Until recently, those looking for serious books about Hong Kong cinema in English had to cultivate a collection of catalogs from the Hong Kong International Festival. The Retrospective catalogs, published by the territory's Urban Council, were especially useful, featuring authoritative essays by local and foreign critics on Hong Kong film history.

Ironically, in light of Hong Kong's recent demise as a filmmaking force, more books that rise above fan-based 'bullets and babes' literature like Sex and Zen and a Bullet in the Head are slowly making it to the shelves. 1997 saw the publication of Stephen Teo's Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (BFI publications). Teo, a onetime English-language editor of the Hong Kong festival catalogs, elegantly describes the history of the territory's film industry, and neatly sets it in the context of local culture and political and social developments. There's also South China Morning Post critic Paul Fonoroff's collection of idiosyncratic reviews At The Hong Kong Movies (Film Biweekly Publications), which gives the reader an often scathing local perspective.

Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover's City on Fire, which focuses on films from 1984 onwards, is the latest work to attempt a serious analysis of Hong Kong cinema. The author aim to cxontextualize the movies and the industry "in light of the increasing reach of global capital and cultural commodification," along with providing a reflective reading of the texts. They also include great wedges of data about both the film industry and Hong Kong itself.

Hong Kong cinema is generally considered reflective - that is, the films reflect the lives and hopes of Hong Kongers. Stokes and Hoover attempt a reflective reading, admitting that they are 'outsiders' but claiming that 'under these circumstances we have tried to reflect as much of a Hong Kong perspective as possible based on enquiries and research.'

They have compiled a mass of information, to be sure, but an evident lack of first-hand knowledge of the territory has lef to problems. For instance, Aman Chang's unsavory Raped by an Angel 2: The Uniform Fan, which sees a dentist rape and murder a schoolgirl, according to the authors, 'punishes women for Hong Kong's recent economic difficulties.' But women in Hong Kong have never been blamed for Hong Kong's recent economic difficulties. Hong Kong women are respected for taking jobs and working hard, not least to help families keep up with Hong Kong's high rents. The way the film links 'voyeurism to sadism' is probably more down to the influence of Japanese pornography - freely available in the territory - than any social concerns.

Another example: cinemtographer Chris Doyle's street-shooting in Chungking Express 'captures the already disappearing spirit known as Hong Kong.' What disappearing spirit are we referring to here, exactly? To use the author's term, 'mapping' Hong Kong's complex and shifting society and culture is difficult at the best of times, and any reflective view of the territory's films that is conducted by crunching statistics and research material must take greater care not to fall prey to such glib conclusions.

Equally irritating is City on Fire's penchant for quoting Marx. This seems pretentious. For instance, Chow Yun-fat is quoted as saying, 'We're always breaking the law, shooting on the streets without a permit.' According to the authors, Chow's words 'have a striking similarity to Marx's description of "the transformation of the labourer into a workhorse, [which] is a means of increasing capital, or speeding up the production of surplus value.'" And so on. Wow! Did Mr. Chow really say all that?

To make matters worse, mistakes and omissions occur throughout. These bring the books credibility into question, especially as a work of reference. For example Maxu (sometimes Ma-Xu) Weibang's celebrated 1937 film Song at Midnight (aka *Midnight Song*) is referred to as Midnight Charm; Kuomintang is wrongly spelled as Kuomingtang; and Lo Wei, director of Bruce Lee's The Big Boss and Fist of Fury is written as Ma Wei. The authors also refer to Lee's 1972 film as Fists of Fury, when the title is in fact the singular Fist of Fury: the plural Fists of Fury was actually the U.S. title of 1971's Big Boss. These are nitpicky points to be sure, but ones that any serious student of Hong Kong cinema would know as a matter of course.

