THE ART OF HONG KONG CINEMA
Planet Hong Kong : Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment, David Bordwell, Harvard University Press, 2000
David Bordwell’s book of devotion to Hong Kong cinema, amounting to over 300 pages seems intended to be a combat against the recent crisis and fall of Hong Kong cinema. Hong Kong cinema has shrunk frighteningly from the peak it reached in its glorious past, and no one has been able to present easy solutions. With a great fandom not only in Asia but also in the West, Hong Kong cinema, among local cinemas, had been the last hope to compete with Hollywood. However, along with political upheavals, a fading overseas market, the growing local taste for Hollywood movies, and a VCD piracy market have driven Hong Kong film industry into a deadlock. Adieu, the golden age! But does it mean Hong Kong film industry is totally over?
Interestingly, this frustrating reality has made people, not only ordinary viewers but also scholars who have been enchanted by Hong Kong cinema go wilder with enthusiasm, rather than grieve, celebrating its tradition and inventiveness more than ever before. Some people seem to believe that the first step toward the solution of the difficulty of present Hong Kong cinema can be found in their efforts and activity of recovering the past and celebrating new possibilities, such as Peter Chan and Wong Kar-wai’s works. Bordwell is one of them. In an academic approach, he examines in Planet Hong Kong Hong Kong cinema’s significance as an international "popular cinema and art of entertainment." He asserts that there is "something" audiences desire in Hong Kong movies. While confessing, like a shy fan, his feelings at the first moment that Hong Kong films affected him, Bordwell emphasizes constantly, through the whole book, that Hong Kong cinema shows how entertainment can be art, how beautiful it is and how rich in forms and styles. Definitely, there is no other reason except genuine stylistic artistry in Hong Kong cinema why Bordwell, who has notoriously stuck to stylistic analyses, has become addicted, seeing approximately three hundred seventy Hong Kong movies and visiting Hong Kong several times.
Therefore, his exploration, as he makes his position clear in his preface, is not based on a deep study of the history of Hong Kong cinema in terms of indigenous Chinese culture or national cinema. Asking, "How did this tiny cinema come to be so successful? How did such a frankly commercial filmmaking tradition manage to create the conditions for something we might recognize as artistry?" he seeks answers in the film themselves—their global and transcultural filmic structure and style, rather than in the cinema’s history and culture. As usual, he engages in his special talents—frame-by-frame analyses of style, which style has deep roots in Hong Kong’s popular filmmaking tradition aimed at a mass audience.
While Hong Kong cinema has borrowed formulas from Hollywood—the most powerful popular cinema in the world—it has developed its distinct ones through remarkable inventiveness and careful craftsmanship. For Bordwell, what makes Hong Kong cinema superior to Hollywood is, above all, its ability to arouse emotion kinesthetically through action and music. He applies theories of Kuleshov, Pudovkin, and Eisenstein about expressive movements to qualify Hong Kong action movies. The best Hong Kong action directors are aware of the mechanics of the body, and they show the "cinema’s power over the physical world.”
The latter part of this book is devoted to revealing the ”purely cinematic” secrets behind Hong Kong’s filmmaking tradition. Examining a vast of number of films and directors, Bordwell sketches the historical development of the action genre and explores the techniques and principles that have established its traditions. Constructive editing and segment shooting, which do not have establishing shots like Hollywood continuity editing, and the pause/burst/pause pattern, which amplifies expressive force, have become central to Hong Kong action films. Thanks to them, Hong Kong films are full of physical and pictorial coherence, even though they are weak in narrative structure. To offset this weakness in storytelling, though, Hong Kong cinema has developed other skillful strategies : parallel situations and motivic associations. Calling Hong Kong cinema’s plot structure "episodic construction” or “piecemeal plotting,” Bordwell points out that the narrative/spectacle dichotomy is not the best way to understand Hong Kong films, and that the use of parallels and motifs—musical, visual, or verbal—is an artistic strength of Hong Kong cinema. Truly, what makes Hong Kong cinema, which is full of vulgarity, audacity, slickness, and bizarreness, look charming and artful is this tradition of popular cinema, which has developed its distinguishing techniques and strategies.
Emphasizing this entertainment-oriented filmmaking tradition, Bordwell puts even Wong Kar-wai, the most contemporary Hong Kong cineaste, whose films are treated as idiosyncratic or art movies, in the development of popular norms. Referring to Wong’s films, such as As Tears Go By, Ashes of Time, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, and Happy Together, Bordwell notes that they are firmly rooted in genres, such as swordplay movies, gangster movies, and "relationship” movies established by Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark, and many others. That is why Bordwell argues that Wong’s films should not be treated as abstract allegories of Hong Kong’s historical situation -namely, the fateful handover to China. Rather, Bordwell sees his films as expressing an unashamed romanticism, faithful to the Hong Kong tradition of seizing the viewer’s attention with an energetic image.
