commentary 2

the largest theater chain in Hong Kong and had acquired dozens more screens overseas (Bordwell 2000: 68). An even more spectacular period of success came when it cooperated with the Hui brothers and helped revive Cantonese cinema.

Television and Cantonese cinema: the Hui brothers and comedy

In spite of the Mandarin box-office boom, the early 1970s was an unsettling time of double-digit inflation, economic recession, stock market crash, rampant crime and corruption – all of which, together with new mainland immigrants (legal and illegal), provided fertile subjects for Hong Kong cinema and television news coverage. According to one estimate, news and weather forecasts reached 1.7 million viewers daily and were the two most popular television programs in 1974 (HKIFF 1984: 12). The household ownership of television sets in Hong Kong had grown from 12.3 per cent in 1968 to 41.2 per cent in 1970, 72 per cent in 1972 and 90 per cent in 1976 (Cheuk 1999: 26). Unlike in Taiwan, however, television did not drastically affect movie attendance in Hong Kong. But the rapid growth of the television industry still had an impact on Hong Kong cinema, not just in personnel flow but also in subject matter and modes of representation. During the decline of Cantonese cinema in the early 1970s, many film artists migrated to the television industry, where they were able to experiment with new subjects and styles (Teo 2000). The establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in 1974 and its high-profile arrests, as covered by the media, prompted public interest. And this explains the popularity of new crime films like Anti-Corruption (Lianzheng fengbao, dir. Wu Siyuan, 1975), with its fast-paced documentary- style presentation.

A more prominent Cantonese feature was The House of Seventy-two Tenants (Qishier jia fangke, dir. Chor Yuen, 1973), which set a new box-office record of over HK$5.6 million and single-handedly revived Cantonese cinema (HKIFF 1984: 149). Based on a hilarious Shanghai stage play about a housing shortage, this comedy remake of a Wang Weiyi film directed in Guangzhou a decade earlier is distinguished by its all-star cast, which included many top names in film and television of the time. Co-produced by Shaw Brothers and HK-TVB (Hong Kong Television Broadcast, TVB for short, Gangshi, aka Wuxian, established in November 1967), this ingenious work anticipated what was to come in Cantonese cinema from the cross-fertilization between film and television: loose episodic structure, smart punchlines, outrageous humor and exaggerated acting.

Under these circumstances, the Hui brothers’ rise to fame in cinema was only natural. In 1971 Michael Hui (Xu Guanwen) and Sam Hui (Xu Guanjie) co- hosted a popular TVB variety show. In 1972 Michael Hui proceeded to play the lead in The Warlord (Da junfa, dir. Li Hanxiang, 1972; Mandarin), a Shaw Brothers production that established him as Hong Kong’s leading comedian.

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After a few more films Michael and his brother Ricky (Xu Guangying) both left Shaw Brothers, and together with Sam they established the Hui Brothers Company in 1974. From the start, the comedies directed by Michael Hui frequently ranked among the top ten – a trend that continued until the early 1990s (Chan 2000: 40). For example, co-produced with Golden Harvest, Games Gamblers Play (Guima shuangxing, dir. Michael Hui, 1974) outperformed Bruce Lee’s films, taking HK$6.2 million at the box office. By the time The Private Eyes (Banjin baliang, dir. Michael Hui, 1976) grossed HK$8.5 million, the drawing power of Cantonese cinema had more than doubled that of Colorful Youth a decade earlier. The earlier temporary demise of Cantonese cinema now seemed very distant.

Owing much to the Hui brothers’ ingenuity, satirical comedy – characterized by verbal gags, humorous situations, insignificant urbanites and their incon- sequential acts – had become an effective competitor to martial arts pictures by the mid-1970s. Neither a lone hero of the martial arts films nor a decadent philanderer of the soft-porn pictures, the Hui brothers’ pathetic anti-heroes always work in a comic pair (paidang) – a Cantonese tradition of comedy that would be exploited to the fullest in subsequent decades. With all his pretensions, frustrations and complaints, the Hui brothers’ anti-hero stood for what Law Kar describes as ‘Hong Kong’s Everyman, a screen persona which arouses audience identification’ (HKIFF 1984: 65).

