city on fire
review
Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, July 2000
HONG KONG CINEMA: SPEED AND CRISIS
Leon Hunt
CITY ON FIRE: Hong Kong Cinema
By Lisa Odham Stokes
and Michael Hoover
Verso, 372 pages
Is Hong Kong cinema dead, and if so, why is it still inspiring so many
books? Of course, this is no paradox at all - a cinema doesn't need to
be active to be worthy of study. In addition, while the 'Hollywood of
the East' is clearly a thing of the past, there are still signs of life,
whether it's in indie hits like Fruit Chan's Made in Hong Kong
(1997) or FX extravaganzas like Storm Riders (Andrew Lau, 1998, a
Box office success often ignored in pronouncements about the industry's
imminent demise). But significantly, this proliferation of books is a
western phenomenon - outside Asia, Hong Kong cinema is still
comparatively undiscovered and unmapped beyond the global successes of
Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, John Woo or, more recently, Category III schlock
like Naked Killer (Clarence Fok, 1994). Most of the books
available are still generically focused, although we should beware of
dismissals like Tony Rayns' of 'celebrations of the Hong Kong industry'
for 'Fan-boy types'. Bey Logan's Hong Kong Action Cinema (1995),
for example, is as intelligent and well-researched as any 'serious'
book. Of those books with a broader interest, Fredric Dannen and Barry
Long's Hong Kong Babylon (1997) is essentially an essay on the
industry padded out with interviews, plot summaries and critics' best-of
lists, while Miles Wood's Cine-East (1998) consists of nothing
but interviews, barring a David Bordwell foreword which makes the book
sound more interesting that it actually is. Only Stephen Teo's Hong
Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimension (1997) tackles the whole history -
Teo, significantly, has contributed to the Hong Kong International Film
Festival's ongoing project of reclaiming and evaluating Hong Kong film
history. Stokes and Hoover tackle a narrower period than Teo - from 1984
(the Sino-British Joint Declaration) to the post-Handover present - but
their respective books complement each other rather well, the weaknesses
of the one compensated by the strengths of the other. Teo's
authoritativeness is a drawback as well as an advantage. His critical
judgements are often terse and unargued - there are minimal footnotes,
no bibliography and an unreflexive certainty about what these films
really mean (he's particularly dogmatic about Bruce Lee's 'Chineseness').
Stokes and Hoover are more responsive to recent debates about Hong Kong,
to the work of Ackbar Abbas and others, and provoke rather more of an
engagement with their ideas and textual readings. But their vagueness
about the pre-80s period sometimes limits them - they might in places
have dug a little deeper into the exports of the 1970s to get a bigger
picture of the concerns and themes of Hong Kong genre cinema. In other
ways, however, this narrow focus is an advantage, especially for viewers
never likely to see Cantonese Opera films or Mandarin wenyi
(literature and art) movies. Teo's book is slightly exhausting and its
first third deals with films largely unavailable in subtitled prints,
while a trip to most Chinatowns would soon turn up most of the films
discussed by Stokes and Hoover. This is, of course, less a judgement
about the respective merits of two books than a reflection of Hong
Kong's shifting fortunes in the global arena, but I do suspect that many
will find City on Fire the more accessible of the two books.
City on Fire takes its title from Ringo Lam's 1987 Chow Yun Fat
vehicle and its cover image from another Chow film, John Woo's A
Better Tomorrow (1986) - hair immaculately gelled, shades in place,
burning a counterfeit 100 dollar bill on the tip of his cigarette. The
title and the image define the authors' take on Hong Kong's cinematic
representation of itself - the response to the handover and events like
Tiananmen Square 'compounded Hong Kong's accelerated rate of economic
growth; hence a 'city on fire' becomes its cinematic representations'
(Stokes and Hoover 1999: viii). Hence, Hong Kong's unique experience of
postcolonialism and an accelerated version of late capitalism (globalisation,
capital intensive production, technological transformation) created a
'crisis cinema', 'one that finds itself in a historic conjuncture where
new patterns of language, time and space, place and identity, and
meaning itself, are emerging' (Ibid: 36). 'Speed' is the linking motif
here - as it is in Abbas' writing about Hong Kong - with cinematic style
embodying a postmodern, transnational experience of disjuncture and
velocity - 'rapidly changing camera angles, collision editing for action
sequences, and changing film speeds to visualize narratives' (Ibid: 35).
Hoover and Stokes' achievement is to synthesise these complex and
potentially rather abstract notions with a well-researched account of
the industry and an enthusiast's engagement with the films themselves.