Meanwhile, while deploying formalistic micro analyses, he tries to draw a big picture, too. He outlines the socio-political aspects of Hong Kong that have influenced and established the realm of Hong Kong cinema. He traces general social facts, such as the power of triads who control economy and filmmaking, the huge piracy market that has destroyed the industry, and relevant government policies, including censorship, a screen quota, and a ratings system. While summarizing the brief city history of immigrants and expatriates, Bordwell points out that Hong Kong’s municipal nature—a crammed city with million people, four times more populated than Calcutta—is one of the most important factors that have made today’s Hong Kong cinema. The social longing to escape from cramped households has created a public-entertainment-loving milieu and given a birth to a population of the world’s most frequent moviegoers. Therefore, the process and effects of a unique exhibition habit—"midnight preview”- is treated seriously in analyzing the local audience.
In addition, he makes appealing but provocative claims. While explaining the process of introduction and circulation of Hong Kong cinema in the West and the reason for young generation’s frenzy over it, Bordwell presents two ways to become a global popular cinema : by joining the only truly global film industry (namely, Hollywood) or by becoming a subcultural cinema that can offer downmarket pleasures people cannot find among mass-marketed products. Strangely enough, Hong Kong cinema has become global popular cinema through both ways, which look quite contradictory to each other. However, I question how many such subcultural groups exist and to what extent they can build up a force powerful enough to control film markets. Are Bordwell’s opinions not too dogmatic(the first way) or optimistic(the second way)? How can people realize the true downmarket pleasures of "bad movies” like Hong Kong cinema? How can we persuade people who treat Hong Kong cinema as vulgar and stupid trash movies to discover the true values of a diverse film culture beyond martial arts and comedy in Hong Kong cinema? Bordwell is trying to answer to these questions, by repeatedly emphasizing the artistry of entertainment in Hong Kong cinema.
One of true strengths of this book is its somewhat "essayistic” style, which will appeal to a general audience that does not want to suffer through pretentious, jargon-laden academic studies but is interested in reading serious critical reviews of Hong Kong cinema. An informal story about Tarantino and Jackie Chan surrounding MTV awards is one of the pleasures of reading Planet Hong Kong. At the same time, this book’s acute analyses, sharp criticism, and deep information address academic readers who are already familiar with theoretical works. His detailed explanation of production process characterized by efficient collective creation and routinized studio filmmaking is impressive, and information about Hong Kong critics, criticism trends in Hong Kong and the west, and main periodicals and magazines dealing with Hong Kong cinema is very useful. But, among others, the elaborate analyses of structures and styles between Hollywood and Hong Kong systems, in terms of a plot structure (three act VS reel by reel format), shot scale (a matter of long shots, medium shots, or close-ups), the number of shots, camera position, editing, and cutting, are truly Bordwell’s original ideas.
On the pretext of Hong Kong cinema, he also deploys his general perspective about art and cinema. Above all, Bordwell attacks the meaningless dichotomy between art cinema and popular cinema. On the one hand, he points out that art cinema is also market-oriented like popular cinema and that this market pressure has affected its traditions, genres, and conventions. His contention looks compelling because there are certain trends among so-called art cinema exhibited and distributed through film festivals. On the other hand, he emphasizes that popular cinema controlled by commercial demands is open to the creation of "something worth calling art” because a streamlined system offers freedom as well as constraint. If they are genuine craftsmen, filmmakers will take advantage of such a system to practice their skills over and over (like Yasujiro Ozu and John Ford) and to challenge and invent genres and norms. Just as a genre is developed by a "dialectic interplay between convention and innovation, familiarity and novelty,” a studio system is run by a similar process. Hong Kong cinema is nothing but a great example to prove his main thesis about art and its system.
Putting the analysis of Wong Kar-wai’s film Chungking Express in the last chapter, Bordwell finishes the book as an open text. Even in sketching independent film making in Hong Kong and its short history, represented by Shu Shuen, he seems to try to present the future possibility of Hong Kong cinema as "avant-pop cinema.” Disappointingly, however, he pulls back at this point. He does not explain what is avant-pop cinema exactly and stealthily eschews proposing any explicit opinion about the future of Hong Kong cinema. He seems to want to believe that Hong Kong cinema is still open to dialectic relationship between familiarity and innovation as it has always been ,and that this flexibile popular filmmaking tradition will be a great power that will lead Hong Kong cinema into the future. Yes, Hong Kong cinema is still there, in Hong Kong, even after the most talented filmmakers and actors have fled to Hollywood. As one of great fans of Hong Kong cinema, I also do not want to hastily judge or tell the future of Hong Kong cinema. In this respect, the conclusion of this book, like Bordwell himself, is smart and skillful.
To refer to one missing point, because this book is primarily directed towards an English-speaking audience, it contains no information about Chinese film titles or Chinese names that would be familiar to Asian readers. Overall, however, Planet Hong Kong is a useful source for the study of Hong Kong cinema. It is not just about Hong Kong cinema. Rather, it is about the Hong Kong cinema "world,” composed not only of films but also of people and the system that move forward the world cinema. At first, you may think some chapters look banal because Bordwell, as others do, also deals with major figures such as Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, John Woo, Tsui Hark, Wong Jin, and Wong Kar-wai. However, readers hoping for something "Bordwellian” will not be disappointed.
Mina Shin is a graduate student at the School of Cinema and Television, University of Southern California, USA.