Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and New Global Cinema

No Film is An Island

Gina Marchetti, Tan See Kam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134179169
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

In recent years, with the establishment of the Hong Kong Film Archive and growing scholarly interest in the history of Hong Kong cinema, previously neglected historical documents and difficult-to-access films have offered new research materials. As Hong Kong film history comes into sharper focus, its inextricable links across the decades to Southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, the United States, and to the far reaches of the Chinese diaspora have also become more evident. Hong Kong's connection with Hollywood involves ties that bring together art cinema and popular genres as well as film festivals and the media marketplace with popular transnational genres.

Giving fresh and facsinating insights into the vibrant area of Hong Kong, this exciting new book links Hong Kong with world film culture both within and beyond the commercial Hollywood paradigm. It emphasizes Hong Kong film in relation to other cinema industries, including Hollywood, and demonstrates that Hong Kong film, throughout its history, has challenged, redefined, expanded, and exceeded its borders.

Part I
Chinese on the move

‘Hongkongers’ abroad

1 From South Pacific to Shanghai Blues

No film is an island

Tan See Kam (

)

. . . The love of my heart / Is it the dream of your heart?
Is it possible to borrow a bridge for us to connect?
On this borrowed bridge / The I of tomorrow, the you of tomorrow Can the embrace be like the other day again!? . . .

(Theme Song, Shanghai Blues)¹

The allusion to the Shanghai classic Crossroads/Shi Zi Jie Tou (1937) and the depiction of Shanghai as a magical metropolis, is [sic] Tsui [Hark]’s way of paying tribute to the golden era of Chinese cinema . . . Shanghai Blues is the first explicit indication of Tsui’s status as a true ‘movie brat’, conscious of Chinese film history and its links with Hong Kong cinema.

(Stephen Teo, 1997)²

Introduction

While manifesting a perceptive awareness for the cinematic phenomenon of overlaps in filmmaking practices between classic Shanghai cinema of the 1930s and late colonial Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s, Stephen Teo’s observation in regards to Shanghai Blues (Shanghai Zhi Ye; dir. Tsui Hark [Xu Ke], 1984) is however inattentive to the intricate complexity therein. My close reading of Shanghai Blues here elaborates on this complexity, in the following related ways.³ First, it takes an intertextual approach to the film – the ways this film (as a text) cites other texts, filmic or otherwise. It will show that the so-called ‘movie brat’ in Tsui, in his capacity as its producer, director and scriptwriter, has in fact done more than merely ‘always evok[ing] or quot[ing] the [Shanghai film] classics of bygone eras’.⁴ That is to say, the citations have the additional function and consequence of serving up structural and narrative spins, spins that have enabled an otherwise clichéridden film to break away from established norms so that it be felt and seen in some new and original ways.

While resonating with ‘postmodernity’s avid disdain for originality (or more accurately, the cult of the original) . . . [consequent to] the expansion of pastiche and affective flattening afforded by globalisation’,⁵ this kind of breakaway points to tactics of strategic selection and creative manipulation in regards to cultural traditions, intellectual ideas and filmic forms established within and outside Hong Kong. These are tactics that involve astute juggling of ‘foreign’ and ‘local’ cultural capital accrued in, and available to, the late colonial Hong Kong film-scape. In this sense, no film is an island: it is inextricably (inter-)connected in some way, via discourse or practice. That is to say, if Hollywood, mainland Chinese and past Hong Kong filmmaking legacies are indeed to be understood as three dominant spheres of influence in regards to post-1980 Hong Kong cinematic practices, then my reading of Shanghai Blues here would instantiate that contemporary Hong Kong cinema has too danced outside the putative stranglehold of those three spheres. This is arguably a defining characteristic of the new Hong Kong cinema that rolled into sight around 1980 (more below).

