further complicated by the tendency in Hong Kong commercial filmmaking of combining more than one genre within one work, creating hypergenres and subverting conventions in creative, often humorous ways.
Hui came to world attention with the international success of Boat People in 1982. The film forms part of a trilogy devoted to Vietnam refugees, which include the television drama Boy from Vietnam and The Story of Woo Viet (1981). All three works speak out for the contemporary problems of the Vietnam refugees and for displaced people the world over.
Like Hollywood, the Hong Kong cinema is a genre-based industry, and that affects independent filmmaking. Few directors can buck the system and expect to do well at the box office. Hui's first feature, The Secret (1979), is a psychological thriller with many elements derived from ghost films, an estab-lished formula in Hong Kong cinema. This was followed by The SpookyBunch (1980), which explored the genre further while introducing comic elements.
In 1981, Hui shot The Story of Woo Viet, which gave her an opportunity to do a crime, action thriller. This was followed in 1984 by Love in a Fallen City, a romantic melodrama set in Shanghai in the 1940s. She again turned to costume drama with the two-part adaptation of Romance of the Book and the Sword (1987), this time on an epic scale, drawing heavily from the swordplay genre.
With Zodiac Killers (1991), Hui returned to the crime film, this time set in Japan. Likewise, her 1996 feature Ah Kam, starring Michelle Yeoh, ostensibly about a stunt performer in the Hong Kong film industry, also incorporates a good deal of crime elements. Her most recent work, Eighteen Springs (1997), gave her a chance to return to period, romantic melodrama.
Finally, among her more personal works are Starry is the Night (1988), a story in part centered around Hong Kong University and Song of the Exile, a highly autobiographical work focusing on a mother/daughter relationship. In addition, there is Hui's award-winning domestic drama, Summer Snow (1995), which celebrates the life of a middle-aged Hong Kong housewife. My Ameri-can Grandson (1991), like Summer Snow, is also a serio-comic, domestic drama, but unlike the aforementioned works, was an assignment that contains little personal input from Hui.
Like the directors of the French New Wave, Hui has developed a unique style, which is apparent to a larger or lesser degree in all her films. Most prominent is Hui's reliance on flashbacks to tell a story. Unlike the Hollywood filmmaking tradition that used cinematic markers such as out-of-focus shots, close-ups of eyes, or other indicators of time shifts, Hui has always used flat cuts with or without visual or aural clues. This is very demanding on audi-ences and sometimes confusing. Viewers must be attentive to detail, willing to make their own connections -or willing to remain confused.
Hui has stated that the use of flashbacks dates back to her television days when she was looking for an aesthetic means to counterpoise against the realist dramas. She saw flashbacks as a way to change point of view and to add a sense of the poetic.4 Flashbacks occur in many of her works, culminat-ing in the highly creative and sophisticated techniques of Song of Exile, where there are flashbacks within flashbacks.
Related to the use of flashbacks, which are often allied to an individual's memory, Hui frequently uses voiceover, which allows viewers to experience a character's interior subjectivity. Like flashbacks, the voiceovers occur some-times in an overt, experimental manner, and at other times without much prominence. Both techniques enable Hui to tell her story in the most efficient manner. One of her most creative uses of voiceover is in Eighteen Springs, where the narrative voice is shared by hero and heroine jointly.
Like the range of genres that characterize her works, Hui has continually moved between various cinematic modes of representation. Her early televi-sion work was steeped in film realism and documentary technique. Due to budgetary and time constraints, these dramas were tightly constructed. This impulse toward realism remains apparent in Hui's works over a long period.
In contrast to the hard-hitting aesthetic of her television work, Hui fre-quently draws upon expressionistic techniques to tell her story or to create a specific atmosphere. This is most prominent in The Secret, where Hui was anxious to experiment with film language. But these stylistics can be seen in other works in her use of subjective point of view shots, symbolic composi-tions and suggestive tracking shots.
And like the tension between realism and expressionism, the overall tone of Hui's works gradually shifts from an early hard-edged style to an increas-ingly melodramatic bent. The tendency toward sentimentalism first emerges in Boat People and is given full reign in a work like Eighteen Springs.
The subject matter of Hui's films also evidence a personal vision. Dating back to her television career, Hui was interested in the experience of society's marginalized figures. Perhaps her own experiences as an immigrant from mainland China and later as a token Asian student at the London Film School sensitized her to the plight of immigrants and refugees. The Vietnam boat people was a natural subject.
Throughout her career, she has focused on the lives of characters who find themselves exiles in a foreign land: Vietnamese in Hong Kong and the Philippines, Japanese in Vietnam, Mainlanders in Hong Kong, Hong Kongers in England and Japan, Americans in China, foreigners in Macau, and even Han Chinese under the Manchus. For Hui, this is a natural subject as she considers the Chinese a diaspora nation throughout the world. Thus a major theme in all of Hui's work is the search for personal identity within the increasingly complex notion of national identity.
Although the experience of displacement frequently leads to feelings of alienation, it also proves to be enriching and revealing. Hui's characters occupy a multicultural space, which offers new possibilities, as well as a place from which to critique cultural difference.
As a Chinese female growing up in colonial Hong Kong, Hui was inti-mately familiar with both British and Chinese culture. In addition to national and ethnic differences, Hui's world, like the social reality of Hong Kong in the second decade of the twentieth century, was an ongoing negotiation between the traditional values of the East and the modern values of the West. These themes play themselves out in a variety of ways in many of Hui's works, especially in her later films.
One of the strengths of Hui's work is her refusal to become a propagandist. She has been very vocal about her unwillingness to take sides on political issues. Over and over again she has stated that she is "not political."5 Some critics have responded to these comments by accusing her of being politically naive or commercially wily. These debates began with Boat People and resurfaced with Romance of the Book and the Sword.
However, Hui's refusal to take sides politically, preferring instead to show the strengths and weaknesses of all systems, has led to a dialectical approach. She has been quick to assert her reservations about nationalism, seeing clearly the oppression and destructiveness which allegiance to nation can have. As Lynn Pan noted in 1990, "Hui has a deep distrust of nationalistic sentiment, anything that smacks of pride of blood."6
Like her judicious handling of political issues, Hui eschewed allying her-self with feminism. When Hui began feature filmmaking in 1979, the Hong Kong film industry was a male-dominated enterprise. With few exceptions, this remains the case today. That her first two films were directed and scripted by women, and in the case of The Spooky Bunch, produced by a woman, did not go unnoticed. Yet despite the fact that The Secret is about three female characters and the protagonist of The Spooky Bunch is a young woman, neither film could be classified as a woman's picture. Hui was determined at the outset of her career not to be singled out as a female director, which for all intents and purposes would have excluded her from much mainstream work. She distinguished herself as a tough director who was fully capable of doing action sequences along with "the boys." It is only in the second half of her career, that she has turned her attention to the female experience, investigating women's lives and sentiments.
The Hong Kong New Wave directors of the 1980s attempted to establish an auteur cinema, similar to the New Wave cinema of France. Whether this was achieved is open to debate. Hui's works vary enormously in terms of attention to cinematic language, generic transformation, thematic concerns, and political emphasis. Likewise, during her career she has experienced sev-eral highs and lows in terms of critical and popular reception. Both Hui and her critics have justified these vicissitudes as a consequence of having to negotiate between a desire to create personal cinema and the necessities of surviving in the difficult atmosphere of Hong Kong film industry. Although this may indeed be the case, an alternative means of assessing her films is offered by Chicago critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who compared Hui to the Hollywood studio directors, who may not have created masterpieces, but who turned out professional films year after year -metteurs-en-scene.1
This chapter offers an overview of Hui's career, taking up some of the issues presented in the introduction. Because of the number of works and the range of subject matter, I will focus only on a few films that represent her best work. The chapter covers three areas: Hui's experimentation with film language, the theme of exile and displacement, and female representation. The experimental nature of Hui's films is especially significant when seen within the context of the formula-driven Hong Kong film industry, where cinematic innovation has been developed to create spectacular imagery and special effects, rather than subtle psychological mentalities. The innovations I will highlight are: (1) the use of flashbacks, (2) the handling of voiceover narra-tion, and (3) the preference for fragmented narrative structures. Second, this analysis will point out Hui's continued interest in the plight of displaced persons within various social contexts and the experience of exile. This theme is sometimes foregrounded, becoming the dominant thrust of the work; at other times, it is one of several threads within the narrative. Third, I will trace Hui's gradual development in chronicling the female experience, especially the interiority of a woman's world. Finally, I will point out the ways in which Hui's works, produced during the two decades preceding the 1997 handover, generate readings related to "the China Factor."
THE NEW WAVE BEGINNINGS: FORMAL EXPERIMENTATION AND THE DISCOURSE OF DISPLACEMENT
Coming out of television in the late 1970s, Hui's work was steeped in social realism and focused on contemporary events. For her commercial debut she
chose a subject straight from the pages of the local press. The story features a sensational crime -the double murder of a young man and woman found mutilated in the local forest preserve.
Although the story and its investigation would seem to fit squarely into the detective genre, Hui's handling of the narrative is anything but traditional. The Secret blends a modern story involving love, jealousy, unwed pregnancy, and contemporary, forensic medicine with an ancient tale of ghosts, supersti-tion, and Chinese ritual. Put another way, the modern story is overlaid upon a supernatural base. For Hui, this is an accurate expression of Hong Kong life and culture, where the old and new are always intricately intertwined, not necessarily in opposition, but rather in a delicate balance.
The bodies in the forest turn out to be Li Yuen (Teresa Chiu) and her fiance Ah Cho. The police suspect a young retarded man, who lives like an animal in the forest. A young nurse, Ah Ming (Sylvia Chang), who takes care of Li Yuen's blind grandmother, decides to investigate on her own.
The film is pervaded by a sense of mystery as reports of Li Yuen's reappearance seem to confirm that she has come back to haunt her murderer. Eventually the crime is solved when it is discovered that the dead woman is not Li Yuen but a woman named Mei Shui Jei, who was having an affair with Ah Cho. In the final scene, again at the site of the crime, Li Yuen, now in her last days of pregnancy, attacks Ah Ming but is strangled by the retarded man. The film ends with the birth of the motherless child -clearly the stuff of melodrama. However, unlike the expected uplifting ending of so many dra-mas, The Secret ends on a somber note, lacking even a sense of emotional closure.
What makes The Secret so extraordinary is what Hui chooses to do with her material. Through the creative and experimental use of image and sound, Hui creates a world suffused with uncertainty. Suspense is created by shots of empty spaces, unmotivated camera pans, misty streets, a lone cat crossing an alley, a moving light with no source and off-screen sounds of high heel shoes, all seen and heard against eerie organ music. Together, these elements create an atmosphere of the supernatural.
Several scenes in The Secret reveal Hui's propensity for the grotesque. One example is the autopsy, where we watch the dissection of a nude corpse as the police describe the procedure in voiceover. Unnecessary for narrative development, it nonetheless provides a cold, graphic reality to the murder and the meaning of death. Equally visceral is the final scene in which the retarded man's mother, using a cleaver, performs a cesarian section on the dead Li Yuen to deliver the baby.
Of all the techniques in The Secret, the one that most distinguishes Hui's work is her handling of flashbacks. One example is the opening scene. We watch as a young woman in red serves tea to her blind grandmother. When she drops the cup, Hui cuts to a child in a hospital, falling to the ground. Is this simultaneous action? Is it a flashback? Is the young child, the woman in red at an earlier period? Nothing is explained.
Throughout the film,Hui cuts directly from present to past, placing de-mands on the viewer to integrate the fragmented episodes. One of the longest of these scenes is the final episode, which reveals the true events of the murder. By using flashbacks, Hui is able to provide multiple perspectives and a complex narrative in the tradition of Citizen Kane.8 Hui claims that The Secret remains one of her favorite works (along with Boat People) because of the freedom she enjoyed in shooting the film.9
Many of the techniques Hui developed in The Secret reappear the following year in The Spooky Bunch, which also deals with ghosts and unexplainable events. Both films demonstrate Hui's interest in subverting genres by creating new combinations of generic elements. The Spooky Bunch merges Cantonese opera with ghost stories and comedy.
Two years later, Hui directed The Story of Woo Viet, a hard-hitting gang-ster/crime film with political overtones. It established once and for all that Hui was not a typical woman's director and proved that she was fully capable of directing action sequences.
The film opens as a refugee ship leaves Saigon for Hong Kong, exactly where Boat People will later end. The story is narrated by Woo Viet (Chow Yun-fat), a former Vietnamese soldier. As a refugee, Woo is interned in a camp where he learns of the precariousness of his situation. After escaping, Woo meets and falls in love with another refugee, Sum Ching (Cherie Chung). The two buy false passports to the United States but are betrayed and taken to the Philippines. The girl is sold into prostitution. To gain their freedom, Woo works as a hit man for a Chinese crime boss.
After several life-threatening encounters, the two make a run for freedom, but Sum Ching is killed in the get-away. Woo takes her body out to sea for burial. The film ends with Woo's hopes still fixed on the United States. Like The Secret, the film offers only partial closure.
As in Hui's previous films, Woo Viet is an unsentimental narrative of the hardships of being a displaced person. The film chronicles the various prob-lems and brutalities to which the Vietnam refugees (boat people) were sub-jected: dismal refugee camps, physical abuse, robbery, bribery, attack by guards and other inmates, forced prostitution, and drug addiction, all of which led many to turn to crime as a means of survival. Woo Viet places great emphasis on the theme of displaced persons and the importance of home and country. The appearance of this theme will strengthen as the fate of Hong Kong moves closer to 1997.
Like much of Hui's television work, The Story of Woo Viet was based on real events, with information gathered through first-hand conversations. The cops-and-robbers sequences, as well as the tight editing, were holdovers from television. It was also during this period that Hui, along with other Hong Kong New Wave directors, began to use direct sound rather than the common practice of post-dubbing.
