Directory of World Cinema: China : China [1 ed.] 9781841505978, 9781841505589

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Volume 12

directory of world cinema china

Edited by Gary Bettinson

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

Directory of World Cinema

First Published in the UK in 2012 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2012 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Publisher: May Yao Publishing Manager: Melanie Marshall Cover photo: Hero (dir. Zhang Yimou). Beijing New Picture/Elite Group/The Kobal Collection Cover Design: Holly Rose Copy Editor: Emma Rhys Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire Directory of World Cinema ISSN 2040-7971 Directory of World Cinema eISSN 2040-798X Directory of World Cinema: China ISBN 978-1-84150-558-9 Directory of World Cinema: China eISBN 978-1-84150-597-8

Printed and bound by Cambrian Printers, Aberystwyth, Wales. 2  Japan

ontent

directory of world cinema china Acknowledgements 5 Introduction by the Editor

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Chinese Opera and Cinema

11

Taiwanese Documentary

17

Hong Kong Action Cinema

22

Three Action Heroes David Chiang Chow Yun-fat Ti Lung

28

Three Female Stars Grace Chang Esther Eng Brigitte Lin

44

Hong Kong New Wave Allen Fong Ann Hui Patrick Tam

55

Directors: Mainland China Chen Kaige Lu Chuan Tian Zhuangzhuang

65

Directors: Taiwan Chu Yen-ping Hou Hsiao-hsien Tsai Ming-liang

78

Directors: Hong Kong Fruit Chan Wong Kar-wai John Woo

92

Drama: Mainland China Reviews

106

Drama: Taiwan Reviews

134

Kung Fu and Wuxia Pian (Swordplay Film): Hong Kong and Taiwan 164 Reviews Action Cinema and Heroic Bloodshed: Hong Kong Reviews

178

Independent and Art Cinema: Hong Kong 192 Reviews Comedy/Musical: Taiwan and Hong Kong 198 Reviews Documentary: Mainland China and Hong Kong 214 Reviews Recommended Reading

220

Online Resources

222

Test Your Knowledge

224

Notes on Contributors

227

Filmography 231

KNOWLEDG

Directory of World Cinema

This book differs from previous volumes in the Directory of World Cinema series insofar as it addresses not one national cinema but three distinct sites of Chinese filmmaking, located in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The book’s wide ambit accounts for some minor deviations between this and other volumes in the Directory of World Cinema series, though the present volume largely adheres to the series’ standard format. By parsing Chinese cinema into three filmmaking centres, the Directory of World Cinema: China benefits from the expertise of writers specializing in each field of Chinese film, and I am indebted to all these authors for their valuable contributions. Their varied critical methods testify to the rich diversity of both Chinese cinema and contemporary Film Studies. My appreciation goes to Melanie Marshall, May Yao, and Masoud Yazdani at Intellect for their enthusiastic support and careful nurturing of this project; Holly Rose for her work on the manuscript; and James Campbell for seeing the Directory through the marketing and advertizing stage. I would also like to acknowledge Lancaster University’s Faculty of Social Sciences Research Fund, which supported some of the research presented in this volume. Lastly I thank Yvonne Teh and Wing-Ho Lin for stimulating exchanges of information and opinion.

Gary Bettinson

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Introduction by the editor

Unlike many national cinemas represented in the Directory of World Cinema series, ‘China’ does not signify a national cinema in a unitary sense. Rather it denotes three distinct yet equally ‘Chinese’ cinemas – those of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, and Hong Kong, all of which receive coverage in the Directory of World Cinema: China. Cultural historians and film scholars discriminate among the so-called ‘three Chinas’ on the grounds of socio-political and historical difference, while the globally-dispersed Chinese diaspora further disarrays notions of a unified nation state. Admittedly, assumptions of a homogenous Chinese cinema are not wholly unjustified. This century has borne witness to intensified cooperation between and among the three Chinas, inviting us to categorize Chinese cinema in holistic terms. At a 2011 industry seminar1, Chinese film producers claimed to regard the Mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong markets as a single entity, where once they had distinguished among them. Behind this conviction is the recent surge of coproductions between the PRC and Taiwan and/or Hong Kong, which has seen the borders separating the three Chinas grow increasingly porous. Co-produced movies such as John Woo’s Red Cliff (2008-2009) are fast becoming the norm as the Mainland coproduction model shifts toward the centre of Chinese film production. What makes the Chinese coproduction strategy so seductive? Certainly all three territories are able to produce commercial hits independently. But some compelling incentives promote the trend for cross-border cooperation. For each party, coproductions spread risk, provide inroads into foreign markets, and augment box-office revenue in the local territory. In the case of Mainland China, the coproduction boom has expanded a thriving domestic market. Recent joint ventures account for a substantial portion of the

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Red Cliff, China Film Group/Lion Rock Productions/The Kobal Collection.

PRC’s box-office returns, with megapictures such as Let the Bullets Fly (Jiang Wen, 2010), Aftershock (Feng Xiaogang, 2010), and The Founding of a Republic (Huang Jian-Xin, Han San-Ping, 2009) consolidating the market. In addition, Mainland studios benefit from the craft expertise, market savvy, and global star appeal provided by the Taiwanese and Hong Kong affiliate, advancing both production values and distribution practices. The Mainland industry’s rapid growth and vast expansion of screens demands a high turnover of product, but quota restrictions on foreign imports mandate that local firms shoulder the burden of productivity; since Mainland coproductions qualify officially as local products, they help to fill theatre slots. The pooling of resources acquires yet additional luster as domestic studios venture into stereoscopic film-making, enabling Mainland producers to tap technical expertise from across Asia. The PRC’s coproduction upsurge has also advertized to other film-making centres, notably Hollywood, a renewed appetite for cooperation, leading to a flurry of Sino-US features with global potential (e.g. The Karate Kid [Harald Zwart, 2010]; The Children of Huang Shi [Roger Spottiswoode, 2008]; The Forbidden Kingdom [Rob Minkoff, 2008]). Mainland coproduction also yields benefits for Hong Kong and Taiwan investors. Local film-makers now capitalize upon the PRC’s advanced infrastructure, gaining access to sophisticated studio facilities, diverse locations, and far-reaching distribution channels.

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Of course, the huge China market provides a key incentive for local studios to embark on Mainland coproductions. Neither Taiwan nor Hong Kong can sustain its local cinema without relying on outside markets, and (the global distribution network notwithstanding) the Mainland market is among the world’s largest. Some Chinese coproductions (e.g. Young Bruce Lee, 2010) pan out even wider to target global audiences. Recent transformations of PRC national policies, resulting in advantageous trade agreements, have stimulated cooperation. The Closer Economic Partnership Agreement, signed in 2003, waived the quota restriction on Hong Kong films and permitted the region’s firms to privately own Mainland theatres (a privilege not extended to Taiwan or the US); this trade deal triggered an increase in Hong Kong-China coproductions, crucially reviving the flagging Hong Kong industry. In 2010 the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) marked a decisive improvement in cross-strait relations, ameliorating sixty years of political enmity; the ECFA signaled a willingness to remove or relax the PRC’s import quota for Taiwanese films, and to encourage collaboration across the China straits. By liberalizing the market, the People’s Republic has rejuvenated Taiwan’s moribund industry: vulnerable, like Hong Kong, to Hollywood hegemony, the island’s box-office returns have lately been boosted by solid Mainland coproductions such as Kung Fu Dunk (Chu Yen-ping, 2008) and Reign of Assassins (Su Chao-pin, 2010). (Solely indigenous hits, such as Monga [Doze Niu, 2010] and Cape No. 7 [Wei De-sheng, 2008], are rare.) In all, the rise in pan-Chinese coproduction raises prospects for a unitary national cinema, a borderless conglomerate whose historical divisions and dissensions are supplanted by strategic, commerce-driven unification. Against the benefits of Mainland coproduction must be set some acute disadvantages. Many critics inveigh against perceived artistic compromise, as when concessions to the PRC are detected in the jingoistic flagwaving of Wilson Yip’s Ip Man 2 (Hong KongChina, 2010) and Yuen Woo-Ping’s True Legend (Hong Kong-China-US, 2010). Another concern is that the exodus of major talent to Mainland China results in an impoverished local scene. Moreover, coproduction criteria set in place by the PRC – for example, that one-third of the project’s cast must be of Mainland Chinese descent – limit opportunities for Taiwanese and Hong Kong players. Local producers also have to contend with the certainty of losing substantial revenue to the PRC’s pirate distribution channels. Then there is the challenge of producing a film universal enough to satisfy the markets of both (or all) parties; this requires delicate negotiation of each territory’s distinctive ‘identity,’ established through domestic cinema in the foregoing decades. Yet another challenge besets Hong Kong in particular. Taiwan’s Mandarin-language product finds an amenable market in the Mainland, but Hong Kong’s Cantonese cinema risks decline or displacement if Mainland coproductions continue to dominate production. Likewise, culturallyspecific genres such as mo-lei-tau comedy, whose brand of humour stems from the Cantonese vernacular, may be discarded in favour of Mandarin-dialect blockbusters. The growth in Hong Kong-Mainland alliances poses a genuine threat to the regional specificity of Hong Kong cinema. These last concerns highlight the fear that what is distinctive about the cinemas of Hong Kong and Taiwan has been, or will be, abdicated to the PRC. Exacerbating this anxiety is the latter’s state censorship regime, a notoriously opaque and capricious system imposed upon all films seeking theatrical Mainland distribution. Thorny areas for PRC censors include graphic violence and sex, the promotion of superstition (including spectres and religious cults), negative portrayal of authority figures (law officials, politicians, doctors, teachers), the glorification of criminals, and controversial elements that might jeopardize good relations with the PRC’s political allies. Since Hong Kong cinema’s most characteristic (and commodifiable) genres involve ghosts, gangsters, and stories of police corruption, the threat to its indigenous brand is legitimate. Indeed, recent coproductions such as The Warlords (Peter Chan; Raymond Yip, 2007)

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and Battle of Wits (Jacob Cheung, 2006) adroitly trade in the dynastic military genre, chosen for its historical distance, political neutrality, and potential to navigate transnational markets. Acceding to coproduction and censorship exigencies, Hong Kong companies are economically as well as artistically straitjacketed – potentially lucrative niche markets, say, for ‘extreme’ horror or polemical dramas, must go untapped under Mainland regulations. If the PRC’s state prescriptions effectively blacklist certain Hong Kong genres, so they also induce self-censorship among directors seeking Mainland distribution. Anxious that the Chinese title of Sylvia Chang’s Run Papa Run (2008) would fall foul of Mainland culture officials, the film’s Hong Kong producers retitled it to play down underworld connotations (originally titled Black Papa, it was renamed One Good Papa). Such apparently minor concessions harbor major implications: once Hong Kong or Taiwanese firms and film-makers start sanitizing their movies for Mainland release, PRC imperialism is voluntarily reasserted, making casualties of local cultural traditions and creative independence. Not all Taiwanese and Hong Kong film-makers covet Mainland cooperation. Several high-profile figures have migrated to Hollywood, returning occasionally to direct films in Asia. Some firms circumvent Mainland constraints by obtaining overseas finance;

Monga, Greenday Films/The Kobal Collection.

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recent years have seen an increase in Sino-French films (Blue Gate Crossing [Yee Chinyen, 2002]; Vengeance, [Johnnie To, 2009]), Japanese coproductions (Café Lumière [Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2003]; Shamo [Soi Cheang, 2007]), and Taiwan-Hong Kong alliances (20:30:40 [Sylvia Chang, 2004]; Prince of Tears [Yonfan, 2009]). An industrial orientation toward the China market also creates a reaction in the form of stridently ‘local’ filmmakers. This contingent flouts PRC coproduction and forfeits the Mainland market, but preserves both localism and creative freedom. Operating with small budgets procured in their home territory, these film-makers mount socially-conscious, sometimes overtly politicized projects anathema to Mainland strictures; consequently, they target domestic and other Southeast Asian markets. Regionalized films like Ann Hui’s The Way We Are (2008) tour the global festival circuit, while a few others (e.g. Dream Home [Pang Ho-cheung, 2010]) reach the Chinese diaspora through international theatrical distribution. Such cases doggedly prove that the cinemas of Hong Kong and Taiwan need not rely upon Mainland China for success, presenting an alternative route by which Chinese cinema might fruitfully proceed. So much reveals the present state of Chinese cinema, but it also reaffirms the claim that China comprises a tripartite, rather than a unitary, national cinema. Aside from a host of divisions (geographic, ethnic, linguistic, economic, political), the three Chinas comprise distinct film-making centres, each with its own cultural specificity. Historically, moreover, the three Chinese cinemas have operated with considerable mutual independence while negotiating separate socio-economic pressures. Given these discrete histories, critics are justifiably reluctant to conceive Chinese cinema in monolithic terms, no matter the PRC’s vocal promulgation of a unified nation state. The strong presence of regional and local film-making, preserved by film-makers committed to domestic issues, also ratifies the continued necessity to territorialize Chinese cinema. Without denying the transnational, cross-fertilizing connections among the cinemas of Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, the Directory of World Cinema: China preserves these basic distinctions. That scholars and students of Chinese cinema tend to segregate the field in this way also informs this book’s organization, which specifies the place of origin of particular films, and the territories with which particular directors and players are associated. No study encompassing the three Chinese cinemas can claim to be exhaustive, but the present volume aims to balance breadth of coverage with detailed information and analysis. It examines a wide range of films, elucidates the careers of key personnel, and surveys significant cinematic trends within and across the three territories. Not least, it aims to convey the cultural significance, historical diversity, and sheer creative exuberance of Chinese cinema in all its manifestations.

Gary Bettinson Note 1. Asian Film Producers Forum, Filmart, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Hong Kong, 22 March 2011.

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Farewell My Concubine, Tomson Films/China Film/Beijing/The Kobal Collection.

chinese opera and cinema Chinese Opera and Cinema 11

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From the very first Chinese motion picture created in 1905 to renowned contemporary films, the influence of Chinese opera can be felt throughout multiple periods of film production across the three Chinas. It is both a cinematic genre (Huangmei opera films popularized by the Shaw Brothers studio are among the best known), and a recurring narrative theme that affects the content and aesthetics of recent award-winning films such as Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (Zhang Yimou, 2005) and Farewell My Concubine (Chen Kaige, 1993). Chinese Opera also provided the foundations for Chinese genre cinema, including horror and martial-arts films, both of which rely heavily on the carefully calculated rhythms, movements, and folklore that originated on stage. With origins dating back to the third century CE, Chinese opera is still seen today in theatres across Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China. Performances feature music, heavily codified gestures, acrobatics and martial arts within the narrative scope of classic Chinese literature and folktales. Chinese opera movements, costumes, and stories are infused with a rich use of Confucian, Buddhist and folkloric symbolism. The meaning of each gesture or movement acts as a vehicle for the narrative, while costumes (their colours and embroidered motifs) convey the nature and status of the wearer. Over time, numerous regional styles of Chinese opera developed into distinct branches, creating Beijing opera, Cantonese opera, and Sichuan opera to name a few. The first motion pictures to be developed in North America and Europe during the late nineteenth century documented scenes of everyday life, including popular stage arts. Dance-hall routines were soon immortalized on camera in Thomas Edison’s vaudeville films, such as Annabelle Butterfly Dance (1894). Similarly, in 1905, the first Chinese film captured a well-loved form of entertainment, the Beijing opera The Battle of Mount Dingjun. Tan Xinpei, a well-known opera performer, and the Fengtai Photo Studio of Beijing collaborated to film action sequences from the opera in Shanghai, under the direction of Ren Jingfeng. Now lost, the film marked the birth of Chinese cinema in both its source material (The Battle of Mount Dingjun is based on the epic fourteenth century novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms) and its production crew. American influence soon established itself in the newly formed Shanghai-based film industry, but Chinese opera remained a popular performance art in Chinese communities and did not take long to make a more prolific transition from live theatre to the cinema screen. While many copies of early Chinese opera films of the 1920s and 1930s are now lost or destroyed, extant sources from the period suggest that Beijing opera and Cantonese opera productions were filmed with increasing frequency and were well received in both Hong Kong and Mainland China. This trend continued until the outbreak of World War II when film production largely came to a halt. It was the 1950s that gave birth to the golden era of opera films, chiefly adapting the Huangmei style of opera for the screen. Shanghai Film Studio worked with the Anhui Huangmei Opera Troupe to create The Heavenly Match (Shi Hui, 1955), the very first Huangmei opera film. Its huge success at the box office spurred the film adaptations of The Female Prince Consort (Liu Qiong, 1959), The Cowherd and the Weaving Maiden (Cen Fan, 1963), and other Huangmei operas in China. It also inspired director Li Hanhsiang to helm Diau Charn (1958) for Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong, which led the studio to steadily produce Huangmei opera films until the late 1960s. Compared to the brightly painted faces featured in Beijing and Cantonese opera, Huangmei opera is a simpler, less decorative form of performance that originated in rural tea-picking songs from Huangmei County in Eastern China. Its naturalism made Huangmei opera the perfect vehicle for screen productions that developed a system of recognizable stars, real faces to whom audiences could relate. The Shaw Brothers features, unlike the Huangmei opera films made in China, were generally more polished, shot on Eastmancolour and filmed on elaborately-constructed studio lots that integrated traditional Chinese architecture and natural landscapes. The

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combination of complex decor and opera’s aestheticized codes of behaviour led to a formulaic camera approach. Transitions between scenes, for example, rely heavily on wide-angle shots to provide literary exposition. Painterly landscapes illustrate well-known folkloric motifs in anticipation of the narrative action, such as two Mandarin ducks seen floating on a lake – a traditional symbol of marital harmony. Medium shots are also seen with great regularity to capture dance movements for the hands, arms and face typical of Chinese opera. Despite the lush realistic sets, the films maintain something of a theatrical flatness with few camera movements circling the performers from behind. Aerial shots and side angles add something to the operas that would be unattainable in live theatre, but lack of dimensionality and few travelling shots are consistent features of Huangmei opera films. The craze for Shaw Brothers Huangmei opera films peaked with The Love Eterne (Li Han-hsiang, 1963), which was screened for 186 days in Taiwan and held the box-office record there and in Hong Kong for two decades. Often cited as China’s Romeo and Juliet, the film is based on the classic story, The Butterfly Lovers, a tragic tale of arranged marriage that tears apart two lovers who are reunited in death as a pair of butterflies. With their mythic fables of Confucian loyalty and harmony set in an idealized remote past, Huangmei opera films were a nostalgic reminder of the homeland that many members of displaced Chinese communities yearned for in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Many of today’s established Chinese directors, such as Ang Lee, cite Huangmei opera films as an important influence on their own work, having grown up during the pinnacle of the Shaw Brothers’ Huangmei opera period. The Love Eterne featured an 8-year-old Jackie Chan, then a promising Beijing opera student, an experience that would later mark much of his own film-making style. Several celebrated martial-arts film directors, such as King Hu and Zhang Che, made their directorial debut with Huangmei opera features. Static poses and brisk tumbling passages accompanied by rhythmic percussions are evidence of Chinese opera’s influence on their early martial-arts or wuxia films in the 1960s. Some still stand as hallmarks of the genre today, including Come Drink With Me (King Hu, 1966). During one scene in this film, a fight in an inn builds in waves of suspense as the protagonist, a swordswoman, takes her time to size up the bandits that surround her, turning their own tricks on them and defeating them. Silence is woven into the percussions that accompany this scene, creating a deliberate rhythmic pattern of stillness and action. King Hu, who had worked on several Huangmei opera films while at Shaw Brothers, later left for Taiwan and created some of his best works, including Dragon Gate Inn (1967) and the Cannes prize-winner A Touch of Zen (1971). When the popularity of Huangmei opera films started to decline, Shaw Brothers began incorporating new elements into the Huangmei fold, including brief moments of nudity or intensifying the supernatural elements of folk stories that already recognized ghosts and shape-shifting humans as a normal literary device. These efforts led to new genres in Chinese film-making, including the Shaw Brothers’ prolific soft-porn era of the 1970s. Their burgeoning work in the horror and fantasy realm with Lady Jade Locket (Chun Yen, 1967) helped pave the way for later films like Ching Siu-tung’s A Chinese Ghost Story (1987). While Huangmei films were at the height of their popularity across the Chinese diaspora, Mainland China was becoming increasingly isolationist under communist leadership. Mao Zedong’s insistence that art must serve proletarian ideology limited the population’s entertainment options and traditional opera was banned. It was replaced with a new form of theatre known as Revolutionary opera, modeled on the technique of Beijing opera without the painted faces or lavish costumes and stories. Jiang Ching, Chairman Mao’s wife, fostered a series of performances known as the ‘eight model plays’ − operas and ballets with communist themes that were soon turned into films. These

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works became classics in their own right, mainly due to the repetition with which they were screened, as few other productions were permitted during the Cultural Revolution (1966−76). Among the best known films in this genre are The Legend of the Red Lantern (Cheng Yin, 1970) and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Xie Tieli, 1970), tales that demonstrate the triumph and courage of selfless peasants. Little appreciated today as anything more than curious relics of the Mao era, some scholars have recently encouraged a new reading of Revolutionary opera films, asserting their value as an original genre that merges social realism and romanticism. While few screen adaptations of Chinese opera have been made since 1980 (with several notable exceptions, including Yonfan’s The Peony Pavilion in 2001), Chinese opera continues to exercise a great deal of aesthetic and thematic influence over contemporary film-making in the three Chinas. Elements of Chinese opera’s stories and symbolism provide modern film-makers with a structure to address contemporary issues or comment on historical events of the past. Chen Kaige’s internationally renowned Farewell My Concubine uses the backdrop of Beijing opera as a tragedy to illustrate modern China’s political upheaval and its impact on the lives of two performers. From the encroaching Japanese invasion to the communist regime’s growing importance, these politically-charged events are marked as intertitles within the film, distinguishing them like acts in an opera. The film’s two protagonists become famous for their interpretation of the opera The Hegemon King Bids Farewell to His Concubine, a play that describes a courtesan’s love for her ill-fated king who is defeated by the Han Dynasty’s founder. The narrative of this opera closely mirrors the personal and political drama of the film’s present day, blurring the edges between theatre and reality. The opera school’s courtyard, where much of the film’s action unfolds, and Cheng Dieyi’s trial in the courtroom become substitute theatres. Chinese opera props, rich with symbolism, such as swords, handkerchiefs and fans, are regularly used during the film’s real-life scenes to mark courtship and servitude, underlining the dramatic scope of changes in China’s modern history and its profound influence on the country’s artistic heritage as well as on the lives of its individual citizens. Chen Kaige revisited these themes again in a less dreamlike fashion with Forever Enthralled (2008), a biographical film of the celebrated opera star for whom the film is named. Like the fictional character of Cheng Dieyi in Farewell My Concubine, Mei Lanfang was renowned for his interpretation of female roles in Bejing opera. Notions of gender identity continue to resurface in Chinese opera-inspired cinema due to the country’s longstanding tradition of cross-gender stage roles. With women barred from performing in Chinese Opera until the mid-twentieth century, all female characters were interpreted by men. Interestingly, recent Chinese films often choose to reverse the gender swapping and use women as male impersonators. Tsui Hark’s political satire Peking Opera Blues (1986) pays tribute to Chinese opera through its original title, meaning ‘knife horse actresses,’ a Beijing opera term for male actors playing female warriors. In this film, Tsui stages operatic sequences both in and outside the theatre, following the actions of a band of misfits, including several cross-dressing characters whose adopted genders either open new opportunities or lead to serious complications. Far from the slapstick action featured in Peking Opera Blues, some cross-gender portrayals offer serious social commentary on how women have been unjustly barred from certain aspects of society. King of Masks (1996), directed by Ting Ming Wu, follows the life of a young girl given up for adoption and disguised as a boy to increase her chances of finding a home. An aging master in the art of bian lian or changing faces, a Sichuan opera tradition in which layers of silk masks are peeled away one after the other in quick succession to reveal newly painted faces, seeks to adopt an heir who will inherit the guarded secrets of his theatrical trade. Fooled by the young girl’s boyish appearance, the master adopts her and teaches his new disciple in earnest until he learns the truth about

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Peking Opera Blues/Do Ma Daan, Cinema City Film Prod/The Kobal Collection.

her gender. Females are forbidden to study or perform bian lian, and the young girl finds herself abandoned on the streets once more until she intervenes in a criminal mix-up to save the falsely accused opera master. The filial piety and tenacious determination shown through her acts echo the Confucian codes outlined in Chinese opera. Realizing the girl’s potential, the old master puts tradition aside and trains the talented youth in the age-old secrets of his art. The masks’ rapidly changing colours and expressions serve as a reminder of the evolving attitudes about gender and class in modern China. Zhang Yimou’s film Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles features Nuo opera − a style of masked performance − at the heart of its narrative about a long solo journey made in honour of a loved one. The story of a Japanese father’s quest to film a Chinese opera star that his dying son admires parallels the famed opera that the father seeks to record, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a fable about long travel and family loyalty. Nuo opera was traditionally believed to drive away demons and ill health. In this vein, the film culminates in Takata’s catharsis through opera, relieving him of the painful past he shares with his estranged son. Opera props, such as cloth banners, featured in many forms of Chinese opera, take on a particular importance in the film when Takata uses a contemporary version of them to achieve his goals. His difficulty with communication and

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expressing emotion are reflected in the masked theatre of Nuo. The demons on stage represent the family’s own façade, which throughout the film is peeled away and finally revealed, alongside the much sought-after opera performer. While Chinese Opera is considered a national treasure in Mainland China and continues to thrive as a live performance art in Taiwan and Hong Kong, its deeply-rooted artistic traditions will continue to influence Chinese film-making as directors repeatedly call on its distinct traits to express something essential and unique to Chinese culture. Whether used to embrace national identity or to depart from tradition, Chinese opera films and their contemporary descendents are vital components of China’s rich cinematic heritage.

Marisa C. Hayes

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taiwanese documentary

In 1985, the judges of Taiwan’s annual Golden Horse Awards, the island’s most prestigious film event, decided not to give any award in the documentary category. They believed that none of the submissions could qualify as ‘documentary,’ but instead should be classified as ‘industrial film’ or ‘information film’ (Li 2006: 72). The judges’ verdict did not only embarrass the government because almost all nominees were government funded and/or produced projects, but also stimulated heated discussion among filmmakers and film scholars in Taiwan. This controversy prompts me to choose the year 1985 as a watershed in examining the development of documentary films in Taiwan. I shall argue that prior to 1985, there were few documentaries made by private individuals for two reasons: (1) documentary was generally not regarded as a commodity with commercial value in Taiwan; and (2) the cost of making a documentary was too high to be easily affordable by independent filmmakers. Hence, over three decades since the 1950s, the majority of Taiwan documentaries had been produced by government-funded film studios and national television companies (Yang 2004: 17). While it may be overly simplistic to condemn all the officially sanctioned newsreels, educational films and documentaries as propaganda, many of these nonfictional films tend to be conservative and institutionalized in terms of subject matter, content, viewpoint and aesthetic style. After 1985, a gradually increasing number of independent film-makers became involved in making documentaries, even though the ones produced directly or indirectly by the state continued to dominate. Some private organizations (such as Green Team and Third Image) took advantage of newly available, relatively inexpensive video camcorders to produce records of political events that countered images and narratives

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disseminated by the mainstream media (Chi 2003: 156; Rawnsley and Rawnsley 2001: 58–9). Other individuals (such as Li Dao-ming and Wu Yi-feng) experimented in documentary-making with cinematic techniques to explore local and social issues (Hu 2007). As a result more varieties of documentaries have emerged in Taiwan since the mid1980s, which led to an explosion of quality documentary films in the 1990s (Li 2006: 8 and Chi 2003: 146–96) and finally the appearance of commercially-viable documentaries in the new millennium (Kuo 2009: 97–113). What inspired the changes of Taiwan documentary in the mid-1980s? Can the documentary films made in Taiwan be explained by western documentary theories? What is the current state of Taiwan documentary? To fully understand documentaries in Taiwan it is important to situate their development within the island’s historical context. Taiwan was a Japanese colony between 1895 and 1945, and it was returned to the Republic of China (ROC) after the World War II by the Allies. The ruling government of the ROC, the Kuomintang (KMT, or the Nationalist Party), lost the civil war to the communists and retreated to Taiwan in 1949 when a new regime, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), was established on the Mainland. The KMT government proclaimed martial law on Taiwan and the island was caught in the ideological fever of the Cold War, enjoying US support after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. The nonfiction films made by the KMT from the 1950s to the 1970s were mainly about ‘the military, patriotism, Taiwan’s natural beauty, and other local colour’ (Hu 2007). However, there were still outstanding documentaries made during this period. For example, Chen Yao-qi’s Liu Bi-jia (1966) was hailed by commentators in Taiwan as a unique milestone. Despite political pressure and institutional constraints at the time, Liu Bi-jia focuses on ‘a single poor and ordinary laborer and his mundane existence’ and is often compared to Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) (Chi 2003: 154). The 1970s witnessed a series of fundamental changes to Taiwanese society: economically Taiwan had risen to be one of the four Little Dragons in Asia, alongside South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong, and this transformed the island from an essentially rural to an urban society. Internationally Taiwan suffered serious setbacks when the PRC replaced the ROC in the UN in 1971. Consequently the ROC on Taiwan quickly lost formal diplomatic relations with many countries including its most powerful ally, the United States, in 1979. Meanwhile, the contradictions between the Chinese ideology imposed by the ROC state and the reality experienced by the residents of Taiwan were emphasized and a sense of political and cultural crisis triggered the rise of Taiwanese consciousness. The Nativist literature movement that calls for ‘back to the earth’ (i.e. back to the Taiwan soil) became prominent (Yip 2004: 26–9); and in the political realm, activists and dissidents began to gain public sympathy and challenge KMT authority and legitimacy (Rawnsley and Rawnsley 2001: 50–60). Therefore by the 1980s, a momentum for cultural, social, and political liberalization had been generated throughout the island and became a powerful undercurrent within Taiwanese society. In the film industry of the early 1980s, many young film-makers made a conscious decision to project the reality of contemporary Taiwan on screen as they understood it, not as the official rhetoric preferred. Their films broke government censorship and language policies and became thematically very different from the mainstream commercial films with which Taiwanese audiences were familiar (Rawnsley 2009: 91–3). This film movement, Taiwan New Cinema, occurred in parallel with the process of democratization, which in turn may also explain the changing perceptions and reflections of documentary-makers about their own work during this time. For example, Zhang Zhao-tang’s The Ship-Burning Sacrifice (1980) shocked viewers with its formal daring. It had no traditional voiceover at all and ‘paired images of the local religious ritual of burning a ship performed annually near the city of Tainan with American art-rock music by Mike Oldfield’ (Chi 2003: 155). Hu Tai-li became the first anthropologist in Taiwan to use

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a 16 mm camera as a tool for researching and documenting aboriginal cultures when she publicly screened her film The Return of Ancestor Spirit: Paiwan Tribe’s Five-Year Sacrifice in 1984 (Wang 2006a: 15). In other words, the aforementioned debate about documentary during the 22nd Golden Horse Awards in 1985 is intertwined with the complex process of political, social, economic and cultural liberalization in Taiwan. Since the 1980s Taiwan gathered pace towards democratization: the first opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was formed in 1986, one year prior to the lifting of martial law in 1987; the first free presidential election took place in 1996; and the KMT regime was replaced by the DPP in 2000. The second change of government happened in 2008 when the KMT defeated the DPP and was voted back to power. The lifting of martial law in 1987 has provided documentary-makers with the necessary freedom to tackle social, cultural, political and aesthetic issues in their art. However, documentary in Taiwan could not become as popular or as diversified as it is today if not for two factors: (1) the availability of digital technologies in the 1990s that reduced the cost of film-making and allowed almost anyone to become film-makers; and (2) the establishment of the Public Television System (PTS) in 1997 and the creation of its documentary platform, View Point (jilu guandian), in 1999 (Wang 2006b: 83). Theorist Bill Nichols (2001) divides documentary into six modes: (1) the poetic mode, (2) the expository mode, (3) the observational mode, (4) the participatory mode, (5) the reflexive mode, and (6) the performative mode. Many documentary scholars in Taiwan have found the theory useful to analyze Taiwanese documentaries (Yang 2004 and Wang 2006c). I wish to point out that (1) before 1985 the majority of the government-funded documentaries seem to belong to the conventional expository mode. It is only after 1985 when there are more varied outputs that Taiwanese documentaries can be classified into different modes; and (2) many Taiwanese documentaries can easily fit into different modes of production at the same time. Hence straightforward categorization may be at risk of misleading the nature of certain documentaries. For example, Zhou Mei-ling and Liu Yun-hou’s Corner’s (2001) reveals the challenges faced by lesbians in Taiwan. The film-makers took an autobiographical approach when they made this documentary about a bar named Corner’s that was popular with the homosexual community. Zhou and Liu wished to expose their innermost secrets without feeling sexually exploited. They found it extremely difficult to achieve the balance they wanted until they decided to adopt the performative mode for a particular segment dealing with their sexual desire. The voiceover for this particular segment is in French, a language that is unfamiliar to the film-makers and their intended viewers. Although there are parts of naked female bodies on screen, the sequence is shot and edited in such a way that it is poetic instead of arousing. The film-makers believe that the performative arrangement helps uphold the integrity of their documentary and their private emotions (Wang 2006b: 94–6). In other words, Corner’s can be classified as a performative documentary. Yet the performative element, however effective, occupies only a small percentage of the film. The rest of Corner’s is about several other customers of Corner’s bar and is similar to the fly-on-the-wall documentary (Sieder 2003). For this reason, Corner’s can also be classified as an observational documentary. It is worth noting that among the six modes of production proposed by Nichols the participatory mode became particularly prominent in Taiwan in the 1990s. There may be three explanations: first, anthropologist Hu Tai-li’s work, mentioned earlier, is more participatory than observational because anthropologists may need to become part of the community they research in order to acquire authentic data. Hu’s work inspired other field workers in Taiwan to take a similar approach to documenting their research subject. Second, democratization has been arguably Taiwan’s largest achievement since 1949 and it has profoundly affected every aspect of Taiwan society and daily life since the lifting of

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martial law in 1987. When film-makers are able to freely explore previously taboo issues and neglected areas such as identity and human rights, the force of democratization makes some unwilling to be mere observers, while others are simply part of the story they wish to tell. For example, Xiao Ju-zhen’s Grandmother’s Hairpin (2000) is about her family history. The documentary traces her father’s journey as a young soldier from Mainland China to Taiwan in 1949, his marriage to a local girl, and how he was finally allowed to revisit his hometown in China in the 1990s. The family reunion does not only symbolize a personal tragedy, but also provokes debate about self and national identity. Although Xiao tackles the problems faced by aging veterans in Taiwan, which makes Grandmother’s Hairpin a thoughtful documentary with big scope, Xiao’s role in the film makes her more a participant than an observer. Third, documentary worker Wu Yi-feng is another influential figure that makes participatory documentary a trend in Taiwan. Wu began making documentaries in the 1980s and has been most concerned about the marginalized and the disadvantaged in the society. He considers himself more a social activist than a film-maker (Chi 2003: 163). Wu established the Full Shot Workshop in 1988. His Moon Children (1990) is about albinoism in Taiwan and exposes how they suffer from social prejudice and misunderstanding. As Chi (2003: 163) has discovered, this film ‘was so widely distributed, seen, and discussed that “the Wu Yi-feng style” became reified as a model for the integration of social activism and documentary film-making.’ Wu Yi-feng, via his Full Shot Workshop, created Community Documentary Film-maker’s Training Program in 1994, which encouraged many young film-makers to embrace Wu’s form of documentary production. As Li-hsin Kuo (2009: 97) has observed, since the turn of the new century ‘documentary film-making in Taiwan has evolved into an enthusiastic cultural practice, almost outshining the significance of feature films.’ Moreover, several of these ‘low-budget, often self-financed and lightly-equipped production[s] of documentary works’ (Kuo 2009: 97) proved to be commercially successful when they were screened in local theatres. For example, Viva Tonal: The Dance Age (Guo Zhen-di and Jian Wei-si, 2003) uncovers how the middle class in Taiwan enjoyed modernity brought by the Japanese colonization in the 1930s; Let It Be (Yan Lan-quan and Zhuang Yi-zeng, 2004) explores the joy and hardship of rice farmers in Southern Taiwan; and Jump! Boys (Lin Yu-xian, 2005) introduces us to a group of primary school children who train to be gymnasts. A significant number of new millennium documentaries are sponsored by the Public Television System and they appear to break away from the participatory mode of documentaries of the 1990s in terms of content and style. Some scholars see the new trend of documentary in Taiwan as a betrayal because they believe that documentary film-makers should ‘take serious interest in public/political issues’ and ‘provide a vision for people to gain a broader understanding towards their state of being, immediate society, and the world they live in’ (Kuo 2009: 113). But others are encouraged by the popularity of these new documentaries because their success points to ‘the promise that local filmmakers can find an audience if they adapt their art to fit changing economic and cultural conditions in Taiwan’ (Hu 2007). However, I believe that it may be too early to announce the commercial triumph of Taiwan documentaries. After all, the film industry is still volatile and vulnerable in Taiwan. For example, Wu Yi-feng’s Full Shot Workshop was forced to close down in 2010 due to financial difficulties (Rawnsley 2010). Moreover, the funds for making documentaries remain slim (the main source of funding is the PTS), and the channels for screening locally-produced documentaries are limited (the main platform is View Point). As documentary has become an important arena for Taiwanese film-makers who are devoted to film-making since the end of 1990s, Taiwanese documentary has quickly become an area that is largely neglected but full of potential and deserves serious attention from scholars and policy makers.

Ming-Yeh Rawnsley

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References Chi, R (2003) ‘The new Taiwanese documentary,’ Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 15: 1, pp. 146–96. Hu, B (2007) ‘The worst of times, can be the best of times,’ Asia Pacific Arts, 21 September, UCLA Asia Institute, http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article. asp?parentid=78209. Accessed 2 October 2010. Kuo, LH (2009) ‘Sentimentality as de-politicised commodity: Observations of contemporary Taiwanese documentary films,’ in C Neri & K Gormley (eds), Taiwan Cinema, Lyon: Asiexpo, pp. 97–113. Li, DM (2006) ‘Taiwan jilupian de meixue wenti chutan’/‘Exploring the aesthetics of Taiwan documentaries,’ in WC Wang (ed), Taiwan Dandai Yingxiang/A Retrospective Collection of Documentary Films from Taiwan, Taipei: Tosee, pp. 72–81. Nichols, B (2001) Introduction to Documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University. Rawnsley, MY (2009) ‘Taiwan New Cinema,’ in C Neri & K Gormley (eds), Taiwan Cinema, Lyon: Asiexpo, pp. 78–96. Rawnsley, MY (2010) Private interviews with documentary film-makers in Taiwan, Taipei, September. Rawnsley, G & Rawnsley, MY (2001) Critical Security, Democratisation and Television in Taiwan, London: Ashgate. Sieder, J (2003) ‘Fly on the wall TV,’ Screenonline, BFI, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/ tv/id/698785/index.html. Accessed 3 October 2010. Wang, WC (2006a) ‘1960–2000 nian Taiwan jilupian de fazhan yu shehui bianqian’/‘The development of Taiwan documentary and social change 1960–2000,’ in WC Wang (ed), Taiwan Dandai Yingxiang/A Retrospective Collection of Documentary Films from Taiwan, Taipei: Tosee, pp. 10–32. Wang, WC (2006b) ‘Taiwan jilupian de leixing fazhan yu fenxi’/‘Genre development and analysis of Taiwan documentary: A research based on Bill Nichols’s six modes,’ in WC Wang (ed), Taiwan dandai yingxiang/A Retrospective Collection of Documentary Films from Taiwan, Taipei: Tosee, pp. 82–99. Wang, WC (ed) (2006c) Taiwan Dandai Yingxiang/A Retrospective Collection of Documentary Films from Taiwan, Taipei: Tosee. Yang, CC (2004) ‘Taiwan guanfang jilupian de zhizuo yu fazhan’/‘The Production and Development of Official Documentary in Taiwan,’ MA thesis, Tainan National University of the Arts, Taiwan. Yip, J (2004) Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Ip Man, Mandarin Films/The Kobal Collection.

hong kong action cinema

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Action and Chinese cinema are almost synonymous with the martial-arts film and for the most part the history of action genres in Chinese cinema has long been associated with the post-war Hong Kong cinema and the international ascendency of the kung fu film. Action cinema is a global language that often transcends national cinemas, yet one of the most identifiable and influential forms of ‘nationalized action’ has been the martialarts film and its star ambassadors Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li. However, to reduce action cinema in this context to a handful of recognizable stars and their films is to overlook the ways in which the genre is more varied and flexible with a history of constant redefinition and a keenness to respond to political and social unease through allegory. Action cinema in this context refers to a number of genres, and while martial arts is the gravitational centre, it also includes gangster films, comedies, adventure, exploitation and horror. In that sense martial arts is often more than a genre; it is a master template of action cinema that informs other genres, and its influence can be seen throughout Hong Kong cinema and beyond. As an example, gambling movies such as King Gambler (Ching Gong, 1976) and Challenge of the Gamesters (Wong Jing, 1981), while principally about gambling matches, down-on-their luck characters, conmen and triads, also incorporate action sequences that integrate the gambling themes with typical kung fu genre conventions: playing cards and mahjong tiles are expertly used as deadly weapons; fights in gambling rooms involve the tables and furniture in creative ways; training sequences are concerned with improving secret skills; and master-disciple relationships are examined. One only has to think of Shaolin Soccer’s football-meets-kung fu premise to see how this logic is played out in other scenarios. Aside from romantic comedies and pornography it would seem that most genres in Hong Kong cinema incorporate action on a sliding scale, from the out-and-out action to the occasional scene of action spectacle in otherwise non-action genres. The martial-arts genre is without doubt the action genre par excellence and is often divided into two major sub-categories. These are the swordplay film or wuxia pian, represented by canonical features such as Come Drink with Me (King Hu, 1966), the extensive Shaw Brothers canon, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000); and the kung fu film, typified by Way of the Dragon (Bruce Lee, 1972), Police Story (Jackie Chan, 1985) and the Once Upon a Time in China series (Tsui Hark, 1991−97). These sub-categories have often been discrete forms of action cinema that have parallel histories of development and differ in their historical settings, genre conventions, and martial style of action. It is useful to understand those two categories in more detail. Unlike the modern post-war kung fu film, the wuxia is also a literary genre that predates cinema as far back as 400BC. Wuxia films often unfold in a remote Chinese past that is ancient, fantastical or mythical, but definitely pre-1900. Contemporary examples of wuxia films include Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2002) and Reign of Assassins (Su Chao-pin, 2010), although the film genre dates back to the prosperous Shanghai cinema of the 1920s and the classic Burning of the Red Lotus Monastery (Zhang Shichuan, 1928). In a shift from China to Hong Kong the genre was renewed in the 1960s when the Shaw Brothers studios announced through their film magazine Southern Screen that it was going to herald a new era of the colour wuxia film. Shaw Brothers released several films under the ‘new wuxia era’ banner, including a remake of the 1928 Monastery film, which transformed the assumptions about the genre as old-fashioned, especially when OneArmed Swordsman (Zhang Che, 1967) broke the HK$1 m barrier at the local Hong Kong box office. The production talent working under studio contract developed a new type of cinematic language to express and stage action, movement and power, that is evident from some of the first post-war wuxia features. Come Drink With Me’s action scenes were a triumph in showing how editing, special effects, and cinematography were able to create a new perception of movement and action, suggesting that what was new about the new wuxia era was an unprecedented cinematic expression that was completely

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Once Upon a Time in China II, Golden Harvest/Paragon/The Kobal Collection.

opposed to the theatricality of the opera stage so characteristic of older action films. When the character Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei Pei) leaps from her table to the inn’s balcony, the careful selection of shots and rapid editing create in the blink of an eye the illusion of a tremendous preternatural leap in the air. Golden Swallow’s extraordinary leap is only possible because she inhabits the imaginary world of the jianghu (often translated as ‘the martial world’) where swordsmen and swordswomen wander the ‘rivers and lakes’ (a literal translation). Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a more recent take on the jianghu which makes obvious the different rules and physics that govern supernatural leaps and movement, and the honorable codes of conduct and combat defined by the altruistic code of xia. The jianghu is not the ordinary world and thus explains why Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-fat’s characters can never consummate because they are bound by the code of xia. It offers Jen Yu (Zhang Yiyi) an escape from marriage and patriarchy and thus is also cast with feminist possibilities. The jianghu is a purposeful narrative device in that the rule-bounded context is ripe for melodramatic convention, creating drama, emotion, conflict, and a clear demarcation of good and evil. Understanding the meanings of the terms wu and xia and the concept of the jianghu is key to accessing a more complex layer of reception relating to the conventions of the genre, especially in terms of character actions and types, narrative situations, and the action itself. Before Hong Kong’s Mandarin studios dominated 1960s film production with their wuxia action films, the local Cantonese film industry had already established its own martial genre through the folk hero figure of Wong Fei-hong, whose long-running film

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series began in 1949. These lower-budget, black-and-white, serialized features were the prototype for what would become the kung fu film. Unlike the wuxia films with their panAsian appeal these films were instead a local Hong Kong phenomenon with an awareness of Hong Kong’s colonial status and the region’s separateness from Mainland China. The Wong Fei-hong films eschewed the spectacle and ambition of the China-derived wuxia in favour of a realist approach that would preserve martial-arts techniques and local practices such as lion dancing, while conveying Confucian ethics and values to its local audience. If the wuxia films have their origin in the centuries-old literary culture and the fantastical jianghu, then the kung fu film has its origins in the near past and historical folk heroes – although martial arts itself, as combat and exercise, is traced back to the historic Shaolin Temple. Figures like Wong Fei-hong have been immortalised on screen in more than ninety films, and more recently other hero-titled features include Fong Sai Yuk (Corey Yuen, 1993), Ip Man (Wilson Yip, 2008) and Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen (Andrew Lau, 2010). In contradistinction to the preternatural leaping, flying, and magic that defines the weightless action in the wuxia, the kung fu film centres on the body’s physicality and materiality, and often emphasizes unarmed combat, pain, ritual training, and an overt fetishization of the male body. While the genre later develops to involve more specialeffects involving wires and digital imaging, kung fu films capture the complexity of fluid combat movement in various martial styles, as evinced in Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin (Chen Chi-Hwa, 1978) and any of the kung fu films featuring the Five Venoms (1978) troupe. There is an emphasis on ‘hand and fist’ and ‘foot and leg’ work in Chinese Boxer (Jimmy Wang Yu, 1970), The Magnificent Butcher (Yuen Woo-Ping, 1979) and Tai Chi Master (Yuen Woo-Ping, 1993) while emphasis on weaponry skills is most evident in classics like Heroes of the East (Lau Kar-leung, 1978) and Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (Lau Kar-leung, 1984). Editing is also a crucial element of style in kung fu films and is central to the tendency to preserve choreographic movement and momentum, constructing a flow of action in ways that present the performers and choreographers as experts in what they do. The wuxia film comes and goes in cycles of popularity but the kung fu film has been a more reliable and constant form of action cinema that is amenable with other modern genres, for example, the kung fu comedies Drunken Master (Yuen Woo-Ping, 1978) or Mr Vampire (Ricky Lau, 1985) which combine kung fu, comedy and horror. Kung fu cinema’s internationalization begins with the western reception of Five Fingers of Death (Cheng Chang-Ho, 1972) and the popularity and legacy of kung fu cinema is certainly cemented by Bruce Lee despite only making a few films (which are atypical of the genre in terms of conventions). However, Lee’s films were significant in widening the appeal of kung fu while expressing an anti-colonial and anti-racist stance that reaches a nadir in the Once Upon a Time in China series. Bruce Lee’s films may remain classics of the genre in the early 1970s but they remain stoic and even heavy-handed in comparison to the inventiveness of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, who moved the genre forward in terms of action and spectacle. Often working together and separately with colleague Yuen Biao (high-points include Project A [Jackie Chan, 1983] and Dragons Forever [Sammo Hung, 1988]), the trio importantly made Hong Kong itself the star of the film. Their emphasis on contemporary Hong Kong as a location for the story and action to unfold certainly paved the way for urban-set action genres of the 1980s like A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986), Yes Madam (Corey Yuen, 1985), Tiger Cage (Yuen Woo-Ping, 1988), and the appropriately-titled City on Fire (Ringo Lam, 1987). Before constructing a niche as the gangsters-and-gunplay auteur, John Woo had already made some lesser-known martial-arts films like The Hand of Death (1976), which suggests a causal link between martial arts and the gun-toting ‘hero’ films A Better

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Police Story, Paragon/Golden Harvest/The Kobal Collection.

Tomorrow and The Killer (1989). What made the Hong Kong gangster films unique were the way guns were used with one held in each hand and also held horizontally rather than vertically – now a clichéd posture of action cinema. The heroes and the villains leapt about and dived for cover in spectacular and impossible ways to avoid the spray of bullets. Every detail from the movement of the bodies to the way the gun functioned as an action prop was connected to the history of the martial-arts films; in short, the gun-fight was choreographed and edited to perfection and this is what distinguished the Hong Kong gangster film from its international peers. Leading up to the Hong Kong handover, many of the key action film talent hastily moved overseas, leaving a creative void in action cinema that was subsequently filled with pop stars and talent with no discernable action cinema credentials. While 1997’s handover and the beginning of a new system of funding and transnational Asian production increased the scale and scope of Chinese action cinema, often quantifiable by the money onscreen, the films rarely struck the same level of ingenuity and excitement that characterized previous decades. However, a number of key directors and performers

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have come to prominence in recent times, all of them contributing to an action cinema that remains distinct and relevant: Andrew Lau’s Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002-3); Johnnie To’s prolific yet inventive cornering of the gangster genre with PTU (2002) and Election (2005); Stephen Chow and his cinema of nonsense typified by Kung Fu Hustle (2004); the actor and choreographer Donnie Yen and his violent, tougher and more impact-oriented kung fu features which remain engaged with the kung fu film’s history of anticolonial sentiment; and finally, a return to form from Tsui Hark with Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010), John Woo and his two-part epic Red Cliff (2008-9), and Yuen Woo-Ping with True Legend (2010).

Gary Needham

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New One-Armed Swordsman/San Duk Bei Do, Shaw Brothers/The Kobal Collection.

three action heroes david chiang

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David Chiang achieved fame in Vengeance (Zhang Che, 1970), portraying a brittle, brooding assassin bent on revenge. His searing performance won acclaim at the Asian Film Festival, where officials pronounced him ‘Asian Movie King’ in 1970. The son of Mandarin movie stars, Chiang had been a child actor in notable features (e.g. Li Hanhsiang’s The Kingdom and the Beauty [1959]) before finding work as a stuntman at the Shaw Brothers studio. In 1969, director Zhang Che promoted Chiang to contract player, initiating a period of remarkable productivity that resulted in over forty films between 1969 and 1975. These films would cement Chiang’s place in Hong Kong cinema history as both star player and director. Vengeance came early in Chiang’s Shaw Brothers career, and its success gained him the firm’s highest salary for actors in this period (HK$0.5 m p.a.). Aged 23, the Shanghainese native was now a major star of Mandarin cinema. For five years Chiang worked almost exclusively for Zhang Che, crystallizing his star persona in a score of historical wuxia pian, kung fu sagas, and contemporary dramas. From these films emerge a set of definitive star traits: sometimes prodigiously smart (The Water Margin [1972]), at other times streetwise and hip (Dead End [1969]), the Chiang protagonist is supremely valiant, often enigmatic, and typically prone to solitary wayfaring (Have Sword, Will Travel [1969]; The Wandering Swordsman [1969]). Not least, he is invariably a swordplay adept and martial arts maven, proficient in all fighting styles. Unlike his contemporaries, Chiang lacked the Olympian build that incarnated Zhang Che’s ethos of yanggang (‘staunch masculinity’), and his wiry, swift physique was exploited for nimbleness rather than brute force. Other Shaw heroes executed mostly grounded combat, but Chiang’s fights were developed for leaps, spins, and acrobatic dives, showcasing aerial abilities honed in the stunt trade. Amplified by visual effects and wirework, such scenes endowed Chiang with a graceful, otherworldly agility. To all these traits Chiang brought a performance style at once naturalistic and expressive. Outlandish plots enabled him to register contrastively subtle gestures, but still he cultivated a more dynamic expressivity than his facially stoic peers. In several films including Have Sword, Will Travel, Chiang’s angular visage conveys a tough armature periodically undercut by disarming, tender shifts in expression. Most effective is his deftly calibrated grin, a performative trademark recruited variously to nettle a malevolent warlord (The Heroic Ones [1970]), defy hordes of assailants (The Wandering Swordsman), or cheerfully greet his own death (The Duel [1971]). Alternately breezy and brooding, Chiang evolves a mercurial persona unparalleled among Zhang’s male players. This image coalesced in plots fashioned out of martial virtues. Many of Zhang Che’s films affirm traditional principles of chivalry, loyalty and yi (righteousness), emphasizing communal cooperation over base individualism. Accordingly, David Chiang’s lone wanderer often finds purpose and salvation by means of newfound comradeship (The New One-Armed Swordsman [1971]; The Deadly Duo [1971]). Zhang Che’s Young People (1972) imports martial values into the contemporary campus film. Three classmates enter a string of sports contests but must overcome personal ambition and mutual rivalry to reach victory. Chiang’s kung fu prodigy rallies his peers, espousing the importance of teamwork. At the climax, all three protagonists clutch trophies, the film promoting achievement through collective effort. Sometimes the stress on collectivity assumes a distinctly patriotic cast, as when the heroes suffer death to advance the national cause in Trilogy of Swordsmanship (1972) and 7-Man Army (1976). Zhang Che’s martial precepts also motivate tropes of revenge and betrayal. In several early films, Chiang falls prey to duplicitous allies impelled by personal gain. His discovery of these transgressions forms the mainspring of a revenge plotline or launches a stretch of sustained combat. Deferring if not defying death, Chiang’s hoodwinked hero is subjected to some of the most memorably macabre ordeals in the Shaw Brothers canon (dismemberment in The Heroic Ones; disembowelment in The Blood Brothers [1973]). Yet the topos of deception seldom signifies callowness or credulity in the Chiang character. Rather it reinforces

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The Blood Brothers , Shaw Brothers/The Kobal Collection.

Chiang’s embodiment of martial virtues: pledged to fraternal allegiance, he puts unconditional faith in his comrades. Throughout the 1970s Zhang Che would sharpen Chiang’s persona while mapping this martial framework onto several generic trends, including the wuxia pian, jingoistic military films, shaolin kung fu sagas, and contemporary youthpics. Zhang’s stress on ethical bonds and betrayals lends itself to Manichean plotting, but often the David Chiang figure is a source of moral complexity. His essential altruism might be qualified by ambivalent traits of mercilessness (The Water Margin), insouciance (The Boxer from Shantung [1971]), or casual hedonism (Friends [1974]). Alternatively, social circumstances can put his morality into flux. In the Korean War drama Four Riders (1972), Chiang’s devastating apathy throws his heroic traits into relief; the film hints at a wider paralysis afflicting military veterans returned from battle. The Generation Gap (1973) forces Chiang’s young idealist into delinquency when zealous moralists – epitomized by the older generation – denounce his love for a schoolgirl. Unable to reconcile this chaste romance with traditional mores, he slides into the underworld. The film climaxes with Chiang desperately wounded, slumped in a speedboat as cops gather at the wharf. The closing aerial shot of his rotating boat offers a neat emblem of social

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subjugation (and an echo of the film’s musical ode to the generations, ‘All my life’s a circle’). Slightly more uplifting is The Singing Killer (1970). Falsely accused of a theft, Chiang’s reformed gangster turns fugitive, and the outlaw life tests his moral fortitude. Here again, social pressures provoke moral change. The Singing Killer charts the reformed criminal’s struggle for social acceptance, exonerating him only at the climax. These ostensibly apolitical films do more than qualify Zhang Che’s alleged Manicheism. By exploring how social forces degrade Chiang’s innate decency, they also bear the thrust of social critique. The early 1970s saw the growth of kung fu cinema, tipping the wuxia pian into decline. Accelerating this shift was a fresh crop of stars whose mastery of Chinese martial arts steered Hong Kong films toward physically authentic spectacle. David Chiang lacked the physical excellence of Bruce Lee, and fought to preserve wuxia ingredients. ‘I tried to keep doing swordfighting scenes,’ he says. ‘But the market wouldn’t allow it’ (quoted in Bettinson 2011). Another stimulus for change was newcomer Alexander Fu Sheng, whose persona blended physical prowess with the boyish pertness that was Chiang’s stock-in-trade. Partnered with Chiang by mentor Zhang Che, Fu Sheng furnished puckish performances that drove Chiang into solemn, fairly standard characterizations (Five Shaolin Masters [1974]; 7-Man Army; Shaolin Temple [1976]). As new industry trends and talents came forth, Chiang diversified his output. An alliance between Shaw Brothers and Hammer Films (The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires [Roy Ward Baker, 1974]) afforded a chance for international fame, but the film’s systematic blend of house styles proved too eccentric for mass tastes. More successfully, Chiang launched his directorial career, turning out features for producer Zhang Che; and he took roles in films other than Zhang’s, several of which deepened his persona in surprising ways. Chiang followed Zhang Che into directing, but he shrewdly avoided his mentor’s favoured wuxia pian. Instead he displayed the pluralism common to Hong Kong filmmakers, signing two films radically polarized in temperament, technique and tone. The Drug Addicts (1974) fosters a level of realism not found in Zhang Che’s contemporary dramas, utilizing nonprofessional actors and actual locations. Casting its social-problem plotline in harsh chiaroscuro, the film conjures a somber atmosphere commensurate with the plot’s bleak didacticism. Chiang enlivens the moralistic story with kung fu set-pieces, but resists the euphoric overtones that Zhang Che brings to such scenes. Like The Generation Gap and Friends, The Drug Addicts meshes popular appeals with social comment, exploiting topical issues to motivate both character complexity and genre payoffs. Sharply different is A Mad World of Fools (1974). Elevating artifice above authenticity, it envelops eccentric characters in caricatured, colour-saturated mise-en-scène. The film reflexively masquerades as bawdy sex farce, but its ten vignettes are yoked to an overarching theme of false appearances. In most of the film’s raucous situations, public veneers are punctured to expose private and often sexual perversions. Yet Chiang himself – protective of his teen idol reputation – features in a pair of chaste stories, playfully skewering his own public image. In both episodes he comically deflates his heroic screen persona: first, as a feeble youth obsessed with kung fu, whose delusions of physical mastery lead him into ritual humiliation; and later, as a well-to-do kleptomaniac pilfering goods by use of a prosthetic hand, an ironic allusion to Chiang’s one-armed swordsman. Hardly of apiece, Chiang’s maiden works set the pattern for a directorial oeuvre oscillating between socially-engaged, sentimental melodramas (Silent Love [1986]; My Dear Son [1989]; Will of Iron [1991]) and apparently frivolous comedies catering to local tastes (The Legend of the Owl [1981]; Heaven Can Help [1984]; Double Fattiness [1988]). Chiang’s directorial career was precipitated by industrial shifts, as was his search for directors willing to stretch his star persona. Reunited with Li Han-hsiang, he was able to revamp his image to startling effect. Chiang’s teenage eunuch in The Empress Dowager (1975) has a servile timidity far removed from the unflappable brashness prized by

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Zhang Che. The film’s plot is built out of crippling dissensions within the Qing regime, and Li steeps his story in the persecutions and stratagems pervading the court hierarchy. Through this intrigue moves Eunuch Kou (Chiang), whose friendship with sickly young emperor Kuang Xu (Ti Lung) agitates both the ranking eunuchs and the dowager empress (Lisa Lu). As Kou falls privy to mounting treachery, his imposed quiescence grows unsustainable; at last he protests on Kuang Xu’s behalf, but the dowager puts the eunuch to death for insurrection. Devoid of wuxia elements, The Empress Dowager provides Chiang a wholly dramatic role and spotlights a performance of considerable pathos. Furnishing sidelong glances, stooped gait, and furtive stance, he presents an emasculated hsing-chen (palace servant) caught between deference and defiance. Vocally, the actor adopts upward inflections and raised pitch to denote both youth and servitude. (‘Voice doubling’ was common in these years, but Li urged Chiang to dub his own dialogue.) In the shattering denouement, Kou’s impassioned speech – sustained in the director’s characteristic close-up – allows Chiang’s expressive talents full play, steadily reaching a pitch of anguished emotion. Preserving the moral virtue at the heart of Chiang’s persona, The Empress Dowager at once reworks his star image and showcases his most piercing, poignant performance. Other directors rang robust variations on Chiang’s image. Pao Hsueh-li adapted the actor’s impish traits for light comedy in several diverse films (The Imposter [1975]; The Taxi Driver [1975]; Blooded Treasury Fight [1979]). Chor Yuen cast him as a demented wuxia exponent in Death Duel (1977). And Chiang saddled himself with lamentable fighting ability in The Condemned (David Chiang, 1976). By the late 1970s kung fu comedies were flourishing, but Chiang characteristically bucked the trend, favouring historical spectacles distinguished by elaborate plotting. The plotlines of The One-Armed Swordsmen (co-directed by Chiang, 1976), Strife for Mastery (Raymond Lui, 1977), The Red Phoenix (Tyrone Hsu, 1978), Shaolin Handlock (Ho Meng-hua, 1978), Shaolin Mantis (Lau Kar-leung, 1978), and Murder Plot (Chor Yuen, 1979) turn on narrative snares, reversals, and tart revelations to mount satisfying complex intrigues. Still, several historical dramas bear the hallmarks of kung fu comedy (Magnificent Wanderers [Zhang Che, 1976]; Shaolin Abbot [Ho Meng-hua, 1979]). At last acceding to market forces, Chiang took the genre as a further opportunity to diversify. Eric Tsang’s The Challenger (1979) proved a landmark, the first of several irreverent comedies to travesty Chiang’s valiant traits. Now Chiang’s altruism is tempered by avarice, with braggadocio passed off as bravery. Sizing up an opponent, Chiang releases a deceptively full-blooded battle cry before sprinting away at full pelt. Here, as in The Loot (Eric Tsang, 1980), the actor adopts an expansive playing style motivated by his character’s antic raffishness. Consolidating Chiang’s move into comedy was his Legend of the Owl, a delirious burlesque of the Mission: Impossible TV series. Against handsomely-mounted palatial sets, Chiang stages outlandish action laced with film references: imperial fowls recite royal edicts, plummet from treetops, and explode out of human bodies with the splashy elan of Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979); a wuxia duel swaps swords for lightsabers, embellished by the score from Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977); and the protagonists’ accidental heroics are thinly underscored by a feeble Mission: Impossible refrain. In its scattershot use of cinematic allusions and absurdist humour, this ingenious comedy looks ahead to the parodic films of Stephen Chow Sing-Chi. No longer under contract to Shaws, Chiang spent the 1980s alternating between rival firms Cinema City and D&B Films. As director, he assembled a repertory of players (Lydia Shun, Bill Tung, Maggie Cheung, Jacky Cheung) and honed an unobtrusive visual style offset by occasional flourishes of technique (such as Silent Love’s sweeping reverse-tracking shot through a recreation hall). His contemporary comedies and dramas cohere around class antagonisms, affirming familial relationships over materialism and upward mobility. Invariably, the characters’ class disparities lead to social embarrassment,

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mined by Chiang for humour (Double Fattiness) and pathos (My Dear Son, a patriarchal retooling of Stella Dallas [King Vidor, 1937]). Several efforts (The Wrong Couples [1987]; When East Goes West [1990]) thematize displacement from home, resonating with a Hong Kong public braced for recession to China; invariably, Chiang reinforces the importance both of family and of Hong Kong’s distinct heritage. Much of Chiang’s acting in these years was done in high-concept comedies, often organized around middle-class lifestyles, and informed by a vogue for humorous ghost stories (Till Death Do We Scare [1982]; Where’s Officer Tuba? [1986]). Increasingly such films employed self-conscious allusion to Chiang’s Shaw Brothers history, and soon the actor was coveted by young directors keen to memorialize wuxia cinema. Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China II (1992) endows Chiang’s martyred rebel with the patriotic resolve found in Zhang Che’s historical sagas; and Chiang’s reformed crook of The Singing Killer and The Savage Five (Zhang Che, 1974) finds renewed expression in the 1980s gunplay film (From Here to Prosperity [Philip Chan, 1986]; Just Heroes [John Woo and Wu Ma, 1989]). Allusionism pervades Daniel Lee’s What Price Survival (1994), The Master Swordsman (2001) and Star Runner (2003), all nostalgic paeans to 1970s Shaw Brothers cinema. In the former films, Chiang portrays veteran swordsmen emotionally abraded by personal tragedy. Mournfully taciturn, he poignantly conveys both the stoicism and the vulnerability of the aging warrior. So thoroughly does Hong Kong cinema embrace allusion that entire films are apt for unofficial appropriation. Romance-melodrama 2 Young (Derek Yee, 2005) is a virtual remake of The Generation Gap. As in the earlier film, the story pits a young man and his teenage girlfriend against a disapproving society personified by the girl’s autocratic father. After the youth is thrown in jail, he is brought before Chiang’s courtroom judge for sentencing. Chiang’s character, as ever, exemplifies moral integrity. But now Chiang represents the Establishment, recalling the moral guardians of The Generation Gap and The Young Rebel (Ti Lung, 1975) whose actions so oppress their young, misjudged protagonists. Here, however, 2 Young swerves from its progenitor: Chiang’s judge shows the boy leniency, diverting the plot from the futility presented at The Generation Gap’s climax. Through shrewd casting, the film implies that a society governed by figures such as Chiang – a cinematic exemplar of innate moral decency – can suture generational rifts and safeguard youthful promise (the boy is portrayed by Jaycee Chan, real-life son of Jackie Chan and hence inherently a youth worth saving). Most of Chiang’s late films similarly trade on his embodiment of venerated wuxia values. Latterly placed in avuncular or authoritarian roles (Look for a Star [Andrew Lau, 2009]; Election [Johnnie To, 2005]), Chiang brings seasoned gravitas to characterizations still tinged with youthful idealism. It is this complexity of performance, together with the auteurist cast of his directorial work, which distinguishes Chiang as a most exceptional figure in Chinese cinema.