In Jackie Chan’s case, a subgenre of comedy would integrate martial arts into gongfu or action comedy in the years to come. Thanks to the outstanding per- formances of the Hui brothers and Jackie Chan, by 1977 the annual Cantonese production output had once again surpassed Mandarin cinema. But contrary to the postwar revival, the Cantonese opera movie did not come back this time and virtually disappeared as a genre after three swan-song releases in the mid-1970s (HKIFF 1987: 21).

Of cinema and television: new talents, new styles and new competitions

A group of new talent emerged from cinema and television circles during the 1970s, and among them Tang Shuxuan (Shu Shuen, Cecille Tang), a visionary woman director educated at the University of Southern California, stood out at a time when martial arts and comedies inundated the market. Supported by American money, Tang brought a breath of fresh air to the Hong Kong screen with her debut, The Arch (Dong furen, 1970; b/w, Mandarin).

Set in the Ming dynasty, the film opens with a series of alternating panning and zooming shots of mountains, pine trees, clouds, woods, fields and a village, where soldiers arrive to protect the harvest from bandits. Madame Dong (Lu Yan) is a model widow living with her teenage daughter Weiling and her mother- in-law, and the villagers have petitioned the emperor for an arch of chastity in her honor. Captain Yang stays with the Dong family, and Weiling admires Yang’s

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martial figure from behind a window. A series of shots detail Dong’s household chores and a door dividing the inner and the outer compounds is highlighted several times, with Dong standing by silently after Yang has left or Weiling has gone through to pay Yang a visit. Yang leaves a love poem for Dong in the study and accompanies Weiling to the woods. Under the light of a shining moon, Yang watches Dong applying make-up from outside the window. A cricket surprises them, and while chasing it they touch each other’s hands. In the wine party that follows, shots of Yang’s hands carrying the dishes are repeated, and later in the night Dong in her bed hears Yang reciting a love poem outside.

As is typical of traditional widow tales, The Arch proceeds to show Dong repressing her emotions and marrying Weiling to Yang. A short shot-reverse-shot sequence foregrounds Yang and Dong speechless in the courtyard. Upon seeing the newlyweds off, Dong resumes her household routines. After her mother-in- law’s death, Dong becomes even lonelier when the family’s male servant prepares to leave. The news of the emperor’s approval of the arch does not change her life. Dong shuts the window, sits by the spinning wheel, and the sorrow on her face is intensified by the overlapping images of hands – Yang’s hand writing the love poem, her hands applying make-up, their hands together over a cricket, and a worker’s hands chipping away at the arch stone. Dong stands up and paces around the room. She suddenly opens the door, grabs a knife, rushes out and kills a rooster, its blood spilling on her dress. The servant is stunned and, after a moment of facing each other, Dong runs away into the darkness. A cut to the firecrackers launched in celebration of the completion of the arch returns Dong to her usual demeanor. She lowers her head and silently stands alone under the arch dedicated to her name, while the camera pulls back and pans across the distant mountains and clouds, thus framing the story as an inconsequential drama in human history.

In many ways, The Arch is unique in Hong Kong cinema. First, it is a sympa- thetic exploration of female experience from a feminist perspective. Critic Liu Chenghan (Lau Shing-hon) has pointed out the inadequate portrayal of male characters in the film, but this proves Tang’s strategy of privileging female subjectivity at the expense of a balanced treatment of the genders. Second, Tang’s sophisticated use of cinematic techniques, such as dissolves, jump-cuts, deep focus and freeze-frame, has produced a psychological text which is rich in traditional symbolism and psychoanalytic implications. The shots of Weiling stroking an ear of corn and of Yang eating a peach, for instance, symbolically express their sexual desires, although such symbols of the male and the female sexual organs might appear all too obvious by present-day standards. The sym- bolic enactment of castration in the killing of a rooster also reveals Tang’s reliance on Freudian psychoanalysis: it is only through such an act of bloody violence that Dong can give vent to her frustrations and resume her semblance of peace (HKIFF 1984: 103–9). Third, the film’s critical and popular reception was sharply divided. Even though The Arch had a discouraging three-day run in Hong Kong theaters, Tang’s talent was immediately recognized at the 1971