Like the autopsy and the bloody murders depicted in The Secret, Woo Viet presents many vicious episodes. One is the cold-blooded shooting of a hos-tage, another the brutal killing of one of the women forced into prostitution.
Yet despite the news-story quality of many of the events, Hui continued to experiment with narrating techniques. Woo Viet contains three voiceover ren-derings of letters Woo writes to Lap Quan, a woman he befriended in Hong Kong. In the first letter, we see Woo arriving by boat as we hear details of his life in Vietnam. In the second letter, sent from the Philippines, there is a disjuncture between word and image. Woo expresses his pessimism about extricating himself from his position as a permanent refugee, a major theme of the work. Yet despite the tone of these words, the images show Woo happily drinking with his buddy and romantically involved with his girlfriend.
Unlike the reading of the first letter, this scene elides with its reception in Hong Kong. There is a long hold on Lap Quan's expressionless face, as we hear Woo's voice; we have no access to her interior thoughts. However, the long pause coupled with her actions (snapping off the light) serve to commu-nicate a sense of disappointment and perhaps unrequited love, enhanced by our knowledge that Woo has withheld several truths.
The third and final letter ends the film. Here the discrepancy between what is said and what is shown dominates the scene. Woo talks about going to America with his buddy and Sum Ching, of establishing a home and adopting a child. But what appears on the screen is Sum Ching's body, slowly sinking into the water. Here Woo's words emphasize his broken dreams and unful-filled hopes, closing the film with a sense of aching loss. The Story of Woo Viet was selected for the Director's Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival and is the film that served to establish the career of Chow Yun-fat.
Released in 1982, Boat People, Hui's third major work on Vietnam refu-gees, proved to be her biggest international success. The film was overtly political in its criticism of the postrevolutionary government in Vietnam and disarmingly honest about the gap between the ideal and the real in Vietnamese society. For film audiences in Hong Kong, however, the film resonated in a different way. Local audiences saw an analogy between Vietnam and Hong Kong under Communism.
The story opens in 1975, as the Viet Cong parade through Danang in triumph. A Japanese photographer named Akutagawa (George Lam) docu-ments the event with his camera. Three years later he returns to Vietnam to see the changes brought about by Communism.
At first he is impressed with the joyous faces of young schoolchildren. Akutagawa alters his opinions when he meets the fourteen-year-old Cam Nuong (Season Ma), who reveals the truth behind the happy facade. For a while, Akutagawa remains an observer. But when his camera is stolen and he is arrested, he moves from bystander to a revolutionary participant.
Eventually Akutagawa determines to take Cam and her younger brother out of Vietnam. The night of their departure, Akutagawa is shot and the suitcase of gasoline he is carrying explodes. As the refugee boat pulls away, we see the flames of Akutagawa's body on the pier. The last shot is a freeze frame of Cam and her brother on the open sea, moving toward freedom.
In actuality, the film does not depict the lives of the boat people or refugees so much as the suffering and social reality of Vietnam, which caused these people to flee in the first place. The Chinese title, which translates as "Run into the Angry Sea," better describes Hui's approach. Like other Hui works, Boat People shifts between Cantonese, Vietnamese, Japanese with a smatter-ing of Mandarin and English.10 In fact, the outsider is Akutagawa, although he is neither an exile or refugee. For Hui, this character was necessary to achieve a perspective on the events being depicted.11
More than any other film in Hui's career, Boat People gained an interna-tional audience. Many found it a powerful work.12 On the other hand, critics at the New York International Film Festival objected to the rather one-sided representation of the Vietnam government and the film's lack of historical perspective. Others found the work politically simplistic and sentimental.13
In interviews, Hui avoided becoming embroiled in a political debate. Re-peatedly, she commented, "I don't understand politics."14 Hui continually emphasized her decision to depict the suffering of Vietnam refugees based on the extensive interviews she had done in Hong Kong. Some felt that her comments on politics contradicted her earlier activism. Others concluded that she was just being pragmatically guarded, having learned her lessons about controversial subjects while working for television. Still others observed that in actuality, Hui's approach, even in her television days, was not to fore-ground politics, but rather to use it as background in which to situate her characters.
Despite Hui's protestations, Boat People stirred up political controversy. At the Cannes Film Festival, opposition from left-wing sympathizers resulted in the film being shown out of competition.15 The film was also banned in Taiwan, along with all of Hui's previous works, because it had been shot on Chinese soil (the Hainan Islands).16
Boat People marks Hui's increasing shift away from experimentation to-ward a straightforward narrative form. The film lacks Hui's previous interest in cinematic language and fragmented narrative structures. At the same time, it reveals a new tendency toward sentimentalism.
In Hong Kong, Boat People was a runaway success. It set box office records, earning $HK15,500,000 and filling the theaters for several months.17 Many attributed this to the tendency of Hong Kong audiences to perform a double-reading, substituting the Communist Vietnam government for the PRC and the plight of ordinary Vietnamese citizens for the possible plight of ordinary Hong Kongers after the handover. Li Cheuko-to referred to such interpretations as "the China Factor." Looking back on the films of the 1980s from the perspective of 1990, he observed, "The China Factor resurfaced with a vengeance. Hong Kong movies were infused with allegorical treat-ments of 1997 and were obsessed with themes of destiny and fate."18 Cer-tainly, Boat People falls squarely within this category.
A PERIOD OF TRANSITION: LARGER COMMERCIAL PROJECTS
Following the success of Boat People, Hui adapted Eileen Chang's Love in a Fallen City (1984), which deals with the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, into a lavish period romance. The film received some critical acclaim but failed at the box office. She was then offered an opportunity to film on the mainland by a local production company. The company, pro-Chinese in its allegiances, was hoping to use Hui's new prestige on the international scene to turn a profit. China was opening up to foreign production, and the enterprise began with great optimism.
The two films that constitute Romance of the Book and the Sword I and II (the second part is also known as Princess Fragrance) are based on a famous legend that was popularized by the contemporary writer Louis Cha. The setting is the Qing Dynasty. The story centers around a rebellious group of Han, who hope to overthrow the Manchu rulers and restore the kingdom to the Chinese. The rebels are known as the Red Flower Society, a secret group, whose leader is Chen Jialo (Cheung Doh-fuk).
A major theme in the plot is the revelation that the Emperor Qian Long is Chen's brother. This leads Chen to attempt to win Qian Long to his cause. In the end, however, all efforts to overthrow the oppressive Manchu govern-ment fail, and the country remains unchanged. Critics and audiences alike responded by making the analogy between eighteenth century China and present-day Hong Kong, especially in light of Chen's observations that it is difficult to fight for change when the country is blessed by a period of calm and prosperity. Again, "the China Factor" hovers over this film.
Perhaps the most interesting commentary on Hui's deployment of politics are the film'sfinal moments. Qian Long reminds Chen that rebellion only brings chaos. Chen, who remains in a position to assassinate the emperor, stays his hand, commenting that murder would only bring about a worse leader. With this observation, Hui leaves audiences to ponder the fate of nations.
Although the Romance series foregrounds the struggles of opposing male powers, the two films gave Hui an opportunity to depict strong women warriors for the first time. These characters exist on the pages of the novel and have filmic parallels in works of the great Hong Kong martial arts director King Hu, for whom Hui worked for a brief time, but Hui gives them added definition.
There are four major female characters in the two films. The first is Jialo's sister; the second is the emperor's courtesan. The most developed female character, however, is Hesili, Princess Fragrance. When the Muslims decide to oppose the Qing, Hesili is sent, along with Jialo, to deliver the message. Enroute, they are attacked, and together, with bows and arrows, they annihi-late the enemy. Later, when they are again under siege, Hesili's father selects another daughter as his military leader. Like Hesili, she is a warrior who possesses physical skill along with strategic knowledge. Like the indepen-dently minded protagonists of The Secret and The Spooky Bunch, these women embody strength without any loss of femininity.
Unlike the majority of Hui's productions, which are intimate dramas, the two Romances are works of epic proportions. This is achieved by the vast barren landscape, the large cast of characters, the historical sets and costumes, and the battle scenes. Although Hui had already proven herself well able to handle action sequences, the Romance series gave her the opportunity to work on a much larger scale.
The two films contain many fight scenes (although not enough to please most Hong Kong audiences, who found the pace too slow), several of major proportions. One occurs in Part II as the armies mass on the plain. Here Hui takes an opportunity to introduce creative cinematic effects. The scene is marked by large panoramic shots, overhead-pans, swish-pans, and the clank-ing of battle armor, all set off against western music. The filming is reminis-cent of Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha, especially in Hui's decision not to use music during the height of battle.
The Romance of the Book and the Sword did not turn out to be the hoped-for financial success. Its failure led to some reassessments on Hui's part, primarily the recognition that Hong Kong films needed big stars to insure commercial viability and the fact that her strength lay in the personal drama, rather than in the action film.19
PERSONAL FILMMAKING: NARRATIVE INNOVATION AND FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY
After the failure of her epic adventure in China, Hui turned to a smaller format and a more familiar landscape. The film, Starry is the Night, is set at Hong Kong University during the years when she was a student. The work possesses many personal elements, although Hui claims that the romance between the professor and his student, though based on a real incident, was not her own. The film incorporates Hong Kong political history, especially the student riots and the first Hong Kong local elections of the 1980s. The story, starring Brigitte Lin, dwells on the theme of doomed love. Hui returns to this theme again in her 1997 feature, Eighteen Springs.
Having begun to mine her own experiences, it seemed a logical step to move more deeply into autobiography. The result was Song of the Exile (1990). The script in part reflects actual events that had taken place ten years earlier. Initially it was to be a comic drama about a dysfunctional family, but the project had to be abandoned because of production and script problems.20
The final result is the story of Hueyin, a young woman played by Maggie Cheung, who returns from the London Film School to attend her sister's wedding. Her visit results in conflicts with her mother, a trip to Japan, her mother's native home, and the reconciliation of the two women. The film ends as the protagonist decides to stay in Hong Kong and work in local television.
Like The Story of Woo Viet and Boat People, Song of the Exile presents a multicultural and multilingual space, a reflection of the hybridity that charac-terizes the lifestyle of a large segment of Hong Kong's population. The experience of exile speaks not only for so many of Hui's characters but also for the experience of so many Hong Kongers. The major themes in the film revolve around questions of identity, both personal and national, the experi-ence of displacement, and the desire for belonging. Like Woo Viet, each family member is searching for a home. However, while Woo accepts the fact that this is a dream that will never be fulfilled, Hueyin and Aiko reach a realization that home is a mental state. Although they both ultimately make a commitment to Hong Kong, the film reflects the changing sense of home as something global and mobile. It also reflects the experience of millions of Hong Kongers for whom the city is a transit stop on the way to somewhere else.
Also, in turning to autobiography, Hui managed to render palpable the impact of history on the lives of ordinary citizens. This theme pervades The Story of Woo Viet and Boat People, as well as Love in a Fallen City, but these films lacked a clear definition of history. The same charge could be leveled against Song of the Exile, but the integration of history, politics, and personal destiny seem better focused in this film than in the previous works.
One of the distinguishing features of Song of the Exile is the complex series of flashbacks. Many refer back to Hueyin's childhood in Macau and serve to provide a new perspective on past actions, which she is able to reassess now as an adult. Several incidents are shown more than once, with slightly differing points of view.
Hui also manipulates subjectivity in a manner reminiscent of The Secret. The film incorporates seven flashback sequences of varying lengths. The longest and most complex is the third recollection. It begins with Hueyin's standing at the window, watching her mother below, flashes back to a family argument in Macau, covers Hueyin's parents' journey to Hong Kong, seam-lessly jumps forward to 1963 when Hueyin herself makes this same sea voyage, and continues, covering Hueyin's adolescent years and family ten-sions. During this sequence Hueyin sees a papaya at a fruit stall, which triggers a memory of her grandfather and her child self, thus constituting a flashback within a flashback. The sequence concludes with Hueyin's departure for boarding school as her mother watches from the window above. In this manner, Hui yokes together the subjectivity of both mother and daughter, which results in thematic consequences later in the film. For Hui, the "flash-backs are not flashbacks in the normal sense, but rather a way of placing the present in the past or the past in the present. A character can be thinking about a relevant past event and I show a 'splash' of the past."21
Hong Kong cultural critic Ackbar Abbas has also commented on these flashbacks. "The flashback technique shows us a past and a present that do not quite mesh, that seem initially to contradict one another, but it is these discrepancies that force a reevaluation of both memory and experience."22
Having worked on several projects that did not prove to be critically or commercially successful {Zodiac Killers and My American Grandson), Hui returned in full force with the production of Summer Snow. The Chinese title literally translates as A Woman at Forty. The film stars Josephine Siao, who had starred in Hui's second feature, The Spooky Bunch, and who has been a staple of the Hong Kong cinema since age five. At forty-eight, she com-manded the screen with maturity and a broad range of emotion (Fig. 31).
Summer Snow is a domestic drama. Hui had dealt with similar subject matter in Song of the Exile, although there the emphasis was intensely on the mother-daughter relationship. Summer Snow focuses on a typical Hong Kong family, seen through a semihumorous lens.23
The film offers a keen observation of life in contemporary Hong Kong, with dozens of familiar touches immediately recognizable to any local resi-dent. The story centers around May Sun (Siao) who juggles a full-time office job with her responsibilities at home.
Pressures mount when it is discovered that her father-in-law, Chen (Roy Chiao) has Alzheimer's disease, a neurological disorder that affects short-term memory, eventually reducing the patient to a child-like state once again. When family relationships begin to deteriorate, May decides to devote herself full-time to caring for her father-in-law. The film ends with Chen's death, eliciting the expected sorrow but also serving as a means of family reaffirmation.