Gary Bettinson Reference Bettinson, G (2011) ‘Act of Vengeance: An Interview with David Chiang,’ Post Script 31:1, Fall, 3–11.

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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Columbia/Sony/The Kobal Collection/Chuen, Chan Kam.

three action heroes chow yun-fat

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Chow Yun-fat is one of the most successful Chinese stars of the past three decades. Born in 1955 in Hong Kong’s Lamma Island, Chow was the youngest son in a lower-class family. Unable to finish his studies, Chow worked in a variety of odd jobs before being recruited by Television Broadcast Ltd. (TVB) in 1973. After graduating, Chow became a TVB-contracted actor and gradually achieved TV stardom. He also started to develop his career in the film industry. However, his early work in the film industry was not met with much acclaim and he failed to achieve major cinematic stardom until 1986 when he starred in John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, a huge commercial and critical success. Since then, Chow has established his image as a leading star in the Hong Kong film industry. In 1995, Chow migrated to Hollywood, and subsequently moved into the transnational Chinese cinema. During his early acting career, Chow developed a star image as a modern xiaosheng (a type of good-looking and romantic young male character from traditional Chinese theatre and literature) through his performances in such TV series as Man in the Net (1979), Family Feeling (1980), The Bund (1980) and The Fate (1981). The modernized and westernized characteristics of Chow’s xiaosheng image revealed that although typecasting in the Hong Kong TV industry still emphasized a leading man’s appearance and heterosexual attractiveness, some key features of this type of role, such as his attitudes to women, lifestyle and social mobility, started to shift during this period. Chow’s lower-class family background and his career progress from walk-on actor to popular TV star provided local citizens with a view of a young Hong Konger changing his fate step by step. Accordingly, the popularity of Chow’s xiaosheng image not only met local people’s desire for success, but more importantly fulfilled local citizens’ perceptions of themselves and their society. Chow’s TV career had a great impact on his later stardom. This was not only because his experiences in the local TV industry had created a sense of intimacy with the local audience, but also because this exposure opened the film industry’s door to him. While working in Hong Kong, Chow starred in more than seventy films across a wide range of film genres, including melodramas, action films, comedies, thrillers and westerns, and he created many iconic screen characters in films such as A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986), City on Fire (Ringo Lam, 1987), An Autumn’s Tale (Mabel Cheung, 1987), All About Ah Long (Johnnie To, 1989), The Killer (John Woo, 1989) and God of Gamblers (Wong Jing, 1989). Chow’s performances in these years generated a huge profit for the studios, and earned him numerous awards, including two Golden Horse Awards for his roles in Hong Kong 1941 (Leung Po-Chi, 1984) and An Autumn’s Tale, and three Hong Kong Film Awards for his performances in A Better Tomorrow, City on Fire, and All About Ah Long. Indeed, many of his films of this period were both commercial and critical successes. Among his film roles, Chow is probably most familiar to many people for his screen image as an action hero, particularly those in the heroic bloodshed films directed by John Woo and Ringo Lam. In many of his action films, such as A Better Tomorrow, Prison on Fire I and II (Ringo Lam, 1987 and 1991), The Killer, City on Fire, and Hard Boiled (John Woo, 1992), brotherhood is a key theme. Unlike many Hollywood-produced ‘buddy’ films, such as Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987), Se7en (David Fincher, 1995), and Miami Vice (Michael Mann, 2006), in which partnerships often develop between members of the police force, Chow’s characters often develop friendships with men on the opposite side of the law. In The Killer, Chow plays a good-hearted assassin who wins the respect of Li Ying (Danny Lee), an Inspector who has sworn to bring him to justice. In City on Fire, Chow’s undercover cop develops a friendship with the criminal Fu (Danny Lee), and in Hard Boiled – where the buddy relationship develops between two cops – Chow’s Inspector Yuen (aka Tequila) starts to bond with Tony (Tony Leung Chiuwai), an undercover cop who appears to be a dour gang member in an underworld organization, even before Tony discloses his true identity. During the process of developing

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their homosocial relationships, Chow’s action heroes often embody a man’s sense of loyalty, justice, honour and self-sacrifice. Indeed, many of Chow’s action heroes point to the hybrid nature of a male Hong Konger’s cultural identity and the instability of men’s position within modern society. Unlike the action films of stars like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li, in which good and evil are clearly defined and law and order are always re-established at the end, Chow’s action films frequently position the star between culturally-defined moral standards and statutory obligations in urban Hong Kong. In addition, in many of Chow’s aforementioned action films, his screen characters, as Julian Stringer (2004: 453) argues, appropriate women’s gendered right to tears and feeling, while simultaneously preserving a virile, active masculinity. The complex cinematic representation of screen masculinity and cultural identity inscribed in Chow’s star image is deemed by many film scholars as a demonstration of Hong Kong cinema’s imagination of the local anxiety associated with the city’s return to the PRC in 1997 (Cheung and Ku [2004: 411], Pang [2005: 45], and Stringer [2004: 450]). However, to many Hong Kong citizens, the construction of Chow’s star image extends far beyond the action cinema. Since the release of A Better Tomorrow, Chow has not only become a major star in the Hong Kong film market, but also one of the most indemand celebrities for local businesses and organizations. Following A Better Tomorrow, a range of companies invited Chow to endorse their products or services, which included menswear and accessories, jewellery, mobile phones, food and charity services. Chow’s star image as fashion and lifestyle icon, together with his huge commercial popularity, illustrated the emergence of a new middle-class and mass-consumption culture in Hong Kong society during this time. Moreover, Chow’s performances in local comedies such as The Diary of a Big Man (Chor Yuen, 1988), The Eighth Happiness (Johnnie To, 1988), The Greatest Lover (Clarence Ford, 1988), and Once a Thief (John Woo, 1991) mirror the social mentality during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In these films, Chow’s characters are frequently shown travelling around the world, accessing or owning items symbolically related to foreign culture, yet simultaneously affirming their cultural roots in Hong Kong. All of this echoes Hong Kong’s further transformation into a cosmopolitan metropolis with its own significant status in the world. Despite the fact that Chow developed his career across different genres and media industries, he has rarely played a premodern character in Hong Kong cinema. Frequently appearing as a modern urban citizen, Chow has represented the complexity of social mobility in Hong Kong, and become a public face for the city’s new identity as a global financial and trade centre. Although the Chinese associations have never been completely removed from Chow’s star image, the media construction of his image has centered mostly on the influences of global contact, western culture and modernization, which conveys Hong Kong cinema’s (and society’s) intention of distinguishing the city from China’s traditional agricultural society. The early-1990s’ boom in local cinema production not only made Hong Kong one of the most important cities for film production in Asia, but also introduced many local talents into the global film market. In 1995, Chow expanded his career into Hollywood. Like many other Chinese stars who developed their career in Hollywood during this period, Chow was introduced to the global commercial audience as an action star. However, his non-action image was soon to be accepted in the West in the Hollywood romantic epic Anna and the King (Andy Tennant, 1999). This film made Chow one of the very few Asian male stars to be cast as a romantic lead in the history of Hollywood cinema. Although Chow’s Hollywood roles, especially in The Replacement Killers (Antoine Fuqua, 1998) and The Corruptor (James Foley, 1999), are still criticized by some film scholars as confirming Hollywood’s imagination of Orientals (Marchetti [2001: 37, 52] and Lo [2004: 69]), Chow’s star image as a creative professional and sexually-attractive figure has invited

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public debate about the cinematic representation of Chinese men’s gender and racial identification. Nevertheless, the opportunities for a Chinese star working in Hollywood were limited in the 1990s, and remain so today. As a result, Chow partially returned to Chinese-language cinema at the end of the decade. Although Chow has starred in only a small number of Hollywood films, his transnational popularity and experience of working in different film industries, particularly Hollywood, is highly valued within the increasingly transnational Chinese-language industry, which clearly has ambitions of entering the global market through various genres besides those of action and martial arts. In contrast to the construction of Chow’s early star image, which emphasized the influence of global contact, western culture, and modernization on Hong Kong citizens’ social mentality and lifestyle, the media focus on Chow’s star image is gradually shifting to that of Chineseness as his career grows ever more transnational. In recent years, Chow has become increasingly involved with the production of films set in historical Asia, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000), Curse of the Golden Flower (Zhang Yimou, 2006) and Confucius (Hu Mei, 2010). The highlighted Chineseness subsequently inscribed within Chow’s star persona to some degree positions him as an ideal man for promoting both transnational (commercial) Chinese cinema and traditional Chinese values, both domestically and overseas. As director Hu Mei has revealed, one of the studio’s main reasons for selecting Chow to play Confucius (among the best-known Chinese men in history) is due to his personal characteristics: the humbleness, dignity, grace, self-control, and capacity for hard work and self-improvement inscribed in Chow’s public image (Sun 2009, Yang 2009 and Wen 2009). Such discourse surrounding Chow’s star image clearly correlates with the message delivered by the City University of Hong Kong’s public address upon awarding Chow an honorary doctoral degree in 2001, and with a chapter included in a school textbook in 2003, both of which claimed that it was Chow’s ‘hard work,’ ‘diligence,’ ‘humility,’ ‘determination,’ ‘filial respect,’ ‘life-long learning,’ ‘self-improvement,’ and ‘upright character’ that have made him a role-model for young students and how they should live and learn (Cheng 2001 and Qi Si zhongxue yuwen keben/Qi Si Secondary School Textbook of Chinese 2003). The star qualities highlighted on these occasions contribute to Chow’s international recognition, and strongly correspond with the virtues traditionally appreciated in Chinese culture. Another reason for Chow’s receipt of honours is his long-running career achievement and transnational presence. His increasingly Sinicized star image is used to promote Chinese values not only to a domestic audience but also to audiences not yet versed in Chinese culture. The renewed attention on Chow’s Chineseness is to some degree suggestive of China’s desire to participate progressively in global affairs and to extend its influence over other cultures and ideologies.

Lin Feng References Cheng, Che-ching (2001) ‘Honorary Doctor of Letters: Mr CHOW Yun-fat,’ Address at the 16th Congregation, Hong Kong, City University of Hong Kong, 14 November. Cheung, Esther MK & Ku, Jamie TC (2004) ‘Gendered and Sexualized Bodies in Hong Kong Cinema,’ in Esther MK Cheung & Chu Yiu-wai (eds), Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 400−20. Lo, Kwai-Cheung (2004) ‘Double Negations: Hong Kong Cultural Identity in Hollywood’s Transnational Representations,’ in Esther MK Cheung & Yiu-wai Chu (eds), Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 59−84.

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Marchetti, Gina (2001) ‘Hollywood’s Construction, Deconstruction, and Reconstruction of the “Orient”,’ in Roger Garcia (ed), Out of the Shadows: Asians in American Cinema, Milano: Edizioni Olivares, pp. 37−57. Pang, Laikwan (2005) ‘Post-1997 Hong Kong Masculinity,’ in Laikwan Pang & Day Wong (eds), Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 35−55. Qi Si zhongxue yuwen keben/Qi Si Secondary School Textbook of Chinese (2003), Level 1, No. 2, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Stringer, Julian (2004) ‘“Your Tender Smiles Give Me Strength”: Paradigms of Masculinity in John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow and The Killer,’ in Esther MK Cheung & Chu Yiu-wai (eds), Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 437−58. Sun, Linlin (2009) ‘Hu Mei tan Confucius xuan jue biao zhun; Chow Yun-fat fu he de yi shuang xin’/‘Hu Mei Comments on the Cast of Confucius; Chow Yun-fat Has Both of the De [Ethics, Morals and Virtues] and Yi [Arts and Skills],’ 17 March, http://news. xinhuanet.com/ent/2009-03/17/content_11022770.htm. Accessed 2 January 2009. Yang, Hao (2009) ‘Hu Mei tan xuanjue; Chow Yun-fat yi qizhi qusheng’/‘Hu Mei Comments on the Cast; Chow Wins for His Charisma,’ 31 March, http://yule.sohu. com/20090331/n263106966.shtml. Accessed 2 January 2009. Wen, Jun (2009) ‘Weishenme yong Chow Yun-fat yan Kongzi? You bu ketidaixing’/‘Why Cast Chow as Confucius? He is Irreplaceable!,’ 13 March, http://wenjuanvip.blog.sohu. com/112172481.html. Accessed 2 January 2009.

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The Blood Brothers, Shaw Brothers/The Kobal Collection.

three action heroes ti lung

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Ti Lung is one of Hong Kong cinema’s most distinguished actors. He has worked in film and television for over forty years and although he has recently announced his intention to retire, he is still actively involved in various roles. After achieving stardom in the films of Zhang Che, most notably co-starring with David Chiang in the martial-arts genre, his career waned in the late 1970s and early 1980s until he returned with a vengeance as the leading star of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986). Although that film and its sequel is usually associated with the meteoric rise of Chow Yun-fat, a close examination of the credits reveals that Ti Lung is actually its main star. This is natural within the contemporary context of Hong Kong cinema because of the actor’s association with Zhang Che and John Woo’s role as assistant director on many productions, especially The Blood Brothers (1973) which featured one of Ti’s most interesting roles. With the passing years, Ti Lung has gravitated from leading star to reliable character actor whose roles still maintain indelible traces of honour and endurance, features that distinguished his star persona in his heyday. Significantly, one of his recent roles has been playing the legendary Kwan-Yu in Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon (Daniel Lee, 2008) (another cinematic adaptation, like John Woo’s Red Cliff [2008-09], of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms), starring veterans Andy Lau, Sammo Hung and newcomer Maggie Q. Still living in the same mansion he bought decades ago near Shaw Brothers studios, he regularly attends retrospectives as a living legend of that era with fellow star veterans. Born in Guangdong province in 1946 and educated in Hong Kong’s Eton School, Tan Furong had to terminate his studies at the age of 11 to support his family. He trained as a tailor and entered the Shaw Brothers Nanguo Acting Training Class in 1968, less for any interest in a film career than to learn martial-arts techniques such as Wing Chun for protection from street gangs. Auditioning for the leading role in Dead End (Zhang Che, 1969) at the suggestion of Zhang Che, he not only succeeded in starring in this modern youth drama that also co-starred David Chiang, but first appeared in a small role in the director’s sequel to his most famous film, Return of the One-Armed Swordsman (1969), as foolish youth Lu Hung, succumbing to the deadly charms of female assassin Thousand Fingers. This led to a Shaw Brothers contract and his continuing association with Zhang Che and David Chiang. During this period, Ti Lung continued to study with renowned martial-arts master Chu Wan, a specialist in Wing Chun, who described him as having ‘the advantages of a strong body, intelligence, good footwork, and he also practices diligently.’ These qualities would serve him well for his later roles, especially when he mastered Thai boxing for his role in Zhang Che’s Duel of Fists (1971). When Jimmy Wong Yu ended his association with Zhang Che and left Shaw Brothers to pursue a solo career as actor and director in Taiwan, Zhang decided to split his heroic role in two by having Ti Lung and David Chiang complement each other in a series of films. During the 1970s, both co-starred in several Zhang Che films, each actor balancing the other’s performance. Ti Lung usually provided a more restraining force to Chiang’s acting style in the same way as a straight man complements a comedian. Following Dead End, they both co-starred in Have Sword, Will Travel (1969), Vengeance and The Heroic Ones (both 1970), Duel of Fists, The New One-Armed Swordsman, The Duel and The Deadly Duo (all 1971), The Angry Guest, The Water Margin and Four Riders (all 1972), Blood Brothers (1973), Five Shaolin Masters (1974), and 7-Man Army (1976) among many others. Not all were set in the same historical period. Duel of Fists was set in modern Thailand while Four Riders featured Chinese army veterans in post-war Korea. Others, such as Vengeance and The Duel were located in the early twentieth century while The Empress Dowager (1975), directed by Li Han-hsiang, dealt with intrigue in the court of Ci Xi, with Ti Lung playing the weak heir-apparent and David Chiang his loyal servant. Set in 1925, Vengeance broke a long tradition of showing Beijing Opera performers passively accepting warlord oppression. As Ti’s Kuan Yu-Lou dies in a bloody teahouse ambush leaving him blind and disemboweled, Zhang intercuts his stylized

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heroic-death theatrical performances with the brutal circumstances of his actual death. Playing the vengeful brother, Chiang later settles scores according to the director’s inimitable display of heroic bloodshed. Usually Ti and Chiang played heroes who respected each other, as in The New One-Armed Swordsman, or antagonists who admired each other’s skills. But Ti decided to break the pattern in Blood Brothers by pleading with Zhang to play the villain in what is definitely one of the most distinguished of his early roles. Based on an actual historical incident in the latter part of the Qing Dynasty, Blood Brothers revealed hidden talents within this young actor. Playing ambitious soldier and future provincial governor Ma Hsin I, Ti displays brooding intensity as a character dominated by a guilty passion for the wife of his blood brother, played by Chen Kuan-tai. Unable to handle the consequences of his adulterous affair, he arranges an assassination knowing full well how this will affect his ambition and honour. When later confronted by his other blood brother (Chiang), he kicks over furniture when realizing the enormity of his intended crime, but does nothing to prevent it happening. This gesture gives a more revealing insight into his character than the final climactic fight he has with Chiang. Blood Brothers provided a rare opportunity for Ti Lung to play a role against the grain of his usual star persona, and gained him the Best Actor Award that year. However, Ti Lung’s career also flourished in the films he made with director Chor Yuen, who encouraged him to explore other diverse acting talents that Zhang Che never did. The Magic Blade (1976), The Sentimental Swordsman (1977), The Soul of the Sword (1978), and The Kung-Fu Instructor (1979) used him to good advantage. He also acted in and directed two contemporary socially-aware films in the mid-1970s: Young Lovers on Flying Wheels (1974) and The Young Rebel (1975). Like David Chiang in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974), Ti must have hoped that a similar Hammer-Shaw Brothers collaboration, Shatter (1974), would bring him international stardom. But despite his good command of English, excellent martialarts abilities in a film making superb use of Hong Kong locations, the production faced many problems. As well as the fading star presence of Stuart Whitman, who proved unable to carry the film, problems between director Monte Hellman and Hammer producer Michael Carreras led to Hellman’s suspension and Carreras taking over direction. Ti Lung was reportedly upset with the film’s failure to launch him into greater stardom. Although continuing to work steadily throughout the late 1970s and first half of the 1980s, his star power began to wane. He left Shaw Brothers in 1985. Zhang Che reunited him with David Chiang and other stars he had helped to make famous in his Taiwanese production Shanghai 13 (1984) and both appeared in Just Heroes (1989), a benefit film co-directed by John Woo and Wu Ma in honour of their master. However, John Woo aided his screen comeback in A Better Tomorrow. Playing older brother Triad Ho to his younger law-enforcement brother Kit, Ti has stated in interviews that he based the relationship on his friendship with Shaw Brothers actor Alexander Fu Sheng, who died tragically young in a car accident. Despite his gangster role he delivered an outstanding performance, playing a version of one of Zhang Che’s knightly heroes cast adrift in a vicious twentieth-century Hong Kong capitalist jungle. He repeated the role in Woo’s sequel A Better Tomorrow II (1987), wielding a sword in the climactic battle, evoking his earlier roles in the films of Zhang Che and Chor Yuen. Ti Lung also appeared again with Chow Yun-fat in the 1988 Cinema City productions City War (Sun Chung, 1988) and Tiger on the Beat (Lau Kar-leung, 1988). The first saw him in an uncharacteristic role as volatile old-school cop Ken (whose explosive temper appeared to support stories about Ti’s behaviour on set) against Chow’s more diplomatic character, while the second featured him in a brief scene matching his martial-arts prowess against that of newcomer Conan Lee. During the previous year, Ti Lung played the James Cagney role in Kirk Wong’s remake of Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) − True

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Colours (1986). Set in Hong Kong of 1960 (following a brief prologue five years before), the film mostly followed the original narrative with one key exception. Whereas viewers of the Warner Brothers classic remain in doubt as to whether Rocky actually goes yellow or puts on a performance, the final scenes leave Hong Kong viewers in no doubt that Ho Lung (Ti Lung) is a real hero. He agrees to his minister friend Robert’s (Raymond Wong) request to deter his adolescent followers from imitating him by appearing to be a coward on the way to the death house. But, unlike the original film, we actually see Ti Lung act the coward rather than a shadow on the wall, and once he is safely inside the execution chamber he reverts to his real noble character and proceeds on his ‘last mile.’ As Robert says to Ho’s disappointed followers, ‘A real hero does shed tears.’ The final freeze-frame close-up of Ti Lung eloquently affirms this, showing him resilient as he approaches his imminent execution. If there were any justice in the world, Ti Lung’s role as Sonny Koo in Derek Yee’s People’s Hero (1987) would have received more acclaim than it actually did. Reworking Al Pacino’s role in Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975), the actor plays a distinctive variation on his character in A Better Tomorrow as an honorable person caught up in a corrupt twentieth-century world but now totally doomed, according to the grim determinism that characterizes many of director Yee’s better films. Sonny Koo is a wanted criminal, caught up in a bank robbery organized by two inexperienced punks. Trapped with the hostages, he takes over the situation and demands a safe passage for himself as well as the release of his girlfriend from prison. Ti Lung delivers a performance that is complex and multifaceted, arguably the best of his entire career. Beginning with friendly overtures to the hostages, he cares also for a wounded Sikh guard before circumstances make him dangerous. He then threatens to shoot the hostages if his demands are not met and makes prospective victims play a game to decide who will be first. It turns out to be a bratty schoolgirl. When she badmouths her mother, the horrified Koo asks where she received her education and nearly executes her for being a disobedient daughter before other events intervene. Despite his criminal background, Koo obviously reveres the strict precepts of Confucius and nearly carries them to their most deadly and logical conclusions. He manages to get into an outside van with some hostages but his girlfriend refuses to join him. This is one of the most touching moments in the film, as Koo realizes that his girlfriend has never shared his values and he is now totally alone in the world. Here Ti Lung makes what could have been a maudlin scene work by employing the same type of acting skills that he used in the final scenes of True Colours. After finally realizing the difference between his romantic yearnings and reality, he stages his own execution at the hands of the police. His bloody and brutal massacre at the hands of police gunmen finally gains him full audience sympathy, making him a real ‘people’s hero’ in the fullest sense of the term. Sonny Koo represents Ti Lung’s greatest performance in 1980s Hong Kong cinema, complementing the very different type of role he had undertaken in Blood Brothers a decade before. The box-office failure of this film again deeply affected the actor. After appearing as an honorable assassin in A Killer’s Blues (Raymond Lee, 1990) and a light-hearted version of Sonny Koo in the sentimental comedy Run, Don’t Walk (Wong Chung, 1989), his next accomplished performance was as the honest cop in First Shot (David Lam, 1993). Chosen by the British Governor in 1973 to head an anti-corruption team investigating Triad involvement in the Hong Kong police, Ti Lung’s character Wong Yat-chun (and the actor, by implication) receives praise by the colonial establishment for leading a dedicated team (including Maggie Cheung and Simon Yam) against powerful Triad Luk, played by Waise Lee. But, like Ken in City War, Wong’s family finds his dedication difficult to live with. That same year, Ti co-starred again with Maggie Cheung in The Bare-Footed Kid as fugitive artist Tuan Ching-yuan. In this period drama, his final scenes involve teaching Aaron Kwok moves that his father once taught him. It is a poignant film

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again revealing the actor’s skill in showing a character attempting to maintain honour in life-defying situations. He also distinguished himself in Blade of Fury (Sammo Hung, 1993) as progressive patriot Tan Szu-tung, whose character embodied the best Chinese qualities of honour and justice. As the years passed, Ti Lung’s performances developed this father-figure tradition, attempting to either teach the younger generation or use initiative in favour of justice rather than the letter of the law. His role as Wong Fei-hong’s father Wong Kei-ying in Drunken Master II (Lau Kar-leung, 1994) illustrated this in a performance showing the actor’s balanced combination of humour and seriousness. As a sympathetic cop understanding Leslie Cheung’s dilemma in The Kid (Jacob Cheung, 1999), Ti Lung again delivered a distinguished performance that earned him Best Supporting Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards. Despite appearing in television productions rather than films in recent years, Ti Lung has managed to choose roles reflecting his star values. In 1995, he appeared as Judge Bao Ching in a TVB series. The following year he repeated his First Shot performance for TVB’s ICAC Investigators and teamed up with Yuen Biao in the 1998 Righteous Guards TV soap opera. Evoking his earlier martial-arts training, Ti Lung took on the role of Wing Chun teacher Brother Lung in Star Runner (Daniel Lee, 2003) and appeared in Frozen (Derek Kwok, 2010). Carefully avoiding any appearances in Category III productions and providing a role model for younger audiences in the same way that Kwan Tak-hing did in the 1950s in his Wong Fei-hong series, one can only hope that he will finally play this role before he makes his final decision to retire. Ti Lung is one of the most long-lasting and respected stars of Hong Kong cinema, whose legacy will always remain secure in that industry.

Tony Williams

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Three Female Stars grace chang

Grace Chang (Ge Lan) was the face, body, and voice of Hong Kong Mandarin musicals from the 1950s to the mid-1960s. Her talent for singing was recognized early, and she received vocal training from childhood. She could also dance. To enhance her natural talent, she underwent whatever additional special training was required, depending upon the part, throughout her career. She remains well-known for her stirring performances in tragic Mandarin musicals and melodramas, although she had versatility and made some thrillers such as Murder in the Night (Doe Chin, 1957) and some comedies, such as the satirical Wine, Women and Money (aka Booze, Boobs, and Bucks, 1957, directed by Ma Xu Weibang) and the romantic comedy Our Dream Car (1959, directed and written by Evan Yang). Yang would be her most frequent and fruitful collaborator, on films such as Mambo Girl (1957), My Darling Sister (1959), Air Hostess (1959), Spring Song (1959), Forever Yours (1960), Sun, Moon and Star (1961, in two parts), and Because of Her (1963). Chang became a contract player for MP&GI (Motion Pictures and General Investment, Ltd, formerly, until 1957 when it became Cathay) and was there during its heyday when Robert Chung was general manager and Stephen Soong production manager. It was under their tutelage that these kinds of films thrived. Chang came of age during the golden age of Hong Kong Mandarin film production, reflective of the then-colony’s transitional period, far enough from wartime for it to be an indistinct memory and distant enough from the unrest in the 1960s to celebrate prosperity and rapid development. The films mix old and new, and eastern and western characteristics. Chang’s youthfulness would be exploited in Mambo Girl – refreshing, urban, and authentically Hong Kong. In The Wild, Wild Rose (1960, directed by Wang Tianlin), she would help revive and reinvent the ‘doomed songstress’ role first established by Zhou Xuan in the 1930s and 1940s. Chang appeared in over thirty films during an eleven-year cinematic run, retiring from movies in 1964. She also played piano and was a popular singer. She sang on the ‘Dinah Shore Show’ in the United 44  China

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States in 1959 (she was described as one of the ‘favourite entertainers of the Orient’), seen by an estimated 60 million viewers. US Capitol Records released an album of her Chinese songs in 1961. She was signed to the Pathé label, producing numerous recordings, and Pathé rereleased her albums in the 1990s. Born in Nanjing in 1934, Chang grew up in Shanghai, where she received Peking Opera training before moving with her family to Hong Kong in 1949. (Her opera training would later serve her well in several of her films in which she would perform songs from Chinese opera). She was discovered by director Bu Wancang, who enrolled her in his Taishan Acting Class. After graduating, she debuted in his Seven Sisters (also called Seven Maidens [1953]). The melodrama concerns seven village war refugees who flee to Hong Kong where their lives take different paths; reunited, they reflect and lament. Chang’s character was one whose life in Hong Kong was decadent. In this film, Chang also sang two songs, since Mandarin language films in Hong Kong during the 1950s through the mid-60s followed the stricture of ‘a song in every film.’ From the romantic melodrama Surprise (Doe Chin, 1956), in which Chang’s character murders a misperceived rival and then commits suicide, to the romance Torrents of Desire (Chiang Nan, 1958), in which childhood sweethearts fight their desires but do not prevent tragedy, songs appeared. When Chang made The Story of the Fur Coat (Tang Huang, 1956), she was relieved there were no songs included, and commented in the popular press, ‘No doubt, music can add to a film’s atmosphere, but if you insert a song into an incongruous sequence, then that’s like choosing a wrong hue from the palette.’ While it is difficult to choose among her work, two outstanding performances and films by which Chang will always be remembered are the aforementioned Mambo Girl and The Wild, Wild Rose. Mambo Girl is essentially a family melodrama musical. Kailing (Chang) is the eldest daughter in a middle-class family, with an effervescent personality and a talent for singing and dancing. A jealous girlfriend (who mistakes her as a rival for a boy’s attentions) reveals to Kailing that her parents are not her own. In crisis, Kailing goes in search of her mother, whom she finds working in a nightclub in a seedy part of town (and from whom she gets her talent). The birth mother is too ashamed to acknowledge her, and Kailing returns home to celebrate her birthday with her family, now understanding what true family means. The film (in stark black-and-white) opens with a lively mambo dance sequence, and the patterning of clothes and floor pop during the close-up of Chang’s legs dancing the mambo steps; the camera pulls back to reveal young people enjoying this new, Western dance (during the course of the film, the cha-cha is also featured). Kailing is non-sexualized and instead celebrates youth, the new, and the emergent middle class. The non-threatening domestic setting is also the family business, a toy store. Family values, modernity, and thriving commerce and prosperity are part of the optimism expressed by the story. Chang says the movie originated because she was observed skillfully dancing the mambo, so the story was tailor-made for her. There were seven musical numbers. In The Wild, Wild Rose Chang reinvents the doomed songstress for a new generation, just as director Wong invents a new form, the musical noir. A more mature part (compared to Mambo Girl), Chang’s Deng Sijia (the titular ‘Wild Rose’) is wild, flirtatious, and seductive. She literally dances her way into the life of weak pianist Liang Hanhua (Zhang Yang) in her first musical number, flirting with him, swinging her hips and taunting him, belting out the tune of the ‘Habanera’ from Bizet’s Carmen (‘Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame… Love is nothing more than a common plaything …’). Confused, the engaged former teacher has reluctantly accepted a job as pianist in the New Ritz Nightclub, even though proper people see such a locale as decadent and disreputable. Director Wang picks up on the nightclub setting of many Shanghai films and of the American films noirs of the 1940s, where gangsters rub shoulders with the mostly male clientele, employees are little people with few choices, and anything can happen and does. He exploits the blackand-white photography, along with the light and shadow of nightclub lighting blended with cigarette smoke, to create noir atmospherics. And he presents us with a femme fatale Three Female Stars 45

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who is in charge, has a heart of gold, but is doomed. There are six musical numbers in the movie, exploiting Chang’s strengths as singer and dancer. Primarily, western opera is drawn upon, besides the aforementioned Carmen, also including Verdi’s Rigoletto (‘Men who love such women are the most stupid’), Lehar’s The Merry Widow (‘When I fall in love with you someday, You will be forever in my hands’), and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly (‘I blame no one but myself’). There is also a popular song, ‘Jajambo,’ which Rose belts out when there is an immediate cut from the judiciously unseen love making of Sijia and Hanhua to a close-up of Chang, a woman irrevocably, undeniably, exuberantly, and joyfully in love. Her singing and acting chops carry the day. The musical numbers were adapted and rearranged, with modified rhythms and intact melodies, by Yao Min and Hattori Ryoichi, and the lyrics were adapted by Li Jun-ching. Chang practiced the songs with Hattori, and, for the flamenco dance number, she trained with touring Spanish dancers for several hours a day for several weeks. Also worth mention are The Girl with a Thousand Faces (Chiang Nan, 1959), Air Hostess, and Sun, Moon and Star. In The Girl with a Thousand Faces, Chang put her Chinese opera training to good effect, performing excerpts from The Garden of Muddle and Picking the Jade Bracelet as well as kunqu operatic songs. In this story, a mambo girl has aspirations of becoming an actress. Her grandmother attempts to dissuade her while her father remains ambivalent. In flashback we learn that years ago the father had loved a Chinese opera diva, but his mother disapproved of her profession, opposed their marriage, and made the singer suffer. The grandmother comes to regret her behaviour, and not only allows her granddaughter to pursue acting, but urges her son to find the diva. Chang plays two characters, both mother and daughter. Early in the story, the daughter is offered a film contract after auditioning, unknown to her family. Not of age, she must obtain her family’s approval. Chang noted that these events were similar to her own start in the business, and she believed the movie was written with her experience in mind. Ironically, former doomed songstress Zhou Xuan’s story was also brought to the screen, in Song of a Songstress (He Zhaoshang, 1947). Yet, unlike Chang’s happy ending in reel and real life, Zhou’s included a difficult childhood with foster parents, an ended marriage, and affairs with men who used her. In Air Hostess, Chang leads a cast of air hostesses (some scenes were shot in an actual Viscount cabin) through training and travel to exotic places, and the flight attendants meet eligible and handsome men (Chang finds her mate in beefcake pilot Roy Chiao). Chang’s song/dance numbers included ‘Flying Up the Sky,’ ‘Bell Tolls from the Temple,’ and ‘I Love Calypso.’ The movie showed women in a new position, caught between careers and romance. This movie was chosen to be MP&GI’s first colour film, a musical on the profession of stewardesses, then considered to be glamorous, and providing a new image for modern Chinese women. Women had the world and all it offered before them, but of course, once married they retired. Sun, Moon, and Star, like A Story of Three Loves (Wang Tianlin, 1964, in two parts), is a large scale, epic colour musical, Hong Kong’s version of the Hollywood musical but with historic background. Both films concern weak men who love strong women. The films used the same art director, Fei Bay, and screenwriter Chun Yik-foo. In Sun, Moon and Star Chang played Qiuming (Moon), the city cousin of a weak and favoured son (the male lead Zhang Yang), representing the traditional Chinese woman, both smart and submissive. The latter film was adapted from ‘Mandarin Duck and Butterfly’ author Zhang Henshui’s famous romantic novel; the style was popular across China and Hong Kong in the 1910s and 1920s, featuring tragic love stories and family conflicts. Chang played a street singer loved by a wealthy student who, through circumstances, is forced to marry a villainous warlord (Roy Chiao). She also played a double role as a modern socialite attracted to the wealthy student. In her best roles, Chang delivered a triple whammy, as a memorable actress, strong singer and dancer, and beautiful woman.

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Three Female Stars esther eng

In its issue of May 28 1941, US showbusiness ‘bible’ Variety reviewed an unusual American picture named Golden Gate Girl (1941) – noting that its maker, Esther Eng (1914−70), was China’s ‘only woman film director.’ Esther Eng (Ng Kam-Ha) was American though she was indeed Chinese cinema’s most significant female director for most of last century. She quit the business around 1949 at the age of 35, apart from her later involvement in Wu Pang’s Murder in New York Chinatown (1961). Her nine features as director (those we know) included five made in Hong Kong between 1937−39 and four in the United States/Hawaii through 1941−49. Better still, through 1944−48, she was the one woman seen to be making commercial American features between the directing careers of Dorothy Arzner (1897−1979) and Ida Lupino (1918−95). Sadly, beyond fragments of Golden Gate Girl and some scenes she directed for Murder in New York Chinatown, her entire work as producer, writer, and director of Chinese films has vanished for the present. She would find more fame as a restaurateur in New York City where the New York Times (29 June 1967) hailed her as a ‘five-foot-tall dynamo’ who had run five Manhattan restaurants, notably the ‘Esther Eng’ on Pell Street. As an afterthought, the report mentioned her ‘almost legendary’ past as an ‘international producer, director and distributor of Chinese-language films’ (McLaughlin 1967). Born, like her parents, in San Francisco1, Esther Eng would be one of ten siblings, with ancestral roots in Toy Shan county, Guangdong Province, China. She was a keen fan of movies and theatre since early childhood but her professional life therein began in 1935 when her father, Ng Yu-jat, indulged her dream of making movies by persuading business colleagues to help him co-launch Kwong Ngai [Bright Light] Talking Picture Com-

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pany with Eng on board as a producer. Kwong Ngai, ‘Americanized’ as Cathay Pictures Limited, was based in both Hollywood at 6534 Fountain Avenue and San Francisco at 1010 Washington Street, the Ng family home. For Cathay’s first venture, the feature Heartaches (1935), Eng rented space in Reliable Studios at 6048 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles. According to the Los Angeles Times (25 December 1935), Heartaches comprised nine reels, two of them in colour to show off gorgeous traditional costumes while the logbook of cinematographer Paul Ivano reveals that it was shot during 2−14 December 1935.2 Trade newspaper Film Daily (29 January 1936) advertized it as a ‘Bruce Wang-Esther Eng production’ starring Wai Kim-fong, ‘the Famous Chinese Opera Star.’ Frank Tang (Tong Dai-jung) directed Heartaches. Nevertheless it covered themes favoured in Eng’s own features, especially her first, National Heroine (1937), likewise starring her friend, Wai Kim-fong. Both pictures are examples of the ‘national defense’ genre that emerged in Shanghai’s literature and performing arts of the early 1930s whereby defense of motherland China overran such personal concerns as true love. Heartaches’ script, preserved by the New York State Archives, is still moving to read as a melodrama: a famous stage star (Wai) fears that her love for a Chinese-American pilot (Beal Wong) will weaken his resolve to fight for China in its hour of need; she secretly finances his expensive training as a pilot, yet (on her manager’s insistence) convinces him that their relationship is not serious; they separate and, when the anticipated ‘Shanghai war’ erupts, he flies to the motherland’s defense, eventually returning to the United States as a hero – and newly married to another, he learns of his ex-love’s sacrifices on his behalf as she dies heartbroken in his arms. It is a sad film about gender equality and patriotism that is typically sweetened with musical entertainment. Beginning her multifaceted career as an international producer and promoter in May 1936, Eng, with Wai, took a print of Heartaches aboard the passenger ship President Hoover, bound for Hong Kong where they disembarked on June 4. They immediately set up the film’s Hong Kong premiere for 30 June/1 July at the Queen’s Theatre in Central before exhibiting it elsewhere in the territory. Still just 22 years old, Eng prepared her first movie as director, namely, National Heroine (1937) whose ‘heroine’ enrolls in the Chinese military to prove that women are as vital to the defense of the motherland as men. It premiered in Hong Kong in March 1937 and presumably played in Guangzhou, for the ‘Kwangtung Federation of Women’s Rights’ issued a special Certificate of Merit recognizing the film’s players and the remarkable achievement of its director in honoring Chinese womanhood. That and her remaining Hong Kong pictures, dimly perceived through comments in contemporary journals, are efficiently detailed with lists of artists and crews, premiere dates and plot synopses in the indispensable Hong Kong Filmography, Vol. 1, 1913−1941 (Hong Kong Film Archive, 1997). Her second feature, 100,000 Lovers (first released on 8 March 1938) was followed by three others all made within the space of a year. They were Jealousy (15 November 1938) for which she wrote the screenplay; A Night of Romance, a Lifetime of Regret (20 November 1938), which she co-directed with Leong Wai-man and Wu Pang; and It’s a Women’s World [sic] aka The 36 Amazons (early 1939), which she co-wrote and co-directed with Lo Si. The five films were presumably later distributed internationally to ‘overseas Chinese’ audiences. Golden Gate Girl (United States, early 1941), for which Variety credited Eng as director, was possibly co-directed by Moon Kwan (Kwan Man-ching) who later claimed to be its sole director, screenwriter and editor. Fragments survive including short sequences with baby Bruce Lee (the Bruce Lee, the later martial-arts legend) as a baby version of the ‘Girl.’ Next came The Fair Lady in the Blue Lagoon (United States, 1947), the first of Eng’s last three films, all starring the same woman, Fe Fe Lee. There followed Back Street (United States, 1948), and Mad Fire, Mad Love (United States/Hawaii, 1949).

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Her final feature, Mad Fire, Mad Love, might be the key to recovering some of these lost films. Its production should be recalled by anyone now in their seventies who lived in Hawaii during July to November 1948 for it elicited commentaries, like the following in Honolulu’s Chinese press.3 As per Honolulu’s Sun Chung Kuo Po/New China Daily Press of 25 August 1948, ‘a local film being made by a Chinese woman director [Eng] from the continent [United States] is a unique event in the past 100 years of Hawaiian history.’ The same newspaper (11 November 1948) announced the completion of principal photography for Mad Fire, Mad Love begun on 14 July 1948: ‘After 3 months, Miss Eng has gone to Hollywood to do post production and make copies of the movie’ for buyers in Nanyang (including Singapore and Malaya), India, Hong Kong, Macao, Canton, Cuba, Peru and Mexico. The report provides an extensive cast list of the film. Yet today’s best summaries of films ‘made in Hawaii’ omit Mad Fire, Mad Love (for example, Robert Schmitt’s Hawaii in the Movies 1898–1959 [Honolulu: Hawaiian Historical Society, 1988]), though Honolulu’s New China Daily Press (11 November 1948) had described it as a ‘new page’ in the history of Hawaii’s Chinese community. It concerned a Chinese ship’s captain and a Hawaiian woman of Chinese descent who, for love of the captain, is inwardly torn between two cultures. The production keenly involved locals in various capacities. Esther Eng deserved far better than the lax historiography that forgot her and, from long-available evidence, should have received recognition in her lifetime. The HawaiiChinese Journal of 11 November 1948 described her as ‘the only female director in the Chinese movie world’ and as one with ‘20 films to her credit.’ So her absence in even major histories of Chinese cinema is as puzzling as that of theatre and cinema (by and large) from the numerous studies of the Chinese diaspora throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latter would illuminate the ascent of film-maker Eng and the importance of ‘overseas’ contributions to Chinese cinema as a whole. Still, recent, unexpected discoveries of old film treasures, such as the recovery in Buenos Aires of a full length version of Metropolis (1927) said to accord with director Fritz Lang’s vision, offer hope that director Eng’s films may yet surface on the planet.

Frank Bren Notes 1. McLaughlin, Kathleen (1967) ‘Industry is Up as Tourism Falls Off’, The New York Times, 29 June, p. 59. 2. From Paul Ivano’s papers filed at the Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles. 3. With thanks to Law Kar for summary translations from these 1948 articles.

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Chungking Express, Jet Tone/The Kobal Collection.

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Brigitte Lin (Ching Hsia, b. 1954) presents several problems for critics attempting to locate her star presence within one national cinema location. This Taiwanese actress is usually associated with Hong Kong cinema in terms of her roles in Peking Opera Blues (Tsui Hark, 1986), Swordsman II (Ching Siu-tung, 1992) and its sequel (Raymond Lee; Ching Siu-tung, 1993), The Bride with White Hair (Ronny Yu, 1993), Dragon Inn (Raymond Lee, 1992), and many others before her retirement. Any discussion of her career would place her in the same category as actress-director Sylvia Chang, who has achieved her most notable success in Hong Kong rather than in her own homeland Taiwan. The movement of both actresses from their homelands resembles the 1950s emigration of Australian talents to British television (such as Charles Tingwell, Ray Barrett and Vincent Ball). Similarly, the constant flow of international directors and stars to Hollywood from the silent era to the present day represents another precedent. However, before she relocated to Hong Kong in the early 1990s, Lin had already been a well-known star in her homeland, and it is a mistake to dismiss her films (as well as others made before the Taiwanese New Wave) as the equivalent of ‘le Cinema du Papa’ scorned by the Cahiers du cinéma generation. Much work remains to be done on this early phase of Taiwanese cinema, and it may be a mistake to regard this as being entirely bad as it was once fashionably said about post-war, pre-French New Wave films. The same is true for the Taiwanese films of Brigitte Lin between 1973 and 1984, many of which follow the model developed by scholar Richard Dyer in his 1979 monograph Stars, concerning how star images negotiate social contradictions. These early films form an interesting comparison to the work that Lin would do in Hong Kong. They deserve as much consideration as her later celebrated work in terms of understanding the diverse nature of Brigitte Lin’s star persona, one including the different historical and industrial domains of Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinema. During the first phase of Lin’s stardom, Taiwan was less diplomatic than it is today. Neither any criticism of the official regime nor any depiction of the dark events of its postwar activities (as depicted in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness [1989]) would have been possible. Yet, although Lin’s 1970s’ films may appear to belong to a Taiwanese version of Hollywood’s ‘mindless entertainment’ ideology, contradictory elements do appear below the surface of their various generic frameworks that deserve examination. Whilst still in college, Lin appeared in her fast starring role in Outside the Window (Sung Chuen-Sau; Yu Cheng-Chun, 1973). Based on a well-known 1963 novel by Qiong Yao, the Hong Kong-funded film version featured Lin in an accomplished performance as a high-school student who falls in love with her much older teacher. Despite temptations of becoming a nondescript adolescent weepie, the film is really a sensitive treatment of the destruction of innocent love by social forces and futile youthful fantasies. Although it focuses on individual tragedies, Outside the Window contains insightful images of an affluent but dysfunctional Taipei family and an oppressive school system. It also features a harrowing scene of marital rape after Lin’s character is forced into marriage by one of her father’s students, an act dismissed by her insensitive husband who brings her a breakfast tray the morning after. In many ways, the film represents a Taiwanese equivalent of the subversive Hollywood melodrama typified by Douglas Sirk, in which no explicit criticism of the dominant ideology can be permitted. Nevertheless, both this film and several other Lin melodramas that appeared in her initial phase of stardom are revealing both in mise en scène and performance. Lin’s later Taiwan films never reached the height of her dramatic debut, but certain elements questioning the status quo on gender inequality are never entirely absent from these more light-hearted successors. Although operating far below the level of the accomplished 1950s Cold War melodramas of Douglas Sirk, several of these films do reflect the presence of tensions within Taiwanese society, and some suggest implicitly the necessity for female empowerment that Lin will intuitively move toward in The Dream

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of the Red Chamber (Li Han-hsiang, 1977) and later Hong Kong performances. Many of these films deserve more attention and, in some cases, re-evaluation, despite the fact that they operate according to more conventional generic frameworks than those of the Taiwanese New Wave. Due to Qiong Yau’s objections, Outside the Window was never officially shown in Taiwan, but Lin’s second film Gone with the Cloud (Lau Ga-Cheong, 1974) became a huge box-office success, leading to her appearances in fifty similar romantic films with popular co-star Charlie Chin Han. This film also introduced a particular social dimension into the romance narrative that would dominate Lin’s later Taiwanese films. Here, she plays a 19-year-old high-school graduate dating the son of a rich man who also dates her older sister. The wealthy father refuses to let his son marry Lin because of her class background and her sister’s former job as a nightclub singer. Although Gone with the Cloud ends happily, it reveals the presence of disturbing social tensions within Taiwanese society at a time when they were not officially recognized, as was the diverse ethnic mixture comprising the island itself. Ghost in the Mirror (Sung Chuen-Sau, 1974) was one of Lin’s rare Taiwanese excursions into the realm of supernatural fantasy, portraying a mood-switching ghost whose fluctuations between ‘Yin’ and ‘Yang’ anticipate her role in Ashes of Time (Wong Kar-wai, 1994). Ironically, her brief encounter with the supernatural realm gives her more female agency than her modern romantic roles, but even these latter works raise social issues. In Run Lover Run (Chen Yao-Chi, 1975), she plays a tomboy athlete uninterested in traditional arranged-marriage customs. Admiring masculine Hollywood stars such as Charles Bronson and Steve McQueen, she rejects her gentle childhood sweetheart played by Alan Tang, until this Taiwanese version of a screwball comedy reaches a positive conclusion, one also realizing that the old arranged-marriage customs are no longer relevant to contemporary Taiwan. Viewing several of these Taiwanese films reveals that they are not entirely ‘escapist fluff’ but attempts to negotiate social contradictions in particular ways. Lin obviously became tired of her star role as ‘Taiwan’s Sweetheart,’ and attempted to play more mature roles before she moved to Hong Kong. In The Dream of the Red Chamber, directed by Li Han-hsiang, Lin plays her first male role co-starring opposite Sylvia Chang. She also temporarily relocated to California to shoot Love Massacre (1981), where she shed her cute ‘girly’ look to appear in this film directed by Hong Kong New Wave talent Patrick Tam. Lin credits this film as allowing her to try out new ideas, several of which are developed in films directed by Taiwan cinema’s most bizarre director, Chu Yen-ping. Lin starred in three of his films: Golden Queen’s Commandos (1982), Pink Force Commandos (1982), and Fantasy Mission Force (1983) – a bizarre series of roles far removed from Lin’s 1970s star persona. As bazooka-wielding, leather-clad Lily in Fantasy Mission Force, she helps Captain Dong (Jimmy Wong Yu) rescue three Allied generals captured by the Japanese in a Luxemburg located in Canada. Chu Yen-ping (who sometimes directed using pseudonyms) may also have directed Lin in Night Orchid (1982), in which she plays a bisexual character, anticipating her later roles in Hong Kong cinema. During this period, Lin associated with Wong Yu, who may have told her of other opportunities for her talents in a regional cinema he had left a few years before. Her one-armed swordswoman role in Pink Force Commandos was probably a bizarre homage to the performance that had made Wong Yu famous. Lin then relocated to Hong Kong for the second phase of her career. In Tsui Hark’s Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983), Lin appeared as the Countess of the Jade Pool. However, before she was able to continue her distinctive collaboration with the director, Lin appeared in a disappointing series of films similar to Jackie Chan’s later Hollywood excursions. All the Wrong Spies (Teddy Robin Kwan, 1983), The Other Side of Gentleman (Ringo Lam, 1984), Police Story (Jackie Chan, 1985), True Colours (Kirk Wong, 1986), and The Thirty Million Dollar Rush (Karl Maka, 1987) made limited use of her tal-

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ents. She also attempted other roles such as in Tony Au’s romantic tragedy Dream Lovers (1986), her only appearance with Chow Yun-fat. She struggled valiantly in Sun Chung’s hysterical melodrama Lady in Black (1987), and appeared in Yim Ho’s Red Dust (1990), a twentieth-century melodrama based on the life of Eileen Chang. By contrast, reuniting with Tsui Hark for Peking Opera Blues to play Tsao Wan, the uniformed daughter of a general, began a series of films that defined her as Hong Kong cinema’s most notable bisexual, cross-dressing star. Supervising Ching Siu-tung’s direction of Swordsman II, Tsui cast her as a man who transforms himself into a woman to acquire advanced supernatural powers. Like a Ming Dynasty eunuch, Invincible Asia (Lin) must undergo castration to obtain political dominance. Lin’s performance owes much to the role of traditional cross-gender performances from Beijing Opera. Tsui and Lin may have developed her character from one scene in Zu, where Yuen Biao and Ming Hoi encounter the demonic persona of the Jade Pool Countess, who wears red garments similar to those worn by Invincible Asia. In the sequel, Swordsman III: The East is Red (1993), co-directors Ching Siu-tung and Raymond Lee resurrect Asia in a deliberately chaotic narrative designed to make any further sequel impossible. More bizarre than its predecessor, the sexual ambiguity of Swordsman II now becomes explicit with Asia taking revenge on those who have appropriated her role, such as former lover Snow (played by Joey Wong, the female ghost in Tsui Hark’s A Chinese Ghost Story series [1987-1991]). Several sequences evoke the influence of Chu Yenping, with Asia flying through the air on a swordfish and breaking into song with a group of prostitutes. This film seems to suggest the actress’ input into what became her most famous role, as well as avoiding any sequels by taking it to its most extreme proportions. In 1993 Lin also appeared as the Wolf Girl Ni-chang in Ronny Yu’s The Bride with White Hair, a role she repeated in the 1993 sequel co-directed by Yu and David Wu. Believing herself to be betrayed by Leslie Cheung’s Cho Yi-hang at the end of the first film, the now white-haired Ni-chang organizes an all-female cult to avenge herself on all men including Cho’s own clan. Lin delivers an accomplished performance of furious intensity, one mixing menace and poignancy (representing her divided nature), and superbly complementing Leslie Cheung’s role. By this time, Lin had found her indelible star persona in the same way that John Wayne became associated with the western hero. She did attempt some variation in her Hong Kong period by appearing in the theatrical Taiwanese-based production The Peach Blossom Land (Stan Lai, 1992), but few opportunities to extend her talents arose. Although the inspired combination of ‘Invincible Asia meets Stephen Chow’ failed to live up to its promise in Wong Jing’s Royal Tramp II (1992), Lin’s later performance in Wong’s Boys are Easy (1993) fulfilled expectations and displayed her comedic talents to good effect. Playing a butch cop significantly named after the Hong Kong specialeffects artist who made Lin’s role in the Swordsman series so memorable, she effectively matched Tony Leung Ka-fai’s effeminate and ineffective gigolo in a distinguished performance. The climax of Boys are Easy resulted in a different type of romantic union far removed from her early Taiwanese films. However, three films made in the following year merely repeated her familiar Hong Kong star persona. Fire Dragon, The Dragon Chronicles, and Three Swordsmen (all 1994) revealed that the formula was beginning to stagnate and that it was time for change. Lin decided to change in a very different way from before. Rather than relocating elsewhere or trying a new star image, she married Esprit Asia Chairman Michael Ying Lee Yuen, and began to raise a family. Invincible Asia could defeat many enemies but not the biological clock. The actress concluded her career with outstanding performances in two 1994 films directed by Wong Kar-wai. Ashes of Time exploited her familiar dual-gender persona, featuring Lin as the appropriately named Murong Yin and Murong Yang. Set in the historical past, Ashes of Time featured accomplished martial-arts choreography

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by Sammo Hung as well as a veritable galaxy of Hong Kong stars in various roles. By contrast, Chungking Express returned Lin to a modern world. During the first part of the film, the now mature actress appears as a mysterious femme fatale wearing dark glasses and a blonde wig. She leaves the latter guise on the floor as she departs the film. It is an apt metaphor signifying the type of cinematic masquerade Lin performed throughout the majority of her career. The dark-haired actress exits toward the right of frame, leaving a cinema screen she will no longer inhabit. Since her retirement in 1994, Lin has not appeared in any film, nor is she likely to since she appears quite happy with her new role in life. But she has not entirely departed from the industry. During 1998 and 2001, she supplied the narration for two Hong Kong films directed by Yonfan: Bishonen and Peony Pavilion. Bishonen belongs to the industry’s emerging category of gay movies and owes much to the influence of Lin’s star persona as defined by Stanley Kwan in his documentary, Yang and Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema (1998). Executive-produced by Sylvia Chang, who co-starred with Lin in The Dream of the Red Chamber over twenty years before, the film uses Lin’s voiceover as if in homage to the gender-breaking roles she pioneered at significant moments in her career. Brigitte Lin’s influence will continue in several ways for a Chinese cinema that owes much to her groundbreaking roles.

Tony Williams

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hong kong new wave allen fong To modern audiences and critics, both locally and overseas, Allen Fong must seem so distant from Hong Kong cinema as to be almost a forgotten name. Yet in the 1970s and 1980s he was a distinctive figure that every cineaste would recognize as one of the most distinguished local directors, emerging from TV to engage in the Hong Kong New Wave cinema. Emigrating from television was characteristic of the so-called New Wave directors, who were often criticized for abandoning the achievements of their early films by turning quickly to mainstream production, generating more conventional and less innovative movies. Such is not the case with director Allen Fong. He made his first two films for major film company Feng Hung (Phoenix), both features earning him the Best Director prize at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 1981 and 1983. But he then swerved from the mainstream and embraced experimental and independent projects. In this way, he gradually became alienated from the mainstream. In the past decade Fong has not made any feature films, but his enthusiasm for film-making has persisted; in recent years he has made low-budget documentary films on video, designed to enlighten the audience rather than to entertain or exploit them. Almost all of Allen Fong’s film stories came from real-life events, but what he tried hard to do was not tell but search for the story. This means that he did not merely dramatize the real-life story and adapt it for film; instead he tried to discover the causes behind the event – the living environment, the social conditions, and the human interaction that might give rise to the real story – and to represent the process of discovery in his own way. As such, Fong was not constructing the story but deconstructing it. It is understandable that the general audience would not particularly warm to this form of storytelling, which lacked dramatic development and satisfaction. But Fong’s endeavours opened up new avenues for the generation of independent film-makers to follow.

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His films might not be perfect, but nor are they pretentious. He strongly believes in art for life’s sake, and film-making is a way to learn about life through art. For Fong, making films is a way to enhance communication between people, and not simply to ply them with spectacle. Obviously, this kind of film-making could hardly survive in a society like Hong Kong, where the film industry is dominated by capitalists and government subvention is still small for films of cultural and artistic value. Eventually, Allen Fong disappeared into the background and for some years he had to take a complete rest to recover from ill-health. Allen Fong Yeuk-ping was born on 10 July 1947 in Hong Kong. His father was a clerk, and the family had five children. Fong grew up in a lower-middle class environment during the 1950s, living by the hillside in a crowded hut, attending a nearby school led by the missionary, playing on the streets with his peers, and climbing the nearby hills. When he went to secondary school he was still intent on having fun, and his grades were barely sufficient to gain him entry to the mathematics department at Baptist College. Fong’s father expected him to pursue a career in science or medicine, but after a year this expectation proved to be in vain. Instead the teenager was transferred to the communication department, which suited him well. In 1971 he won a scholarship to study broadcasting, film and television at the University of Georgia. He went on to further his study of film at the University of Southern California, accepting part-time work to support himself. Immediately upon receiving his Master’s degree, Fong returned to Hong Kong in September 1975 to join the government-owned Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK). Starting out as an assistant director for the Below the Lion Rock drama series (19742006), Fong swiftly worked his way up to director. Working on half-hour episodes of the series, he directed Detoxification and Childcare (both 1976), The Wild Child, Ode to Un Chau Chai, and The Extra (all 1977), Nightwalker, For My Brother, The Old Plough and Choice of Dreams (all 1978), and New Life (1979). Among these, The Wild Child and Ode to Un Chau Chai were outstanding for their documentary style, depicting the living environment of people in the lower depths. These episodes were granted special entry to the London Film Festival as TV films, while The Wild Child won the Golden Award at the Iran Film Festival. All of these stories were based on real-life characters, with characterization emphasized over plot. Also evident is Fong’s readiness to create an investigative narrative style. Behind his rich body of work is a keen observer of society, a humanist contemplating the meaning of life and the joy and sorrow it has to offer. Fong made his first full-length feature Father and Son in 1981, a vivid portrayal of a child’s adolescence and his familial conflicts and reconciliation in the fast-changing society from the 1950s to the 1970s. This and his second film Ah Ying (1983) not only won Fong the Best Director prize at the Hong Kong Film Awards, but also accolades for Best Film in 1981 and 1983 respectively. Just Like Weather (1986) is the most experimental of all Fong’s films. Part fiction and part documentary, the film’s open structure invites the audience to explore a young couple’s journey in the United States, accompanied by director Allen Fong and his crew – a frustrating adventure at a time when the 1997 Reunification was impending. It won Fong another directing honour at the 6th Hong Kong Film Awards. In between this and his next realized project, Fong made two shorts for RTHK’s series’ Film Drama in 1989: Veggie Queen and Opera Queen, both documentary-style productions about a real-life figure – a young woman passionate about Cantonese opera and vegetarianism. In the same period, Fong also ventured into stage drama to direct a play titled American Hotel. When Fong was making Dancing Bull (1990), he had recently finalized a divorce and was in a period of readjustment. In this film, which contained a strong element of selfdocumentary, he continued his inquest of art and love, career and family. The film ends

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with the dancing couple leaving their personal problems aside, performing in the open air to express their political concerns and protest against the Tiananmen Massacre of June 1989. Again, Fong was invited to direct a few TV programs for RTHK – Happy Teahouse (1992), about a retired old man finding his own interest in serving friends at a traditional teahouse; I Can Manage (1992), a docudrama centred on an elderly female tramp’s living conditions; Women in Transition (1994), an investigation into the daily life and work of several women and their status in the 1997 transitional era; and Creative Wisdom (1991) an interview with Willy Cho, the founder and artistic director of City Contemporary Dancing Company, who was also the producer of Dancing Bull. As the Hong Kong film industry experienced its downturn after 1993, it was very difficult for a film-maker like Allen Fong, who was not commercial and who insisted on probing and documenting life in its reality, to survive. In these years, he formed his own production house to make corporate videos and sponsored documentaries. In 1998, he directed A Little Life-Opera, a feature project finally realized after several years spent planning and researching Fujian native opera; and in 2000 he completed the sponsored documentary Tibetan Tao, which received a very limited release. Increasingly absorbed in Buddhism, Fong travelled between China and India to learn from the masters, and worked on a series of video documentaries about Buddhist teachings. In 2000 Allen Fong moved to Vancouver to convalesce from ill-health, and after a long rest he recovered and remarried. In July 2009, he returned briefly to Hong Kong to attend the special program Life as Art, Life as Dream – Allen Fong in Retrospective, organized by the Hong Kong Film Archive, in honour of his achievements in film and television production.