Sometimes the authors hit a flow, and provide some thoughtful, if un controversial, readings. The pages on Tsui Hark's Once Upon A Time in China series correctly point out Hark's indcitment of colonialism. The analysis of the trendy triad Young and Dangerous series and its ilk delights in exploring the intertexuality of the films. Here, by striking close to the texts, Stokes and Hoover allow a winning enthusiasm to shine through. Indeed, if the authors had jettisoned both the reflective approach and the Marxism in favor of less ambitious, review-style readings, they might have produced a more credible work. After all, there are other approaches to Hong Kong cinema than the reflective. David Bordwell's exciting essay about the esthetics of Hong Kong action movies ("Aesthetics in Action," published in the HKIFF's 1997 retrospective catalog) opened up an interesting avenue of inquiry, for instance.

As the authors of City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema, we haven't been surprised by the negative comments of some reviewers (in print and on-line) about our use of the M word in the book. After all, we pre-figure as much on page 306 when we note the absence of class analysis in contemporary film criticism. But we were taken aback upon reading Richard James Havis' assertion-- in Cineaste (Vol. XXV, No. 2) of all places-- that our 'penchant for quoting Marx' is 'irritating' and 'seems pretentious'. For the record, Marx 'appears' in City on Fire about twenty times in a work of more than three hundred pages. We turn to him in the context of discussing alienation, social relations, commodification, and 'primitive accumulation' in HK films.

Take, for example, the passage which Havis uses to characterize our pretentiousness. He refers to remarks by Chow Yun-fat about Hong Kong film production that we compare to Marx's description of the worker at work (p. 27). Havis quotes a portion of one line from Chow ("We're always breaking the law, shooting on the streets without a permit) *and* our statement that the actor's words bear similarity to Marx who we then quote ("the transformation of the the labourer into a workhorse, [which] is a means of increasing capital, or speeding up the production of surplus value"). The reviewer contemptuously concludes with "And so on. Wow! Did Mr. Chow really say all that?" Well, maybe not, if one bases one's opinion on the Mr. Havis' selective quoting.

Here is the more complete citation on p. 27 (which has Chow Yun-fat discussing making about seventy HK films in ten years): "It is one kind of way to survive in the Hong Kong film industry... Sometimes everyone is proud of themselves when they make twelve films in a year, but, on the other hand, there is a sadness, I feel shame that we have been working like a dog." The actor then says: "in Hong Kong, our buildings, our rooms are narrow." It is at this point, where Chow refers to illegal shooting, that the review picks up the narrative.

Similarly, he deletes from Marx words that give legitimacy to the comparison we make: "Such economy extends to overcrowding close and unsanitary premises with laborers to crowding dangerous machinery into close quarters without using safety devices; to neglecting safety rules in production processes pernicious to health." We'd also point out to those who have not read our book that we frame the above by quoting Roy Cheung talking about sitting with his feet for three days and nights in stinking water on the cramped set (without adequate ventilation) of Prison on Fire *and* noting that Michelle Yeoh was seriously injured from a fall that she took doing a stunt for Ah Kam.

Mr. Havis also chastizes us for making 'glib conclusions,' such as our suggestion that a recent spate of popular 'rape' movies was not unrelated to HK's economic difficulties. But surely he is aware of the rising number of incidents of violence, including rape, against women in Hong Kong. While his contention that the rise of such films is 'probably' related to the 'influence of Japanese pornograhy' is in itself not entirely disagreeable, the rather casual way in which he makes this comment is certainly off-putting.

We've no wish to shy away from what Havis calls "nitpicky points" although we fail to see how what, in general, are typographical errors relegates us to less-than-serious students of Hong Kong cinema and renders our work less-than-credible. To that end, we note, with more than passing interest, a review in the same issue lamenting the state of book editing these days. Moreover, in castigating us for 'omissions,' whatever is the reviewer saying except that he would have written a somewhat different book.

Finally, Havis informs readers that we do offer some 'uncontroversial' film readings (read: he agrees with them) and suggests that we should have written a book of "less ambitious" film reviews (read: the book he would have liked). Oh yeah, he counsels that we should have dropped the M word. Once again, we fully expected that City on Fire's materialist/class analysis would generate some antagonism, we just didn't see it coming by way of Cineaste.