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Golden Horse Awards, which honored her with a special prize for superlative imagination in film and Lu Yan with the best actress award.

Shot on location in Taiwan in 1974, Tang’s second Mandarin feature, China Behind, further confirmed her exceptional talent. In this first Hong Kong feature to confront the Cultural Revolution at a time when it was going on, Tang dramatizes the physical and emotional traumas four mainland students endure in their illegal border crossing to Hong Kong. Ironies abound in Tang’s drama. In the anti-climatic ending, the illegal immigrants who have reached the land of their dreams find Hong Kong an alienating city, as frenetic with capitalism as China is with Maoism. Even more unfortunate than The Arch, China Behind was banned in Taiwan for containing images of the CCP leaders and in Hong Kong on the premise that it would ‘damage good relations with other territories’ (Law 2001: 36).14 Although its Hong Kong ban was lifted in 1981, the film has never been released commercially, although its significance – especially its daring investigation of sensitive geopolitical issues – has been belatedly recognized.

Tang Shuxuan was ahead of her time with her avant-garde spirit and vision. She made two more features in 1975 and 1979 and, after both failed miserably, quit filmmaking altogether. Her sponsorship of the film magazine Close Up (Da texie) between 1976 and 1979, however, brought together a group of young writers who would launch Film Biweekly (Dianying shuangzhou kan) in 1979 and promote a new wave of cinema in Hong Kong.

Apart from Tang’s work, signs of a new wave were also present in Jumping Ash (Tiaohui, 1976) co-directed by Josephine Siao and Leong Po-chi (Liang Puzhi), a gangster film that created a new visual style in Hong Kong cinema. Skilled at filming commercials, Leong was credited for his realistic use of the hand-held camera, his location shooting in places like Kowloon’s Walled City, and his fast-paced, free-moving documentary style. With the opening scenes shot in Amsterdam and two pleasing theme songs, the film was nicely packaged and did well at the box office, indicative of the potential commercial value of avant-garde techniques.

Although new to the film world, Leong Po-chi was a pioneer of Hong Kong television, having started with TVB as early as 1967. By the time Jumping Ash was produced, television had become a training ground for future film artists. Between 1975 and 1977, when Selina Chow (Leong Suk-yi, Zhou-Liang Shuyi) was in charge of programming and production, TVB gradually shifted its emphasis from variety shows to 30- and 60-minute programs shot in 16mm film. With his distinctive style, Patrick Tam (Tan Jiaming) contributed to such TVB series as CID (1976) and Seven Women (Qi nüxing, 1977), the latter courting controversy with its daring exploration of female sexuality (HKIFF 1999a: 94–105). A pioneer in television dramas, TVB was able to attract several overseas-trained talents, including Tsui Hark (Xu Ke) from Texas, and Ann Hui (Xu Anhua) and Yim Ho (Yan Hao) from London.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s oldest station RTV (Rediffusion Television, Lidi), which had begun operating in cable in May 1957 and had switched to color

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and non-cable in December 1973,15 employed talents like Johnny Mak (Mai Dangxiong). Mak soon earned recognition with the RTV series Ten Assassin- ations (Shida cike, 1976) and Operation Manhunt (Da zhangfu, 1976). In September 1975, a third station, CTV (Commercial Television, Jiashi), was launched. In 1976 CTV also launched a martial arts series, which reached a million viewers, and it competed with RTV for second place in the television market. By early 1978 CTV had consolidated its position with the high-profile defection of Selina Chow along with around 200 former TVB personnel, including Tsui Hark, Patrick Tam, Ringo Lam (Lin Lingdong) and Eddie Fong (Fang Lingzheng). A bidding war for television talent ensued, but TVB was able to win back many of its defectors because it was the only station that generated profits. By late 1978 CTV had ceased production after having spent HK$50 million on production in merely three years (Cheuk 1999: 16).