Law Kar

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Night And Fog, Class Limited/The Kobal Collection.

hong kong new wave ann hui

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Ann Hui, a part of Hong Kong’s New Wave, is internationally renowned as Hong Kong cinema’s most distinguished female director. Like other new wavers, she started working in television in the mid-1970s, then turned to the big screen with her feature debut, The Secret, in 1979. She has worked in the industry for over 35 years and directed 25 feature films to date, exploring all genres, from martial arts and horror to drama and gangster films. She has also produced ten films and acted in nineteen. As film scholar Law Kar reports in Hong Kong Stories: The TV Works of Ann Hui, released simultaneously with the 2009 Udine Far East Film Festival, which screened her two most recent films, Ann Hui is ‘both a devoted film-maker and cineaste’, and ‘To Ann Hui, film is a way of life’ (Kar 2009: 9). Born in the city of Anshan in Liaoning province in 1947, Hui moved with her parents, a Chinese father and Japanese mother, to Guangzhou, Macao and finally, Hong Kong, where she was educated in Hong Kong’s Eton School and earned an MA in English Literature and Comparative Literature from the University of Hong Kong. As a child she loved watching Cantonese and Mandarin movies; as she matured, she understood them more meaningfully, and also developed an appreciation for directors such as Hitchcock, Oshima and Polanski. In 1973 she began studying film at the London Film School, but Hui’s formal film education was short-lived; the school closed after she had completed only five terms, though she did receive a graduation certificate. Hui returned to Hong Kong in 1975, working for three months as an office assistant for renowned film director King Hu. This brief experience would later lead her to describe him as her mentor (and they would work together years later on Swordsman [1990]). But her real film education, as with other members of Hong Kong’s New Wave, would be in television. Hui began working in television when she was hired by Selina Chow at Hong Kong television’s TVB (Shaw Brothers’ Hong Kong Television Broadcasts Limited) in 1976, and she directed episodes of the documentary series Wonderfun, the cop show CID, and Social Worker. She left TVB in 1977 (taking with her important collaborators), lured away by the government’s anti-graft agency, the ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption), which was impressed by her work on CID, for which she had contributed shows culled from criminal cases and current events. They wanted her to provide television material to educate Hong Kong citizenry and enhance public vigilance against rampant corruption in government agencies and business, from bribery in the construction industry and kickbacks in public service industries to police corruption at high levels. In 1978, she moved to RTHK (the government-supported Radio Television Hong Kong), directing three longer works for the series Below the Lion Rock, which she would revisit in 1991. Scholars agree that Hui’s approach, techniques, and thematics honed in her television work formed and continue to shape her film practices. For example, Social Worker: Ah Sze examines the life of an illegal immigrant girl, the title character, who travels from Vietnam to the Mainland, Macao, and Hong Kong in search of her family, but ends up as a prostitute; here, Hui’s interest in diaspora and exile stories as well as her depiction of family stories and strong female characters is introduced. Indirect storytelling is a preferred narrative method – flashbacks provide a fully fleshed out character with whom audiences empathize. Similarly, Below the Lion Rock: The Bridge (1978) concerns the dismantling of the titular bridge by the government, destroying the principal means of travel by villagers living in a slum area. Hui not only provides multiple points of view (the villagers, the press, activists and government bureaucrats) but humanizes the faces of all involved. There is no consensus among any group represented, and more to the situation than meets the eye. How social issues directly impact people’s daily lives will be interwoven into the fabric of her films to come. Hui’s thematic interests and approach to film-making has led her not only to work in all genres, genre-mixing within films, but also to rethink and reinvent genre. Her first feature, made in the horror/thriller genre, The Secret, is based on a true murder case,

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and set in the Western District’s old buildings and narrow streets. The locale creates a sinister atmosphere needing lots of comic relief, and the follow-up ghost story feature, The Spooky Bunch (1980), set on Cheung Chau Island, offered more comedy than scares. Early films included the dramas The Story of Woo Viet (1981) and Boat People (1982), the former starring Chow Yun-fat as a Chinese-Vietnamese refugee trying to reach the United States but trapped in the Philippines, recast as a ‘thriller in Manila,’ as the character undergoes numerous degradations. The latter, set in post-‘liberation’ Vietnam, recast as a family separation story, starring George Lam, put Hui on the global map with its contrasting looks at life under communism, although Hui lets the stories speak for themselves. Other early films include the romance Love in a Fallen City (1984), adapted from an Eileen Chang novel, classified as a wenyi pian (literary film), and The Romance of Book and Sword and Princess Fragrance (both 1987), adaptations (in two parts) of a Louis Cha novel and classified as a wuxia pian (martial-arts film). Later films, such as the often comedic Summer Snow (literally, Woman, 40) (1995), explore social issues, such as elderly care, housing shortages, and, the then little-known disease called Alzheimer’s, but like July Rhapsody (literally, Man, 40) (2002), serve as dramatic character studies. The earlier immigrant stories are readdressed in films such as The Postmodern Life of My Aunt (2006) and Night and Fog (2009), the latter also being a true crime story, as is Zodiac Killers (1991). Throughout her career, Hui has deftly crafted her themes and techniques from real life – no pretentious artiness, no dogma, often no resolution – and the fabric of real-life people and places makes the characters and stories breathe. Hui’s semi-autobiographical Song of the Exile (1990) is perhaps her most personal film, but it also serves as a representative of her common practices. Twenty-something freespirited Hueyin (Maggie Cheung) returns home to Hong Kong from the United Kingdom for her sister’s wedding, only to discover she will be responsible for seeing after her seemingly conventional fifty-something widowed mother’s care. Estranged from her mother since childhood, the daughter progressively re-examines that relationship and learns that much of its basis has been misrepresented. Mother and daughter reconcile and start again with new understanding. Hui chooses not to end the film with reconciliation, but with Hueyin’s visit to her elderly grandparents in Guangzhou, and the refrains of the song of the English title, an old southern Chinese song about a solitary and lonely sojourner sentimentally remembering the homeland. Through flashbacks (some replayed through Hueyin’s perspective), the whole story is revealed, and only halfway through the film does the audience learn that the mother is Japanese, requiring a rethinking of the story, similar to what Hueyin experiences. Consistent in Hui’s work is interest in and loyalty to her characters and the events that shape them. She ties ordinary and often underprivileged characters to specific times and places, making their emotions meaningful through the settings portrayed. Whether Shanghai’s then-remaining hutongs in My American Grandson (1991), the natural beauty of the hot springs area of Beppu and village life in Song of the Exile, the last stand of the Repulse Bay Hotel guests against the Japanese in Love in a Fallen City or the high rise new town of Tin Shui Wai in The Way We Are (2008), where ordinary Hong Kongers co-exist alongside Mainland immigrants in a place known for its poverty and violence, characters’ feelings and behaviour are explained through place. Hong Kong itself is Hui’s star. Not an overtly political film-maker, but politicized, she speaks to power and its abuse, and social issues underlie the oppression of ordinary or marginalized people, often exiled and in search of home and identity. Hui uses multiple narratives (flashbacks, numerous perspectives) to reveal realistic human experience; the films are compassionate; they do not judge characters and they do not use stereotypes. Women are her strong suit, and relationships, specifically between parents and children, but more particularly, between mothers and children, intimately convey the themes. Hui’s films have played at numerous international film festivals, from ‘Un Certain

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Regard’ at Cannes to Chicago, London, Toronto and Vancouver, among others. In 2009, her television work received special attention at the Udine Far East Festival in Italy (The Way We Are was originally intended for the small screen), along with the screening of The Way We Are and Night and Fog. Since the Hong Kong Film Awards were established in 1982, Hui has been a frequent nominee, if not always the winner (the same goes for the Golden Horse and Hong Kong Film Critics Awards). Her HKFA wins have included Best Film and Best Director for Boat People, Summer Snow, and Ordinary Heroes (1999); Best Director for The Way We Are; Best Screenplay (by Alfred Cheung) for Story of Woo Viet, (by Yau-Tai On-ping) for Boat People, and (by Lou Shiu-wa) for The Way We Are; Best Actress (for Siqin Gaowa) for The Postmodern Life of My Aunt and (for Paw Hee-Ching) for The Way We Are. Golden Horse (Taiwan) Awards have included Best Director for Summer Snow and Best Director and Film for Ordinary Heroes. The Hong Kong Film Critics Society has recognized Hui as Best Director for Visible Secret (2001), The Postmodern Life of My Aunt, and The Way We Are. At the Berlin Film Festival, Josephine Siao won the ‘Silver Bear’ for Best Actress and Hui the ‘Ecumenical Jury Award’ for Summer Snow. Besides being a Hong Kong University alumna, Hui was appointed as the University Artist in residence for 2008-10. Notable attention to her work and awards indicate her strengths – creating real people facing real problems, making for her actors a space in which they can be guided to produce their best work and for the stories to be told, and touching audiences in an unforgettable and meaningful way.

Lisa Odham Stokes

Reference Law Kar (2009) Hong Kong Stories: The TV Works of Ann Hui, Udine Far East Film Festival.

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After This Our Exile, Black and White Films/The Kobal Collection.

hong kong new wave patrick tam

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Born in 1948 to a middle-class family, Patrick Tam Ka-ming was raised by parents who loved arts and culture. He was taken to see Cantonese and Hollywood movies as a child, which impressed him greatly, and during his secondary school days in Wah Yan College he was very fond of reading and watching movies, going often to club screenings of European art films. He engaged in cine-club activities, made friends with a group of young cineastes who later became critics and film-makers, and occasionally wrote film reviews. Leaving school in 1967, Tam joined TVB (Television Broadcasting Limited Hong Kong) and worked his way up to director in 1974-75, shooting Superstar Special, TVB’s first stab at making drama on film. He was then sent to San Francisco to attend a film course, returning to TVB in 1976 to direct the hour-long police drama series CID (alternately with Ann Hui and Law Kar). For the next two years, Tam worked intensively with low budgets but a high degree of creative freedom, turning out more than 25 short film productions (each of between thirty and sixty minutes duration). With this kind of experience behind him, Tam was already a professional director before directing his first feature-length film. Among the generation of ambitious young directors (which included, among others, Ann Hui, Tsui Hark, Yim Ho and Allen Fong, all of whom flowed from TV to film-making after 1979 and were labelled New Wave directors), Patrick Tam was the most distinguished and controversial. He experimented with styles and techniques learnt from the masters whom he admired – Godard, Bresson, Bergman and Hitchcock. These works, such as Seven Women (1976-77), CID (1976), 13 (1977) and Social Workers (1977), were often acclaimed (and criticized) for their boldness in expressing such concerns as the fate of woman, the alienation of individuals, juvenile delinquency, love and sex, crimes and punishments – all placed within a society undergoing rapid modernization in the 1970s. Tam tended to look at social and human conditions from a distance, depicting human emotions objectively rather than passing judgment on his characters’ behaviour. Tam encountered a lot of difficulty making his first feature film, The Sword (1980), the wuxia pian (swordplay film) being a genre that he was not at all familiar with. The film was not perfect nor thought provoking, but Tam succeeded in creating a subtle visual style that balanced the static and the dynamic, the expected and the unexpected. His second feature Love Massacre (1981), set in San Francisco, depicts the madness and isolation of a killer (John Chang) from Hong Kong, who falls in love with a student (Brigitte Lin) and kills several of her roommates. It is a thriller that shocked contemporary audiences and critics with its use of cold-blooded violence, yet it displays an exquisite visual style. Although it flopped at the box office, it is remembered for both its bold experiment in terror and its formal beauty. Tam returned to Hong Kong’s everyday reality to make Nomad (1982), starring Leslie Cheung, Cecilia Yip and Pat Ha. It is a film that portrays the drifting young generation under the strong influence of Japanese and western popular culture, presenting both the pretty and ugly sides of the traditional and the modern. A film of vast complexity, Nomad is rich and innovative in visual style, and occasionally gentle and provocative. It emerged not only as one of Tam’s major works, but as one of the most representative films portraying youth culture in Hong Kong in the 1980s. During the next seven years Tam made only four films. Starring Cherie Chung and Tony Leung Ka-fai, Cherie (1984) is a farcical comedy that displays Tam’s virtuoso handling of chase scenes, while Burning Snow (1988) is a low-budget film made in Taiwan that recalls his TV period. Simple in story but stunning in visual style, what Burning Snow lacks is perhaps emotional depth. Final Victory (1987) was made at a time when ‘heroic bloodshed’ movies were coming into vogue. Written in part by Wong Kar-wai, the film subverts the genre by ridiculing the gangster heroes played by Tsui Hark and Eric Tsang, delivering a lot of black humour. Once again, it shows Tam’s brilliance in mise en scène, and in handling his actors. It is also his most commercially popular film so far. But after My Heart is That Eternal Rose (1989), another gangster movie with Tony Leung Chiu-wai

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Ahfei Zhenjuang/Days of Being Wild, In-Gear Film/The Kobal Collection.

playing a killer/lover, Tam seemed to have lost interest in accepting assigned projects and stopped directing for the next sixteen years. The late 1980s marked the most prosperous years of Hong Kong’s commercial cinema, whose output rose to over 200 productions annually, but it was also a period of sensationalism and excess that any intellectual film-maker might detest. Tam quit directing to take stock and later settled in Kuala Lumpur to teach film production. In the interim, he edited Days of Being Wild (1990) and co-edited Ashes of Time (1994) for Wong Kar-wai. In 2002 he returned to Hong Kong permanently, teaching at the Creative Media Centre of City University of Hong Kong. He edited Johnnie To’s Election (2005) and took up directing again in After This Our Exile (2006), winning awards for Best Film and Best Director at various film festivals. Set against the background of an old town in Malaysia, it depicts a father and son relationship that recalls the Cantonese movies of the 1950s, but it goes deeper into the dark side of human nature. The film also displays Tam’s precise mastery of film language and a mature understanding of human behaviour. In all, Tam is a stylist in search of essence, an artist seeking significance. In his entire career he has been searching for appropriate ways to articulate each of his subjects in cinematic terms, and in the process learn the meaning of art and life.

Law Kar

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Farewell My Concubine, Tomson Films/China Film/Beijing/The Kobal Collection.

directors: mainland china chen kaige

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The status of Chen Kaige amongst the most important Chinese directors of his generation, indeed in modern Chinese cinema, was assured when his feature debut, Yellow Earth (1984), marked the beginning of the so-called ‘Fifth Generation’. Prior to this landmark film, throughout the preceding years of the Cultural Revolution (1966−76), Chinese national cinema had been all but destroyed by Chairman Mao. The film archive was closed down, almost every film made before 1965 was banned, and a halt was called on the production of new films. The years 1966−70 thus saw no new films whatever; and thereafter until 1976 only a very few were made – which, under the strictly regimented and regulated auspices of the Gang of Four, amounted to nothing more than transpositions of operatic works from the revolutionary stage. When the Beijing Film Academy re-opened in 1978, it counted among its students all the subsequently major directors of the Fifth Generation, who were given this (in fact nonsensical) tag by the Chinese press following the notoriety and acclaim they had rapidly accrued in the wake of their graduation in 1982 and their feature film work in the ensuing two years. Chen Kaige, who was born in Beijing in August 1952 and had, prior to his studies, worked in a film processing laboratory, was not the first Fifth Generation director to make his feature debut (like almost all his classmates, he was initially assigned to work in a film studio as an assistant director, a post he occupied at the Beijing Film Studio under Huang Jian-zhong, director of God of the Mountains [1992]). However, he was certainly the first to make his mark and to put Mainland Chinese cinema firmly on the international map. Yellow Earth had in fact fared poorly in China – it was described as ‘incomprehensible’ by the China Film Association, and as with Daiei and Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) they decreed it almost un-releasable. However, it was released, and received its international premiere at the Hong Kong Film Festival on 12th April 1985. According to Tony Rayns the packed screening was received ‘with something like collective rapture’ (Kaige & Rayns 1989: 1), and this was repeated a matter of months later when the film played at the Locarno and Edinburgh film festivals. Prizes for Chen soon followed, as did significant distribution deals, making Yellow Earth the bona fide catalyst for the movement that followed, and the most important Chinese film in decades. Yellow Earth, then, did follow Rashomon in opening the international gates for new Chinese cinema as markedly as Kurosawa’s films had done for post-war Japanese cinema. It was also significant in introducing many of what would subsequently become paradigmatic Kaige, and to a certain extent Fifth Generation, themes, concerns and stylistic methodologies. Indeed, Chen’s contemporary Tian Zhuangzhuang noted in 1986 that ‘If it wasn’t for Yellow Earth, then there wouldn’t be the whole debate about film aesthetics (in China... the film) represents the future of Chinese cinema’ (cited in Berry & Farquhar 2006: 102). Migration and displacement feature strongly in many films of this time, as the directors had grown up as part of the Zhiqing generation, those educated urban youths who in 1968 had been repatriated to the countryside to undergo ‘re-education’ (physical labour) alongside the peasants with whom they lived and worked. Yellow Earth initiated this facet, concerning as it does a communist soldier who is sent to the remote countryside to research their folk songs. Moreover, the distinctive landscape photography of Yellow Earth, its dramatic use of a rural, barren, drought-ridden village, would set the benchmark for numerous subsequent Chinese films. Chen himself would return to isolated natural locations for his third and fourth films – respectively King of the Children (1987) and Life on a String (1991) – and in so doing would develop and refine a new language of Chinese cinema. Aided by the cinematography of Zhang Yimou (who also shot the other most important foundational Fifth Generation film, One and Eight [Jheng Jun-Zhao, 1983]) – he emphasizes a concomitantly natural and stylized mise en scène to complement the spare story – at times formal and distanced, at others right in the midst of a throng of people as though a participant in the drama and action. Moreover, beside this revolutionary visual lexicon

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(which had an impact beyond national borders: one can see its influence on 1980s/90s Iranian and Turkish art cinema directors among others), the narrative methodology of Yellow Earth further signalled a decisive break with tradition. Employing a de-dramatized structure the director abounds in contrastive moments of intimate and sweeping conflict and communication. From the first scene, in which village peasants seem to well up from the mountains in the midst of a formal procession, the rituals and rhythms of village life are foregrounded, with the villagers depicted in an unsentimental manner that stresses their strengths as much as their hardships. The film is at once a denaturalization of China and a reification of the land and the peasants’ relationship to it, and is among the most significant Chinese works ever made. The Big Parade (1986), Chen’s ostensibly very different second feature, also centres on soldiers, but this time moves wholesale into an army milieu. It is set entirely within a barracks and is built around the training undergone by the army for the titular celebratory parade, a very brief stint as performative public spectacle that requires an immense amount of training and physical endurance. Chen’s narrative methodology here is comparable to that of Yellow Earth in that the film remains entirely immersed within the one insular environment, but this time the style hovers between a discursive naturalism, editorial formalism (echoes in particular of the Soviet model, especially Eisenstein’s montage of opposition) and an impressionistic account of the ritualistic routines of army life. Following the Taoist narrative and visual principles of King of the Children (Jingfu in Ehrlich & Desser 1994: 117−26), which returned to the blueprint of Yellow Earth’s concentration on a young man sent out to a remote community (and in so doing brought the key years of the Fifth Generation to a close), Chen made Life on a String. This densely poetic fable follows the journeys from desert village to desert village of an old, blind musician and his pupil. Subsequently, Chen’s international reputation was sealed with two films: Farewell My Concubine (1993) and Temptress Moon (1996). Both are grandly opulent narratives with an epic sweep that belies an intimate story, and both feature the great Hong Kong star Leslie Cheung alongside the Fifth Generation’s own most iconic presence, Gong Li. Farewell My Concubine was nominated for an Oscar and won a Palme d’Or at Cannes; it tells of over fifty years of Chinese history and upheaval (from the age of warlords in the 1920s to the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in 1977) through the experiences of two performers in the Beijing opera. In support of their respective characters, Chen’s mise en scène revels in elemental contrasts, especially in the early scenes depicting the children’s harsh training. Shots of a freezing winter snowfall in a courtyard exterior are thrown into relief with the burnished orange glow from windows behind which a fire burns; later a resplendent interior shot of deep red and orange is immediately juxtaposed with a dawn exterior washed in steely, cobalt blue. Even the use of colour photography is factored into this precept, as the narrative begins with a scene in sepia (of a street performance by child actors) that then bleeds into colour when we enter the training grounds of this troupe, a tacit connotation of the animating lifeblood of performance and theatre, or at least the perception of it. The import of this binary vision is made clear when one of the protagonists excels in female roles and becomes famous as such, to the extent that he is talked about as blurring the boundaries between man and woman, life and the theatre. The identity crisis that stems from such a sublimation of self to role throws into relief the dichotomies present elsewhere in the film’s narrative and visual methodology, the protagonist’s conflation of opposing entities and his concomitant difficulty in defining himself in any clear, definitive manner – neither one thing nor the other. This aspect of the character also provides Leslie Cheung with perhaps the most tragically personal role of his distinguished career, and his performance is one of the very best in any of Chen’s films. Farewell My Concubine (the title of which derives from the canonical Chinese opera for which both protagonists become famous) tackles a number of grand themes: the role

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of art in society, and the relationship between the two, whether symbiotic or a case of cause and effect; the myriad determinants of human identity. It is also, like Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite (1993), which was made in the same year, a study of the changing face of modern China. Like Tian’s film, it was also banned in China, although Chen did not have to wait as long as his esteemed contemporary to direct his next feature. Temptress Moon, made three years later, is another opulent period drama, this time set largely in the 1920s. It concerns the tangled emotions attendant on a triangular relationship between a gigolo, a clan head and her cousin. Shot by Chris Doyle, the film mixes sumptuous expressionism with a detailed historical veracity to explore the tensions between old and new China (something central to many Chen films since Yellow Earth). It is also a frank treatment of sexuality, arguably for the first real time in this director’s career, and as such marked a significant step forward from previous works, albeit something that he has only sporadically returned to in the years since. In the light of negative reviews Chen himself looked back on the film (which had a troubled shoot) and concluded that it was too dark. But it is this very aspect that singles it out and bears witness to the director’s ongoing boldness as an artist, someone unafraid to shrink from challenging subject matter. In recent years, Chen has diversified as an artist even as his work in the cinema has seemed increasingly less inspired and distinctive (indeed, with works such as his historical epic The Emperor and the Assassin [1998], the sentimental and protracted story of a child violinist in adverse social and familial circumstances entitled Together with You [2002] – in which Chen himself acted – and his recent, derivative martial-arts fantasy The Promise [2005] he has to all intents and purposes leapt onto various generic bandwagons that have also been exploited by the likes of Zhang Yimou and Zhang Yuan. And this is to say nothing of his ill-fated, critically-reviled English-language debut in the shape of the flaccid erotic thriller Killing Me Softly [2002]). However, in 2008 Chen brought his talent to bear on a staging of Puccini’s Turandot which drew heavily on the Chinese inspiration of the original text in presenting the work in an ornate imperial palace set replete with stunning design and costumes by some of his cinematic collaborators. It is an impressive show: both sweeping and intimate in the manner of Farewell My Concubine; a small story on a grand scale. It revealed a new side to Chen Kaige, and reinforced after a period of uncertain direction and intent that he was still a director to be reckoned with.

Adam Bingham References Berry Chris, & Farquhar, Mary (2006) China on Screen: Cinema and Nation, New York: Columbia University Press. Ehrlich, Linda C & Desser, David (eds) (1994) Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan, Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Kaige, Chen & Rayns, Tony (1989) King of the Children and the New Chinese Cinema, London: Faber and Faber Limited.

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City of Life and Death, China Film Group/Media Asia/The Kobal Collection.

directors: mainland china lu chuan

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After co-writing a popular series for Chinese TV, Black Hole (1999), Lu Chuan, former soldier, graduate of the Beijing Film Academy and currently director of the creative centre of the state-run production and distribution company, the China Film Group Corporation, went on to write and direct three feature films: an eccentric thriller, Missing Gun (2002); a bleak account of the battle against antelope poaching in 1990s Tibet, Mountain Patrol (2004); and a horrific war film, City of Life and Death (2009). All three films were distributed internationally, and as a result of the success of Mountain Patrol at film festivals, as well as the controversy generated by his third film, Lu has acquired a high international profile. It is perhaps too early to identify a clear authorial identity across this trio of allusive, generically and stylistically distinct films, but there are nevertheless some common features. The unfamiliar environments represented in the three films function not as the realistic backdrop to narrative action, but as dramatic, symbolically expressive mise en scène – from the uncanny, oneiric scenery of rural China in the first film, and the empty Tibetan wilderness in Mountain Patrol, to the exceptional carceral space of occupied Nanjing. The three films also share a thematic preoccupation with masculinity, the self-destructive and absurd masculine codes of honour and duty, misogyny and male violence. This is signalled directly but lightly in Lu’s first film, Missing Gun, which recounts the attempts by a rural policeman, Ma Shan, to retrieve the service revolver he lost (although he insists it is merely ‘missing’) after drinking himself unconscious at a wedding party. Missing Gun has comic, playful elements, is stylistically uneven, and bears the traces of its influences. For instance the storyline, based on a Chinese novella, also echoes Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog (1949), which follows a detective’s search for his stolen gun. Missing Gun is, similarly, a detective story in which Ma enlists the help of friends in his ancient village to reconstruct the events of the wedding night after he blacked out. Missing Gun does not belabor the psychosexual significance of Ma’s symbolic unmanning – but the loss of the weapon results in his suspension and the humiliating removal of his uniform, the loss of a salary bonus, and a crisis in his relationship with his wife, since it coincides with the reappearance in the village of a former lover, Xiaomeng. He comprises a conventional masculine type: an ex-soldier and inadequate, self-absorbed father who hits his son, he is emotionally distant from his wife and preoccupied by fantasies of Xiaomeng. The film satirizes heroic masculinity and its relationship to patriotic duty most clearly in a scene where the police chief awards a periodic bonus. He declares solemnly, ‘As policemen we should be ready to die for our country. We don’t need a bonus,’ and the men chorus back in unison, ‘We need it!’ Despite this comically cynical tone, the disgraced Ma nevertheless attempts to redeem himself through self-sacrifice in order to retrieve his weapon. After establishing that the gun was stolen in order to kill a businessman whose bootleg alcohol has killed several locals, Ma disguises himself as the bootlegger in order to draw out the thief, allowing himself to be fatally shot. Missing Gun concludes on an ambiguous note, leaving us uncertain whether this was an act of admirably selfless heroism or suicidal despair. In the final enigmatic shot, the dead policeman walks toward the camera, in silent slow motion, his face convulsed either with laughter or anguish. Masculine obsession and self-destructive devotion to duty is explored further in Mountain Patrol, which tells the story of a group of Kham Tibetan volunteers who patrol the vast Kekexili plateau to protect the endangered indigenous antelope from hunters killing them for their coveted pelts. Prompted by a newspaper article, the film recounts a hazardous 1996 expedition accompanied by Ga Yu, a Chinese-Tibetan journalist from Beijing. After one of his men is murdered by poachers, Ri Tai (another ex-soldier), leads the patrol on the trail of the illegal hunters he has been chasing for years. During the pursuit a number of patrol members are killed or injured and after tracking them for seventeen days, having run out of fuel and food, and having left behind all of his companions except for Ga Yu, Ri Tai finally catches up with the poachers on a mountain pass. He is shot after vainly demanding their surrender and the film finishes with tableau shots showing the preparation of Ri Tai’s

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body for a ‘sky burial,’ in which the dissected corpse is left in the open air to be consumed by vultures and the elements. This conclusion emphasizes the immanence of death in this tough environment and also implies an anti-humanist narrative perspective that levels the patrolmen with the antelopes. Earlier, for example, the patrol happens upon several hundred antelope carcasses that have been skinned and picked clean by vultures. This underlines an equivalence of human and animal, and also an unsentimental, non-anthropomorphic treatment of the antelope. The film refrains from explaining their ecological or cultural importance, and they are barely visible on screen. The natural environment is depicted as a sterile, indifferent space, littered with corpses and skins, resistant to human inhabitation and cultivation due to its vast scale and high altitude. This is highlighted through the motif of extreme long shots showing distant figures and vehicles dwarfed by mountain ranges and extensive plains. One shot in particular, in which Ga Yu and several patrolmen stare up at the enormous night sky from a ridge above their campsite, dramatizes the sublime beauty of the hostile, super-human environment. The film can be understood as an example of the emergence of ‘Chinese ecocinema,’ which, Sheldon Lu suggests, ‘has been a vital constituent of the New Chinese Cinema since the early 1980s’ (Lu 2009: 3). Lu proposes that  cocinema is cinema with an ecological consciousness. It articulates the relationship of e human beings to the physical environment, earth, nature, and animals from a biocentric, non-anthropocentric point of view. In the final analysis, ecocinema pertains to nothing less than life itself. (Lu 2009: 2) Although the intertitles at the film’s conclusion explain that the plateau became a nature reserve a year later, the film’s overall impression is pessimistic. The patrol is a heroically futile gesture to stop poaching – as Ri Tai explains to Ga Yu, ‘We bury more than 10,000 antelopes per year’ – and the impoverished patrol is itself forced at one point to sell confiscated antelope skins in order to pay for medical treatment. Kekexili is the spectacular stage on which this violent drama of masculine aggression and destructive commercial exploitation is performed. As Shuqin Cui observes, Kekexili plateau is a literal and figurative ‘no-man’s land’ in which ‘there is no room for women’s narratives’ (Cui 2008: 155) and the most prominent female character is ‘a migrant working in the local sex industry’ (154). City of Life and Death recounts events in the brutal ‘no-man’s land’ of an occupied city. The $12 m film is an account of the atrocious Nanjing massacre, or ‘Rape of Nanjing,’ the Chinese Republic’s capital, during the second Sino-Japanese war. Up to 300,000 people were killed by Japanese troops over a period of six weeks from December 1937, an event that remains a source of tension in relations between the two countries. Like Mountain Patrol, the film is a reconstruction and partial fictionalization of real events, although the docudrama aesthetic of the earlier low-budget film is replaced by the large cast, detailed production design, and sumptuous visual style of a historical epic. The black-and-white colour scheme situates the narrative events firmly in a distant past, emulating photographs and films from the period, and the absence of colour connotes a seemly solemnity in the face of such horrific events. (Lu suggests that black-and-white film is particularly affective: ‘It’s like religion: it has a holy power, a very strong feeling of honour’ [Chuan, n.d.].) It also locates the film generically as a spectacular war film, recalling in particular the monochrome of Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) and Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood, 2006). After Nanjing’s ancient city walls are breached by besieging Japanese tanks in the film’s opening, the disorganized Chinese troops quickly surrender and Japanese soldiers enter the ruined, largely depopulated city. Following a fierce battle with resistance fighters, hundreds of men and boys are identified as Chinese soldiers, arrested, and gathered

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together in a compound inside the city. They are then executed in a variety of ways that include being burnt to death, buried alive, bayoneted and machine-gunned. From this point on the Japanese soldiers start systematically to rape and murder the women and young girls who remain inside the city, many of whom are contained within a refugee camp, the ‘Nanking Safety Zone’ managed by German businessman, John Rabe, one of several real historical figures who appear in the film. The troops periodically raid the camp, before threatening to destroy it unless Rabe hands over 100 women. A number volunteer and are marched to another building where they are raped repeatedly by soldiers – at one point a tumbril loaded with women’s corpses is wheeled away through the crowd of men who casually drink, talk and sing outside the building. At the film’s conclusion Masao Kadokawa, a naive soldier who has functioned throughout the film as bemused witness to, and reluctant participant in, the atrocities, releases a man and boy into the countryside outside the city. As the freed pair walk away from the city, laughing playfully, Kadokawa explains to a fellow soldier that, ‘Life is more difficult than death,’ and then shoots himself. There follows a series of aged, portrait photographs, marked with the names, birth- and death-dates of the key characters, ending with a photograph of the boy, Xiaodu, who survived the initial battles and, miraculously, a mass execution. The (optimistic) caption to his photograph states, ‘Xiaoduzi is still alive.’ The Nanjing massacre is familiar to Chinese viewers and is the subject of numerous films. Perhaps for this reason, Lu’s film provides only the briefest account of the historical background to the mass killings. Events leading up to the city’s occupation are summarized in the title sequence by hand-written messages on a series of postcards, an expository device used to link scenes throughout the film. One consequence of this elision of context is that there is little sense of the chains of command and decision-making processes that created this hell on earth. Almost all of the action takes place within the confines of the city and the spatial layout of the city and the passage of time remain unclear throughout the film, with the effect that the spectator is immersed claustrophobically in the disorienting, violent chaos of the slaughterhouse that Nanjing became. The film is a memorial or powerful testimony to this horrific interval – an assertion (or reassertion) that it did happen – but in one respect it has little to offer by way of explanation or critical enquiry. Consequently, film critic Shelly Kraicer suggests that, ‘This is not history − it is ideology. Ideology that pins down the viewer, shuts down thought, and demands total emotional submission’ (Kraicer 2009). Identifying the film as an example of ‘nascent post-zhuxuanlu cinema’ (zhuxuanlu meaning ‘main melody’ or propaganda films) due to its monumental style and thematic preoccupation with a crucial constitutive moment of contemporary China’s national history that affords a lasting moral legitimacy, Kraicer proposes that the film exemplifies a ‘totalitarian film language.’ Given that Lu subsequently produced a monumental and sentimental multi-screen film installation for the Chinese pavilion at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, The King’s Banquet and the Path of Beauty, a promotional short for the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou, Together We Can Make it Better, as well as a promotional short for Volkswagen, A Journey Beyond (2010), the contention that he is a propagandist or an uncritical fellow traveller may carry some weight. On the other hand, this remains an event that is beyond explanation, and tracing the series of orders, the power structures, or the strategic logic that facilitated the massacre would tell us little about what enabled the perpetrators of this violence to commit these crimes. Nevertheless, the film could not be less ambiguous in its explanation of how this happened. It makes it as clear as possible that this is an episode of unrestrained male violence in which rape is deployed as a weapon of war, and the film refrains from eroticizing or sexualizing the relentless sexual violence. It is clear, for example, that when the virginal Kadokawa has sex with Yuriko, a Japanese ‘comfort woman’ in the soldiers’ brothel, and comes to believe that they are betrothed, this pathetic fantasy is a disavowal of the sexual violence

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with which he is complicit. When he returns with gifts on his second visit, the now battered and exhausted woman fails completely to recognize him, and, shortly afterward, he sees her body among those piled on the cart outside the brothel. In its exceptional foregrounding of systematic sexual violence the film makes visible an aspect of warfare that is almost wholly omitted from war films, and that is incompatible with any concept of the nobility of battle. For a Chinese film to employ a Japanese soldier as protagonist is a provocative attempt to humanize and individualize the ‘enemy,’ especially since Kadokawa is presented to some extent as an unwilling and unwitting participant. While the narrative perspective shifts throughout the film and many other significant characters of various nationalities are introduced, Kadokawa’s is both the first face we see, and the last corpse, and he serves as a narrative anchor, providing us with access to a variety of diegetic spaces. At the same time his childish naïveté is a barrier to spectatorial identification, limiting our understanding of the motivation of the brutal soldiers because he is characterized as unrepresentative. It also limits our capacity for empathy. By contrast with Kadokawa, the other Japanese are presented as sadistic and gleefully malicious. His superior officer, Osamu Ida, for instance, is depicted as a sadistic psychopath who calmly observes, while supervising the execution of a Chinese collaborator, that ‘Everyone dies in the end.’ This fatalism informs all three films, in each of which narrative closure is forestalled with the protagonist’s death by gunfire. Viewed alongside one another a consistent materialist worldview is evident in which nature is indifferent, (male) humans are animalistic, brutal, irrational and radically alone, while death is both inevitable and unexpected. At the time of writing Lu is reportedly preparing a contribution to the portmanteau film Shanghai, I Love You, the third in the series Cities of Love. These films consist of short episodes recounting romantic urban encounters, commissioned from directors from around the world and assembled into feature-length compilations. While in the light of the analysis above, Lu might seem a somewhat perverse choice, the commission marks another important feature of Lu’s cinema, its transnational mode of address. Although there are undoubtedly local details of the films that will be insignificant for most international viewers, such as the ethnicity and linguistic idioms of the characters in Missing Gun and Mountain Patrol (see Lu 2007), or City of Life and Death’s engagement with zhuxuanlu film traditions, the fact that his films are in dialogue with international cinema ensures that non-Chinese audiences can find familiar generic, thematic and narrative frames through which to view the films.

Bruce Bennett References Cui, Shuqin (2008) ‘Kekexili: Mountain Patrol: Moral Dilemma and a Man with a Camera,’ in Chris Berry (ed), Chinese Films in Focus II, London: BFI and Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 153−9. Kraicer, Shelly (2009) ‘A Matter of Life and Death: Lu Chuan and Post-Zhuxuanlu Cinema,’ Cinema-Scope, no. 41. Available at: http://cinema-scope.com/wordpress/ web-archive-2/issue-41/features-a-matter-of-life-and-death-lu-chuan-and-post-zhuxuanlu-cinema-by-shelly-kraicer/. Accessed 20 September 2010. Lu, Chuan (n.d.) ‘Lu Chuan on City of Life and Death,’ Interview by Phil de Semlyen, Empire. Available at: http://www.empireonline.com/interviews/interview.asp?IID=1028. Accessed 20 September 2010. Lu, Sheldon H (2007) ‘Dialect and Modernity in 21st Century Sinophone Cinema,’ Jump Cut, 49. Available at: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc49.2007/Lu/. Accessed 8 November 2010. Lu, Sheldon H (2009) ‘Introduction: Cinema, Ecology, Modernity,’ in Lu, Sheldon H & Mi, Jiayan, (eds), Chinese Eco-Cinema In the Age of Environmental Challenge, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Directors 73

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The Go Master, Century Hero Film Investment/The Kobal Collection.

directors: mainland china tian zhuangzhuang

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Despite the fact that he retains name recognition and canonization as one of the three key directors of the Fifth Generation (along with Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou), Tian Zhuangzhuang has remained one of this seminal collective’s most elusive, amorphous figures. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has been resolute in pursuing his own path, which has included children’s films, features, instructional films, documentaries, remakes of famous and beloved old works, and popular blockbusters. He has also worked as an actor, writer, production designer, editor and cinematographer for both cinema and television, and has contributed to the Fifth Generation several of its most distinctive, singular and controversial works, especially his epic family drama The Blue Kite (1993), which was promptly banned and led to the director being officially refused permission to make another film. Tian Zhuangzhuang was born in April 1952 in Beijing. Both his parents had been famous actors prior to the Cultural Revolution (his mother, Yu Lan went on to head the Children’s Film Studio in Beijing), and the young Tian grew up in an isolated world of largely movie personnel in a courtyard in the Chinese capital. However, like his contemporaries in the Fifth Generation Tian’s early life was marked by the countryside repatriation and re-education alongside rural peasants that defined Chairman Mao’s Zhiqing policy. Tian spent his time in Jilin Province, working in the fields, something he endured for a long while before joining the army. Subsequently he won an apprenticeship in the photographic department of the Agricultural Film Unit, and returned to the city. He worked on several documentaries and instructional films, and with this valuable experience behind him enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy in 1978, at age 26 (originally out of a love for art). Two years later he codirected with two fellow students a short film entitled Our Corner (1980), based on a short story about the illness suffered by a young man during his time as a Zhiqing. As Tony Rayns notes, this video was acclaimed and regarded as a key development in the link between new literature and a new cinema that many were hoping would materialize throughout the 1980s as part of the new post-Mao climate (Kaige and Rayns 1989: 39). While still a student at the BFA, Tian directed works for television in addition to his acclaimed short. His first directorial credit following his graduation and subsequent studio work (at Beijing Film Studio) was a children’s film entitled The Red Elephant (1982), which again saw the fledgling film-maker co-directing with two contemporaries, in this case Xie Xiaojing and Zhang Jianya. Following this Tian directed a movie for television entitled A Summer Experience (1983), and it was in the wake of both this and the ‘shamelessly sentimental melodrama’ (Kaige and Rayns 1989: 40) of his first major work, entitled September (1984), that he migrated to a tiny regional studio (Kunming) and made the picture that may be regarded as his feature debut proper. On the Hunting Ground (1984) caused controversy in China as its location shoot in a nature reserve in Inner Mongolia sparked debate about the legitimacy of filming in such an officially protected environment. The story (such as it is) concerns a hunter’s transgression of the code that governs his life on the plains, although exactly what this code consists of remains somewhat ambiguous throughout, something that has been criticized for telling too little and remaining too remote and minimalist, but which can be seen to feed into an enquiry on Tian’s part into representation and cinematic practice. That is, such remote lives and worlds simply cannot be adequately represented within any mode of conventional storytelling, any mainstream exegeses of narrative and style. On the Hunting Ground was especially unsuccessful, with only two prints sold for archival collection as opposed to distribution. Undeterred, Tian followed with another sparse, minimalist tale set in an alien, insular world with its own laws, customs and most overtly its own rituals, in this case Tibet. The Horse Thief (1986) was scarcely more commercially viable or successful than its predecessor (there were seven prints distributed around China). However it did crystallize Tian’s place as one of the key Fifth Generation figures in that it saw the director exploring the kind of displacement so endemic in the work of Chen Kaige, and so resonant in these directors’ own lives. The film follows the titular figure (named Norbu), who like the protagonist of On the Hunting Ground is banished Directors 75

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from his tribe, in his case for the titular crime of horse theft. Being an enforced nomad in the wilds of Tibet takes its toll on his family: over several years his young son dies and his wife struggles to hold their tenuous family unit together through the harsh conditions. Another son follows in due course, and ultimately it is for his sake that Norbu attempts to return to his tribe, although Tian offers a troublingly open, ambiguous ending that suggests the fundamental incompatibility of his life with those of a family, their needs and wants. The Horse Thief is a visually staggering work, with Tian not only revelling in the desolate barrenness of the Tibetan plains where the protracted narrative takes place (without ever aestheticizing their harshness) but also the religious rituals that mark out the foundation of life in such an environment. As such, The Horse Thief (and indeed On the Hunting Ground) may be seen as broadly allegorical visions of life within a highly rigid and stratified state, and in this they looked forward to the work that would, for good and ill, secure the director’s name and reputation. The Blue Kite, was made a full six years after The Horse Thief, during which interval he changed his film-making methodology entirely and made several broadly commercial, today almost unknown, dramas that are significant for marking the director’s first explorations of modern China. These include The Street Players (aka The Drum Singers [1987]), an adaptation of a novel by Lao She detailing the fate of artists during the Sino-Japanese conflict; Rock Kids (1988), a detailed look at Chinese appropriations of western cultural tenets in the form of rock ’n’ roll music and break-dancing (which in several ways looks forward to Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastards [1993] and the Sixth Generation); and Illegal Lives (1988), a stark drama (directed by Tian at the request of a friend) about affairs and abortion. In addition he also directed a stylized, verbose riposte to propagandistic communist cinematic mythmaking with a historical film about a eunuch and his relationship with the Empress Cixi: Li Lianying: The Imperial Eunuch (1991). Starring Jiang Wen, the film is a heavily researched exploration of the public and private faces of ruling power: in Tian’s words, about the relationship between ‘humanism and ruthlessness’ (cited in Berry 2005: 66). It is a worthwhile work, but little more than a professional exercise in style on Tian’s part, and it left the director particularly hungry to recapture some of the personal themes and methods of his early period. In covering the years between 1953 and 1969, The Blue Kite brought the elliptical narrative of The Horse Thief squarely into the seismic upheavals of post-war, post-Communist Revolution China. Tian made the film explicitly because he had begun to feel that he was betraying his conscience in working as a director for hire on material with which he felt no personal connection, and he thus aimed to redress this professional imbalance by pouring his soul into his new film. Described by critic Michael Berry as ‘a milestone in the history of Chinese cinema’ (Berry 2005: 68) and with a central symbol in the titular kite that was intended to represent the Chinese people (Tian talks of his nation as populated by people he sees as perennially dreaming of flight but at the same time needing and hoping that someone will hold their string: that is, anchor their individuality in a foundation of collectivity), The Blue Kite is not, in fact, directly autobiographical as many have supposed, but rather a truly universal response to a specific social milieu. It is not simply a great Chinese film, just a great film. From The Blue Kite Tian was unable to complete another film for nine years. When he returned, with a faithful reworking of the Chinese post-war classic Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, 1948), he displayed quite a changed and refined style. Springtime in a Small Town (2002) is a chamber drama of the subtlest variety; and from this Tian changed again and moved into documentary cinema. The insightful Delamu (2004) is a poetic investigation into the so-called Tea-Horse road in southern China, a vital link and trade route between Yunnan Province and Tibet and a region that seems to have been almost completely left behind in the onward rush of Chinese modernization. Although Tian does not downplay the perilous nature of the journey on this route, or indeed the poverty endemic to the people living in the

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region, there is a tendency to retreat in awe at the landscape and linger (à la Herzog) over the almost otherworldly forest and mountain landscapes and to frame their stark beauty in purely aesthetic terms. It is, nonetheless, a fascinating excavation of a neglected subject, and its focus on antiquity in modern China carries echoes of the marginal tribes and cultures of early works such as On The Hunting Ground and The Horse Thief. Subsequently, The Go Master (2006) retained the placid, contemplative beauty and poise of Springtime in a Small Town, and in large part also keeps the narrow focus that characterized the earlier film, the sense of off-screen tension and tumult throwing into relief the personal crises of the titular protagonist (the main body of the narrative covers the escalation of the Sino-Japanese war and then of World War II, with only a few scenes taking place in his later years). Wu Qingyuan was a Chinese brought to Japan in order to compete with the greatest Go players, and this figurative dual nationality encapsulates the wider conflicts between nations and the troubled identity of a man torn between two countries. Like The Horse Thief and The Blue Kite it is a markedly elliptical narrative, skipping years at a time and in a single cut, and typically filling in details with on-screen captions that both state facts and offer quotes from Wu as to his feelings about the narrated times and incidents that his musings accompany. The game of Go is a strategic board game of antiquity that originated in China in which stones are placed on a board with a view to occupying the largest portion of its surface area. It is a protracted affair, and is never elucidated in the film (neither, in fact, are the games depicted in any length or significant detail). However, the style of Tian’s film reflects this, and serves at times to place the viewer in the figurative mindset of one embarking on such a game: that is, in a position of serene detachment, a concentrated focus on minutiae over any external concerns. It thus takes apart the form of the cinematic biopic, and in so doing asks us to consider what exactly makes a life, to what extent do external factors shape personal subjectivity, or is there something innate, a priori, in human identity. It is a quietly staggering film, and more than confirmed the status of its director among the greatest in modern world cinema. In another sudden volte-face, Tian moved from The Go Master to a historical blockbuster entitled The Warrior and the Wolf (2009). The story is about a general stranded in a remote village whose local populace has a mystical connection to wolves. It is an intriguing film that never settles for the stylized battles or sumptuous design of Chen Kaige or Zhang Yimou’s recent work in this mode, and the animating thread uniting many of Tian’s films – the vagaries of individual action and identity amidst the tide of history and society – is given a fresh twist. This overriding theme has obvious personal ramifications for the director, as it does for his generation, and it helps naturalize the turn to the historical epic where others (especially Chen Kaige) have appeared rather more calculating in producing their own entries to the genre. It is a fascinating change of pace for this endlessly fascinating director, someone who has made radical about-turns a number of times over the course of his career, and has thus built an eclectic, idiosyncratic body of work. However, it is also a vital body, a canon as significant to modern Chinese cinema as any of his contemporaries in that he has arguably done more than explore the vagaries of the past and its ongoing relevance to the present.

Adam Bingham References Berry, Michael (ed) (2005) Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Film-makers, Chichester, NY: Columbia University Press. Kaige, Chen & Rayns, Tony (1989) King of the Children and the New Chinese Cinema, London: Faber and Faber Limited.

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directors: taiwan chu yen-ping

The films of Taiwanese director-producer Chu Yen-ping represent a challenge in more than one way to critics of Southeast Asian cinema. Many, like Clyde Gentry of Hong Kong Film Connections magazine, regard him as representing the worst aspects of this cinema. There are many examples of works made within his career that support such a claim. No conceivable case for the defense can be made for Shaolin Popey II: Messy Temple (1994), and in such cases it is advisable to bow to the prosecuting counsel. However, if we have long departed from the old Cahiers du cinéma axiom of an auteur never makes a bad film and a metteur en scène can never make a good film, then we can see this director in a different light. Chu Yen-ping may not have made a high number of masterpieces, but he has directed a few interesting films. He also needs to be seen as a representative of a very diverse popular cinema that was overshadowed in the era of the Taiwanese New Wave, but which existed alongside its more prestigious competitor and managed to outlive it in many ways. Although Chu never belonged to that movement and has recently compared his national cinema to a hot pot that appears inflated, offering a deceptive substance but actually empty inside (a description that could also be applied to some of his own films), his role deserves some examination. Beginning as script supervisor on The 18 Bronzemen (dir. Kuo Nan-Hong) in 1976, Chu moved onto screenwriting and assistant directing before directing his first film, Who Is the Real Tycoon? (1980). He followed his debut with three zany masterpieces – Golden Queen’s Commandos (1982), Pink Force Commandos (1982) and Fantasy Mission Force (1983). Since then he has never looked back, to the despair of most Hong Kong critics. He has worked in both the Hong Kong and Taiwanese film industries in various additional roles, such as casting director, producer and actor (in Kung Fu Dunk [2008]), and .

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production manager on Wong Jing’s screwball comedy Boys are Easy (1993), which reunited him with Brigitte Lin whom he had directed in his breakthrough films. Also in 1993 he would direct the martial-arts comedy Flying Dagger, written by Wong Jing. Featuring major stars of Hong Kong cinema such as Tony Leung Ka-fai, Jacky Cheung, and Maggie Cheung, with martial-arts direction by Ching Siu-tung, and music score gratuitously ‘borrowed’ from sources such as Quigley Down Under (Simon Wincer, 1990) and A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton, 1988), the film reflected the director’s earlier absurdist and contradictory blending of generic motifs in a low comedy manner. Chu is a major irritant to those critics attempting to make a case as to why we should take Hong Kong films seriously. But comedy has always been a staple part of that industry, and Chu’s blurring of diverse genres and times does have antecedents in Southeast Asian cinema. Golden Queen’s Commandos, Pink Force Commandos, and Fantasy Mission Force illustrate this. These films deconstruct conventions in a playfully comedic fashion by parodying genres and inserting elements from different times and contradictory spaces. They all resemble aspects of deconstruction and postmodernism but devised in a uniquely Southeast Asian manner that owes nothing to western definitions. Chu’s greatest achievements merge formulas in consciously disruptive ways to express them in novel representations, to the chagrin of traditional critics expecting generic coherency. This pattern does not exist in a cinema that has Wong Kar-wai acting as executive producer on Jeff Lau’s The Eagle-Shooting Heroes (1993), which parodies the same source material used for Wong’s more prestigious version (Ashes of Time [1994]). Chu Yen-ping’s highly underrated Island of Fire (1990, released under a changed title and dubbed in the United States to cash in on Jackie Chan’s stardom, despite the fact that he only appears in it for a total of ten minutes!) is a case in point. The film appropriates the basic structure of a prison movie with its familiar elements of an undercover cop and revenge behind bars. Chu updates the plot of the Japanese prison movie Death Shadows (Hideo Gosha,1986) and parodies genre conventions by knowingly employing well-known sequences from other films such as Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967), Papillon (Franklin J Schaffner, 1973) and The Longest Yard (Robert Aldrich, 1974). This borrowing is out in the open for all to see, inviting the audience to recognize the reference and how it is employed and utilized in a playful manner that bears none of the exhibitionist type of self-consciousness found in the films of Quentin Tarantino. Containing a supporting role by Jimmy Wong Yu, Island of Fire also uses Andy Lau and Sammo Hung superbly in character roles until a breathtaking climax shot in the Philippines. Lau and Chan expire in freeze frame like Newman and Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969), while Sammo Hung fails to reach the departing plane like Richard Harris in The Wild Geese (Andrew V McLaglen, 1978). Chu makes these references work both as tribute and integral parts of the action. Very little is known about Chu Yen-ping outside Taiwan. He has never engaged in the type of international publicity that Tsui Hark and John Woo embrace, but he is a key part of the commercial sector of the Taiwanese film industry. His specific tour de force appears to have begun with Island Warriors (1983). Its narrative borrows from Terence Young’s turgid female gladiator film The Amazons (1973), known for lines such as ‘We’re all going to the bitches.’ However, Chu decides to spice up this tired source material, stretching it to excessive dimensions by showing strong females castrating wimpish males or using them as sex objects. He also parodies the genre both by using a Taiwanese rock number to accompany the opening scenes displaying Amazonian acrobatics, and employing soundtrack motifs from favourite composers such as Jerry Goldsmith and Ennio Morricone (including First Blood [Ted Kotcheff, 1982] and Once Upon a Time in the West [Sergio Leone, 1968]). Island Warriors also borrows the famous beach love scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953). But this time the tide almost submerges the lovers!

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Golden Queen’s Commandos, Pink Force Commandos, and Fantasy Mission Force all deliberately play havoc with generic conventions. They feature Brigitte Lin, who was obviously trying to break away from her 1970s’ star role as ‘Taiwan’s Sweetheart’ in the same way that Mary Pickford often wished to cut off her long schoolgirl curls and play different roles. These films are all set in indefinable historical locations. Although the first and third films have Japanese villains, the historical period is neither the 1930s nor the 1940s. Chu’s female stars wear trendy costumes borrowed from contemporary Taiwanese boutiques, while the males appear to have grabbed anything available from the wardrobe department. Golden Queen’s Commandos parodies The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960), with Brigitte Lin’s Black Fox (modelled on Yul Brynner and John Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn, complete with eye patch) freeing a group of female prisoners to destroy a chemical warfare plant controlled by a mad scientist, who turns out to be the twin brother of a deceased killer. ‘I was not killed. I have a twin brother – or I had one. He was no good.’ He also has a revolving throne like Victor Buono in The Silencers (Phil Karlson, 1966). Black Fox’s allies include Black Cat (who wears a wig pre-dating that of David Bowie in Labyrinth [Jim Henson, 1986]) and samurai-sword wielding Brandy (who combines Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master with Dean Martin’s Dude from Rio Bravo [Howard Hawks, 1959]). Chu’s ‘Eastern Western’ also borrows from Italian western soundtracks such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966), The Big Gundown (Sergio Sollima, 1966), A Fistful of Dynamite (Sergio Leone, 1971), and My Name is Nobody (Tonino Valerii, 1973), as well as non-western ones such as The Working Class Goes to Heaven (Elio Petri, 1971), Violent City (Sergio Sollima, 1970) and Orca, Killer Whale (Michael Anderson, 1977). Also included is Planet of the Apes (Franklin J Schaffner, 1968) by Jerry Goldsmith. The unofficial sequel, Pink Force Commandos, reunites several actresses from Golden Queen’s Commandos in different roles. Combining the diverse activities of director and production designer, Chu makes this film even more confusingly bizarre than its predecessor by excessively mixing genres, costumes, and historical settings even further. He reintroduces his actresses by using clips from Golden Queen’s Commandos that have nothing to do with this new film. Brigitte Lin’s Jackal betrays her team and pays the price by cutting off her arm, like David Chiang in The New One-Armed Swordsman (Zhang Che, 1971). She receives a mini-Gatling gun as a substitute arm from a blacksmith gunfighter modelled on Christopher Lee in Hannie Caulder (Burt Kennedy, 1971). Most of the females wear gun-belts over modern designer costumes. Pink Force Commandos engages in excessive generic mixing, with deliberate Italian western references and prolific music from the soundtracks used in its predecessor, as well as employing Morricone’s theme from The J & S Gang. Chu models the final battle on John Wayne’s The Alamo (1960) with the villain leading a bizarrely-dressed army (complete with one hooded Klansman), using the musical theme from Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982). Fantasy Mission Force is the most bizarre of the three. Captain Dong (Jimmy Wong Yu) leads a mission to rescue three Allied Generals captured by the Japanese in a Luxemburg located on a map of Canada. Since Roger Moore’s 007, Karl Maka’s Baldy from the Aces Go Places series, and Brigitte Lin’s Black Fox are unavailable, Dong has to find other alternatives, one of them being Brigitte Lin in a different role. Chu again raids the costume department and soundtrack library, and also uses Jackie Chan in a reluctant supporting role similar to that in Island of Fire. Chan sporadically appears in cameo scenes (sometimes doubled), aided by actress-director Chang Ling from Wolf-Devil Woman (Ling Chang, 1982). Chu displays his disruptive technique in Jackie Chan’s opening scene, when Chan appears accompanied by a group of musicians using 1950s band instruments but anachronistically playing 1920s music. As well as borrowing again from Planet of the Apes and Morricone scores, such as those from When Women Had Tails (Pasquale Festa Campanile, 1970), Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Elio Petri,

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1970), and Guns for San Sebastian (Henri Verneuil, 1968), Chu also uses fast-motion to depict a group of inappropriately costumed Scottish soldiers in one scene. Nothing is sacred, not even Jack Nicholson’s sexual ghost nightmare from The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). As well as borrowing from The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and The Evil Dead series (Sam Raimi, 1981-87), Chu parodies the arm-reaching sequence from Val Lewton’s Bedlam (1946), but this time having them offering toilet paper to help a scared human clean himself after running away from a ghost. The sequence ends with a homage to Encounter of the Spooky Kind II (Ricky Lau, 1990), accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s score for Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive (1974). The Alamo is also good for another appropriation with the final assault not only indebted to that movie but also others. Extras wear costumes from The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981) and Qing Dynasty movies, riding cars that are certainly not vintage World War II vehicles despite being daubed with swastikas. After Brigitte and her lover die (like Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun [King Vidor, 1946]), survivors Jackie Chan and Chang Ling ride away on a jeep with an ally’s body strapped on top like the deer in The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978). Inappropriately costumed generals (one being an African) run behind in pursuit, the final scene showing that this film is aptly titled. Chu’s supposedly aberrant techniques are by no means unique to Chinese cinema. In his book Chinese Martial Arts Cinema, Stephen Teo notes that the Youlian Studio’s The Red Heroine (Yimin Wen, 1929) mixed costumes, genres, and historical periods in depicting a ‘western’ army comprised of soldiers ‘wearing European-style musketeer costumes and cavalier hats’ (Teo 2009: 27) invading a Chinese village. The film industry could not allow the bizarre nature of this talent to flourish totally unhindered by any form of constraint. Chu later directed several formula films (either under his own name or using a pseudonym) such as Golden Swallow (1988), Dream of Desire (1989), An Eye for an Eye (1990), Easy Money and My Flying Wife (both 1991). All these lack the creative excessiveness of his three great films starring Brigitte Lin, which challenge every rule of cinematic and narrative construction. Occasionally, one of his bizarre inspirations emerges, as in China Dragon (1995) where the villain’s female groupies wear caps modelled on Robot Maria’s headdress in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927). Yet there is one film Chu has made that has been neglected and deserves recognition if only to show that he can direct a serious work – Requital (1992). Although modelled on The Godfather series (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972-1990), this is a very grim Taiwanese gangster movie, as related to Hong Kong and Taiwanese culture as Coppola’s films were to their Italian-American heritage. Adopted into a Taiwanese kingpin’s family after his own family is murdered after saving godfather Kuang from assassination, Tung (Alan Tang) eventually rises to a position of power in the underworld, but finds himself as trapped as Michael Corleone at the end of The Godfather: Part II (1974), where bonds of friendship and family mean absolutely nothing. The film also has Jimmy Wong Yu in a small role, playing a ruthless assassin far removed from his heyday as the noble one-armed swordsman. Amy Yip’s prostitute-mistress Yin delivers a caustic comment on the Triads’ attitudes toward females. Opening with a ten-minute sepia depiction of a past that shapes Tung’s character, the film moves to its grimly deterministic conclusion as Tung and his ‘brother,’ Way, bloodily massacre each other in a gun battle, leaving the victimized wife alone at the climax. This final sequence applies the baptism-by-blood montage of the second Godfather film to make certain symbolic parallels with a Taiwanese day of national celebration. This veteran director, born in 1950, still remains active today. He returned to prison territory with Jail in Burning Island (1997) and co-wrote and directed Lady in Heat (1999), a Category III trilogy of short films. One Stone and Two Birds (2005) is a Beijing-Taiwanese slapstick satire on Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2002) and House of Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou, 2004), while Kung Fu Dunk (2008), starring Chinese pop idol Jay Chou, is Chu’s

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version of Shaolin Soccer (Stephen Chow, 2001). More recent is The Treasure Hunter (2009), which received mixed reviews. Chu Yen-ping will continue to evoke contradictory critical reactions as before. He has undoubtedly directed his share of unmemorable formula films, but deserves special notice for the undeservedly neglected Requital as well as his rule-breaking fantasy films.

Tony Williams Reference Teo, Stephen (2009) Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition, Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.

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Flowers of Shanghai, 3H Prodcctions/The Kobal Collection.

directors: taiwan hou hsiao-hsien Directors 83

Directory of World Cinema

The current cachet of the Taiwanese director, Hou Hsiao-hsien, is not quite what it once had been in the 1980s and 1990s. Nevertheless, if one looks at all the trends of world cinema over the last few decades, Hou’s impact as a director arguably rivals that of any of his contemporaries anywhere. Before Hou came onto the scene, there was no specifically identifiable ‘Asian’ festival style; now it is almost a cliché for East Asian directors to try to use long takes with a largely immobile camera in films clearly designed for international film festivals. If there was a forefather of this trend, it was Hou. Many notable works by esteemed directors as different as Hong Sang-soo (South Korea), Apichatpong Weeraesthakel (Thailand), Hirokazu Kore-eda (Japan) and Jia Zhangke (China), are all Hou’s progeny of sorts, at least stylistically speaking. Without even intending it, Hou Hsiao-hsien gave birth to a pan-Asian festival style, another way by which Asian cinema semi-consciously distinguishes itself from western norms on the world stage. It is important to keep in mind, however, that this is the result more of a historical accident than individual or cultural genius alone. One can argue that Hou could only have developed such a distinctive style in Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s, not Hong Kong nor China. This was largely the result of a peculiar set of historical and industrial conditions. Hou was born in Mainland China in 1947, and was moved with his family to the island two years later. Yet his immersion in Southern Taiwanese culture was so complete (including a marked Taiwanese accent when speaking Mandarin, and native proficiency in the Taiwanese dialect to go along with it), that many in Taiwan are still unaware that he was born on the Mainland. His film career was almost an afterthought. After military service and a degree at the National Academy of the Arts, Hou began working in the commercial film industry in 1973 as a continuity person for the famed Taiwanese director Lee Hsing (Li Xing). He continued to work in this low budget commercial film industry throughout the 1970s, including several stints as an assistant director, and as a screenwriter toward the end of the decade. In 1980, Hou Hsiao-hsien got his first directorial credit for a bubble-gum musicalromantic-comedy, Cute Girl, which was in truth a star vehicle for Kenny B and Feng Fei-fei who were more singers than actors. Hou then goes on to direct two more films starring Kenny B, Cheerful Wind (1981) and The Green, Green Grass of Home (1982). It was after the third film in particular (which can best be described as an environmental musical) that certain critics began to take notice. Moreover, with these three films Hou was making money at the local box office at a time when most Taiwanese films were flops as the domestic market was being lost to both Hong Kong and Hollywood. Only in retrospect would these three films become in effect Hou’s commercial trilogy; and only careful inspection of these films shows signs of a very different Hou about to emerge after 1983 when he joined the Taiwanese New Cinema. The New Cinema was a collective response to some radically changing conditions in the early 1980s within the film industry, as well as in Taiwan as a whole. It clearly was a rejection of the norms of the commercial cinema up to that time. At the same time the movement placed Taiwan and the ‘Taiwanese Experience’ at centre stage, showing what made Taiwan distinct from elsewhere, including Mainland China. What gave these young film-makers the chance to make films unthinkable just a couple of years earlier, was the realization by many in the industry and the government that the hidebound practices of the existing system could not compete with Hong Kong any longer. Moreover, losing American recognition in 1979 meant political fictions regarding Taiwan were no longer sustainable either. While these films did not make money at home for the most part, they did win awards abroad, to most everyone’s surprise. Nevertheless, it was Hou who was the true trailblazer in the New Cinema movement, because even in his first three films, despite their commercial bent, he was already beginning to change piece by piece the existing practices in the film industry. The long take for which he is now famed was at first merely a modest experiment to allow actors

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more breathing room, something not possible when the existing practice was to shoot any scene a line at a time, with no master shots or coverage, all in order to save money on film stock. Once he joined the New Cinema movement with his chapter in the portmanteau work, The Sandwich Man (1983), he became the standard bearer of Taiwanese cinema’s new path. This he accomplished with his pronounced proclivities toward long takes and an increasingly static camera, coupled with ever denser staging and mise en scène strategies, and unusually oblique and elliptical narratives which are episodic to an extreme. Had the Italian neorealists and Bazin lived to see his films, they would have likely found Hou as the most perfect embodiment of their ideals. Moreover, Hou won prizes, and many of them. His first two feature-length films in the New Cinema, The Boys from Fengkuei (1983) and Summer at Grandpa’s (1984), won the top prize at the Festival of the Three Continents in Nantes, a festival that was a true gateway into Europe for a number of non-western cinemas. Hou also won special prizes at Locarno and Berlin in the 1980s, and at many other festivals too numerous to mention here. Both A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985) (essentially Hou’s autobiography) and Dust in the Wind (1986) are often described as two of the greatest masterpieces of the New Cinema movement as a whole. By mid-decade, Hou was decorated back home for service to the Republic of China, as Taiwan is still officially known. Yet as much of a rising star as Hou became abroad, and as much as he served the island as a cultural diplomat, he never found complete acceptance at home. Throughout the 1980s, Taiwan’s own Golden Horse Awards shut out Hou. He also became the most convenient target for those wanting to pin blame for a dying local film industry. Then came the year 1989. City of Sadness won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, making this film the Chinese-language equivalent to Rashomon’s Japanese breakthrough at the same festival in 1951. Equally astounding was the box office success of the film at home, since it was the first film to touch on the ultimate political taboo in Taiwan: the 228 Massacre of 1947. Once again, Hou was riding the unexpected winds of change. Martial law was lifted in 1987 and publicly broaching this incident was no longer grounds for sedition. The end result was an unparalleled cultural event that really signalled the full-fledged Taiwanese consciousness to emerge on the island at all levels in the 1990s, resulting in the direct election of a Taiwanese-born president, first from the ruling KMT, and then from the opposition DPP in the year 2000. Hou will never again quite have the impact in Taiwan that he had in 1989. Yet the 1990s still saw great works, including The Puppetmaster (1993), which marks Hou’s apogee as a director of static long takes, and the dazzling Flowers of Shanghai (1998), arguably one of the most beautiful films shot in history. Since that time, his career has been decidedly more unpredictable and uneven. For a director known for a peculiar long-take style which is now widely imitated throughout Asia, Hou since the mid-1990s has been moving the camera with almost reckless abandon, following the trends usually found with other long take masters such as Jansco or Angelopolous in the West. This new Hou first became evident in Good Men, Good Women (1995), and was then confirmed by Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996). Every film in the 2000s – Millennium Mambo (2001), Café Lumiere (2003), Three Times (2005) and Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) – shows that he continues to show no interest nor inclination to go back to his definitive style up to 1993. One can argue that only in Flowers of Shanghai has Hou put the mobile camera to distinctive use, with its slow-moving arcs in both directions around extremely densely woven settings and throngs of actors. It would be wrong, however, to merely speak of Hou’s films in formal terms, as striking as they are in his case. As distinctive as his style is, Hou disavows being a stylist or a formalist – for him style is merely a means of expressing what he needs to express at that particular time. Of course, anyone can do a static long take – but few can do it in

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the singular way that Hou has often done, with myriad details so finely laid out in front of the camera, and coupled with such intricately laid out staging techniques. (This is most in evidence in Dust in the Wind, City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster and Flowers of Shanghai.) But why does he go to so much trouble to express what he is trying to say? What exactly is he trying to articulate? Answering these two questions is no easy task when it comes to Hou. If there has been any progression over Hou’s career, it has to be his increasing indirectness which sometimes verges on extreme obliqueness. Hou has taken such radical risks in this regard that he virtually ensures he will have only a specialized following (i.e. film aficionados and festival mavens) rather than a broad one. Every stylistic choice Hou makes seems calculated to this end. In the 1990s, in particular, he and his favoured DOP, Mark Lee, began to push striking lighting schemes to the margins of visibility. All this notwithstanding, there is a consistent logic behind these varied experiments with indirect cinematic narration, since Hou is acutely reluctant to pass any moralistic judgment on his characters. His quest instead is for an odd serene detachment, creating a sort of cinematic Archimedean point from which he, and we along with him, can observe the world without the usual ideological and value-laden judgments. In addition, he prefers to focus, not on the great moments of history, nor on renowned historical personas, but on the forgotten quotidian moments, often experienced by those who have no control over the tides of history or contemporary life, and yet who suffer as a result. While this is often a tragic vision, it is also surprisingly calm and detached as well. Underneath are layers of hidden lyricism, which makes subsequent viewings of some of his films more emotional than a single viewing would ever let on. The inspiration for this vision goes back to his early days in the New Cinema, starting with his introduction to an idiosyncratic Chinese novelist from the twentieth century, Shen Congwen. What impressed Hou most about Shen was his ability to look at everything anew, and without passing judgment in the usual ways expected of Chinese intellectuals of Shen’s time. Hou would have never even read Shen were it not for his screenwriter, Chu Tian-wen, who introduced Hou to Shen’s works because she saw some similarities between the two men. That incident alone demonstrates how much Hou owes not only to Taiwan, but to several close collaborators as well. Chu without a doubt has long been the most important collaborator of all of them, but she no longer works with Hou, making his future works all the more uncertain. Still, no matter what transpires from here on out, in time Hou should be recognized for what he truly has been: one of the most original, significant, and influential directors in East Asia over the last three decades. He also should be recognized as a cinematic master for all time. History has already been kind to Hou once, and he took good advantage of the unique opportunities it provided him in Taiwan. One can only hope future history will also secure his rightful legacy.