Like Boat People, Summer Snow does not have any of the stylistic marks that typify other Hui films. There are no flashbacks, experimental episodes, or voiceover narrations. The strength of the work is the finely observed details and the outstanding performances. Hui's presence recedes, allowing the char-acters to take center stage. The film once again proved Hui's ability to elicit good performances from her actors. And as in many past works, Hui takes a noncommercial subject and turns it into engaging entertainment. Her treatment
Figure 31. Roy Chiao and Josephine Siao Fong-fong are featured in Ann Hui's A Woman at Forty (a.k.a. Summer Snow, 1995). Courtesy Hong Kong International Film Festival.
of Alzheimer's proves both humorous and humane, without downplaying the hard facts of the disabling disease.
Summer Snow is in many ways an homage to the strength of Chinese women, especially those past middle age. The clear heart of the film is May. An early scene establishes her practicality as she thumps a live fish so that she can buy it dead for less. At the same time, we are aware of the effort she puts into pleasing her family. After emphatically telling her husband she will not stop for the two-for-one sale on rice, we see her lugging the two bags on the MTR (local subway system). Hui uses a flat cut; no commentary neces-sary.
The scenes of the old man, which could have been depressing, are turned into a drama that is sometimes fraught with anxiety and at other times is rather humorous. We hear him tell the doctor that he is twelve years old, which in truth is almost correct. It is ironic that Hui, who has built her career examing the effects of memory, now focuses on a character who is losing his memory. It is tempting to interpret the film politically as it was her next-to-last feature before the handover. For grandfather Chen, the past has become the present. Perhaps the film represented a latent fear among Hong Kongers that as the colony merged with the mainland, it would lose its distinctiveness. All that would remain of Hong Kong identity would be the long-ago past.
It also seems relevant that after the intense focus on the sense of displace-ment that marked The Song of the Exile, Hui chose to celebrate the Chinese family in which, for better or worse, the members are together. Yet despite the celebratory note, Summer Snow does not present an uncritical view of the Chinese family. Like other Hui works dating back to The Secret, she questions both traditional and modern values, often finding both lacking. Although she offers a warm depiction of family life, she also points up the demands upon Chinese housewives and mothers, the patriarchal values that still dominate many households and the cramped living conditions in most traditional homes. Conversely, she offers little faith in the values of modern technology or the new health care systems derived from Western models.
The film was immediately hailed as a major come-back for Hui. It received numerous awards in Hong Kong and Tokyo, and Siao earned her first inter-national recognition by winning the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival.
The final work under discussion is Eighteen Springs. Based on a novel by the Hong Kong/Shanghai writer Eileen Chang (Zhang Ai-ling), whose work Hui also used for her 1984 film, Love in a Fallen City, this was a project very close to Hui's heart. She had first thought about adapting the novel in the late 1970s, but at that time shooting in Shanghai was not possible. By the late 1990s, however, the enormous economic changes in China and the impending return of Hong Kong to mainland rule made the timing propitious.
Set in Shanghai in the 1930s, the story concerns a love affair between Gu Manzhen (Wu Chien-lien), an attractive young woman, who must make her way in the world, and Shen Shijun (Leon Lai Ming), a fellow worker, who comes from a wealthy family but is determined to make it on his own.
Like star-crossed lovers, the two are drawn apart, first by Shen's parents' disapproval and later by Manzhen's rape and subsequent pregancy at the hands of her brother-in-law. After months of separation, Shijun settles for an appropriate match. Years later the two lovers meet for a bittersweet reunion.
Eighteen Springs, like most of Chang's works, plays upon the contrast between traditional values and the new imported values from the West, which were so much at play in Shanghai life and culture during the 1920s and 1930s. This theme primarily centers around Manzhen and her sister, Manlu (Anita Mui). In the film, Manzhen works in an office and dresses in Western fashion. In contrast, Manlu earns her living in one of the few options open to women in traditional Chinese society. She is euphemistically referred to as a "dance-hall hostess" and is dependent upon her beauty and charm to attract men. Despite their differences, in terms of temperament Manzhen is the more traditional, representing the old-fashioned values of modesty and virginity, and Manlu is the more modern, reflecting the crass commercial world and sexuality of Shanghai before the Revolution.
In Eighteen Springs, Hui returned to some of her past interests in filmmak-ing. The entire film is one long flashback. Within this narrative are other flashbacks to previous events, filmed in the usual Hui manner. Most interest-ing is Hui's decision to alternate the narrative voice. At certain points the voiceover belongs to Manzhen; at other points, to Shijun. Hui has commented that she used this technique to ' 'convey a sense of space-time disruption .. . where everything becomes blurred in the images and the narration becomes divorced from the visuals," giving the audience a feeling of uncertainty similar to the novel.24 This technique also broadens the scope of the story, allowing audiences to come to their own conclusions about the characters.
Although the scene behind the credits occurs in the 1930s, we are alerted at the outset that this is the past. We see Shijun, wearing glasses and a winter coat, riding on a tram car. This takes place after the end of the Japanese occupation. Later in the film, at a moment of high intensity, the moment when Shujun is aware of his love for Manzhen, Hui merges past and present. First we see the younger Shujun against a door opening. We can hear gypsy-like music emerging from inside. Hui bathes the walls with a shimmering red. The camera then tracks along buildings also saturated with red and purple, and dollies back to reveal Shujun as we saw him at the beginning on the tram.
These moments, plus voiceover remarks, such as Shujun's awareness that at a certain point in their romance, "everything began to fall apart," create a sense of nostalgia, longing, and lost love. In many ways, it is similar to the sense of mono no aware (the sadness of life) that pervades so many Japanese films, especially the works of Yasujiro Ozu. And although the mood is a far cry from Hui's early works like The Story of Woo Viet and Boat People, the overriding world view of people trapped by their destiny, doing what they must do to survive, provides a unifying link with her earlier works.
The film ends on a sad note. Unlike the overwhelming sense of the Chang novels, which depict the world and perhaps all of civilization as "a fallen city," Hui's Eighteen Springs is more wistful than tragic. What one feels is the strong nostalgia of what once was and what can never come again -lost love, Shanghai of the 1930s, and Hong Kong pre-1997.
Despite the alterations Hui made to her source material, she has stated her affinity for Chang's works, claiming that the two share a worldview.25 Cer-tainly, the frequent biculturalism of the characters in the works of both artists mark these men and women for a special destiny, one that precludes easy identity. Hui and Chang also share a similar approach to representing history. Zhang Yingjin has noted that in Chang's works "The politics of the everyday is thus given priority over the politics of nationalism, and Eileen Chang's displacement of the historical by the personal further reveals her fundamental suspicion of the monumentality of history on the one hand and her interest in the triviality of everyday life on the other."26 Nothing could better describe the films of Ann Hui.
Eighteen Springs was well received in Hong Kong. Also during 1997, Hui shot a documentary entitled As Time Goes By, which is her personal statement on the handover. Like so many of her fictional narratives, the documentary focuses on personal memory shot through the lens of political and national history. Her most recent fiction feature, Ordinary Heroes (1999), returns her to the subject matter of her television days. The film, set in the 1980s, chronicles the struggles of a group of social activists, who are working on behalf of the Chinese boat people. Like many of her previous works, the film ends on a note of disillusionment.
In summarizing such a long and productive career, it is not easy to make generalizations that are meaningful and that will hold. Hong Kong film scholar Li Cheuk-to noted in a career piece written in 1982 that all of Hui's films in one way or another were haunted by the past -past traditions, past memories, even the dead.27 In a later piece, written in 1990, Lynn Pan addressed the political aspects of her work. "She disavows any concern with political questions, even though political events appear as backdrops or markers of time in her movies. Perhaps hers is a narrow definition of 'political,' because her films typically turn on the theme of personal fortune riding on the large curve of history."28
Both assessments remain true. Hui's first concern seems to be human beings in all their complexity, and the difficulty of human relationships. Her cinematic techniques are always marshaled to furthering this philosophy. Over and over again Hui's films seem to warn against trying to impose ready-made solutions on life's complex problems. Whatever her grasp of world politics, her understanding of human nature remains keen, and these she captures with a memorable visual style.
When asked about her characters, Hui replied, "It is about survival, and that is all."29 Such a statement brings to mind the final images of The Story of Woo Viet, Boat People, and Eighteen Springs -in fact almost all of Hui's works. Surely this message must also apply to Hui the filmmaker as well as to Hong Kong, a city that has become skilled at transforming itself. In the end, it's all a question of survival.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Assayas, Olivier. "Rencontre avec Ann Hui, la surdouee du nouveau cinema de Hong Kong," Liberation (May 16, 1983): 20. Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). do Rosario, Louise. "Profile: Ann Hui," in Far Eastern Economic Review 158. 23 (June 8, 1995): 62. Chan, Evans. "Nostalgia and Laments on Rootlessness: Some Thoughts on Ann Hui" in Film Biweekly 98 (November 4, 1982). (In Chinese.)
Cheng, Scarlet. "I Heard a Voice from My Memory: Chinese Opera and Film," Asian Art and Culture (1994): 81-94.
Cheney, Harry M. "Three Summer Movies," in Christianity Today 28 (August 10, 1984): 36-37.
Chung, Winnie. "A Reluctant Star Still Shines, at 48," South China Morning Post (May 8, 1995): 25.
Dannon, Frederic and Barry Long. Hong Kong Babylon (London: Faber and Faber, 1997).
G.P.S. "Entretien avec Ann Hui," in Liberation (May 25, 1982). Hoare, Stephanie. "Romance du livre et du film: 1" adaptation de la Romance du livre et de Vepee par Ann Hui," Cinemas (special edition on Le Nouveau cinema chinois) 3. 2-3 (n.d.) 141-155.
Hui, Ann. "Three Recollections of Eileen Chang," Transcending the Times: King Hu and Eileen Chang, The 22nd Hong Kong International Film Festival, 1998, 161-63. Hui, Ann. Hui on Hui, Kwong Po Wai, ed. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Development
Council) 1998. (In Chinese). "Hui Sees Fest-Fave 'Boat People' As 'Non-Political' Cry For Rights," in Variety (October 12, 1983): 30, 34. Jaehne, Karen. "Boat People: An Interview with Ann Hui," Cineaste xiii. 2 (1984): 16-19.
Lai, Linda. "Interview with Ann Hui: The World View of Eighteen Springs," Hong Kong Panorama 97-98, The 22nd Hong Kong International Film Festival, 1998, 51-53.
Li, Cheuk-to, "Comments on Four Ann Hui Films," in Film Biweekly (Hong Kong) 98 (November 7, 1982). (In Chinese.) Li, Cheuk-to. "Introduction," The China Factor in Hong Kong Cinema," The 14th Hong Kong International Film Festival, 1990.
Li Cheuk-to. ' 'The Return of the Father: Hong Kong New Wave and Its Chinese Context in the 1980s," New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics, Nick Browne et al., eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 160-79.
Pan, Lynn. "Home Truths," in Far Eastern Economic Review (April 5, 1990): 32-33. "Rocking the Revolution's Boat," in Asiaweek (October 9, 1982): 40-41.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "Eighteen Springs: Defense of Non-Masterpieces," ChicagoReader (April 17, 1998): 41-44.
Shu Kei. "The Television Work of Ann Hui," Changes in Hong Kong Society Through Cinema, The 12th International Hong Kong Film Festival, revised edition, 1998, 47-52.
Teo, Stephen. Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: British Film Insti-tute, 1997). Zhang, Yingjin. The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender (Stanford, Calif. Stanford University Press, 1996). Zhong Bao (Taiwan, 1983). (In Chinese)
NOTES
1.
Pan, "Home Truths," 32.
2.
Shu, "Television Work," 47.
3.
Shu Kei, interview with the author, February 12, 1997.
4.
Ann Hui, Interview with the author, June 11, 1997.
5.
Some of the statements by Hui concerning her lack of interest in politics include her interview with Li Cheuk-to in Film Biweekly 96 (November 7, 1982), comments to Olivier Assayas in Liberation (May 1983), comments to Variety (October 12, 1983), interview with Karen Jaehne of Cineaste XIII. 2 (1984), and statements in Big Screen 12 (December 16, 1988), a Chinese publication.
6.
Pan, "Home Truths," 33.
7.
Rosenbaum, "Eighteen Springs," 41.
8.
Hui claims that because of possible audience confusion, the distributor insisted that the flashback sequences be redone in black and white. Several prints still contain the black and white sequences (interview with the author, June 11, 1997).
9.
Hui, Interview with the author, June 11, 1997.
10.
Boat People was postdubbed into Mandarin and Cantonese versions.
11.
Hui, Interview with author, June 11, 1997.
12.
Praise for Boat People came from Serge Daney in Liberation (May 16, 1983), Lawrence O'Toole in Motion Picture Review (December 5, 1983) and David Denby in New York Magazine (December 5, 1983), among others.
13.
Negative reviews based on Hui's politics include J. Hoberman, Renee Shafransky and Andrew Sarris; all three reviews were published in the Village Voice on Novem-ber 22, 1983.
14.
See note 5.
15.
Cheney, "Three Summer Movies," 37.
16.
"Rocking the Revolution," 40.
17.
The film cost HK$6,000,000. Zhong Wen in Zhong Bao.
18.
Li, "Introduction," 9. Further comments on this subject in Nick Browne et al, eds., New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics (New York: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1994), 168.
19.
Hui, Interview with the author, June 11, 1997.
20.
Shu, Interview with the author, February 12, 1997. Also mentioned in Hui on Hui.
21.
Hui, Interview with the author, June 11, 1997.
22.
Abbas, "Recontre," 38.
23.
Chung, "Reluctant Star," 25. Siao states, "I told Ann I could only do [SummerSnow] if she let me have a comical part."
24.
Lai, "Interview," 51.
25.
Lai, "Interview," 51.
26.
Zhang, The City, 24.
27.
Li, "Comments on Four."
28.
Pan, "Home Truths," 33.
29.
Li, "Comments on Four."