In the midst of the unprecedented competition, RTHK (Radio-Television Hong Kong, Xianggang dianshi), the only public station in Hong Kong, produced Below the Lion Rock (Shizishan xia, 1975). Shot on film, this series benefited from young artists such as Allen Fong (Fang Yuping) and Ann Hui, the latter also shooting episodes for the ICAC (Law 2001). Not owning its own channel, RTHK broadcast its programs on commercial channels during government-allocated time (HKIFF 1999a: 167–94).

A number of characteristics distinguish this group of television talent from previous filmmakers or their contemporaries like the Hui brothers. First, their sense of television professionalism compelled them to capture the reality of Hong Kong using candid camera techniques, confronting taboo subjects and exposing government bureaucracy in an earnest rather than in a cynical way. Second, their profound sympathy for the underprivileged continued the humanist tradition of Cantonese cinema, but without the former’s didacticism. Further, the limited time per television episode prevented lengthy moral preaching and resulted in a realist documentary style. Third, their command of new film techniques further enhanced the visual quality and emotional impact of their dramas, which appealed in particular to younger audiences. By the time TVB canceled its film unit after the closure of CTV, most of these new television program-makers were on their way to feature filmmaking. Extras (Qielifei, dir. Yim Ho, 1978), the first feature film from this group, heralded the advent of a new wave in Hong Kong cinema.

The death of Mandarin cinema Even though it had monopolized the Mandarin market, Shaw Brothers had no idea when it co-produced The House of Seventy-two Tenants a year after Cantonese cinema’s temporary demise that the boom in Mandarin cinema would face an even worse fate. As Teo states: ‘By 1979, Mandarin-language cinema was dead’ (Teo 2000: 90). Teo attributes several factors to Mandarin cinema’s demise, a situation that was unimaginable at its peak in the early 1970s. First, when Shaw

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Brothers and Golden Harvest raised their distribution fees in the boom years, Southeast Asian exhibitors changed their strategy by seeking partnership with Taiwan and co-producing Mandarin films there. Second, the profitable partner- ship with Taiwan inevitably caused overproduction, which resulted in a backlog of Mandarin titles waiting for release in Southeast Asia. Third, Indonesia imposed an import quota on Mandarin films, which dropped from 300 in 1972 to 100 in 1973, ninety in 1974 and fifty-six in 1977. Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand raised their import duties on films, and the South Vietnam market was closed at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Finally, unlike Cantonese cinema, where new talent simply migrated from film to television and back, Mandarin cinema in Hong Kong suffered from the drain of its talent pool. Therefore, as the new wave pushed Cantonese cinema into the international spotlight, Mandarin cinema suddenly disappeared, and the history of Hong Kong cinema began an entirely new chapter.

CONCLUSION: TOWARD REGIONAL IMAGINATION

In April 1977 the Hong Kong Urban Council inaugurated the annual Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF), which exhibited films from various countries and regions and organized special retrospectives and forums on Hong Kong cinema. Apart from its political significance in promoting Hong Kong as a cosmopolitan city and its artistic significance in discovering new talent, themes and techniques, the HKIFF has carried cultural significance in reconstructing Hong Kong film history. Since 1978, the annual retrospectives and the accompanying bilingual publications have placed Hong Kong cinema on research agendas. Given the involvement of a new generation of critics and scholars, Cantonese cinema has received special attention.