James Udden

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Rebels of the Neon God, Central Motion Picture Corporation/The Kobal Collection.

directors: taiwan tsai ming-liang

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When the Musée du Louvre in Paris decided to commission a director to make a film that was to become its first collection in the medium of film, it chose, out of a list of more than two hundred directors, the Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based Tsai Ming-liang. The resulting film, Visage (2009), set partly in the museum’s premises and partly in Taiwan, is a work that suitably pays homage to the legacy of the French New Wave, which holds a special place in the director’s vision. Tsai is famed for his affinity to François Truffaut and he frequently names The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959) as his favourite film. Having cast Jean-Pierre Léaud and incorporated scenes from The 400 Blows in his 2001 film, What Time Is It There?, Tsai extends this cross-cultural cinephilia in Visage by casting Léaud, Jeanne Moreau and Fanny Ardant, all of whom had had close working and personal relationships with Truffaut. Visage is Tsai’s most self-consciously meta-filmic and intertextual film. Its diegesis centres on a director (played by Tsai’s regular actor and cinematic alter ego, Lee Kang-sheng) who is making a film in Paris, and is littered with references to Truffaut, who makes an appearance in a photograph in a book on him. In one scene Lee and his film-within-a-film actor, Léaud (Truffaut’s cinematic alter ego) rattle off a list of names of auteurs (Pasolini, Fellini, Antonioni, Welles, Murnau, Truffaut, etc.), clearly alluding to a scene in Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973) in which Truffaut plays a film director who had ordered a parcel of books whose covers are shown in close-ups as he unpacks them, revealing the names of Buñuel, Bergman, Godard, Hawks, Hitchcock, etc. Thus in one cinephilic moment Tsai has inserted himself among the pantheon of (mainly) European auteurs from the mid-twentieth century that he regards as constituting the high point of film history, his Visage elevated to the status of art, now that it has become a permanent collection in the Louvre. According to Catherine Derosier-Pouchous, head of the Louvre’s audiovisual program, Tsai’s film will ‘rethink the meaning of cinema in the 21st century’ (Robertson 2006). Recent changes in the technologies of making, viewing and exhibiting films, especially in digital form, have prompted pronouncements on the death of cinema, both in its celluloid form (in which Tsai insists in filming) and in the physical space of cinematic theatres and, with it, the social practice of going to the movies. With films increasingly viewed in privatized modes and diminishing scales of television and computer screens as well as on airplanes and mobile phones, Tsai’s 2003 film, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, set in an actual soon-to-be-demolished theatre, the Fu Ho Theatre in Taipei County, crystallizes for cinephiles across the world this impending doom. Writing in Sight and Sound in October 2007, Peter Matthews took the recent passing of Antonioni and Bergman to indicate that the end of cinema is nigh, citing Goodbye and those by other auteurs (Béla Tarr, Michael Haneke and Abbas Kiarostami) as representing ‘lonely cul-de-sacs, their rigour and high seriousness pathetically out of step with dominant values’ (Matthews 2007: 17). Yet, notwithstanding the film’s nostalgic tone that seems to suggest a lamentation for the death of cinema, Tsai is also at the forefront of pushing the definition of cinema, not least in relation to its possible exhibition spaces. In 2007 Tsai included discarded seats from the Fu Ho Theatre in an installation piece, It’s a Dream, at the Venice Biennale, thus staging a dialogue between the film medium and another art form. With British artists previously known for their video art installation venturing into feature-length film-making (Steve McQueen’s 2008 film, Hunger, and Sam Taylor-Wood’s 2009 Nowhere Boy), Tsai’s foray into installation art confirms that the boundary between these art forms and their exhibition spaces are more porous than ever. The disappearance of Fu Ho Theatre in Goodbye becomes an opportunity to imagine where films might be seen in the new millennium − in a museum perhaps? One feature, however, remains consistent for Tsai: he unabashedly regards film as an art form and the film director as an auteur in the spirit of the French discourse of politique des auteurs, championed by Truffaut the Cahiers du cinéma critic before he became the harbinger of the Nouvelle Vague. By insisting that film is art, Tsai has,

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throughout his career, resolutely refused to bow to commercial pressure, shunning entertainment impulses, psychologizing characterization, cheap thrills of car chases and blown up buildings, special effects and CGIs (computer-generated images). Instead, his films are challenging to watch, with unexplained narrative ellipses, a minimalist approach toward story, plot and characterization that gives an impression that nothing much happens, and an austere aesthetics typified by slowness of pacing, stillness of camera and silence of the soundtrack. There is usually very little dialogue and no use of a voiceover and, while Mandarin songs from the mid-twentieth century have featured in the endings and as musical numbers in his recent films, non-diegetic music is denied after his debut film. ‘Popular’ responses, gleaned from postings of reviews of his films and DVDs on the Internet, for example, tend to compare the experience of watching his films to watching paint dry − after all, Tsai’s films are not exactly action-packed. However, his films are festival darlings and have garnered many international awards, including a Golden Lion in Venice for his second film, Vive L’amour (1994), and a Silver Bear in Berlin for his third, The River (1997). Europe has become the main source for his films’ financing and an important locale for their exhibition, where it is more likely to catch a Tsai film at festivals and arthouse cinemas than in Taiwan. Tsai is not short of admirers in East Asia either: South Korea’s Pusan International Film Festival named Tsai the Asian Film-maker of the Year 2010, citing his ‘considerable contribution to enhanc[ing] the global status of Asian Cinema’ (Anon. 2010). All of these seem a very long way away from Tsai’s humble beginnings. Born in Kuching, East Malaysia in 1957, Tsai was brought up by his grandparents who took turns, while running a street noodle stall, to take him to the cinema to keep him entertained. Tsai went to Taiwan to pursue his college education in the late 1970s, graduating from the film and drama section of Chinese Culture University’s drama department in 1982. It was during this period that Tsai was exposed to European post-war modernist cinema at Taipei’s National Film Archive and developed what was to become a life-long obsession with Truffaut. Tsai’s early career after graduation was in experimental theatre (acting, scriptwriting and directing), followed by writing screenplays for other film-makers and directing acclaimed television drama, which led eventually to film-making. Coming after the Taiwan New Cinema movement of the 1980s that produced auteurs such as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, Tsai’s 1992 debut film, Rebels of the Neon God, was hailed as representing the movement’s second wave. While Central Motion Picture Corporation, the same company responsible for most of the films from Taiwan New Cinema, produced his first three films, Tsai has tended to dismiss the link between his film-making and the legacy of the movement. Indeed, from his fourth film onward, Tsai’s thematic concerns, film style and financial backing have departed further and further from Taiwan, culminating, most recently, with the Louvre’s commission that sees him established more as an international auteur than one associated chiefly with a national cinema. Tsai’s early films set in Taipei and focusing on issues of gender and sexuality earned him the dual titles of a clinical chronicler of loneliness and alienation in metropolitan life and of a ‘gay’ director. These are, however, rather facile observations. For Tsai’s seemingly lonely characters do not merely embody existential angst but also indict the mythology of the Chinese family and kinship system, rendering it empty through visual representation of space and the spectre of homosexuality (see Martin 2003). Yet ‘homosexuality’ is never purely presented in a straightforward manner but it performs a queering/querying function that denaturalizes the status quo, be it heteronormativity, the global system of late-capitalism, or even the nature of film language and film narrative. Tsai’s queer poetics (Lim 2006) and non-literal approach to representation gain sharper focus in his later works, as recurrent symbols (such as water) enrich in their allusions, queer sensibilities inflect upon non-queer subjects (in a film like the 2005 The Wayward Cloud that is set in a straight porn film set, starring a real-life Japanese porn actress), and

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The Wayward Cloud, Wild Bunch / The Kobal Collection.

musical numbers provide a fantasy land whereto the imagination of both the characters and the audience can take flight. Tsai’s films have, particularly since he introduced musical numbers in The Hole (1998), become a curious mix of corporeal realism with its extreme long takes on banal everydayness and fantastical otherworldliness with its glorious song-and-dance sequences. They fulfil Michel Ciment’s call for a fusion of the Lumière path, which has seen the reality effect in fiction film centering ‘more and more on the details of everyday life,’ and the Méliès tradition represented by ‘totally artificial worlds’ (Ciment 2003). Ciment, a long-time editor of the French film magazine Positif, is one of the first cinephiles to muse on the subject of slowness in cinema. It is difficult to qualify slowness in cinema, and I will posit stillness and silence as its two essential elements. By stillness I refer to the use of static rather than mobile camera and of long takes for shots that typically also feature stillness of diegetic action (i.e. very little happening). By silence I mean the paucity of sonic elements usually heard on film, such as diegetic and non-diegetic music, dialogue and voiceover. These are, of course, only general rules, and Tsai is more than capable of achieving a cinema of slowness precisely by breaking these rules. The ending of Vive L’amour includes a tracking shot of the female protagonist walking in a park, reminiscent of Léaud’s escape from the reformatory at the end of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows; the shot lasts

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two minutes and eight seconds, the sense of slowness accentuated by sounds of footsteps on the hard surface of the pavement while the tracking shot does nothing to hasten our perception of speed. Later, the female protagonist sits on a bench and cries for almost six minutes; this time, the static long-take traps the audience in a diegetic world of inconsolable sobbing, listening to these uncomfortable sounds alongside strangers in an auditorium. It is during moments like these that one feels Tsai’s films are very slow indeed. The reception of Tsai’s films is understandably mixed, but it is probably fair to say he appeals particularly to cinephiles drawn to the film festival and arthouse circuits. Besides an aesthetics of slowness that divides opinion, Tsai’s choice of subject matter can also be seen as controversial, from the father-son incest scene in The River to the use of comatose bodies in sex scenes in The Wayward Cloud and I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006). Finally, while I have focused mainly on issues of poetics and aesthetics in this short piece, political critique is not completely absent in Tsai’s films, such as the oblique reference to the Anwar Ibrahim incident in Malaysia by casting a discarded mattress in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai’s only film to be set in Malaysia),1 or turning a statue of Taiwan’s ex-president Chiang Kai-shek into a prop for a camp musical number in The Wayward Cloud. Tsai may not take political and historical events as the core of his narratives the way many Taiwanese film-makers do, but his random pokes at politics are arguably more challenging in their queer irreverence.

Song Hwee Lim References Abbott, Jason (2001) ‘Vanquishing Banquo’s Ghost: The Anwar Ibrahim Affair and Its Impact on Malaysian Politics,’ Asian Studies Review, 25: 3, pp. 285−308. Anon. (2010) ‘PIFF 2010 Announces the Asian Film-maker of the Year, TSAI Ming Liang,’ http://www.piff.org/artyboard/mboard.asp?Action=view&strBoardID=9611_05&intP age=1&intCategory=0&strSearchCategory=|s_name|s_subject|&strSearchWord=&int Seq=2984. Accessed 2 September 2010. Ciment, Michel (2003) ‘The State of Cinema,’ http://web.archive.org/web/ 20040325130014/http://www.sfiff.org/fest03/special/state.html. Accessed 18 August 2010. Lim, Song Hwee (2006) Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Martin, Fran (2003) ‘Vive L’Amour: Eloquent Emptiness,’ in Chris Berry (ed), Chinese Film in Focus: 25 New Takes, London: BFI Publishing, pp. 175−82. Matthews, Peter (2007) ‘The End of an Era: A Cinephile’s Lament,’ Sight & Sound, October, pp. 16−8. Robertson, Campbell (2006) ‘Arts, Briefly,’ http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/13/ arts/13arts.html?_r=2. Accessed 5 September 2010.

Note 1. In September 1998 the then Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim was detained on charges of corruption and sodomy. At the preliminary judicial hearing Anwar appeared with a black eye (hence the Chinese title of Tsai’s film, literally ‘black eye circle’), and the trial that followed ‘provided lurid details of alleged sexual acts involving the former Deputy Prime Minister, which were covered with zeal by the media culminating in the farcical sight of a mattress bearing the alleged “stains” that proved the defendant’s guilt being dragged in and out of the court’ (Abbott 2001: 286−7).

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directors: hong kong fruit chan

Of all the prominent film-makers to have stamped their mark on modern Hong Kong cinema, few if any can claim as paradigmatic an oeuvre, as intrinsically, inextricably a Hong Kong body of work, as Fruit Chan (Gor). Engaging thoroughly with the multifaceted, at times contradictory, nature of both his nationality and cinematic lineage, Chan is one of the key Hong Kong directors of the past fifteen years. His film Made in Hong Kong (1997) was among the most important Cantonese films of the 1990s, no less than the first independent Hong Kong picture to emerge from the former British colony following its 1 July 1997 reversion to Chinese sovereignty, and the clearest example of a new cinema for a brand new era. Indeed, it became the first instalment of what would become a tripartite of films collectively known as the ‘Handover Trilogy’ for their insistent exploration of the immediate pre- and post-1997 state of the nation as it affected numerous, interconnected, transnational citizens living lives of quiet struggle and frustration in working-class Hong Kong. Fruit Chan was born in 1959 in Mainland China (Guangdong), and his early career was so entrenched in commercial cinema that he knew nothing of independent film-making, even of film festivals. He began in the industry at the very bottom in 1980 (after having studied at the Hong Kong Film and Cultural Centre and by his own admission falling into film-making by chance); and over the course of many years worked his way up from sweeping sets to become an assistant director at the prestigious Golden Harvest studio. After working in this capacity beside major directors such as Ronny Yu, Kirk Wong and even Jackie Chan, he made his first film in 1991, turning in a professional job on a fairly routine genre assignment that offered little scope. Finale in Blood (1991) is a late and calculated addition to the curious, distinctly Hong Kong romantic/horror/

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mystery/comedy hybrid genre that proliferated in the 1980s through such varied hits as A Chinese Ghost Story (Tony Ching Siu-tung, 1987) and Stanley Kwan’s masterpiece Rouge (1988). Although examples of this generic mongrel were still finding expression well into the late-1990s – with, for example, Tsui Hark and Andrew Chan’s 1997 animated reworking of A Chinese Ghost Story (which Hark had originally produced), and further through the protracted soft-porn franchise of the numerous Chinese Erotic Ghost Story pictures – it was already a dated entity by the time Chan contributed his film. Finale in Blood thus feels like a rather cynical offering, especially as it attempts to marry the broad, knockabout comedy of A Chinese Ghost Story with the emotional weight of Rouge (although this pre-empts what would later become a typical feature of Chan’s work: a bold, postmodern juxtaposition of dichotomous stylistic and narrative elements). The story concerns a murdered woman returning as a ghost to confront her duplicitous husband, and telling her story over consecutive nights on a radio program, a show whose awkward, socially inept host is the film’s ostensible male lead – a marked contrast to the ghost’s philandering partner. This popular, and populist, meta-narrative is the most interesting aspect of the film, as it places the fantastical scenario in implicit quotation marks and cannily emphasizes its postmodern self-reflexivity. Otherwise, it is a distinctly unexceptional affair, and shows on screen the slightly rushed, hectic nature of its production – it was born when a film on which Chan was assisting Tony Au stalled during shooting and an impromptu decision was taken to shoot another picture in its stead, leaving Chan to step up and direct, and approach what he himself called the ‘guillotine’ (cited in Berry 2005: 464). Finding directorial work hard to come by in the wake of Finale in Blood, and indeed feeling dismayed at his experiences on that film (in addition to the above it was shelved until 1993 before receiving its belated theatrical release and faring poorly at the box office), it took Chan a further four years to realize Made in Hong Kong. Its very existence in fact represented a triumph of will, endeavour, and determination over serious strictures and limitations. It was completed for a mere HK$500,000 (around US$80,000) with an entirely non-professional cast, a crew of only five and a borrowed production office. Chan even had to shoot the film on the short end of leftover film stock accrued from his time working as an assistant on an Andy Lau picture entitled Heaven and Earth (1994). It was a work that spewed forth from its director in a decisive moment of inspiration that took its cue from the real-life events unfolding around him; and its ostensibly chaotic production style is mirrored in the story and style of the film itself. Employing a restless, urgent, quasi-nouvelle vague method of location shooting, handheld camerawork, freeze-frames, flash-cuts, jump-cuts, compressed lap dissolves and fragmentary snatches of dreams and fantasies, all overlaid with a voiceover narration that sporadically changes its relationship and mode of address to the pro-filmic, Chan offers a singularly personal response to many of the norms of frenetic Hong Kong cinema as it developed throughout its own New Wave of the late 1970s/early 1980s (Ann Hui, Patrick Tam, Tsui Hark, John Woo, etc). Indeed, Tam’s film Nomad (1982) offers a paradigm that Made in Hong Kong in many ways picks up and carries forward, giving the narrative (that centres on three variously alienated, disaffected youths) a sense of ostensible familiarity that Chan uses to underline the figurative entrapment within the shabby lives of his protagonists; and indeed, it is telling that, against this, when the trio leaves the confines of the city, he shoots in long takes and long shots as though to visually inscribe their sense of (illusory) freedom. Subsequently, the two films that completed the ‘Handover Trilogy’ both offered personal experience and testimony as markers of the upheaval endemic in Hong Kong’s becoming a SAR (Special Administrative Region) of the People’s Republic. These works –The Longest Summer (1998) and Little Cheung (1999) – followed closely on the heels of Made in Hong Kong, and are similarly replete with an urgency and immediacy tempered

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with a sense of distance and recall. Neither proved commercially successful, but they both saw Chan refining his particular style and vision, and in so doing cemented the paradigm that was initiated by their illustrious predecessor. The former follows a group of former soldiers in the British army corps, who following its disbandment in March 1997 make plans to rob a bank. Introducing elements of subjectively-rendered magic realism into his already combustible technique (in particular an image of a man with a hole through his face), The Longest Summer is by Chan’s admission a film stranded between art and popular cinema, but remains a reflective action picture to the extent that personal action and agency (in the existential sense) seems to precipitate crises throughout, offering a vision of the circumscribed options open to Cantonese peoples at this important point in their history. Its follow-up, by way of contrast, is a more pointedly considered, dramatic, less stylistically audacious and frenetic narrative that follows the titular young boy as he works for his father’s cafe and befriends a young girl named Fan, whose family has arrived from Shenzen in China and who soon become illegal immigrants. There is an amazing moment at the end of this film when Little Cheung sees ghostly visions of the protagonists of Made in Hong Kong and The Longest Summer, and the connection forged between them – between successive generations of pre-pubescent, adolescent and young adult – infers a certain blanket cynicism of the future that awaits both young citizens and the newly young country of which they are now a part. In the wake of these handover films Chan continued his hectic pace of production and immediately began work on another tripartite series, this one termed the ‘Prostitute Trilogy.’ Durian Durian (2000) retains the character of Fan from Little Cheung, and uses her by now established story of migration and illegality in Hong Kong from Mainland China to refract a story that ultimately centres on a prostitute (Yan) whom Fan befriends. The narrative is split in two, with an opening section in Mongkok, Hong Kong giving way to one set in Mainland China (in Mudanjiang, Heilongjiang, in the rural northeast), a duality that pertains to Yan’s experiences as a prostitute in the former and an ordinary girl in the latter. The film has been convincingly argued to represent and rethink a vision of China and Hong Kong national identities. As Wendy Gan states: ‘Durian Durian is [...] a “DissemiNatory” film that “begins the work of imagining [...] a new form of community” that will disturb and challenge dominant notions of Chinese nationhood through hybridity and difference’ (Gan 2005: 3) and as such it is replete with doubles: from the title itself (taken from a fruit whose pungent odor and hard shell make it particularly unpalatable) to the two cities that dominate the two halves of the narrative; even the two protagonists, whose views of each other inform the ongoing story. The film was shot using no script, and with Chan employing hidden cameras to capture authentic scenes of prostitutes at work, and the result is Chan’s most piercing and arguably human drama, shorn of stylistic hyperbole and affect and demonstrating his skill with actors. The second film in this new trilogy is a much more overtly postmodern, blackly comedic film. Its title, Hollywood Hong Kong (2001), alludes to the fact that cinematic signification is being very consciously appropriated to underline a vision of a working-class milieu (very much a heightened, stylized mirror image of the back alley locations of Mongkok in Little Cheung and Durian Durian) and its close proximity to a new block of upperclass apartments. There is thus another duality and oppositional conflict at the heart of this film, which can again be related to a discourse on motherland China’s burgeoning identity crisis and its increasingly dialectical relationship with its newly returned offspring. The myriad protagonists of Hollywood Hong Kong are, among others, a family of overweight butchers and, again as in Durian Durian, a Mainland Chinese prostitute working in the new Chinese state, and these characters neatly service the typical Chan themes of the society in microcosm, the impact of place on self and subjectivity, a Claude Chabrolesque social/political narrativization of food and eating as representative of consumption and figurative cannibalism (just as prostitution becomes a Godardian metaphor for living

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under modern advanced capitalism), and an emphasis on the contrastive personal and official vicissitudes of language (typically seen in the first-person voiceovers that predominate in a number of his works). The film explores a concept of Cantonese identity as a constant negotiation of opposites and disparate entities, as signified by the title; it also seems to see Chan himself coming to terms with a new identity – that of an auteur film-maker. The credit ‘A Fruit Chan film’ had not been prominent before Hollywood Hong Kong; however, here this marker appears stamped on the carcass of a pig in a tacit acknowledgement of his status as a piece of meat in a marketplace where his name now means something very specific, and very connotative. Chan’s next project saw him calling a halt to the ‘Prostitute Trilogy’ and developing both his technique and narrative methodology further by making the move to DV (Digital Video). Public Toilet (2002) makes the most of this new technology to increase the offbeat, handheld aesthetic of Made in Hong Kong, and to introduce a more explicit discourse on film-making, in particular its potential to engage (or otherwise) with reality; or indeed to create its own realism. The ensemble of characters and stories contained within Public Toilet centre around the titular location, the bodily functions that it caters for being as pervasive and endemic a human need as their corollary in eating and drinking. Chan implicitly locates several stories as meta-narratives by using fantastical scenarios (especially the thread featuring a beautiful, boneless female sea creature), but he also introduces films and film-making directly into the narrative. At one point, a character travelling in India in search of a magic illness remedy bathes in the Ganges and is told by his Indian companions: ‘It’s like our Indian movies. It removes all the pressure from us.’ ‘He grew up with only HK movies. What does he know?’ ‘Indian movies are like medicine. [They] remove all the pressures and sufferings of everything.’ The home movies of two characters also factor into this, especially as one man engaged in an assassination has a companion film him in a document of and testament to his reality, which in turn carries obvious overtones of a movie. These layers mark out Public Toilet, and although the various stories do not always cohere (the links between them at times both strained and ambiguous), it nonetheless showed Chan continuing to grow as a director, to demonstrate an ambition to challenge and reinvent himself and his work. A move into horror film-making has occupied Chan’s efforts in recent years. His short film Dumplings made up one segment of the compendium release Three... Extremes (2004), and was expanded into a feature-length release; whilst Don’t Look Up (2009) returns to the overt engagement with cinema that had earlier made itself felt in Public Toilet, focusing as it does on a film crew who begin to lapse into insanity while shooting a film about an ancient curse. These pictures have unfortunately done little to enhance Chan’s artistry, or indeed his reputation. However, he remains one of the most important directors in modern Hong Kong, with a legacy that few of his contemporaries can match.

Adam Bingham References Berry, Michael (ed) (2005) Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Film-makers, Chichester, NY: Columbia University Press. Gan, Wendy (2005) Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

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Chungking Express, Jet Tone/The Kobal Collection.

directors: hong kong wong kar-wai

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Partway through Wong Kar-wai’s directorial debut As Tears Go By (1988), gangster Wah randomly encounters a former girlfriend, now heavily pregnant. The scene begins with a distant view of Wah dashing through a downpour. As he arrives close to frame, the camera glides sideways to reveal the woman standing nearby. The arcing camera comes to rest, framing the pair in frontal two-shot. This setup presents the characters’ stilted exchange as they take refuge from the rain, the woman assuring Wah that he is not her child’s father. Assuaged, Wah bids farewell and ventures back into the rainstorm. Now the camera reverses its original path, tracking away from the woman, and reclaiming its initial vantage point as Wah darts into the distance. Bracketed by rhyming tracking shots, this sequence evinces a formal unity consistent with the film’s generally episodic construction. In some respects this scene is prototypical Wong Kar-wai. The fondness for action motivated by coincidence; the use of inclement rainfall as pathetic fallacy; the interruption of genre plotting by apparently incidental action; the expression of interior states through subtle implication (as when the woman’s hesitancy hints at emotional secrets) – all these features have become cornerstones of Wong’s cinema. Yet the scene’s visual symmetry betrays a degree of detailed calculation, perhaps even storyboarding, uncharacteristic of Wong’s subsequent films. Here, the indications are of economical shooting and cutting-in-the-camera, not least because the scene’s visual bookends were evidently conceived prior to editing. Wong’s next film, romance-melodrama Days of Being Wild (1990), signals a decisive shift toward the director’s now-customary film practice: an experimental preference for shooting many improvized variants of a scene. Now a rich lode of footage multiplies options for scene construction, and this fund of possibilities – afforded by Wong’s spontaneous method of shooting, which does not presuppose how the finished scene will look – effectively relegates the sort of neatly symmetrical sequence found in As Tears Go By. As it makes one aesthetic option less likely, however, Wong’s production method promotes other formal choices. Elliptical editing now emerges as a major strategy, thanks partly to continuity gaps arising from assembled takes. If scenic symmetry in As Tears Go By yields crisp scene divisions and formal finesse, ellipticality fosters ambiguous effects more in tune with Wong’s sensibilities. The romantic role-plays of In the Mood for Love (2000) register disorientation largely by elliptical cutting, which blends discrete scenes imperceptibly together; the resulting temporal ambiguity renders the protagonists’ relationship indeterminate. Noting this early shift in Wong’s production methods – from cutting-in-camera to on-set spontaneity – reminds us not only that Wong often favours complication over clarity, but that his films’ formal complexity stems in part from his distinctive, mercurial mode of production. Wong’s method embraces chance and experiment to a degree that is unusual even for Hong Kong film production. Still, the films themselves contradict the purportedly aleatory nature of their creation. Whereas Wong prizes exploratory shooting practices, the postproduction phase – supervised by editor William Chang Suk-ping – evidently prioritizes Aristotelian principles of coherence and unity, subjecting creative experiment to formal constraints. For all their capricious, mazy gestations, Wong’s films display remarkable internal unity at every level of design. The music track in Chungking Express (1994), for instance, may seem a casual collage of appropriated songs, but it integrally weaves the film’s two-part structure into an organic whole. A languorous, sultry jazz theme sweeps across both plotlines, ironically juxtaposed against the protagonists’ chaste romances. This tune tacitly hinges the two loosely-connected stories. More elaborately, music in both episodes articulates the film’s primary theme of change. The blonde woman of the first story safeguards against change, but Dennis Brown’s reggae track ‘Things in Life’ mildly rebukes her: ‘It’s not every day we’re gonna be the same way / There must be a change somehow.’ In the second part, the elfin waitress is indefatigably obsessed with ‘California Dreamin’,’ a

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song that both epitomizes her phobia of change and literalizes her urge to start afresh in America. Similarly, ‘What a Difference a Day Makes’ and Cantopop ballad ‘Dreams’ lyrically meditate on the transformations wrought by romantic love. Apart from thematizing songs in leitmotivic fashion, Wong accords music throughout Chungking Express a palpable self-consciousness. In all such ways, the apparent arbitrariness of Wong’s music track – highly heterogeneous in idiom and cultural origin – masks a thoroughgoing unity. No less harnessed to formal integrity is Wong’s visual design. My Blueberry Nights (2007), an Americanized counterpart to Chungking Express, lends its travelog narrative a lush pictorial consistency. A putative road movie – though in fact, like Happy Together (1997) concerned as much with stagnation as with progress – My Blueberry Nights assigns a dominant colour scheme to each major locale. Deep blues and greens saturate the New York setting; hot reds and oranges mark the Memphis milieu; golds and tans pervade Nevada and Vegas. Similarly the New York setting’s window inscriptions reemerge in the film’s other major plot strands as an overt visual motif. These cohesion devices help knit distinct plot episodes together and reveal once more the organizing hand of William Chang (here responsible for production design as well as editing). Critics have castigated My Blueberry Nights as loosely-plotted and unfocused, but it is no less solidly constructed than Wong’s more feted works. Just as Wong’s films exhibit internal unity, so they cohere into a broadly hermetic oeuvre. At the production level, Wong’s corpus is unified by trusted associates. The contributions of Chang, cinematographer Chris Doyle, and a prized troupe of players (including Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung, Faye Wong, Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi) have been widely recognized, not least in connection with the films’ visual sensuousness. Then there is the dense thicket of intertextual allusions that recycles characters, locales, and music cues across the entire oeuvre. The apparent integrity of Wong’s authorial universe tantalizes viewers into positing connections among the films’ narrative agents and events (though, tellingly, the diegeses resist neat alignment). Dramatically, too, the films converge on common terrain. Permeating these works are recurring thematic concerns: the friction between social mores and romantic desire; the longing to surmount psychic inertia; the capricious forces that thwart or furnish personal encounters; the impregnability of time and memory; the spatiality of time; the temporal ambiguities of place. So much unity might seem conservative, but Wong’s films construct a pervasive ‘roughening’ of the viewer’s experience that reveals aesthetic risk. Critics regularly note the dreamlike effects of Wong’s cinema, but its seductive, narcotic qualities are offset by tactics designed to perplex, thwart, or mislead. Put simply, these films demand a cognitively alert spectator. If, ultimately, Wong’s aesthetic of disturbance submits to narrative intelligibility, it nevertheless achieves startling moments of ambiguity and irresolution. At the level of visual style, Wong’s aesthetic is neither wholly opaque nor wholly informative. Equally, it refuses both the direct emotional payoffs of Hong Kong’s popular cinema and the affective ‘distance’ of the art film. A favourite stratagem, achieved by various means, is the denial or disturbance of facial access. Admittedly, the legible facial close-up constitutes an active resource for Wong: at times he cannot resist lingering on the sensuous visages of his players. But such compositions operate in counterpoint to less instantly readable images designed to block or obscure the human face. In Days of Being Wild, close singles and frontal staging offer no guarantee of legible facial views; oblique body posture, intrusive shadows, or impinging foreground figures often disturb visibility. Nor is the over-the-shoulder shot (OTS) exempt from obfuscating treatment. The ornate, anamorphically-filmed 2046 (2004) strangulates the OTS schema, occluding much of the frontal character’s face by obstructive back-to-camera figures. As if defied by the wide screen ratio to flout spaciousness, Wong perversely jams the onscreen pair together, wedging them against the frame edge to conjure unnaturally oppressive framings; in the

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process, characters’ faces are abbreviated as beguiling fragments. Even the freeze-frame – typically an aid to dramatic clarity – is in Wong’s repertoire an available source of obfuscation. Chungking Express violates cinematic tradition by arresting an indistinct image: fleeing a murder, the blonde-wigged woman, suspended in motion, becomes an off-centre, murky figure. (Perceptual and narrative frustration coalesce here: the oblique image flagrantly stymies revelation just as the enigmatic woman sheds her noirish disguise.) Wong’s strategy of facial masking reminds us that typically-informative devices such as facial close-ups, OTS staging, and freeze frames possess no essential property of legibility. Moreover it tends to throw expressive weight onto other bodily attributes (hands, feet), features of setting (landscape, mise en scène), and parameters of style (cinematography, music), diffusing the conventional site of character emotion, and affectively saturating the diegetic terrain. Neither coldly objective nor emotionally direct, Wong’s visual style elicits cognitive arousal suffused with feeling. Wong’s detractors might regard these tactics as mannerisms, but his aesthetic of disturbance plays a crucial role in the viewer’s narrative uptake. Denying facial access, for example, can trigger errors of character individuation, as when In the Mood for Love coaxes the viewer’s misidentification of Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) as the cheating husband of his neighbour, Su (Maggie Cheung). In one sequence, Su accosts a back-tocamera figure – inferably, her husband – with allegations of infidelity. Wong postpones the reverse shot of the male figure, encouraging the viewer’s false inferences to mount. The eventual facial view of the man stirs a frisson of surprise: the figure addressed by Su is not her husband, but Chow. Misdirection springs from Wong’s formal play with facial masking, prompting short-term errors of comprehension, and long-range hypotheses as to the true nature of the protagonists’ relationship. Narrative ambiguity is fostered by yet other challenges to perception. Ellipticality deletes pivotal passages of story action, as in Ashes of Time’s (1994) staccato swordplay duels. Smudge motion vitiates or occludes the action’s specificity. When Ashes of Time blends both of these techniques with oblique framings, whip pans, fast cutting, restless figure movement, and erratic camerawork, the action’s legibility emerges only in brief spasmodic bursts. As often in Wong, the viewer’s perception is ‘roughened’ but not wholly negated; decelerated shots and communicative sound provide vital aids to intelligibility. Yet the welter of gestures and bodies ambiguates key phases of combat – amid the ferment, the superior swordsman is impossible to discern. Such strategies both intensify suspense (e.g. which of the duellists will prevail?) and powerfully convey the fighters’ stunning, whipcrack agility. Only in the abrupt aftermath of battle is the action’s key information made apparent. Disorienting effects are achieved by intercutting in Fallen Angels (1995). A barbershop shootout crosscuts between the feline Agent (Michelle Reis) and Killer (Leon Lai), the inscrutable assassin she accomplices. Though Wong’s crosscutting implies simultaneity – as does the salon space through which both protagonists maneuver – the characters’ paths do not once intersect. Soon it becomes evident that a significant time gap separates the parallel lines, disqualifying our assumptions of concurrent action. Wong’s initially bewildering gambit harbors narrative significance. Most simply, it foregrounds the protagonists’ mutual isolation, the pair having pledged never to meet in person. It also conveys that one protagonist follows a spatial path set by the other. Just as the yearning figures of In the Mood for Love restage the adulterous activity of their spouses, so Killer and Agent each trace itineraries laid out in advance. Both Agent (who privately adopts the assassin’s routines) and Killer (whose work patterns are supplied by Agent) avoid mapping purposeful trajectories of their own. Like the protagonists of In the Mood for Love, they obliquely renounce purposeful activity and personal responsibility (‘I like others to arrange things for me,’ proclaims the assassin). Fallen Angels’ protagonists, like Chow and Su, seek emancipation from the burden of human choice and action.

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In the Mood for Love, Block 2 Pics/Jet Tone/The Kobal Collection.

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Their bad faith, more than their societal constraints, forms the mainspring of unfulfilled romantic desire. Wong’s aesthetic of disturbance is further mobilized by generic pluralism. The viewer’s genre hypotheses get thwarted by means of generic subversion or audacious genre hybridity. Hence the viewer’s narrative uptake must reckon with unpredictable shifts from convention. Wong’s films are seldom generically forthright. Chungking Express starts as a policier but swerves into breezy romance territory. 2046 interweaves baroque science fiction and period melodrama. Happy Together, an ostensible road movie, disdains the symbolic use of the highway as a site of human intersection, opting instead for a claustrophobic focus on the isolated male lovers. In the Mood for Love flaunts the materials of melodrama (social subjugation, personal sacrifice, emotional suffering, coincidence) but crucially refuses the omniscience ingredient to the genre; tacitly the film invokes the norms of detective fiction, structuring its plot around an investigation, and wringing suspense from a restricted, at times deceptive, narration (see Bettinson 2009). Each film synthesizes standard genre tropes with quite radical points of departure, attenuating the emotional and narrative payoffs of formulaic storytelling. It is partly Wong’s effort to frustrate the viewing experience that connects his oeuvre to modernist traditions. Wong is self-consciously and astutely an exponent of art cinema. But in a more local context his obfuscating strategies seem keyed to stand out against most Hong Kong cinema, which makes maximal clarity an abiding principle. Committed to modernism’s stress on ‘difficult’ experience, Wong sets himself apart from the redundancy of popular Hong Kong storytelling. In terms of overall coherence, his tactics of disturbance are themselves a source of unity in an oeuvre typified by generic and visual pluralism. In the final analysis, classical principles of coherence, clarity, and unity contain those violations of convention, preventing the films from becoming wholly opaque or recondite. It is revealing that, in restoring Ashes of Time, Wong reworked the film for greater dramatic and expressive clarity. Ashes of Time Redux (2008), however, is still a demanding experience. Here again, Wong deters us from sheer sensuous absorption. The viewer bathing in Wong’s intoxicating imagery risks missing crucial plot details; the auteur’s strategies of disturbance force us to balance aesthetic pleasure with cognitive assiduity. The case of Ashes of Time Redux points to Wong’s position in global film culture. Like many Wong films (particularly since the mid-1990s), this restoration was intended less for the local Hong Kong market than for international distribution on the festival circuit. Wong’s success on this network brands him not only as a ‘Hong Kong’ director, but as an international purveyor of film art – a reputation consolidated in such portmanteau films as Eros (2004) and Chacun son cinéma (2007). At festivals Wong has arguably won admirers and critics in equal measure – Happy Together and In the Mood for Love took major prizes at Cannes, but detractors seized upon his drawn-out work methods when a postponed, unfinished version of 2046 was shown there in 2004. Such critics decry Wong’s purported profligacy and self-indulgence. But without his unique production methods – the relentlessly varied takes and rough cuts, the protracted shooting schedules – Wong’s films would lose that distinctive aesthetic which makes them so singularly exhilarating and elusive.

Gary Bettinson Reference Bettinson, Gary (2009) ‘Happy Together? Generic Hybridity in 2046 and In the Mood for Love,’ in Warren Buckland (ed), Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, Malden, Mass; Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 167–186.

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Directory of World Cinema

Hard Boiled (1992), Milestone/The Kobal Collection.

directors: hong kong john woo

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John Woo (Ng Yu-Sum, b. 1946) is one of the major directors of the Hong Kong film renaissance of the 1980s whose career has extended importantly into the new millennium. Born in Guangzhou, he was brought to Hong Kong by his parents as a small boy. With very limited means, his family was assisted by ‘an anonymous American Lutheran family.’ A youngster of artistic inclinations, he had decided by age 20 that he wanted to become a film director (Stokes 2007: 497). He worked on martial-arts films for some years, most crucially as an assistant director under the tutelage of the great martial arts and swordplay director Zhang Che (1923−2002), whose style he would refashion later as a central element of his own mature work. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Woo worked chiefly for Golden Harvest as a contract director, chiefly turning out comedies with varying artistic and commercial success. One of the more interesting of these was Plain Jane to the Rescue (1982), which starred comedienne Josephine Siao Fong-fong as a recurring character of her own creation. Another Woo film from this period, Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979), a swordplay film, anticipates his later work in its emphasis on loyalty between paired heroes. By 1985, Woo’s career was at a standstill. Then the opportunity came, through producer and director Tsui Hark’s Film Workshop studio, to direct a loose remake of a 1962 film called Story of a Discharged Prisoner (dir. Lung Kong). The result was to be a film with the same Cantonese title but with a revamped focus and a brilliantly realized style, A Better Tomorrow (1986). The box-office success of this film led to Woo’s development of other projects and to his growing professional partnership with Terence Chang, who still works closely with him. Significant artistic successes during the next few years were The Killer (1989) and Bullet in the Head (1990), two masterpieces. Woo also directed A Better Tomorrow II (1987), with less artistic and commercial success than the first installment, and a light heist film, a remake of sorts of Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962), Once a Thief (1991). (Once a Thief also served as the source for the Canadian television series [1996−98] produced by Woo and whose pilot he directed in 1996.) The Killer received international attention and Woo began to be spoken of as a new auteur. With the explosive Hard Boiled (1992), a tough cop film starring Chow Yun-fat and Tony Leung Chiuwai, Woo suspended his Hong Kong career and prepared his move to Hollywood. The Hollywood period of Woo’s career was mixed at best. His first feature, Hard Target (1993), suffered from uneven acting (particularly given the presence of Jean-Claude Van Damme in the lead) and production interference. Still, it was a competently executed remake of The Most Dangerous Game (Irving Pichel, 1932) which did showcase some of Woo’s trademark flourishes. Broken Arrow (1996), a military-themed adventure story about a stolen nuclear warhead (a ‘broken arrow’) featured John Travolta and Christian Slater, both of whom would work with Woo on other projects, but once again studio interference tainted Woo’s vision. The same cannot be said of Face/Off (1997), his most fully realized film in Hollywood. Starring Nicolas Cage and John Travolta in interchanging roles, the project was remarkably free of studio interference and allowed Woo to present striking visual compositions like Cage’s flashy appearance at the airport, and even to engage in some wickedly humorous character treatment. The film was among other things a send-up of Woo’s familiar double theme, with the Cage and Travolta characters exchanging faces and roles to a dizzying extent. Woo enjoyed a big box-office success with his sequel to Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (1996), Mission: Impossible II (2000), which again starred Tom Cruise and was filmed chiefly in Australia under often difficult circumstances. These included inclement weather and political squabbling, as well as the need to replace the director of photography after shooting had started. But the project benefited greatly from a good supporting cast, including Sir Anthony Hopkins, Thandie Newton and Dougray Scott, and from fine scoring by Hans Zimmer. The film retold Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), the second of Woo’s Hollywood films to play off a Hitchcock original (the first had been Face/Off, which recast Strangers on a Train [1951]).

Directors 103

Directory of World Cinema

John Woo, 20th Century Fox/The Kobal Collection.

Woo’s next Hollywood project was the underrated World War II film Windtalkers (2002), with Nicolas Cage as Joe Enders, an embittered and shell-shocked Marine tasked with bodyguard duty for Navajo code talker Ben Yahzie (Adam Beach) in the Pacific. (The two are mirrored by code talker Charlie Whitehorse [Roger Willie] and his bodyguard Ox Henderson [Christian Slater].) Although studio interference, especially with regard to budget, weakened the project, and although the film was criticized for inadequate attention to the code talker story, Windtalkers did present, with a great deal of historical

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Directory of World Cinema

detail, a visceral portrait of Pacific combat and its effects on men like Enders. Woo also was able to weave his themes of loyalty and brotherhood into the relationships among the pairs of Marines featured in the film and drew strong performances from his Native American cast. The last Hollywood film to be directed by Woo before his working move to China was the ill-fated Paycheck (2003). Starring Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, Aaron Eckhart and Paul Giamatti, it was not a characteristic project for Woo, as it emphasized sciencefiction elements. Based on the Philip K. Dick story of the same title, its story of memory wipes and future apocalypse was melded into a plotline homage to yet another Hitchcock work, North by Northwest (1959), the espionage film with its innocent hero Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) trapped into becoming an unlikely agent in order to save his own life. Again Woo was hampered by budget problems, and the film was not well-marketed. The resulting downturn in his Hollywood fortunes was surely a factor in Woo’s decision to work in China. Woo’s transfer to China was fortuitous for him, as he was able to develop a project much more suited to his style and talents, the epic film Red Cliff, to be based on the classical Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Released in Asia in two parts in 2009, total length nearly 5 hours, Red Cliff was cut down to approximately 2 1/2 hours for release in the West. The film replays the famous battle of Chi Bi (Red Cliff) between the warring lords of the ‘three kingdoms’ in third-century China, after the breakup of the Han state. Starring Takeshi Kaneshiro as legendary strategist Zhuge Liang (Chu-ko Liang), Tony Leung Chiu-wai as advisor Zhou Yu, and Zhang Fengyi as Cao Cao, lord and general of the opposing forces, the project was a giant undertaking, with thousands of extras and with daunting production challenges. The tragic death of a stunt player during shooting was one of the many setbacks and difficulties. Nevertheless, the film, especially its second half, is a compelling epic treatment of a section of the long romance, and it enjoyed considerable commercial success in Asia. Woo and business partner Terence Chang have also been active as producers, and Woo has also mentored young directors. One of the notable instances of the latter is Antoine Fuqua, who directed the Woo-produced Replacement Killers (1997), which starred Chow Yun-fat and Mira Sorvino. Fuqua subsequently became a much soughtafter director, with films such as Training Day (2001). Woo has served as producer of several films including a remake of Blood Brothers (Zhang Che, 1973) and a period film, Reign of Assassins (Su Chao-bin, 2010), with Michelle Yeoh. Woo has also appeared on occasion in cameo in his own films, most notably in A Better Tomorrow as the police inspector who arrests Ho and follows his case, and in Hard Boiled as the wise bartender who advises Tequila. In September 2010, Woo became the first Chinese director to win the prestigious honorary career achievement Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival (Lyman 2010).

Kenneth E. Hall References Dick, Philip K (1997) ‘Paycheck’, The Philip K. Dick Reader, New York: Kensington, pp. 355–84. Lo, Kuan-Chung (1959 [1925]) Romance of the Three Kingdoms (trans. CH BrewittTaylor), 2nd edn, Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Company. Lyman, Eric J (2010) ‘John Woo Did Not Expect Venice Honour’, http://pro.imdb.com/ news/ni4140709/. Accessed 5 October 2010. Stokes, Lisa Odham (2007) Historical Dictionary of Hong Kong Cinema, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

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The Blue Kite Lan feng zheng Studio:

Beijing Film Studio Longwick Film Distributors:

Kino International Image Entertainment Fortissimo Film Sales Vértigo Films Director:

Tian Zhuangzhuang Producers:

Cheng Yongping Luo Guiping Screenwriter:

Xiao Mao Cinematographer:

Hou Yong Art Director:

Zhang Xiande Editor:

Qian Lengleng Duration:

144 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Lu Liping Pu Quanxin Guo Baochang Yi Tian Zhang Wenyao Chen Xiaoman Zong Ping Chu Quanzhong Liu Yanjin Year:

1993

Synopsis China 1953: Chen Shujuan and Lin Shaolong get married, and the following year their son Tietou is born. As the country’s communist regime under Chairman Mao accelerates and oppositional factions are purged, Shaolong is sent to a reform camp, where he subsequently dies in an accident. Tietou’s life becomes increasingly fraught, and after working away for a time Chen subsequently remarries a man who had lied to the authorities by denouncing Shaolong. However, his health is poor and he succumbs to malnutrition, at which point Chen and Tietou move away when the former accepts a marriage proposal from a military officer. A stern figure, he clashes with Tietou, but as sweeping changes begin to accrue in the wake of the cultural revolution, there looms further trouble and uncertainty on the horizon.

Critique The Blue Kite was Tian Zhuangzhuang’s most controversial film, and along with being banned outright in China it also led to a formal letter from the Ministry of Broadcast being passed to all China’s film studios and laboratories stating in no uncertain terms that Tian was forbidden from making any more films. This action coincided with its winning the Best Film award at the Tokyo Film Festival, and with international distribution in the United States and elsewhere. It was generally received very well outside China, ranking amongst the ten best works of 1994 in polls conducted by a number of prominent US journals, and cementing its director’s stature and reputation at the same time as it cost him the chance to make another film for almost ten years. Spanning fifteen years between 1953 and 1968, The Blue Kite takes in the seismic transitions in China’s fraught one-party state rule at this time through the experience of one family, with the young boy (named Tietou, or Iron Head) who is born in 1954, acting as the narrator and in some ways the central focalizer of events (even though he is not present for all that transpires). The narrative is structured in three distinct acts, each delineated with a chapter heading denoting the successive father figures that enter into Tietou’s life, something that subtly throws into relief the paternal figure of Chairman Mao, whose presence is increasingly felt following a precisely dated opening scene that takes place on the day of Stalin’s death (something that causes Tietou’s parents to delay their wedding). The real strength of Tian’s film lies in its ability to suggest the uncertainty and dangerous flux of the political climate without ever losing sight of the domestic milieu and the fractious central relationship between Tietou and his long-suffering mother Chen. There is little sense of easy allegory in their characterization or personal trajectory throughout the narrative here (as one may suppose given such a protagonist at the heart of a story about a figurative national adolescence). Indeed the director is keen to stress through

Left: Ju Dou, Tokuma Enterprises/The Kobal Collection.

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Tietou’s difficult formative years the frequent inscrutability of his mopish moods and actions. However, his titular blue kite, created for him by his father and later remade by him for a younger child, figures as a potent symbol: an object caught in the wind and thus blown here and there given prevailing conditions, and as such an apt metaphor for China itself, which turns first one way and then another as the political and ideological climate sways this way and that, making criminals of yesterday’s heroes and vice versa. Besides this, though, the same innate, though arguably less than positive, aspects of Tietou’s character remain, and this is highlighted in a pair of closely mirrored scenes in which, first of all, the young boy is prevented from throwing stones at a gang of bullies who have accosted him, and years later, following the detention by cultural revolutionaries of his third stepfather, when he attacks one of the fervent ideologues with a rock. In neither case is anything achieved by the character’s violence, which perhaps alludes to a sense of the value of individual identity and action in such times of collective hysteria but which does not negate Tian’s quietly humanist sensibility. Ultimately, to be defined against the tide in any form seems preferable to simply blowing with the wind. It characterizes his young protagonist here; and it was to characterize Tian himself in the cruelest way.

Adam Bingham

Blind Shaft Mang Jing Studio/Distributor:

Édition Paradis Distribution Director:

Li Yang Producer:

Li Yang Screenwriter:

Li Yang Based on Liu Qingbang’s novel Sacred Wood Cinematographer:

Liu Yonghong Art Director:

Yang Jun

108  China

Synopsis Blind Shaft begins in a coalmine and with an exchange between three miners, one of whom is asked whether he is homesick. When he responds that he misses his son very much, the miner whom we will come to know as Tang Zhaoyang replies that it is his intention to send the man home that very day. The puzzled miner is given just enough time to register surprise – ‘But I just arrived’ – before being brutally murdered by Tang. Tang Zhaoyang and his accomplice, Song Jinming, it soon becomes apparent, fake familial ties with miners they recruit, only to murder them for the purpose of claiming compensation from the owners of the private mines in Shanxi province, where many of China’s miners toil. Tang and Song go on to recruit a young, vulnerable 16 year old, Yuan Fengming, who turns out to be the very son discussed in the film’s opening scene. Song expresses doubts about recruiting Yuan from the outset and begins to resist the plan to kill him as he begins to discern family resemblances between the young man and the last victim. As Tang begins to ask the very questions with which the film began, he unexpectedly beats Song over the head with a shovel, but not fatally so. Song reciprocates as Tang corners Yuan. Both Song and Tang collapse, leaving Yuan to flee the mine just seconds before a planned explosion. In the final scenes Yuan receives compensation for the deaths of his ‘relatives’ and observes the smoke

Directory of World Cinema

Blind Shaft, Tag Spledour & Films Ltd/The Kobal Collection.

Editors:

Li Yang Karl Riedl Duration:

92 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Li Yixiang Wang Shuangbao Wang Baoqiang An Jing

curling toward the sky from a chimney at the crematorium where their bodies are being burnt.

Critique Blind Shaft, which won the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2003, is an example of what is variously referred to, not without controversy, as independent film-making, underground film-making, and Sixth Generation filmmaking in China (Pickowicz & Zhang 2006; Zhen 2007). Banned in China and shot under circumstances involving considerable risks to the film-maker (Xan Brooks 2003), Blind Shaft draws attention, through what is virtually a documentary-style approach, to the plight of the many migrant workers who toil in dangerous

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Bao Zhenjiang Sun Wei Zhao Junzhi Wang Yining Year:

2003

and illegal mines to meet the needs of a new China defined by globalization, urbanization, savage capitalism, and an ever widening gap between rich and poor. The utterance of a brutal boss – ‘China lacks everything except manpower’ – efficiently articulates the exploitative attitudes that characterize, not only those who own and run the illegal mines, but the many local policemen and officials who condone their activities and profit from them, through various forms of corruption. Although the three main characters – Tang, Song and Yuan – represent a spectrum of types, ranging from the cynical to the properly moral, there are moments when their thoughts and actions converge. Each of these characters has a family to support and the hopes and aspirations that they have for these individuals are ultimately very similar. The differences arise in the means that Tang, Song and Yuan embrace in order to support their families. What is indicted ultimately is the exploitative and corrupt system that pits all against all in a brutal fight for survival and that leaves those who are neither canny nor cynical, and for whom moral norms still have some genuine force, both vulnerable and unprotected.

Mette Hjort References Pickowicz, Paul G & Zhang, Yingjin (eds) (2006) From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Brooks, Xan (2003) ‘Going Underground,’ The Guardian, 3 November, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2003/ nov/03/china. Accessed 16 December 2010. Zhen, Zhang (ed) (2007) The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

The Horse Thief Dao ma zei Studio/Distributor:

Xi’an Film Studio International Film Circuit Director:

Tian Zhuangzhuang Producer:

Wu Tian-Ming Screenwriter:

Zhang Rui

110  China

Synopsis The location is Tibet in 1923 and the protagonist is Norbu, a thief of horses and temple offerings. Caught and sent into exile by his tribe, Norbu must fend for himself while supporting and protecting Dolma, his wife, and Tashi, their gravely ill child. Tashi dies despite the prayers and rituals that Norbu and Dolma offer to the gods, and Norbu blames the calamity on his sinful ways. During their banishment Dolma becomes pregnant again, and when their new son is born they return to the clan, vowing that Norbu will obey Buddhist and tribal law. Wilderness life remains harsh and unforgiving, however, and Norbu reverts to thievery, soon getting caught. Fleeing from tribesmen through snow-covered terrain with Dolma and the baby, Norbu realizes that capture is inevitable. He sends his family in the direction of safety and lures the pursuers toward

Directory of World Cinema

Cinematographers:

Hou Yong Zhao Fei Art Director:

Huo Jianqi Editor:

Li Jingzhong Duration:

83 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Tseshang Rigzin Dan Jiji Daiba Jayang Jamco Drashi, Gaoba Year:

1986

his own trail, riding into the distance with poor chances of escaping death.

Critique Critics have rightly noted the importance of Tian Zhuangzhuang to China’s well-known Fifth Generation group, who graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in the early 1980s and received international acclaim for their innovative approaches to storytelling and visual style. But pinning a single label onto directors as different as Tian and his most gifted contemporaries, including Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, obscures the diversity of the creative paths they have taken. Tian has been among the boldest of them all. After launching his career with the children’s film Hong xiang / The Red Elephant in 1982, he made a drama called On the Hunting Ground (1984), shooting it – perhaps illegally – at a nature preserve in Inner Mongolia, and winning praise for his skill at combining narrative thrust with ethnographic detail. He then turned to a project guaranteed to raise the eyebrows of Chinese authorities: a story set in the occupied nation of Tibet and depicting Tibetan law, religion, folkways, and mores as these are understood by Tibetans themselves, not the Chinese who have ruled their country by force since 1951. The significance of Tian’s movie is threefold. From a Tibetan perspective, its effort to give an authentic, unsentimental depiction of traditional Tibetan life gains enormously from Tian’s decision to film it on location with local actors. From the perspective of Tian himself, shooting far from Beijing put considerable distance between him and the Chinese cultural commissars, reducing the political pressure to conform to government notions of what artists are supposed to do. From the official Chinese perspective, the film’s portrait of a dogged individualist determined to survive outside the bounds of organized society – and being pushed into crime by the lack of alternatives offered him by that society – was politically and culturally incorrect, as was the depiction of a harsh and difficult way of life that contradicts China’s chosen image as the great modernizer of the land it occupies. Indeed, these aspects of The Horse Thief were so incorrect that the film was initially banned from distribution in China, demonstrating that Tian made excellent use of the physical and ideological distance between the authorities and his shooting locations. The aesthetics of The Horse Thief are no less extraordinary than its cultural implications. The plot is minimal yet involving and sometimes very moving, conveyed almost entirely through images and ambient sounds, with small amounts of dialogue when necessary to propel the narrative. Although most of the action takes place in the far-flung and forbidding countryside, some scenes depict Buddhist temples, ritual grounds, and other civilized places in shots of startling, unadulterated splendour. It is safe to say that no film has presented more vivid portraits of Buddhist holy places, celebrations, and acts of worship as experienced by indigenous Tibetan people. As a feat of visual storytelling, The Horse Thief has few peers in Fifth Generation cinema.

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All of this said, The Horse Thief is a product of the Xi’an Film Studio, which studio chief Wu Tian-Ming made into a centre of Fifth Generation film-making after the dark years of the Cultural Revolution, and although this studio is something of an outlier, the movie bears clear traces of its Chinese provenance. Its dialogue was dubbed in Mandarin for international distribution, and it is likely that Tian compromised with Chinese policy to some extent by playing down the story’s metaphorical elements – its omission of any visible Han Chinese influence on life in the Tibetan wilds, for instance, and the motif of crime as the default option in a poor and disadvantaged society. In the absence of a homegrown Tibetan film industry, however, The Horse Thief is as close to an authentic representation of twentieth-century Tibet as we can expect to see until the nation regains its autonomy and makes the socioeconomic advances necessary for a functioning film culture. It stands with the most striking achievements of modern Chinese cinema.

David Sterritt

In the Heat of the Sun Yangguang Canlan de Rizi Studios:

China Film Co-Production Corporation Hong Kong Dragon Film Distributors:

Golden Harvest Company Mei Ah Entertainment (DVD) Director:

Jiang Wen Producers:

Er Yong Guo Youliang Hsu An-chin Ki Po Executive Producers:

Manfred Wong Liu Xiaoqing Screenwriter:

Jiang Wen Based on the story Wild Beasts by Wang Shuo

112  China

Synopsis China 1969: Ma Xiaojun is a young boy when his father is sent away as an army rep during China’s Cultural Revolution. Later, in the ensuing decade, Ma and his friends are more concerned with girls and fighting than school. Ma takes to breaking into houses, and in so doing sees a photo of a girl named Mi Lian who takes his attention. After meeting her on the street, they begin to strike up a friendship, but to a certain extent his male group of friends begins to get in the way, and Ma begins to feel possessive and jealous. He also incurs the wrath of his father; and in becoming obsessive about pursuing Mi risks being alienated from his friends.

Critique Although he is perhaps best known as a director for his sophomore feature, the incendiary, controversial World War II-set comedy/ drama Devils on the Doorstep (2000), Chinese actor/film-maker Jiang Wen had already directed one film prior to this national cause célèbre and international breakthrough. In the Heat of the Sun is a drama about youth that was not widely seen outside China, and unlike Devils on the Doorstep remains difficult to see today. It was, however, highly acclaimed, and featured in at least one critic’s list of the ten best Chinese films of the 1990s alongside works by Zhang Yimou, Edward Yang and Wong Kar-wai. A veteran actor of such films as Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987), Xie Fei’s searing Black Snow (1990) and Xu Jinglei’s 2004 Chinese transposition of Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Jiang demonstrates an immediate affinity with the connotative aspects of film-making. Beginning with a dramatic low-angle shot of a large statue of Chairman Mao (during a jubilant send-off as

Directory of World Cinema

Cinematographer:

Gu Changwei Art Director/Production Designer:

Chen Haozheng Li Yongxin Editor:

Zhou Ying Duration:

134 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Xia Yu Feng Xiaogang Geng Le Jiang Wen Liu Xiaoning Ning Jing Shang Nan Siqin Gaowa Tao Hong Year:

1994

the protagonist, Ma Xiaojun’s father, goes off with the army), he very soon cuts to a similarly angled shot of Ma and his friends throwing their bags into the air, immediately establishing the fact that the subsequent film will treat its young protagonists and their resolutely personal problems as seriously, as reverentially (if not as pompously and in comparably didactic terms) as any party propaganda. The allusive nature of memory figures strongly in the film. It is narrated in the present by Ma (nicknamed Monkey), who is looking back over his early life and exploits and perhaps unconsciously, arguably at times willfully, distorting them. As he says at the very beginning of the narrative: ‘Change has wiped out my memories. I can’t tell what’s imagined from what’s real,’ and this leads to a later scene into which Ma’s voice interjects to highlight the preceding actions as entirely false, as manifestations of a wish fulfillment on his part. This then feeds into an inquiry into the vagaries of subjectivity within a repressive regime, and the extent to which such a context can shape or impress upon personal selfhood, identity, and experience. Or, indeed, otherwise: for in truth there is comparatively little of the social context of the Cultural Revolution to be found in Jiang’s film. The script, by the iconic, bestselling author and so-called ‘bad boy’ of Chinese literature Wang Shuo (author of No Regrets about Youth and Masters of Mischief among numerous others) is unsurprisingly replete with youthful sexuality and violence. Like Edward Yang’s broadly comparable A Brighter Summer Day (1991) the tone mixes a nostalgic evocation of the transience of youth (that flowers in the heat of the sun, something captured in a number of shimmering scenes by DOP Gu Changwei, who also shot Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine [1993] in the same year) with a clearsighted admission of the indulgence and abashed self-aggrandizement of youthful rebellion. There is also a balanced analysis of the seeds of the action on view, especially those pertaining to fighting, with Shuo elucidating how the violence done to Ma by others is internalized and then made manifest in the form of a cathartic external conflict. It is one of the ways in which a potentially generic storyline and focus is strengthened and subverted (elsewhere a remarkable black-and-white coda further intensifies this aspect of the film), making In the Heat of the Sun one of the freshest debuts in Chinese cinema since the inception of the Fifth Generation.

Adam Bingham

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Ju Dou Studio/Distributor:

China Film Co-Production China Film Export and Import Tokuma Shoten Publishing Tokuma Communications Xi’an Film Studio/Miramax Films Directors:

Zhang Yimou Yang Fengliang Producers:

Zhang Wenze Yasuyoshi Tokuma Hu Jian Screenwriter:

Synopsis In provincial China in the 1920s, laborer Yang Tianqing lives at the fabric-dying mill owned by his aging uncle, Yang Jinshan, who has recently bought the beautiful Ju Dou to be his wife. Enraged that she does not get pregnant and supply him with an heir, Jinshan regularly beats and tortures her. Driven to despair by pain and sexual frustration, she starts an affair with Tianqing, who is infatuated with her; when Jinshan has an accident that partly paralyzes him, they take revenge on him by carrying on their affair in plain view. Dou gives birth to Tianqing’s child, Tianbai, but to avoid scandal she and Tianqing pretend that Jinshan is the father. As a little boy Tianbai accepts this as the truth; yet when the old man falls into a vat of dye and drowns, the child merely watches and laughs. A few years later, the increasingly thuggish Tianbai finds his parents near death in an airless cellar where they have gone to make love, and rescues his mother only, leaving Tianqing there to perish. Dou then sets fire to the dye plant and those within.