FILMOGRAPHY
The Secret (1979)
The Spooky Bunch (1980)
The Story of Woo Viet (1981)
Boat People (19^2) Love in a Fallen City (1984)
Romance of the Book and the Sword (1987)
Princess Fragrance (1987)
Starry is the Night (1988)
Song of the Exile (1990)
Zodiac Killers (\99\)
My American Grandson (1991)
Summer Snow (1995) (also producer)
Ah Kam: The Story of a Stuntwoman (1996)
Eighteen Springs (1997) (also coproducer)
As Time Goes By (1997) (codirected with Vincent Chui; also coproducer) Ordinary Heroes (1999) (also producer)
BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND COLONIALISM: MAINLAND EMIGRES, MARGINAL CULTURE, AND HONG KONG CINEMA 1937-1941
Poshek Fu
Hong Kong has been marginal to twentieth-century Chinese culture. This marginality stems both from the fact that Hong Kong is situated at the fringe of China's geopolity and from a popular stereotype of the city as a "cultural desert." This imagery began to circulate around the 1920s among some mainland intellectuals seeking refuge in the British colony who, as the chil-dren of the May Fourth Enlightenment, were ill at ease not only with the "exotic" local dialect but with what they considered its hybridized culture: simultaneously Westernized, feudal, colonial, and provincial. Westernized as it appeared, Hong Kong had never experienced a cultural revolution compa-rable to the May Fourth Movement and its cultural discourse controlled by colonizers, taipans, compradors, and Confucian moralists. To many mainlan-ders it was a desert at the periphery of Chinese culture where no progressive, diverse modes of cultural practice could possibly exist. This stereotypical representation has until recently dominated both the popular and scholarly imagery of Hong Kong.1
The colony's cinema, its major mass cultural product, has also been largely ignored by China scholars.2 Movies "made in Hong Kong" were perceived as merely "made for money": box-office driven, frivolous, devoid of artistic and social meaning. One of the early critics was Shanghai modernist writer Mu Shiying, who, after a brief stint with the Cantonese cinema, ridiculed it as "the biggest joke in the world and the greatest humiliation of the human race."3 Coming from the center of new Chinese culture, Mu's smug sense of cultural superiority was all too evident.
This marginalization of Hong Kong is integral to what could be called a "Central Plains syndrome" (da Zhongyuan xintai) that has been embedded in a centralizing, antiimperialist state-building discourse underlying twentieth-century representation of Chinese culture. It comes as no surprise that a master film historian such as Cheng Jihua would block out Hong Kong's dynamic contribution to the birth of Chinese cinema altogether.4 Cheng does include Hong Kong in his authortative history text on Chinese cinema but privileges only the two periods (1930s and late 1940s) during which mainland intellec-tuals had allegedly policed and guided the local movie scene.5
In fact, since the beginning of the twentieth century, Hong Kong has been a dynamic site of disparate discourses and practices that centers particularly around the notion of mass culture. The colony was the largest center of dialect filmmaking in Republican China, and after the Communist takeover, it re-placed Shanghai as the ''Hollywood of the East." Although dominated from the outset by commercial concerns, Hong Kong cinema has a complex history of contestation between various political and ideological positions and aes-thetic orientations. It was in this way not so different qualitatively from the mainland cinema where, aside from the few cannonized leftist films, the dominant mode of the Republican screen was profit-driven, popular entertain-ment fare. Likewise, since its beginning around 1900, Hong Kong cinema has been a significant part of the Chinese cinema, connected as much by business rivalries as by artistic and financial interactions.6
This cinematic connection became particularly intricate during the first years of the Second World War, between 1937 and 1941, when Hong Kong was swarming with filmmakers, stars, and critics who fled the mainland to seek refuge in the colony or to stop over on their way to the unoccupied interior. Many of them brought a political intensity and sense of moral ur-gency, as well as a creeping Central Plains syndrome, to the ideological contestation in the local cinema between patriotism and profit and the collision of national demand with local interest. Wartime Hong Kong cinema provides us, therefore, a privileged vantage point from which to explore the marginali-zation of Hong Kong in the Chinese geocultural imagination.
At the same time, the war engendered an incipient sense of local identity among the people of Hong Kong. Identification, as broadly defined, is articu-lated in terms of the relation of self to other, subject to object: We define ourselves in relation to the other. In a colonial situation, it is common knowl-edge that the colonizer, in Sartre's words, "has been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters" out of the natives -lazy, incompetent, and primitive.7 This situation was further complicated in the case of Hong Kong by its marginalization in the China-centered discourse of nationalism and modernization. Contaminated by British colonization, it was seen by the mainland cultural elites as a land of "slavishness," "decadence," and "back-wardness," obstructing the progress of the national project. The war drama-tized this double marginality. While the colonial government excluded the "Chinese," the racial Others, from the military defense of the colony, dias-pora from the mainland sought to mobilize the colonized to defend the ' 'moth-erland" against Japan. At the same time the mainland emigres continued to ascribe to them traits of the contaminating Others.
The war also dramatized Hong Kong's sociocultural difference with and geopolitical apartness from the mainland. I would argue that it was a combi-nation of this incipient sense of difference and this double marginality (in the nationalist and colonial discourses) that generated a construction, still tenta-tive, of an ambivalent, hybrid identity that continues to haunt Hong Kong natives today: They are caught in between identification with the past and the present, with the centralizing nationalism of the mainland and the hybrid tradition of Hong Kong. This ambivalent identity was subtly but powerfully projected in the local cinema. Based on some recently discovered films, this chapter discusses the industrial practices and production strategies of the wartime Hong Kong film industry, the ways in which the mainland emigres police and "otherize" the local cinema, and its representation of a collective sense of identity for the colonized subjects.8
I
The Second World War in China began on July 7, 1937, with the fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge. Four months later, the premier center of Chinese filmmaking, Shanghai, fell to Japan. Unlike the war-torn inland, the British colony of Hong Kong stayed outside the hostilities. As a result, there was a massive influx of wartime refugees into the colony seeking safety. Between July 1937 and July 1938, for example, according to official figures,a quarter of a million people crossed the border. In the next two years, another half a million mainland Chinese fled to the "haven of tranquility," sometimes at the rate of 5,000 a day, swelling the city's population from less than 1 million in mid-1937 to 1.7 million in 1939.9 Some of these refugees were social notables such as the underworld boss Du Yuesheng and the Beijing opera star Mei Lanfang, whose wealth and exuberant lifestyle provided an impetus to the consumer economy. But the bulk of refugees were destitute. They created an abundance of cheap labor, which coincided with a large demand for war materials from "Free China." As a result, there was an economic boom in the city. Thus, besides the great increase of foreign trade, the number of factories with more than twenty workers, which constituted the backbone of Hong Kong's small manufacturing economy, jumped from 689 in 1937 to 1,200 in 1941.10
The Hong Kong film industry thrived in this favorable environment. By 1939 the industry boasted more than forty film studios employing about 2,000 people. As an important center of Cantonese production since the late 1920s, the industry was dominated by Cantonese-speaking natives. But the war brought in many Mandarin-speaking film people from Shanghai, only a few of whom bothered to learn the local dialect. Thus, in general, film directors, cinematographers, and scriptwriters were better able to rebuild a career in local production than actors, whose performances were invariably affected by behind-the-scenes dubbing.
One major reason for the unwillingness of these Shanghai emigres to learn the local dialect was their sense of cultural superiority. In their eyes, the Hong Kong cinema, as a part of the colony's sociopolitical culture, was "back-ward." Compared to the prewar Shanghai cinema, it was small in capitaliza-tion, lacked artistic sophistication, and was undeveloped in technology. In fact, prewar Hong Kong was seen as a colonial backwater, in comparison with the thriving, glamorous Shanghai, which was the center of the regions's international trade.l ] Hong Kong cinema was also politically irrelevant. Unlike the mainland film industry, except for occupied Shanghai, which was since 1937 centralized under the Nationalist government in Chongqing to rally the nation for continued resistance, and unlike Hollywood, which was trans-formed by its alliance with Washington from "peacetime entertainment to wartime engagement," Hong Kong cinema remained aloof from politics.12
This political aloofness was in fact largely a result of colonialism. Typical of colonial situations, the Hong Kong government treated the colonized, in the words of Albert Memmi, as no more than an "anonymous collectivity," a "mark of the plural."13 They were suspicious and unworthy; they were the Other. Racism was rampant in the colony, where social life was racially segrated. For example, not only were the natives not allowed to live in certain residential areas like the Peak, which was "reserved" for Europeans, they were paid less than the Europeans for the same work on the grounds of race. Only in 1937 were Chinese allowed to become subinspectors in the police force, and even then they were placed under the orders of British junior to them. Sir Alexander Grantham, the first Governor of postwar Hong Kong, summed up the colonial attitude pointedly: "The basis of the [European] arrogance and [snobbery] is the assumption that the European is inherently superior to the Asian, taking such forms as the exclusion of Asians from clubs, downright rudeness or a patrionizing manner."14
On the other hand, Hong Kong had been a "relative haven of tranquility" compared to the political turmoil and social chaos of the mainland since the 1860s. Most Chinese came to the colony to seek refuge from wars and rebellions. Their objectives were to survive and, among the rich, to protect their wealth. Indeed, the small, close-knit local elite was "created by property-owning lineages," especially from south China.15 This created a strong tradi-tion of political conservatism in the colony. Exacerbated by colonial prejudice, this tradition bred, in the apt phrase of two Hong Kong scholars, "a fear of politics" within the local Chinese community.16 As a European professor at the elite University of Hong Kong exclaimed, "[the Chinese] asked only that they should be left alone, they asked for no shares in political control. . . . They have no spirit of willing sacrifice for the community."17
No wonder the British made no attempt to involve the locals when they prepared for the defense of Hong Kong in 1937. To begin with, partly because of its limited commercial importance, London saw little strategic importance in the colony. Instead, its naval defense in the region was centered in Singa-pore.18 In Hong Kong, only British of "European birth" were subject to conscription. The colonized were relegated to the racially segregated auxiliary forces (the "Chinese Company") and to "junior positions in civil defence." The colonial government exhibited no interest in mobilizing the city's media industry for war propaganda, except installing in 1939 a chief censor (concur-rently the University of Hong Kong's vice-chancellor) to police newspapers, pamphlets, and entertainment in Chinese.19 The film industry was thus "left alone" in the wilderness of market calculations.
Between 1938 and 1940, the heyday of wartime cinema, there were more than forty movie companies in the colony, most of them small independents making about one film each year. Only six major producers boasted their own movie studios and stars on contract. They included the Daguan Film Company (Chiu Shu-sum/Zhao Shushen), Nanyang Productions (Shao Zuiweng), and Nanyue Studio (Zhu Qingxian). The latter two were founded by Shanghai businessmen in 1932-1933.20 In general, these studios were poorly equipped, rarely employing more than two cameras on a shot. For example, the industry was shocked in 1938 when Nanyue imported several high-voltage projection lights from Shanghai.21 Independents had to rent film stars and studio spaces, as well as postproduction facilities from the six majors. Thus production scheduling was tight and control over filming equipment and stars' shooting schedule led often to nasty fights.
The market for wartime Hong Kong cinema was limited. As the major center of Cantonese productions, Hong Kong had marketed its products throughout south and southwest China prior to the war. After 1938, when south China was under Japanese rule, its outlet was limited to Hong Kong, Macao, and the Cantonese communities in Southeast Asia (mainly Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines) and the Americas.22 After an economic boom be-tween 1937 and 1938, the industry increasingly contracted as a result of the inflationary spiral in 1939, when food prices began to rise quickly and export-import trade flattened due to the Japanese hold on the Pearl Estuary and the onset of the European war.23 This change of fortune was demonstrated clearly in the drop of the industry's gross profits from more than HK$900,000 in 1938 to much less than HK$500,000 in 1939.24
This sensivity to market conditions and backward technology during the war exacerbated the industry's prewar problems of low budget production and "sloppy craftsmanship." The average cost of a Cantonese feature-length picture in 1937-1939 was about HK$7,000 to $8,000 (contemporary Shanghai films cost an average HK$30,000).25 To beat the market meant to cut costs. Production companies paid little budgetary attention to scriptwriting or cine-matography, investing only in the proven box-office records of movie stars. Restrained by the scheduling problems of studio space and stars' filming time, these companies were under tremendous pressure to finish their projects fast. Seven to ten days per film became the industry norm during the war.26 Actors were compelled to work hard and fast. The majority of them signed on with one of the six majors on a one-to three-year basis; during that period they were required, on paper, to make nine or ten films each year. Except for a few superstars like Sit Gok-sin (Xue Juexian), who commanded about HK$3,000 a film, most actors got a basic salary of somewhere between HK$80 and HK$300 a month, which barely stayed abreast of the rising cost of living in post-1939 Hong Kong. To survive, most actors had to find extra work from other independents, which would in turn pay a charge to their home compa-nies. Movie businessmen could make huge profits by loaning out their con-tracted stars. For example, the standard charge for "borrowing" the leading man Ng Chor-fan (Wu Chufan, Fig. 32) from Nanyang in 1940 was a hefty HK$ 1,200 per film. That was why all the majors required their stars, whether they needed extra income or not, to work for other studios. As a consequence, each star would end up making more than thirty movies a year, usually
Figure 32. Film star Ng Chor-fan (Wu Chufan). Courtesy Hong Kong International Film Festival.
working on several projects at the same time. Indeed, Cantonese opera idols-cum-movie superstars such as Sit Gok-sin had to be literally dragged, still wearing stage makeup, to movie studios right after finishing their stage per-formances at midnight. It was hard to expect them to perform at a high artistic level under these conditions. Thus "sloppy craftsmanship" (cuzhi lanzao) came to be the standard criticism of wartime Hong Kong cinema. This "slop-piness" accentuated, as will be shown, the projected image of Hong Kong cinema as frivolous and "feudal."