That said, it is necessary, however, to make clear from the outset, my stand in regards to the Hong Kong–Hollywood connection with respect to Hong Kong cinema. On this matter, three gross generalisations which David Bordwell has made in his otherwise illuminative book, Planet Hong Kong (2000), would serve as my immediate point of departure, most particularly:

From the start Hong Kong film was indebted to America . . . Today Hollywood remains the reference point [for Hong Kong cinema] . . . As Hong Kong became part of world film culture [since the 1980s], American filmmakers returned the compliment of plagiarism . . . signal[ing] the Hongkongfication of American cinema.⁶

Bordwell’s grand sketch of the Hong Kong-America (Hollywood) intercinematic connection demands a leap of faith. Admittedly, Hong Kong filmmaking from the start was ‘indebted’ to America in that Right a Wrong with Earthenware Dish/Wa Pen Shen Yuan and Stealing the Roasted Duck/ Tou Shao Ya – the two earliest known Hong Kong fictional films – were produced by an American national, Benjamin Brodsky, and that these productions were most likely made with film stock and equipment imported from America.

That said, my observations are as follows: first, the two said films, both produced in 1909, and directed by Liang Shaobo (a Chinese theatre actordirector and amateur film enthusiast), were adapted from well-known Chinese opera repertoire, that is, non-American resources. Since there are no surviving prints of the two films, it is not possible to compare their formal style with, say, Thomas Edison’s (one of the founding ‘fathers’ of American filmmaking) heavily staged The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895). Nonetheless, what those three examples have made abundantly clear is that cross-medium borrowing has indeed been a trait of fictional filmmaking from the beginning.

Second, while the supposed ‘Hongkongfication of American cinema’ in recent times will remain a moot point for film scholars for years to come,⁷ this cinema has had a long history of importing creative talent, from its earliest days. For example, Charlie Chaplin – one of the biggest names associated with Hollywood’s silent film era – was in fact an English comic before Keystone contracted him, from across the Atlantic. Then, transatlantic stories were also a popular source for adaptation. Well-known examples would include Edison’s The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots and other silent films like D. W. Griffith’s epic Intolerance (1916) which contains stories about ‘Love’s Struggle through the Ages’ (also the film’s subtitle) in ancient Babylon, historic Judea and Renaissance Paris. Recent Hollywood blockbusters such as Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001, 2002 and 2003) clearly show that Hollywood producers continue to maintain the transatlantic connection, while casting their eyes further afield – the former film runs with gladiators in ancient Rome, with New Zealand-born/Australian-trained Russell Crowe playing the titular role, while the latter epic is based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel of the same name (1954–55); it is shot in New Zealand and directed by a New Zealander, with an international cast. It is true that early American filmmakers have drawn on American sources as well, as in the case of, say, D. W.Griffith’s The Birth of the Nation (1915) which is based on Thomas Dixon Jr’s novel The Clansman (1905); but this intra-cultural connection does not hide that the fact that American cinema, then and now – like Hong Kong cinema (of whichever era) – has been produced by, and productive of, the interplay between internal and external forces, filmic, cultural or otherwise.

As such, Bordwell’s concept for understanding overlaps between cinemas in the terms of ‘plagiarism’ is not only conceptually lame, but also offers little insight into the interplay of intersections in cinemas (or, for that matter, cross-medium borrowing and cross-territory appropriation) which account for the diverse filmmaking traditions that we know today. This conceptual shortfall is due to Bordwell’s unrelentingly uncritical application of formalism in relation to film studies. Let me explain the issues involved analogically. A formalist approach to American English and British English would conclude that the form of the two languages is similar to the extent that they both have a common lexicon and grammar. But it would be ludicrous to then deduce that the former, though a derivative of sorts in relation to the latter, is a plagiarist form of language; this type of deduction neglects the force of history, society and culture on the matter of language development, across time and space. Just as the Hong Kong and Hollywood cinemas both converge and diverge in part, the two English-based languages are likewise simultaneously similar and different, manifesting linguistic idiosyncrasies and overlaps. Hence, MGM would make color films, while Pinewood would shoot theirs on colour filmstock.

If, as Bordwell has charged, ‘[i]ntellectuals who expatiate on the cultural significance of a movie and pop song [have paid] virtually no attention to the ways in which the [film-]artisan has used the medium’,⁸ then the Bordwellian school of formalism in relation to its appropriation of Hong Kong films for Planet Hong Kong would be guilty of a slightly different charge: that it has not paid enough attention to the manner in which film-artisans from different cultures have used the medium differently, and for different purposes.