Liu Heng

Critique

Cinematographers:

The most conspicuous visual element of Ju Dou is its extraordinary sense of colour. Set amid the creaky, complicated mechanisms of a traditional textile-dying plant in rural China, the action is often framed, enveloped, or thrown into relief by long strips of brightly tinted cloth that enhance the moods and heighten the emotions of the already melodramatic story. Red fabric tumbles from a wooden reel when downtrodden Ju Dou and friendless Tianqing have their first impulsive tryst; sadistic, self-obsessed Jinshan drowns in the vat of crimson where he has just dyed a piece of straw to amuse little Tianbai; and ultimately the title character, her lover, and their child are consumed by flames of a similar hue, which linger as a freeze-frame even after the narrative concludes. Here and elsewhere, colours serve as far more than embellishments or symbols, becoming integral elements of a supercharged mise en scène that seems not merely to enhance but actually to propel the story’s tragic incidents. Looking beyond pictorial brilliance and narrative energy, Ju Dou is also a quick-witted allegory of Chinese cultural politics. Made at the Xi’an Film Studio when it was a stronghold of innovative Fifth Generation directors, the picture uses its 1920s time period and countryside setting to provide cover for incisive comments on recent Chinese history. The cumbersome wooden dye plant is a relic of premodern times that entrenched Confucian patriarchs like Jinshan are loath to relinquish; and lest one think that the coming wave of Maoist revolution will counteract the legacies of the past, a good look at young Tianbai definitively erases the idea – uncommunicative as a baby, callous as a little boy, and downright thuggish as a glowering adolescent, he is a frightening portent of Red Guard malevolence. Like a number of Fifth Generation films, Ju Dou was initially suppressed by the

Gu Changwei Yang Lun Art Directors:

Cao Jiuping Xia Rujin Editor:

Du Yuan Duration:

95 minutes Genre:

Melodrama Cast:

Gong Li Li Baotian Li Wei Zhang Yi Zheng Jian Year:

1991

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Chinese government, despite its enthusiastic reception elsewhere, including an Academy Award nomination for best foreignlanguage film. It is likely that the story’s primitive milieu and the lurid nature of some pivotal scenes is partly responsible for this, since China’s cultural authorities were keeping a close eye on the nation’s image as a modernizing and progressive state. But it is equally probable that the film’s implicit criticisms of overzealous Maoism hit uncomfortably close to home. Ju Dou was Zhang’s third feature film, following the drama Red Sorghum (1987) – winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, among other honours – and the 1989 suspense picture Codename Cougar, the first of his two collaborations with codirector Yang Fengliang, who joined him on Ju Dou as well. Ju Dou was also the third of Zhang’s many collaborations with actress Gong Li, whom he discovered and cast in Red Sorghum when she was studying at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, where she had enrolled in 1985. Herself a critic of Chinese censorship practices, Gong went on to star in Zhang’s drama Raise the Red Lantern (1991), a politically cautious tale that was briefly barred from release anyway, as well as The Story of Qiu Ju (1992) and To Live (1994), both of which raised considerable fuss among Chinese authorities. Zhang’s partner for several years both on and off the screen, Gong contributes immeasurably to the emotional power of Ju Dou, hiding her striking loveliness (she was voted China’s Most Beautiful Person in a 2006 newspaper poll) behind the bruises and ungainliness of an abused and vengeful peasant. Ju Dou marks a high point in one of the most fruitful associations Asian cinema has known.

David Sterritt

King of the Children Haizi Wang Studio:

Xi’an Film Studio Distributor:

GZBeauty (DVD) Director:

Chen Kaige Producer:

Xi’an Film Studio

Synopsis Lao Gar is an educated youth who chooses to become an elementary teacher in a school in the mountains. Leaving his companions he travels to the school and immediately finds its deficiencies to be all but crippling. The pupils have no books or other resources, and he himself is unsure of what and how to teach them. He begins by having the children copy out lessons from the blackboard, but after several days this bears no fruit as the children do not understand what they are mindlessly writing down. In particular, he has some trouble with a boy named Wang Fu. Lao Gar then begins to talk to his pupils about learning for themselves rather than copying, but when he makes a bet with Wang Fu about collecting firewood he risks his position as teacher.

Critique In his notes for the published screenplay of King of the Childen, Chen Kaige asserts that this film represents his own judgment on

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Screenwriters:

Chen Kaige Wan Zhi Based on the short story by Ah Cheng Cinematographer:

Gu Changwei Art Director/Production Designer:

Chen Shaohua Editor:

Liu Miaomiao Duration:

110 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Xie Yuan Yang Xuewen Zhang Caimei Xu Guoqing Le Gang Tan Tuo Wu Xia Quiang Xiaolu Wu Di Sun Jianjun He Jianzhong Year:

1987

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traditional Chinese culture, in particular the voracious acquiescence to dogmatic official values that characterized life under Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Individual rights were abolished during these years; it was a time when ‘culture (became) the master of man’ (Kaige and Rayns 1989: 62) and a figurative impotence resulted; and it is this corrosive mindset that the director wished to portray and subvert in what was his third feature (following Yellow Earth [1984] and The Big Parade [1986]). King of the Children, even more than its forebears in the Chen canon, is a highly personal film for its director. Like his protagonist Lao Gar, an educated youth sent to teach young children in a remote mountain village, he was himself a Zhiqing (he in fact worked alongside the author of the short story from which King of the Children was adapted, Ah Cheng), and the simple story here develops into a polemical account of children learning to break away from rote learning and indoctrinated culture (their copying of lessons and one young boy’s copying out of a dictionary) and in so doing developing a certain individuality, an identity, and a mind of their own. Together with this narrative import (which echoes Yellow Earth in detailing an outsider’s stay in a remote and insular community), Chen’s film is visually breathtaking. Indeed, just as the young children must overcome the repetitious learning and copying that has largely defined their education and think and compose and invent for themselves (signified by Lao Gar’s invention of the word ‘cattlepiss’), so in his first films Chen himself can be seen to have pioneered something like a new language of Chinese cinema, and King of the Children is arguably the most resonant example – not simply in its starkly beautiful, often dreamlike panoply of lush green hills, flaming sunsets and translucent moonscapes, but also in its thematic appropriation of the same. Shot in the mountains of Yunnan province in western China, Chen uses this arresting imagery to stress a natural order beside which the aformentioned thematic can be legitimized. The stunning opening time-lapse photography, which details a sunrise over the mountains, introduces the centrality of the mountainous topography, and in a precisely bracketed (perhaps entirely subjective) final shot of a fire on the same hillside, the idea is cemented that the old is burning away, leaving ashes from which a new China could (should) rise. As with Yellow Earth and the subsequent Life on a String (1991), this visual aesthetic does not preclude a documentary-esque depiction of the rhythms and rituals of life in rural isolation (the children were in fact non-actors from the actual school in the story). Chen sidesteps many of the potential pitfalls in the material, and never patronizes or sentimentalizes the hardship of the lives on view. The protagonist, for instance, oscillates between awkward incompetence and an over-reaching of himself (seen most clearly in his self-important attempt to second a mute young cowherd into attending school), and Chen is honest enough to stress the potential rewards as much as the disadvantages of the Zhiqing experience. As such, King of the Children emerges as one of the final, and definitive, pictures of this social phenomenon; and although

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the film was a commercial failure in China, its lasting impact as one of the curtain calls and crowning achievements of the Fifth Generation is beyond question.

Adam Bingham

Reference Kaige, Chen & Rayns, Tony (1989) King of the Children & The New Chinese Cinema, London: Faber and Faber.

Pickpocket/ Artisan Pickpocket Xiao Wu Studio/Distributor:

Radiant Advertising Hu Tong Communication Director:

Jia Zhangke Producers:

Li Kit Ming Jia Zhangke Screenwriter:

Jia Zhangke Cinematographer:

Yu Lik Wai Art Director:

Liang Jing Dong Editor:

Lin Xiao Ling Duration:

110 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Wang Hong Wei Hao Hong Jian

Synopsis Xiao Wu is a small-time pickpocket in Fenyang, a semi-urban city in Shanxi province. His former partner in crime, Jin Xiaoyong, has gone into business and become a respected citizen, while Xiao persists in his thieving ways, displaying a mixture of arrogance and apathy that suggests he is impervious to hard knocks. When he learns that Jin is about to be married, though, he feels so hurt about not getting a wedding invitation that he confronts his old friend and pleads for one – which Jin refuses to give him, fearing that Xiao’s presence would remind the other guests of his own criminal past. Xiao compensates for this rejection by seeing more of Mei Mei, a waitress and prostitute who grows fond of him after he visits her at home when she is bedridden with a cold. She helps him rise above his shy and nervous temperament, but he withdraws again when she abruptly leaves town with another man. Visiting his family for consolation, Xiao is sadly disappointed by his mother, embarrassed by his successful brother, and finally driven from the house by his indignant father. In the final scene he is arrested for petty theft and handcuffed in a public square for all to see.

Critique Jia Zhangke is an ethnographer as well as a storyteller. He makes both fiction and documentary films, and often blurs the boundaries between these categories, as in his 2008 docudrama 24 City, about people challenged by socio-economic change in Sichuan province. His first feature, Xiao Wu, gives a vivid indication of the path his career would travel: although it has a linear dramatic narrative, it was shot on video in a quick three weeks, with no screenplay and a non-professional cast. The result is at once an engrossing tale and a persuasive account of the lives led by restless youths in Jia’s home city of Fenyang, a place he knows in intimate detail. Jia has little use for the labels attached by critics to periods in modern Chinese film, but like other directors of the so-called Sixth Generation that emerged in the 1990s (including Lou Ye and Zhang Yuan) he favours modest production techniques – handheld

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Zuo Bai Tao Ma Jin Rei Liu Jun Ying Year:

1997

camerawork, lengthy takes, unpolished acting and sound recording – that bring a sense of in-the-moment spontaneity to explorations of pointedly contemporary themes, such as the displacement of traditional Chinese culture by the utilitarian values of global capitalism. Among the symbols of this transformation in Xiao Wu are a couple of gizmos that represent consumerism at its least trustworthy: a stolen cigarette lighter that emits an utterly un-Chinese tune (by Beethoven) when activated, and a beeper that Xiao buys to keep in touch with Mei Mei, only to get arrested when it unexpectedly blares a weather report while he is picking a pocket. Touches of this kind offer a grimly amusing commentary on the stupid side of capitalism. Jia’s criticism of modern materialism also resonates in references to gold throughout the film. Acquiring a packet of cash in an early scene, Xiao idly weighs it on a scale as if it were precious metal instead of a state-controlled paper substitute; later he buys a ring for Mei Mei and takes pride in knowing it is not copper but real gold; and his family visit goes into crisis when he learns that his mother has not treasured a gold ring he bought for her, but has given it to his brother’s fiancée, thinking it is only gold-plated anyway. While these metaphorical series might seem forced or didactic in the hands of a less able director, Jia makes them integral to the narrative, allowing their thematic implications to surface as organically as any other aspect of the film. Jia has acknowledged the influence of Roberto Rossellini’s neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Robert Bresson’s metaphysical thriller Pickpocket (1959) on his work, and while he says he did not consciously think of these films while preparing Xiao Wu, the gritty naturalism of the former and the fatalistic structure (and masterly montage) of the latter are clearly among his reference points. Few film-makers have surpassed Jia’s ability to connect characters with their environments in loosely framed shots that might almost have been captured by a casual onlooker with a camera, and the unhappy outcome of Xiao’s criminal exploits is foreshadowed, mirrored, and confirmed by the steadily declining fortunes of Fenyang itself. Its character-centered intimacy notwithstanding, Xiao Wu is very much a story of today’s China generally, from the camera’s early glimpse of Mao Zedong’s portrait in a city bus to its final view of Xiao’s public humiliation for failing to obey the rules of the new autocracy called global capitalism – a system no less unprincipled than his poorly chosen trade, but infinitely more powerful and insidious.

David Sterritt

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Platform Zhantai Studio/Distributor:

Artcam International Bandai Entertainment Hu Tong Communications Office Kitano T-Mark Director:

Jia Zhangke Producers:

Shozo Ichimaya Li Kit Ming Screenwriter:

Jia Zhangke Cinematographer:

Nelson Yu Lik-wai Art Director:

Qiu Sheng Editor:

Kong Jinglei Duration:

154 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Wang Hongwei Zhao Tao Liang Jingdong Yang Yitian Wang Bo Year:

2000

Synopsis Set in Fengyang in northern China, Platform follows the trajectory of a travelling performance troupe from 1979 to the end of the 1980s. At first doffing Mao suits and performing pieces in praise of the late leader, the troupe undergoes radical changes in both look and sound as they face a brave new world of post-Maoist market forces and cultural shifts unimaginable a few years earlier. Members of the troupe come and go, while those that remain are never quite sure where they stand with each other or the world around them. By the end, all the lives involved with the troupe, including an intricate constellation of relationships, find that a world they once knew is irretrievably lost, while the new world they face is difficult to define.

Critique If Platform is the first film one sees by the director, Jia Zhangke (as it was for this reviewer), then the opening pre-credit sequence deceptively seems like more of the same. An opera troupe gathers on a bus after a performance of Maoist musical numbers. One of the members (Minliang) acts defiantly toward the troupe’s leader, seemingly disrespectful with his string of jokes. This beginning has all the earmarks of yet another tragedy set in the Cultural Revolution, and Minliang is seemingly another victim in the making for failing to conform to the strictures of an extraordinarily brutal time. Yet it turns out that this was not the Cultural Revolution. It is 1979. Moreover, the defiance was more in jest and the troupe leader gave it no heed. It is a pure quotidian moment, closed off by a darkened screen motivated by a darkened moving bus, and the unified howls of the passengers entering a new uncertain historical era. In this opening scene, Jia Zhangke pointedly demonstrates why he is truly of a new generation, often called the ‘Sixth Generation,’ a term he does not always embrace. Unlike Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang, what interests Jia is not the recent dark past, but the even more uncertain, and more recent, ‘present’ – namely the post-Maoist era he grew up in and which continues today. As a result, in this one film he chronicles the dazzling transformations that occurred in China in the 1980s as a peripatetic troupe makes its way across dust-laden, ochre landscapes. The music changes from Maoist ditties to the beats of 1980s rock. The clothes go from blue Mao suits to blue jeans. The lights go from unadorned stage lighting to garish, flashing colours. Everything changes, and the people change along with them. The problem is that they do not know exactly who or what they should be, since nothing seems to ever settle down. What is most remarkable about Jia’s film is its decided lack of moralizing and sermonizing. He views the world, rendering it in exacting detail, and says it is what it is and nothing more. Of all film-makers alive today, Jia Zhangke is closest to the spirit of

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Platform, Artcam International/The Kobal Collection.

Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose decisive influence Jia has always openly embraced. This is moreover a film with minimal editing, and it does have a number of memorable, static long takes, including a penultimate shot of a domestic setting accented by a boiling tea kettle in the foreground, a shot that lingers in the mind for its vivid ordinariness. But Platform follows the spirit of Hou, not the literal letter. Jia here makes a film of his time and his place, just as Hou has done for Taiwan. While those of the generation before him, most of all Zhang Yimou, have now found refuge in an increasingly fantastical, bombastic and remote historical past, Jia here shows a decided commitment to peer at the world before him without the usual judgments expected of a film-maker of his stature. For this stance he was cast a wary eye by the Chinese government, which did not support this film in any way. (It was made instead with Japanese, French and Hong Kong money.) Yet Platform won the top prize at Nantes and the Netpac award at Venice. By the decade’s end, a poll by the Toronto International Film

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Festival ranked Platform the second best film of the decade for the entire world. If there was ever a film that indelibly shows the extent of China’s changes, this film is it. Platform best represents a new cinematic vision that has emerged in China, without the shrouds of melodrama or the dazzle of historical pageantry. Clearly Jia Zhangke at this early date has already come well into his own.

James Udden

Spring in a Small Town Xiao cheng zhi chun Studio:

Wenhua Film Company Distributor:

Cinema Epoch Director:

Fei Mu Screenwriter:

Li Tianji Cinematographer:

Li Shengwei Art Directors:

Ning Che Dexiong Zhu Duration:

95 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Cui Chaoming Li Wei Shi Yu Wei Wei Zhang Hongmei Year:

1948

Synopsis Zhou Yuwen is a housewife in a small, war-damaged town. She spends her time caring for her ailing husband, Dai Liyan, and his young sister, but he has begun to treat her poorly due to his own self-hatred. An old friend of Dai, a doctor named Zhang Zichen (who was also once in love with Zhou) arrives for a visit after being estranged for ten years, and immediately both his and Yuwen’s feelings seem to return as the four spend a happy few days with each other. As Yuwen and Zichen’s feelings grow, Liyan suggests that Zichen and his young sister become engaged; however, the former dimisses the idea, and at the latter’s sixteenth birthday party he gets drunk and almost sleeps with Yuwen. Subsequently, a deterioration in Liyan’s health seems to spell an end to their time together.

Critique In a 2005 industry poll of the best ever Chinese films, Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town was voted number one, the greatest Chinese film yet made. It is a work that was popular upon its initial release but which went on to face scathing criticism from the communist authorities, who vilified what they saw as its ideological backwardness and dangerous bourgois decadence. As such, it remained difficult to see for a long time, and only began to resurface in the 1980s, when its place in the history of Chinese cinema became assured, for both the Ozu-esque delicacy and poise of its contemplative style and for Mu’s subtle and sensitive engagement with female subjectivity within a potentially melodramatic scenario. This subjectivity is most overtly constructed through the use of voiceover narration, which dominates the soundtrack for much of the film. However, rather than remaining constant it modulates and subtly alters its mode of address throughout: at times a stream of consciousness relay of inner conflict, at others an expositional elucidation‚ and intriguingly at key moments also an apparently omniscient storytelling device, with certain plot developments discussed by the weary protagonist as though she were narrating the tale in retrospect. Thus, what could have been a heightened and exaggerated narrative in the manner of other Mu films, which were frequently decidedly operatic, becomes a study of internal conflict and a need to assert a measure of personal agency and

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Spring in a Small Town, The Kobal Collection.

control in a symbolically barren milieu (the narrative plays out in a war-damaged village in which there are no signs of other life whatsoever, save the authorities who switch off the electricity every night at midnight). The film in fact is entirely placid on the surface, with its central focus on a love triangle between an ailing man, his mistreated wife, and the doctor friend who comes to stay with them, serving to stir feelings that fester inside but facilitate little in the way of external conflict. Indeed, in this regard Liyan’s illness serves as an objective correlative, his physical ailment throwing into relief the emotional frailty and impairment of Yuwen and Zichen. Mu’s careful modulation of close-ups and longer shots, especially as combined with his use of long takes, allows the full import of the performances and of the investment in objects as repositories of meaning, to come to the fore. A handkerchief that Yuwen always has about her person figures prominently but very differently in successive scenes: from the suggestive, performative way she hides her face when playfully seducing Zichen to the manner in which she forcefully cries into it when her husband is taken ill. Such moments carry the charge of the whole film – glances, gestures, an

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aversion of the eyes or a hand to the face; in short, both separation and contact (note in particular the way Yuwen, without looking, holds out her hand for her sister-in-law in expectant consolation over Liyan’s illness, something that bespeaks a lifetime of trust and closeness). Here resides the heart of Spring in a Small Town, and it has made of the film a perfectly timeless entity.

Adam Bingham

Springtime in a Small Town Xiao cheng zhi chun Studios:

Beijing Film Studio Beijing Rosart Film China Film Group Fortissimo Film Sales Fortissimo Films Orly Films Paradis Films Distributors:

Artificial Eye Filmmuseum Distributie Palm Pictures Director:

Tian Zhuangzhuang Producers:

William Kong Li Xiaowan Tang Yatming Screenwriter:

Ah Cheng Based on the 1948 story by Li Tianji Cinematographer:

Mark Lee Ping-bing Art Directors:

James David Goldmark Tu Xinran Editor:

Xu Jianping

Synopsis Zhou Yuwen is a housewife in a small, war-damaged Chinese town. She spends her time caring for her ailing husband, Dai Liyan, and his young sister, but he has begun to treat her poorly due to his own self-hatred. An old friend of Dai, a doctor named Zhang Zichen (who was also once in love with Zhou) arrives for a visit after being estranged for ten years, and immediately both his and Yuwen’s feelings seem to return as the four spend ostensibly a happy few days together. Yuwen and Zichen begin to see more of each other, but Liyan suggests that Zichen and his young sister become engaged, something that the former dismisses. At the latter’s sixteenth birthday party he gets drunk and almost sleeps with Yuwen. Subsequently, a deterioration in Liyan’s health seems to spell an end to their time with each other.

Critique Springtime in a Small Town marked Tian Zhuangzhuang’s return to feature film-making following an absense of almost a decade, during which time he had been officially ostracized as a result of his hugely controversial family drama The Blue Kite (1993). The decision to remake Fei Mu’s 1948 classic was perhaps a calculated one: calculated, that is, to pay homage to a notable progenitor who himself suffered (albeit in the wake of his death) at the hands of the communist authorities. Certainly Tian and writer Ah Cheng’s adaptation sticks incredibly closely to its source in terms of story outline and characterization, retaining every beat of the original’s love-triangle narrative wherein an ailing man (Dai Liyan) and his unhappy wife (Zhou Yuwen) are shaken from their staid routine by the arrival of the former’s estranged friend and latter’s one-time lover. The setting of post-World War II China in an all-but-destroyed village is retained, as is the hermetic locus of action within the similarly dilapidated house of Liyan. Indeed, but for one notable addition (a scene at Liyan’s younger sister’s school in which Zichen teaches the children to dance the waltz), the removal of the original’s prominent voiceover by Yuwen and a slightly modified ending, the two works are almost identical. However, academic though these changes may ostensibly seem, they in fact serve to elucidate key aspects of the film’s thematic. Even small alterations such as the characterization of

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Springtime in a Small Town, Beijing Film Studio/The Kobal Collection.

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Duration:

116 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Hu Jingfan Wu Jun Xin Bai Qing Ye Xiao Keng Lu Si Si Year:

2002

Liyan’s young sister, who is here more sternly reprimanded for her childish behaviour, serves to place her more overtly on the cusp of womanhood, something that then teases out the situations of the other characters who themselves remain suspended between dichotomous feelings and actions (life and death on Liyan’s part; two men on Yuwen’s, etc.). Even the timeframe of the film catches China itself as an entity in-between, caught as it was after World War II between the Japanese occupation and the 1949 Communist Revolution. Cheng (a novelist whose story Haizi wang was adapted by Chen Kaige into King of the Children [1987]) was already adept at chamber narratives; and although such a narrative mode was slightly anathema to Tian, his choice of Mark Lee Ping-bing as cinematographer (surely as good a candidate for the DOP-as-auteur as Chris Doyle) reaps untold rewards. Lee has long been Hou Hsiao-hsien’s cinematographer, as well as working with other notable directors such as Wong Kar-wai, Hirokazu Kore-eda and Tran Anh Hung. His long take/long shot/deep focus methodology, coupled with the trademark gentle lull and subtly modulating perspective of his slowly, often almost imperceptibly, moving camera (which at times views the characters obliquely, through frames, glass or lattice panels), simultaneously liberates and subtly shapes and guides our perception of the characters and their drama. This coupled with a carefully balanced colour mise en scène that in exteriors plays off chalky browns and dull greens against the red of the newborn seasonal blossoms on the trees in Liyan’s garden facilitates a contrastive sense of tension, a tentative seed of hope amidst devastation, closeness amidst distance, love among the ruins (even if the precise nature of that love is amorphous and difficult to discern). This, of course, is in direct contradistinction to the narrative methodology of The Blue Kite, which was predicated on a sweeping sense of how the torrents of socio-historicity continually invade and corrupt individual lives. Springtime in a Small Town is built on a restrained and intimate vision of personal suffering figuratively abstracted from society and from history, something that feeds into a concern with the ways in which exterior or fateful precepts contribute to constructions of selfhood, and similarly how one’s feelings about oneself define one’s relationships with others. The film won the San Marco Prize at the 2002 Venice Film Festival, and the ecstatic reviews garnered worldwide proved that Tian was still a major director, and his magnificent, almost uncontainably beautiful and melodious film does full justice to the original, and there can be no higher praise than that.

Adam Bingham

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Summer Palace Yihe yuan Studios:

Laurel Films Dream Factory Rosem Films Fkying Moon Filmproduktion Fantasy Pictures Distributors:

Ciemien Festive Films Océan Films Palm Pictures Shaw Organization Homescreen (DVD) Director:

Lou Ye Producers:

Fang Li Nai An Sylvain Bursztejn Screenwriters:

Lou Ye Yingli Ma Mei Feng Cinematographer:

Hua Qing Art Director:

Liu Weixin Editors:

Lou Ye Zeng Jian Duration:

140 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Hao Lei Guo Xiaodong Hu Ling Zhang Xianmin Bai Xueyun Year:

2006

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Synopsis China 1988: Yu Hong is a free-spirited young woman living in a provincial town on the Chinese border with North Korea. After securing a place at Beijing University and moving away she becomes embroiled in a passionate relationship with a man named Zhou Wei, and they flit between moments of ecstasy and turmoil, love and hate. Following Zhou Wei’s infidelity the pair’s relationship seems to definitively end, and at this time both are caught up in the tragedy of Tiananmen Square. Over the ensuing nine years, Yu Hong moves away from Beijing back to the provinces and agonizes over her lost love whilst seeing a succession of men. Zhou Wei moves to Germany but he too cannot settle, and eventually moves back to China, where a meeting with Yu seems an inevitability.

Critique With only a few isolated exceptions (such as Wang Xiaoshuai’s Shanghai Dreams [2005]) the work of Lou Ye represents the most sustained, if at times highly subjective, engagement with recent Chinese history from the famed Sixth Generation. As his previous film, the wartime resistance thriller Purple Butterfly (2003), demonstrated, Lou has, in the years since his breakthrough film Suzhou River (2000), developed an interest in abrasive comng of age stories in which personal trauma and confusion mirrors that of his country at large. His characters tend to find themselves poised, indeed torn, between opposing poles: between love and hate, isolation and personal attachment, physicality and dreamlike reverie and reflection, and Summer Palace, the director’s fifth film, extends and refines this paradigm in a host of fascinating ways. Using the protagonist’s reflections on her life and experiences at Beijing University in 1988/1989 as a foundation for his elliptical narrative, Lou fashions an impressionistic account of a young soul in turmoil, and sets it against the backdrop of both national and international transformation. Indeed, the film is structured in two distinct parts, with a condensed central montage that connects them by following the protagonists over the course of seven years wherein their lives are contrasted with worldwide change and upheaval, such as the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of the Soviet Union, and the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China. Upon its international premiere at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, Summer Palace was greeted with indifference, and was banned outright in China for its liberal smattering of nudity and copious graphic sex scenes. This aspect of the narrative is significant, especially for the ironic physicality that frequently masks the lack of a viable emotional connection, the characters at times falling into quite aggressive sexual acts in lieu of other means of connection and communication (in one scene sex follows immediately on the heels of a violent altercation). The naked bodies,

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then, throw into relief the masked and shielded souls on the one hand, but on the other they also contrast with the subsequent, literal violence visited upon the bodies of many young Chinese at Tiananmen Square, thus figuring in a marked dialectic and negating those reviewers who complained about the overabundance of such scenes. Moreover, Lou’s tendency to internalize the conflict (there is a predominance of voiceover narration by the female protagonist, taken from her diary entries) effectively sets beside this physical immediacy a sense of transcendence, even spirituality, and foregrounds a subjective ‘reality’ that contrasts with the objective facts of the seismic world events that punctuate the narrative. Given this approach, Summer Palace can at times be an oppressively solipsistic experience, Lou sometimes indulging his heroine Yu Hong’s mournful self-indulgence, especially in the latter half of the film when he seems content to observe her increasing morbidity in what feels at times like an extended montage. Against this, however, is the unquestionable authenticity of the milieu. Lou himself graduated from Beijing University in 1989, and the first half of the narrative, which details Yu’s initial year at this institution (leading to the tragedy at Tiananmen Square), captures perfectly not only the phenomenological details of the era but more significantly the emotional and intellectual fervor of a fomenting political situation within a very volatile atmosphere that facilitates a life rather than an academic education. As in so many Sixth Generation works by the likes of Jia Zhangke, Zhang Yuan, Wang Xiaoshuai and others, the notion of youthful alienation and disaffection here comes to the fore, but in Lou’s attempt to trace a growth into maturity and adulthood (the narrative ultimately covers more than twelve years), he sets his film apart from the crowd.

Adam Bingham

Suzhou River Suzhou he Studio/Distributor:

Essential Filmproduktion Dream Factory Strand Releasing Director:

Lou Ye Producers:

Nai An Philippe Bober

Synopsis An unnamed videographer takes a job shooting publicity footage of Meimei, a nightclub performer who swims around a water tank in a mermaid costume. Meimei and the videographer begin an affair that is often interrupted by her mysterious habit of disappearing without explanation. On returning, she always asks the videographer if he would search for her forever were she to vanish permanently; to illustrate her question, she tells the story of a motorbike courier who never stopped looking for his girlfriend when she went missing. The videographer then invents the full story of the courier, Mardar, and his lover Moudan, a schoolgirl with a wealthy, neglectful father. Mardar joins a scheme to kidnap Moudan, despite the love that has blossomed between them, and when Moudan angrily discovers how little ransom was demanded for her, she jumps into the Suzhou River and is never seen again.

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Screenwriter:

Lou Ye Cinematographer:

Wang Yu Art Director:

Li Zhuoyi Editor:

Karl Riedl Duration:

83 minutes Genre:

Drama Film noir Cast:

Zhou Xun Jia Hongsheng Hua Zhongkai Yao Anlian Nai An Year:

2000

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After years in prison, Mardar begins an endless search for Moudan, whose body was never found. Then he meets Meimei, who eerily resembles Moudan, and seduces her, infuriating the videographer. Mardar eventually finds the actual Moudan, but both of them soon drown in the river. Meimei then drops from sight again, asking the videographer to search for her forever.

Critique In his opening voiceover, the videographer in Suzhou River says he does not believe in mermaids, thus raising and simultaneously rebuffing the mermaid motif that flows through the film. Mermaids are everywhere and nowhere in Lou Ye’s melancholy drama: we never actually see one, but the videographer talks about them, Meimei (played by Zhou Xun) masquerades as one, superstitious people think Moudan (also played by Zhou) becomes one when she jumps into the Suzhou River, and the river itself is a constant presence in the movie’s vividly pictured Shanghai, although its dirty water and heavy traffic evoke industrial blight more than mythic wonder. The mermaid leitmotif symbolizes two types of metamorphosis that shape and propel Suzhou River. One is the seeming transformation of Moudan into Meimei, which seems eerily real until the actual Moudan finally surfaces near the end, working at a 24-hour convenience store where she peddles the brand of vodka that Mardar favours. The other, more sweeping kind of metamorphosis is the ongoing transmutation of the story itself. It enters the movie in the form of Meimei’s little tale about the courier and the schoolgirl, which then evolves in the imagination of the videographer, who finds himself unable to carry it beyond a certain point unless another character, the courier himself, takes up and continues the thread. The film thus pursues a highly self-reflexive course, with major elements being determined and developed by characters who play key parts in them. What rescues Suzhou River from drowning in the crosscurrents of its continually shifting story is the elegiac atmosphere with which Lou surrounds it, encouraging viewers to take the film not as a puzzle to be solved but rather a set of moods to be experienced and a set of spaces to be meandered through, much as the river runs through the districts and neighbourhoods of the sprawling city. Lou’s membership in the unsentimental Sixth Generation school makes the movie’s strength as an atmosphere piece even more impressive. His neon-lit Shanghai has the kind of spasmodic rhythm and disordered ambience found in Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing and Jia Zhangke’s Fenyang, for example; and using the videographer’s anecdotes and reflections to frame the story provides an added rationale for the restlessness of the cinematography and the first-person intensity of the movie’s tone, sometimes conveyed through subjective camerawork as the videographer shoots people and places around him. This sort of edgy spontaneity is a Sixth Generation trademark, and Lou deploys it without diluting the sense of tragic poetry that suffuses the film as well.

Suzhou River, Coproduction/Essential Filmproduktion/The Kobal Collection.

The poetic sensibility of Suzhou River is also fuelled by its many allusions to Alfred Hitchcock’s dreamlike Vertigo (1958), which likewise involves water, memories, a wandering protagonist, a vanishing woman, an ambiguous death, an uncertain identity, and voyages through urban scenes that are by turns hypnotic, nervous and elegiac. Jörg Lemberg’s music further establishes this connection, employing lush string melodies resembling Bernard Herrmann’s exquisite Vertigo score but merging them with a pumping technobeat that captures the jittery anxiety of this very different city. Critics have also linked Suzhou River with Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, made in the same year and similarly influenced by Hitchcock’s masterpiece. Suzhou River is ultimately a highly original work, however, and its most salient qualities owe little to other movies or directors. This includes its splendid acting, crowned by Zhou Xun’s double portrayal of teenaged Moudan and hard-bitten Meimei – an authentic marvel of screen performance, ideally crystallizing the film’s haunting obsession with metamorphosis, memory and loss.

David Sterritt

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Woman Sesame Oil Maker/The Women from the Lake of Scented Souls Xiang hun nu Studio/Distributor:

Tianjin Film Studio/Changchun Film Studio Director:

Xie Fei Producer:

Jing Yonglu Screenwriter:

Xie Fei Based on Zhou Daxin’s novel Sesame Oil Workshop by the Souls’ Lake Cinematographer:

Bao Xiaoran Art Directors:

Ma Huiwu Wang Jie Editors:

Liu Jin-Wen Zhang Qing-He Duration:

100 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Siqin Gaowa Wu Yujuan Lei Luosheng Chen Baoguo Year:

1993

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Synopsis Despite being married since childhood to a lazy, alcoholic husband, Xiang has used her energy and intelligence to establish a successful sesame-oil mill, using the income to provide a decent home for Zhi’er, her young daughter, and Dunzi, her epileptic and mentally disabled son. The clan’s prospects brighten further when a Japanese investor visits their town and offers to put a substantial amount of money into modernizing and enlarging the plant. Chronically worried about Dunzi’s future, Xiang uses her newfound wealth and social status to arrange a marriage between him and Huanhuan, a peasant whose family desperately needs money. Once installed in her new home, Huanhuan encounters a number of disagreeable realities: Dunzi almost kills her during an epileptic seizure, and she learns that Xiang is having an affair with another man when she is not being severely beaten by her husband. The sesame business continues to thrive, but Xiang becomes increasingly depressed. Deciding that at least one woman in the household should be free of oppressive family burdens, she encourages Huanhuan to leave and start an independent life. Huanhuan fears her own family’s displeasure, however, and believes it is too late for a new beginning anyway. Deprived of hope, she sinks into despair.

Critique Originally released in English-speaking territories as The Women from the Lake of Scented Souls but later distributed under a translation of its Chinese title, Woman Sesame Oil Maker, this uncomplicated tale of village life stands with the most emotionally affecting achievements of modern Chinese film. Its narrative is often grim, occasionally violent, and ultimately tragic. Yet the treatment of this sad material by writer-director Xie Fei is nuanced and understated, bypassing melodrama in favour of a delicate, low-key tone that enhances the story’s power while staying true to the mood of quiet fatalism that permeates the characters’ lives. The film’s presiding spirit is the lake that inspired its alternate title, covered with lotuses and known by townspeople as the watery grave where, according to local legend, two teenage girls once ended their lives over unrequited love. Xie’s camera returns to it periodically, as if it were the refrain of a melancholy song, emphasizing its dark beauty and suggesting its subtle influence on the moods of those who live nearby. The rural village where the story unfolds is not entirely bound up in tradition, though. The excellence of the sesame oil that Xiang makes in her mill may owe something to special qualities of the water taken from the scented lake, but her skill and discipline deserve most of the credit, and when foreign investors offer to expand and restructure it, she hesitates no longer than it takes to think over the proposition and make sure it is in good faith. Like other important Chinese films of its time, such as Xie’s Black Snow (1990) and Zhou Xiaowen’s Ermo (1994), Woman Sesame

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Oil Maker is a story of modernization and change; but the process is so gradual and halting in this rural environment that the conspicuous upheavals and confusions seen in films by Jia Zhangke or Zhang Yuan, for example, are nowhere to be found. Even the most dramatic events – Dunzi throttling Huanhuan in the throes of an epileptic fit, Xiang being beaten by her slothful husband – take place in quick, abbreviated scenes that downplay their sensational aspects. Conversely, Xie offers detailed depictions of seemingly small matters, such as steps in the oil-making process and the beauty of an old-fashioned wedding. At times the advance of new customs and conventions has a humorous effect, as when Xiao takes a business trip to meet with an investor and is startled to learn that extramarital sex is normal for sophisticated city folks. She takes the discovery in stride, knowing her own time-honoured values will remain secure. The most modern aspect of Woman Sesame Oil Maker is its knowing depiction of the constraints surrounding Xiao and Huanhuan, whose awareness and self-knowledge are no match for the circumscribed mindsets of their society. As the story nears its end, Xiao realizes that the only way she can reduce the pain in her miserable household is to send Huanhuan away so she can seek out her own destiny, but fear and insecurity make Huanhuan powerless to act. Capitalism has upgraded the family business, travel has broadened Xiao’s perspective, and a misbegotten marriage has opened Huanhuan’s eyes to social ills that flourish everywhere. Yet the old cycle will now inevitably repeat itself: Xiao was sold to a repellent husband by her parents; Huanhuan has suffered the same misfortune at Xiao’s instigation; and there is no reason to hope that future generations will be spared, barring some huge cultural change that nobody dares to expect or even imagine. This sense of awful, inescapable recurrence is what makes Woman Sesame Oil Maker such a haunted, haunting film.

David Sterritt

The World Shijie Studios:

Office Kitano Lumen Films Xstream Pictures Bandai Visual Shanghai Film Group Xinghui Production

Synopsis Tao is a performer in Beijing’s World Park. She is dating a guard named Taisheng and soon forms a close friendship with a Russian who begins working in the park. A visit from an old boyfriend precipitates a hesitancy on Tao’s part over her relationship with Taisheng, who himself begins to spend some time with a woman, a fashion designer named Qun who needs to make a long-distance trip on behalf of her brother. Tao becomes upset when Anna leaves and starts to cling to Taisheng, whose personal problems mount when his cousin, who also works as a guard at World Park, is fired for stealing; and when a close friend is injured in a construction site accident his relationship with Tao is further tested.

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Distributors:

Ad Vitam Distribution Bitters End Celluloid Dreams Contact Film Golden Village Entertainment Office Kitano Zeitgeist Films Director:

Jia Zhangke Producers:

Yu Likwai Xu Pengle Masayuki Mori Hengameh Panahi Chow Keung Takio Yoshida Shozo Ichiyama Ren Zhonglun Screenwriter:

Jia Zhangke Cinematographer:

Yu Likwai Art Director:

Wu Lizhong Editor:

Kong Jinlei Duration:

143 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Zhao Tao Cheng Taisheng Jing Jue Jiang Zhongwei Huang Yiqun Wang Hongwei Liang Jingdong Ji Shuai Xiang Wan Alla Chtcherbakova Year:

2004

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Critique World Park, located in Beijing’s large Fengtai district, comprises over 115 acres and encompasses famous sites and landmarks from fourteen different countries, including The Eiffel Tower, The Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Great Pyramid. It is a curiously postmodern, even contradictory, space: an ostensible tourist attraction yet seemingly aimed at a national audience who could not or would not leave China. Its proud boast of offering the chance to view the world without leaving the capital city – to, in effect, see without seeing and experience without experiencing – has resulted in a much-vaunted gloss and artificiality; and as Jia Zhangke has emphasized when talking about his fourth feature, this fake landscape is a perfect counterpoint to the very real problems and emotions faced by his characters. As he says: ‘More and more I get the feeling that the surreal has become reality in Beijing … relationships (are) both free and restricted, deep and superficial.’ These relationships orbit around the central pairing of Tao, a dancer at World Park (played by Jia’s perennial leading lady Zhao Tao), and a park security guard named Taisheng. Both characters have encounters outside their union, though for various reasons neither achieves fruition, and their at times awkward and forceful declarations to each other at times carry more than a little sense of masking feelings that they cannot process, act upon, or (in Taisheng’s case) deal with. This is then offset by the extremes experienced between two other World Park performers named Wei and Nui, who go from a violent break-up to marriage in all of two scenes, and perfectly exemplify a shallow reconciliation of character and milieu, interior and exterior, that so jars with Tao in particular, and even further with a friend of Taisheng’s who suffers an accident on a nearby construction site. This contrastive sense is underlined by the style of the film. The long take/long shots methodology familiar from other Jia films here sits beside a sporadic use of vibrant animated episodes that intrude as if from another picture entirely. It is used in conjunction with the text messages sent between different characters (typically Tao and Taisheng), and seems to highlight a gulf between them even as its technological sophistry and communicative import should be bringing them closer together. These scenes offer fantasies of interior worlds, thoughts and emotions, and in their anomalousness they mirror the juxtaposition of the park and the blue-collar milieu glimpsed beyond the confines of the park. Jia’s features and documentaries have both come to revel in contrasting lives and environments, and the ostensible differences between The World and his earlier work (most overtly the setting – this was Jia’s first work not to be set in his home province of Shanxi) only underline this dichotomy. As the most celebrated and perceived paradigmatic figure of China’s Sixth Generation of film-makers, Jia has become something of an outspoken critic of his country’s modern development, which he has taken to chronicling in minute detail. Indeed, beginning with

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the 1980s-set autobiographical exegesis of Platform (2000), one could almost trace the changing face of modern China through his canon and its various representations; and The World fits neatly into this project for its emphatic picture of the new capitalist fervor defining China in the twenty-first century. It is a revolution as thorough as its communist progenitors, but in Jia’s eyes it is one that will leave many of its populace behind.

Adam Bingham

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A Brighter Summer Day Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian Studio/Distributor:

ICA Jane Balfour Films Yang & His Gang Filmmakers/ Cine Qua Non Films MK2 Diffusion Director:

Edward Yang Producer:

Synopsis The year is 1960, when people in Taiwan have fresh memories of the mass exodus a decade earlier from Mao Zedong’s newly triumphant communist regime. Brought up in the resulting atmosphere of instability and uncertainty, many adolescents turn to street gangs as an outlet for anxiety and hostility. One such is teenager Xiao Si’r, who starts hanging around with the Little Park Gang because he has a crush on Ming, an older girl whose lover, Honey, led the group until he went on the lam after a murder. Honey comes out of hiding just long enough to be killed by Shandong, the kingpin of the rival 217 crew, whereupon Ming becomes even more promiscuous, Si’r grows increasingly confused, and the Little Park Gang lusts for revenge. An important subplot shows Zhang Ju, the father whose bland guidance Si’r has always ignored, being harassed and arrested for alleged links with the communist underground that this timid family man would never have dared to establish.

Yang Yu Weiyan

Critique

Screenwriters:

A Brighter Summer Day begins with a printed reminder of the huge migration that brought some two million Chinese refugees to Taiwan as the Chinese Civil War turned from a shooting war to a cold war in 1949. Having escaped from Mao Zedong’s revolutionary China, the immigrants found themselves in an equally oppressive environment under the martial law imposed by Chiang Kai-shek; but they quickly adapted, and while native-born citizens still made up 85 per cent of Taiwan’s population, the newcomers acquired disproportionate power through channels provided by Chiang’s government. Edward Yang was a little boy during this period, but he understood the immigrant situation well, since he had arrived in Taiwan as a child when his father fled Shanghai’s new communist regime. Like such New Taiwanese Cinema colleagues as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Chen Kun-ho, he began making films a few years after Chiang’s death in 1975, when the government was slowly liberalizing its policies. Taking its story from Taiwan’s first juvenile murder case, involving a boy and girl in their early teens, A Brighter Summer Day depicts the coming-of-age challenges faced by immigrants’ children who found street gangs a readily available tool for carving out identities in an anxious and uncertain society. Two such outfits propel much of the action: the Little Park Gang, whose members come from immigrant households, and the 217 Gang, made up of kids from native Taiwanese families. The main character is Xiao Si’r, a promising 14-year-old whose chances for a good education and successful career are undermined by a deep immaturity where elders and authorities are concerned. The intricate plot follows his relationship with a variety of people including Zhang Ju, his chronically submissive father, and Ming, a promiscuous girl whose boyfriend ran the Little Park Gang until he killed a rival and went into hiding. Other characters range from school and police authorities to

Edward Yang Lai Mingtang Hung Hung Alex Yang Cinematographers:

Li Huigong Zhang Longyu Art Director:

Yang Yu Weiyan Editor:

Chen Bo-Wen Duration:

228 minutes Genre:

Youth-gang drama Cast:

Zhang Zhen Zhang Guozhu Lisa Yang Lin Hongming Alex Yang Year:

1991

Flowers of Shanghai, 3H Productions/The Kobal Collection.

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A Brighter Summer Day, Yang & His Gang/The Kobal Collection.

gang members whose nicknames – Sex Bomb, Headlights, Baldie, Animal, Underpants – would ring equally true in a Hollywood mafia movie. These kids probably know a thing or two about American mobsters, since influences, artifacts, and social patterns from many international sources come into their lives, presaging the globalized culture that would blossom later in the twentieth century. Honey took to reading foreign novels during a stretch in jail, and wishes he had paid attention in school so that he could now write stories about his own experiences. Characters often run across objects left behind when Japan ended its bygone occupation of China, and samurai swords play a deadly role in the film’s climactic bloodbath. And everyone is mad for American popular music, which members of the Little Park crew sing at dances and entertainments. The movie’s Chinese title has been translated as ‘The Boy in the Murder Incident on Guling Street’, but the film takes its more resonant English-language title from the 1960 recording of ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ by Elvis Presley, which gets Si’r

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and his sister puzzling over a phrase in the lyrics that might be ‘a brighter summer day’ or ‘a bright uh-summer day.’ The question is trivial, of course, but it is fascinating that a hooligan like Si’r really cares. With almost 100 characters and a running time just shy of four hours, A Brighter Summer Day is a remarkable feat for Yang, who made it at a time when heightened competition from Hong Kong and Hollywood was dislodging the Taiwanese New Wave from public favour. Filmed in dark and brooding tones, it marks Yang’s shift to a more contemplative visual style marked by lengthy takes and relatively distant camera positions that emphasize relationships and environments over individual emotion and psychology. Regrettably, though, complexity and objectivity have played against widespread popularity. Its lofty reputation notwithstanding, A Brighter Summer Day is a film more written about than seen.

David Sterritt

Café Lumière Kōhī jikō Studios:

Shochiku Asahi Shimbunsha Sumitomo Corporation Eisei Gekijo Imagica Corp Distributor:

Shochiku

Synopsis Yōko is a young Japanese woman researching the life and work of a Taiwanese composer. When not working she spends time with a friend, Hajime, who records the sounds of Japan’s trains and railways and who runs a bookstore. Whilst visiting her parents Yōko tells her mother that she is pregnant by her Taiwanese boyfriend but that she intends to bring up her child by herself, which seems to displease the mother. Later, Yōko tells Hajime a frightening dream she has had and he procures for her a fairy tale that seems to resemble it; and as she conducts further research she feels the effects of her pregnancy. In addition, this matter continues to agonize her parents.

Director:

Critique

Hou Hsiao-hsien

The opening moments of Café Lumière, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s fifteenth feature and first produced entirely outside Taiwan, resound with the quiet, contemplative sensibility that has come to define Hou’s work as thoroughly as that of the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, for whose centenery this project was commissioned (by the major Japanese studio Shochiku). As the gentle rhythms of a small train enter into the soundtrack and a ‘pillow shot’ of the engine crossing the static frame fades langorously in and out, the natural, unforced structure and drama of the ensuing narrative is metonymically established, and Hou’s already well-developed and refined style is subtly modulated to include the paradigm of his forebear: in other words, to encompass the best of two major worlds. Like his contemporary Edward Yang, Hou has long been an admirer of Ozu (both directors have a great fondness for trains, as

Producers:

Liao Ching-Song Hideji Miyajima Fumiko Osaka Ichirō Yamamoto Screenwriters:

Hou Hsiao-hsien Chi T’ien-wen Cinematographer:

Mark Lee Ping-bing Art Director:

Toshiharu Aida

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Editor:

Liao Ching-Song Duration:

105 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Yo Hitoto Tadanobu Asano Masato Hagiwara Kimiko Yo Nenji Kobayashi Year:

2003

almost any single one of their works can attest), and as an adolescent in the years immediately following Japan’s occupation of Taiwan, the new Taiwanese cinema luminary had valuable firsthand experience of Japanese culture. However, Café Lumière is no mere hagiography or imitation. It is a masteful updating of Ozu’s domestic, elliptical narrative focus and methodology, but significantly (and wisely) not his style. At no point does Hou replicate the inimitable surface of an Ozu picture, retaining the long take/long shot, observational style that had by this point become crystalized as a key component of his work with cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing. As in Hou’s follow up, Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), the narrative is almost entirely de-dramatized: the conflict, such as it is, centres upon a young and independent Japanese woman named Yōko (played by singer/songwriter and first time actor Yo Hitoto), who is pregnant by her Taiwanese boyfriend but who is determined to have and raise her child alone. Hou follows this character throughout, avoiding the omniscient narration favoured by Ozu and simply observing his young heroine’s largely uneventful life. The whole thus becomes more like an incitement to drama, a platform for each individual viewer to construct their own narrative, making Café Lumière more than a film; more than cinema: it is a philosophy, a perspective on life itself. Elsewhere, the clash of generations at the heart of the narrative serves to modernize a typical Ozu plot structure. Here though, unlike Claire Denis’ recent Ozu update 35 Shots of Rum (2008), it is a maternal rather than the generally paternal clash that takes precedence. Indeed, Café Lumière is replete with quietly submissive, even feminized male figures: Yōko’s father remains an impassive presence, and is berated by her mother as such, whilst her boyfriend is, she relates, not a terribly mature or reliable partner. Then there is Hajime, her close friend (played by Japanese superstar Asano Tadanobu); he is a bookstore owner whose passion is recording the sounds of Japan’s railways, and remains a sturdy companion throughout, more like a female friend than a potential partner as one may expect (he in fact seems entirely asexual). Not that Hou offers any judgment on their respective characters; the feeling is very much one of openness to the untold complexities of human beings; and this is precisely what sets the film apart from so many. Ozu once said that to use characters in films is to misuse them, and in this Hou is perfectly in accord with his master.

Adam Bingham

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Cape No.7 Hai jiao qi hao Studio/Distributor:

ARS Film Production Buena Vista International Director:

Wei De-sheng Producers:

Chang-ti Chang Ming-fu Cheng Tony Hu Screenwriter:

Wei De-sheng Cinematographer:

Ting-chang Chin Art Director:

Chia-Hung Tang Editors:

Lai Hui-chuan Pei-yi Su Duration:

129 minutes Genre:

Romance drama Cast:

Van Fan Yi-Chen Chie Tanaka Min-Hsiung Wei-min Ying Year:

2008

Synopsis The film is set in the present day in a small town in southern Taiwan, Hengchun (literally ‘forever spring’). It is a sleepy seaside town with a beautiful beach. On the one hand, the residents of Hengchun are generally conservative with traditional values, and yet on the other, one can see international tourists in bikinis walking on the street during the holiday season. The town also holds an annual rock concert on the beach to attract visitors. The local residents of Hengchun decide to form a local rock band three weeks before the concert begins. The lead vocal singer of this new band, Aga, is a substitute postman. He discovers a package of undelivered love letters written in Japanese from the colonial period. The letters are addressed to ‘Cape No.7,’ an address in 1940s Taiwan which no longer exists. However, Aga finally delivers the letters just before he goes on stage to perform his music. While the Japanese writer of the love letters had to leave his Taiwanese lover in 1945, Aga is able to persuade his Japanese girlfriend to stay with him.

Critique In 2008, Cape No.7 generated a huge amount of excitement in Taiwan on a scale never before experienced. Cape No.7 is important not because it is the best Taiwanese film, but because it is the highest grossing film ever produced in Taiwan and is on its way to becoming the highest-grossing film in Taiwanese box-office history, surpassing even the international blockbuster Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). For a film market that thought local viewers were no longer interested in local films, the box-office performance of Cape No.7 is not only surprising, but also significant.1 Cape No.7 became a cultural phenomenon in Taiwan due to a combination of many factors including an innovative blog-marketing strategy (Su 2009: 181), free screenings before the official release, and an agreement from the Taiwanese branch of Disney to distribute the movie nation-wide (Rawnsley 2009). Most important of all is the broad appeal of the film to local viewers. As Taiwan’s film critic Michael Mai has commented: Taiwanese movies haven’t made me feel so good for a long time until Cape No.7. All the characters are so vividly portrayed and their relationships so well presented […] I always hope that local movies can equal Hollywood productions and now I’ve finally found a Taiwanese director that can create a movie of real commercial value. (Chung 2009) Indeed the popularity of Cape No.7 comes from its production values and its feel-good factor. But on a deeper level, the film also deals in a light-hearted manner with the complexity of modern Taiwan and the shadow of its history. The fact that local viewers are able to respond to the film and to make their own personal

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interpretations of it may be the key to the film’s commercial success. The film-maker has skillfully tackled the Taiwanese population’s desire to escape from an anxiety stemming from their efforts of de-colonization since 1945 and the pursuit of Japanese-inspired modernity among the younger generations since the 1990s. Cape No.7 acknowledges such an anxiety from within and offers reconciliation through three elements: (1) retelling the colonial past with an ambivalent tolerance; (2) creating a young Japanese character, Tomoko, with sweet and vulnerable qualities that render her ‘a member of intra-Asian imagined community’ (Liao 2007: xv); and (3) placing the protagonist, Aga, a young Taiwanese singer, on an equal footing with a major Japanese pop star on stage at the end of the film. To quote Yu-fen Ko (2004: 124), what makes local viewers respond to the film ‘may be interpreted as a desire for an ideal modernity’ and, I may add, without colonial guilt. This may be the reason why the movie makes the people of Taiwan ‘feel good,’ ‘feel proud,’ and ‘feel real.’ The box-office success of Cape No.7 is particularly important to Taiwan’s film industry. It is a locally-produced commercial film that the local audiences have been waiting for over two decades to see. Its popularity proves that there is a local market for Taiwanese commercial cinema, and it demonstrates that there is talent in Taiwan that is capable of producing financially viable films in addition to arthouse cinema. Moreover, Cape No.7 has restored the faith of audiences, investors and theatre owners in local cinema. Several locally-produced films after the commercial victory of Cape No.7, such as Orz Boyz (Yang Ya-zhe, 2008), Hear Me (Zheng Fen-fen, 2009) and Seven Days in Heaven (Wang Yu-lin and Liu Zi-jie, 2010), all performed solidly at the box office. Cape No.7 and its successors have certainly rekindled some hope of a renaissance in Taiwanese cinema.

References Chung, Oscar (2009) ‘Showtime for Taiwan’s Movies,’ Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York, 6 February, http:// www.taiwanembassy.org/fp.asp?xItem=79101&ctNode=3483 &mp=62. Accessed 11 May 2009. Ko, YF (2004) ‘The desired form: Japanese idol dramas in Taiwan,’ in K Iwabuchi (ed), Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 107–28. Liao, PH (2007) ‘Preface: Screening contemporary Taiwan cinema,’ in DW Davis & RSR Chen (eds), Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts, London: Routledge, pp. xiii–xv. Rawnsley, MYT (2009) ‘Film note: Cape No.7,’ EW Cross Road, 9 May, http://blog.chinatimes.com/mingyeh/ archive/2009/05/09/402626.html. Accessed 12 September 2010. Su, CN (2009) ‘Beyond south of the border: A textual analysis of the Taiwanese blockbuster Cape No.7,’ Asian Cinema, 20: 1, pp. 176–87.

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Note 1. According to Chung (2009), from 1996 to 2006 the yearly revenue from Taiwanese movies accounted for less than 2 percent of total ticket sales in Taiwan. More than 90 per cent of the boxoffice income was for foreign-language movies, mostly Englishlanguage films from Hollywood.

City of Sadness Bei cing cheng shih Studio/Distributor:

ERA International Director:

Hou Hsiao-hsien Producers:

Chang Hwa-kun Chiu Fu-sheng Screenwriters:

Chu Tian-wen Wu Nian-jen Cinematographer:

Chen Huai-en Art Directors:

Liu Chi-hwa Lin Tsung-wen Editor:

Liao Ching-song Duration:

159 minutes Genre:

Historical drama Cast:

Tony Leung Chiu-wai Chen Song-yong Hsin Shu-fen Jack Kao Li Tian-lu Year:

1989

Synopsis This film chronicles the dramatic changes in Taiwan between 1945 and 1949 through the fictional account of a single family. In the Lin family, one of four brothers is already missing from the war. In 1945, the war ends as Japan surrenders and Taiwan is returned to China. In response, the Lin family opens a new establishment ‘the Little Shanghai’, an apparent welcome of the new Mainland arrivals. However, over the course of the next four years, two of the other brothers are victims of economic and political exploitation by Mainland gangsters, the oldest dead at the hands of wellconnected gangsters and the other driven insane due to torture by government officials. Meanwhile the youngest, the deaf-mute Wen-Ching, falls victim to the new political regime for his involvement with a group of intellectuals who join the resistance to corrupt and ineffective rule. By the film’s end, only a very diminished family line is left while Taiwan becomes the seat of the government of the ROC.

Critique Given how unprecedented it is on multiple levels, it is hard to know what Hou Hsiao-hsien’s monumental 1989 work, City of Sadness, can be compared to. It was the first Taiwanese film, or even Chinese-language film, to win the top prize at the Venice Film Festival in September of that year. This makes City of Sadness the Chinese-language equivalent of Japan’s Rashomon in 1951, when that film won the same prize and opened the floodgates for Japanese cinema on the world’s stage thereafter. In addition, there is its unparalleled box office success at home with some estimates calculating that up to half of the island’s 20+ million citizens saw the film on its first run. This one film became a cultural event unlike any other. The main cause of this domestic attention was the historical backdrop of the film, namely the infamous 228 Incident of 1947 where the new and then egregiously corrupt Nationalist government slaughtered untold Taiwanese citizens who were considered more conquered Japanese subjects than Chinese compatriots. The local Taiwanese, long used to a much higher standard of living and governance under the Japanese, had rebelled in early 1947 and nearly ousted the Nationalists until Chiang Kai-shek sent over fresh troops from the Mainland. Thereafter the locals suffered bitterly from this violent backlash. In the tense Cold War atmosphere to

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City of Sadness, The Kobal Collection.

follow, the government in Taiwan squelched any public mentions of this incident, which lasted until martial law was lifted in 1987. This film, however, brought all of this in the light of day as both Hou and the 228 Incident became a part of everyday parlance. By the mid-1990s, the government had offered both an official report on the incident and an official apology as well. Still, there are those who suggest that the film’s success was only due to timing and the exploitation of both recent and not so recent historical tragedies. In 1989, the film was even promoted as being about the Taiwanese ‘Tiananmen Incident’ which was still fresh in everyone’s mind at the time. While historical and contemporary curiosity may account for the box-office numbers, this should not overshadow the actual achievements of this film as a film. City of Sadness represents another milestone in Hou’s peculiar aesthetic development over the 1980s, which continues all the way up to 1993. Despite averaging over forty seconds per shot, over 70 per cent of them are utterly still, a trait not usually found among

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long-take directors. And yet the images teem with life: Hou’s extravagantly dense staging strategies make for very intricate compositions where even the subtlest and minutest character movements carry a lot of weight, and can direct our attention without the usual aids of editing and/or camera movements. Equally remarkable is the overall narrative structure, built not around the grand historical events themselves, but around the lingering effects of those grand events found in the intimate moments of those who suffer from them, and have no control over the outcome. Thus, in terms of historical and aesthetic vision, City of Sadness represents Hou at a new peak. It remains to this day the single most important film ever made in Taiwan, and arguably one of the most important in Asia for the last twenty years. Fortunately, a new print is now available to celebrate its twentieth anniversary.

James Udden

Flowers of Shanghai Hai shang hua Studio:

3H Productions Shochiku Director:

Hou Hsiao-hsien Producers:

Liao Ching-sung Yang Tend-kuei Shozo Ichiyama Screenwriter:

Chu Tian-wen Cinematographer:

Mark Lee Ping-bing Art Director:

Huang Wen-ying Editor:

Liao Ching-sung Duration:

120 minutes Genre:

Chamber Drama

Synopsis Set in the foreign concession of late nineteenth century Shanghai, this film follows the complex interactions of men and courtesans in what was commonly referred to as a ‘flower house,’ a sort of upscale brothel. The main storyline involves Master Wang, an esteemed government official outside of the house who is seemingly lost within. He begins to court a courtesan named Crimson, yet neither seems able to follow the unwritten laws already established through intimations and whispers, most of all the unwritten dictates of Pearl and Master Hong who often work behind the scenes to entangle and disentangle this complex web of relationships. In the end, neither Master Wang nor Crimson could retain the most dangerous commodity in this flower house – love.

Critique For many, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1998 work, Flowers of Shanghai, was the ultimate shock, even more so than his previous two films. For the first time in his career, a Hou film is not set in Taiwan even for a minute, and the Taiwanese dialect is never heard. That alone represented either a refreshing change for some or the ultimate betrayal for others. Then there are the actual formal qualities, which some found so overwhelming that they end up dismissing this film as nothing more than empty formalizing, a dazzling cinematic display signifying nothing. Certainly this film also represents the longest average shot length in any Hou film, averaging close to three minutes per shot. Yet the camera also moves almost incessantly in this film, revealing there was no going back to his signature style up to 1993. In this case, however, the slow moving arcs right and left were of an unusual quality for Hou, since no other film by him consistently uses camera movements of this sort. This is combined with

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Cast:

Tony Leung Chiu-wai Michiko Hada Carina Lau Michelle Reis Jack Kao Year:

1998

arguably the densest staging strategies in Hou’s entire oeuvre, with the possible exception of City of Sadness. Moreover, the dazzling lighting design is literally breathtaking (including often two oil lamps that leave a lasting impression). To this date, Mark Lee as director of photography has not received the recognition he deserves for what is perhaps one of the most beautifully shot films in history. But is this empty formalism? It is if one does not reflect on the deeper and indirect implications of what Hou and company lay out before us. For starters, as much as The Puppetmaster may best reflect Hou’s philosophy of history, this film may best represent his philosophy of civilization. Hou has suggested as much in interviews: he states that he loved this particular story because it represents civilization at its highest level of refinement, and indicates how power plays out underneath all that surface glitter. Further complicating this film’s thematic implications are other messages that are perhaps less universalist. For example, Hou at one point describes late nineteenth century Shanghai, most of all in a concession like this, as being very unlike the rest of China at the time, where romantic love was virtually unknown. He goes on to note how much Shanghai at that time, including its reliance on international trade, was very much like Taiwan today. In addition, the original impetus for making this film was to make a biopic about Zheng Chenggung (Koxinga), who is known as the ‘Father of Taiwan.’ However in reading Han Bangqing’s novel as translated by Eileen Chang as preparation, Hou fell in love with the atmosphere itself. One final complication of note is that Hou was not even able to get permission to shoot this in Mainland China due to its supposedly ‘decadent’ subject matter. The entire film was shot in Taiwan instead. As always with Hou, one must peer beyond the surface, even in this case when it is one of the most dazzling in cinematic history.

James Udden

Good Men, Good Women Hao nan hao nyu Studio:

3H Films Shochiku Director:

Hou Hsiao-hsien

144  China

Synopsis Partially based on the real-life stories of political victims of the White Terror in post-war Taiwan, this film follows three stories at once. One narrative strand occurs in Taiwan during and after the war, and follows the tragic story of Zhang Haodong and Jiang Biyu as they fall victim to the government’s repressive Cold War policies. The other two strands involve an actress, Liang Jing, who in the present is trying to prepare for a role as Jiang Biyu in an upcoming film, yet who cannot seem to shake her own loss three years earlier of her underworld boyfriend, Ah-wei. In the end, two pasts and the present become seemingly one.