II
Between 1937 and 1941, the film industry turned out an average of more than eighty features each year. Most pictures were various modes of popular genres like folk drama, tragic romances, and period pieces that were adapted directly from Cantonese operas, folk tales, and popular novels as well as Hollywood fantasy.27 Just as in wartime Hollywood, where no new "project of cultural creation" was involved in its filmic expressions in spite of the war mobiliza-tion, Cantonese genres were built on a foundation of generic elements devel-oped in prewar films: simple and bipolar narratives, melodramatic aesthetics, emotional identification, and stereotypical characters. Consciously invoking and appropriating past forms, as Leo Braudy notes, genre films derived their power from an affinity with the "existing audience." In fact, all of these filmic elements became generic because they seemed to "answer well to the experience, intelligence, and feelings of the audience."28
Who was the audience for Cantonese movies in the war years? The lack of business statistics or company archives has presented a formidable challenge to Chinesefilm historians trying to reconstruct the demographic and class make-up of the film audience. Judging from the number and location of venues, however, it seems that Hollywood and Mandarin productions attracted the colony's small, close-knit community of economic and cultural elites who were cosmopolitan, bilingual, and conservative (supporting, if not necessarily serving in, the colonial parliament, the Legislative Council) and yet racially ambivalent.29 Of the thirty-one theatres in Hong Kong, eighteen showed Hol-lywood films, and two showed Mandarin. There were four first-run venues in town, including the plush Queen's Theatre in the Central District and the Lee Theatre in Causeway Bay, which had since 1940 showed Mandarin films from Shanghai. The Cantonese pictures were mostly shown in second-and third-run venues like Jiurufang, Chongqing, and Guomin, which were located in lower-middle and working class neighborhoods, and which staged Cantonese operas alternatively. Fares ranged from HK$1.2 to HK$3 for Hollywood premiers and HK$0.4 to HK$1 for Cantonese pictures, and HK$0.05 to HK$0.2 for second-and third-runs.30 Thus the averge moviegoer to whom Cantonese filmmakers appealed was an illiterate or semiliterate urbanite who was economically disadvantaged, steeped in the moral universe of local per-forming arts, and unexposed to the May Fourth discourse of modernity and enlightenment. To most of the Cantonese audience, motion pictures repre-sented a less expensive and more regular alternative to opera performances. Thus the popularity of opera-related films and the immense drawing power of opera-cum-screen stars in Cantonese cinema both before and during the
31
war.
For modernizing intellectuals from the mainland, Cantonese movies were without exception "frivolous," "superstitious," "escapist," and "racy," serving only to perpetuate the "evils" of feudal mentality. The famous leftist emigre Cai Chusheng, a Shanghai-born Cantonese film director, expressed his contempt unreservedly: "Owing to the backwardness of Hong Kong culture as a whole, it inevitably has a proportional effect on its cinema. Thus, al-though Hong Kong has produced many, many movies, and although 'artists' here claim that Hong Kong has replaced Shanghai after its fall to Japan to be the center of Chinese cinema, all of these movies are frivolous and vulgar commodities. It is impossible .. . to find any title that would make Hong Kong deserving the claim of a cinematic center -national defence films."32 Obvi-ously, this critique stemmed from an anxiety over the decentering of Chinese cinema33 and the insistence that Hong Kong, for its political irrelevance and lack of authenticity, remained on its periphery. Yet I have found no documen-tary evidence so far to justify Cai's claim that Hong Kong was trying to project itself as the new center of Chinese cinema. His anxiety might have reflected rather a projected superiority of the mainland filmmaking commu-nity.
From 1938 until 1941, most of the filmmakers and intellectuals among the mainland emigres were from Shanghai, the foremost center of Chinese mo-dernity before the war. It is interesting to note that Shanghai, for its Western-ization and semicoloniality, was itself the object of nationalist outcry and conservative attacks. It was "the other China." But when Shanghai intellec-tuals and artists came to the colony, they became the "Chinese" by imposing a slavish otherness on the Hong Kong natives. This happened both because of their perception of Hong Kong as "inferior" and "alien" to Shanghai, owing to its total contamination by the British colonization,34 and as Leo Ou-fan Lee points out, Chinese intellectuals had always imagined themselves as the voice of the nation, at the center of national discourses.35
Many of these intellectuals and artists found the colony a charming yet souless city, and its men of culture dull and slavish. They were nostalgic for the excitement and cultural vitality of the war-torn homeland and constantly chastised the city for its "indifference to the national resistance."36 As the leftist writer Lou Shiyi complained: "When I know that I have to stay here for a while and to live together with all these listless, rotten (meilan) people, I become melancholic."37 They justified their melancholic exile in Hong Kong as a "necessary sacrifice" to enlighten as well as to mobilize the colony to China's defense. As one critic wrote with a biting tone, "Three or four years ago Hong Kong people had no culture to speak of. Only most recently have us mainlanders (waijiang lad) come and brought culture here."38 That smug sense of cultural superiority was all too evident.
It was thus only natural that another diasporic filmmaker Yan Meng would castigate the local films as inferior to those of the mainland cinema: "Edu-cated Chinese are invariably scornful of Cantonese cinema. [Hong Kong filmmakers with social conscience are therefore] full of pain and anguish on the one hand, and deeply humiliated on the other. What we need to do instead is to change our approach to filmmaking."39 This critique obviously grounded itself in the nationalism and enlightenment values that constituted the May Fourth discourse of modernity. Thus, for its politically irrelevant, "frivolous and vulgar" culture, Cantonese cinema in Hong Kong continued to be the suspicious, illegitmate Other to this enshrining national tradition.40
The marginalization of Cantonese production did not begin with the war. Since around 1931, the Nationalist government had been trying to outlaw dialect (i.e., Cantonese) production in its effort to create a new national guoyu (Mandarin) cinema as part of its centralizing, state-building project. The Nanjing government framed its prohibition in the nationalist discourse of antiimperialism and modernization. The Cantonese screen was represented as projecting a "feudalistic" and "superstitious" mentality, which allegedly impeded China's progress to modernity and needed to be swept away. This drive enjoyed widespread support among Chinese intellectuals espousing the May Fourth goals of nationalism and enlightenment as well as Shanghai studio heads who had been competing with their Hong Kong counterparts for market share in south China, the Americas, and Southeast Asia. To kill off Cantonese production would assure a larger profit and market control for the Shanghai industry.41
Underneath this virulent representation of Cantonese film was the Nation-alist government's attempt to reunify the country by strengthening its hold on Guangdong province (formerly headquarters of the anti-Nanjing separatist regime of Hu Hanmin and the militarist Chen Jitang) with which Hong Kong had close geocultural connections based on kinship, language, and ethnicity.42 The modernizing Chinese intelligentsia rallied behind this state-building drive. Under the "centralizing nationalist ideology" that pervaded the intellecual discourse of twentieth-century China, they saw an unpoliced perpetuation of a south-centered cultural discourse as a politico-linguistic weapon against their "hegemonic imaginary" of an independent nation.43 Cantonese cinema, in this vein, was represented as promoting both a local dialect as well as an alternative imagination of collective identity based on regional ties, which, in their minds, impeded the modernizing project of state-building, linguistic unity, and antiimperialist autonomy. Underlying this anxiety was the Chinese intellectuals' creeping consciousness of da Zhongyuan xintai, which, by priv-ileging the "Chineseness" of the north plain, held in contempt all cultures in the periphery of the mainland. By the 1930s, the Nationalist government and the Communists, in pursuing their antiimperialist agenda, had reformulated and celebrated the "old idea" of a primodial identity for all Han Chinese of a shared origin in the north China plain. This Central Plains syndrome repre-sented a hierarchy of cultural differentiation derived from geographic, territo-rial, and cultural boundaries between the mainland core and the outlying periphery. Hong Kong was on the margin, and the colonization accentuated its marginality in the Chinese geopolitical imagination.44 Thus the mainland intellectuals could readily dismiss its lack of an articulated nationalism and elite culture as a "cultural desert" and ridiculed and condemned its cinema as the inferior Other.
In response, the Hong Kong motion picture industry took the lead in 1936 in lobbying the National Government and succeeded in postponing the prohi-bition for three years on the condition that it would pay for the expense of setting up a Central Censorship Bureau in Guangzhou to expedite the review of dialect movies.45 The bureau had to approve all Hong Kong products before public release. By redirecting the Nanjing government's strategic attention, the war saved the industry from dissolution. However, a sense of uncertainty and bitterness was prevalent among local filmmakers who wondered aloud why the Cantonese cinema was singled out for such an unfair attack and how long this suspension would last.46 This demoralization, combined with the problems of small capitalization and primitive technology, aggravated the sloppy tendencies of the local film industry. Most studio heads saw filmmak-ing as a short-term money-making venture, a vehicle of speculation to be quickly exploited when the market looked lucrative.
Although the prohibition was postponed, the framing rhetoric of the cine-matic critique remained in the early years of the war only to be transformed from a discourse of modernity to one of patriotism. During the war, Hong Kong cinema was condemned for its narcotic lure, blunting the patriotic spirit of the people. Peng Yangnong, editor of the pro-Nationalist emigre magazine Yilin {The Arts), expressed this rankled vox populi: "[Hong Kong films] are full of sex and ghosts and monsters. They coincide with the demands of the Fascists."47 Another critic concurred: "Filmmaking has been known [in China] as a harbinger of cultural changes (wenhua xianqu). But it is now divorced from our times, betraying the War of Anti-Japanese Resistance, as if it has forgotten that there is a gap between [Hong Kong filmmakers] and the homeland. It makes us wonder why there would be people living in a dream world, ignoring everything: our homeland, our hometown, justice, and even their own existence. The only thing they really care about is money." (my emphasis).48 This equation of entertainment film with dreamy escapism was typical of the May Fourth tradition of privileging bourgeois realism as the artistic medium of social engagement, unifying the discursive positions of both the leftists and rightists. Indeed, in terms of cultural politics, there was little contention between the Nationalists and their nemesis, the Communists.49 It also brought to fore the elitism of modernizing Chinese intelligentsia who viewed the predominately mass-appeal Cantonese production as polluting the people and thereby carrying an odor of treason.
In fact, the marginalization of Hong Kong became the emigre community's structuring theme for its institutional and cinematic discourses. To rally the colony to China's defense, mainland filmmakers sought to create an alterna-tive hegemony to cleanse the local entertainment industry of vices. This space was embedded in the mainland politics of Nationalist-Communist relations. Under the wartime United Front, both parties had branches and various open or semi-overt agencies in Hong Kong aimed mainly at taking advantage of the city's willingness to reach out to and police the Chinese diaspora com-munities. For example, in the late 1937 the Communists had established an office of the Eighth Route Army to raise funds from and distribute propaganda to the Chinese diaspora as well as to gather military intelligence.50
The inland filmmakers involved in creating the alternative hegemony in-cluded former Lianhua Studio boss Luo Mingyou, young director Yan Meng, leftist filmmakers Situ Huimin and Cai Chusheng, and Nationalist film critic Peng Yannong, all of whom had recently fled Shanghai. They frequently invoked the authority of the Nationalist government to legitimize their polic-ing power. Indeed, they were the nation. For example, in addition to their involvement in various kinds of patriotic activities organized by the Nation-alist or the Communist cells, they also sponsored the annual Guomindang All-Nation Spiritual Mobilization Campaign for the local cinema in which all participants were required to sit through a long series of patriotic speeches by prominent artists (e.g., Hong Shen and Cai Chusheng) and political dignitaries (e.g., Madam Sun Yat-sen) before swearing unswerving loyalty to Chong-qing.51 They also worked with the Nationalist Overseas Chinese Commission to introduce visiting officials to local studio heads and filmmakers. At a welcoming party for the Film Censorship Chief Xu Hao, who came to bring the local cinema in line with the official propaganda policy, Cai Chusheng reported that Japan was targeting HK$2 million to "buy over" Cantonese cinema. In other words, any studio executive who continued to make "frivo-lous" and "trashy" films must have been bought by the enemy. According to one report, all the guests "fell silent."52
These mainland diasporas articulated and circulated their nationalist dis-course in such publications as the Nationalist-sponsored Yilin and Huashangbao {Chinese Business News), which was financed by the Office of the Eighth Route Army, and/or set up networks of elite mobilization through patriotic organizations like Zhongguo dianying jiaoyu xiehui Xianggang fenhui (Fed-eration of Chinese Film Education, headed by Luo Mingyou) and Xianggang Zhongguo dianying bihui (Chinese Cinema PEN, [International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists], headed by Peng Yannong), both local chapters of national film organizations based in Chong-qing. Probably to highlight the "backwardness" of the local film world, these groups were open only to those locals who were "patriotic" and led a "clean life" free of such vices as opium addiction and prostitution (although there was no mention of how to test the applicants). Chinese film personnel, as everywhere in the world, were publicly conceived as extravagant, self-indulgent, promiscuous, and scandalous.53 Yet none of these organizations excluded people from the mainland on the basis of "cleanliness." To single out the Hong Kong industry was to underscore its inauthenticity and margin-ality. Parallel to this institutional discourse was a discursive boundary between "patriots" and "traitors." The former group included some local filmmakers like the opera idols Sit Gok-sin and Ma Shih-tsan (Ma Shizheng) and stars Bak Yin (Bai Yan), Lo Tun (Lu Dun), and Ng Chor-fan, who either identified with the mainland cause or did not want to offend the northerners. All the rest were excluded as, presumably, the unclean, unworthy others.