Bordwell’s observation that ‘Hollywood remains the reference point’ for contemporary Hong Kong cinema is indeed grounds for laying that second charge.⁹ His use of the determiner-article here raises an urgent question: to what extent have Hollywood-tinted glasses affected Bordwell’s viewing of the ‘370’¹⁰ Hong Kong films for Planet Hong Kong? His subsequent ‘essayist attempt[s] to understand the interplay of art and entertainment’ have indeed subjugated Hong Kong filmmaking within an ideology of universalism; or, in Bordwell’s words,

despite many claims to the contrary in our multicultural milieu, there are more commonalities than differences in human cultures: universal physical, social, and psychological predispositions and facial expressions of many emotions will be quickly understood in a film, whatever its country of origin.¹¹

The image of parents shedding tears for their dead child, whether in the United States or Iraq, spells sorrow, but when seen through the context of the so-called war on terror(ism) the tears would surely tell us of more than just personal grief! In determinedly propounding the ideology of universalism as his conceptual premise for Planet Hong Kong, Bordwell has thus chosen to skirt around issues of historical and cultural differences in the matter of film production and consumption, and the contexts involved. Little surprise then that Bordwell would make the mistake of taking the Planet Hollywood tree for the forest of Hong Kong cinema. The sad irony here is all the more astounding when Bordwell insistently asserts, in the same breath, that ‘two films produced by MGM were never analogous to two Thunderbirds rolling out of Dearborn’.¹²

Finally, as in the case of film production and consumption, film scholarship has become globally interconnected. Border-crossing professors who venture out of their usual zone of comfort to become tourists of foreign places and sightseers of ‘beautiful’¹³ things (including films) need to cultivate a more sensitive appreciation, if not a more responsive alertness to, the histories and cultures of the places to and from which they shuttle, from time to time, as well as those pertaining to the things they periodically encounter during their journeys. This kind of appreciation and awareness, once developed, would enrich the growing field of globally-interconnected film scholarship even more.

Tsui Hark and New Hong Kong cinema

Tsui Hark is now regarded a Hong Kong director of international stature with a transnational following and, for some, has made films that ‘are very Chinese indeed, referring as they do to Chinese history and culture, a Chinese environment’.¹⁴ Yet he is not Hong Kong native; he was born to parents of Chinese ancestry in French Cochinchina (now Vietnam) in 1951. When he embarked on a filmmaking career in Hong Kong in 1979 he had in actuality no more than five years of accumulated residency in the territory. As a young man, Tsui lived mostly in the United States, first as an university student in film and television, occasionally making independent films (1969– 75), and then working for New York’s Chinatown newspaper and Chinatown Community Cable TV (1975–77). This background would initially constitute him an ‘expatriate’, when working in Hong Kong, whether that be with TV stations from 1977 onwards (1977–79) or for film studios since 1979 (including his own Film Workshop established in 1984). Yet in another sense, this transnational gallivanter, a diasporic (Indo)Chinese no less, could also be thought of in the terms of a ‘voluntary repatriate’, in that his place of relocation is to a ‘Chinese’ territory where he had briefly lived as a teenager (1966–69), and where he would pass as an ethnic Chinese in colonial Hong Kong, and so blend in well with the vast majority of people living there. As it turns out, this ‘repatriation’ has allowed Tsui to hone his craft and develop his skills as a filmmaker with a track-record that includes a brief spell in Hollywood in the 1990s.¹⁵

Tsui’s stay in Hong Kong in the late 1970s coincided with the territory’s ascendancy as an economic dragon in the Far East, this engendering a growing confidence in Hong Kong in the city’s international viability. The city’s tremendous success came with a force of revelation: that Hong Kong people could take on occidental rationality at its own game, on local terms, to produce a global outcome, and that Hong Kong’s economic triumphs rested on an astute accumulation of ‘foreign’ capital for localised manipulation and a shrewd amassing of ‘local’ capital for global transaction. This led to the rediscovery of the local, giving credence to a new form of localism premised on a ‘cancel out and pass on’ attitude¹⁶ that celebrated Hong Kong’s economic achievements and global interconnectivity, while happily chucking out past connections that were deemed parochial. But as the ‘1997’ issue emerged, and became a matter of concern, a sense of foreboding also started to set in.