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Producers:

Chang Hwa-fu Shozo Ichiyama Katsuhiro Mizumo Screenwriter:

Chu Tian-wen Cinematographer:

Chen Huai-en Art Directors:

Huang Wen-ying Lu Ming-ching Ho Hsien-ko Editor:

Liao Ching-song Duration:

108 minutes Genre:

Historical drama Cast:

Annie Shizuka Inoh Lim Giong Jack Kao Vicky Wei Tsai Chen-nan Year:

1995

Critique It is hard to know what to make of a film from a renowned filmmaker when even key members of his entourage seemed dumbfounded by the result. Long-time collaborator of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Zhan Hongzhi, edited the short story anthology from which this film derived its original idea. (The short story is ‘Song of the Covered Wagon’ by Lan Bozhou.) Yet when Zhan first saw Good Men, Good Women, his initial reaction was described as being like he was saying goodbye to an old friend he had once known so well. Chu Tian-wen, right after the film was released, predicted that from this point onward, Hou’s aesthetic career would be nothing but unexpected twists and turns. This turned out to be more prophetic than any would have dared imagine at the time. As a film, however, Good Men, Good Women represents both a permanent break and a one-time experiment. In many ways this is Hou’s most analytical and didactic of films, since his three-pronged narrative strategy, where the past is washed over in almost nostalgic sepia, is starkly contrasted with the harsh and murky present. The characters in the past are selfless heroes, whereas those in the present are seemingly aimless and have lost all values. Compared to other Hou works, this comes across almost as heavy-handed, and it is hardly a novel notion to be found in Taiwanese cinema or elsewhere. (Xu Xiaoming’s Heartbreak Island [1995] is another example of this common strain of film-making.) Hou will never again try to paint things in such stark contrast, although he will always continue to struggle with presenting the contemporary landscape of Taiwan later in his career. What is more inexplicable is why the sudden aesthetic abandonment of his signature style. For the first time in his career as a festival director, Hou now moves the camera almost incessantly, and yet he and his crew do not quite give a clear account as to why this radical change in style occurred. Hou explains this was because scenes from the past need a static camera, unlike the present. However, in Good Men, Good Women, even those scenes set in the historical past also feature ample camera movements in the majority of the shots. The director of photography, Chen Huai-en, on the other hand, passed this off as simply taking advantage of a new, inexperienced camera operator whose hand was unsteady. No matter what the reasons, this one change has been permanent ever since, and it marks a true divide in Hou’s career. Ironically, it is right around this year that we find evidence of other Asian directors starting to imitate the now ‘old’ Hou, starting with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Maborosi (1995). Nevertheless, for Hou himself, Good Men, Good Women represents not only one of his least favourite films personally, it also represents a still not adequately explained point of no return in his career.

James Udden

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Goodbye Dragon Inn Bu san Studio:

Homegreen Films Distributors:

Diaphana Films Wellspring Media Director:

Synopsis In a dilapidated movie theatre in Taipei, several characters gather to watch the martial arts film Dragon Gate Inn (King Hu, 1967) before the cinema closes down. The janitor, a clubfooted young woman, spends her time cleaning, eating and spying on the projectionist, to whom she leaves some food of hers; whilst a young male patron is constantly annoyed throughout the screening and finally sets off around the labyrinthine building, where he has a strange encounter with a Japanese man taking shelter from a rainstorm. Elsewhere, a grandfather and his grandson watch the film in wonder, and the old man also has a special meeting as he leaves the theatre. As the film closes, the janitor and projectionist make their preparations to leave the building one final time.

Tsai Ming-liang Producers:

Liang Hung-Chih Vincent Wang Screenwriter:

Tsai Ming-liang Cinematographer:

Liao Pen-jung Art Director:

Lu Li-Chin Editor:

Chen Sheng-Chang Duration:

83 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Lee Kang-sheng Chen Shiang-chyi Mitamura Kiyonobu Miao Tien Shih Chun Chen Chao-jung Year:

2003

146  China

Critique Several times in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn, a shot taken from the outside of the dilapidated cinema that features as the film’s single location displays a poster for the Pang Brothers’ Hong Kong horror hit The Eye (2002). It is a strangely appropriate reference, given that film’s emphasis on privileged vision and the singular witnessing of ghosts, for Tsai’s picture too is concerned with ghosts and with specifically personal, subjective visions. In actual fact, although one scene features talk of hauntings in the old movie house, and there appear to be several spirits watching the film that is being shown for the final time (King Hu’s historical martial arts epic Dragon Gate Inn [1967]), the true ghosts remain on the screen, the present/absent images of real people that play out their circumscribed story in a distinct yet coterminous realm (the fact that potentially one actor’s ghost seems to be viewing his work in the cinema is, in this regard, a wonderfully allusive and self-reflexive aside). Goodbye Dragon Inn has also been favourably compared to films like Guiseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988) and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971). However perhaps Wim Wenders’ Kings of the Road (1976) offers a more apposite point of contrast, less in any concrete details of story or character than for the New German Cinema luminary’s nostalgic evocation of the lost days of small-scale exhibition. Tsai does not offer quite the same vision: the vein of magic realism mined by the director here, in addition to the broad comedic material he provides in the shape of a young male spectator who is continually distracted by the antics of those few patrons around him (a nod to the less than ideal communality of the theatrical experience), contravenes Wenders’ particular narrativity. Nonetheless, as with Kings of the Road, he is clearly interested in the pure magic of film viewing, the dazzling other-world that can shine in and illuminate even such drab surroundings as a Taipei cinema during a rainstorm (and in truth a golden-oldie tune over the end credits clearly introduces a note of nostalgia, something dear to Tsai who used this particular theatre

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because it reminded him of his childhood cinema-going). Single locations are common in this director’s work, as are serious problems with monsoon weather and water leakage (as in Rebels of the Neon God [1992] or The Hole [1998]); but here there is a certain fondness for the dank, labyrinthine interior and the determined janitor who tirelessly maintains what she can of its upkeep. Tsai even uses the water to offer a diegetic soundtrack of rhythmic dripping to counterpoint his largely dialogue-free narrative and provide something like a metronome against which to measure the myriad offbeat characters and personal stories. The fact that his unkempt theatre represents a modern movie house, and an utterly quotidian interior space that resembles the dilapidated, even disused bowels of a factory, does not negate this import. Indeed, the space of the theatre seems to act as a catalyst to a drama as several characters are compelled to wander its domain, as though it had absorbed some of the screen’s narrative power and potential. Tsai’s typically de-dramatized, long take/long shot deadpan style, allows an extended and uncluttered temporality conducive to such drama, and although not the essence of King Hu or the beloved Chinese genre cinema of old, it is very much the essence of its director here, in what is arguably his masterpiece.

Adam Bingham

Goodbye, South, Goodbye Nan guo zai jian, nan guo Studio:

3H Films Shochiku Director:

Hou Hsiao-hsien Producers:

Chang Hwa-fu Shozo Ichiyama Screenwriter:

Chu Tian-wen Cinematographers:

Chen Huai-en Mark Lee Ping-bing Art Director:

Huang Wen-ying

Synopsis This is a film by Hou Hsiao-hsien set in the contemporary Taiwan of the 1990s. Flatty and Kao are two friends who embark on a road trip to southern Taiwan in search of elusive treasure. Kao’s only wish is to open a restaurant in Mainland China, whereas Flatty only hopes to get his due from some financial dealings involving his extended family. However, neither is ever quite able to achieve their goals largely because of their lack of necessary connections. As a result, they even meet violence at the hands of those who are connected. In the end they both are in a desolate field in Taiwan with the sun rising, shining light on an uncertain future.

Critique Every film by Hou Hsiao-hsien at first glance seems more loosely constructed than one later finds with closer analysis. Nevertheless, Goodbye, South, Goodbye is undeniably the most haphazardly constructed film Hou has ever attempted. His original inspiration was the interaction between Jack Kao, Lim Going and Annie Shizuka Inoh at the Cannes Film Festival. Yet some of the ideas found here – most of all, shady economic and political dealings involving pig farms – were first to be used in Good Men, Good Women (1995), something found in the published script in Chinese. The end result is a hodgepodge of sorts: twice the film’s production was halted before being completed, and Hou

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Editor:

Liao Ching-song Duration:

100 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Jack Kao Lim Giong Annie Shizuka Inoh Hsu Kuei-ying Vocky Wei Year:

1996

only managed to finish the third time after seeing once more how relentless the protagonist is in Godard’s Breathless (1960). The end result is not a film that is so much as indirect (which Hou has always strived for) as it is very loose, even after closer analysis. While one of the more overlooked of Hou’s films, Goodbye, South, Goodbye is still significant for several reasons. First, this film fully confirmed what many could not quite accept with his previous film, Good Men, Good Women: the old Hou signature-style of static long takes was now a thing of the past. Here we enter a brave new world of an ever moving camera, including prolonged handheld shots in nightclubs which display none of the former precision of the earlier Hou, nor the more intricate arrangement of mise en scène to be found in his next film, Flowers of Shanghai (1998). Perhaps most significant, however, is how much this film catalogues the nature of a lot of economic activity in Taiwan. If the film as a film seems uncertain and slapdash, so do the contours of a lot of everyday economic life on the island. Such deal making as seen here is not that much outside of the norm, and often leads to real internal strife among family members, as occurs with Flatty who essentially is thrown out of town for attempting to claim what he believes is rightfully his. (The film does not verify one way or the other how legitimate this claim actually is.) Meanwhile, Kao’s dream of opening a restaurant in China is a true sign of the times, given the billions of dollars Taiwanese have invested in the Mainland and the hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese who currently live there. Without even announcing it, and without even judging it, Hou is frankly laying out the ‘dirty laundry’ of Taiwan’s economic miracle. His point is not to condemn it nor praise it, since Hou almost always resists doing either. Instead, this economy shown here at its most intimate level is merely what it is and nothing more. Thus, even in this film where Hou does not seem to be at his most aesthetically accomplished, there is once again more than meets the eye.

James Udden

The Hole Dong Studios/Distributors:

Haut et Court Arc Light Films China Television Central Motion Picture Corp./ Fox Lorber

148  China

Synopsis During the opening credits, offscreen voices give news reports of dire events in Taipei as 1999 draws to a close. An illness called Taiwan Fever is ravaging the population; quarantined areas have been marked off; and the government is pressuring those who refuse to leave their homes by cutting off garbage collection and threatening to stop the water supply. The story centres on two characters, known only as ‘the Man upstairs’ and ‘the Woman downstairs,’ who live in a run-down tenement. The Man works in a food shop but spends most of his time drinking, sleeping, and feeding a stray cat. The Woman lives in the apartment below him, where a hole in the ceiling allows the Man to spy on her and drop

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Director:

Tsai Ming-liang Producers:

Cheng Su-Ming Chiu Shun-Ching Jiang Feng-Chyt Screenwriters:

Yang Ping-Ying Tsai Ming-liang Cinematographer:

Liao Peng-Jung Art Director:

Lee Pao-Lin Editor:

Hsiao Ju-Kuan Duration:

89 minutes Genre:

Drama Fantasy Cast:

Yang Kuei-Mei Lee Kang-sheng Tong Hsiang-Chu Lin Hui-Chin Lin Kun-Huei Year:

1997

things into her living room. It is raining heavily throughout the film, and the story is interrupted several times by musical numbers performed by the two characters in the hallways of the building.

Critique Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang made The Hole for a 1997 project called 2000 Seen by…, comprising eight international films dealing in various ways with the coming millennium. The story’s decisive event takes place in the first scene, when a plumber shows up at a young man’s apartment to find the source of a water leak, and then leaves without fixing the hole he has made in the floor. This hole, which opens onto a young woman’s apartment below, propels the movie’s slender plot and provides the key metaphor for its view of human relations, simultaneously linking and separating the two characters. At first the tensions between them grow steadily stronger: the Woman wants her privacy while the Man is a snoop and a slob, so ill-mannered that at one point he drunkenly vomits into her living room. Yet the hole also serves to draw them together, since it is the only thing their dull, unhappy lives have in common. The slow growth of their affection is symbolized by the fantasy song-and-dance routines they perform in the tenement’s dirty, dreary corridors. The music is taken from Hong Kong movies starring singer-actress Grace Chang, which Tsai enjoyed as a child. The first, ‘Calypso,’ is done by the Woman alone, but later the Man joins her. Each subsequent number has more dancers and glittery costumes than the last, until the one that ends the film, ‘I Don’t Care Who You Are,’ in which the Man and Woman simply gaze into each other’s eyes while moving in slow, rhythmic circles. Love has finally arrived. Although much bizarre humour arises from the film’s surrealistic premise and odd juxtapositions, it projects a dark vision of urban life on the eve of the twenty-first century. The incessant, torrential rain suggests that nature itself has lost its bearings, and the theme of illness grows increasingly grim as the story proceeds. Taiwan Fever is carried by cockroaches, we learn, and it induces cockroach-like behaviour in its victims, causing them to scuttle about like insects on the floor. The Woman comes down with this malady, and even before this her life appears to be drab and joyless, even when she is not searching doggedly for a plumber to fix the everpresent leak (still dripping away) or buying mountains of paper towels to sop up the water. Yet the end of the picture is hopeful to the point of transcendence, as the Man hoists the Woman through the hole like a benevolent god raising a righteous mortal to the heavens. It is a strange and wonderful moment, as is the slow dance that follows it. After this the screen displays Tsai’s words of tribute to the movie’s music: ‘In the year 2000, we are grateful that we still have Grace Chang’s songs to comfort us.’ The mood and tone of The Hole owe a great deal to the dilapidated building where all the action takes place. Tsai started the film with a different story in mind, but everything changed when he discovered this location: its similarity to a building he once lived

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in started new ideas and associations clicking in his mind, and his decision to make it the story’s sole milieu freed him from having to plan the movie’s structure in advance. The performances – especially that of Tsai’s favourite actor, Lee Kang-sheng, as the Man – also contribute strongly to the film’s uncanny power. At once a musical, a melodrama, a romance, and a science-fiction portrait of a dystopian future, The Hole is original and idiosyncratic even by Tsai’s lofty standards. Rarely has a film combined so many paradoxes and contradictions – pessimism and optimism, gracefulness and clumsiness, despair and hope – into such a unified, transfixing whole.

David Sterritt

In Our Time Guang yin de gu shi Studio/Distributor:

Central Motion Pictures Corporation Directors:

Tao Te-chen Edward Yang Ko I-chen Chang Yi Producer:

Ming Chi Screenwriters:

Tao Te-chen Edward Yang Ko I-chen Chang Yi

Synopsis A portmanteau film in four parts, In Our Time dramatizes everyday stories of Taiwan in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s. In part one, ‘Little Dragon Head,’ a grade-school loner is picked on at school and at home, and only finds solace in his dinosaur toys and a girl who becomes his sole friend. In part two, ‘Expectations,’ a girl enters puberty at the same time that her elder sister rebels against their parents, and a tall, handsome college student moves into the family’s guest house. An absent mother, distracted sister, and pre-pubescent male friend are of no help to the younger sister, so she is left to discover sexuality herself while pining for the boy next door. Part three, ‘Leapfrog,’ follows a college student at a crossroads – changing majors, finding jobs, appeasing parents and meeting girls. The only potential release from the stress is a university swimming competition against foreign students. The final section, ‘Say Your Name,’ is a comedy about a young married couple in a new apartment, bickering about work and each other. Their problems are put in perspective when the wife cannot get into the building of her new job, and the husband has locked himself out of the apartment while only wearing boxer briefs and a towel.

Cinematographer:

Critique

Chen Chia-mo

Justly considered one of the turning points of Taiwanese cinema and the forerunner of the Taiwan New Cinema movement, In Our Time was enough of a critical and commercial success to get government studio CMPC investing in relatively unknown directors and screenwriters like Wu Nien-jen and Hou Hsiao-hsien. In Our Time is the proper debut of directors Edward Yang, Ko I-cheng, Chang Yi and Tao Te-chen, all of whom would go on to be important filmmakers and actors in the internationally-recognized film movement. In Our Time proves that what the New Taiwanese film-makers did better than anyone else in the history of Chinese-language film is narrating stories of growing up. (Incidentally, Growing Up is the English title of what is considered the first feature-length film of the

Editor:

Liao Ching-song Duration:

109 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Sylvia Chang Lee Li-chun

150  China

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Li Kuo-hsiu Shih An-ni Lan Sheng-wen Year:

1982

movement.) For the generation of directors discovering their art in the early 1980s, growing up meant coming of age in a time of relative poverty, improvized living, and rock and roll. Foreshadowing the radios and cover bands of Edward Yang’s landmark A Brighter Summer Day (1991), In Our Time (and the entire Taiwan New Cinema, for that matter) begins with silence, then a close-up of a needle hitting an LP. Santo & Johnny’s instrumental classic ‘Sleep Walk’ fills the soundtrack. The image dissolves to a boy walking on railroad tracks (another signature location of the 1980s Taiwanese film). The dreamy electric guitars complement the loneliness of a boy walking with eyes pointed to the ground. Strolling by garbage and brushing past fences, he almost seems to walk in the slow motion of the song. New Taiwan Cinema begins here, in a daze of American popular culture set against a modern nation still in its infancy. This impressive display of sound, image, and editing is the work of Tao Te-chen. The rest of the short, entitled ‘Little Dragon In Our Time, Central Motion Pictures/The Kobal Collection.

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Head,’ overlaps timelines, voiceovers and fantasies – a more contemplative version of the impressionistic effects Pai Ching-jui innovated in the 1960s. Music is key throughout, as in a highschool fight scene that uses not a thrilling score, but one teeming with ironic triumph and nostalgia. Of the four directors of In Our Time, Tao would go on to be the least prolific in the following decades. Most successful is the director of part two, Edward Yang. His short, ‘Expectations,’ is the extraordinary debut of a film-maker already in command of visual storytelling. ‘Expectations’ is the most formally beautiful of the four, using shadows to carve out the spaces of a middle-class home, and using soft-lighting to evoke dreamlike tones. Already, Yang is experimenting with doorways, mirrors, and windowpanes that would later become visual signatures in films like Taipei Story (1985) and Yi Yi (2000). More impressive is how the visual style is deployed to depict the coming-of-age of a girl discovering her own sexual desire. In one of the film’s most memorable – and risqué – moments, the girl, Hsiao-fen, gazes at a shirtless college student lifting bricks, the camera fetishistically roaming over his sweaty, toned pecs and arms, capturing the ecstasy of female heterosexual desire. Yang pulls a fast one on her though: through the most efficient editing and framing, we find that the gaze belongs to not just Hsiao-fen, but her sister as well, setting off an important triangle that will proceed to shape her expectations of love. Parts three and four abandon the dreamy interior states of the first two, in favour of chatty comedy. The result is a second half that largely sags under the dialogue. ‘Leapfrog,’ by Ko I-cheng, curiously channels a college student’s energies (he is always rushing, but has no place to go) into a swimming competition against non-Asian foreigners, a climax that invites allegorical interpretation. ‘Say Your Name,’ by Chang Yi, is a more credible comedy, helped by charming performances by Lee Li-chun and Sylvia Chang, one of the most important figures of Taiwanese film and music.

Brian Hu

Kuei-Mei, A Woman Wo zhe yang guo le yi sheng Studio/Distributor:

Central Motion Picture Corporation Director:

Chang Yi

152  China

Synopsis Kueimei, a woman originally from Mainland China, loses a husband to the civil war and moves to Taiwan with the KMT government. There she marries a widower with his own children. She then suffers from his infidelities, drinking and profligacy. After enduring this for years, Kuei-mei takes matters into her own hands by creating her own economic success story, starting in Japan. She is then able to return to Taiwan and keep the family together, including dealing with a daughter with an unwanted pregnancy. As she is dying, her family gathers together while she is able to leave them each a part of her legacy.

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Producers:

Lin Teng-fei Hsu Kuo-liang Screenwriter:

Chang Yi Cinematographer:

Yang Wei-han Art Director:

Wang Hsia-chun Editor:

Wong Chun-San Duration:

116 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Yang Hui-san Lee Li-Chun Wen Ying Lau Ming Year:

1985

Critique What is arguably most significant about Kuei-mei, A Woman, is not so much the film as its reception in 1985. This was only the third feature film by the now little remembered Taiwanese New Cinema director, Chang Yi. Yet it truly was Chang’s moment in the sun, since it won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Performance by a Female at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards. At the same time, however, it earned no awards at film festivals abroad, unlike its main ‘rival’ in 1985, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A Time to Live, A Time to Die. What accounts for this disparity is how this film became a lightning rod in the local media. With the Taiwanese film industry in dire straits as a whole, many in the local media blamed the New Cinema directors for supposedly indulging in their aesthetic proclivities with no regard for the local audience. Chang initially wanted to cease production on the film so Yang Hui-san could put on a dozen kilograms of body weight in order to more accurately portray a middle-aged woman. The media lashed out at Chang Yi for this apparent indulgence, unwittingly providing the film with advance publicity it would not have had otherwise. Since Yang was a well-known star, everybody wanted to see how much weight she actually put on. Once the film was finally released, it became an unexpected box-office hit, a rarity at that time, largely due to people curious about Yang’s weight gain. Suddenly many in the media changed their tune and supported Chang for ‘remembering’ his audience. At the same time they used this film to attack the ‘aesthetic indulgences’ of Hou Hsiao-hsien instead. Yet Kuei-mei ended up being Chang’s penultimate film. Soon the media turned against him once more after his highly publicized affair with Yang Hui-san. Meanwhile, Hou would go on to be Taiwan’s most decorated director in the international festival realm. Scandal alone does not quite explain Chang Yi’s sudden departure from the film world to a more successful venture in glassware inspired by traditional Chinese aesthetics. A closer inspection of this film, long after the passions of 1985 have died down, reveals both this film’s strength and its flaws. In terms of content, Kuei-mei is similar to Wan Ren’s Ah-Fei (1983), another story of a Taiwanese woman who suffers under a man until she takes matters into her own hands and restores domestic stability. Such melodramatic tropes do reflect a certain reality about Taiwan, most of all about how scores of Taiwanese matriarchs have managed many of the family-run businesses, playing a key role in the Taiwanese economic miracle. Yet aesthetically speaking, one realizes why Chang Yi never made the impact that Hou and Edward Yang made abroad. One of the most astonishing facts about Chang is how consciously he tried to have the longest takes of any director of his time in Taiwan. Kuei-mei, A Woman averages well over forty seconds a shot, a figure much higher than Hou’s now better remembered film from the same year. This shows how little shot duration means alone, because while the takes were longer, Zhang came nowhere near to Hou’s intricate design of these long takes through lighting,

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staging, and other aspects of mise en scène. Moreover, he could hardly repeat the gimmick of beefing up a star over the course of production. For this reason, Kuei-mei is perhaps best remembered as the oddest, most short-lived moment of glory in the history of Taiwanese cinema.

James Udden

The Puppetmaster Xi meng ren sheng Studio/Distributor:

ERA International Director:

Hou Hsiao-hsien Producers:

Chang Hwafu Chiu Fu-sheng Screenwriters:

Chu Tian-wen Wu Nian-jen Cinematographer:

Mark Lee Ping-bing Art Directors:

Chang Hung Lu Ming-ching Editor:

Liao ching-song Duration:

142 minutes Genre:

Historical drama Cast:

Li Tian-lu Lim Giong Huang Ching-ju Bai Ming-hwa Kao Tung-hsiu Year:

1993

154  China

Synopsis Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, this is a half documentary, half biopic of Taiwan’s famed puppeteer, Li Tian-lu, who had already acted in several of Hou’s films since the mid-1980s. Rather than covering his whole life, however, the film covers his earlier years when Taiwan was still a part of the Japanese empire. After his mother dies, the young Li storms out of his home after suffering endless abuse from his new stepmother. After starting his own puppet troupe later on, he is forced indoors to perform live opera due to a Japanese ban on outdoor performances during the war. It is then he has a memorable but short-lived affair. The film ends when the war ends: Li briefly contracts cholera as many did at the time, but he continues to perform, as he will for several decades thereafter.

Critique If there has ever been anyone who best understood Hou and his films, it would have to be his long-time collaborator (at least until recently), the famed Taiwanese novelist, Chu Tian-wen. Two things she has said about The Puppetmaster prove most of all how well she did in fact recognize what made Hou who he was. First, she noted that this film is very much like editing together passing clouds. Second, she predicted two years later that this film would prove to be Hou’s pinnacle in terms of his aesthetic development, and that every film after 1993 would represent uncertain turns and twists. It is indeed hard to argue today with either Chu’s insight or her prescience, since in many ways The Puppetmaster is the ultimate Hou film, and one of the greatest to ever come out of Taiwan or anywhere else. This does not mean it has had the same immediate impact as his previous work, City of Sadness (1989), or even many of his works from the New Cinema period of the 1980s. Yet in terms of aesthetic and philosophical vision, Hou does seem to reach a peak from which there were no higher heights he could strive for. For starters, this film is so elusive in terms of its structure that many fail to grasp how intricately these ‘clouds’ were edited together, since various parts flow into each other almost as if this is a prolonged historical dream. The Puppetmaster certainly represents the fullest expression of Hou’s vision of the world: to look at the world as it is, as it is lived on a daily basis, without the usual fetters of moralistic posturing and ideas of what it should be – to delight in quotidian excess

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for the sheer pleasure of it. Yet now all this becomes a philosophy of history in itself, because even the Japanese overlords come across nothing like overlords, but simply a part of life, a small speck of a vast landscape engulfing all of them. Numerous people die in this film, and yet life keeps moving on, the clouds keep drifting by. It is not surprising then, that this film also represents a peak for Hou in aesthetic terms as well. The average shot length in The Puppetmaster is nearly double that of Hou’s previous work, the monumental City of Sadness. Nevertheless, the camera for the most part is so resolutely static that every image comes across almost as a tableau. The lighting for the first time approaches a more extreme chiaroscuro, resulting in a look that is both challenging and yet unforgettable in its imagery. If many did not quite grasp what they were seeing in 1993, that is because The Puppetmaster truly does take time to fully grasp or appreciate. Yet it is clear that in the history of Taiwanese cinema, this profound and subtle masterpiece will stand the test of time, for rarely has time itself been so unforgettably transformed for the big screen.

James Udden

Taipei Story Qing mei zhu ma Studio/Distributor:

Golden Harvest Productions Director:

Edward Yang Screenwriters:

Edward Yang Hou Hsiao-hsien T’ien-wen Chu Cinematographer:

Yang Wei-han Art Director:

Choi Jing-ban Editors:

Song Fanchen Wang Qi Yang Duration:

117 minutes Genre:

Drama

Synopsis Chin and Lon are a couple caught between youth and middle age and facing an impasse in their relationship. Chin is struggling with work, and resigns when her company is restructured following a takeover, whilst Lon, just returned from a trip to see his brother-inlaw in America, runs a textile business but is stuck in past glories and dreams of baseball and harbors feelings for an ex-girlfriend, who he stopped over to see in Tokyo. Chin’s father is in debt and struggling for money, and Lon’s loan of a substantial amount of money complicates his apparent dream of moving to America with Chin. Elsewhere in Chin’s family, her younger sister appears to be heading down a wayward path with a group of hedonistic friends, and her mother borrows money from her to get by. Problems with an old friend, and the appearance of his ex-partner from Japan, further exacerbate the growing rift between Lon and Chin, and she takes up with her sister’s friends in an action that will have farreaching consequences for herself and her relationship.

Critique Taipei Story, despite being only Edward Yang’s second feature (he had previously directed one film – a drama about the gulf between two reunited friends entitled That Day, on the Beach [1983] – and a short that made up one segment of the significant portmanteau narrative In Our Time [1982]), already shows the New Taiwanese Cinema luminary beginning to hone the film-making paradigm that would soon make him among the world’s greatest directors. The comparison with Yasujiro Ozu is inevitable, unavoidable, from

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Cast:

Tsai Chin Hou Hsiao-hsien Ko I-Chen Wu Nien-jen Lin Xiuling Chen Shufang Ding Nai-zhu Year:

1985

the very start, Yang’s film by its very title setting up a contrast with the Japanese master’s Tokyo Story (1953). And in truth there are some pertinent points of commonality, most overtly the inter-generational cross-section of modern Taipei and the pervasive sense of distance and contemplation in the storytelling, of remaining at one remove from the characters and regarding them through eyes unfettered and un-coloured by a central focus that guides and shapes our perception. However, there are in truth as many discrepancies with Ozu’s signature work as there are likenesses, not the least of which is the resolutely working-class focus (more in keeping with Ozu’s earlier forays into the Shomin-geki genre of everyday lower-class life) and the pervasive sense not only of an almost ahistorical present but at times a modern urban void in which any social lineage becomes actively disadvantageous. For example, the male protagonist Lon, played confidently by Edward’s Yang’s great New Taiwanese Cinema contemporary Hou Hsiao-hsien, remains wedded to a tradition of filial piety (lending his financially careless father-in-law a significant sum of money) and this causes serious friction with his partner Chin (played by Taiwanese pop star Tsai Chin). With Taipei Story Yang’s distinctive artistic voice makes itself keenly felt for arguably the first real time in his career. One of this director’s greatest strengths has always been the delicate balance, the precise trade-off, between form and content; between a structure that retains more than it discards of a classical paradigm, and the disorder and chaos of the lives that are thus thrown into stark relief. The narrative begins with the two protagonists looking around a new apartment. It then ends with Chin looking around a new and prospective office that will be her next place of work; and in between these signifiers of new beginnings the film traces a series of figurative and literal deaths that decisively shapes the world of these characters. These deaths and endings affect Chin more than anyone else in the narrative. She is a particularly complex character and a signifier of loss at the confluence of ostensibly opposing, even contradictory feelings: at once more isolated, lonely, and at the same time more independent than her partner, more at home in modern Taiwan but strangely more affected by it. She is also an essentially reactive character whose actions nonetheless shape events throughout the narrative, and we at once look at and with her for the duration. It is something that looks forward in particular to the female dynamics of Yi Yi: A One and a Two… (2000), especially as Lon comes into contact with an old flame, and it marks Taipei Story out as a significant precursor to that later masterpiece.

Adam Bingham

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The Terrorizers Kong bu fen zi Studio:

Central Motion Pictures Corporation Distributors:

Golden Harvest Company Inbaubel Director:

Edward Yang Producers:

Raymond Chow Lin Deng Fei Zhao Qibin Screenwriters:

Edward Yang Yeh Hsiao Cinematographer:

Chang Chen Art Director:

Lai Ming-Tong Editor:

Liao Ching-Song Duration:

119 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Miao Cora Gu Bao-ming Wang An Hong Shanqun Huang Jiaqing Jin Shi-Jye Lee Lichun Year:

1986

Synopsis In modern Taipei a gunfight between the police and a criminal impacts upon and/or connects several citizens of the city: a young photographer and his girlfriend, a struggling novelist and her crumbling marriage to her doctor husband, and a teenage hustler who was caught up in the shootout and who was injured fleeing from the scene. The novelist bemoans her lack of inspiration and begins seeing, both professionally and personally, a publisher; whilst her husband informs on a colleague to a superior at work in order to secure a promotion. The young female hustler, who has a fractious relationship at home with her mother, begins making prank phone calls, and in so doing arouses the suspicion of the novelist toward her husband; whilst the photographer, who has become obsessed by the hustler through the photos he took of her, tracks her down to live out his obsession (she herself is engaged in sexual scams with a young man). The novelist leaves her husband to complete her novel, and finds success with it, but he is passed over for promotion and labours over his feelings toward his estranged wife, something that ultimately leads to drastic action on his part.

Critique If Taipei Story (1985), Edward Yang’s previous, sophomore feature, depicted the amorphous, changing face of Taiwan’s capital and the attendant ways in which different generations reconcile (or indeed fail to reconcile) themselves to its modern thrust, his subsequent work, The Terrorizers explores in more depth the alienation resulting from its figurative stasis. The focus here remains on young and middle-aged characters for whom the city tends to recede into the background as personal imperatives and crises interject in their lives. Indeed, the very structure of the narrative – which begins with a moment of pronounced violence that links together an ensemble of characters in its immediate vicinity, to follow a centrifugal pattern of emanation outward from this single event – works to dramatize a sense of an exterior catalyst that facilitates and brings to the surface a whole nexus of latent feelings and emotions no less violent; frequently more so. Where one could but invoke the spirit of Yasujiro Ozu as a determinant on Taipei Story, here the shadow of Michelangelo Antonioni has been perceived to loom large over the narrative, not simply because of the prevalence of a vision or urban alienation and isolation but due to one of the characters being a photographer who obsessively pores over several photographs he has taken of a woman at a crime scene. This has somewhat too easily been compared to Blow-Up (1966), but there is in fact no mystery to be unravelled or crime to be solved by this young man. His quest is personal and emotional, and works as a microcosm of The Terrorizers in general. The title seems to refer explicitly to the criminal activities of the young photographed girl, who works with a male friend to lure in and rob men and who takes to making

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prank telephone calls. However, her situation is merely an objective correlative, perhaps even a corrective, to the other characters, the impersonal trauma that she visits merely throwing into stark relief the myriad ways in which the other characters all visit pain and torture on those seemingly closest to them. The Terrorizers is perhaps the most austere and unforgiving work in Edward Yang’s sadly curtailed canon. Its unforgiving dramatization of individual action and emotional cause and effect serves to narrativize the classicism that was beginning to emerge as a distinctive marker of the director’s fledgling artistry. As such, it is a key work in his career, and with its poignant, ambiguous, dreamlevel denouement serving to crystallize a vision of the symbiosis between internal and external conflict, it is also perhaps the most anomalous.

Adam Bingham

A Time to Live, A Time to Die Tong nien wang shi Studio/Distributor:

Central Motion Picture Company Director:

Hou Hsiao-hsien Producers:

Hsu Kuo-liang Chen Wen-sun Screenwriters:

Chun Tian-wen Wu Nien-jen Cinematographer:

Mark Lee Ping-bing Art Director:

Lin Tsung-wen Editor:

Wang Chi-yang Duration:

138 minutes Genre:

Drama

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Synopsis Based on the early years of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s own life, this film follows A-ha both as a young boy and later as a teenager. While the Cannon War of 1958 is occurring in the background, A-ha’s father is ill which allows him to roam freely outdoors. After his father dies, A-ha becomes a teenager and a not so successful hooligan. While trying to find his way in a world now changing around him, including the death of a vice president in 1965, the teenage A-ha must deal with the death of his mother and finally his beloved grandmother, who is never able to return to the Mainland as she had always desired.

Critique A repeated trope of the Taiwanese New Cinema was autobiographical, cinematic essays that often depicted the flavours and contours of the post-war ‘Taiwanese Experience.’ Yet few films can quite match the cinematic autobiography by Hou Hsiao-hsien from 1985, A Time to Live, A Time to Die. For those who lived through this period, Hou’s film serves as a virtual time capsule reminding them of numerous minute details of an island that has changed rapidly over the years. Yet so well are those details rendered on the screen that not everyone notes the deeper underlying structure of this film and its messages. A Time to Live, A Time to Die is split into two halves: one when Hou is still a young boy, the other when he is a teenager in high school. Equally important are three deaths that come with little warning or fanfare, always occurring in the most mundane of settings among the most mundane of family routines. Even Hou is remarkably ordinary as an artist and a young man – as far as hooligans go, he is hardly the Don Corleone of his time and place.

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Cast:

You An-hsun Hsin Shu-fen Mei Fang Tang Ru-yun Tien Feng Year:

1985

Yet in weaving all these elements together, the end result is not a loose set of autobiographical essays as they appear at first glance. Instead, the film overall represents an arc of forgetting, or rather of transformation. The first half occurs at the height of Cold War tensions in Taiwan. The family is constantly reminded through radio reports of a place they had left and were still hoping to return to. Nevertheless, what they desired was not the fulfillment of KMT ideology – they merely desired to be reunited with family members they had left behind. However, slowly it is Taiwan that becomes their true and final home: even the grandmother, always preparing both for her death and her return to the Mainland, becomes distracted from her ‘journeys’ by items such as guava trees. This poignant scene occurs just before the first family death in the film, in this case of the father, who never realizes how permanent Taiwan has become as a home for all of them. The second half jumps unexpectedly ahead to the mid-1960s. Not only is Hou now much older, the historical backdrop has also changed. He plays pool with his cronies and cares not at all that that same day was the funeral of the famed vice-president, Chen Cheng, an event that is often said to mark the end of an era focusing on China and the beginning of a new era focusing instead on developing Taiwan itself. For the teenage Hou, Taiwan was already his home, the only place he has ever known. Moreover, this is the place where both his mother and his grandmother die. The latter’s death even closes the film with a particularly poignant and deeply symbolical ending. A Time to Live, A Time to Die is one of Hou’s most deeply moving films, and for some their favourite Hou film, and for some even their favourite film of all time. In terms of aesthetics, the long takes are hardly as long as his later films, and the staging is not yet as complex as it will soon be, nor is the lighting quite as audacious as it will be a decade later. Nevertheless, if one wants to understand who Hou really is, and what the place he grew up in was really like, there is no better film to start with than this understated classic.

James Udden

What Time is it There? Ni na bian ji dian Studio/Distributor:

Arena films Homegreen Films Director:

Tsai Ming-liang

Synopsis After his father dies suddenly, Hsiao-kang sells watches on a bridge near the central train station in Taipei. There he meets a young woman named Shiang Chyi who is about to leave for Paris. Thereafter, Hsiao-kang becomes obsessed with Paris, both by watching The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959) and resetting every watch and clock he can find to Paris time. Meanwhile, Shiang Chyi has her own strange encounters, starting with a brief lesbian affair with another traveller of Chinese descent. Yet nothing is stranger than her encounter with Jean-Pierre Léaud, the star of Truffaut’s film, or in the end with Hsiao-kang’s father (his ghost?) as she is sleeping on a park bench.

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Producer:

Bruno Pesery Screenwriters:

Tsai Ming-liang Yang Pi-ying Cinematographer:

Benoit Delhomme Art Director:

Timmy Yip Editor:

Chen Sheng-chang Duration:

116 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Lee Kang-sheng Chen Shiang-chyi Lu Yi-ching Miao Tien Cecilla Yip Year:

2001

Critique What Time is it There? is both a film about haunting and a haunted film. To be sure, Tsai Ming-liang is not Hou Hsiao-hsien in multiple ways. Yet Tsai never even acknowledges any influence that Hou may have had on him. Instead he often speaks of the influence of avant-garde theatre, from which he emerged, and of other directors, most of all François Truffaut. In this respect, no film directed by Tsai is quite as literal as What Time is It There? To wit, this film is almost haunted by its literalness both as homage and as a stylistic exercise. The film opens with Hsiao-kang’s father alone, calling out to his son. Thereafter the father dies, only to return mysteriously at the end in a Paris park as a ferris wheel slowly turns in the distance while Hsiao-kang’s love interest sleeps on a bench. In addition to the haunting of the father, however, the film is further haunted by longing for a faraway place. In conveying this, Tsai acknowledges his spiritual godfather: François Truffaut. To further emphasize this cinematic lineage, he has the actual Jean-Pierre Léaud, now an adult, also appear next to Hsiao-kang’s love interest. In an understatedly witty film with Tsai’s signature economy of dialogue, this is even wittier as homage, much like he will do next for King Hu in Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003). Yet the inserted images from The 400 Blows drives home one other key point: as much as Tsai Ming-liang is inspired by the spirit of Truffaut, stylistically speaking, What Time is it There? is nothing like Truffaut. Instead, this film belies another haunting, one Tsai does not seem to acknowledge. To be a Malaysian-born director in Taiwan is challenging enough, but even more challenging is how much he has had to work under the shadow of Hou Hsiao-hsien. That Tsai now has the cachet he does on the international scene is a testament to how ingeniously Tsai has managed to etch his own place. Yet in What Time is it There? Tsai follows to the letter a peculiar tendency pioneered by Hou in recent Asian cinema: to couple the long take with a static camera. Even more astonishing, in this case Tsai does it literally in every single shot, excluding the inserted images from Truffaut. Despite an average shot length of over a minute, not once does the camera even move for the slightest reframing, or anything else for that matter. Even Hou Hsiao-hsien was never that literal with a tendency he inadvertently popularized among Asian directors aspiring for festival success. By contrast, Tsai follows the literal letter of an unwritten cinematic ‘law’ first established by a father figure he otherwise has little in common with. He never does this again: ever since this film, Tsai has allowed at least some camera movements, even if often subdued and minimal in nature. He thus follows a pattern here seen in other directors also exploring the static long take such as Korea’s Hong Sang-soo. After finding how far one can go with this rare aesthetic tendency, they seemingly pull back and begin to explore other aesthetic territory. Perhaps in this way Tsai and others exorcize their own cinematic ghosts, much unlike the characters within What Time is it There? Either way, this film epitomizes the cinematic games and puzzles that are undeniably Tsai Ming-liang’s, and Tsai’s alone.

James Udden 160  China

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Yi Yi: A One and a Two… Studio/Distributor:

Atom Films WinStar Cinema Director:

Edward Yang Producers:

Shinya Kawai Naoko Tsukeda Screenwriter:

Edward Yang Cinematographers:

Weihan Yang Longyu Li Art Director:

Kaili Peng Editor:

Bowen Chen Duration:

173 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Wu Nianzhen Elaine Jin Ogata Issei Kelly Lee Jonathan Chang Year:

2000

Synopsis Numerous storylines revolve around the middle-class Jian family and others who interact with them. Set mostly in Taipei, the narrative begins with the wedding of A-Di to his pregnant bride, but we soon learn that this feckless young man plays second fiddle in the family to his older brother, NJ, an executive at a software company that has not been thriving lately. NJ’s wife, Min-Min, becomes increasingly depressed when her mother has a stroke and goes into a coma, and when Min-Min takes up with a new religious group, NJ considers making a new start with Sherry, an old girlfriend who now lives in America but runs into him during a visit back home. Children are also important characters. TingTing, the teenage daughter of NJ and Min-Min, starts a tentative romance with a troubled boy who is involved with her best friend, and her little brother, Yang-Yang, is interested beyond his years in the unpredictable puzzles posed by ordinary life. By the time of the funeral that ends the film, the story’s tensions and emotions have been partially resolved.

Critique The little boy named Yang-Yang is a secondary character in Yi Yi: A One and a Two…, but he plays an important role, as one might guess from his name, which marks him as writer-director Edward Yang’s surrogate in the story. Young though he is, Yang-Yang is precociously smart and endlessly curious about a remarkable range of subjects, including the imperfect ways in which the grown-ups around him see – and fail to see – the complicated world in which they live. He wants to know how people can tell what is true and what is not, especially since nobody can see things from every angle and point of view; when his father says he can expand his vision by using a camera, Yang-Yang starts photographing the places we cannot ordinarily look at, such as the backs of our own heads. This is a perfect metaphor for Yang’s distinctive kind of cinema – a cinema that is expansive yet intimate, comprehensive yet particularized, focused on individuals yet steadily aware of their surroundings, including cultural influences that they themselves do not see. The title Yi Yi is the Mandarin word for ‘one’ repeated twice – unity plus multiplicity in two tiny, breathlike syllables. While the film gives it no definitive meaning, it hints at the blend of loneliness and togetherness that envelops most of the characters. This mixture operates most poignantly in the case of NJ, a middle-aged software executive, lover of Beethoven, and nominal head of the Jian family, who thinks about breaking with his humdrum life – the uninvolving job, the distant spouse, the growing children already turning into strangers – and starting afresh with an old flame who has unexpectedly renewed acquaintances with him. Other characters are similarly caught in liminal zones between connection and disengagement: NJ’s wife, who copes with sorrow by going

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Yi Yi: A One and a Two…, Atomfilms/Omega/Pony Canyon Inc/The Kobal Collection.

on a long religious retreat; their daughter, who hesitates between supporting and betraying her best friend; a skinny teenager called Fatty, who feels both lust and fear toward a new girlfriend; NJ’s former lover, who swings between anger at their past and hope for a future with him; and even little Yang-Yang, who pursues his own idiosyncratic interests while self-absorbed family members bustle around him without a clue. Given his intelligence and creativity, there is good reason to expect that Yang-Yang will ultimately have a fulfilling and stimulating life; but it is clearly too late for his relatives, whose spiritual sluggishness is rooted in an inchoate fear of change, of novelty, of experience itself. This inertia is diagnosed by a Tokyo businessman during a conversation with NJ in one of the film’s most moving scenes. Life is a ceaseless stream of new experiences and activities, he says, speaking in halting, heavily accented English, the only language he and NJ both understand. We never live the same day twice, he continues, yet we are not afraid to get out of bed in the morning. Why are we so afraid of decisive action – so torn between

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the poles of fear and hope, of movement and stasis? He has no answer, but at least he recognizes the problem, which is more than we can say of the others, except Yang-Yang, whose intuitive explorations provide the story’s philosophical centre of gravity. Yang has been called the most methodical, even the most scientific of the directors who forged a Taiwanese New Wave in the second half of the 1980s. He studied computer science (as NJ presumably did) before turning to the arts, and while there is no trace of scientific disinterestedness in his movies, his systematic thought processes give him uncommon dexterity and suppleness as he orchestrates and integrates large sets of characters with correspondingly large arrays of social, psychological and philosophical concerns. Yi Yi brought him awards for Best Director at Cannes, Best Picture from the National Society of Film Critics, and many other honours; but it was the last film he completed before succumbing to cancer in 2007 at age 59. Yang’s death signalled the end of the New Taiwanese Cinema he pioneered with such gifted colleagues as Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, masters of the subtlety, nuance, and restraint that are sorely lacking in much of the film-making that has followed.

David Sterritt

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ung Fu and Wuxia Pia Swordplay Film) Hong Kong and Taiwan

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The Blood Brothers Ci Ma Studio/Distributor:

Shaw Brothers Director:

Zhang Che Producer:

Runme Shaw Screenwriters:

Zhang Che Ni Kuang (I Kuang) Cinematographer:

Synopsis Following the death of General Ma Hsin I, accused assassin Chang Wen Hsiang is placed under arrest. Arraigned in court, Chang writes his version of the events leading to the act. Nine years before, Chang and blood brother Huang Tsung attempted to rob Ma, but after a fight joined him to overpower Yen Chen Feng’s mountain gang. Ma became their blood brother and achieved his goal. Following Ma’s sexual encounter with Huang’s wife Mi Lan, Ma leaves the brothers intending to pursue his ambitions. Three years later, the now haughty and reserved General Ma sends for the brothers and their bandit allies, using them in campaigns against rebels resulting in his promotion to Governor of Nanking. Falling again for Mi Lan, Ma sends Huang on a mission to Huai Pei and arranges his murder. Determined to avenge Huang, Chang waits for the right moment and kills Ma honorably in a duel. Despite knowledge of the full facts, the judge accuses him of perjury and hands him over to Ma’s men for execution following a message from the Emperor.

Kung Mu-To

Critique

Art Director:

This Shaw Brothers production of Blood Brothers represents another of Zhang Che’s successful contemporary star collaborations of David Chiang and Ti Lung, following Wong Yu’s departure from Shaw Brothers. Usually, the two stars complement each other as Vengeance (1970), Duel of Fists, The New One Armed Swordsman (both 1971), Four Riders (1972) and other films show. But this time the two stars represent opposites both in terms of class and interpretation of codes of honour. Set in the late Qing Dynasty (1644−1912), perhaps during the mid-nineteenth century, Blood Brothers depicts an historical incident described by Sun Yat-sen in the credits as the most controversial of its era. In his 1974 Monthly Film Bulletin review, Tony Rayns described the film as ‘The least romantic of Chang Cheh’s evocations of heroism in unheroic times.’ Co-scripted with his frequent collaborator I Kuang, with John Woo acting as co-assistant director, Lau Kar-leung operating as co-martial arts director, and co-starring Che’s original ‘Boxer from Shantung’ Chen Kuan-tai, Blood Brothers is unmistakably the bleakest of the director’s historical films. This element appears visually, with darkness surrounding Ma following Mi Lan’s knowledge of his decision to murder her husband; a curtain almost covers her face, suggesting both knowledge of reciprocal guilt and the fact that their relationship now ends at this point of the film. Like all Zhang Che films, Blood Brothers does not disappoint its audience with any lack of stabbings and semi-disembowelments, as seen in the knives penetrating the stomachs of its three stars in different scenes. But the context here is important. Although the dying Huang is outnumbered by enemies, he is not allowed a heroic death. Instead, a concealed horseman delivers the deadly blow. Also, honour does not rule in the demise of Chang. Instead, he faces execution and ritual disembowelment in the same place he engaged Ma in heroic combat. Placed within a world of Machiavellian Qing

Johnson Tsao Editor:

Kwok Ting-Hung Duration:

118 minutes Cast:

David Chiang Ti Lung Chen Kuan-tai Li Ching Ching Tien Danny Lee Year:

1973 Location:

Hong Kong

Come Drink With Me, Shaw Brothers/The Kobal Collection.

Kung Fu and Wuxia Pian 165

The Blood Brothers, Shaw Brothers/The Kobal Collection.

Dynasty politics not even permitting a ‘last hurrah for heroes’ (the title of one of John Woo’s early films), Zhang Che here reveals that the knightly values and honorable combat depicted in his other films is nothing less than a male daydream for those living in a very different twentieth-century world. From the very beginning of the film, ruthless authoritarian structures dominate, as in the opening trial sequence where Chang undergoes torture before being allowed to write his account of events. Ma never conceals his political ambitions from his blood brothers, telling them that ‘We shall do great things together; no one is born a bandit, or a general. If I succeed, you can succeed also.’ He also ruthlessly kills a difficult recruit during his drilling exercises rather than following a less punitive method. The film questions whether either the loutish Huang or the naively honorable Chang will choose to follow this path to success. Gossip concerning his affair with Mi Lan (affecting Ma’s ambitions to become a Minster) determines his decision to dispose of his former ‘blood brother,’ while Chang takes time to realize the implications of Ma’s frequently repeated line in the film, ‘I won’t let anyone stand in my way. They must all be destroyed.’ Honour and justice does not determine the court’s final decision. Despite knowing all the facts, they order Chang’s torture

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and appear relieved when the Emperor’s decision results in their prisoner being handed over to military officers, who use a knife to pluck out his supposed ‘black heart.’ As Mi Lan watches the execution, memories of less complicated days lap-dissolve over her, leading the film to conclude on the bleak image of Ma’s men. They rejoice over the execution like gleeful jackals, having suppressed the truth for political reasons of state.

Tony Williams

Come Drink With Me Da Zui Za Studio/Distributor:

Shaw Brothers Director:

King Hu Producer:

Run Run Shaw Screenwriters:

King Hu Yi Cheung Cinematographer:

Ho Lan-Shan (Tadashi Nishimoto) Art Director:

Johnson Tsao Editor:

Chiang Hsing-Lung Duration:

91 minutes Cast:

Cheng Pei-Pei Yueh Hua Chen Hung-Lieh Lee Wan-Chung Year:

1966 Location:

Hong Kong

Synopsis A group of bandits led by Jade Faced Tiger, kidnap official Zhang and hold him hostage at the Buddhist Scriptures Pavilion in exchange for their leader, who faces execution. Expecting the intervention of Zhang’s ‘brother’ Golden Swallow, they lay a trap for this legendary fighter at a local inn. Swallow (actually a female) receives unexpected help from beggar Drunken Cat, both physically and by means of a song revealing the location of the bandits. Arriving at the Temple in female attire, Swallow finds that Jade Faced Tiger and his men already know her identity. Although benefiting from Cat’s hidden help, she is wounded during her escape and is saved from death by Cat, who is a covert senior martial artist out to avenge the death of his sifu (master) at the hands of a former brother, Abbot Liao Kong. Suggesting an exchange of hostages, the heroes manage to overpower their rivals and rescue Zhang. Cat saves Swallow from Liao Kong, defeats his rival, but allows him to go free. Liao Kong makes one last attempt at killing Cat before he is finally killed. In the film’s final shot, Drunken Cat and his beggar orphans watch Swallow leave in safety.

Critique Come Drink With Me represented King Hu’s breakthrough as a major talent. This Shaw Brothers production took HK$1 million at the Hong Kong box office alone, and featured Cheng Pei-Pei in her first starring role, one that she would repeat in the very different follow-up, Golden Swallow (1968), directed by Zhang Che. Set in King Hu’s favourite historical period of the Ming Dynasty (1368−1644), Come Drink With Me is the first part of his celebrated ‘Inn Trilogy.’ The others, Dragon Gate Inn (1967) and The Fate of Lee Khan (1973) would be filmed in Taiwan. The first inn sequence parallels the choreography of a Chinese checkers board, an analogy that would become more explicit in the succeeding films, with The Valiant Ones (1975) as its final expression. Yet, though developing the movements of Beijing Opera in a more cinematic and mobile direction, this sequence (which would identify Hu as an auteur) owes more to ballet and modern jazz. Cheng Pei-Pei studied ballet in Shanghai and still continued her training at this time. The sudden movements punctuated by a drum owed more to

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modern forms of acoustics as compared to the traditional accompaniment characterizing Dragon Gate Inn. As with the other entries in the ‘Inn Trilogy,’ deep focus mise en scène, mobile camera, trick cinematography, sudden rapidly-edited movements, and eyeline matches, characterize a chessboard strategy between an outnumbered heroine (representing a resilient Queen facing checkmate) and her more numerous enemies who are far from being pawns. As other critics have noticed, King Hu utilizes familiar types from the worlds of Beijing Opera and contemporary martial-arts cinema, but uses them in unfamiliar ways. Golden Swallow first appears in the film dressed as a man and later wears female attire to enter the Buddhist Temple hideout. A seemingly harmless song sung by Cat’s orphaned beggar-children actually contains clues, in the same way that the flute in The Valiant Ones enables the heroes to work out their strategy against encroaching Japanese pirates. Jade Faced Tiger may appear effeminate, but, since his white make-up also evokes the traitor in Beijing Opera, he is also a deadly foe. Abbot Liao Kong is actually renegade big brother Diao Jintang to Drunken Cat, who first brought him as an orphan into an esteemed martial-arts order and then murdered their teacher. As Cat points out, his adversary’s beautifully-woven robe of Buddhist authority is actually dyed red with their master’s blood. Cat himself initially appears as a fun-loving, drunken beggar, but he is actually an accomplished master who has formed 36 alternative branches of the Green Bamboo League that Liao Kang has defiled. Cat refuses to give his master’s Green Wand to his murderer, and the film moves toward the final confrontation between these adversaries. Thus the Chinese title of the film, Great Drunken Hero, actually emphasizes the real focus of this film. Despite Cheng Pei-Pei’s starring role here, the real weight is on Yueh Hua’s character of Drunken Cat, who sees Swallow’s mission as also giving him an opportunity to confront his most deadly foe. Although western audiences may wonder why King Hu allows Jade Faced Tiger to escape a final reckoning with Swallow, the answer lies in the fact that it is the final deadly battle between two superior kung-fu masters that is important for the entire film.

Tony Williams

Dragon Gate Inn Long men Kezhan Studio/Distributor:

Union Film Director:

King Hu

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Synopsis Set in ad 1457 during the Ming Dynasty, Dragon Gate Inn opens by introducing key figures of the Easter Group Intelligence and Imperial Guard who control the Court during this period, especially dangerous eunuch Tsao Shao Chi, who has engineered the execution of loyal Minister of Defense Yu Chien. The group intends to execute Yu’s children, who are sent under guard to Dragon Gate Inn to prevent Yu’s spirit living on. However, a group of patriots rescues the children, and others of the Intelligence Group decide to await them at the Inn by taking over the premises. Hsiao Yan

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Producer:

Cheung Tiu-Yin Screenwriter:

King Hu Cinematographer:

Wa Wai-Ying Art Director:

Chow Chi-Leung

arrives at the inn and overpowers the group, aided by the arrival of swordswoman Chu who masquerades as a man. After defeating a number of their enemies, the patriots have to face Tsao himself in the next stage of this deadly game. A battle occurs between both forces, resulting in the loss of numbers on both sides – until Tsao becomes outmaneuvered by his foes and ends up beheaded in a deadly fight. The film ends with three survivors at twilight viewing the departing figures of the Yu family they have rescued from the Eastern Group.

Editor:

Critique

Chan Hung-Man

Although King Hu once remarked that he decided to make Dragon Gate Inn as a response to the popular James Bond cycle (to show audiences how vicious secret agents actually were, by focusing upon the notorious Ming Dynasty Eastern Group), other creative intentions are more important. Following the success of his Shaw Brothers production Come Drink With Me (1966), King Hu relocated to Taiwan to gain more creative freedom and make the second of his ‘Inn Trilogy,’ which eclipsed The Sound of Music (1965) in local box-office popularity. As in Come Drink With Me, the director further refined his goal of combining traditional Chinese artforms such as calligraphy and Beijing Opera with a creative utilization of cinematic techniques such as mobile camera, fast editing, deep focus, and mise en scène involving both interior space (the ground floor of the inn) and exterior space, especially the use of landscape paralleling the work of Hollywood director Anthony Mann. Dragon Gate Inn also represents the full synthesis of the director’s work with two art forms: traditional and modern cinematic technique. During the pre-credit sequence, a musical score influenced by Beijing Opera fills the soundtrack, with one theme being a consistent leitmotif for Bai Ying’s deadly eunuch, Tsao, who then opens a scroll with the film credits represented in traditional Chinese calligraphy. As in Come Drink With Me, the inn represents a Chinese checkers (chess) battle of wills between Shih Jun’s solitary hero Hsiao Yan and his deadly Eastern Group adversaries. Unlike The Fate of Lee Khan (1973) and The Valiant Ones (1975), no Chinese checkers board appears but its presence is apparent in the eyeline matches between the players, reverse shots, dynamic camera movements, and the tossing of various implements (such as a bowl of noodles) from one part of the inn to another. Here, Hu utilizes a particular form of deep space cinematography seen also in Orson Welles’ inn sequence in Chimes at Midnight (1965) but refined by sophisticated use of mobile camera and overhead shots where mise en scène plays a key role. Within this space, competing groups attempt to occupy opposing spaces until the climactic battle finally erupts outside. Sound complements image in a very sophisticated manner, revealing King Hu’s ambition to develop the theatrical techniques of Beijing Opera to a new medium such that the influence is far from archaic. Fight choreographer and former Beijing Opera performer (and The Big Boss of Bruce Lee’s first Hong Kong film as an

Duration:

111 minutes Cast:

Shih Jun Bai Ying Shangkuan Ling Feng Miao Tian Year:

1967 Location:

Taiwan

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adult performer), Han Ying-chien frequently stages fight scenes in an advanced version of the movements seen in stage productions. He also synchronizes them to the accompaniment of accented beats of the ban, a wooden board frequently used in Beijing Opera. Han also appears in the role of villainous Eastern Agent Mao Tsung-hsien, sent to the inn by Tsao to kill the children on arrival. The climactic battle involving Tsao occurs in an outside environment characterized by trees and rocks. There, the villain often transcends space, rapidly moving from one tree to another, defying the usual depiction of real and cinematic time by rapid editing. Taunted over his castration and affected by asthma, Tsao battles his adversaries. Quick subjective lap-dissolves reveal his developing impotence in combat. Since Cheng Pei-Pei was still under a Shaw Brothers contract, King Hu replaces her with Shangkuan Ling Feng in the role of swordswoman Chu, who is an essential member of the team. Dragon Gate Inn is a great classic of Chinese cinema and, more than coincidentally, was chosen as the last film shown in a crumbling theatre on its last night in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003).

Tony Williams

The Fate of Lee Khan Yingchun Ge zi Fengbo Studio/Distributor:

Golden Harvest Director:

King Hu Producer:

Raymond Chow Screenwriters:

King Hu Wong Chung Cinematographer:

Tsing-Can Chun Editor:

Vincent Leung Wing-Chan Duration:

105 minutes

170  China

Synopsis The Fate of Lee Khan is set in 1366 during the last two years of Mongol domination of the Yuan Dynasty and two years before the beginning of the Ming Dynasty. Prince Lee Khan and his swordswoman sister Lan Erh receive information that a traitor in the resistance army of General Zu Yuanzhang wishes to sell secret information to him. Knowing that the Han opposition movement will prevent this, he sends a group of men to secure a safe meeting place in Shenxi province. Patriotic female Wan Renmi opens the Ying Chun Inn which provides both gambling and the services of four pretty waitresses, knowing that this location will entice Lee Khan. Wan Jun and an itinerant musician-spy also join the group. Lee Khan and his entourage eventually arrive and take over the inn. They gain the map from the traitor they dispose of. The patriots conspire to secure the map with the help of double-agent Cao, who has infiltrated Khan’s inner circle. A failed attempt to steal the map occurs inside the inn. Then the two sides battle outside until the final victory, which leaves only three patriots alive.

Critique Like Dragon Gate Inn (1967), this final segment in King Hu’s celebrated ‘Inn Trilogy’ begins with credits depicted in the director’s beautiful calligraphy before showing traditional portraits of historical figures such as Genghis Khan, Kubla Khan and Zu Yuanzhang, anticipating the similar opening to The Valiant Ones (1975). As Stephen Teo notes, The Fate of Lee Khan offers five heroines,

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Cast:

Li Li-Hua Hsu Feng Roy Chiao Angela Mao Helen Ma Year:

1973 Location:

Hong Kong

instead of one, led by veteran Mandarin actress Li Li-Hua in the role of innkeeper Wan, supervising her four waitresses – several of whom have shady pasts, such as Peony (Angela Mao). Among the group is Helen Ma, the heroine of Wu Ma’s classic Deaf and Mute Heroine (1971). Opposing them is Hsu Feng’s icy swordswoman Lan Erh, making the match more than equal. By contrast, Bai Ying’s Wan Jun, Han Yingjie’s musician (modelled on ‘Drunken Cat’ of Come Drink With Me [1966]), and even Roy Chiao’s Cao (who will deliver the final deadly blow to Lee Khan) resemble secondary characters rather than the type of active roles they perform in Hu’s other films. The first part of the film – set in the deep space of the inn’s ground floor – employs mobile camera, quick editing and trick shots, anticipating the role of the Chinese checkers board that will be set up in the second part when Khan arrives to control both camera movement and space by his very presence. The quick movements and verbal banter that the waitresses use to deal with various difficult customers and situations parallel huadan features of flirtatious romantic melodramas (particularly associated with Li Li-Hua’s career), and also anticipate the later wusheng heroism that will occur outdoors in the climactic deadly battle. As with the internal space of the Gaosheng Inn of Come Drink With Me, the ground floor of the Ying Chun Inn becomes transformed by the use of wide-angled deep-focus cinematography (variously employed for high-, medium-, and low-angle shots whenever necessary) into a world beyond real time. This process will reach its culmination in the impossible temporal and spatial shots that occur in the final battle and which will reach their zenith in the closing sequence of The Valiant Ones. The ground floor is a female space where Wan and her waitresses employ tables and domestic items as weapons against any nuisance elements inside, until Lee Khan and his men arrive. Then tables will be cleared away, camera mobility limited, and a more calculated Chinese checkerstype strategy will operate, also characterized by eyeline matches between different characters, abrupt editing and swish pans, which disrupt the screen like the unexpected move of a chess player calculating the eventual ‘mate.’ The Mongols refuse Wan and her staff entry to the upper room where the map is concealed. Thus, the second level of the inn functions as a mostly concealed, controlling space, and restricts the movements of those downstairs. The Fate of Lee Khan forms an appropriate conclusion to Hu’s ‘Inn Trilogy.’ Acting again complements camera movement but in a more complex manner. Although playing Lan Erh as a dangerous antagonist, Hsu Feng reveals her as also devoted to her brother and sincerely outraged when she discovers Cao’s treachery. Lee Khan is at least honorable and direct in his methods, as opposed to the Han group’s questionable use of deceit and treachery. However, as in the concluding scenes of Dragon Gate Inn and The Valiant Ones, victory is tinged with regret at the cost of human lives. Wan Renmi, Wan Jun, and the musician-spy are the only survivors.

Tony Williams

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Fist of Fury Jing wu men Studio/Distributor:

Golden Harvest Company Director:

Lo Wei Producers:

Raymond Chow Liang Hua Liu Screenwriter:

Lo Wei Cinematographer:

Ching-Chu Chen Art Director:

Chen Hsin Editor:

Yao Chung Chang Duration:

102 minutes Cast:

Bruce Lee Nora Miao James Tien Maria Yi Robert Baker Year:

1972 Location:

Hong Kong

172  China

Synopsis The setting is pre-World War II Shanghai. When famed Chinese martial arts master Fok Yun-kap dies after a sudden illness, his student Chen Jun suspects foul play. The local Japanese deliver an insulting sign reading ‘Sick Men of Asia’ to Fok’s funeral, and Chen storms their karate school and beats up everyone in the place. After learning that the Japanese are actually responsible for Fok’s death, Chen stages a one-man war against them in his quest for vengeance. This sets him at odds with both the Japanese and his kung fu brothers, who are placed under increasing pressure from the authorities to turn Chen in. Finally, Chen Jun is forced to fight a Russian boxer, Petrov, and the head of the Japanese school, Suzuki.