The emigre filmmakers' nationalist discourse centered around two structur-ing notions: Hong Kong was a part of the mainland but also marginal. To be truly patriotic, then, was not only to mobilize the city to China's defense but also, ultimately, to subvert Hong Kong, that is, to leave and discard the colony for the authenticity of China. This theme came off forcefully in several patriotic films made by the emigres. Between 1937 and 1941, the China Film Studio of Chongqing set up an office in Hong Kong to acquire film equipment from overseas and to recruit personnel from the mainland community. To take further advantage of the colony's openness, in 1939 it founded Dadi (Good Earth) Studio to make Mandarin films. Its staff included all the famous Shanghai filmmakers like directors Cai Chusheng, Situ Huimin, Fei Mu, and female leads Li Lili and Li Zhuozhuo. A year later Dadi closed. Cai and Situ then founded Xinsheng (New Life) Film Company, which lasted long enough to finish one Mandarin picture. All four of the releases of Dadi and Xinsheng
- The March of Guerrilla (Youji jingxinqu, Situ Huimin, 1938), The Paradise of the Solitary Island (Gudao tiantang, Cai Chusheng, 1939), and Homeland (Baiyun guxiang, Situ Huimin, 1940) -were apparently targeted for the China markets as well as the elite sector of Hong Kong. Their principal roles were played by actors mostly unknown to local audiences and their settings were mostly framed on the imagined mainland. Particularly significant was the ideological subtext of da Zhongyuan xintai. All of these films were either about resistance heroism inside China or about local resisters leaving the colony's decadence and inauthenticity to "return" to the mainland. They invariably represented Hong Kong as an allegorical site of evil and backward-ness. Moreover, while all the heroes and heroines in these films were mainland stars, collaborator roles were mostly given to minor Cantonese comedians whose Mandarin was awkward, easily evoking the much-denounced image of Wang Jingwei, the Cantonese-speaking head of the collaborationist regime, among the (mainland) film audience!
The narrative structure of The March of Guerrilla, the best known of the four Mandarin films, was typical of this strategy of marginalization. Directed and written by Cai Chusheng, the film follows two lovers in a Lake Tai town who are separated by the Japanese occupation. The enemy destroys their homes and kills their parents. Here private and public emotions merge into a strong determination to fight for the nation. The man (played by the Shanghai star Li Qing) goes off to join a guerrilla group. His fiancee (Rong Xiaoyi, also from Shanghai) has to stay behind to care for the family. She is arrested and later raped by the Japanese.
Recent scholarship demonstrates that national imagery is suffused with gender politics. In the modernizing discourse of the Chinese state, which represented a male-defined order, woman was the "inessential" other, whose body and agency were subsumed under the nationalist agenda. It denied woman both her identity and subject-position in the public sphere.54 The traditional allegorization of female chastity with national purity was rein-scribed within the nationalist discourse. The violation of the female body by foreign invaders symbolized the ultimate victimization of the Chinese state and the need to valorize the nation by way of mobilizing national loyalties.55 Thus, this imaginative coupling of raped woman and foreign invaders served to reduce "female" to a signifier of marginalization and sacrifice.
This trope of raped woman was the focus of the narrative structure of The March of Guerrilla. To stay behind to care for the domestic order rather than joining the local guerrilla, which, significantly, was an all-male force, the Rong Xiaoyi character was peripheral to the Chinese resistance. It evokes a parallel with the Crown colony's marginality to nationalist politics. Her vio-lation by the Japanese in the climax sequence, a powerful symbol of intimi-dation and humiliation, dramatizes the need and, even desire, for complete sacrifice of the marginal to serve the collective interests.
In the rape scene, which crosscuts with a surprise attack on the Japanese by Li Qing's guerrillas set to a soundtrack of Wagner and Beethoven' there is none of the erotic allure typical of most rape fantasies in Chinese or Holly-wood cinema. Instead, the director avoids any on-screen sexuality (probably for fear of being criticized as frivolous and racy) by allowing only the sexual desires expressed in the erotic gaze and lascivious and intimidating laughter of the rapist. Framed in medium shots, rather than low-angle shots, which create a sense of paralyzing intimidation on the victim's part, the sequence projects a confrontational mood, further accentuated by the strutting caricature of the Japanese colonel, who appears on the screen more a figure for ripe ridicule than a superhuman Fascist, embodying all the Chinese racial stereo-types about the enemy: womanizing, alcoholic, and dimwitted. Indeed, after a series of shots and reverse-shots of the victim and the victimizer, the camera stops at a medium close-up that commands respect. Recovering her courage, Rong Xiaoyi picks up a knife and kills the marauder.
Transforming herself into a woman warrior, Rong Xiaoyi puts up a Na-tional flag outside the Japanese compound to direct the guerrilla attack (Fig. 33). She is then shot by a malicious collaborator (Hong Kong comedian Chow Chi-shing/Zhou Zhicheng) who is trying to run away from the attack. When the guerrillas discover her death, they angrily throw Zhou down the hill in a climax of moral revenge and nationalist passion. The movie ends with Li Qing leading a horse carrying the rape victim's body covered by the blue-sky white-sun flag, and marching triumphantly with the all-male troop to the patriotic tune "Unity Brings Victory." Symbolically, then, the marginal other is now accepted into the national body after making the ultimate sacrifice; Rong Xiaoyi becomes an emblem of patriotic devotion. Although there is no direct reference to Hong Kong, the marginality and violation of Rong Xiaoyi and the denial of her subject-position in the form of complete sacrifice would invoke in some viewers' minds a symbolic parallel to the need to subjugate the colony to the national cause.56
The March of Guerrilla shows skillful camera control, but it lacked a realistic and credible appreciation of the Japanese. Trying to rally resistance,
Figure 33. Rong Xiaoyi puts up a national flag to direct guerrilla attacks against the Japanese in The March of Guerrilla, 1938. Courtesy Hong Kong International Film Festival.
the movie was full of cliches, exaggerations, and bigotry. The acerbic remark of RKO producer David Hemstead on cheap Hollywood anti-Fascist farces was equally pertinent about these Mandarin films: "No Nazi or Japs will be portrayed as a comic figure for .. . that would only provide a hero or heroine with windmills against which to battle, and would kill dramatic impact."57 With its lack of such "dramatic impact" and its Mandarin dialogue, The March of Guerrilla, like other Dadi products, did poorly at the local box office.
The emigre filmmakers also worked with local artists to make a few Cantonese films. Among them Situ Huimin's Baoshhan in Bloodshed {Xuejian Baoshan cheng, 1938) and Tan Xiaodan's Little Cantonese (Xiao Guangdong, 1940) were most well-known. Like all the Dadi's Mandarin films, both were set in the inland, one in Baoshan near Shanghai and another in Canton, and both projected China-centered patriotic heroism to instill nationalist ideology in the locals. Xiao Guangdong was particularly emblematic of the Central Plains syndrome. The title phrase remains today a demeaning, derogatory ethnic slur against the Cantonese by their northern neighbors, especially the Shanghainese, making offensive fun of their physical smallness and "slick-ness." Both films got rave reviews in emigre publications but were medicore in box-office returns. In 1940 when Little Cantonese got the honor of the few Hong Kong films to be released in Chongqing, only a handful of homesick Cantonese showed up.58
Ill
While mainland filmmakers and critics tried to project and disseminate a hegemonic nationalist discourse in Hong Kong, the local film industry was struggling to negotiate the changing politics of wartime cinema. Unlike what some recent postcolonial scholars have theorized in other contexts, local filmmakers produced no counternarratives of alternative identification and cultural opposition with respect to the colonizer or to the core culture, but rather an uneasy ambivalence accompanying a limited contest against the emigre discourse of centralizing nationalism.59
Between 1937 and 1941, while Hong Kong stayed out of a war that brought to China horrendous causalities and calamity, most local studio heads and filmmakers seemed to be of two minds regarding the role and function of cinema. This division was a result of the colonial history of Hong Kong. Since the end of the Opium War in 1842, Hong Kong had been a part of the global system of colonization. Classified as Huaren (Chinese), the colonized, who were mainly immigrants from southern China, had been racialized and infer-iorized in the colonialist discourse and excluded from the colony's public sphere. They were socially marginalized and systematically depoliticized. The colonialist apparatus had accordingly inscribed itself on the colonized by exaggerating their conservatism and "fear of politics." Thus the prevalence of popular entertainment cinema in prewar Hong Kong. This apathy fed into the "sojourner mentality" of many of the locals who, under the colonial gaze, continued to identify with the mainland, particularly Canton, as their home-land from which they traced their male ancestries, historic memories, and cultural practices. Yet at the same time, with the increase of local-born from 26 percent in 1921 to 32.5 percent in 1931 among the native population, Hong Kong became a distinct geopolitical space with its specificity of historical and social formations. Peripheralized by the mainland, this difference marked out a possible site for the articulation of a local identity.
The war experience presented a moment of this identity construction, and the film industry found itself unknowingly at the center of this historical uncertainty. Consistent with its policy of racial-political exclusion, the Hong Kong government had made no effort to mobilize the local motion picture industry for war preparation. Similarly, the Nationalist government and the Communists, aside from rehashing their familiar antiimperialist rhetoric of national resistance, offered no practical advice, guidance or funding to the studios. This, however, did not stop the mainland intellectuals and filmmakers from policing and censuring the Cantonese cinema in the name of a central-izing nationalist ideology. With no experience in political cinema, the film industry found itself alone in unfamiliar waters, caught between the conflict-ing demands of the nation-state and the local-colonial condition.
Although some local film businessmen were interested only in a quick return from low-budget, small-cast escapist fare, the major studios, whatever their ideological orientation, could not afford to ignore the nationalist de-mands. The future of Cantonese production as well as their own reputations were at stake. There were also some filmmakers and artists, notably the famous actors Ng Chor-fan, Bak Yin, and Lo Dun and the directors Lee Fa (Li Hua) and Kwan Man-ching (Guan Wenqing), who were close to the emigre community. Praised in the emigre press as "serious," "patriotic," and "committed" artists, they shared the nationalist vision of a political cinema devoted to modernization and national autonomy.
Right after the Marco Polo Bridge incident, all the major studio employees contributed money and volunteered time to make The Critical Juncture (Zuihou guantou). Its production crew included everybody who was anybody in the film world and was intended to drum up support for China's defense. Screen celebrities also became involved in various kinds of fund-raising activities.60 Between 1937 and 1938, the industry brought out a large number of war-theme movies. Their titles were revealing: Forward (Qianjin qu, Dag-uan Studio), In Defence of South China (Baowei Huanan, Da Zhonghua Company), and Return to the Homeland (Hui zuguo qu, Nanyang Pro-ductions), which won praise from the Central Commission of Film Censor-ship. After the fall of Canton in December 1938, however, the number of resistance-related films declined notably.
Judging from available synopses and movie stills, all of these patriotic films were suffused with commercial elements of scholar-beauty romances, operatic interlude, and free-for-all farces. In the critical eyes of the Nationalist government and mainland intelligentsia, they were, with few exceptions, in the words of the Nationalist film censor Xu Hao, "racy" and "vulgar" and by and large misrepresented the military-political situation in the mainland.61 In other words, the Cantonese productions remained "backward" amid the rise of patriotic fervor.
What was absent in this diatribe was an emphatic recognition of the Hong Kong film industry's lack of experience in handling propaganda and political themes and the geopolitical differences of the colony. Without any funding or specific guidance from either the central or the colonial governments, studio heads were uncertain about the audiences' reception and unable to come up with a coherent production strategy to deal with the tensely ambivalent situa-tion: China was at war, but Hong Kong remained outside of the conflict. How to prioritize production planning? How to reckon with the geopolitical speci-ficity of Hong Kong?
The overwhelming majority of Hong Kong Chinese identified themselves as Huaren or Guangdong ren (Cantonese) or Huaqiao (Chinese diaspora), depending probably on the level of collective identification that demanded their commitment at a given time and situation. They were, in effect, an overseas Chinese community in a colonial situation. Although they supported the territorized state of Republican China as a matter of course, they lived in a Westernized, colonial, and highly commercialized city that was distinct from the mainland. This became especially obvious during wartime. Most of the mainland intelligentsia chose to deny the difference by instead marginalizing Hong Kong culture as an unseemly hybridity of "new and old, redolent of colonial flavor and suffused with feudal morality and obscene, degenerate (shangfeng baishu) literature."62 They renounced the young generation of Hong Kong natives, many of whom were born in Hong Kong, as "slavish," "forgetting that they were in fact Chinese," and "being ignorant of Chinese history and proud of knowing no Chinese."63 These harangues were too moralistic and impractical for local filmmakers.
At a safe distance from the war, life in Hong Kong rapidly returned to normal after the reopening of horse-racing in early 1938. There was indeed a widespread illusion before 1941 that the Japanese would not attack Hong Kong for fear of provoking the British, whose priggish complacency and racist underestimation of Japanese prowess led the Colonial government to claim itself as the "fortress of Asia."64 This illusionary sense of security, what some mainland intellectuals smeared as an "ostrich mentality," was reinforced by the continual influx of refugees from across the border.65 Hong Kong was a paradise in a war-torn world. On the eve of the Japanese invasion on December 8, 1941, the race track and movie theatres were packed.66 Few people of Hong Kong had the same moral burden or emotional urgency as the mainland emigre about the war. Indeed, the city's patriotic fervor began to drain away in 1938, after the fall of Canton late that year.
Patriotic movies sold well as long as popular enthusiasm for the war remained in force. The return to normalcy in Hong Kong corresponded to the film audiences' demand for entertainment fare. After 1938, many critically acclaimed resistance-theme films turned out to be financial disasters. For example, Ng Chor-fan closed his new film company in frustration after a very poor opening of its first project, the political satire Two Lovers in a Silver World (Yinhai yuanyang, 1938).67 Daguan Studio's 1938 big-budget release Behind the Shanghai Front (Shanghai huoxian hou) was a disappointment, despite the drawing power of the female lead, Bak Yin. At the same time, Bak Yin's romantic tragedy, Madame Butterfly (Hudie furen, based on the 1922 Hollywood film Toll of the Sea), which exploited her on-screen trade-mark of tears and feminine passivity and misery, sold well,68 as did superstar Sit Gok-sin's smashes Thief Prince (Zei wangzi, 1939) and Gone was the Love (Hu bu gui), both adapted from his prewar Cantonese opera hits. Un-doubtedly, there were several popular patriotic movies, like Lau Fong (Liu Fang)'s Song of Exile (Liuwang zhe zhi ge, 1941), a moving tale of love and endurance about a Cantonese refugee music troupe's patriotic commitment. But even these exceptions were spiced up with familiar romance and farcial elements.
