Cinema of Hong Kong
From Academic Kids
The history of Chinese-language cinema has three separate threads of development: Cinema of Hong Kong, Cinema of China and Cinema of Taiwan. Hong Kong, as a British colony, had a great degree of political and economic freedom relative to Mainland China and Taiwan, and developed into a filmmaking hub for the Chinese-speaking world (including the worldwide diaspora) and East Asia in general. For decades it was the third largest motion picture industry in the world (after Bollywood and Hollywood). Despite an industry crisis starting in the mid-'90s and Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty in July 1997, Hong Kong film has retained much of its distinctive identity and continues to play a prominent part on the world cinema stage.
In the West, Hong Kong's vigorous pop cinema has long had a strong cult following, which has become large enough that it is now arguably a part of the cultural mainstream, widely available and imitated. This influence has been particularly heavy on recent Hollywood trends in the action genre.
History to World War II
During its early history, Hong Kong's cinema played second fiddle to that of the Mainland, particularly the city of Shanghai, then the movie capital of the Chinese-speaking world. Very little of this work is extant: one count finds four films remaining out of over 500 produced in Hong Kong before World War II (Fonoroff, 1997). Thus detailed accounts of this period, especially those by non-Chinese speakers, have inherent limitations and uncertainties.
Pioneers from the stage
As in most of China, the development of early films was tightly bound to Chinese opera, for centuries the dominant form of dramatic entertainment. Opera scenes were the source for what are generally credited as the first movies made in Hong Kong, two 1909 short comedies titled Stealing a Roasted Duck and Right a Wrong with Earthenware Dish. The director was stage actor and director Liang Shaobo. The producer was an American, Benjamin Brodsky, one of a number of Westerners who helped to jumpstart Chinese film through their efforts to crack China's vast potential market. (His name is given as "Polaski" in some sources, such as Leyda 1972, due to confusion over its Chinese transliteration.)
Credit as the first "feature film" is most often given to Zhuangzi Tests His Wife (1913), which also took its story from the opera stage, was helmed by a stage director and featured Brodsky's involvement. Director Lai Man-Wai (Li Ming Wei or Li Minwei in Mandarin) was a theatrical colleague of Liang Shaobo's who would become known as "Father of Hong Kong Cinema." In another borrowing from opera, Lai played the wife himself. His brother played the husband, and his wife a supporting role as a maid, making her the first Chinese woman to act in a Chinese film, a milestone delayed by longstanding taboos regarding female performers (Leyda, 1972). Zhuangzhi was the only film made by Chinese American Film, founded by Lai and Brodsky as the first movie studio in Hong Kong, and was never actually shown in the territory (Stokes and Hoover, 1999).
The following year, the outbreak of World War I put a large crimp in the development of cinema in Hong Kong, as Germany was the source of the colony's film stock (Yang, 2003). It was not until 1923 that Lai, his brother and their cousin joined with Liang Shaobo to form Hong Kong's first entirely Chinese-owned-and-operated production company, the Minxin (or China Sun) Company. In 1924, they moved their operation to the Mainland after government red tape blocked their plans to build a studio. (Teo, 1997)
The advent of sound
With the coming of sound in the early 1930s, China's many, mutually unintelligible spoken dialects had to be grappled with; Hong Kong was a major center for Cantonese, one of the most widely spoken. Political factors on the Mainland also provided opportunities. The government of the Kuomintang or Nationalist Party wanted to enforce a "Mandarin-only" policy and was hostile to Cantonese filmmaking. It also banned the wildly popular wuxia genre of martial arts swordplay and fantasy, accusing it of promoting superstition and violent anarchy.
The British colony became a place where both these trends could be freely served. Filmed Cantonese operas proved even more successful than wuxia and constituted the leading genre of the '30s. Major studios that thrived in this period were Grandview, Universal, Nanyue and Tianyi (the last an early incarnation of the Shaw family dynasty that would become the most enduring and influential in Chinese film). (Teo, 1997)
The advent of war
Another important factor in the '30s was the Sino-Japanese War. "National defense" films - patriotic war stories about Chinese resisting the Japanese invasion - became one of Hong Kong's major genres; notable titles included Kwan Man Ching's Lifeline (1935), Chiu Shu Sun's Hand to Hand Combat (1937) and Situ Huimin's March of the Partisans (1938). The genre and the film industry were further boosted by emigre film artists and companies when Shanghai was taken by the Japanese in 1937.