A manifesto-like introduction by Li Cheuk-to (Li Zhuotao), a veteran HKIFF program coordinator, to the 1988 retrospective, Changes in Hong Kong Society Through Cinema, states that:

Hong Kong is a city commonly thought of as having no history . . . Where the last generation is concerned, Hong Kong was a place of refuge but whose time and locality was borrowed. Hence, a sense of belonging was lacking. To the newer generations, the sense of belonging is stronger but their perspective of history (especially that of China) is sadly limited . . . Hong Kong’s history has been subdued and a new historical consciousness was never nurtured.

When Li announces the intention of the 1988 retrospective as ‘a beginning towards understanding Hong Kong’s history’, his ultimate goal is not history per se but culture – ‘Without a local history, there is no local culture. Without a local culture, the meeting of minds from both east and west would essentially come

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to naught’ (HKIFF 1988: 9). The Chinese phrase Li uses for ‘local culture’ is wenhua benwei, literally ‘culture’s original locale’, which foregrounds both the locality of Hong Kong culture and the historicity of this culture’s transformation. In this sense, cinema furnishes a means of retrieving collective memory and experience as well as reconstructing local history and culture.

Li Cheuk-to’s overview of Hong Kong cinema of the 1970s represents an attempt at such historical reconstruction of a ‘local culture’ through cinema. On the one hand, Li locates in Cantonese television programs and comedies such as The House of Seventy-two Tenants a sign of renewed interest in ‘the strong oral tradition of the Cantonese culture’, which added to local color and fostered a ‘genuine Hong Kong consciousness’. On the other hand, insatiable desires permeated the screen, as exemplified by Zhang Che’s swordsmen fighting for personal gain rather than moral principles or by Li Hanxiang’s women seeking emotional and sexual fulfillment while volunteering themselves as objects of the male gaze. As affection and morality became objects of distrust or ridicule, cynicism spread across all genres and furnished an outlet for discontented Hong Kong audiences: while submitting to the status quo, they at least could deride authority, injustice and decency. Such cynicism, nonetheless, betrayed a funda- mental contradiction in Hong Kong culture and engendered an intensifying identity crisis that sometimes verged on schizophrenia (as in soft-porn pictures produced by Lui Kei). For Li Cheuk-to, the cinematic search for Hong Kong’s ‘original locale’ (benwei) or local culture failed to go beyond native legends and folk wisdom, and the apathy to contemporary politics and marginality in history continued to characterize Hong Kong identity in the 1970s (HKIFF 1984: 123–31).

It is evident from Li Cheuk-to’s overview that an uneasy relationship exists between ‘Cantonese culture’ and Hong Kong’s ‘local culture’. Significantly, in a 1966 review Law Kar chose to describe Chan Po-chu as a ‘Cantonese woman’ rather than a ‘Hong Kong woman’, and as someone who represented ‘a pro- gressive new woman’ entirely independent in a male-centered society and thus distinguished herself from previous Cantonese female stars. Law detected in Chan’s screen images such ‘traditional Cantonese qualities’ as compassion, filiality, perseverance, reticence and righteousness. Already ‘modernized but not completely Hong Kong-ized’ as were some of her counterparts in Mandarin cinema, Chan’s was an outstanding image of ‘a new generation of Hong Kong’s Cantonese women’ (HKIFF 1982: 88–90).

For both Law Kar and Li Cheuk-to, Cantonese culture extends beyond Hong Kong’s borders, and Hong Kong’s local culture is therefore intimately related to Cantonese culture as a regional culture, at least up to the late 1960s. This intimate relationship is illustrated in the case of Li Wo’s radio storytelling, which reached a large number of listeners in the region of Guangzhou (originally designated as Canton), Hong Kong and Macao in the 1950s. Nevertheless, upon closer scrutiny, Law Kar and Li Cheuk-to differ in their concept of Hong Kong culture. Law’s term ‘Hong Kong-ized’ (Xianggang hua) reveals his suspicion

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of the ‘contaminating’ effects of a Westernized Hong Kong culture of the 1960s, which as a cosmopolitan culture (represented by Mandarin musicals) was not ‘local’ to Hong Kong but was originally imported from Shanghai in the postwar period. Li’s insistence on a ‘local culture’ in Hong Kong is therefore problematic, for what was ‘local’ to Li (Cantonese orality) was part of a regional culture and what was ‘Hong Kong’ to Law (Westernization) was, in Stephen Teo’s terms, the ‘Shanghai hangover’ or ‘Shanghai redone’ (1997: 14–39).

