The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity (review)

As many film scholars well know, writing and teaching about “Chinese cinema” presents a set of distinct challenges, especially given the multiplicity of nationalist and sociocultural specificities that render such a project both historically complex and aesthetically expansive. Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan all have their own rich and multifaceted traditions of motion picture production, the convoluted developments of which can be evidenced by the wealth of scholarship in English that has been generated over the last few decades. Scholarly engagements of Hong Kong cinema alone have ranged from popular overviews (Stephen Teo, David Bordwell, and Esther Yau on Hong Kong cinema), to monographs dedicated exclusively to the films of specific directors (Kenneth E. Hall’s John Woo: The Films, Peter Brunette’s Wong Kar-wai, and Lisa Martin’s The Cinema of Tsui Hark), to critical anthologies containing key essays on Hong Kong cinema (Poshek Fu’s edited collection on the Shaw Brothers, and Leon Hunt and Leung Wing-Fai’s recent edited volume on East Asian cinemas).¹ While the aforementioned works represent important contributions to the study of Hong Kong cinema, there is still plenty of ground to cover when discussing such a dynamic and vast film culture.

To this fertile dialogue The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, edited by Poshek Fu and David Desser, contributes a variety of perspectives by established and emerging voices in cinema studies. As the book’s subtitle suggests, the contributors write at the intersection of the political and the aesthetic. Indeed, it is in its extensive range of critical inquiries that the collection distinguishes itself from other critical anthologies on Hong Kong cinema. As Fu and Desser observe in their introduction, scholars and fans of Hong Kong cinema have been challenged by, first, a lack of “access to the cinematic past,” a situation that has only been partially addressed by the admittedly meager availability of titles on DVD and celluloid, and, second, by the intensive cross-fertilization that defines “the very place, the very situation, of Hong Kong itself.”² Such obstacles are indeed profound, and it is a credit to this volume and its knowledgeable contributors that better-known aspects of Hong Kong cinema—like the martial arts extravaganzas of the 1970s—while certainly not overlooked, by no means dominate the book’s content. Consequently, The Cinema of Hong Kong allows for extensive investigations of the rise and fall of various Mandarin-and Cantonese-language traditions in Hong Kong film, a topic addressed in greatest detail by Stephen Teo in his contribution, “The 1970s: Movement and Transition.” Such an approach also provides for considerations of heretofore rarely considered auteurs such as King Hu, Ann Hui, and Michael Hui in excellent chapters by David Bordwell, Patricia Brett Erens, and Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, respectively.

Assembling an anthology both strongly researched and diverse in its focus is no easy task, which makes what Fu and Desser have accomplished all the more remarkable. No collection of essays on the features of a national or regional cinema can provide an exhaustive overview. What this book provides, though, are several valuable additions to the existing scholarship. One such essay is Tony Williams’s “Space, Place, and Spectacle: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo.” Through a careful consideration of the oeuvre of one of the most iconic directors of the Hong Kong new wave of the 1980s, Williams posits that in seminal works like A Better Tomorrow (Ying hung boon sik; 1986), The Killer (Dip huet seung hung; 1989), and Bullet in the Head (Die xue jie tou; 1990), Woo dissects a culture rapidly approaching a defining historical moment. Consequently, Woo’s trademark “stop-motion visual images of heroes transcending the normal temporal boundaries of time and space” provide “tentative possibilities” for a heterogeneous society “struggling to survive a problematic future”³ that is marked not only by the loss of a stable cultural identity, but also by a potential...