Along with the changing market was the Colonial government's censor-ship. Trying to maintain its neturality, it prohibited anti-Japanese expressions in the public sphere. In 1939, for example, the Secretary of Chinese Affairs who doubled as Chief Censor met with local movie businessmen several times to warn them against screening "explicit anti-Japanese sentiments."69 In response to the Japanese consuler's protest, the Hong Kong government in 1940 banned the Chongqing-produced victory short The Battle of Changsha (Changsha huizhan, 1939) and Marches of Guerrilla, which was released in 1941 only after making big cuts and with the new title Zhengqi ge (Song of Righteousness).10
At the same time pressures from the mainland officials and intelligentsia persisted. In addition to the discursive attack on Hong Kong cinema, there were also death threats and political assaults. Several famous film producers and directors received letters from a group called Patriotic Youth Corps containing "pictures of pistols and bullets" warning them to stop making "racy and feudalistic" pictures.71 Many studio heads and filmmakers found the pressures both unproductive and unfair. Daguan Studio producer Chiu Shu-tai (Zhao Shutai) aptly expressed the dilemma confronting the film indus-try: "As a commercial cinema, we certainly have to be concerned with the educational/inspirational values of filmmaking, serving the interests of our country and people on the one hand . .. but we cannot, however, ignore market needs, making movies that suit the audience's entertainment taste . . . in order to stay afloat."72 The veteran Cantonese film director Hou Yiu (Hou Yao), who had been bitterly attacked by the emigre press for his "senseless" films, was even more blunt and bitter in his dissent. Meeting with Central Censor Xu Hao and other local Guomindang leaders, Hou urged the National government either to nationalize the Cantonese cinema as the Soviets had the Russian film industry or to give it free rein as in the United States. In other words, he wanted the National government to back up its rhetoric with deeds or back out. As soon as he finished his speech, he was bitterly renounced by the participants.73
While Chiu and Hou used the China-centered nationalist idiom to enunciate their dissent, some young filmmakers appropriated familiar language of na-tionalism to conjure an ambivalent, hybrid local identity. This hybridity came out powerfully in a popular Cantonese film Two Southern Sisters (Nanguojiemei hua, 1940). Directed by two young, Hong Kong-born directors, Leung Bun (Liang Bin) and Leung Sum (Liang Shen), it was produced by a small independent company founded by the female lead Wu Dip-ying (Hu Dieying). Originally a minor Cantonese opera singer, Wu became a major Hong Kong star after playing the lead in the first Cantonese talkie, Genu qingcao (Ro-mance of Opera Stars, 1932), produced by Daguan in San Francisco.74 The company folded after making this film, which was billed as the last screen appearance of Wu before her retirement.
Two Southern Sisters was a high-budget and carefully crafted film. Unlike the Dadi Mandarin productions, its cast was composed entirely of local stars, including Ng Chor-fan and buffon Lau Kuai-hong (Liu Guikang). Unlike Mandarin films, the opening sequence of sampan, fishing boats, subtropical landscape, and Cantonese folk songs firmly establishes the localness of the film. In fact, like most Cantonese films, it was melodramatically didactic, and its narrative centered around family relations. Typical of the hybridism of local cinema, it combines within the framework of a family drama various genric elements (e.g., romance, thriller, and social satire) and popular themes (e.g., national defense, step-mother syndrome, and a love triangle), spiced up with a long episode of Cantonese opera, all of which were familiar to the local audience.
The film was centered on a romantic triangle involving a struggling artist (Ng Chor-fan) and two twin sisters (both played by Wu Dip-ying). The sisters do not know of each other because they have been separated since childbirth. The elder (Chow Wen-ying) was adopted by a rich businessman, while the younger one (Hsiu Dip) was raised by her own fisherman father and step-mother on an outlying island. Significantly, there is no romanticization of rural Hong Kong's idyllic purity, which is typical of mainland leftist cinema. Instead, we see the rich sister, well-educated and assertive, devoting herself to a wide variety of fund-raising activities (including opera singing) to support the Chinese resistance, and leaving home when her father forces her to marry the son of a business partner. The poor sister tearfully and helplessly suffers the constant abuse of her step-mother (her father looks on with pain but is too meek to intervene). Old-fashioned and passive, she has little exposure to modern life and cares little about nationalism or the war. The artist falls in love with Hsiu Dip when he moves to the fishing village in search of a peaceful life. He teaches her such modern values as independence and the struggle. One day Hsiu Dip disappears and the artist goes into the city to look for her. Instead, in a melodramatic twist, he brings back Wen-ying whom he has mistaken as Hsiu Dip. The well-educated sister admires the artist's talents and quickly develops a romantic relationship with him. The step-mother is threatened by this newly found independent-minded daughter and tries to kill her but ends up killing herself. At this juncture, in another melodramtic turn, Hsiu Dip reappears. The twin sisters happily rejoin, but they also have to make an agonizing choice: Who will marry the artist? The artist, like the twins' father, is an emasculated male, weak and indecisive. He is not sure what to do with the two girls he loves. The decision thus has to be made by the twins.
It is significant to note that Wu Dip-ying, Ng Chor-fan, and most of the cast (including the famous character actors Ng Wui/Wu Hui and Lau Kuei-hong) were closely associated with mainland filmmakers and had been critical of the political apathy of local cinema. They were aware of the contestation within wartime Hong Kong cinema. In this context, it is interesting to see that the film ends with Wen-ying, sadly but determinedly, leaving for the mainland to join the resistance so that her sister can stay to marry the artist and care for their aged father. Not knowing this, in a climactic sequence, Hsiu Dip wants to sacrifice her love so that her sister can marry the artist. She runs up a hill yelling fanatically, "I have to struggle! I have to struggle!" until the artist finds her and tells her that Wen-ying has left.
The twin sisters' choice became an allegorized site where the identity of Hong Kong was constructed. Interestingly, unlike the strong male figure (the guerrilla leader) who defines the heroic spectacle and serves as the object of woman's sacrifices in The March of Guerrilla, both the father and artist in Two Southern Sisters are irrelevant to the choice the twin sisters are making except that they create a difficult situation for them. The two sisters have to make the choice by themselves, and each chooses to make a sacrifice for the happiness of each other, not for the men. They are thus endowed with the subject-position that was usually denied to women who were marginalized in the patriarchal order. This valorization of the weak and marginal is, I would argue, in effect an ideological subversion of the Central Plains syndrome and, allegorically, a construction of an identity about Hong Kong, which was marginal within the China-centered discourse of nationalism.
Indeed, the melodramatic and dichotomous ending of Two Southern Sisters dramatized a vision of local identity that was marked by a double marginality. Marginalized by British colonialism and Chinese nationalism in a wartime situation, Hong Kong was unsure and tentative in defining (and thereby asserting) itself. Thus, unlike Hong Kong Cantonese films from the 1960s on (like Lung Kong's Feinu zhengzhuan, or Teddy Girls, Allen Fong's Father and Son, or Fuzi qing, or Ann Hui's The Song of Exile, or Ketu qiuheng, or Stanley Kwan's Rouge, or Yanzhi kou),75 this film did not consciously engage in evoking a collective memory of Hong Kong or mapping an alternative discourse surrounding its colonial situation. Rather, just as Wen-ying returned to the mainland and Hsiu Dip stayed on to marry her lover, the film projected an ambivalent hybridity in the imagery of Hong Kong, highlighting the double marginality that framed it. Unable to identify fully with either British coloni-alism or with Chinese nationalism, both of which shunned it as inferior and suspicious, Hong Kong appeared to be positioned uncomfortably in between Chinese tradition and Western lifestyle, moral commitment to the "home-land" that was China and emotional attachment to the home that was Hong Kong. As symbolized in the two different mental worlds the two sisters lived in, the cultural identity of Hong Kong consisted of an ambivalent mixture of tradition and modernity, nationalism and local consciousness. This colonial hybridity was threatened under the nationalistic pressures of Chinese diaspora who imposed their wartime "us and them" vision on the locals: either patri-otic or slavish, Chinese or traitorous. At the same time, the colonial govern-ment excluded the locals from the defense of the their own city because of their racial otherness. Doubly marginalized, the identification of Hong Kong, as Two Southern Sisters articulated, took on an ambiguous, almost schizo-phrenic, turn: It was torn between centralizing nationalism and local con-sciousness. Thus Wen-ying was made to leave for the mainland while Hsiu Dip stayed in Hong Kong. This happy ending was, however, marked by an uneasy compromise, wishful thinking.
On Christmas Day 1941, after three weeks of brutal shelling and bombing, Japan took over Hong Kong. The colony became a part of occupied China in the Great East Asian Coprosperity Sphere, no longer the wartime paradise it once was. Privation and oppression reigned. The entertainment business fell under Japanese control. Unwilling to cooperate, many filmmakers and major stars fled to the safety of southwest China, effectively closing the cinema until the end of the war in August 1945.76
Thus, by the 1930s there was an incipient sense of Hong Kong identity shaped by its hybridized culture and colonization. The sense that Hong Kong was linked to China in race, lineage, and language and yet different in its cultural practices and geopolitical situation was now highlighted by the war.
However, in the shadow of the China-centered discourse of nationalism en-gendered by the modern Chinese state and cultural elite, with their chauvinis-tic undertones, wartime was also an ambivalent moment to construct a local identity. Hong Kong's marginalization in the Chinese national imagery gener-eated contempt and attacks on Cantonese film culture, thereby disempowering and suppressing all the local voices. In fact, Two Southern Sisters was railed by the emigre press as a "frivolous, escapist" fare77 and has been excluded from the standard historical accounts of Chinese cinema, which includes only films made by the mainland exiles.78
Trinh Minh-ha once remarked that there is margin in the center and center in the margin.79 China's marginalization in twentieth-century global politics is well known, but much less known is the Chinese marginalization of other places and cultures inside and/or outside its territorial boundaries. Hong Kong has been one of these Others. In fact, it has been doubly marginalized in the official discourses of Chinese nationalism and British colonialism. As evi-denced in the 1997 crisis, the Chinese state and cultural elites continues to marginalize Hong Kong by seeing it as merely an "economic city" of finan-cial prowess but cultural decadence, "a cultural desert," and, together with the colonial government, by denying its people, many of whom identified with neither discourses, their right to self-determination. Also, the Central Plains syndrome has contributed to a widespread belief in both scholarly and popular worlds that had they not been confronted with the "crisis of legit-macy" of 1997, the colonized would not have had the collective desire and discursive energy to construct a cultural identity of their own. Yet, this chapter demonstrates that this view is wrong. The war was an important moment in the imagination and projection of Hong Kong's identity, tentative and hybrid as it was, on the local screen. There must have been many comparable moments of imagining an alternative vision of Hong Kong in its colonial history, whether in cinema or other cultural forms. We need to bring to the fore the cultural politics surrounding the many stereotypes about Hong Kong and, in the process, to reconstruct the complexity of its (post) colonial history.
NOTES
1.
The desert stereotype has been an underlying trope in almost every major academic study and literary representation of Hong Kong culture. For example, see the various essays by Chinese writers collected in Lu Weiluan, ed., Xianggang de youyu, 1925-1941 {The Melancholy of Hong Kong), Hong Kong: Huafeng shuju, 1983; and Frank Walsh, A History of Hong Kong (London: HarperCollins, 1993). Until most recently, however, no writers have ever questioned the semantic origin or discursive meaning of this cultural construct. It is now time to deconstruct it. For a pioneering popular work on reevaluating the cultrual scene of Hong Kong, see Luo Fu, Xiang-gang wenhua mangyou {Wandering Through Hong Kong Culture) (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 1993).
2.
Recently, as a result of the critical and immensely popular reception in film circles
of such innovative filmmakers as Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat, and Wang Ka-wei, film scholars have begun to look seriously at the cultural-political significance of Hong Kong cinema. But this pioneering trend has focused on the filmic representa-tion of the heavily contested issues of identity politics of the 1980s and 1990s. No systematic study has been devoted to earlier periods. For two fine examples, see Rey Chow, "A Souvenir of Love," Modern Chinese Literature 7, 2 (Fall 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), 202-15.
3.
My Shiying "Cinematique" [Original], Dianying quan (Hong Kong), 2 (February 1937).
4.
For a discussion, see Law Kar, "Xianggang zaoqi de dianying guiji, 1909-1915" {Early Impressions of the Early Hong Kong Cinema), in Early Images of Hong Kong and China (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1995), 27.
5.
Cheng Jihua, Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi (A History of Chinese Cinema) (Bei-jing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1980).
6.
See Paul Pickowicz, "The Theme of Spiritual Pollution in Chinese Films of the 1930s," Modern China 17. 1 (January 1991), 38-75; Guan Wenqing, Zhongguoyingtan waishi (An Unofficial History of Chinese Screen) (Hong Kong: Guangjiao-jing chubanshe, 1976), 128-96.
7.
Jean-Paul Sartre, "Preface," Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 26.
8.
Recently an increasing amount of exciting research has been devoted to decentering China and reconstructing a Hong Kong identity, principally through film and litera-ture but this research has focused only on the period after the 1980s. See, for example, Rey Chow, "Between Colonizers: Hong Kong's Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s," Diaspora 2. 2 (1992): 151-70; Leo Ou-fan Lee, "Tales from the 'Floating City'," Harvard Asia Pacific Review (Winter 1996-97) 43-9; Leung Ping-kwan, ed., "Xianggang wenhua zhuanji" (Special Issue on Hong Kong Culture), Today 28 (1995): 71-257; Luo Feng, Shiji mo chengshi (Fin-de-siecle City) (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1995); Daisy Ng, "Back to the Future: Imaginary Nostalgia and the Consumer Culture of Hong Kong," unpublished paper, 1996.
9.
See G. B. Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1978) 11; Frank Walsh, A History of Hong Kong, 404; Lin Youlan, Xianggangshihua (An Informal History of Hong Kong) (Hong Kong: Bajiao shufang, 1975): 148-56.
10.