This of course came to an end when Hong Kong itself fell to the Japanese in December 1941. But unlike on the Mainland, the occupiers were not able to put together a collaborationist film industry. They managed to complete just one propaganda movie, The Attack on Hong Kong (1942; aka The Day of England's Collapse) before the British returned in 1945. (Teo, 1997) A more important move by the Japanese may have been to melt down many of Hong Kong's prewar films to extract their silver nitrate for military use (Fonoroff, 1997).
Mandarin vs. Cantonese (1940s-1960s)
Postwar Hong Kong cinema, like postwar Hong Kong industries in general, was catalyzed by the continuing influx from Mainland China. This became a flood with the 1946 resumption of the Chinese Civil War (which had been on hold during the fight against Japan) and then the 1949 Communist victory. These events definitively shifted the center of Chinese-language cinema to Hong Kong. The colony also did big business exporting films to Southeast Asian countries (especially but not exclusively their large Chinese expatriate communities) and to Chinatowns in Western countries (Bordwell, 2000).
The postwar era also cemented the bifurcation of the industry into two parallel cinemas, one in Mandarin, the dominant dialect of the Mainland emigres, and one in Cantonese, the dialect of most Hong Kong natives. Mandarin movies had much higher budgets and more lavish production. Reasons included their enormous export market; the expertise, capital and prestige of the Shanghai filmmakers; and the cultural prestige of Mandarin, for centuries the official tongue of China's cultural and political elite. For decades to come, Cantonese films, though sometimes more numerous, were relegated to second-tier status (Leyda, 1972).
Another language-related milestone occurred in 1963: the British authorities passed a law requiring the subtitling of all films in English, supposedly to enable a watch on political content. Making a virtue of necessity, studios included Chinese subtitles as well, enabling easier access to their movies for speakers of other dialects. (Yang, 2003) Subtitling later had the unintended consequence of facilitating the movies' popularity in the West.
Cantonese movies
- Cantonese opera on film dominates. The top stars are the female duo of Yam Kim Fai and Pak Suet Sin (Yam-Pak for short). Yam specializes in male scholar roles to Pak's female leads. They make over fifty films together, The Purple Hairpin (1959) being one of the most enduringly popular (Teo, 1997).
- Low-budget martial arts films:
- Long-running series of roughly 100 kung fu movies starring Kwan Tak Hing as Wong Fei Hung. Starts with The True Story of Wong Fei Hung (1949) and ends with Wong Fei Hung Bravely Crushing the Fire Formation (1970). (Logan, 1995)
- Fantasy wuxia (swordplay) serials with special effects drawn on the film by hand, such as The Six-Fingered Lord of the Lute (1965). (Chute & Lim, 2003, p. 3)
- Contemporary melodramas of home and family life
- Wah Tat Studio
Mandarin movies
- Shaw Brothers and MP&GI (later renamed Cathay) are the top studios and bitter rivals. Shaws gains the upper hand in 1964 after the death in a plane crash of MP&GI founder and head Loke Wan Tho. The renamed Cathay falters, ceasing film production in 1970. (Yang, 2003)
- A musical genre called Huang2 Mei2 Diao4 (黃梅調) is derived from Chinese opera - Shaws' The Love Eterne (1963) becomes record-breaking hit and the classic example of the genre.
- Romantic melodramas such as Red Bloom in the Snow (1956), Love Without End (1961), The Blue and the Black (1964) and adaptations of novels by Chiung Yao (瓊瑤 pinyin qiong2 yao2).
- Hollywood-style musicals such as Mambo Girl (1957) and The Wild, Wild Rose (1960).
- Historical costume epics; Shaws' Li Han Hsiang is the leading director with titles like The Kingdom and the Beauty (1963).
