city on fire
review
BOOKFORUM
HOWARD HAMPTON
SPRING 2000
CITY ON FIRE: Hong Kong Cinema
By Lisa Odham Stokes
and Michael Hoover
Verso, 372 pages
Karl Marx might have anticipated the frantic, phantasmagorical
capitalism represented by Hong Kong film when he described a world where
"all this solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned…" That is, at least, the premise of Lisa Odham Stokes
and Michael Hoover's wide-ranging City on Fire, the most astute,
detailed, and stimulating overview yet produced on the late twentieth
century;s most emblematic - and enigmatic - pop cinema. From the likes
of A Chinese Ghost Story (1987), God of Gamblers (1989), and Once Upon a
Time in China (1990) through Chungking Express (1994) and Expect the
Unexpected (1998), Hong Kong films have been paeans to dislocation and
displacement, to venerable traditions, and "fixed, frozen
relations," even while they are swept away forever in the headlong
rush of commodity fetishization.
Stokes and Hoover neatly invoke Marx to sum up the deadly hit woman's
alienated, self-erasing labor in Beyond Hypothermia (1997): "In its
blind unrestrainable passion, its werewolf hunger for surplus labour,
capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical
maximum bounds of the working day." Of course, besides being a
meditation on the vicious, inescapable circle of gangster capitalism,
the movie is also at once an exercise in nihilistic hyper-romance and an
oddly affecting picture of dehumanized lives stranded in isolation -
lonely souls lost in a sterile urban space. Like the grim 1987 Ringo Lam
film whose title it borrows, City on Fire is an exploration of blurred
boundaries of (of identity as much as of genre), shifting allegiances
(traversing the Hong Kong film industry's tightrope between personal
expression and economic survival, the make-believe gangland on-screen
was often bankrolled by real Triad money), and that hypnotic, nearly
euphoric sense of malaise that permeates much of the best Hong Kong
cinema. The passing description here of Lam's neon-and-concrete jungles
serves as a microcosm for the imaginary Hong Kong that has colonized the
unconscious of moviegoers around the globe: "There is a shoot-out,
two police cars crash and explode, and the street bursts into flames.
While people flee in terror, fire trucks arrive and the streets are
bathed in chemicals…Such is the characterization of the city in this
movie: dangerous, tumultuous, intense."
City on Fire mainly focuses on the '80s to the present, so it nicely
complements Stephen Teo's Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions, which
carefully traced the postwar development of the industry through
emergent figures of the '60s and '70s, like the graceful, innovative
director King Hu and international superstar Bruce Lee. Stokes and
Hoover concentrate on the period framed by the Joint Declaration of
1984, in which the British agreed to return the city to mainland Chinese
rule in 1997 under the "one country, two systems" plan. The
enormous anxiety and ambivalence with which Hong Kong's citizenry
greeted the prospect of the impending handover (a decision in which they
had no say) saturated and energized its movies in the meantime. As City
on Fire shows, this millenarium mind-set - oscillating between thoughts
of diaspora and (re) colonization - helps account for the aura of dread,
doubt, and elegiac longing that overtook the ostensibly super-commercial
Hong Kong cinema. (The authors also remind us that while John Woo's The
Killer [1989] and Bullet in the Head [1990] may have become sensations
abroad, they weren't box-office successes at home.)
If Stokes and Hoover falter here, it is in emphasizing a Marxist
rationalist approach to these films over the nocturnal, Walter
Benjaminian logic of "profane illuminations" and the poetics
of unreason. Strict Marxist analysis can parse only so much of an
aesthetic that produces the ejaculatory likes of East in Red (1992), in
which political and libidinal economies become indistinguishable. The
authors are very good on relatively mainstream fare - not only Woo and
Jackie Chan, but also the family melodramas and comedies, such as the
charming He's a Woman, She's a Man (1994), which are far less well known
in the West. But they devote only a single sentence to Tsui Hark's
perversely brilliant The Blade (1995), a slice of meta-cinema that
serves as both double-remake and sardonic commentary. Superimposing the
martial-arts framework of 1967's One Armed Swordsman over the art-film
tropes of Ashes of Time (1994), creating a breathtaking reverie of
sadism and homoeroticism. Writing of Ringo Lam's deliciously excessive
teen-punk classic School on Fire (1988) (with the priceless
self-reflexive line "This is such chaos, you should clap your
hands") as a "difficult film to watch," the authors can
sound like well-meaning but tin-eared scholars. All questions of
sensibility and personal taste aside (where the hell is gay mad-hatter
Clarence Fok, with his outlandish, three-ring Sirk-du-Suzuki approach to
directing?), City on Fire is a superb introduction to the Big Picture of
Hong Kong film: genre as Gesamtkunstwerk, in which myth, passion, and
capital all conspire to seduce - or abandon one another
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