Endacott, Eclipse, 23-5; Lu Yan, Xianggang zhanggu (Ancedotes of Hong Kong) (Hong Kong: Guangjiaojin chubanshe, 1981), 4.
11. For a vivid discussion of prewar Shanghai, see Harriet Sergeant, Shanghai: Collision Point of Cultures 1918/1939 (New York: Crown Publishers, 1990); for wartime Shanghai, see Poshek Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices under Japanese Occupation, 1937-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). The term colonial backwater is adapted from Walsh, A History of Hong Kong, 390.
12.
See Du Yunzhi, Zhongguo dianyin qishi nian (Seventy Years of Chinese Cinema), Taipei: Zhonghua minguo dianyin tushuguan, 1976, 226-47; and Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 4-39.
13.
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, Susan Miller trans., New York: Beacon Press, 1991.
14. See Walsh, A History of Hong Kong, 386.
15.
For a discussion of the social and political conservatism of the Hong Kong elites, see Lynn White and Li Cheng, "China Coastal Identities: Regional, National, and Global," in Lowell Dittmer and Samuel Kim Eds., China's Quest for National Identity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 154-93.
16.
Lau Siu-kai and Kuan Hsin-chi, The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1988), 1-4.
17.
Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse, 26-27'.
18.
For two solid discussions of the much understudied British strategy in Hong Kong, see G. B. Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse, and Benjamin Proulx, Underground from Hongkong (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1943).
19.
Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse, 29^5.
20.
See Xianggang nianjian (Hong Kong Annual Report), 1941, n.p.; for the founding and business strategies of these major studios, see Guan Wenqig, Zhongguo yintan waishi.
21.
Yilin (The Arts), 43 (December 1938). 22. Yilin, 62 (November 1939).
23.
See Lin Youlan, Xianggang shihua, 154-56; G. B. Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse, 22-26; Nigel Cameron, An Illustrated History of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1991) 251-56.
24.
Xianggang nianjian. 1941, n.p.
25.
Yilin, 63 (December 1939) and 75 (June 1940); see also Bai Yan, Yige nu yanyuan de zishu (An Actress's Autobiography) (Hong Kong, 1955), 15.
26.
See Yilin, 50 (March 1939) and 72 (April 1940).
27.
See Yilin 52 (April 1939) and 53 (May 1939), Dianyin yu xiju 1, (January 1941).
28.
Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 104-114.
29.
The best examples of this conservatism and ambivalence are Sir Robert Ho Tung and Sir Lo Man-kam. An Eurasian billionaire of his time, Sir Ho had served in various major advisory positions with the Colonial government and had made countless financial contributions to London, but he was allowed to move into the exclusive midlevel neighborhood only after his family went through many racist attacks. Perhaps as a psychological reaction, he wore only Chinese gowns despite his Caucasian look and was well known as a "patriotic businessman" for sending his only son to serve in the Nationalist Army and was the chief financier of the Lianhua Studio. Son-in-law of Sir Ho, Sir Lo was a prominent London-trained attorney and sat on many government committees. Known as an outspoken member at the Legislative Council, he often criticized the racist policy of segration (which did not change until 1946), yet he was convinced that "Chinese did not expect to receive the same salaries as Europeans." See Frank Walsh, A History of Hong Kong, 380-86. For biographical backgrounds of them as well as other elites of Hong Kong, a total of 87, almost all of them were in business, see Wu Xingluan, Xiang-gang (1937) Huaren mingren shilue (Who's Who in Hong Kong), Hong Kong, n.p., 1937.
30.
For fares and location of movie theatres, see Yilin 75 (June 1940); and Wu Hao, Xianggang dianying minzuxue (An Ethnography of Hong Kong Cinema) Hong Kong: Ciwenhua tang chubanshe, 1993, 3-21. For two samples of films shown throughout Hong Kong, see Huashang bao (Hong Kong), August 20 and 21, 1941.
31.
See Yilin, 84 (October 1940) and 96 (April 1941). The biggest Cantonese box-office
smashes in the war years were Zei wangzi (Thief Prince, 1939) and Hu bu gui (Gone Was the Love, 1940), both tragic romances based on prewar Cantonese opera hits of the same names, starring Sit Gok-sin, who had also starred in the stage original. The Colonial government seemed to be aware of the socioeconomic hierarchy of the film spectatorship. Thus, in 1940, it decided to impose entertainment tax for all fares higher than HK$0.2, which was indeed what most Catonese moviegoers were pay-ing. Yilin, 75 (June 1940).
32.
Cai Chusheng, ' 'Zhanhou de Zhongguo dianying dongtai ji muqian de gaijin yun-dong" (Chinese Cinema after the Outbreak of the War and the Present Reform Movement), Wenxian 4 (January 1939), 12-3.
33.
There was in fact a widespread anxiety in the emigre cultural community about the decentering of new Chinese culture by the war in general. See Liao Liao (Sha Kongliao), "Jianli xin wenhua zhongxin" (Establish a New Cultural Center), Li bao (April 1938) in Lu Weiluan, Xianggang de youyu, Hong Kong: Huafeng shuju, 1983, 101-2.
34.
See, for example, Tu Yangci, "Jihuai Shanghai" (Nostalgic of Shanghai), Yuzhou feng, May 1939, in Lu, Xianggang de youyou, 157-60. He wrote: "Shanghai is still very much like a place of Chinese. But in Hong Kong, although everywhere is Chinese .. . it has no Chinese flavor, it lacks a Chinese soul."
35.
Leo Ou-fan Lee, "Xianggang wenhua de bianyuan xing chutan" (A Prelimiary Study of the Marginality of Hong Kong Culture), Today 28 (1995): 75-80.
36.
All these quotes are from Lu, Xianggang de youyu, 107, 157-9, 178, 207-9.
37.
Lou Shiyi, "Xianggang de youyu," Xingdao ribao (November 17, 1938) in Xiang-gang de youyu, 125-26.
38.
Yang Yanqi, "Xianggang bannian" (Half a Year in Hong Kong), Yuzhou feng (May
1941), collected in Xianggang de youyu, 207-12; Liao Liao, "Jianli." p. 102 39. Yilin, 84 (October 1940).
40.
For a fine study of the represented Chinese filmic tradition, see Paul Pickowicz, "Melodramatic Representation and the May Fourth Tradition of Chinese Cinema," in Ellen Widemer and David Dar-wei Wang, Eds. From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-sity Press), 1993.
41.
For the National government's suppression of the Cantonese cinema, see Zhiwei Xiao, "Film Censorship in China, 1927-1937," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 1994, 212-57.
42.
For the Nationalist regime's political and military relations with various provincial authorities, see L. Eastman, "Nationalist China during the Nanking Decade, 1927-1937," in Lloyd Eastman et al., The Nationalist Era in China, 1912-1949 (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), particularly 32-40. For a historical survery of Guangdong-Hong Kong relations, see also Ming Chan, ed., Precarious Balance: Hong Kong between China and Britain, 1842-1992 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1993).
43.
See Prasenjit Duara, "Provincial Narratives of the Nation: Centralism and Federal-ism in Republican China," in Harumi Befu, ed., Cultural Nationalism in East Asia (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1994) 9-35. See also his Rescuing History from Nation: Questioning Narrative of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
44.
Edward Friedman sums up the political-cultural meaning of da Zhonyuan xintai cogently: "The People's Republic of China in the Mao era presented itself as the
heir of a Han people who had come together millennia earlier in the north China plain of the Yellow River valley, built a great civilization, fought to preserve it, and expanded over the centuries by civilizing barbarian invaders. Mao's anti-imperialist revolution was the culmination of this Chinese national history." See "Reconstruct-ing China's National Identity: A Southern Alternative to Mao-Era Anti-Imperialist Natioanlism," Journal of Asian Studies, 53. 1 (February 1994), 67-91.
45.
Wu Chufan, Wu Chufan zizhuan {Autobiography of Wu Chufan) (Hong Kong: Weiqing shudian, 1956), 74-9.
46.
See Guan Wenqing, Zhongguo yingtan waishi, pp. 214-16; Wu Chufan, Wu Chufan
zizhuan, 1, 78-80. 47. Yilin, 51 (April 1939).
48.
Yilin, 53 (May 1939), my italics.
49.
See Paul Pickowicz, "The Theme of Spiritual Pollution in Chinese Cinema"; Edward Friedman, "Reconstructing China's National Identity." For a sensitive study of Chinese Realism, see David Der-wei Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia Univerity Press, 1992).
50.
After an agreement between Zhou Enlai and Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, the British Ambassador to China, the office was established in the winter of 1937. Liao Cheng-zhi, the son of former Nationalist leader and martyr Liao Zhongkai, headed the Office until its close in December 1941. With his extensive family and political connections with the business elites in Hong Kong and overseas, he was able to establish an account in the Sino-Belgium Bank to which overseas Chinese could make direct contributions to the Communist army. For the Communist activi-ties, see the memoir of one of the activist, Liang Shangwan, Zhonggong zai Xiang-gang (Chinese Communists in Hong Kong) (Hong Kong: Guangjiaojin chubanshe, 1989).
51.
For an example of this political ritual, see Yilin, 58 (July 1939).
52.
See Wenxian, 1 (October 1938).
53.
Dianying shenhuo (Hong Kong) 4 (April 1940); Yilin, 67 (March 1940). For discus-sions of popular stereotypes of Chinese and Hollywood stars, see Paul Pickowicz, "The Theme of Spiritual Pollution," and Thomas Doherty, Projecting the War, 180-91.
54.
See Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesto Press, 1990); Lydia Liu, ' 'Invention and Intervention: The Making of A Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature," in Ellen Widemer and David Der-wei Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth, 194-220; Elizabeth Spelman, Inesssential Woman: Problem of Exclu-sion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988).
55.
For a study of wartime literary appropriation of women for nationalist purposes, see Poshek Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration, chapter 2.
56.
See for example, Ye Ming, ''Zhengqi ge'' (Song of Virtues), Huashang bao, June 14, 1941.
57.
Quoted from Thomas Doherty, Projecting the War, 132.
58.
See Yilin, 83 (October 1940).
59.
The important postcolonial studies, which influence much of my thinking here, are inspired by the Subaltern School and the works of Franz Fanon. Recently, its argument has become more nuanced and less totalizing as more scholars and theo-rists are contesting its relevance in different national and regional contexts and
working to prevent it from slipping into a mere badge of academic privilege. For some fine examples, see Iain Chambers and Lidia Curtia, eds., The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies and Divided Horizons, London: Routledge, 1996; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Critical Fa-nonism," Critical Inquiry 17 (Spring 1991): 457-70.
60. See Guan Wenqing, Zhongguo yingtan waishi, 216-17; Wu Chufan, Wu Chufan zizhuan, 1, 50-62. See also Yu Mo-wen, "Xianggang dianying de aiguo zhuyi chuantong" (The Patriotic Tradition in Hong Kong Cinema), in Law Kar, ed., EarlyImages of Hong Kong and China, 53-68.
61. Lingxing (Macao), 8. 6 (March 1938).
62.
An Ping and Lin Guangtong, Gang Jiu jianying (A Sketch of Hong Kong and Kowloon) (Hong Kong: Gangjiu wenhua chuban gongsi, 1949) 8.
63.
See Xu Dishan, "Yinian lai de Xianggang jiaoyu ji qi zhanwang," (Hong Kong Education in One Year and Its Prospect), Wenyi, 487 (January 1939); Yang Yanqi, "Xianggang bannian," both collected in Lu Weilian, ed., Xianggang de youyu, 133�X 42, 207-12.
64.
See Endacott, Eclipse, 43-111; Jan Morris, Hong Kong (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 265-92.
65.
Tang Hai, Xianggang lunxian ji (The Fall of Hong Kong) Shanghai: Xin shenhuo chubanshe, 1946.
66.
Tang Hai, Xianggang lunxian ji, 1-6; Ye Dehui, Xianggang lunxian shi (A History of the Occupation of Hong Kong) (Hong Kong: Guangjiaojin chubanshe, 1982), 1-18.
67.
Wu Chufan, Wu Chufan zizhuan, 1, 65-73.
68.
Bai Yan, Yige nu yanyuan de zhuanzhi, 26-27'. 69. Yilin, 44 (December 1939).
70. Dianying shenhuo, 10 (May 1940); Yilin, 74 (May 1940) and 75 (June 1940). 71. Yilin, 58 (July 1939).
72. Zhao Shutai, "Jianshe jinbu dianying de renwu" (The Responsibility to Create A
Progressive Cinema), Huashang bao, August 1, 1941. 73. Wenxian, 1.
74.
Guan Wenqing, Zhongguo yingtan waishi, 137-9.
75.
For discussions of these films and the contexts of their production, see Poshek Fu, "The Turbulent Sixties: Modernity, Youth Culture, and Cantonese Films in Hong Kong," in Law Kar, ed., Fifty Years of Electric Shandows (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1997) 34-46; Law Kar, "H. K. Film Market and Trends in the Eighties, in Hong Kong Cinema in the Eighties (Hong Kong: Urban Council 1991), 70-7; Leung Ping-kwan, "Minzu dianying yu Xianggang wenhua shenfen" (National Cinema and Hong Kong Identity), Today, 1994, Li Chuek-to, "Postscript," in A Study of Hong Kong Films in the Seventies (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1984), 123-31; Luo Fung, Shiji mo chengshi, 8-75; Stephen Teo, "The Squint-eyed Gaze" in The Chinese Factor in Hong Kong Cinema (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1990), 86-94; Esther Yau, "Border Crossing: Mainland China's Presence in Hong Kong Cinema," in Nick Browne et al., eds., New Chinese Cinemas, 180-201.
76.
See Wu Chufan, Wu Chufan zizhuan, 2: 1-50; Poshek Fu, "Patriotism or Profit: Hong Kong Cinema during the Second World War," in Law Kar, ed., Early Images of Hong Kong and China (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1995) 69-79.
77.
See Yilin, 74 (May 1940).
78.
Cheng Jihua, Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi, and Du Yunzhi, Zhongguo dianying qishi nian.
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