- In the second half of the '60s, Shaws inaugurates a new generation of more intense, less fantastical wuxia films with glossier production values, acrobatic moves and stronger violence. The trend is inspired by the popularity of imported samurai movies from Japan (Chute & Lim, 2003, p. 8), as well as the loss of movie audiences to television. It marks the turn of the industry from a female-centric genre system to an action movie orientation. (See also the Hong Kong action cinema article). Key trendsetters:
- Xu Zenghong's Temple of the Red Lotus (1965)
- King Hu's Come Drink with Me (1966) and Dragon Inn (1967, made in Taiwan; aka Dragon Gate Inn)
- Chang Cheh's Tiger Boy (1966), The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) and Golden Swallow (1968)
Years of transformation (1970s)
Mandarin-dialect film in general and the Shaw Brothers studio in particular started the 1970s in apparent positions of unassailable strength. Cantonese films virtually vanished in the face of Mandarin studios and Cantonese television; in 1972 none were made (Bordwell, 2000). The Shaws saw their longtime rival, MP&GI/Cathay, ceasing film production, leaving themselves the only megastudio and the leaders of the massive martial arts, or "kung fu", boom. But changes were beginning that would greatly alter the industry by the end of the decade.
The Cantonese comeback
Paradoxically, television would soon contribute to the revival of Cantonese in a movement towards more down-to-earth movies about modern Hong Kong life and average people.
The spark was the ensemble comedy The House of 72 Tenants, the only Cantonese film made in 1973, but a resounding hit. It was based on a well-known play and produced by Shaws as a showcase for performers from their pioneering television station TVB. (Yang, 2003)
The return of Cantonese really took off with the comedies of former TVB stars the Hui Brothers (actor-director-screenwriter Michael Hui, actor-singer Sam Hui and actor Ricky Hui). The rationale behind the move to Cantonese was clear in the trailer for the brothers' Games Gamblers Play (1974): "Films by devoted young people with you in mind." This move back to the local audience for Hong Kong cinema paid off immediately. Games Gamblers Play initially made US$1.4 million at the Hong Kong box office, becoming the highest grossing film up to that point, even beating such favourites as the (Mandarin) films of kung fu deity Bruce Lee. The Hui movies also broke ground by satirizing the up-to-date reality of an ascendant middle class, whose long work hours and dreams of material success were transforming the colony into a modern industrial and corporate giant (Teo, 1997). Cantonese comedy thrived and Cantonese production skyrocketed; Mandarin hung on into the early '80s, but has been relatively rare onscreen since.
Golden Harvest and the rise of the independents
In 1970, former Shaw Brothers executives Raymond Chow and Leonard Ho left to form their own studio, Golden Harvest. The upstart's more flexible and less tightfisted approach to the business outmaneuvered the Shaws' old-style studio. Chow and Ho landed contracts with rising young performers who had fresh ideas for the industry, like Bruce Lee and the Hui Brothers. By the end of the '70s, Golden Harvest was the top studio, signing up Jackie Chan, the kung fu comedy actor-filmmaker who would spend the next twenty years as Asia's biggest box office draw. (Chan and Yang, 1998, pp. 164-165; Bordwell, 2000)
Meanwhile, the explosions of Cantonese and kung fu and the example of Golden Harvest had created more space for independent producers and production companies. The era of the studio juggernauts was past. Shaws nevertheless continued film production until 1985 before turning entirely to television (Teo, 1997).
Other transformative trends and figures
The rapidly growing permissiveness in film content that was general in much of the world affected Hong Kong film as well. A genre of softcore erotica known as fengyue became a local staple (the name is a contraction of a Chinese phrase implying seductive decadence). Such material did not suffer as much of a stigma in Hong Kong as in most Western countries; it was more or less part of the mainstream, sometimes featuring contributions from major directors such as Chor Yuen and Li Han Hsiang and often crossbreeding with other popular genres like martial arts, the costume film and especially comedy. (Teo, 1997; Yang, 2003) Violence also grew more intense and graphic, particularly at the instigation of martial arts filmmakers.