Clearly, they're unashamed fans as well as academics, and some of their
textual choices are engagingly unorthodox. Martial arts star Donnie Yen,
for example, is a cult favourite in western Hong Kong fan circles, but
barely registers outside fanzine culture - nevertheless, City on Fire
includes enjoyably detailed readings of Legend of the Wolf
(1997), part of a small cycle of martial arts 'memory loss' films, and
the noirish Ballistic Kiss (1998), both directed by as well as
starring Yen. They cover the usual suspects - Tsui Hark, Jackie Chan,
John Woo, Wong Kar Wai - but also provide an accessible and informative
account of Hong Kong's numerous comic cycles. Some of the best chapters
are thematically focused; in particular, those on storytelling and
gender confusion.
I do have a
couple of reservations about the book. Stokes and Hoover cover a range
of themes and concerns, but they can't resist spotting Handover
references at regular intervals. In a recent essay on Hong Kong comedy,
Jenny Kwok Wah Lau cautions against reductionist '1997' readings which
tend to 'erase the concrete details of cultural experiences and covers
up the complex social and psychological realities of life in Hong Kong
in the early eighties' (Lau, 1998: 22). She reminds us, for example,
that the 'New Wave' - film makers more directly concerned with a
specifically Hong Kong cultural experience - emerged three years before
Thatcher's trip to China. The authors are too smart to reduce all to
'1997', but there are some overemphatic and slightly repetitive readings
of generic material. Ronny Yu's Bride with the White Hair (1993)
does resonate with a sense of political instability - its setting is the
final days of the Ming Dynasty as the Manchus prepare to invade. But City
on Fire tells us that hero Leslie Cheung spurns warrior-assassin
Brigitte Lin 'much as doubters believe China will do in defying the
terms of the Joint Declaration' (Stokes and Hoover, 1999: 110), and that
he discovers later that 'he has been lied to by his own, much as the
British misled Hong Kongers about the negotiations over 1997' (Ibid:
111) Undoubtedly, many 1984-97 films do contain such subtextual
resonances - the issue is their relative weight, the difference between
throwaway gags or references and more sustained explorations, even if
encoded in generic form. This is not to advocate a return to the view of
HK genre cinema as exotic but empty - rather to acknowledge that there
are problems in finding the right tone for exploring their pleasures and
meanings. How do the 'betrayals' in Bride play differently from
similar moments in earlier martial arts films - do we just read them in
this way because we can? Similarly, it might be valid to read (as
many have) Woo's 'signature face-offs' (Ibid: 62) as images of political
deadlock - 'a gun to the head, time running out' (Ibid: 63) - but, by
the time of The Killer (1989) and Hard Boiled (1992), it
is also a directorial trademark and key to Woo's success as
transnational commodity. To put it another way, what does the 'face-off'
mean in Face/Off (1997)?
Stokes and Hoover are largely astute in their equal targeting of
students/academics and fans interested in contextualising their
favourite films - the book's packaging (lots of stills) confirms this
dual address and the book works best as cultural history. But the
authors seem to feel the need, intermittently, to flex their academic
muscles with some undigested quotes and chunks of theory. To say,
apropos of nothing, that A Chinese Ghost Story (Ching Siu-tung,
1987) 'displays a kind of Derridean extravagance' (Stokes and Hoover,
1999: 101) is to hedge your bets somewhat about your 'real' readership.
But the Marxism is the real problem - fine when connecting HK to late
capitalism, but clumsily integrated into some of the analyses. This
comes to a head in the John Woo chapter, where the villain of A
Better Tomorrow is seen as Marx's 'vampire-capitalist, who 'only
lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it
sucks' (Ibid: 45-6). Like ... er ... most gangster figures in popular
cinema? Quotes from Marx turn up on every other page as though to
convince us, subliminally, that Woo's films are implicitly Marxist (as
opposed to preferring 'good' capitalism to 'bad' capitalism, honorable
triads to dishonorable ones). This is compounded by a rather uncritical
take on Woo - he's a 'man of strong convictions' who '"envisions a
better place with no war, no violence, and everyone loving and caring
for each other", far afield from emergent capitalist societies'
(Ibid: 39). In particular, Woo's claim that he's 'most influenced by the
values of Jesus Christ' (Ibid: 39) conjures up images of the
moneylenders driven out of the temple by someone sliding down the stairs
backwards with a gun in each hand. It's odd that the one film-maker who
gets an entire chapter to himself (even Wong Kar Wai has to share)
receives the least satisfactory treatment.
Overall, though, I like City on Fire very much - it's
intelligent, readable and its strengths greatly outweigh its flaws. I'm
presently teaching a course on Hong Kong cinema for the first time and
it effortlessly assumed the position (for now) of central course reader
- student response certainly confirms its usefulness and accessibility.
But - to return to fanboy territory for a moment - if they're going for
a second edition, they really need to add some Jet Li pictures.
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