city on fire
review
Charlotte Creative Loafing
Burn, Hong Kong, Burn
Sam Shapiro
CITY ON FIRE: Hong Kong Cinema
By Lisa Odham Stokes
and Michael Hoover
Verso, 372 pages
The Hong Kong perspective is of a "city on fire," representing
not only the illumination of images on a screen but also a world burning
with anxiety and confusion.
Like many other action film aficionados, I came upon the vast and
glittering treasures of Hong Kong cinema quite innocently, like a naive
and inquisitive Ali Baba approaching the Cave of the 40 Thieves. And
like so many others in the early 90s who either subscribed to Cinemax or
knew someone who did, my "Open Sesame" came in the form of a
preternaturally calm Chow Yun-Fat, blasting away like an elegant Angel
of Death in John Woo's The Killer. From that point on I was hooked, I
was hungry for more, and money was simply going to be no object.
Some years and untold videos (bootleg and legal) later, I consider
myself a seasoned veteran of the Hong Kong juggernaut. But as someone
who has always felt the need to place his obsessions (sick and
otherwise) within some sort of informed context, I have been aware of
the lack of intelligent discourse on this subject.
Granted, in the past few years American enthusiasm for Asian films
(eclipsing that brief parabola of interest in the 1970s, when Bruce Lee
stormed our bijous) has produced a few useful books on the subject.
While some of these have been visually arresting and informative, they
all seem to have been assembled in a somewhat slapdash, predictable
manner, focusing primarily on "shoot-em-ups" (the so-called
Heroic Bloodshed films of John Woo and company) and martial arts films
-- to the exclusion of other fascinating, less blood-soaked genres. As a
result, there has been an unfortunate misconception among film fans and
even film critics that Hong Kong's "pre-handover" film
industry of the 80s and early 90s produced nothing more than a lot of
iconic macho posturing and two-fisted gunplay.
City On Fire should dispel that misconception. It is by far the most
comprehensive, insightful book written on the subject, balancing
exuberant appreciation for the films with lucid, scholarly understanding
of the perplexing (at least to Western eyes) culture that produced them.
Not least among its accomplishments is that, unlike any of the preceding
books on the subject, authors Hoover and Stokes make admirable sense of
a complex entertainment industry that in the space of 10-15 years
produced an extraordinary number of low-to-high budget films,
encompassing a multitude of genres and sub-genres. For example, popular
Vietnamese actor Simon Yam starred in over a hundred feature-length
films during a nine-year span, an indication of the speed and volume at
which films were being produced in the 80s and 90s. It should also be
pointed out that City On Fire could not have been published at a more
significant time, as a combination of historic, political, and
socio-economic factors transpired in the past half-decade to ring the
death knell of a once bold and dynamic era in popular film-making.
Hoover and Stokes have structured their book like a textbook, but don't
let that dissuade you from taking their wonderfully informative course.
Large sections are devoted to the most important, prolific filmmakers
(John Woo, Tsui Hark), as well as wildly popular, charismatic stars such
as the almost-certainly insane Jackie Chan and the aforementioned Mr.
Fat. A number of female performers are profiled (Brigitte Lin, Maggie
Cheung, Michelle Yeoh), all of whom have taken action roles to heights
(and physical limits) well beyond the realm of possibility for Hollywood
actresses (check out The Heroic Trio or Angel, and find out that in Hong
Kong flicks, women rule!).
The book's most valuable asset, however, is its brilliant analysis of
Hong Kong cinema's wildly diverse genres: the whirligig fantasies, the
demented horror films, the hellzapoppin' thrillers, the loopy comedies,
the gender-swapping sex farces, the jaw-dropping martial arts films, and
last but certainly not least, the rather curious "gastronomic
sagas" (or "the food movies"). Food features prominently
in many Hong Kong movies, in part due to the colony's status as a
gourmand's paradise...a large part of the "food movies" are
about bringing people, especially families, together. The two ways that
food functions in the films relate to jing (survival) and qing (emotive
feeling).
In describing particular films, Hoover and Stokes never fail to place
characters and story-lines within proper historic/cultural context, and
by doing so enhance the pleasurable experience of viewing such landmark
supernatural fantasies as A Chinese Ghost Story and Bride With White
Hair. As it turns out, these films, as well as a large portion of the
martial arts flicks (starring such greats as Jet Li, Jackie Chan, Sammo
Hung), turn out to be based almost entirely on ancient tales and legends
-- with rather heavy doses of contemporary, anxiety-ridden messages
stirred into the brew.
And there is where City On Fire proves most invaluable, where other
books on the subject have been clueless or not up to the task -- by
identifying the symbiotic relationship between the films and the
volatile political climate under which they were produced. Throughout
the 80s and early 90s, the specter of 1997 -- the knowledge that an
irrevocable, seismic shift from democracy to Communism was impending --
as well as the terror and hopelessness that followed the Tiananmen
Square massacre, undeniably influenced the physical look and underlying
themes of Hong Kong films.
Hoover and Stokes examine every aspect of the films -- the ferocious
energy, the subversive messages, the pell-mell stories -- and draw
direct parallels to the fear and uncertainty of 1997. Although known for
their wild exuberance and over-the-top humor, the films of this era
remained painfully cognizant of the fact that a way of life was nearing
completion, or possibly annihilation.
As Chow Yun-Fat's melancholy assassin murmurs in The Killer: Our world
is changing so fast. It never used to be like this. Nostalgia has become
our saving grace.
And the proof has already arrived. Since the "hand-over," a
once thriving film industry has become anemic and lackluster, as if an
enormous creative bubble had been rudely, abruptly, unforgivably burst.
In that sense, then, City On Fire can be read as a history book -- the
"city on fire" has been incinerated.
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