Director Lung Kong blended these trends into the social-issue dramas which he had already made his specialty with late '60s Cantonese classics like The Story of a Discharged Prisoner (1967) and Teddy Girls (1969). In the '70s, he began directing in Mandarin and brought exploitation elements to serious films about subjects like prostitution (The Call Girls and Lina), the atomic bomb (Hiroshima 28) and the fragility of civilized society (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, which portrayed a plague-decimated, near-future Hong Kong). (Teo, 1997)
The brief career of Tang Shu Shuen, the territory's first noted woman director, produced two films, The Arch(1970) and China Behind (1974), that were trailblazers for a local, socially critical art cinema. They are also widely considered forerunners of the last major milestone of the decade, the so-called Hong Kong New Wave that would come from outside the traditional studio hierarchy and point to new possibilities for the industry (Bordwell, 2000).
Boom years (1980s-Early 1990s)
The 1980s and early '90s saw seeds planted in the '70s come to full flower: the triumph of Cantonese, the birth of a new and modern cinema, superpower status in the East Asian market, and the turning of the West's attention to Hong Kong film.
A cinema of greater technical polish and more sophisticated visual style, including the first forays into up-to-date special effects technology, sprang up quickly. To this surface dazzle, the new cinema added an eclectic mixing and matching of genres, and a penchant for pushing the boundaries of sensationalistic content. Slapstick comedy, sex, the supernatural, and above all action (of both the martial arts and cops-and-criminals varieties) ruled, occasionally all in the same film.
The international market
During this period, the Hong Kong industry was one of the few in the world that thrived in the face of the increasing global dominance of Hollywood. Indeed, it came to exert a comparable dominance in its own region of the world. The regional audience had always been vital, but now more than ever Hong Kong product filled theaters and video shelves in places like Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and South Korea. Taiwan became at least as important a market to Hong Kong film as the local one; in the early '90s the once-robust Taiwanese film industry came close to extinction under the onslaught of Hong Kong imports. (Bordwell, 2000) They even found a lesser foothold in Japan, with its own highly developed and better-funded cinema and strong taste for American movies; Jackie Chan in particular became popular there.
Almost accidentally, Hong Kong also reached further into the West, building upon the attention gained during the '70s kung fu craze. Availability in Chinatown theaters and video shops allowed the movies to be discovered by Western film cultists attracted by their "exotic" qualities and excesses. An emergence into the wider popular culture gradually followed over the coming years.
Leaders of the boom
The trailblazer was production company Cinema City, founded in 1980 by comedians Karl Maka, Raymond Wong and Dean Shek. It specialized in contemporary comedy and action, slickly produced according to explicitly prescribed commercial formulas. The lavish, effects-filled spy spoof Aces Go Places (1982) and its numerous sequels epitomized the much-imitated "Cinema City style." (Yang, 2003)
Directors and producers Tsui Hark and Wong Jing can be singled out as definitive figures of this era. Tsui was a notorious Hong Kong New Wave tyro who symbolized that movement's absorption into the mainstream, becoming the industry's central trendsetter and technical experimenter (Yang et al., 1997, p. 75). The even more prolific Wong is, by most accounts, the most commercially successful and critically reviled Hong Kong filmmaker of the last two decades, with his relentless output of aggressively crowd-pleasing and cannily marketed pulp films.
Category III films
The 1988 introduction by the government of a film ratings system had a certainly unintended effect on subsequent trends. The "Category III" (adults only) rating became an umbrella for the rapid growth of pornographic and generally outré films. By the height of the boom in the early '90s, roughly half of the theatrical features produced were Category III-rated softcore erotica descended from the fengyue movies of the '70s. (Yang, 2003) A definitive example of a mainstream Category III hit was Michael Mak's Sex and Zen (1991), a period comedy inspired by The Carnal Prayer Mat, the seventeenth century classic of comic-erotic literature by Li Yu (Dannen and Long, 1997).
The rating also covered a fad for grisly, taboo-tweaking exploitation and horror films, often supposedly based on true crime stories, such as Dr. Lamb (1992), The Untold Story (1993) and Ebola Syndrome (1996).