Critique If I could have attended the world premiere of any Hong Kong kung fu movie, it would have been that of Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury, held at the Queen’s Theatre in Hong Kong’s Central district. There, I would have witnessed the normally reticent Hong Kong audience rise to their feet to applaud the scene where Bruce Lee’s character trashes the martial arts school of the domineering Japanese, then proudly declares that, contrary to Nipponese assertions, the Chinese are definitely not ‘the sick men of Asia.’ How they must have raised the roof! Even today, that scene and that sentiment are extraordinarily effective. Given how many revenge-themed kung fu films both preceded and followed it, it is amazing how well Fist of Fury stands up today. The plot is the most straightforward of Lee’s four completed starring vehicles: in 1920s Shanghai, a young kung fu exponent named Chen Jun, played by Lee, learns that his teacher has been poisoned by the racist, bullying Japanese, and he decides to take them all on, single-handedly, until vengeance is his. The sheer physicality of Lee’s performance remains astonishing. His breakthrough film, The Big Boss (Lo Wei, 1971), was shot in Thailand; his next film, Lee’s directorial debut, in Italy. Fist of Fury was shot almost entirely at the Golden Harvest company’s Hong Kong studio. It feels like the soundstage walls can barely contain Lee’s energy. Audiences worldwide felt a visceral connection with this incredible man; a lone hero who did not need guns or bombs to enforce his will upon the world. The film is also better structured than either its successor or predecessor. In both The Big Boss and The Way of the Dragon (Bruce Lee, 1972), there are long periods of inaction, before Lee finally explodes across the screen. In Fist of Fury, the Chinese receive the insulting signboard at their teacher’s funeral (it reads ‘Sick Men of Asia’) and in the very next scene goes off to the Japanese dojo to knock seven kinds of sushi out of them. Though audiences had been given a taste of what Lee was capable of in Big Boss (and even on the old Green Hornet TV series [1966-67]), this sequence saw the first time he really delivered

Fist of Fury, Golden Harvest/The Kobal Collection.

Bruce Lee on camera. For example, Lee executes a series of eight kicks, in one take, to demolish the first wave of karateka, and later, when it seems, for a moment, that Lee might be overwhelmed by the sheer number of opponents, he evens the odds by producing a pair of the nunchakus (known in Chinese as seurng jee kwun [two sectioned staff]) that would become his trademark weapon. In the next scene, Chen seeks refuge in a park supposedly located on Shanghai’s Bund, though the scene was actually filmed at the Luis de Camoes Park in Macao. There he encounters a sign saying ‘No Dogs and Chinese Allowed’; Chen’s kicking and shattering the sign is another truly iconic moment for Lee. That night, Chen discovers that a cook planted at the kung fu school by the Japanese poisoned Fok. He kills the man and his accomplice, and the rest of the film, structurally, consists of Chen taking revenge, and the ineffectual efforts of the Japanese, the local Chinese authorities, and even his own school mates to stop him. The finale sees Chen back at the Japanese dojo, decimating the remaining karateka, then a Russian fighter, Petrov (played by Lee’s student Bob Baker) and, finally, the head of the school, Suzuki. Lee disposes of this final foe with a flying kick to the throat, and it’s worth noting that, when Suzuki crashes backward through some shoji panels, he is doubled by Jackie Chan, who would become Lee’s successor as Asian action king.

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There is a perfect ending for the film after Chen, his mission accomplished, sinks to his knees in the Japanese garden, looks to heaven, exhausted, the music swells… However, the studio was compelled to provide a different one: at the time, certain lucrative Asian territories demanded that film characters that kill (even with justification) have to be arrested or dead by the end of the movie. Thus, the film’s lengthy coda ends with a shot inspired by the final image of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969), with Chen making a defiant final leap into a hail of gunfire. It does not matter; all that went before serves to make Fist of Fury a masterpiece, and what I would give to have been there on the opening night!

Bey Logan

One-Armed Swordsman Dubei Dao Studio/Distributor:

Shaw Brothers Director:

Zhang Che Producer:

Runme Shaw Screenwriters:

Zhang Che Ni Kuang (I Kuang) Cinematographers:

Yuen Chang-Saam Kuang Han-Lu Art Director:

Chen Chi-Ruey Editor:

Chiang Hsing-Lung Duration:

111 minutes Cast:

Jimmy Wong Yu (Wang Yu) Lisa Chiao Chiao Tien Feng Ku Feng

174  China

Synopsis Suffering deadly wounds after saving the life of Master Swordsman Qi Rufeng Fang, Cheng receives a promise that his son will become a student at the Golden Sword School. Several years later, the talented Fang Gang suffers humiliation and scorn from richer students and Rufeng’s daughter, Pei-er. Learning that his Master’s desire for a successor will only make matters worse, he decides to leave but is honour-bound to face a midnight challenge by two students and Pei-er. Defeating all three easily, Fang Gang loses his right arm due to Pei-er’s vicious jealousy. Stumbling away, he falls off a bridge to land safely in the barge of peasant woman Xiaoman, who nurses him back to health. In the meantime, Rufeng arrives on the scene and assumes that Fang Gang has drowned. Traumatized by his injury, Fang Gang eventually regains his former prowess with the aid of a partially-destroyed training manual left to Xiaoman by her swordsman father, enabling him to use his left arm. When he learns that Qi Rufeng and his school are threatened by two enemies using unfair techniques, he returns to the Golden Sword School to save his master and family. Having accomplished his goal, he fulfils his promise to Xiaoman to become a farmer.

Critique Co-scripted by Zhang Che’s frequent collaborator I Kuang and choreographed by Tang Chia and Lau Kar-leung, One-Armed Swordsman not only made a star of Wong Yu but also moved Hong Kong cinema into the direction of heroic martial-arts bloodshed that would soon define it internationally. It is a classic in more than one sense of the word, combining Confucian values of loyalty and righteousness with penetrating insights into corruption and the redundancy of martial arts, values that Zhang Che develops in his later films, most notably The Blood Brothers. Although OneArmed Swordsman has been justifiably celebrated for its archetypal introduction of elements that would soon define the martial-arts

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Year:

1967 Location:

Hong Kong

genre, it is less affirmative and far more complex than is generally believed. Fang Gang and Xiaoman are orphans and victims of the martial-arts world. Although his dying father believes that enrolment in the Golden Sword School will bring Fang Gang future eminence, it instead causes as much pain as the knightly values of Xiaoman’s father do to her family. The broken sword left to him by his father parallels that partially-destroyed parchment kept by Xiaoman. Both legacies represent past pain and future suffering. Far from receiving respect for his superior prowess as a student, Fang Gang encounters class discrimination and petty jealousy from Rufeng’s selfish daughter, who slices off his arm when he refuses her charms. Xiaoman’s family suffers downward mobility, choosing a life of rural poverty rather than the type of unceasing revenge that the Golden Sword School faces at the end of the film, involving extermination not only of students but also an entire family. Although Fang Gang decides to reject the world of martial arts in the latter part of the film, knowledge of the danger facing his master and the devious tactics employed by his enemies moves him toward his final battle. As he tells Xiaoman, he has to return to save them or ‘I’ll never find peace for the rest of my life.’ His decision suggests that he may be as doomed as Wong Yu’s later characters in Golden Swallow (1968) and The Assassin (1967), as well as David Chiang in Vengeance (1970), due to deadly entrapment in the world of martial arts. But, unlike his successors, Fang Gang survives and will finally reject the role of the hero in the concluding scene of the sequel Return of the One-Armed Swordsman (1969). Mise en scène is crucial. Apart from one scene in a familiar Shaw Brothers street location and the two final shots, virtually all of One-Armed Swordsman is filmed entirely in the studio. Whether interior rural highway or isolated village inn, the world of the film represents a claustrophobic environment symptomatic of the martial-arts ideology; this ideology can trap its victims and offer them dubious prowess that any unfair tactic (such as a twopronged sword) can easily undermine. Thus, the final overhead shot showing Qi Rufeng, his family, and surviving disciples standing before the sword that he has broken, may also register his recognition of this new world, as well as an illusionary retirement he once thought would be graceful and under his control. By contrast, having paid his debt of honour to his master, Fang Gang is now free to live a different lifestyle, and the first and last non-studio shot in the film reveals both a final breach in the claustrophobic world that has trapped all the characters, and a positive future for hero and heroine.

Tony Williams

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A Touch of Zen Xia nu Studios/Distributors:

International Film Production Lian Bang Union Film Company/Tai Seng Director:

King Hu Producers:

Sha Wing-fung Hsia Wu Liang-fang Screenwriter:

King Hu Adapted from Strange Stories from Liu Jai by Pu Songling Cinematographer:

Hua Hui-ying Art Directors:

Chow Chi-leung Chan Sheung-lam Editor:

Wong Jun-sun Duration:

187 minutes Cast:

Hsu Feng Shih Chun Pai Ying Tien Peng Roy Chiao Year:

1969/1971

176  China

Synopsis The film is divided into two parts. A scholar and artist named Ku Shen-chai lives with his nagging mother near a spooky abandoned fort. One day a stranger named Ouyang Nin enters his shop, and eventually we learn that the power-mad Eunuch Wei has sent Ouyang to capture two enemies he has condemned to death, General Shih and the beautiful Yang Hui-Ching, who has taken refuge in the fort near Ku’s home. Flashbacks show how Yang hid in a Zen Buddhist monastery when Wei had her father killed; there she learned martial arts from the abbot, Hui Yuan, who still looks out for her welfare. The film’s second part details the long struggle between Yang and her allies, on one hand, and Wei’s chief warrior, Hsu, on the other. Along the way, Yang gives birth to Ku’s child and then re-enters the monastery, returning to the world when she learns that Ku’s life is in danger. In the final skirmish, good triumphs over evil when Hsu leaps to his death in an effort to reach Hui, who is bathed in supernatural light on a distant hilltop.

Critique King Hu put his personal stamp on martial-arts cinema with his influential Come Drink with Me in 1966, and A Touch of Zen cemented his reputation as a central figure in wuxia film. With its sprawling narrative and relatively sophisticated themes, the 1969 production opened up new possibilities for what had been a fairly limited genre. This reflected the varied nature of Hu’s background. Born and raised in Beijing, he had relocated to Hong Kong in the late 1940s, working his way from acting to writing to directing, and then changing his base of operations to Taiwan, where he set up his own studio. The success of his first Taiwanese production, Dragon Gate Inn (1967), allowed him to embark on A Touch of Zen, his most ambitious project to that time. More than three years in the making, it won a Technical Grand Prize at Cannes, becoming the first Chinese picture to receive an award at Europe’s most prestigious festival. Hu’s fortunes declined in the 1980s, and at his death in 1997 he had not completed a film in several years. But his legacy is secure on the basis of Dragon Gate Inn and A Touch of Zen, both of which placed in the top ten when the Hong Kong Film Awards selected the best Chinese films of all time in 2005. Much of the action in A Touch of Zen unfolds in fairly long scenes, with unhurried editing that quickens when action sequences approach. The film’s expansive size, expressive landscapes, and offbeat use of long shots and close-ups often bring Sergio Leone’s westerns to mind, while the flamboyant displays of archery and swordplay recall legendary heroes as different as Robin Hood and King Arthur’s knights. True to its title, though, the film’s most distinctive element is its touch of zen – just a touch, to be sure, but enough to set the story’s vision apart from most others in the genre. Hui Yuan, the Zen Buddhist abbot who sheltered young Yang Hui-Ching in his mountain monastery, taught her

A Touch of Zen, Lian Bang/The Kobal Collection.

esoteric arts of self-defense, and still watches over her from afar, is a unique character, at once an enlightened monk, a skilled warrior, and an implacable enemy of Eunuch Wei’s malevolent gang. He is a secondary figure during most of the picture, not rising to his full stature until the series of showdowns that steer the adventure toward its finale; but then he prevails with elegance, radiating a spiritual aura that literally bedazzles the evil Hsu, who plummets from a mountainside while trying to kill Hui’s immortal essence with merely human weapons. Played by Roy Chiao with both dignity and panache, Hui emerges as the film’s most memorable male character, rivalled only by Ku Shen-chai, the deceptively modest scholar deftly portrayed by Shih Chun. Among the women in the story, the most striking by far is Yang, played by Hsu Feng in the second of five pictures she made under a six-year contract with Hu, who discovered her in a casting call for Dragon Gate Inn. Her career continued successfully until her retirement from acting in the early 1980s. A Touch of Zen is the only major martial-arts film to celebrate physical and metaphysical prowess with full sincerity on both sides of the equation. Yet it is also a picture with surprising amounts of wit, as when Ku engineers a crucial victory by having his mother spread rumors that an abandoned fort is inhabited by ghosts, and then inducing panic in his antagonists with scary haunted-house illusions. This remains Hu’s signature film and a singular achievement in wuxia cinema.

David Sterritt

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ction Cinema an eroic Bloodshed

Hong Kong

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A Better Tomorrow Ying huang boon sik Studio/Distributor:

Cinema City Director:

John Woo Producers:

Tsui Hark John Woo Screenwriters:

Chan Hing-Ka Leung Suk-Wah John Woo Cinematographer:

Wong Wing-hang Art Director:

Lui Chi-leung Editors:

Kam Ma David Wu Duration:

91 minutes Cast:

Ti Lung Leslie Cheung Chow Yun-fat Emily Chu Waise Lee Year:

1986

Synopsis The film blends the story of ‘brothers’ in the triads with a family story of two brothers, one, Ho (played by Shaw Brothers veteran Ti Lung) trying to retire from the triads, the other, Kit (the late Leslie Cheung) trying to rise in the ranks of the Hong Kong police. When a deal in Taiwan goes bad, Ho is arrested. Mark is informed that Shing had betrayed Ho, and so Mark goes to the restaurant frequented by the triad members who had assisted in the betrayal. He guns them down (in a now iconic scene, with the witty touch of backup handguns for Mark hidden in flowerpots, which helped to make Chow famous). Mark is crippled in one leg as a result of the fight and becomes an embittered hanger-on at Shing’s establishment. After Ho is released from prison, he encounters Mark and gradually discovers that Shing was his betrayer. Kit is deeply estranged from Ho, in part because their father was killed by Shing’s man, and additionally because his family relationship with Ho is hindering his police career. Mark and Ho steal evidence incriminating Shing, leading to a ferocious shootout in which Mark is killed and Kit and Ho fight Shing to the point of arresting him. In the final scene, Kit gives Ho his gun, Ho shoots Shing, completing the cycle of vengeance, and Ho extends his hands to Kit to be handcuffed, signalling to Kit that he does not wish to impede his police career.

Critique A Better Tomorrow, a seminal work of the new Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s, is a cornerstone of the yanggang (heroic bloodshed) action subgenre. The film grew from a collaboration between Woo and his producer Tsui Hark and was a loose remake of Lung Kong’s 1962 film with the same Cantonese title (literally translated, ‘True Colours of a Hero’). It represented a career breakthrough for Woo and for Chow Yun-fat, who turned in strong supporting work as Mark Gor (or Mark Lee), the betrayed and discarded gangster who relentlessly seeks vengeance on his former colleague. A Better Tomorrow clearly displays its melodramatic nature but still represents an early example of Woo’s mature style. It recasts Zhang Che’s heroic brotherhood emphasis from its wuxia pian (chivalry film) origins into a contemporary setting – as Woo noted about his own films, he exchanged Zhang Che’s swords for guns. A Better Tomorrow also showcases, although in less fully developed form than in later Woo works, the characteristic ‘ballet of bullets,’ that is, the highly choreographed but frenetic action style associated with Woo. At times the film almost veers into excessive sentimentality or perhaps into a rather trite view of reformed criminals (as in the taxi company scenes, which remind one a little uncomfortably of 1930s Pat O’Brien and James Cagney films), but the relationship between the three main characters – Ho, Kit and Mark – is well-drawn and sharply acted and directed. While the film contains fewer pyrotechnics than some of Woo’s later efforts, it did set

A Better Tomorrow, Cinema City Film Prod/The Kobal Collection.

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the template for his mature focus on loyalty and courage among heroic groups, and his corollary emphasis on the rightness of traditional values. The film also inspired many imitations and should be seen historically as the initiator of the heroic brotherhood set of triad-themed movies so prevalent in Hong Kong during the 1980s and 1990s. Woo’s film was his career breakthrough as well as Chow Yun-fat’s. Woo soon became prominent as a stylistically brilliant director who emphasized male brotherhood and loyalty, and Chow became a box-office phenomenon and a pop culture icon in Asia (and to some extent in the West) despite not having been the lead in the film (see Hall 1999: 97 and 216). Although Woo has since become a rather more astringent director, focusing more closely on the rivalry of heroes and enemies and on questions of honour and loyalty than on more sentimental attachments, the basic elements of his thematics and style are all present in A Better Tomorrow. The film was followed in 1987 by the less artistically successful sequel A Better Tomorrow II, directed by Woo, and by a rather unrelated third installment set in Vietnam and directed by Tsui Hark.

Kenneth E. Hall

Reference Hall, Kenneth E (1999) John Woo: The Films, Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers.

Bullet in the Head Dip huet gaai tau Studio/Distributor:

Golden Princess/ John Woo Productions Director:

John Woo Producers:

Catherine Lau Patrick Leung John Woo Screenwriters:

Janet Chun Patrick Leung John Woo

180  China

Synopsis Opening in Hong Kong of 1967 during a period of communistinspired demonstrations against British rule, Bullet in the Head introduces its leading characters: three lower-class street youngsters, Ben, Frank and Paul, who have different goals in life. Frank facilitates the marriage of his best friend Ben by secretly transferring the deed to his parents’ apartment to a loan shark. When Ben discovers that his friend has been badly beaten up by local gangster Ringo, who attempted to steal money intended for Frank’s wedding, he accidentally kills Ringo. Both friends then decide to flee to Vietnam with their more mercenaryminded friend Paul, smuggling medical supplies and fake watches into the war-torn country. Losing their goods during an explosion, they team up with Eurasian hit-man Luke and attempt to extort money from local gangster Leong. Rescued from the Vietcong by Luke, Paul shoots Frank in the head and escapes to Hong Kong. Ben follows him there later, and exacts revenge on his former friend, now a prominent Triad, by shooting him in the head after an exciting car chase and gun battle. He leaves behind both the skull of Frank and the body of Paul as dawn breaks.

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Cinematographers:

Wilson Chan Ardy Lam Chai Kittikumom Wong Wing-hang Art Director:

James Leung Editors:

John Woo David Wu Duration:

130 minutes Cast:

Tony Leung Chiu-wai Jacky Cheung Waise Lee Simon Yam Fennie Yuen Yolinda Yam Year:

1990

Critique Following his break with Tsui Hark over the latter’s tactics to prevent him filming a project set in Vietnam, John Woo formed a production company to direct his first major epic production. Although obviously influenced by Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah, 1974), The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978) and Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984), Woo’s key text is the epic cinema of David Lean, one that he subverts in a decidedly apocalyptic manner, having several links with Jacobean revenge melodramas. Like the title character in Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), Ben experiences betrayal, and will obviously be traumatically affected by this for the rest of his life. But, unlike Lean’s epic, Bullet in the Head is a film marked by nostalgia and yearning, both for a lost world of Hong Kong and for a friendship between three young men that economic greed and historical forces ruthlessly destroy. By being forced to kill his last friend in an act of revenge for his betrayal of the sensitive Frank, Ben will be haunted by this final act for the rest of his life in a much more traumatic manner than Lawrence in the closing scenes of Lawrence of Arabia. Bullet in the Head is as much a lament for chivalry as Woo’s earlier film Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979) which is set in the distant past. The old virtues are either quickly disappearing or facing destruction by a more economically avaricious and ruthless world – a new Hong Kong, represented by Paul, who will betray friendship for gold and allow nothing (not even a friend who once saved his life) to stand in his way. As Woo’s most violent film up to then, the apocalyptic inferno of both Mr Leong’s nightclub establishment in Saigon and the hellish environment of the Vietcong prison camp act as metaphors for the brutal worlds of betrayal and violence far more dangerous than the gangster underworld of Hong Kong seen earlier in the film. The three heroes of the film embody different aspects of Hong Kong values. Despite his role as a dance instructor in a church hall and his romantic attachment to Jane, Ben is also a part of the Hong Kong gang culture, as the revealing pre-credits sequence showing him orchestrating an ‘invitation to the dance’ against a rival group reveals. Despite his initial reluctance, he will be drawn deeper into the world of violence that will contaminate his whole being forever, as the final scene reveals. Frank is the ‘noble fool’ of the three, a ‘back-alley prince’ whose altruistic acts of friendship result in him becoming a murderous Frankenstein’s monster thanks to the selfish acts of Paul. By contrast, Paul represents the new face of Hong Kong capitalist rapaciousness, whose desire to make money and betray friends is the real ugly face of this film. Ironically, Woo’s friend and producer Terence Chang remarked that one reason the film did not do well at the box office was due to the fact that audiences regarded Paul as the real hero and saw nothing wrong in his desire to make money! The original version of Bullet in the Head ran nearly three hours, and Woo had to edit the film, losing several crucial scenes. Several versions exist with

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different running times, the most complete being 130 minutes. Woo discovered later that the cut footage was discarded, and the fragments that remain suggest a much more epic dimension to the original (especially the scenes shot in Vietnam) than the version available today.

Tony Williams

City on Fire Lung foo fung wan

Studio/Distributor:

Cinema City Director:

Ringo Lam Producer:

Karl Maka Screenwriter:

Tommy Sham Based on a story by Ringo Lam Cinematographer:

Andrew Lau Art Director:

Luk Chi-Fung Editor:

Wong Ming-Lam Duration:

101 minutes Cast:

Chow Yun-fat Danny Lee Sun Yueh Roy Cheung Carrie Ng Elvis Tsui Year:

1987

182  China

Synopsis City on Fire opens with the murder of an undercover cop, Wah, in a crowded Hong Kong marketplace. Although wishing to resign from the force and marry his girlfriend, Hung (to take her away from the attentions of a prosperous businessman), undercover cop Ko Chow is persuaded by his superior officer Inspector Chow to continue his predecessor’s mission by getting evidence of a criminal gang’s arms purchase. The situation is worsened by veteran Inspector Chow’s humiliation by younger officer John Chan. Chan expresses contempt for the older man’s traditional methods, and seeks to place Ko Chow in even greater danger by infiltrating the gang. Despite the presence of experienced gangster Tiger, one robbery is ruined by the activities of an inexperienced recruit. Abandoned by Hung, Ko Chow becomes accepted by the gang and forms a friendship with Tiger. After another abortive robbery, resulting in the murder of a jewellery saleswoman, the gang turns on each other. Tiger defends Ko Chow but everyone dies in the final battle with the police, except Tiger. Inspector Chow then expresses his anger toward the upstart Chan by hitting him with a brick and leaving in disgust.

Critique Based on a story by Ringo Lam, this Cinema City production represented the director’s breach with the comedy films he had previously directed, and led to his becoming a key exponent of Hong Kong neo-noir, social realism. Also featuring former model Roy Cheung and Carrie Ng in their first screen appearances, City on Fire prominently features the music of Teddy Robin Kwan and the excellent noir cinematography of Andrew Lau. It also marks Lam’s initial collaboration with Chow Yun-fat, who won the Best Actor prize at the 7th Hong Kong Film Festival for his superb role of a guilt-ridden cop attempting to leave the force and marry his long-suffering girlfriend, Hung. Danny Lee also delivers a well-rounded performance, complementing that of the leading star as a complex gangster trapped as much into his own social role as Ko Chow is. Like Roy Cheung’s Yeung Kong in Triads: The Inside Story (Taylor Wong, 1989), Tiger has nowhere else to go. But, unlike most Triads, he exhibits a nobility of character that suggests had he gained other opportunities his life would be different. Similarly, veteran Taiwanese actor Sun Yueh as Inspector

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Chow ideally complements the abrasive persona of his younger competitor, played by Roy Cheung, whose performance differs little from his brutal prison warden in Prison on Fire (1987) and the many Triad roles he plays in Hong Kong cinema. As a Hong Kong neo-noir, this is the first example of Lam’s continuing preoccupation (mostly with scenarist Nam Yin) with the determinative forces of gritty naturalism that will also characterize his School on Fire (1988) and Prison on Fire films (1987, 1991). As Foster Hirsch has noted in The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir (California: Da Capo Press, 2001), the deterministic, naturalistic fiction of Emile Zola has always influenced the noir tradition, and it is not surprising to see relevant stylistic and thematic parallels existing in City on Fire, especially as literary naturalism has a respectable tradition in the eastern world as much as in the West. Ko Chow is trapped by his own psychological demons as well as by the vicious environmental forces of the new Hong Kong police, represented by John Chan. He feels guilt over the death of a friend, and when he experiences his second nightmare it is Tiger’s face that now replaces that of his former betrayed friend. As the camera tilts down on the Hong Kong cityscape, a mournful saxophone theme dominates the soundtrack, complementing the excellent dark cinematography by Andrew Lau. The film will end with the repetition of a blues number performed by Maria Cordero, seen earlier in a nightclub scene, containing contrasting lyrics of ‘Strive for happiness’ and ‘Such a waste.’ These lyrics exemplify the final somber overhead shot in the film, showing Ko Chow’s body with the telegram from Hung sent to him from Hawaii amidst all the bodies of fallen gangsters surrounded by police guns. It is commonly known that Quentin Tarantino borrowed from City on Fire to make his first film Reservoir Dogs (1992). Viewing both films clarifies the essential inferiority of the remake. While Reservoir Dogs abounds with gore, dramatic posturing and smart-ass dialogue, City on Fire is a more accomplished, tightly-directed work, described by Hong Kong critic John Charles as ‘the most sustained and intelligent [film] Hong Kong film-makers have offered up to date.’ Far from being a flamboyant and immature piece of showmanship, it is an emotionally-involving genre production with Ringo Lam’s collaborative authorship synthesizing key talents, and concluding in an appropriately mournful mood rather than celebrating violence for its own sake.

Tony Williams

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Hard Boiled Laat sau san taam Studio/Distributor:

Golden Princess/ Milestones Pictures Director:

John Woo Producers:

Terence Chang Linda Kuk Screenwriter:

Barry Wong From a story by John Woo Cinematographer:

Wong Wing-hang

Synopsis Cop Tequila attempts to destroy the criminal enterprise eventually headed by psychotic Johnny Wong and finds himself blocked by his chief because of the undercover presence of Alan/Tony within Wong’s organization. Eventually, while visiting an informant who was nearly killed when discovered, Tony and Tequila discover that Wong’s arsenal of weaponry is hidden in the hospital basement. An extremely violent and protracted gun battle ensues as Wong takes hospital workers and patients – including a large group of newborns – hostage. After nearly incredible carnage, Wong is shot by Tequila as Tony seemingly sacrifices himself by firing through his own body to hit Wong, who holds him hostage. An ambiguous ending appears to show Tony on his boat, sailing into anonymity, although the ending might be read as a fantasy experienced by Tequila.

Critique Hard Boiled, a key work of the new Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, was John Woo’s last film before leaving Hong

Hard Boiled, Milestone/The Kobal Collection.

184  China

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Art Director:

James Leung Editors:

Kai Kit-Wai John Woo David Wu Duration:

126 minutes Cast:

Chow Yun-fat Tony Leung Chiu-wai Teresa Mo Philip Chan Philip Kwok Anthony Wong Year:

1992

Kong for the United States. Starring Chow Yun-fat as Tequila, the ‘hot-handed God of cops’ of the literal title, and Tony Leung Chiuwai (also starring in Woo’s Red Cliff [2008−09]) as Alan/Tony, the undercover cop who is drawn into partnership with Tequila, the film should be understood thematically as Woo’s response to his perception of the increasing lawlessness in Hong Kong and his desire to support the efforts of the police against it. Additionally the film represents the culmination of the supercharged, hyperkinetic Woo style of his later Hong Kong years. As an epitome of Hong Kong action cinema, Hard Boiled has been less favorably received by some critics than other Woo films like The Killer (see Rayns 1992). The protracted battle at the hospital, the seeming fascination with choreographing death, and the sheer volume of the gunfire cannot fail to attract both superficial admirers and moralistic detractors. Nevertheless violence in Woo films is anything but gratuitous or shallow. Little in action cinema is so affecting as the death of boss Mr Hui (Kwan Hoi-shan) at the hands of his ‘favourite son’ Alan (who must kill him to maintain his cover) or the murder of Mad Dog by Wong: as always, Woo uses violence and destruction to showcase the consequences of evil and of the loss of honour. The film is undoubtedly excessive in the degree of its indulgence in violent displays, though, although perhaps some of this is in the service of style purely considered. Hard Boiled does allude freely, though not obtrusively, to other films, including Melville’s The Red Circle (1970); and Chow’s Tequila borrows not a little from Steve McQueen’s cool image in Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968), including Bullitt’s insolence toward higher authority, his loner posture, and his difficulty with romantic relationships. The Tequila role, and the film more generally, neatly epitomize the Hong Kong phase of Woo’s film career.

Kenneth E. Hall Reference Rayns, Tony (1992) ‘Hard Boiled,’ Sight and Sound, 2:4, pp. 20–3.

The Killer Dip huet seung hung Studio/Distributor:

Golden Princess Magnum Pictures Director:

John Woo

Synopsis The Killer details the last act in the life of contract killer John, who accepts a contract brought to him by his friend, retired hitman Sidney. His contract goes awry as he accidentally injures the sight of beautiful torch singer Jenny during the hit. He decides to accept a final contract to make money both to pay for her cornea operation and to retire from his way of life. The contract turns out to be a trap in which Sidney’s employer Wong intends to kill John. After carrying out the hit at the Dragon Boat Festival (on Wong’s uncle Tony), John twice turns the tables on Wong, killing his hit men and telling Sidney that he will kill him too if he ever sees him again. But

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The Killer, Film Workshop/The Kobal Collection.

Producer:

Tsui Hark Screenwriter:

John Woo Cinematographers:

Peter Pau Wong Wing-hang Art director:

Man-Wah Luk Editor:

Fan Kung-wing Duration:

104 minutes Cast:

Chow Yun-fat Danny Lee

186  China

John has lost his anonymity and is now being tracked by cop Li. Understanding that he is now alone except for Jenny, John makes plans to escape with her and is nearly trapped in her apartment by Li and his colleague Chang. John and Li soon become partners (the ‘pair of blood-spattered heroes’ of the literal title) in the fight against Wong, after Chang is killed and Wong’s men attack the house where John and Jenny have been staying. The house belongs to Sidney, whose differences with John have by now been patched up in a crucial reconciliation scene in which loyalty and traditional values are discussed. Sidney promises to get John’s money for him from Wong, while John, Li, and Jenny wait at the church where the first scene of the film was set. Sidney attempts to kill Wong but fails and escapes, mortally wounded. Returning to the church and followed by Wong’s men, he dies in John’s arms. John and Li then fight a battle of amazing courage and skill against Wong’s men. The fight ends in a standoff between John and Wong, who is holding Jenny hostage. John shoots Wong, but in a final irony John’s eyes are shot out in the confrontation, making impossible his gift of

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Sally Yeh Kong Chu Kenneth Tsang Year:

1989

corneas to Jenny. Enraged, Li kills Wong and is arrested by his own colleagues.

Critique The Killer, an essential work for the career of John Woo and for the history of Hong Kong cinema, is central to the yanggang (heroic bloodshed) film tradition. Aside from its importance to Hong Kong film, Woo’s work connects directly into western film as it pays homage to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967), and more generally to film noir, for example This Gun for Hire (Frank Tuttle, 1942). The Killer represents an important milestone in Woo’s artistic maturity. More strongly focused on the anti-heroic status of its hitman protagonist than was the sometimes diffused and more sentimental A Better Tomorrow, it is also solidly grounded in the film noir tradition. Not merely a remake of Le Samouraï, it creatively re-imagines the tragic, doomed killer archetype which traces back through film noir history at least to This Gun for Hire and Walsh’s High Sierra (see Hall 2009: 23-43), placing it within a newly transcultural environment of Hong Kong organized crime and police, Cantopop music, and Dragon Boat festivals. The film not only cemented Chow’s image as cool, poised Asian leading man but, more importantly for film history, allowed Woo to elaborate upon and arguably to perfect his neo-romantic, visually rich shooting style. The links between the film and the French New Wave and American film noir provide a strong demonstration of Woo’s own grounding in world cinema, and The Killer succeeds as well as an example of Woo’s acknowledged updating of the wuxia pian as represented by masters like Zhang Che and King Hu. The Killer thus fulfills the promise of A Better Tomorrow, which was more narrowly focused on wuxia pian models.

Kenneth E. Hall Reference Hall, Kenneth E (2009) John Woo’s The Killer, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

PTU Studio/Distributor:

Milky Way Image HK Ltd. Mei Ah Film Company Director:

Johnnie To

Synopsis Sgt. Mike Ho and his Police Tactical Unit assist in the dual investigation of a policeman’s missing gun and the murder of a Triad boss’ son, Ponytail. Sgt. Lo Sa loses his gun after he slips on a banana peel in an alley after chasing a young thug that has vandalized his car. While unconscious, Lo is beaten by members of Ponytail’s gang. Rather than report the missing weapon, Lo tries to hide his blunder by illegally purchasing another gun and by asking PTU to assist him in his search. Lo’s actions are scrutinized

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Producer:

Johnnie To Screenwriters:

Yau Nai-hoi and Au Kin-yee (From an idea by Johnnie To) Cinematographer:

Cheng Siu-keung Art Director:

Jerome Fung Editor:

Law Wing-cheong Duration:

88 minutes Cast:

Simon Yam Maggie Shiu Lam Suet Ruby Wong Lo Hoi-pang Eddy Ko Year:

2003

188  China

by Inspector Leigh Cheng, a member of the Criminal Investigation Department who suspects Lo of tampering with evidence. Meanwhile, Ponytail’s father, Baldhead, seeks to avenge his son’s murder by killing his chief Triad rival, Eyeball. Unbeknownst to both Triad leaders, though, Ponytail may have been killed by a gang of robbers from the Mainland, who commit the murder in an effort to distract police away from their own nefarious activities. All of these lines of action come together in a bloody shootout at Canton Road. Baldhead and Eyeball are both killed along with the members of the Mainland gang. Lo recovers his gun in the same alley where he lost it. In the aftermath of the shootout, the various police factions all lie to corroborate the accounts of the others involved in the incident.

Critique Johnnie To’s PTU is among the most challenging and rewarding of the director’s self-described ‘exercises,’ a term To uses to characterize the more personal, less commercial side of his oeuvre. The film is unusual for To in that its action is confined to a single September night in Kowloon’s Tsimshatsui district. PTU also has a slightly unusual narrative structure in tracing out several separate, but interrelated, lines of action that receive almost equal weight over the course of the film. Although one could easily characterize PTU as a ‘cops and robbers’ thriller, that description fails to capture the complexity of the internecine struggles that the film depicts within each group. On one side of the coin is the turf war between Baldhead, Eyeball, and the gang from the Mainland. On the other side is the inter-unit rivalry among Hong Kong’s regular police force, its Criminal Investigation Department (CID), and its Organized Crime and Triad Bureau (OCTB). For To, one of PTU’s central themes is the ‘Blue Curtain,’ the tacit agreement that police ultimately will protect one another despite any rivalry and despite acts of illegality committed in the course of an investigation (Ingham 2009: 137). Much of PTU’s power derives from To’s ability to capture the ambience of hotpot restaurants, arcades, and barren streets in Tsimshatsui. The area, normally a bustling commercial district, is eerily de-populated in PTU, an aspect of the film that led some critics to see it as a dark allegory of the SARS crisis of 2003. To himself dismisses this interpretation, noting that he began shooting the film in 2000, long before anyone even knew what SARS was. To shot the film over a two-year period, working on location on Sunday nights between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. (Ingham 2009: 38). To used the ambient light of Tsimshatsui for exposure, and the mise en scène of the film’s exteriors are dominated by the bluish and yellowish hues of the area’s lamp posts, storefront signs and nighttime shadows. Indeed, Tsimshatsui’s empty commercial areas are so important to the film’s tone that one might easily describe PTU’s look as ‘neon noir.’ The ominous mood created by these empty urban spaces proves to be a perfect backdrop for the casually brutal acts that punctu-

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ate the film. Sgt. Ho coldly slaps a sullen gang member about his tattoo; the gang member responds by rubbing his skin raw trying to remove it. Ho’s team kicks a young asthmatic, but they then have to perform CPR on him when he stops breathing. These acts of small cruelty, though, pale in comparison to Baldhead’s torture of Ponytail’s gang. In a genuinely horrific image, To’s camera shows Ponytail’s gang stripped down, their heads shaved, locked in small cages that line the floor of a warehouse. Baldhead noisily clangs on the cages and screams at their occupants for failing to protect his son. The aura of tightly coiled aggression created by such offhand cruelties finds release in the climactic gun battle at Canton Road. Taking a cue from Akira Kurosawa and John Woo, To films the scene in super slow-motion, creating a ballet of muzzle flashes, blood spurts and falling bodies. When the proverbial smoke clears, PTU and the other law enforcement officials are the only ones left standing. In a brief epilogue, To crosscuts among Ho’s, Lo’s, and Cheng’s accounts of the incident. Each of them has something to gain in their collective lie. The sequence reinforces the notion of the ‘Blue Curtain’ described by To. As Ho says earlier in PTU, ‘Anyone who wears the uniform is one of our own.’

Jeff Smith Reference Ingham, Michael (2009) Johnnie To Kei-Fung’s PTU, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Tiger on the Beat Liu foo chut gang Studio/Distributor:

Cinema City Director:

Lau Kar-leung Producer:

Karl Maka Screenwriter:

Chang Kwok-tse Cinematographers:

Joe Chan Cho On-Sun

Synopsis Philandering veteran cop Francis Li talks his way out of a confrontation with an angry husband only to find himself held hostage by a criminal fleeing new cop-on-the-block Michael Cho. Humiliated by wetting his pants during the ordeal, Li finds himself teamed with Cho to investigate the murder of a Thai drug dealer murdered by Johnny Law. Both use Marydonna, sister of dealer ‘Poison Snake,’ to discover the location of Law’s next transaction. Although Law murders ‘Poison Snake,’ the two cops arrest him, earning promotion. Despite Li obtaining travel documents for Marydonna to leave Hong Kong, the celebration party ends on a somber note with the death of Marydonna and the kidnapping of Li’s sister, Mimi, by Fai in exchange for Law. Removing Law from hospital, the two cops take on Fai and his men in a spectacular duel, climaxing in a chainsaw battle between Cho and Fai. Li finally ends the confrontation by shooting Fai, who survived a supposedly definitive demise. Rescuing Mimi, the duo returns Law to custody, receiving acknowledgment from their superior officers.

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Art Director:

Eric Lee Editor:

Wong Ming-Lam Duration:

88 minutes Cast:

Chow Yun-fat Conan Lee Nina Li Chi Shirley Ng Ling James Wong Ti Lung Gordon Liu David Chiang Lydia Shum Year:

1988

190  China

Critique Opening and closing with a frenetic number sung by Filipina actress-singer Maria Cordero, aptly paralleling the pace of this film, Tiger on the Beat is a Cinema City action comedy-drama produced by Karl Maka and directed by Shaw Brothers veteran Lau Kar-leung. Combining the comedy talents of Chow Yun-fat with the ‘straight-man,’ low-key performance of Conan Lee, the film coherently synchronizes the presence of two genres (action and comedy) normally separate in Hollywood cinema, with a contemporary updating of many elements well-known from the Shaw Brothers days. Cameo roles performed by Ti Lung, Lydia Shum, David Chiang, Philip Ko Fei and Lau himself, nod in this direction, revealing these talents’ easy assimilation to a new type of cinema in the same way as Lau Kar-leung. While an older Ti Lung reveals that he has lost little of his Shaw Brothers martialarts prowess in his cameo appearance overcoming Conan Lee, Gordon Liu resorts to more modern methods by employing a chainsaw in the film’s climactic battle. Old master Lau Kar-leung reveals that he is equally capable of directing a madcap action comedy paralleling the successful Police Story (1985-2004) and Aces Go Places (1982-97) franchises but in his own inimitable manner. Opening with a scene combining Chow Yun-fat’s comedic talents with the stooge persona of Shing Fui-on’s aptly-named ‘Dummy,’ the following sequence at the junk food franchise – where Francis amazes customers by downing a hangover remedy supposedly transferred down the line by both eastern (Ti Lung) and western (Alain Delon) stars – is one of the most grotesque breakfast scenes ever seen in Hong Kong cinema. Every film needs a good villain, and Shaw Brothers veteran Gordon Liu aptly fulfils this role in a performance far removed from his association with the Shaolin Temple in Shaw Brothers classics such as The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978) and Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (1984). Discarding his novice robe to reappear in the twentieth century as villain rather than hero, with a growth of hair also signifying his new status, Liu’s Fai now wears the attire of a Triad Number Two and wields a chainsaw in place of the traditional weapons associated with him at Shaw Brothers (whether unarmed martial-arts techniques or eight diagram poles). The chainsaw battle between him and Conan Lee is justifiably the climactic action sequence of the entire film, following scenes showing Francis Li using cunning with a rifle against his antagonists. Far surpassing the anemic chainsaw duel in Motel Hell (Kevin Connor, 1980), this battle between a veteran titan and a new challenger is expertly choreographed in a breathtaking manner by a great action-director still working today. Tiger on the Beat is a dynamic Hong Kong action film combining new and veteran talents, revealing that old wine can sometimes inhabit new bottles by combining emerging stars (such as Chow Yun-fat and Conan Lee) with familiar faces such as Ti Lung, Gordon Liu, Lydia Shum (as a bra saleswoman who uses her merchandise in a surprising manner to detain suspects, rather than employing official police devices

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such as handcuffs), and others. This is a highly pleasurable film combining action and comedy from the great days of an innovative and prolific cinema, with veteran actor-director Lau Kar-leung revealing that the heritage of the Shaw Brothers era could be successfully transferred to a new era in Hong Kong cinema. The 1990 sequel featured many of the original actors in different roles, but with Danny Lee substituting as a replacement co-star with Conan Lee.

Tony Williams

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ndependent an rt Cinema

Hong Kong

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Boat People Tau Ban No Hoi Studio/Distributor:

Bluebird Film Company Greenworld Company Director:

Ann Hui Producer:

Hsia Meng Screenwriter:

Yau-Daai On-Ping Cinematographer:

Wong Chung-Gei Art Director:

Tony Au Ting-Ping Editor:

Kin Kin Duration:

109 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

George Lam Season Ma Cora Miao Andy Lau Qimeng Shi Year:

1982

Synopsis Documenting the victorious entry of the North Vietnamese Army into Da Nang during 1975, photojournalist Akutagawa becomes attracted to the image of a young crippled Vietnamese boy moving away from him down an alley. Three years later, he returns to the area to witness the successful relocation of orphans in a children’s camp located in #16 of the New Economic Zone outside the city. As Akutagawa investigates the city and sees a ‘reactionary’ attempt suicide to escape from the police, he soon becomes suspicious and discovers a darker side of post-Liberation society. Attracted to lively teenager Cam Nuong and her family, Akutagawa learns about their desperate struggle for survival in a world where soldiers terrorize the population, round up ‘reactionaries’ to clear minefields with their bare hands, and stigmatize those having any contact with the old regime whether children of deceased South Vietnamese officers or former US Army interpreters. Seeing Nuong and her younger brother face separation after the death of their prostitute mother, Akutagawa decides to help them escape from Vietnam. While he dies in the attempt, the two youngsters leave on a boat facing an uncertain future.

Critique This second chapter in Ann Hui’s ‘exile trilogy’ (the others being The Story of Woo Viet [1981] and Song of the Exile [1990]) gained many awards in Hong Kong, most notably for Best Director and Best Picture. Overseas, it drew criticism for its bleak depiction of post-war Vietnamese society as well as Stephen Teo’s observations that the film fell into the western ideology of the ‘escape from communism’ genre. He notes that only former South Vietnamese officers who had laid the mines in the first place were forced to dismantle objects that had indiscriminately maimed and killed thousands of their fellow countrymen. Despite the film’s confused political message, it is really a contradictory illustration of Hong Kong’s feelings concerning the colony’s own insecurities in the two years preceding the 1984 agreement between Britain and China, which involved Hong Kong’s eventual return in 1997. Boat People is a naturalistic depiction of fears expressed in films such as Tsui Hark’s dark comedy We’re Going to Eat You (1980), concerning a motherland still associated with the dark side of the Cultural Revolution. Boat People is also a film displaying the brilliant directorial talents of Ann Hui, both visually and in eliciting striking performances from her actors. The film opens with a long shot showing Akutagawa photographing the arrival of a victorious army. It views the events from a high angle, the camera moving into an overhead position before it cranes down to concentrate on the crippled boy, eliciting his attention before cutting to the alley the boy runs into (as well as giving us our first close-shot of the protagonist himself). Evoking the opening shot of Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958), Hui contrasts

Boat People, Bluebird Photoplays Inc/The Kobal Collection.

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official spectacle with a concealed story that her film will explore. Akutagawa soon learns the difference between the ‘Potemkin Village’ setup of New Economic Zone 16 and its more deadly counterpart nearby. There, prisoners are engaged in clearing mines and live in concentration camp conditions. After the opening scenes, Boat People soon moves into claustrophobic interiors such as the abandoned boat where Nuong and her family live, the dark alleyways, and backyard execution areas such as the ‘chicken farm,’ where children plunder the bodies of recently dead victims. Ironically, when Akutagawa follows Nuong and her older brother to this destination, an overhead shot framing him in a narrow alley (insignificantly attempting to make his way past the execution squad) evokes the overhead camera of the film’s opening scene. Co-produced with China with Hainan Island substituting for Da Nang’s coastal region, Boat People appeared shortly after the short border war between China and Vietnam in 1979, and reflects a period when Mainland authorities were unaware of the parallels Hong Kong audiences would make with their country’s recent past. In his first film appearance, Andy Lau plays former US Army interpreter To Minh, who dreams of escaping to New Orleans and opening a restaurant where the current mistress (Cora Miao) of senior communist cadre Nguyen (played by Chinese actor Qimeng Shi) will work until she is 70. Aged 40 (but looking far younger), the woman has passed from various colonial occupiers (Vietnamese, Japanese and American), until she now caters to Sorbonne graduate Nguyen’s memories of a more cosmopolitan past, memories that will also send him to a prison camp. Leaving the French cuisine and wine provided to him in his nostalgic haven, he quotes Baudelaire to her before he departs: ‘There are scents as fresh as the flesh of children / And others, rich and triumphant that reek of decay.’ As an orphaned Akutagawa also learns, decay is already tarnishing the fruits of victory he witnessed in the opening scenes.

Tony Williams

Leaving in Sorrow Youyou chouchou de zou le Studio/Distributor:

Ying e Chi Director:

Vincent Chui Producer:

Vincent Chui

194  China

Synopsis Set in the pre- and post-1997 Hong Kong, the film consists of three strands of non-intersecting stories set in San Francisco, Hong Kong and Beijing. Working in the field of new information technology and leading the carefree life of a womanizer in San Francisco, Ray returns to Hong Kong to visit his father who lives a life of solitude. They pay a visit to a village in Mainland China due to the death of an elderly relative. During this process, Ray finds himself at a crossroads when Hong Kong is drawing closer to China culturally and economically after 1997. The second story is about Reverend Lai and his wife who are inevitably caught up in the heated property market in Hong Kong. The former is in charge of the sale of his church to speculative developers while the latter, a property agent herself, tries to sell her own flat before immigrating to the United States. Their marital

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Screenwriters:

Vincent Chui Patrick Kong Cinematographer:

SK Yip

relationship strains as they have to be separated from each other because of emigration. The third story narrates a gossip magazine writer Hong’s persistent courtship of his editor Chris. Chris later reveals to him the repressed, traumatic memories of the June Fourth Incident of 1989; it was the time when she developed an unfulfilled romance while studying in Beijing during the political crisis.

Art Director:

Carmen Cheng

Critique

Editors:

Funded by government financial aids from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (ADC), Vincent Chui’s Leaving in Sorrow is an independent film which belongs to the tradition of realism in Hong Kong cinema. A digital video shot at a low cost, the film contributed to the revival and growth of independent film-making in the late 1990s and the new millennium; it demonstrates how alternative film-making is possible outside the Hong Kong mainstream cinema. While one can trace Chui’s realism back to Hong Kong New Wave film-makers such as Ann Hui, Allen Fong, and Lawrence Ah Mon because of their shared social concern, Leaving in Sorrow is noted by its innovative style associated with Dogme 95. Inspired by the Dogme 95 aesthetics popularized by Danish film-makers Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, Chui shot the film on location with natural lighting and sound effects. The film also submits itself to the Dogme’s ‘Vows of Chastity’ with its frequent use of handheld camera as well as amateur and improvized acting. Chui’s insistence on authenticity, however, is not simply a matter of reflectionism. His realistic style is employed to document as well as comment on socio-political changes. The film depicts Hong Kong as a city caught up at a moment of critical reflection. With its focus on the aftermath of the 1997 handover and the subsequent world-wide financial crisis, the film can be regarded as a punctual response to such socio-political transitions. If the Danish film-makers aim to challenge the global hegemony of Hollywood cinema with their Dogme style, Chui’s film seeks to open up a space for independent filmmaking by defining Hong Kong society through his lens of realism. It is the tripartite narrative structure that has allowed the film to portray Hong Kong society as multifaceted and dynamic, but the treatment of the three separate stories is rather uneven. The first story about Ray is explored with less force and depth than the other two strands. Nonetheless, the film as a whole succeeds in addressing issues in connection with home, migration, and globalization by depicting Hong Kong as a space of flows. As the characters exert their floating existences within the local, national and international network, they have to grapple with the significance of self-understanding and cultural memory. Ray’s homecoming to Hong Kong and Mainland China has prompted him to reconsider how he should reconnect with his Chinese roots. At the same time, he has to deal with the greater economic and cultural links between China and Hong Kong after the return of sovereignty in 1997. The need for reflection is equally demanding for Pastor Lai and his wife. Whereas Lai realizes how one’s moral conviction is continuously challenged by economic

Kedy Fan Ip Yuk-yiu Duration:

90 minutes Genre:

Drama Cast:

Tony Ho Wah-chiu Ivy Ho Shawn Yu Man-Lok Crystal Lui Duncan Lai Sheung Ming Fai Year:

2001

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pragmatism, his wife achieves a better self-understanding when she confronts her own sense of vanity in a commercial society. In the third story, both Hong and Chris reveal their buried memories which are almost erased by their mundane involvement in the job at the tabloid magazine. While Hong’s past failed romance is personal, Chris’ inability to forget her memories associated with the June Fourth Incident signifies the collective will to resist amnesia. Delivered by the actress Crystal Lui’s excellent improvized acting and without a script, the final scene in which Chris breaks down in tears in a Beijing back alley closes the film with power and rigor, suggesting the lingering effect of traumatic memories. Leaving in Sorrow contributes to the tradition of realism in Hong Kong cinema by manipulating the Dogme style and historicizing the general themes of home and movement in the context of Hong Kong in the post-1997 era. With the use of quick editing and handheld camera, the film captures the ethos of this unstable period of time through a tripartite structure and a fractured style. It goes beyond reflectionism to perceive film as a critical device for social and political commentary.

Esther M.K. Cheung

Rouge Yin ji kau Studio/Distributor:

Golden Way Films Golden Harvest Company Director:

Stanley Kwan Kam-Pang Producers:

Jackie Chan Leonard Ho Screenwriters:

Dai An-Ping Chiu Lei Bik-Wa Lillian Lee Pik-Wah (Original novel by Lee Pik-Wah) Cinematographer:

Bill Wong Chung-Biu Art Director:

Yuk Mok Pok Editor:

Peter Cheung

196  China

Synopsis Rouge has two parallel storylines involving the same characters, one set in the 1930s and the other about fifty years later. The first begins in a Hong Kong brothel, where a young man named Chan ChenPang and a young courtesan named Fleur meet and fall in love. Fleur hopes to leave the brothel and start a new life with Chan, who has his own dreams of becoming a performer in the Chinese opera. Chan’s family disapproves of the match, however, and eventually the lovers make a suicide pact, pledging to eat raw opium and die in one another’s arms. The 1980s storyline begins in a newspaper office where Fleur arrives, looking just as she did decades earlier, to place a classified ad asking Chan to come forward and explain why he did not join her in the afterlife as they had planned. While arranging the ad she meets a young newspaperman named Yuen; he is frightened when he realizes Fleur is a ghost, but soon he and his girlfriend Ah Chor decide to help her in her quest, discovering that Chan, who did not die on the appointed day, must still be somewhere in the city. The climax takes place on a movie set, where the story’s mysteries are resolved.

Critique Rouge is one of the most honored Asian films of the 1980s, winning six Hong Kong Film Awards out of ten nominations, including Best Director for Stanley Kwan Kam-Pang, Best Actress for Anita Mui Yim-Fong, and Best Picture for the movie itself. Many critics now consider it a showcase for Mui’s distinctive talent – she also

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Duration:

96 minutes Genre:

Drama Fantasy Cast:

Anita Mui Yim-Fong Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing Alex Man Chi-Leung Emily Chu Bo-Wee Patrick Tse Yin Year:

1988

won the Golden Horse Award and Taiwan’s first Golden Dragon Award for Best Actress – although director Kwan, cinematographer Bill Wong Chung-Biu, and co-star Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing deserve equal credit for the film’s artistic merit. Mui’s reputation has continued to rise since her death from cancer in 2003 at the untimely age of 40. Cheung had committed suicide a few months earlier, adding further to the dark mystique of a film in which suicide plays a central role. The story’s highly romantic tone is established in the opening scene, set in a 1930s brothel where Fleur is singing a quiet, sexy song – earlier in her career, Mui was a popular singer known as the Madonna of Hong Kong – that sets off sparks in Chan, who starts wooing her there and then. The camera moves expressively throughout, enthralled by the sumptuous decor and exquisite colours of Yuk Mok Pok’s set design as well as the bemused backand-forth of the courtship, a spirited game in which Chan and Fleur take turns as cat and mouse. With its brothel setting, graceful camera movements, and meticulous attention to detail, this portion of Rouge anticipates Flowers of Shanghai, the 1998 masterpiece by Taiwanese film-maker Hou Hsiao-hsien, in which eating raw opium is again the favoured form of suicide for unhappy courtesans. Rouge is more outgoing and expansive than Hou’s minimalist melodrama, though, and its story soon goes beyond the premodern confines of the flower house to confront the postmodern urbanity of the city as a whole. The very idea of a melancholy ghost seeking her long-ago soulmate by placing a classified ad in the paper indicates the balance of dramatic, humorous, and supernatural elements that Kwan is working to achieve. Rouge does not entirely succeed in striking that balance, for two interrelated reasons. One is Kwan’s failure to make the 1980s portions as alluring as the 1930s scenes, and the other is the low charisma quotient of Alex Man Chi-Leung and Emily Chu Bo-Yee as newspaper clerk Yuen and reporter Ah Chor, who are far less tantalizing and intriguing than the gorgeous ghost and her elusive loved one. But other factors compensate for these shortcomings. For one, Rouge is full of interesting lore; although Chan is only the secondborn in his family, for instance, he is called Twelfth Master Chan because the higher number has more panache at a time when large families are in vogue. For another, the cosmetic item named in the title (a strip of pigment-saturated cloth) is fascinating in its shifting, multiple meanings – it is an element of beauty in the mise en scène, a sign of the courtesan’s blend of natural and artificial charm, and a token of the tie between Fleur and Chan that endures the passage of half a century, signifying first the fire of passion and later the dying ember of disappointment. Rouge is in some ways an eerie, ethereal story, reflecting Fleur’s position halfway between the physical and metaphysical realms, and in other ways a solid, down-to-earth story where a ghost rides buses and traipses around the city looking for an old boyfriend. Its magical realism is steadily appealing, if not quite as persuasive as one would wish.

David Sterritt

Independent and Art Cinema 197

Comedy/ Musical

Taiwan and Hong Kong

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All’s Well End’s Well Jia you xi shi Studios/Distributors:

Regal Films Mandarin Films Ko Chi Sum Films Director:

Clifton Ko Producers:

Clifton Ko Raymond Wong Steven Lo Screenwriters:

Vincent Kok Tessa Choy Roman Cheung Cinematographer:

Lee Kin-keung Art Director:

Raymond Chan Editor:

Kim Ma Duration:

100 minutes Genre:

Comedy Cast:

Leslie Cheung Stephen Chow Maggie Cheung Sandra Ng Teresa Mo Year:

1992 Location:

Hong Kong

Synopsis Brothers Shang Foon, Shang Moon, and Shang So must overcome their romantic hang-ups in order to find true marital happiness. Shang Foon is a radio DJ whose playboy ways are challenged by the kooky and Hollywood-obsessed Holiyok. Businessman Shang Moon is unhappily married to diligent, but plain-looking, housewife Ching, so he turns to floozy Sheila. Shang So is a feminine flowerarranger who does not realize that the love of his life is his butch aunt Mo-shang. Troubles escalate when the romantic interests collide in the same house. Holiyok is hired to take care of Shang Foon after a bizarre accident, Sheila moves in after Ching storms out because of her husband’s infidelity, and Mo-shang is brought in as a foot masseuse for the brothers’ stoic parents.

Critique A representative entry in the Lunar New Year comedy genre, All’s Well End’s Well is Hong Kong cinema at its most charmingly madcap. The gag-a-minute pacing is triply enlivened by the film’s cutting between the romantic woes of three brothers. The restless editing also helps deliver one visual punchline after another. In one of the film’s more outlandish moments, an elevator door opens to reveal not another floor in a building, but random worlds like outdoor swimming pools and the backstage of a theatrical production. The visual gag sums up the film’s comedic audacity well. Each cut, each reveal, can lead to essentially anything: a housewife on a toilet, a fist in a mouth, a gravity-defying haircut. Director Clifton Ko pulls no punches when it comes to broad characterizations. Housewife Ching (played by Sandra Ng) is supposed to be unattractive, but each reverse shot to her face is designed to further exaggerate her ungroomed moustache; Shang So and Mo-shang are gay and lesbian stereotypes, but Ko does not hesitate to up each punchline with even cruder sequins or ever louder top hats and tails. If the characters are extreme versions of types, it is because All’s Well End’s Well is obsessed with the possibilities of reality spectacularly playing out the world of fiction. The Shang Foon/Holiyok storyline is built on one film reference after another. Holiyok (a name derived from the Cantonese word for ‘Hollywood’ and the Cantonese name for actress Maggie Cheung) lives her life as a capricious movie-lover, recreating scenes from Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990), Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1990) and Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990), and also flaunting Madonna’s cone-bra. Never to be outdone, Shang Foon evokes Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-wai, 1990) to fend off groupies and The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) to win Holiyok’s movie-made heart. Meanwhile, the brothers’ deliciously deadpan parents are obsessed with black-and-white Cantonese movies, which hilariously serve as a running commentary on the situational insanity going on in the living room. But it is popular music that drives the characters and their loony

Eat Drink Man Woman, Central Motion Pictures/The Kobal Collection.

Comedy/Musical 199

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ways. Shang Foon and Holiyok literally cannot kiss if ‘Unchained Melody’ (playing in the background) skips a beat. Ching cannot function if she cannot sing. When we first meet her, she is wailing a Cantopop song while sweeping the kitchen and mowing the lawn. Her unfaithful husband proves unromantic precisely because he refuses to sing with her in bed. When Ching becomes a karaoke hostess, she sings her heart out, even if it means alienating her customers. Though Shang Moon wrongs Ching, we believe in their ultimate reconciliation because the entire family (including Shang Moon) sings a melodramatic ballad for her at the end of the film. Music heals her wounds and rekindles the heart. All’s well that sings well. All’s Well End’s Well would itself become a pop culture reference for Alfred Cheung’s All’s Well End’s Well ’97 (1997) and Vincent Kok’s All’s Well End’s Well 2009 (2009). The later films, also produced by Raymond Wong, sorely lack the 1992 edition’s manic performances. Stephen Chow as Shang Foon is unforgettably energetic, especially in a hospital scene during which he acts out a number of psychological conditions. Maggie Cheung as Holiyok brings sass to Julia Roberts, Demi Moore and Kathy Bates; more than simply impersonating each classic character, Cheung flaunts the idea of stardom altogether, foreshadowing her later work in Stanley Kwan’s Centre Stage (1992) and Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep (1996). Leslie Cheung as the feminine brother (who refuses to get married because ‘giving birth is too painful’) manages to combine progressive attitude (and gender-bending) with traditional family loyalty. And Teresa Mo as Mo-shang proves a master of faces ranging from the sensitive to the sadistic.

Brian Hu

Eat Drink Man Woman Yin Shi Nan Nü Studio/Distributor:

Ang Lee Productions Central Motion Pictures Corporation Good Machine The Samuel Goldwyn Company (US) Director:

Ang Lee

200  China

Synopsis From the cosmopolitan hustle and bustle of Taipei’s streets, the camera turns to the retired and widowed chef Master Chu’s kitchen. Chu violently controls his culinary world: killing fish and poultry, skilful slicing of food, stewing, steaming and frying. He prepares the weekly culinary and visual feast for his three daughters. The eldest Jia-Jen devotes her life to the church. Second daughter Jia-Chien is a deputy director of an airline; her professional ability is nevertheless contrasted with her emotional and personal indecision and turmoil. Jia-Ning works in a fast-food restaurant, an insult to her father’s profession. As Chu’s presence in his adult daughters’ lives fades, his indulgence is shifted to Shan Shan, the young daughter of a divorcing friend Jin Rong, for whom he cooks and delivers school lunches of many courses. Jia-Jen and Jia-Ning’s surprise marriage and pregnancy force Chu out of his insulated existence. He chooses to make his own surprising announcement of his proposal to Jin Rong

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Producers:

Hsu Kong Hsu Li-Kong Screenwriters:

Ang Lee James Schamus Wang Hui-Ling Cinematographer:

Lin Jong Art Director:

Lee Fu-Hsiung Editor:

Tim Squyres Duration:

124 minutes Genre:

Comedy Cast:

Lung Sihung Yang Kuei-Mei Wu Chien-Lien Wang Yu-wen Sylvia Chang Year:

1994 Location:

Taiwan

during Sunday lunch. Chien loses her investment in an apartment and takes over the responsibility for the family home. So it is now up to Chien to cook the Sunday feast for her father.

Critique The last film in Ang Lee’s (Chinese) ‘Father Knows Best’ trilogy (the other two films being Pushing Hands [1992], and The Wedding Banquet [1993]) begins with the retired chef’s kitchen of which he is in total control. Chu is still called upon to troubleshoot in the professional kitchen of the Grand Palace Restaurant, another stainless and masculine cocoon for the old master. Here lies the two central themes of the film as the title suggests, gender relations and food-health-family life, which are played out through the symbolic Sunday banquet. Chien, the most elaborated female protagonist, describes how the family ‘communicate by eating.’ She tries to buy an apartment with all her savings and, after the sale falls through, considers working abroad in order to escape the ‘Sunday dinner torture ritual’ and therefore her father’s domination within the family. Like her father, Chien expresses affection through cooking, which she does twice in the film for an ex-lover and Master Chu. The fetishistic displacement of affect onto food dominates the relationships between the individuals, and consumption mediates their interpersonal interactions. Jia-Jen, the stereotypical old spinster, initially takes up the role of the missing maternal figure. She even makes up the story of being jilted in order to avoid intimacy with her family or potential suitors. She cracks up after years of emotional repression and finally finds romantic love. The youngest Jia-Ning works in a fast-food joint as a modern contrast to her traditional father. The female-male, daughter-father conflicts are explained as part of the natural hierarchy of patriarchy, and food is symbolically central in creating and maintaining the family; Chu’s friend Old Wen claims, ‘Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. Food and sex. Basic human desires. Can’t avoid them.’ However, Chu’s functions as the fatherly figure presiding over the family hearth are made redundant when he loses his tastebuds and two daughters to marriages. Chu decides to strike out himself to form a new family with the younger divorcee Jin Rong. The family melodrama ends with several happy occasions within the confines of patriarchal linearity. Ning gives birth to a daughter; Jen’s new husband gets baptized under her approving eyes (baptizing is also a rebirth), and Jin Rong is heavily pregnant. The wayward Chien has taken responsibility for the family kitchen, newly vacated by Master Chu, and she now cooks the Sunday lunch. While tasting Chien’s soup, Chu discovers that his sense of taste has returned, the most symbolic of the rebirths within the narrative. This father/daughter reconciliation therefore resolves the gender and familial conflicts. Master Chu now sits while Chien stands, serving him more soup; the two address each other, emphasizing the resolution. Ang Lee returns to Taipei for this ultimate film in the trilogy that signals a turning point in his oeuvre. Pushing Hands and The

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Wedding Banquet were made from the point of view of a diasporic Taiwanese director based in the United States. After Eat Drink Man Woman, Lee became a Chinese American director and did not return to Chinese language film-making until Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000. So Eat Drink Man Woman would appear to have concluded Lee’s own exploration of his diasporic status, and fascination for the father/child relationship in Chinese culture.