In the cultural realm, around 1980 the Hong Kong New Wave – also known as the New Hong Kong Cinema – rolled into sight, of which Tsui is a major progenitor. In his book Hong Kong: Culture and Politics of Disappearance (1997) Ackbar Abbas observes that this new cinema has yielded films that ‘[assert] the importance of the local’, while at the same time drawing attention to the presence of ‘foreigners and foreign elements’ in the territory in sustained ways not seen before; in so doing, it manifests an interest in ‘investigat[ing] the dislocations of the local’.¹⁷ Caught between the ‘local’ and the ‘foreign’, the cultural space of Hong Kong becomes difficult to represent since it would disappear as soon as it appears, thus making Hong Kong as a subject elusive to grasp, and the subjectivity of Hong Kong slippery to behold. This particular elusiveness and slipperiness conveys a feeling of ‘déjà disparu’ that, according to Abbas, is highly reflexive and expressive of the ‘cancel out and move on’ attitude prevalent in Hong Kong society at the time. Abbas explains thus:

Hong Kong’s history is one of shock and radical changes. As if to protect themselves against this series of traumas, Hong Kong people have little memory and no sentiment for the past. The general attitude to everything, sometimes indistinguishable from the spirit of enterprise, is cancel out and pass on.¹⁸

As such, the déjà disparu phenomenon in relation to the new cinema presents makers of this cinema with the following set of challenges: how to capture the cultural space of Hong Kong that is ‘always on the point of disappearing’? how to ‘construct images out of clichés’ – those which the déjà disparu leaves behind – so that they be experienced in refreshing ways?¹⁹ Put contextually, the razor-fast editing, hyperkinetic quick cuts, campy comic-book characters who zip in and out of the diegesis and mindboggling storylines narrated on the run, and that all too often noisily interrupt the narrative flow of Shanghai Blues, are symptoms of the déjà disparu at work. Such characteristics are now regarded as markers of the Tsui Hark brand (of films).

Genres and affectivity

Made after 1982 (the year when Margaret Thatcher, the then British prime minister, visited the PRC to begin the process of negotiating Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty) and released in 1984 (the year in which the Sino-British Joint Declaration to revert Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 was made), Shanghai Blues is Tsui’s sixth feature film and the debut film of Tsui’s newly-formed Film Workshop.²⁰ Although Abbas’ study of the New Hong Kong Cinema in the above-mentioned book does not include Shanghai Blues, the film has arguably many elements in common with the new cinema that Abbas has elaborated on; it likewise ‘adopt[s] . . . spatial narratives to suggest dislocations’ and contains ‘a new complexity in the treatment of affects and emotions, a creative use of popular genres, a new localism, and a politics that can only be indirect’.²¹

Shanghai Blues is set in Shanghai around 1937 just prior to the Japanese Invasion of Shanghai and then moves on to 1947 and the Chinese Civil War which broke out within months of the Japanese surrender in September 1945. This turbulent setting serves as a backdrop for the film to track dislocations in postwar Chinese (Shanghai) society, first using the dislocations to tell stories about a society in chaos and individuals in crisis (as well as the choices and decisions they make), and then turning these stories into analogies for putting a trace on the correspondent crisis mentality in relation to the ‘1997 factor’ in Hong Kong. But, as we shall see, Shanghai Blues does more than express this social concern.

Shanghai Blues assembles a cast drawn from the Chinese diaspora: some like Kenny Bee of Hong Kong and Sylvia Chang of Taiwan are stars; others are well-known veterans of Hong Kong’s postwar ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Chinese on the Move
• Part II To-ing and Fro-ing
• Part III International Players and a Global Niche
• Notes
• Bibliography