Since the mid-'90s, the trend has withered with the shrinking of the general Hong Kong film market and the wider availability of pornography in home video formats (Bordwell, 2000).
Alternative cinema
In this landscape of pulp, there remained some ground for an alternative cinema or art cinema, due at least in part to the influence of the New Wave. Some New Wave filmmakers such as Ann Hui and Yim Ho continued to earn acclaim with personal and political films made at the edges of the mainstream.
The second half of the '80s also saw the emergence of what is sometimes called a "Second Wave." These younger directors included names like Stanley Kwan, Clara Law and her partner Eddie Fong, Mabel Cheung, Lawrence Ah Mon and Wong Kar Wai. Like the New Wavers, they tended to be graduates of overseas film schools and local television apprenticeships, and to be interested in going beyond the usual, commercial subject matters and styles (Teo, 1997).
These artists began to earn Hong Kong unprecedented attention and respect in international critical circles and the global film festival circuit. In particular, Wong Kar Wai's work in the 1990s has made him the most internationally acclaimed and award-winning filmmaker yet to come out of Hong Kong.
Post-boom (Mid-1990s-Present)
The industry in crisis
During the 1990s, the Hong Kong film industry underwent a drastic decline from which it has not recovered. Domestic ticket sales had already started to drop in the late '80s, but the regional audience kept the industry booming into the early years of the next decade (Teo, 1997). But by the mid-'90s, it went into freefall. Revenues were cut in half. By decade's end, the number of films produced in a typical year dropped from an early '90s high of well over 200 to somewhere around 100. (It should be noted, however, that a large part of this reduction was in the "Category III" softcore pornography area [Bordwell, 2000].) American blockbuster imports began to regularly top the box office for the first time in decades. Ironically, this was the same period during which Hong Kong cinema emerged into something like mainstream visibility in the U.S. and began exporting popular figures to Hollywood.
Numerous, converging factors have been blamed for the downturn:
- The Asian economic crisis, which dried up traditional sources of film finance as well as regional audiences' leisure spending money
- Overproduction, attended by a drop in quality control and an exhaustion of overused formulas (Yang, 2003)
- A costly early '90s boom in building of modern multiplexes and an attendant rise in ticket prices (Teo, 1997)
- An increasingly cosmopolitan, upwardly mobile Hong Kong middle class, that often looks down upon local films as cheap and tawdry
- Rampant video piracy throughout East Asia
- A newly aggressive push by Hollywood studios into the Asian market
The greater access to the Mainland that came with the July '97 handover to China was not as much of a boon as hoped, and presented its own problems, particularly with regard to censorship.
The industry had one of its darkest years in 2003. In addition to the continuing slump, a SARS virus outbreak kept many theaters virtually empty for a time and shut down film production for four months; only fifty-four movies were made (Li, 2004). The unrelated deaths of two of Hong Kong's most enduringly popular singer/actors, Leslie Cheung, 46, and Anita Mui, 40, rounded out the bad news.
The Hong Kong Government in April 2003 introduced a Film Guarantee Fund as an incentive to local banks to become involved in the motion picture industry. The guarantee operates to secure a percentage of monies loaned by banks to film production companies. The Fund has received a mixed reception from industry participants, and less than enthusiastic reception from financial institutions who perceive investment in local films as high risk ventures with little collateral. Film guarantee legal documents commissioned by the Hong Kong Government in late April 2003 are based on Canadian documents, which have limited relevance to the local industry.
Recent trends
Efforts by local filmmakers to retool their product have had middling success overall. These include more American-styled, CGI-enhanced contemporary action pictures such as Downtown Torpedoes (1997), Gen-X Cops and Purple Storm (both '99). Successful mini-trends in the late '90s and early 2000s have included the "Triad kids" subgenre launched by Young and Dangerous (1996); yuppie-centric romantic comedies like Needing You (2000) and Love on a Diet (2001); and supernatural chillers like Horror Hotline: Big-Headed Monster (2001) and The Eye (2002), often modeled on the Japanese horror films (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_film#1990s:_Was_the_genre_dead.2C_or_just_sleeping.3F) then making an international splash.
