cinema study all smoke and no fire

Mainland Chinese critics have sometimes complained about how Zhang Yimou's rural China portrayals in films such as Raise The Red Lantern or Ju Dou did scant justice to the country's rate of development. In the same way, many of the books about Hong Kong cinema have not been able to capture the true essence of the industry.

City On Fire, unfortunately, makes the list. The title of the book is obviously borrowed from the Ringo Lam action film that courted Hollywood controversy when critics accused Quentin Tarantino of ripping it off for his Reservoir Dogs.

That, plus the picture of a cool-looking Chow Yun-fat from John Woo's A Better Tomorrow, suggest racy excitement. After all, in his blurb for the book, Woo even says it is "exciting and riveting". Don't be fooled. Woo was being polite.

But if one reads between the lines, then the blurbs from other film-makers - "cinema history", "film historians" and "walking down memory lane" - might shed more light on the crux of the book.

City On Fire is by academics for academics. It is an excuse for two scholars (Stokes teaches humanities and Hoover teaches political science at Seminole Community College in Florida - information the book does not include) to analyse Hong Kong's socio-political state pre-1997 through the films of Hong Kong - not to explore the phenomenon of Hong Kong cinema, in particular action cinema, as the title and cover imply. But isn't it two years too late?

There is no denying that one can find social and political nuances in the films of certain film-makers, such as Woo, Tsui Hark and Ann Hui. However, the American writers of City On Fire are in danger of over-analysing the films: they see innuendoes and references at every turn and everything seems to be connected in some way with the handover.

Even in Michael Hui's Aces Go Places, which was made two years before the 1984 Joint Declaration, Stokes and Hoover see shadows of the handover. Hui's earlier films, for the most part, have been better known for his social "blue collar worker" themes than for political overtones.

Stokes' and Hoover's research is not the first to deal with Hong Kong films from an academic viewpoint. In Transnational Chinese Cinema (edited by the University of Hawaii's Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu), a section on Hong Kong films also deals with issues concerning the former territory's "identity, nationhood and gender".

But while Transnational Chinese Cinema just about makes unbearable reading, City On Fire is extremely tedious and heavy-going. The authors take each film and dissect it thoroughly, describing every movement and word - bad subtitles included. The analysis of Peter Chan's gender-bender He's A Woman, She's A Man, for instance, goes on for six pages.

On top of the description of scenes, Stokes and Hoover pad out the book with quotes about social and political issues, including a mind-boggling amount from Karl Marx. They also offer this insight into John Woo's The Killer: "financial gain and expanded profit margins are all that matters to these villains; the way they get it is through brute force." One assumes viewers are quite capable of figuring that out for themselves.

The authors obviously needed help with the book's structure - as did the proof-readers (there are too many typos, including names spelt incorrectly) - as topics jump around. The chapter "Whose Chinese Feast?" starts with comedies and then leaps into the subject of food. At the end of the long description of Chan's He's A Woman, we are abruptly told: "Food features prominently in many Hong Kong movies, including comedies", a flimsy connection as food did not "feature prominently" in Chan's movie.

Ironically, the best part of the book comes at the end - if one makes it through the first 307 pages - where people such as Woo, Chow Yun-fat, Tsui Hark, Michelle Yeoh, Terence Chang, Chris Doyle and Lau Ching-wan have their say more coherently. With half the padding and half the long descriptions, the book might have been twice as readable. As it is, it will offer little those new to Hong Kong films would want to know, never mind those who are familiar with the genre. Hong Kong International Film Festival publications are cheaper and more informative.

Writer Winnie Chung tells readers of her review of _City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema_ (SCMP, 8/29/99) that John Woo was "being polite" when he called our book "exciting and riveting." Her omniscience about the director apparently does not extend to our work, however, which we assume she would read before commenting on it. For example, she claims that information about our positions as instructors at Seminole Community College (in Florida) is not included when said information can be found in both the book's acknowledgements and on its back cover. Ms. Chung's inaccurate contention that we have not identified our institutional affiliation stands as a charge that we have attempted to mislead readers when you understand that her dislike of the book is summed up by her comment that "City on Fire is by academics for academics." Read: too serious, not fun. To the contrary, our book is'serious fun.'

Chung asserts that our interest is not Hong Kong cinema but the socio- politics of pre-1997 hand-over Hong Kong and she alleges that the book's title and its Chow Yun-fat cover picture misrepresent the work as being about action cinema to prospective readers. Regarding the assertion, we don't see the two as mutually exclusive (we similarly reject her distinction between movies with social 'blue collar worker' themes and those with political overtones). As to the allegation, the title is a symbiotic metaphor for HK, its film industry, and the movies themselves. Moreover, the subtitle, cover blurbs, and table of contents, as well what we say in the acknowledgments, convey the multi-genre approach of our work. She also raises suspicion about the book when she asks whether or not its release, two years after Hong Kong's return to the Mainland, is too late? Her question, if taken seriously, suggests that all writing addressing 'history' is dubious. And while it is true that our principal focus is on the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, we do include discussion about the initial post-hand-over year.

Ms. Chung contends that we over-analyze and see the hand-over everywhere, even in films made prior to the 1984 Declaration, an opinion held by some other reviewers of the book. We would point, however, to already nervous residents and corporate planners in Hong Kong by the beginning of the 1980s. We'd argue that the colony changed irrevocably between Deng Xiaoping's 1979 visit - in which he publicly articulated for the first time what would become a mantra: 'one country, two systems' - and Margaret Thatcher's 1982 trip that failed to persuade Chinese leaders that Britain should have some official capacity after 1997. Finally, we would respond to the reviewer's complaints that our film reads are too long and that we 'padded' our book with quotes about social and political issues by saying that we view these features to be among _City on Fire's_ strengths. We flesh out the analysis of films we discuss and we place them in socio- historical context. But then we wrote a different book than the one that Winnie Chung wanted to read.