The historicity of Hong Kong culture is accentuated by the locality of its multiple origins, and what Leo Lee describes as the ‘Shanghainization’ of Hong Kong in the 1950s (1999: 330) is itself only part of a larger and longer process of translocal, transregional, transnational cultural integration in Hong Kong. With her multiple ties to Shanghai, Hong Kong and the US from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s, Eileen Chang’s Mandarin screenplays for MP&GI contributed to the formation of a cosmopolitan culture in Hong Kong that recognizes its multiregional origins (hence the popular theme of nanbei he – ‘south–north integration’). By the time Cantonese cinema reinvented itself with The House of Seventy-two Tenants, even characters from other regional backgrounds (Shanghai, Shandong and Chaozhou) spoke Cantonese, albeit with regional accents. In Teo’s opinion, The House of Seventy-two Tenants is ‘one of the first instances in Hong Kong cinema to show the territory as a Cantonese society able to assimilate Chinese people from different regions’ (1997: 145).

Grounded in such regional imagination, by the late 1970s Hong Kong cinema had gained the flexibility of crossing national and regional borders and the advantage of assimilating east and west as well as north and south. The grounding in regional imagination also enabled Hong Kong filmmakers to approach Chinese culture not as a single entity but as one consisting of multiple regional cultures characterized by many regional dialects. The awareness of southern Fujian thus accounts for a large number of Hong Kong productions of Amoy-dialect features intended predominantly for Southeast Asia and Taiwan. The cinematic negotiation with northern Chinese culture in martial arts pictures further confirms the advantage of regional imagination. It is interesting to note that in all three cases of Bruce Lee, King Hu and Zhang Che, a haunting sense of rootlessness accompanies the physical journeys of these artists and their screen heroes. Traveling between the US, Hong Kong and Taiwan, these martial artists presented uprooted knights-errant whose claims to certain origins – specific schools of martial arts connected to certain mountains or temples – remain at best nominal and must be tested through countless duels. The kind of Chinese ‘nationalism’ projected by these martial arts pictures, consequently, cannot help but be abstract: ‘China’ exists as an abstract ‘cultural ideal’ that does not impose any obligation on the part of Hong Kong filmmakers to support ‘a particular regime or political ideology’ (Teo 1997: 112).

Herein lies another definitive advantage of regional imagination. Hong Kong cinema can effectively evoke cultural nationalism – a sense of cultural pride and national belonging – without endorsing or identifying with competing

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representatives of the Chinese nation (either CCP or KMT).16 Bypassing the question of authenticity and legitimacy, Hong Kong’s cinematic productions of ‘China’ and ‘Chineseness’ are intended for mass consumption in Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities and at times have met with critical acclaim. The fact that Hong Kong has served as the site of such a large-scale production of signs of China and Chineseness – not just in martial arts films but also in opera movies originated from numerous localities – has further confirmed the advantage of regional imagination. Compared with Taiwan and the PRC, Hong Kong cinema may have been denied the status of a national cinema (see Chapter 1), but Hong Kong’s marginality in history and politics has fostered a distinctive type of regional imagination that transcends the national by assimilating both the local and the international. As evidenced by the multilocal operations of Minxin and Tianyi between Hong Kong and Shanghai, Grandview between Hong Kong and San Francisco, Cathay and Shaw Brothers between Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, Hong Kong cinema has always been ‘borderless’ (Yau 2001) in its transregional and transnational imagination. Simply put, ‘Hong Kong’s is the regional cinema par excellence’ (Bordwell 2000: 61).

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