In the 2000s, there have been some bright spots. Director/star Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer (2001) and Kung Fu Hustle (2004) used digital special effects to push his distinctive humor into new realms of the surreal, becoming two of the territory's most successful films ever. The blockbuster Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002-2003) suggested new directions for the Hong Kong crime film and garnered international acclaim.
See also
Notable directors, actors and actresses
- Fruit Chan
- Jackie Chan
- Sammi Cheng
- Leslie Cheung
- Maggie Cheung
- David Chiang
- Samson Chiu
- Stephen Chow
- Chow Yun Fat
- Ekin Cheng
- Linda Lin Dai
- Tsui Hark
- King Hu
- Ann Hui
- Michael Hui
- Sammo Hung
- Wong Jing
- Lu Jie
- Stanley Kwan
- Leon Lai
- Ringo Lam
- Andy Lau
- Anthony Wong
- Bruce Lee
- Tony Leung
- Tony Leung
- Betty Loh Ti
- Anita Mui
- Michelle Reis
- Patrick Tam
- Johnnie To
- Stanley Tong
- Eric Tsang
- Wong Kar Wai
- Daniel Wu
- John Woo
- Sally Yeh
- Michelle Yeoh
- Yuen Biao
- Yuen Wo Ping
Film awards
References
- Bordwell, David. Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-674-00214-8
- Chan, Jackie, with Jeff Yang. I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action. New York: Ballantine, 1998. ISBN 0-345-41503-5
- Chute, David, and Cheng-Sim Lim, eds. Heroic Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Film. Los Angeles: UCLA Film and Television Archive, 2003. (Film series catalog; no ISBN.)
- Dannen, Fredric, and Barry Long. Hong Kong Babylon: The Insider's Guide to the Hollywood of the East. New York: Miramax, 1997. ISBN 0-7868-6267-X
- Fonoroff, Paul. Silver Light: A Pictorial History of Hong Kong Cinema, 1920-1970. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1997. ISBN 9620413040
- Leyda, Jay. Dianying/Electric Shadows: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1972.
- Li Cheuk-to. "Journal: Hong Kong." Film Comment September-October 2004: pp. 10-12.
- Logan, Bey. Hong Kong Action Cinema. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1995. ISBN 0-87951-663-1
- Stokes, Lisa Odham, and Michael Hoover. City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema. London: Verso, 1999. ISBN 1-85984-203-8
- Teo, Stephen. Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions. London: British Film Institute, 1997. ISBN 0-85170-514-6
- Yang, Jeff. Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Mainland Chinese Cinema. New York: Atria, 2003. ISBN 0-7434-4817-0
- Yang, Jeff, and Dina Gan, Terry Hong and the staff of A. magazine. Eastern Standard Time: A Guide to Asian Influence on American Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. ISBN 0-935-76341-X
External links
- Another Hong Kong Movie Page (http://www.kowloonside.com/links.html)
- Asian Cult Cinema (http://www.asiancult.com/)
- The Girls Guide to Hong Kong Movies© (http://www.girlsguidetohkmovies.com/)
- Hong Kong Critics Society (http://www.filmcritics.org.hk/)
- Hong Kong Film Archive (http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/CulturalService/HKFA/)
- Hong Kong Film Services Office Website on the Film Guarantee Fund (http://www.fso-tela.gov.hk/film_guarantee_fund.cfm)
- Hong Kong Movie DataBase (http://www.hkmdb.com/)
- Chinese Movie DataBase(GB) (http://www.dyddy.com/)
- The Wonderful World of Hong Kong Action Cinema (http://kungfu4u.0catch.com/)—includes an extensive bibliography on martial arts films.
- Cinemasie (http://www.cinemasie.com/)—A database about Asian Cinemas, including Hong Kong, China and Taiwan.
- Hong Kong Legends - A British DVD company of Asian films (http://www.hongkonglegends.de/)de:Chinesischer Film
