Party leader Xi Jinping was given a third term as party leader last weekend.He already put the last nail in the coffin of Hong Kong’s film industry lastyear. In October 2021, the censorship law of the former British colony wasexpanded: everything that threatens China’s ‘national security’ is now banned,a deliberately vague concept. Previously approved films can be retroactivelycensored.
The tightening was in response to documentaries about the 2019 Hong Kong massprotests, but genre film fans are not reassured. Will Stephen Chow’s crazy spycomedy be? From Beijing With Love (1994) soon cut up? And are heroes inclassic thrillers still allowed to smoke?
The American Hong Kong expert Grady Hendrix stocked blu-rays of genre classicsthis year. Now it’s still possible. Hendrix: “The new censorship law prohibitsanti-patriotic themes, but corrupt officials or certain forms of crime arealso sensitive, as are swearing and snake.”
wild freedom
Characteristic of the Hong Kong film, certainly before the transfer of theBritish colony to China in 1997, was precisely an almost savage freedom. A lotwas allowed – sex, violence, gore – as long as it made money. Hong Kong’shyper-commercial film industry in its heyday was a pressure cooker for cheap,fast-paced genre films, for young talent, innovation and experimentation.
The Imagine Film Festival, which takes place in Amsterdam from October 26 toNovember 5, honors Hong Kong with a panel, a lecture by Hendrix, new films anda small retrospective of films that represent phases in Hong Kong’s history.This is how musical illustrates The Wild, Wild Rose – 1960, about anightclub singer and unwilling femme fatale – the glory days of Hong Kong’sstudio system, gangster film trivisa (2016) the hangover after the Chinesetransfer and state the extreme horror film Dream Home – 2010, femaleworkaholic murders her way into housing – before Hong Kong’s real estatecrisis.
Although the metropolis still produces action films, little is left of HongKong’s dominant position in the past. In its heyday, Hong Kong, with studioslike The Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest, only tolerated Hollywood; a city ofabout 7 million inhabitants produced two to three hundred films a year. Theexport market was initially Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora, then all of Asiaand, since the kung fu craze around Bruce Lee in the early 1970s, also theWest.
kung fu
Grady Hendrix recently published a coffee table book about that martial artscraze in the United States: These Fists Break Bricks. The kung fu genreemerged in 1967 from the anti-colonial protests in Hong Kong, he says. „Italmost always came down to a angry young man against the corrupt power.Bruce Lee’s films are not without humor, but his film personality wascharacterized by frustration and rage. That struck a chord in the then deeplydivided America, especially among black viewers and Latinos.”
Exports of kung fu movies turned out to be a gold mine for Hong Kong, althoughthe boom in kung fu comedies continued after Jackie Chan’s double-cross Snakein the Eagle ‘s Shadow And especially Drunken Master in 1978 an Asianphenomenon – in the West this genre did not catch on. Jackie Chan was not anangry control freak but an improvising clown. Hendrix: „Hong Kong was readyfor its lighter tone at the time. At the end of the 1970s, the city becamericher, a middle class and a yuppie culture emerged. Angry kung fu also datesback to 1967, it became more something for your parents.”
exotic cult
In the 1980s, Hong Kong movies were exotic cult in the West, available inChinese theaters and obscure corners of the neighborhood video store. The HongKong ‘heroic bloodshed’ that conquered Asia after 1986 remained as marginalhere as kung fu comedies; crime films by directors such as Ringo Lam andespecially John Woo were characterized by extreme weapon use, a towering bodycount and gunmen who revolved through the screen in slow motion.
This kinetic style only really broke through in Hollywood in the 1990s, thanksin part to video nerds like Quentin Tarantino. Hong Kong’s modern wuxia –historical, often magical fighting films featuring weightless swordsmen onwires – went mainstream thanks to Ang Lees Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon(2000).
In the late 1990s, an exodus of talent towards Hollywood also began. JackieChan broke through in 1995 after numerous failed attempts with Rumble in theBronx Jet Li became a bona fide action star, John Woo filmed Americanblockbusters like Face/Off Yuen Woo-Ping choreographed The Matrix (1999).Hendrix: “At the time, the American public got bored of muscle bundles likeSchwarzenegger and Stallone. The speed, acrobatics and unpredictability ofHong Kong was a revelation.”
At the same time, the film industry in Hong Kong imploded: both the receiptsand the number of films halved in the late 1990s. This was related to the 1997handover to China, the 1998 Asian financial crisis, overproduction, risingcosts, and a demanding, cosmopolitan audience that digitally preferred moresophisticated Hollywood blockbusters. And maybe also with the exodus toHollywood.
Censorship
That exodus was inevitable, Hendrix thinks. “The logic of action movies isthat it has to get bigger and bigger. Hong Kong could no longer afford that.So why not walk into Hollywood financially as a filmmaker and master newdigital techniques at the same time?”
In the early 21st century, many greats – Tsui Hark, Jet Li, Jackie Chan –returned to apply their knowledge gained in Hong Kong. Another remarkableaction and art house film came out of Hong Kong, thanks to authors such asWong Kar-Wai and Ann Hui. Still, China became a problem. The 1997 transferinitially brought Hong Kong larger film budgets, beautiful new locations andaccess to an explosively growing film market. But we had to learn Hong Kong toavoid the sensitivities and censorship of the mainland. And that certainlybecame more difficult after Xi Jinping’s moral revival after the 2016Olympics.
Hendrix: „At the moment there is little interesting cinema in China. In Asia,Hong Kong can’t be honored with the foot on the brakes, Korea dominates popculture. Hong Kong’s film industry has ended up in a dead end.”
The censorship is slightly less strict than in China: for example, a film fromHong Kong is allowed to broach paranormal subjects. And sometimes somethingslips through the censorship: Hendrix points to Stephen Chow’s hit film TheMermaid from 2016, about a colony of aquatic creatures, half human, halffish, who are attacked by cruel oppressors from the mainland on an island offthe Chinese coast. This metaphor for Hong Kong may have escaped censorship.
But that’s subtext for insiders, flowers on the grave of a film industry thatflourished as a free outpost of a closed, inward-looking China, which itselfbarely produced any films. Hendrix advocates a more careful handling of HongKong genre classics, given the dangers of retroactive censorship and sloppyarchiving. If only because Hong Kong’s studios have shaped the rest of theworld for decades to see what China looks like.