Popular Culture Co-production and Collaborations in East and Southeast Asia

4. Regional Contexts of Cooperation and Collaboration in Hong Kong Cinema

68 Caroline S. Hau and Takashi Shiraishi 68 CHAPTER 4 Regional Contexts of Cooperation and Collaboration in Hong Kong Cinema Caroline S. Hau and Takashi Shiraishi The Hong Kong film industry has often been described and analyzed in terms of transnationalism and globalization, and the conjoined categories of “global” and “local.”1 In this essay, we identify the conceptual limits of these perspectives and argue in favor of the salience of “region” as a unit of analysis in understanding the cross-border and cross-cultural links and processes that characterize Hong Kong cinematic production. We then pinpoint the specific patterns and densities of cross-border and cross-cultural inflows into the Hong Kong film industry through a statistical survey and analysis of Hong Kong filmmakers’ cooperation and/or collaboration with non-Hong Kong agents over a 29-year period from 1978 to 2006. We argue that these patterns and densities can best be explained by reference to the way in which the regional system of what is now called “East Asia” has evolved and changed over time. We conclude with a discussion of three examples of cultural entrepreneurship that have sought, with varying degrees of success, to tap into these regional flows and cater to a regional market, and the impact that regional cooperation and/or collaboration may have in shaping these respective cinematic productions and visions. “Transnational” and “Global/Local” Perspectives on Hong Kong Cinema Studies of Hong Kong cinema have sought to make sense of this particular film industry’s cross-border and cross-cultural flows, connections, and characteristics by recourse to the vocabulary of “transnationalism” Cooperation and Collaboration in Hong Kong Cinema 69 and “globalization.” An example that brings the two terms together is Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu’s concept of “transnational Chinese cinemas”, which aims at rethinking the “national/transnational interface in Chinese film history and in film studies and cultural studies at large” by positing a plurality of sites of cinematic production across a “broad geographic and historical terrain, including Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and to some extent overseas Chinese communities” (1997: 1). Arguing that “film in China has always been of a transnational character” and that “film has always been a transnational entity” (1997: 25), Lu identifies four “levels” at which “transnationalism” may be observed: “first, the split of China into several geopolitical entities since the nineteenth century — the Mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong — and consequently the triangulation of competing national/local ‘Chinese cinemas,’ especially after 1949; second, the globalization of the production, marketing, and consumption of Chinese film in the age of transnational capitalism in the 1990s; third, the representation and questioning of ‘China’ and ‘Chineseness ’ in filmic discourse itself, namely, the cross-examination of the national cultural, political, ethnic, and gender identity of individuals and communities in the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora; and fourth, a re-viewing and revisiting of the history of Chinese ‘national cinemas’, as if to read the ‘prehistory’ of transnational filmic discourse backwards” (1997: 3). Zhang Yingjing complicates Lu’s formulation by arguing that the triangulation among these “Chinese cinemas” is characterized not only by competition, by also by the “transregional strategy since the late 1980s” of “close cooperation” among filmmakers in the three “regions” (i.e., Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong”) (2002: 36). Zhang criticizes Lu’s ahistorical use of “transnationalism:” “a replacement of ‘national cinema’ by ‘transnational cinema’ as an overriding term for Chinese film production in the first half of the [twentieth] century runs the risk of erasing the issue of cultural colonialism. We must remember that it is against Hollywood’s domination that China launched a national film industry in the late 1920s” (2002: 38). Zhang’s endorsement of a transregional “cultural and Greater China” concept of cooperation among Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong rests on a critical awareness of the problematic nature but heuristic expediency of the terms “China” and “Chineseness,” and a call to “map out the changing networks and locations of film production and distribution in or between mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, as well as their complex relationships with other regions in Asia (especially Japan) and around the world” (2002: 40). 70 Caroline S. Hau and Takashi Shiraishi While Lu and Zhang locate Hong Kong cinema within a “Chinese” transnational (Lu) and “transregional” (Zhang) context, Esther Yau deploys the term “globalization” as a theoretical strategy to “consider...