Leung Wing-Fai

Her Fatal Ways Biao jie, ni hao ye! Studio:

Bo Ho Films Co., Ltd. Mobile Film Production Ltd. Distributor:

Golden Harvest (Hong Kong) Limited Director:

Alfred Cheung Kin-ting Producers:

Chan Pooi-wa Leonard Ho Screenwriters:

Alfred Cheung Kin-ting Wong Wang-gei Cinematographer:

Yan Wai-lung Art Director:

Huang Ruimin (Wong Yeuihman) Editor:

I pure Duration:

96 minutes Genre:

Comedy Cast:

Carol ‘Do Do’ Cheng Yu-ling Tony Leung Ka-fai

202  China

Synopsis 1990. Colonial Hong Kong anticipates its return to Mainland China in 1997. Sister Cheng, a puritanical security officer from China, delivers drugs felon Niu across the border to Hong Kong’s police to testify against druglord Su Kuo-jung, a Hong Kong importer of medicinal herbs. When Niu escapes, Cheng offers to cooperate in his recapture, stressing that communism’s ‘human’ intuition will outperform capitalist technology. However, Cheng’s ‘fatal ways’ (like trying to beat a confession out of Su) antagonize local police. For their protection, Cheng and her assistant Sheng are housed by Hong Kong’s Inspector Wu alongside Wu’s father, an anti-communist, exarmy man. The Niu dragnet occupies much of the remainder of the film and, despite their differences, Wu and Cheng become mutually attracted. But Cheng’s ‘ways’ finally force local police to incarcerate her for deportation. Wu Senior, who admires Cheng’s courage, chastizes his son who, with loyal fellow officers, ‘kidnaps’ Cheng from police custody to launch an unauthorized ‘Hong Kong-China’ operation on Su. They find incriminating drugs in Su’s warehouse but Su corners them and is about to burn them alive when Wu Senior and ex-army colleagues rush in to save the day.

Critique The above scenario and the film’s feel-good propaganda for a united China scarcely prepare us for Her Fatal Ways, one of the best Chinese film comedies in memory. If that is due to its stunning central performance by Carol Cheng – as the Mainland patriot so proud of China and so ready to re-educate compatriots tainted by ‘British snooker, American football, Japanese-styled night clubs and Thai bathing’ (i.e. Hong Kongers) – it reflects on the entire film. Great acting rarely emerges from so-so scripts and this is a great role on paper, Cheng making it even more wonderful onscreen. She fully deserved her Best Actress statuette at the 1991 Hong Kong Film Awards. Her creation of public security officer Cheng Shih-nan, a complicated, prudish figure, recalls similar roles embodied by Greta Garbo in Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939) and Jean Arthur in Billy

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Alfred Cheung Kin-ting Lam Gau Fong Gong Michael Chow Man-gin Year:

1990 Location:

Hong Kong

Wilder’s great A Foreign Affair (1948) as the straitlaced Congresswoman probing moral degeneration within American forces in occupied Berlin. The more likely model though is Ninotchka, with Garbo as the hardline communist sent to rein in Soviet agents succumbing to capitalist pleasures in Paris. All three are contemporary comedies and timeless as entertainment, yet each is specific to its time, each having a central figure by turns ridiculous, funny and touching. If scriptwriters Cheung and Wong studied Ninotchka and A Foreign Affair, more credit to their craftsmanship. Even the opening credits offer two good laughs. Cleanly divided into credits alone and action clips without titles, the sequence quickly establishes the set up and introduces three principals in Sister Cheng, her nephew Sheng (erratically gifted with ESP) and Inspector Wu (annoyed at having to babysit a woman cop from China). When Wu shows his Mainland guests the police force’s Orwellian computers (‘information on the entire population of Hong Kong’), a lie detector even detects unwitting untruths, shattering a wired-up Sheng by telling him his mommy is not his real mother. Cheng castigates machines in general; they will never compete with China’s genius in using ‘human’ means to solve crimes. Apart from the deft writing and acting (Tony Leung always excellent as the exasperated Wu), with jokes and gags rarely pushed too far, Cheng’s ‘human’ moments give us the film’s best scenes. The finest occurs in a rural outback village nicknamed ‘Little China’ for its émigré residents drawn from all over China. Sullen and hostile to local police, the residents open up to Cheng who speaks their dialects. They invite her to eat with them and finally provide clues to Niu’s whereabouts, winning her, for the first time, grudging respect from her Hong Kong colleagues. An early scene, Cheng’s girlish, guilty experiments with lipstick (a crime-fighting necessity on behalf of the People) pays off in a later ‘Cinderella’ transformation when she goes undercover to entrap Su in a nightclub. A long static shot of her trapped in a blacked-out lift, gasping in terror, embarrassed by the enforced intimacy with Wu beside her, is real and affecting. Her confrontations with Wu’s father – each upstaging the other with patriotic songs late at night; the standoff resumed at breakfast in their respective communist and nationalist uniforms; and, later, Cheng drinking Wu Senior and his old army buddies under the table – are, like the above but a few of the film’s scenes better savoured onscreen than set down in ink. Director Cheung, still making films, may never equal this work. But he set himself and others less experienced in the minefield of film comedy, a high benchmark that will always repay close study.

Frank Bren

Comedy/Musical 203

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The House of 72 Tenants Chat SapYee Ga Fong Hak Studio/Distributor:

Shaw Brothers Director:

Chor Yuen Producers:

Run Run Shaw Andrew Eu Screenwriter:

Chor Yuen Cinematographer:

Wong Chit Art Director:

Chan Ging-Sam Editor:

Chiang Hsing-Lung Duration:

98 minutes Genre:

Comedy Cast:

Yueh Hua Tin Ching Ching Li Woo Gam Lydia Shum Chor Yuen Ku Feng Year:

1973 Location:

Hong Kong

204  China

Synopsis Based on a 1945 Shanghai stage comedy, The House of 72 Tenants occurs in a tenement setting dominated by manipulative landlady Pak Koo, eager to exploit her tenants despite whatever economic and personal hardships they face. Each episode reveals how lower-class tenants circumvent the mercenary plots of Pak Koo and her husband Bing. Cobbler Fat Chai inspires the tenants and represents a major obstacle to them both. They bought Ah Heung as their adopted daughter when a child, and now intend to realize their investment and either sell her into prostitution or force her into marriage with an aged police chief. The tenants all collaborate to foil this scheme. Recent altruistic Mainland emigrant Dr Kim tries to raise $3 for hospital treatment of his son’s pneumonia after robbers steal money from his wife. Despite situations in which these diverse groups of tenants face eviction, exploitation, or direct confrontation with the brutal realities of Hong Kong society, they collaborate in helping each other, out-maneuvering Pak Koo’s selfish schemes and eventually achieving a victory of communal solidarity.

Critique Until the recent DVD release of Shaw Brothers films, this social comedy remained unknown to most western audiences. Its release not only gave it long-awaited international recognition but also acclaim as a key work of director Chor Yuen, who revitalized Cantonese-language cinema in the 1970s. Although having links with 1950s leftist Cantonese social dramas such as In the Face of Demolition (Lee Tit, 1953), this film is more universal in spirit, leading audiences to appreciate both its message and the performances of its players, who were all well-known faces in 1970s’ Hong Kong cinema. Here it prefigures Peter Chan Ho-sun’s co-directed He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father (1993), whose appeal lies less in its appropriation of Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985) than in its references to the era of this earlier film. Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle (2004) also refers to this earlier production in several scenes, especially those involving a domineering landlady and her weak husband. Produced by a studio known for its contemporary Mandarin-language martial-arts films, The House of 72 Tenants bridges the gap between 1950s socially-conscious Cantonese cinema and the contemporary world of Hong Kong that experienced economic depression in 1972. Although all the characters appear in 1950s costumes, the problems they face are those of the early 1970s, as themes of eviction by ruthless landlords and a life of prostitution facing poverty-stricken single women all show. The introductory voiceover situating the film as belonging to some time in ‘the distant past of a community’ is probably designed to avoid censorship problems in the era of the Cultural Revolution, as well as acknowledging government suppression of the left-wing Cantonese cinema in the 1950s. By this manner, The House of 72 Tenants advertizes itself as just ‘harmless entertainment.’ Like all

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socially-aware directors of this period, Chor Yuen uses the past to comment on the present, as well as evoking awareness on the part of his audience that poor people were much more socially united in the past. Chor Yuen retains the theatrical structure of the original play by shooting the film on studio sets with very few exterior scenes outside the tenement itself. However, he cinematically opens out his adaptation by employing his distinctive use of mobile camera, deep-focus long shots, and mise en scène framings well known from his work at this time. The film’s narrative does operate very much like a play by dividing scenes into individual episodes, each concluding in a freeze frame. Like Hong Kong cinema’s later Chinese New Year films, The House of 72 Tenants features a virtual gallery of contemporary-era stars, such as Yueh Hua (playing Pak Koo’s nemesis Fat Chai) and Lydia Shum, in its ensemble. Others appear such as those from the popular television series Enjoy Yourself. Chor introduces each well-known star with a caption listing their name and the character they play. This technique not only evokes titles employed in silent cinema, but also well-known theatrical forms of recognition whereby audiences applaud stars when they first appear on stage. Tenants recognize the bad social conditions motivating robbery – ‘It’s the economy. People turn to crime’ – and collectively pool their resources even if it involves precious medicine money to help consumptive unemployed graduate Mr Han, whose wife has to work as a hostess. They also rally to prevent an elderly man from being evicted. ‘How will we live if we don’t help each other?’ is one of the many meaningful lines in a film having much to say about the many losers in Hong Kong’s developing capitalist economy, making it much more than a warmhearted comedy.

Tony Williams

Intimate Partners Nan xiong nan di Studio/ Distributor:

Kong Ngee Co. Director:

Chun Kim Producer:

Hoh Kai-Wing Screenwriters:

Foh Sam Cho Kei

Synopsis Intimate Partners is adapted from a popular ‘three dime novel’ of the same title. The story revolves around two down-and-out buddies. The former is streetwise and quick-witted, while the latter is naive and kind-hearted. This oddball duo goes through ups and downs and eventually gets their break in life. This combo is the archetypal ‘Laurel and Hardy’ or ‘Odd Couple’ of Cantonese cinema.

Critique Of the 85 films produced by Kong Ngee studio from 1955 to 1968 (excluding works by subsidiaries like Yuet Ngee Motion Picture Production Company), the directorial output of Chun Kim and Chan Man together accounted for nearly half of the total. Although Chun Kim’s career at Kong Ngee took off earlier than Chan Man’s,

Comedy/Musical 205

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Cinematographer:

Chan Kon Art Director:

Leung Hoi-saan Editors:

Tang Kon Gwok Keung Duration:

101 minutes Genre:

Comedy Cast:

Patrick Tse Yin Nam Hung Wu Fung Kong Suet Geung Chung-Ping Year:

1960 Location:

Hong Kong

the duo worked in complete harmony. Chun Kim, bright and selfexpressive, was willing to provide backseat support to Chan Man. Their complementary roles made them ‘intimate partners’ during their time working at Kong Ngee. Chun Kim was sensitive and emotional, while Chan Man liked reasoning and was more rational. Although the latter usually showed a preference for didacticism, his works sometimes also revealed his wittier side. Chun Kim might well have unplugged Chan Man’s hidden potential for whimsy and wit. Before Chun Kim’s Kong Ngee phase, he was generally regarded as a director of romantic drama, but his later endeavours demonstrated that he was equally clever at sparkling comedies. Kong Ngee studio was originally a distributor and owner of cinema chains in Singapore and Malaysia. It established Hong Kong arms in 1955, and due to its close ties with Singapore, the films Kong Ngee produced contained transnational elements. The studio showed a preference for westernized and fashionable locations by making urban romances. While other studios like MP&GI and Shaw Brothers were less concerned with adapting local novels, Kong Ngee, with Chun Kim as its leader, was able to transform lowbrow ‘three dime novels’ into several fashionable film series. Although Chun’s early works were laced with lyricism, they were surprisingly free of sentimental melancholia, unlike many of the Cantonese films of the same period which were greatly influenced by the literary style of the May Fourth School. Chun’s works radiated with a wit that exposed his affinity with the Lingnan culture, and they also retained the down-to-earth, popular appeal of paperback novels with a ‘modern’ packaging. Chun Kim’s use of background music, interior monologues, and seamless editing was rarely found among works by his local peers. These techniques were most effectively applied to create a light-hearted comic rhythm and clever double entendre in Intimate Partners. For example, the interior monologues of Chui Choi, one of the main characters, were frequently crosscut with other characters’ dialogue to create visual and verbal puns. Intimate Partners also displays Chun’s verbal alacrity. His instinctively playful expressiveness with the Cantonese dialect enabled him to pepper dialogue with quirky colloquialisms and interesting repartee. Some slang words in his dialogue were not widely heard in mainstream Cantonese films of that era but culled from hip talk of the day. The integration of everyday dialect into the script enhanced the modern atmosphere of the Hong Kong society portrayed by the Kong Ngee studio. Intimate Partners scored a big hit in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, and ranks as one of the company’s all-time classics.

Grace Mak Yan-yan

206  China

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Our Sister Hedy Si qian jin Studio/Distributor:

MP&GI Director:

Doe Ching Producers:

Robert Chung Stephen Soong Screenwriter:

Doe Ching Cinematographer:

Charles Tung Art Director:

Rex Fay Editor:

Wang Zhaoxi Duration:

114 minutes Genre:

Comedy Cast:

Jeanette Lin Tsui Julie Yeh Feng Peter Chen Ho Mu Hong Dolly Soo Fung Year:

1957 Location:

Hong Kong

Synopsis A year in the lives of the Kong sisters sees heartbreak, jealousy, matrimony and humour. Hilda, the eldest, constantly has her boyfriends stolen by vampish second sister Helen. Youngest sister Susu, not yet eighteen, is the first to be married, further rocking the wedding boat in the Kong household. In the middle of it all is meddling third sister Hedy, whose good intentions lead her to playing matchmaker, but distract her from her own romantic pursuits. Swarming the Kong nest are young men taken and rejected at the whims of the sisters, as well as the quiet, widowed patriarch who provides moral support when sisterly quibbles get out of hand.

Critique Along with Shaw Brothers, the MP&GI studio was famous for Mandarin-dialect comedies about urban life, and Doe Ching’s Our Sister Hedy is one of MP&GI’s most enduring successes. The film shares with the wenyi (romance melodrama) genre many of the concerns regarding ethical female behaviour, but more memorable than the ultimate resolution is the film’s lively depiction of the four daughters, each with their own take on what a young woman should be in post-war Hong Kong. Hilda is a soft, cautious talker. As the eldest daughter in a family without a mother, she chooses her words conservatively and seriously, always hesitating in life to maintain a good example for her younger sisters. When she finally smiles, the room lights up, and youth returns to her face. Second sister Helen has a sinewy way of talking, sneakily changing volumes and pacing mid-sentence, as if trying to maintain the upper hand in any conversation. She is a seductress, using her voice (and her body) to hook any handsome man that comes her (or her sisters’) way. Played by Julie Yeh Feng, Helen holds her chin up, with eyes forwards, as if always on the prowl. In another movie, she would be the femme fatale, though director Doe Ching does find moments in this romantic comedy for her to perch in noir shadows. Third sister Hedy, played by Jeanette Lin Tsui with so much verve that her character made it into the film’s English title, is a tomboy with Audrey Hepburn hair and a schoolgirl blouse. She is a straight talker, spitting crazy schemes and sisterly advice with verbal velocity and directness. Hedy brings energy to everything she does (her eyes dart about quickly and she never walks when she could scurry), and brings energy to everyone else (she cooks up plans for her sisters and uses song to teach her young students to fence). Equally at home playing mixed doubles on a tennis court and playing chess with her widowed father, Hedy loves company and company loves her, though her stubbornness in her principles means she often oversteps by meddling in her sisters’ business. Lastly, youngest sister Susu (also called Hazel) is Hedy’s opposite: a slow talker with a blank way of enunciating each word. If Hedy has a stockpile of sneaky smiles that say she is up to no good, Susu’s

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one-note grin says she is game for anything, be it playing along with Hedy’s schemes or assenting to marriage. Mother, vamp, tomboy, and innocent make for enough amusement to fill a feature, a sequel (Wedding Bells for Hedy [1959]), and a loose remake (Eat Drink Man Woman [1994]). In Our Sister Hedy, the comedy frequently derives from the characters’ interactions with the modern world. The film is a comedy of consumption (as in the opening scene, where a shop-owner allows the sisters to independently and unknowingly buy their father the same birthday gift) and a comedy of technology (as in the multiple moments of eavesdropping during phone conversations). In fact, many of the film’s simple pleasures come from the splendours of consumerist modernity. The Kong family has a giant, high-ceilinged house, unusual in cramped Hong Kong but not unusual in the cinema of MP&GI. They throw a Christmas party complete with decorations, music, a Christmas tree and dancing. The daughters are impeccably fashionable in their own ways: Hilda with her white gloves, Helen with her come-hither earrings and bared shoulders, Hedy with her shorts and pants, and Hazel with her teenage plaid. Marital success is measured by cosmopolitan achievement. After losing two previous boyfriends to Helen, Hilda snags a jet-set Europeeducated scientist living in Macao. Hazel marries an airplane pilot, and proves her worth at the end of the film by becoming a flight attendant. For 1950s Hong Kong, Our Sister Hedy represented a utopic vision of family and career improvized in a moment of social change, with all the youthful flair of its titular heroine.

Brian Hu

The Wedding Banquet Xi Yan Studio/Distributor:

Ang Lee Productions Central Motion Pictures Corporation Good Machine The Samuel Goldwyn Company (US) Director:

Ang Lee Producers:

Ang Lee James Schamus Ted Hope

208  China

Synopsis Gao Wai-Tung lives with his white, long-term boyfriend Simon in New York. Under pressure from his parents in Taiwan to get married, he decides to wed his female tenant and impoverished Chinese art student Wei Wei when his parents come to visit. Wei Wei, an illegal immigrant, duly agrees in order to stay in America. This culminates in a huge banquet given to celebrate the ‘marriage.’ Both drunk, Wei Wei ends up sleeping with Wai-Tung on their wedding night and becomes pregnant. Simon is livid, resulting in a huge row between the two lovers. The old couple’s departure is delayed by Mr Gao’s stroke. Wai-Tung comes out to Mrs Gao who speaks to Wei Wei and persuades her to keep the baby. Mr Gao later reveals to Simon that he can understand English and therefore knows that Wai-Tung is gay, and the reason for their argument. Nevertheless, there is an unspoken agreement between all the players. As everyone gathers at the airport to see Mr and Mrs Gao off home to Taiwan, the old couple maintain that they are happy with their son’s marriage and imminent grand-parenthood. Simon, Wai-Tung and Wei Wei compromise to become a ‘family.’

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Screenwriters:

Ang Lee James Schamus Neil Peng Cinematographer:

Lin Jong Art Director:

Rachael Weinzimer Editor:

Tim Squyres Duration:

106 minutes Genre:

Comedy Cast:

Winston Chao Mitchell Lichtenstein May Chin Lung Sihung Kuei Ya-lei Year:

1993 Location:

Taiwan

Critique Ang Lee describes The Wedding Banquet as a gay film. Together with Brokeback Mountain (2005) Lee shows a considered interest in gay identity but the narrative of The Wedding Banquet resolves in maintaining the illusion of a heterosexual family. The apologia for Mr and Mrs Gao’s inability to accept their son’s homosexuality comes from both their Chineseness and age/generational difference. Lee’s own cameo appearance as a wedding guest reminds the audiences that they are ‘witnessing the results of five thousand years of sexual repression.’ The central concern of his (Chinese) ‘Father Knows Best’ trilogy (the other two films being Pushing Hands [1992], and Eat Drink Man Woman [1994]) is the social constraints upon the Chinese family. In contrast to its New York setting, the Chineseness of The Wedding Banquet is connected to Taiwan as ‘home,’ an abstract and distant concept. Wei Wei further acts as a counterpoint to Wai-Tung and his family in a variety of ways. She is artistic but poor (perhaps a Mainland stereotype), as opposed to Wai-Tung, the Taiwanese American slumlord. She is modern while Mrs Gao is traditional. Even this modern woman fails to fully accept Wai-Tung’s sexuality as she claims during seduction, ‘I am going to liberate you.’ Other than the amount of alcohol and the heightened sexual overtones of the nuptial games, she may also be pressurized to consummate her fake marriage by the care her surrogate parents show to her, and so continuing the patrilinear line. Ang Lee’s depiction of the gay couple mirrors the traditional familial roles, with Simon and Wai-Tung’s relationship being as close to the monogamous and middle-class family as possible. Simon is the one who can cook, looks after Mr Gao after his stroke, and in return the one the old man confides in. The cross-cultural relationship between Mr Gao and Simon echoes that between the father and the white daughter-in-law in Pushing Hands. As such, Simon seems to occupy the role of the ‘first wife,’ while Wei Wei has to learn how to be a daughter-in-law after accidentally becoming one. The family in the film is therefore both a performance and performative. Mrs Gao believes that Wai-Tung has turned gay as a result of over-exposure to American culture and makes him promise not to tell his father. Mr Gao reveals to Simon that he has already figured it out but kept quiet so he could have his grandson. Despite tacitly acknowledging Wai-Tung’s homosexuality, the elderly couple’s wish to continue the family line takes priority as they remind their son of the hardship of Mr Gao Senior’s escape from Mainland China to Taiwan. The responsibility weighs on Wai-Tung as he is an only child due to a difficult birth. Mrs Gao cries after the ‘shabby wedding’ at the registry office because she will not be able to face friends and family, so the ungrateful son Wai-Tung is forced to give a grand banquet with copious amount of drinking, noise, banter and disturbance. The wedding banquet is the ultimate performative façade for the heterosexual family. The performance comes to an end as everyone gathers around the wedding photographs at the climax. The old couple are happy even

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though they know the underlying truth they leave behind in America, as Mr Gao remarks, ‘All the weeds will come back when I’m gone.’ The freeze-frame at the end as Mr and Mrs Gao walk down the tunnel and are stopped by airport security may be a sign that they are leaving a world they do not belong to (in terms of nationality, sexualities and the young generation). The fact that Mr Gao holds his hands up signals a degree of surrender to the Port Authority, symbolic of the West, that permits his safe return to the East he knows best.

Leung Wing-Fai

The Wild, Wild Rose Ye mei gui zhi lian Studio/Distributor:

MP&GI Director:

Wang Tianlin Producer:

Robert Chung (Zhong Qiwen) Screenwriter:

Qin Yu (Yifu) Cinematographer:

Huang Ming Art Directors:

Fei Ba-yi Bao Tian-ming Editor:

Wang Zhao-xi Duration:

128 minutes Genre:

Musical noir Cast:

Grace Chang Zhang Yang Wang Lai Su Feng Tian Qing

210  China

Synopsis Unemployed teacher Hanhua stands with fiancée Suxin outside the New Ritz nightclub where he reluctantly accepts work as a pianist, replacing Old Wang, whose wife is ill. Inexperienced Hanhua is mesmerized by singer Sijia’s ‘Habanera’ performance. A catfight ensues between Sijia and singer Meimei; Hanhua’s intervention angers her. A wager is struck between Sijia and her bandmates that Sijia can seduce Hanhua in ten days. Meanwhile, Fat Lin, sugar daddy of Sijia’s roommate Sherry, desires Sijia. She refuses, until she learns of Old Wang’s dire straits, so she sells herself to provide for his family. Sijia’s wild and seductive ways fail to win over Hanhua, but her good turn wins his heart, and surprising herself, she loves him too. They vow love forever, but he warns her never to leave him for another or he will kill her. When the Cyclops, her criminal husband, reappears, a melee ensues, and the couple flees, believing Hanhua has killed him. Instead, he is only injured. Sijia waits while Hanhua does jail time. Reunited, the couple’s situation worsens as Hanhua’s drinking increases. Sherry discovers a destitute Sijia, and, disguising Sijia as Madame Butterfly, she arranges an audition for her. An overnight sensation, Sijia convincingly breaks with Hanhua, saying she has a new boyfriend supporting her, but really to save him from the Cyclops. Suxin and Hanhua’s mother also know of Sijia’s good heart, but inadvertently lead Hanhua to her at the new club, where he strangles her.

Critique Over the opening credits, Deng Sijia, the ‘Wild Rose’ of the title, dances onstage, with her fancy footwork in close-up; this is her film, from start to (her) finish, and as such, she follows the line of doomed songstresses established by Zhou Xuan and Bai Guang. Mandarin musicals and melodramas dominated in Hong Kong from the 1940s into the 1960s, and the influence was so strong that a common saying was ‘a song in every film.’ What makes this one distinctive is that it is a musical noir. Director Wong Tin-lam, in collaboration with screenwriter Qin Yu and MP&GI general manager Robert Chung, chose the nightclub setting of many American films noirs. Shot

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Year:

1960 Location:

Hong Kong

in black-and-white, with creatively suggestive mise en scène and editing, the film moves in and out of shadows and cigarette smoke, exploiting low-key lighting with strong contrasts and stage lighting bringing various elements in and out of play. The songstress not only claims the stage space as her own, but invades the club space as she interacts with its clientele, and she is inexorably linked to disreputableness and danger, setting the tone and establishing pungent atmospherics where seduction, crime, and even love happen. Hardcore noir like Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) comes to mind. In that film, femme fatale Rita Hayworth performs a titillating ‘Put the Blame on Mame’ cum striptease, enticing men. Similarly, Rose manipulates her audience and toys with men, in particular Hanhua, making every word she sings count, from the expanding ‘L’Amour’ to the animalistic ‘Love’ and ‘Men,’ more spat out than sung in the ‘Habanera’ from Bizet’s Carmen. She is aggressive, sexy, and on the prowl. The film-makers both satisfy the prevailing norm of strong female characters in an era when women ruled at the Hong Kong box office, and play with the makeup of the western noir protagonist, erasing the hardboiled male detective and replacing him with a strong but ultimately doomed woman. Following the opening overture/credits, we get six musical numbers, mostly adapted from western opera, including Bizet’s Carmen, Verdi’s Rigoletto, Lehar’s The Merry Widow, and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, as well as a flamenco dance and a shi dai qu (Mandarin pop) number, ‘Jajambo,’ defining Hong Kong as an assimilation of East and West. The rearranged opera numbers modified rhythms but kept melodies intact and recognizable, and the lyrics close to the original but adapted to fit the themes of passion and destruction in relation to the modern, urbanized songstress. Chang’s singing and dancing strengths were highlighted, and because of her classical foundation and further training, she delivered. ‘Jajambo’ moves to the mambo beat of the modern. The operas, using diatonic scales and chromatic tone colouration, provide not only a nostalgic western element (established operas from a cultural canon used on a mid-twentieth century stage) but quote the exoticized East (the western operas’ depictions of and borrowings from the East) and Sinicized West (modernization transferred to Chinese tradition and culture). The ‘Habanera’ from Bizet’s Carmen is sung in Mandarin and French; it dominates the film and establishes Rose as a wild seductress. But, as the final opera introduced, Puccini’s Madame Butterfly gets the last word, its suicide number achingly heartbreaking, due to Chang’s singing and acting abilities; close-ups reveal the tamed flower is well aware of the song’s meaning for her after sacrificing her happiness to spare her lover’s life. Ironically, Chang, cast against type as the bad woman, emerges triumphant and memorable in a woman’s picture in the mould of strong woman/weak male plotting in which she is destined to suffer at the hands of the very love she belittles for the majority of the picture. However, the unforgettable image and sound of her effervescent celebration of a woman in love in ‘Jajambo’ remains indelible, a happy ending, in a way.

Lisa Odham Stokes Comedy/Musical 211

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You Shoot, I Shoot Maai hung paak yan Studios/Distributors:

Golden Harvest Linksun International Director:

Pang Ho-cheung Producers:

Raymond Chow Pang Ho-cheung Vincent Kok Screenwriters:

Pang Ho-cheung Vincent Kok Cinematographer:

O Sing-pui Art Director:

Bill Lui Editor:

Wenders Li Duration:

95 minutes Genre:

Comedy Cast:

Eric Kot Cheung Tat-ming Audrey Fong Miao Feilin Asuka Higuchi Year:

2001 Location:

Hong Kong

212  China

Synopsis Bart, dressed à la Alain Delon in Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967), works hard to appear a slick assassin, but is regularly put in his place by a slumping economy which has him playing a door-to-door salesman, negotiating prices for hits and cold-calling potential clients. Business is so bad that Bart takes up a special assassination request that requires him to film a hit as he carries it out. After a botched attempt at filming it himself, Bart decides to hire a New York Film Academy-trained assistant director named Chuen to tape his killings. As long as they can differentiate their product in a cramped economy, Bart and Chuen secure contract after contract, culminating in an increasingly-complicated hit commissioned by the mob.

Critique Hong Kong cinema had not seen anything quite like Pang Ho-cheung’s You Shoot, I Shoot. As a declaration of a young, hip independent voice, it was unlike anything since Cecille Tang Shu Shuen’s The Arch (1970) or Tsui Hark’s The Butterfly Murders (1979). As a black comedy, it was pretty much in a league of its own. Though it does have some of Hong Kong’s characteristic broad comedy (mostly through the parody genre and through association with star Eric Kot), You Shoot, I Shoot has more in common with juvenile comedy from the West, with its pot humour and Tarantinoesque indulgence in zany violence. The film itself is one extended pun on the English word ‘shoot,’ referring to firing a gun, filming a scene, and much more subtly, ejaculating. Collectively, the three represent a postmodern take on frat-boy antics, a sensibility that would continue to mark Pang’s later works, though with varying degrees of self-reflexivity. That You Shoot, I Shoot is also a clever commentary on postfinancial crisis Hong Kong – the struggling film industry in particular – only makes the hijinks even more hilarious. In the film, the hitman business is sinking. Killers offer discount cards and come up with enticing slogans (‘the more you kill, the more you save!’). In-laws request family discounts on killings. The movie business is just as bad. Everything is run by gangsters and pornographers, and creativity is at a standstill. The only artistic outlet for an aspiring film-maker is in collaborating on commissioned works of real-life assassination. The creative juices triggered by artistic freedom actually lead to a modicum of financial success, and in one of the film’s most hilarious sequences, we see the film-maker and the assassin upgrading their film equipment and blocking elaborate scenes with Lego pieces. In a world where everything is a media event and every job requires an audio-visual pitch, it is not enough for the assassin to shoot a video. He must shoot it well: it must be polished and channel Martin Scorsese. You Shoot, I Shoot is particularly perceptive about the fact that in such an environment, the ability to package a job is often more important than doing the job well to begin with.

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Meanwhile, You Shoot, I Shoot takes pleasure in the miseries of underemployment by comically demythologizing the assassination and film businesses. ‘You’ve never seen me eat,’ says Alain Delon in a dream sequence that leads the killer Bart to realize that being an assassin is not all glamour. ‘Killers wear PJs too,’ says Bart’s wife. The sheer mundaneness of being a killer-for-hire is made funny in Godardian down-time, as when Bart has dinner with his crazy in-laws. Film-makers have it worse. They are kicked around by their superiors and resort to drug dealing to pay the bills. Life is only redeemed by the presence of beautiful, sexuallyavailable women, in this case a Japanese actress the director ‘saves’ from porn. After You Shoot, I Shoot, Pang specialized in comedies of men’s idealism about women (AV [2005], Trivial Matters [2007]) and men’s absolute fear of women (Men Suddenly in Black [2003], Exodus [2007]). You Shoot, I Shoot is definitely in the former category, and for all of its cleverness about Hong Kong society, its borderline-misogynistic take on female subservience reminds us that the film is, at heart, an adolescent male fantasy. In fact, it is precisely that adolescent energy that inspires Pang to play his tricks and unleash them with so much inspiration. The film’s hilarious animated title sequence captures that energy best. Assassination is mass-produced, and decapitations and groin attacks get their own corporate logo. With You Shoot, I Shoot, Pang Ho-cheung proclaims himself CEO of commercial mischief in Hong Kong.

Brian Hu

Comedy/Musical 213

ocumentar

Mainland China and Hong Kong

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1428 Studio/Distributor:

CNEX Inc Director:

Du Haibin Producers:

Ben Tsiang Du Haibin Cinematographer:

Liu Ai’guo Editors:

Mary Stephen Du Haibin Duration:

116 minutes/160 minutes (director’s cut) Year:

2009 Location:

Mainland China

Critique On 12 May 12 2008, at 14:28 CST, an earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale hit Sichuan Province in China, leaving an estimated 100,000 people dead. Du Haibin’s 1428 documents what the film-maker saw during two separate trips to Beichuan in Sichuan. The film divides into two roughly equal parts, with the first focusing on images shot during the first trip, ten days after the disaster, and the second on images recorded 210 days after the disaster. While Du’s interest in exploring responses to the disaster that were not part of ‘the mainstream media record’ (Du 2009) remains constant throughout, each of the film’s parts has its own focus and indeed its own editing style. In the first the focus is on how the survivors of the earthquake make sense of the devastation and their loss, and on the ways they find to survive in the wake of the disaster. A mysterious, nameless and dishevelled vagabond-like figure, who wanders into framings, who stares into the camera, and whom the camera follows as he marches through a town reduced to rubble, provides a counterpoint, often through montage, to the various stories that emerge through Du’s interaction with the survivors. In the second part of the film the focus shifts to the ways in which survivors sought opportunities in the disaster through, for example, the use of marketing techniques to frame new buildings as tourist spots and through the selling of various types of disaster memorabilia to tourists eager to see the sites of earlier death and devastation. As our attention turns to the situation 210 days after the disaster, we find that the vagabond-like figure, with his matted hair, torn clothes and bare feet, has been given a name (Yang Bing-bing) and a context, and that his story is now connected to those of others. In the second part of the film Du and Mary Stephen (well known for her editing of Eric Rohmer’s films) set aside montage in favour of an approach that redefines the space around the dishevelled vagabond by means of ‘a Bazinian use of the depth of field’ (Reynaud 2009). And this in turn allows the film-maker to articulate the film’s central point, which is that the situation in Beichuan, Sichuan before the disaster was anything but promising, for reasons having to do, we are led to believe, with human nature and the challenging realities of contemporary China. Off-screen the film-maker asks the father of Yang Bing-bing a key question: ‘What is the difference between your life before and after the earthquake?’ The response given is telling: ‘Almost the same. Our life is getting better now. We have more clothes and quilts now. The money is distributed by the government. We got more this month.’ In terms of the established types of documentary film-making, Du Haibin’s 1428 combines elements of direct cinema with a more interactive approach, but complicates all this through the montagestyle editing used in connection with the vagabond in the first part of the film. The international cut of 1428 (116 minutes) has been shown at many international film festivals and won the prestigious

KJ: Music and Life, Edko Films/The Kobal Collection.

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Orizzonti Prize for Best Documentary at the 66th Venice Film Festival.

Mette Hjort References Du Haibin (2009) ‘Director’s statement,’ 1428, http://1428.cnex.org. cn/dytd.html. Accessed 23 December 2010. Reynaud, Bérénice (2009) ‘Men Won’t Cry – Traces of a Repressive Past: the 28th Vancouver International Film Festival,’ Senses of Cinema 54, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2010/festivalreports/men-won%E2%80%99t-cry-%E2%80%93-traces-of-arepressive-past-the-28th-vancouver-international-film-festival/. Accessed 23 December 2010.

KJ: Music and Life Studio:

CNEX Inc Distributors:

CNEX Inc Edko Films Ltd Director:

King Wai Cheung Producers:

Ben Tsiang King Wai Cheung Cinematographers:

Harry Lee King Wai Cheung Tam Tsz Kit Editor:

King Wai Cheung Consultant:

Ann Hui Duration:

91 minutes Persons:

Ka Jeng Wong Ms Nancy Loo

216  China

Critique KJ: Music and Life focuses on the musical prodigy Ka Jeng Wong, at the ages of 11 and 17. The film opens with sequences documenting KJ’s trip to the Czech Republic, along with his father, where the young boy performed Beethoven’s Concerto for Piano No. 1 with a professional orchestra. Cheung begins by establishing the prodigious nature of the young KJ’s talent, the boy’s deep attachment to his teacher, Nancy Loo, and the father’s enormous investment in his son’s musical achievements. Moving back and forth in time, Cheung goes on to suggest an argument, not only about KJ’s relation to music and life, but about the impact of the competition- and exam-oriented approach to parenting and childhood that is a defining feature of Hong Kong life today. KJ’s talent and achievements as an 11-year-old may surpass the norm to a considerable degree, but the troubled teenager’s deep rejection of an essentially competitive approach to musical practice is anything but unusual in a Hong Kong context, where young players regularly pass the highest of examinations only to reject the very instrument in question, and the musical culture with which it is associated. The 17-year-old KJ, a wayward student at Hong Kong’s prestigious Diocesan Boy’s School, explains his own refusal of the life of a concert pianist in terms of its putative irreconcilability with ‘being a human being’ and ‘leading a meaningful life.’ The brilliance of Cheung’s film has a lot to do with the way in which it ultimately reveals the deeply personal context for the troubled teen’s strident stance. In one key scene the 17-year-old expresses his contempt for his father’s failings as a human being, failings that cannot be exonerated by the successes of affluence: the father, we learn, was a successful doctor, but also a philandering husband whose deceptions produced a broken home. The scene was the first to be shot by Cheung after a shooting hiatus of several years and was prompted by the director’s casual question

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Year:

2008 Location:

Hong Kong

about the reasons for KJ’s move from an upscale apartment in Kowloon Tong to a west-facing (and therefore, as any Hong Konger will know, hot) apartment in West Kowloon. Surprised by the response to his casual question, and by its intensity and length, Cheung claims to have hesitated for up to a year about whether to include the material in the final edit. The film would without a doubt have been far less interesting and moving − and arguably also less ethical in its thrust − had Cheung decided to exclude it.1 The absence of the mother, striking throughout the film, takes on new meaning as a result of the scene. KJ is indeed a film about music and life, as its subtitle suggests, but it is also a film about the existential havoc that parental failings create, be they a matter of spousal betrayal or of ambitions so single-minded and strong that they ultimately become childhood-denying. Cheung selected KJ from amongst twelve exceptionally gifted young musicians, and cites a strong sense of affinity for the boy as his reason for having done so. Indeed, Cheung sees affinity as a basic principle underwriting his practice as a documentary film-maker.2 With an eight-month run in three Hong Kong cinemas, an unprecedented achievement for a Hong Kong documentary, KJ: Music and Life made Hong Kong film history. The film also distinguished itself at festivals, winning the Best Documentary, Best Editor, and Best Music awards at the 46th Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival, the Best Film award at the 16th Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards, and a Best New Director award for King Wai Cheung at the 29th Hong Kong Film Awards. KJ: Music and Life is a CNEX (Looking for Chinese2.0) production and thus part of an initiative that aims to develop and promote documentary film-making in Taiwan and Hong Kong and on the Chinese mainland.

Mette Hjort Notes 1. Personal communication. Cheung credits film scholar Chris Berry for having helped him to understand the ethical import of including the material. 2. Personal communication.

Though I am Gone Wo sui si qu Distributor:

Visible Record

Critique Though I Am Gone is a documentary produced by Hu Jie in 2006. Hu was originally a painter, but shifted to video as his main medium in order to document different social issues in China. His focus on social issues has attracted unwelcome attention from Chinese officials. The Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival (Yunfest) in 2007, for example, was interrupted because of the inclusion of the film. Though I am Gone tells the story of how the vice principal of a school, Bian Zhongyun, was beaten to death by her students at the

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Director:

Hu Jie Cinematographer:

Hu Jie Editor:

Hu Jie Duration:

68 minutes Year:

2006 Location:

Mainland China

very beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China. The woman’s husband, Wang Jingyao, a scholar of Modern History, survived. But Bian’s death left him struggling to deal with almost unbearable grief. In front of the camera, he begins to relive the traumatic events, and, it would seem, to transfer the burden of memory to the film-maker and viewers. In the film’s final sequence, Wang shares the contents of a chest with the film-maker. These include the bloodied clothes worn by Bian the day she was beaten to death, and her watch, which had stopped at some point during the beating. The film concludes with a long list of names of victims of the Cultural Revolution. This visual element is contrasted with the soundtrack that accompanies it: a propagandistic radio broadcast from the time of the Cultural Revolution. In terms of documentary types, Hu’s Though I Am Gone can be said to deploy a range of strategies that go well beyond those associated with an expository mode. As a result of the film-maker’s use of different types of materials and a variety of audiovisual methods, Though I Am Gone becomes a formally and aesthetically compelling collage consisting of facts, memories and associations. The film opens with an image of a clock, in colour. This image fades to black-and-white and is followed by another black-andwhite image of a vintage folding camera. The ticking sound of the clock and the clicking sound of the camera’s shutter produce a hypnotic atmosphere that sets the stage for Wang’s recollection of his painful memories of the past. The image of the vintage camera recurs at various points throughout the film, a reminder of Wang’s own documentary efforts. As he himself says, with reference to the photographs that he took of the large character posters denouncing his wife and of his wife’s bludgeoned body, ‘I had to document the truth of history.’ The photos taken by Wang provide a deeply personal dimension to the film and stand in contrast to the various elements of the Cultural Revolution’s propagandistic discourse, as depicted through archival footage. Like other films about the Cultural Revolution, the archive footage in Though I am Gone shows the destruction of buildings and slogan shouting by young people waving Mao’s little red book. Archival materials drawn from government sources are clearly identified as such and thus clearly contrasted with other historical footage. As Wang’s intensely personal photos are brought together with archival images from the period, they make their way into the public domain where they begin to provide a record not only of the suffering of Bian and her family, but of the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution. Hu Jie’s Though I am Gone is a deeply moving documentary about a crucial period in China’s history and a stunning example of just how important a role such film-making has to play in contexts marked by personal and collective trauma.

Cheung Tit Leung

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References Li, Jie (2009) ‘Virtual Museums of Forbidden Memories: Hu Jie’s Documentary Films on the Cultural Revolution,’ Public Culture, 21: 3, pp. 539−49, available at: http://publicculture.org/articles/ view/21/3/virtual-museums-of-forbidden-memories-hu-jie-sdocumentary-films-on-the-cultural-revolution. Accessed 10 September 2010. Rui, Shen (2005) ‘To Remember History: Hu Jie Talks about His Documentaries,’ Senses of Cinema, http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/35/hu_jie_documentaries.html. Accessed 10 September 2010.

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recommen reading Berry, Chris (ed) (2008) Chinese Films in Focus II, Palgrave Macmillan: BFI. Berry, Chris & Farquhar, Mary Ann (2006) China on Screen: Cinema and Nation, New York: Columbia University Press. Berry, Chris & Lu Feii (eds) (2005) Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Berry, Chris (ed) (1991) Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, London: BFI. Berry, Michael (2005) Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Film-makers, New York: Columbia University Press. Bordwell, David (2011) Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment, 2nd edn, Madison, Wisconsin: Irvington Way Institute Press. Cheung, Esther MK & Yiu-wai, Chu (2004) Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Ciecko, Anne Tereska (ed) (2006) Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in a Global Frame, Oxford: Berg Publishing. Cornelius, Sheila & Haydn Smith, Ian (2002) New Chinese Cinema: Challenging Representations, New York: Columbia University Press. Curtin, Michael (2007) Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV, Berkeley: University of California Press. Davis, Darrell William & Yueh-yu Yeh, Emilie (2008) East Asian Screen Industries, London: BFI. Davis, Darrell William & Ru-Shou, Robert Chen (2007) Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity, and State of the Arts, New York: Routledge. Eleftheriotis, Dimitris & Needham, Gary (2006) Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fu, Poshek (2003) Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fu, Poshek & Desser, David (eds) (2000) The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hong, Guo-Juin (2011) Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hunt, Leon & Wing-Fai, Leung (eds) (2008) East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film, London & New York: I. B. Tauris. Kar, Law & Bren, Frank (2004) Hong Kong Cinema: A Cross-Cultural View, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Logan, Bey (1995) Hong Kong Action Cinema, London: Titan. Lu, Sheldon H & Jiayan, Mi (eds) (2009) Chinese Eco-Cinema In the Age of Environmental Challenge, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

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Lu, Sheldon (ed) (1997) Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Marchetti, Gina (2006) From Tian’anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989-1997, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Stokes, Lisa Odham & Hoover, Michael (1999) City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema, London: Verso. Tam, Kwok-kan & Dissanayake, Wimal (1998) New Chinese Cinema, New York: Oxford University Press. Teo, Stephen (2009) Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Teo, Stephen (1997) Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions, London: BFI. Xu, Gary G (2007) Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema, London: Rowman & Littlefield. Yang, Jeff (2003) Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Mainland Chinese Cinema, New York: Atria. Yau, Esther CM (ed) (2001) At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu & William Davis, Darrell (2005) Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, New York: Columbia University Press. Yip, June (2004) Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Zhang, Yingjin (2004) Chinese National Cinema, New York: Routledge.

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china cinema online Bright Lights Film Journal http://www.brightlightsfilm.com A site dedicated to cinema in general, Bright Lights Film Journal contains valuable material related to all aspects of Chinese cinema, including scholarly articles, festival reports, interviews, book reports, and other resources. Chinese Movie Database http://www.dianying.com/en A searchable database of films from Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The site also reports current industry news, with coverage of film festivals and award events. Directory of World Cinema http://worldcinemadirectory.org The official website for the Directory of World Cinema series, featuring biographical profiles of leading directors and critical reviews of films from around the globe. Film Business Asia http://www.filmbiz.asia/ An essential source of information about the Asian film industries, providing boxoffice statistics, industry updates, film reviews, and feature articles. Film Studies For Free http://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.com/ Devoted to cinema in general, this invaluable site includes well-compiled and useful links to articles on Chinese film. Hong Kong Cinemagic www.hkcinemagic.com A well-stocked database complemented by film and book reviews, festival reports, interviews with industry person, and informative articles in French and English.

Directory of World Cinema

Hong Kong Movie Database www.hkmdb.com A valuable database including data not only for Hong Kong films, but also for films from the PRC and Taiwan. The database is searchable by film title and personnel, and the site includes regular industry news and film reviews. Love Hong Kong Film www.lovehkfilm.com A lively site dedicated to Hong Kong and pan-Asian cinema. Love Hong Kong Film features archived interviews and articles, film reviews, and an A-Z of film stars complete with selected filmographies. Observations on Film Art: David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema www.davidbordwell.net An indispensible scholarly resource for devotees of cinema in general, with specialized essays and blog entries devoted to Asian film territories and film-makers. Taiwan Cinema http://www.taiwancinema.com Bilingual site equipped with a searchable database of Taiwanese films, news items on industry developments, interviews with local film-makers, and boxoffice data.

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test your knowledge Questions   1. Infernal Affairs was remade in the US under which title?  2. Hero, 2046, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon feature which female star?   3. Which Taiwanese leading man frequently appears in the films of Tsai Ming-liang?  4. Who directed Two Stage Sisters (1964) and The Legend of Tianyun Mountain (1981)?  5. Secret is the directorial debut of which Taiwanese pop idol?   6. The character of Song Lian was played by which Mainland star in Raise the Red Lantern?   7. Which film directed by Tsui Hark features an oracular talking stag?  8. Peter Chan’s The Warlords is a remake of which 1973 wuxia pian?   9. In what year did Zheng Junli’s Crows and Sparrows appear? 10. Who portrayed Chinese actress Ruan Lingyu in Stanley Kwan’s Centre Stage? 11. The credits of which cinematographer include In the Mood for Love and After This Our Exile? 12. To which Generation of Chinese cinema do Jia Zhangke and Zhang Yuan belong? 13. For which film did Wong Kar-wai receive the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival? 14. Which film carried the tagline, ‘Deadly Horrors! Dragon Thrills! The First Kung Fu Horror Spectacular!’? 15. Which actor stars in Chungking Express (1994), Hero (1997) and Confession of Pain (2006)? 16. Love in a Fallen City and Lust, Caution are adaptations of novels by which author? 17. Gallants is largely set in which popular Hong Kong setting? 18. In which film does Bruce Lee wear a pendant as a reminder to renounce violence? 19. Who directed Song of China and Confucius? 20. Which historical figure has been played by both Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Donnie Yen? 21. What Hou Hsiao-hsien film is narrated from the point of view of a fast-food waitress? 22. Kwan Tak-hing frequently portrayed which Chinese folk hero?

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23. Maggie Cheung, Michelle Yeoh, and Vivian Wu portray siblings in which historical biopic? 24. An errant chess piece sparks a government investigation in which Mainland comedy? 25. Which actor counts Infernal Affairs, Jiang Hu, Initial D, Trivial Matters, and The Spy Dad among his credits? 26. Betty Loh Ti and Ivy Ling Po formed a memorable partnership in which classic Huangmei Opera? 27. Which film marked the debut of Taiwanese director Lin Cheng-sheng? 28. Who composed music for The House of 72 Tenants, The Spiritual Boxer, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Spooky Encounters and Chungking Express? 29. Name the director of Big Shot’s Funeral, Cell Phone and The Banquet. 30. Aggie and Louis are the protagonists of which film directed by Yim Ho? 31. By what name was the Cathay Studio formerly known? 32. Cheng Pei-Pei, star of Come Drink With Me, portrays the vengeful Jade Fox in which celebrated wuxia pian? 33. What film pits Team Shaolin against Team Evil? 34. Li Yu’s Buddha Mountain stars Chen Bolin, Fan Bing Bing, and which veteran actor-director? 35. The eponymous Five Shaolin Masters are comprised of David Chiang, Ti Lung, Chi Kuan-chun, Meng Fei, and which other kung fu star? 36. What is the title of Stanley Kwan’s documentary about sexuality in Chinese film? 37. What modern policier features crooks named Strepsil, Aspirin and Panadol? 38. Wu Tianming, Zhang Yimou, Jia Zhangke, and Wang Xiaoshuai are alumni of which film-making school? 39. Which actor produced Fruit Chan’s first indie success, Made in Hong Kong? 40. Which Asian film-maker directed The Ice Storm, Sense and Sensibility, Brokeback Mountain and Hulk? 41. Who directed the Jackie Chan vehicle Twin Dragons? 42. Which Hong Kong studio produced Bruce Lee’s 1970s movies? 43. Whose observational documentary Secondary School explored public education in 2002? 44.  All Men Are Brothers is the sequel to which 1972 film? 45. Who composed the screenplays for the Taiwan New Cinema films City of Sadness, That Day at the Beach and The Sandwich Man? 46. The US credits of which action choreographer include The Matrix and Kill Bill? 47. In what Category III film does a murderous restaurateur pack his victims into buns? 48. Wang Tung’s ‘Taiwan Trilogy’ consists of Straw Man, Hill of No Return, and which other film? 49. In what Hong Kong-China coproduction are Donnie Yen and Nicholas Tse embroiled in an uprising against the Manchus? 50.  Born to Defend was directed by which Chinese action star?

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Answers   1. The Departed   2. Zhang Ziyi   3. Lee Kang-sheng   4. Xie Jin   5. Jay Chou   6. Gong Li   7. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame   8. The Blood Brothers   9. 1949 10. Maggie Cheung 11. Mark Lee Ping-bing 12. The Sixth Generation 13. Happy Together 14. The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (aka The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula) 15. Takeshi Kaneshiro 16. Eileen Chang 17. A teahouse 18. The Big Boss 19. Fei Mu 20. Ip Man 21. Daughter of the Nile 22. Wong Fei-hong (Huang Feihong) 23. The Soong Sisters 24. Black Cannon Incident 25. Edison Chen 26. The Love Eterne 27. A Drifting Life 28. Frankie Chan Fan Kei 29. Feng Xiaogang 30. Kitchen 31. MP&GI 32. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 33. Shaolin Soccer 34. Sylvia Chang 35. Alexander Fu Sheng 36. Yang and Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema 37. Yes Madam (aka In the Line of Duty 2) 38. Beijing Film Academy 39. Andy Lau 40. Ang Lee 41. Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark 42. Golden Harvest 43. Tammy Cheung 44. The Water Margin 45. Wu Nian-jen 46. Yuen Woo-ping 47. The Untold Story 48. Banana Paradise 49. Bodyguards and Assassins 50. Jet Li 226  China

notes on contributors The Editor Gary Bettinson (PhD, University of Kent) is Lecturer in Film Studies at Lancaster University, United Kingdom. His research on Chinese cinema has appeared in Asian Cinema, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Post Script, and the anthology Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Warren Buckland [ed], Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). He serves on the editorial board of the Asian Journal of Literature, Culture and Society. Contributors Bruce Bennett is lecturer in Film Studies in the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University. Publications include articles on celebrity culture and social class, cinema and the war on terror, general economy and film, and the co-edited collection, Cinema and Technology: Theories, Cultures, Practices (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008). He is currently completing a monograph on the films of Michael Winterbottom (Wallflower). Adam Bingham has a PhD in Asian, specifically Japanese, cinema, from the University of Sheffield, where he also taught Film Studies between 2005-08. He is currently teaching film at Edge Hill University, in addition to writing regularly for CineAction, Cineaste, Asian Cinema, Electric Sheep and Senses of Cinema. He is the editor of the forthcoming critical directories on East Europe and Indian cinema, and has contributed to other volumes, including Japan, Sweden, Great Britain and Italy. Frank Bren, Australian-born (1943) actor, playwright and author is a Film Animation graduate of the London International Film School (1975−76). A historian and essayist, often on Chinese/other cinemas, he co-authored with Law Kar and Sam Ho Hong Kong Cinema: A Cross-Cultural View (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004), following his earlier published history of Polish cinema in the 1980s. He is completing a biography of French comic film-maker and clown Pierre Etaix to be followed by a ‘biopic’ (as book and script) of Chinese cinema’s greatest early female director, American Esther Eng. Esther MK Cheung is currently Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Director of the Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures

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at the University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Fruit Chan’s ‘Made in Hong Kong’ (Hong Kong University Press, 2009) and In Pursuit of Independent Visions in Hong Kong Cinema (in Chinese) (Joint Publishing, 2010), editor and co-editor of four anthologies which include Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema (in English) (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Edge (Hong Kong University Press, 2011). Her essays have appeared in Cultural Studies, The International Journal of the Humanities, Studies on Asia, Jump Cut, China Perspectives and anthologies on Hong Kong/Chinese cinema, literature and cultural studies. Cheung Tit Leung is a PhD candidate in the Department of Visual Studies at Lingnan University. Cheung was born in Hong Kong and received his Bachelor degree in Visual Studies. He is a documentary film-maker and practitioner who contributes to the local art scene. His research interests include documentary studies, film festival studies, visual culture and anthropology. Lin Feng completed her PhD in Film Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her PhD thesis examines how the cross-media construction and distribution of Chinese film star Chow Yun-fat’s public image reveals the socially- and culturallyspecified perception of a Chinese man’s gender, racial and cultural identity. She has published a few articles and delivered conference papers on Chow’s stardom, Chinese masculinity and transnational cinema. Currently, she is teaching a course at the Broadway Cinema & Media Centre on the topic of the construction of Shanghai’s urban culture and space in Chinese cinema. Kenneth E Hall (PhD, University of Arizona, 1986; MA, University of NC-Chapel Hill, 1978) is Professor of Spanish at East Tennessee State University. He has taught at the University of North Dakota and at Wake Forest University. His publications include John Woo’s ‘The Killer’ (Hong Kong University Press, 2009), Stonewall Jackson and Religious Faith in Military Command (McFarland, 2005), John Woo: The Films (McFarland, 1999), and Guillermo Cabrera Infante and the Cinema (Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 1989). Dr Hall is also a regular contributor to Studies in the Western. He lives with his family in Johnson City, Tennessee. Marisa C Hayes regularly writes and lectures about the links between performance art and cinema, chiefly the history of dance films. She co-directs the International Video Dance Festival of Burgundy, an international platform for dance films at the National Theatre in Burgundy, France. Recently, she gave a series of lectures about dance films at the University of Burgundy and contributed to the dance research journal of the French National Dance Biennale and the Directory of World Cinema: Spain. In 2011 she was named a cultural ambassador to Hong Kong by the Regional Government of Burgundy. Mette Hjort is Chair Professor and Head of Visual Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong and Co-director of the Centre for Cinema Studies. She is also an Honorary Professor at CEMES (University of Copenhagen) and an Affiliate Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She has published a number of books, including Stanley Kwan’s ‘Centre Stage’ (Hong Kong University Press, 2006) and, more recently, Lone Scherfig’s ‘Italian for Beginners’ (University of Washington Press & Museum Tusculanum, 2010). Her current research focuses on environmental aesthetics, practice-based approaches to film education, and documentary film in Hong Kong and on the Chinese mainland. 228  China

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Brian Hu earned his PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is currently the artistic director of the San Diego Asian Film Foundation. His writings on Asian cinemas have appeared in Screen, Post Script, Film Quarterly, and the Journal of Chinese Cinemas. He is working on a manuscript about cosmopolitanism and cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Law Kar has worked as a programmer for the Hong Kong International Film Festival and the Hong Kong Film Archive, and is now a project researcher. His English publications include: Hong Kong Cinema: A Cross-Cultural View (co-author) (Scarecrow Press, 2004), From Art form to Platform, Hong Kong Plays and Performances 1900-1941 (co-author) (IATC, 1999), a chapter in The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity (Poshek Fu and David Desser [eds]) (Cambridge University Press, 2000), At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World (Esther Yau [ed], University of Minnesota Press, 2001), and Forever China (Poshek Fu [ed], University of Illinois Press, 2008). Leung Wing-Fai completed a doctoral thesis ‘Image, Performance and Identity: An Exploration of the Practices and Discourse of Multi-media Stardom in Hong Kong’ at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her publications include East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film (co-edited with Leon Hunt) (I. B. Tauris, 2008); ‘From Wah Dee to CEO: Andy Lau and Performing the Authentic Hong Kong Star’, Film International (2009); ‘Multi-media Stardom, Performance and Theme Songs in Hong Kong Cinema’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies (forthcoming) and ‘Importing Genre, Exporting Cult: The Japanese Zom-com’, Asian Cinema (forthcoming). Song Hwee Lim is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (University of Hawaii Press, 2006), co-editor of Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (Wallflower Press, 2006), and founding editor of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness. Bey Logan is a British-born writer-producer in Hong Kong. He scripted and coproduced the documentaries Jackie Chan: My Story (1998) and Jackie Chan: My Stunts (1998). Other writing credits include the feature films Gen-Y Cops (1998) and The Medallion (2001), and co-producer credits include The Twins Effect (2001), Dragon Squad (2005) and Shanghai (2010). A consultant for The Weinstein Company, he launched his own production company, B&E Productions, in 2009, and is currently preparing a new slate of live-action and animated productions. He is author of Hong Kong Action Cinema (London: Titan, 1995), a narrative history of the genre. Grace Mak Yan-yan holds a PhD from the National University of Singapore, and an MPhil from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is currently a Lecturer at the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University, and also a member of the Hong Kong Film Critics Society and Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique (FIPRESCI). She once learned scriptwriting under director Tsui Hark. Her creative works (in Chinese) include the novel The Black Box of Dreams (2008), and the screenplay for Three Narrow Gates (Vincent Chui, 2008).

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Gary Needham is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of Brokeback Mountain (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) and co-editor of Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2006) and Queer TV: Histories, Theories, Politics (Routledge, 2009). He is currently co-authoring a textbook Film Studies: A Global Introduction (Pearson) and a book on Andy Warhol’s films called Warhol in Ten Takes (BFI). Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley (PhD) is Research Fellow at the Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds where she lectures and researches on East Asian cinema. She publishes widely both in Chinese and in English on media/cinema, literature and culture. Her most recent publications include Global Chinese Cinema: The Culture and Politics of ‘Hero’ (Routledge, 2010) and Small Study, Big Universe (Lixu, 2010). She is currently writing a monograph, Culture and Democratization in Taiwan: Cinema, Theatre and Social Change (Routledge, forthcoming). She is also hosting a blog run by the China Times (http://blog.chinatimes.com/mingyeh). Jeff Smith is a Professor of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) and a contributor to Milkyway Image, Beyond Imagination (Lawrence Pun [ed]) (Joint Publishing, 2006). David Sterritt is chairman of the National Society of Film Critics, film professor at Columbia University and the Maryland Institute College of Art, professor emeritus of theatre and film at Long Island University, and chief book critic of Film Quarterly. His writing has appeared in Cahiers du cinéma, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Film-Philosophy, and many other publications, and he is author or editor of many film-related books. He was film critic of The Christian Science Monitor for almost forty years, writing frequently about Chinese cinema. Lisa Odham Stokes teaches Humanities and Film at Seminole State College in Central Florida, United States. She is co-author (with Michael Hoover) of City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema (Verso, 1999; repr. 2001) and author of The Historical Dictionary of Hong Kong Cinema (Scarecrow Press, 2007) and Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s ‘He’s a Woman, She’s a Man’ (Hong Kong University Press, 2009). She has published numerous articles on film, literature, and popular culture with a special interest in Chinese cinemas. She is a programmer for the Florida Film Festival. James Udden is Associate Professor and director of the Film Studies Program at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. He has authored numerous articles on Asian cinema and the first book-length study in English of the Taiwanese film director, Hou Hsiao-hsien, entitled No Man An Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien (Hong Kong University Press, 2009). Tony Williams is Professor and Area Head of Film Studies in the Department of English, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He has contributed frequently to Asian Cinema, Asian Cult Cinema and Journal of Chinese Cinemas. His article on Brigitte Lin has appeared in Chinese Film Stars (2010) and he is currently coediting an anthology on Hong Kong Neo Noir with Esther Yau.

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filmography

1428 (2009) 215 A Better Tomorrow/Ying huang boon sik (1986) 179 A Brighter Summer Day/Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian (1991) 135 A Time to Live, A Time to Die/Tong nien wang shi (1985) 158 A Touch of Zen/Xia nu (1969/1971) 176 All’s Well End’s Well/Jia you xi shi (1992) 199 Blind Shaft/Mang Jing (2003) 108 Boat People/Tau Ban No Hoi (1982) 193 Bullet in the Head/Dip huet gaai tau (1990) 180 137 Café Lumière/Kōhī jikō (2003) Cape No.7/Hai jiao qi hao (2008) 139 City of Sadness/Bei cing cheng shih (1989) 141 City on Fire/Lung foo fung wan (1987) 182 Come Drink With Me/Da Zui Za (1966) 167 Dragon Gate Inn/Long men Kezhan (1967) 168 Eat Drink Man Woman/Yin Shi Nan Nü (1994) 200 Fist of Fury/Jing wu men (1972) 172 Flowers of Shanghai/Hai shang hua (1998) 143 Goodbye Dragon Inn/Bu san (2003) 146 147 Goodbye, South, Goodbye/Nan guo zai jian, nan guo (1996) Good Men, Good Women/Hao nan hao nyu (1995) 144 Hard Boiled/Laat sau san taam (1992) 184 Her Fatal Ways/Biao jie, ni hao ye! (1990) 202 In the Heat of the Sun/Yangguang Canlan de Rizi (1994) 112 In Our Time/Guang yin de gu shi (1982) 150 Intimate Partners/Nan xiong nan di (1960) 205 Ju Dou (1991) 114 King of the Children/Haizi Wang (1987) 115 KJ: Music and Life (2008) 216 152 Kuei-Mei, A Woman/Wo zhe yang guo le yi sheng (1985) Leaving in Sorrow/Youyou chouchou de zou le (2001) 194 One-Armed Swordsman/Dubei Dao (1967) 174 Our Sister Hedy/Si qian jin (1957) 207 Pickpocket/Artisan Pickpocket/Xiao Wu (1997) 117 119 Platform/Zhantai (2000) PTU (2003) 187

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Rouge/Yin ji kau (1988) 196 Spring in a Small Town/Xiao cheng zhi chun (1948) 121 Springtime in a Small Town/Xiao cheng zhi chun (2002) 123 Summer Palace/Yihe yuan (2006) 126 Suzhou River/Suzhou he (2000) 127 Taipei Story/Qing mei zhu ma (1985) 155 The Blood Brothers/Ci Ma (1973) 165 The Blue Kite/Lan feng zheng (1993) 107 The Fate of Lee Khan/Yingchun Ge zi Fengbo (1973) 170 The Hole/Dong (1997) 148 110 The Horse Thief/Dao ma zei (1986) The House of 72 Tenants/Chat SapYee Ga Fong Hak (1973) 204 The Killer/Dip huet seung hung (1989) 185 The Puppetmaster/Xi meng ren sheng (1993) 154 The Terrorizers/Kong bu fen zi (1986) 157 The Wedding Banquet/Xi Yan (1993) 208 The Wild, Wild Rose/Ye mei gui zhi lian (1960) 210 The World/Shijie (2004) 131 217 Though I am Gone/Wo sui si qu (2006) Tiger on the Beat/Liu foo chut gang (1998) 189 What Time is it There?/Ni na bian ji dian (2001) 159 Woman Sesame Oil Maker/The Women from the Lake of Scented Souls/   Xiang hun nu (1993) 130 Yi Yi: A One and a Two… (2000) 161 You Shoot, I Shoot/Maai hung paak yan (2001) 212

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