Cinema at the City's Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia

4 - City of Youth, Ocean of Death: Taiyōzoku on the Edge of an Island

The relationship between the city and cinema has been an important topic in studies of cinematic modernity. Regarding the increased significance of the city due to the inception of the sound era, Anthony Sutcliffe writes, “[T]he definitive arrival of sound in 1929 confirmed the credentials of the big city, as par excellence the home of noise, as a neutral or even positive setting for feature films.”1 This is amply manifested in the outpouring of a series of American musicals extolling the excitement of New York, the Chaplinesque comedy containing mild social criticism, and a new genre called the gangster film.2 Sutcliffe’s reference to the city-musical connection suggests that the ways and the extent to which the city is deployed vary with cinema technologies and historical periods. Another significant moment when the city assumes a symbiotic relationship with cinema was the postwar era, which witnessed the emergence of film noir and urban youth problem films in America, the iconoclastic Taiyōzoku (Sun Tribe) literature and cinema in Japan, and the “Teddy Boy” and “Teddy Girl” film imagery in Hong Kong.3 The postwar concatenation between these national/regional films highlights the transnational operation of urban culture as refracted through marginal figures such as the shady characters in film noir and juvenile delinquents in urban youth problem films. Such transnational linkage becomes more conspicuous and better documented, in the late twentieth century, due to the escalation of worldwide urbanization and globalization. An important conception of the contemporary city is put forward by Rem Koolhaas, an architect and writer, whose notion of the “Generic City” has been frequently cited in analyses of contemporary filmic representation of city. In this chapter, I contemplate the implications of the Generic City through the lens of two urban youth films from postwar Japan and Hong Kong respectively. My study of the 4 City of Youth, Ocean of Death: Taiyōzoku on the Edge of an Island Yiman Wang 70 Yiman Wang Generic City in the postwar era may seem anachronistic, because what Koolhaas calls the “Generic City” did not exist then. Nevertheless, as shall become clear in the following pages, my study not only underscores an early phase of imaging the Generic City triggered by the postwar dissemination of Western urban youth culture in East Asia (often via the mediation of Japan); I also examine the political and cultural implications of “genericity” in relation to the commonly emphasized specificity. I demonstrate that genericity actually inscribes the inability to address the specificity, which in turn constitutes the very content of the specificity. In other words, genericity should be understood not as a factual existence antithetical to specificity, but rather as the manifestation of specific socio-political conditions and representations. The global “genericity” and the local specificity intersect in ways that make them mutually constitutive, rather than subsuming the local to the global. Georg Simmel’s study of early modernity and spatiality usefully highlights the politics of the global/local space. According to Simmel, the metropolis necessarily “overflows by waves into a far-flung international area” so that a “single city has broadened into the totality of cultural production.”4 To understand such a space, one must follow Iain Borden’s reading of Simmel and see space “in the realm of the ideological, the representational, the structuring and the more mental dimensions of the phenomenological; it is a space that alludes, extends, permeates and envelops.”5 In this chapter, my goal is precisely to study the ideological register of (urban) spatiality at the interwoven global and local levels. I base my argument on two films: the Japanese Taiyōzoku film Crazed Fruit (dir. Nakahira Kō, 1956), based on Ishihara Shintarō’s fiction of the same title, and its Hong Kong remake Summer Heat (Kuang Lianshi), again directed by Nakahira Kō (aka Yang Shuxi) in 1968. I choose to focus on this remaking practice for two reasons. The first has to do with a theoretical concern. That is, the generic turn manifested in these (and other 1960s remakes directed by Japanese directors contracted by the Shaw Bros. Studio) provides an optimal opportunity for discussing the dialectic of specificity and genericity (especially the Generic City) in a concrete context. Secondly, my attention to film remaking practices responds to an important phenomenon in Hong Kong film industry from the 1950s to the 1970s, namely, the collaboration with Japan, initiated by the Shaw Bros. Studio and its rival, MP & GI (later renamed Cathay). Such collaboration took the form of...