By 1975, of the 4,000 or so feature films made worldwide, half came from Asia. Although the bulk of these were produced in India and Japan, other countries contributed a surprising number. Malaysia, for instance, developed a significant film industry thanks to government encouragement. Similarly, Indonesian cinema benefited from protectionist legislation, allowing companies to produce an average of 70 films a year, many in a distinctive horror genre featuring “snake women.” Thailand be-
26.20 The slum dwellers’ plight emphasized by the name of the street (Manila: In the Claws of Neon).
26.21 My Country: Clinging to a Knife Edge: a worker forced into a robbery meets a gang member under portraits of the Philippines’ first family.
Came another major force, producing over 600 films between 1983 and 1987. Although most of these countries’ output dropped when the video boom decimated Asian attendance in the mid-1980s, they produced some significant works, such as Teguh Karya’s Mementos (Indonesia, 1986) and Cherd Songsi’s The Scar (Thailand, 1978).
The Philippines established a small, vertically integrated studio system during the 1930s, but the companies declined in the postwar era and most production was in the hands of independents. Under the rule of Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda (1965-1986) production rose, leveling off at about 150 features per year in the mid-1970s. Most of these were in the popular genres of romantic melodrama, musicals (zarzuela), comedies, religious films, and soft-core eroticism (bomba). A star system was firmly in place, and many plots were derived from action - or romance-based comic books. The audience was proportionately large: 1,300 theaters lured in over 66 million viewers per year.
In the early 1970s, a new generation of Filipino filmmakers began to tackle social subjects. Their films retained the rapes, beatings, and other lurid conventions of mainstream genres but framed these as part of social criticism. Ishmal Bernal’s Speck in the Water (1976), Eddie Romero’s We Were Like This Yesterday, How Is It Today? (1976), and Mike De Leon’s Black (1977) dwell on poverty, crime, and corruption in a manner reminiscent of American film noir.
One of the most noteworthy efforts was Manila: In the Claws of Neon (1975). Lino Brocka had begun making films in 1970, most of them exploiting the conventional love triangles, rapes, and violent action in order to make points about contemporary Filipino life. In Manila, Ligaya is lured to the city by a procuress, who sells her to a Chinese. When Ligaya’s finance Julio finds her, the Chinese kills Ligaya, and Julio murders him before being slain by a mob. Alongside the passion-driven plotline, however, runs an indictment of economic exploitation. Julio’s search for Ligaya becomes a cross section of Manila’s unemployed men and women, and collateral scenes, such as some dockers’ brutal attack on bourgeois men in a movie theater, define the city as a class battleground. Brocka underlines the suffering of slum dwellers with symbolic compositions (26.20).
Just as the “New Filipino Cinema” was emerging, President Marcos’s government installed much stricter censorship. Scripts were reviewed before production, and completed films could be either cut or banned. De Leon, Brocka, and others aroused censors’ ire: not particularly popular at home, their films were winning praise abroad and calling attention to the seamy side of Marcos’s regime. Brocka, the most outspoken of the group, spent time in prison for fighting censorship and participating in strikes. Yet he and his peers were still allowed to make films merging social criticism and entertainment conventions. One of the most stinging is Brocka’s My Country: Clinging to a Knife Edge (1982), which criticizes the regime’s inequities with remarkable bluntness (26.21).
In 1986, an urban insurrection overthrew Marcos’s regime and installed President Corazon Aquino, widow of an assassinated opposition leader. The revolution raised hopes for a new, dynamic cinema, but mass entertainment ruled the market as intensely as before. Aquino’s government passed no measures to protect the industry, and the Marcos censorship apparatus remained in place. Many filmmakers expressed bitter disappointment with Aquino’s policies; Brocka’s Fight for Us (1989), produced by Pathe, suggested that repression and militarism had not left the islands.
In other respects, however, the Philippines’ commercial industry prospered. Attendance and feature output rose sharply, and several local productions proved to be huge successes. New laws gave more rights to women, and several female directors began careers, notably Marilou Diaz-Abaya (Milagros, 1997). Aquino’s daughter Kris found stardom in a series of romantic comedies in 1991—the same year that an auto accident killed Brocka, who was planning another film critical of the post-Marcos era.
In the early 1990s, with Aquino’s former defense chief, Fidel Ramos, now president, popular film stars were being elected to government posts. The industry won some favors from Ramos’s regime, chiefly a liberalization of censorship. Producers continued to release between 120 and 200 films each year, many of which were pito-pita (“seven-seven”) films, shot in seven to ten days and aimed at recouping quickly their minimal costs. Few films made money, and most were quickly pirated on video.
In May 1998, film actor Joseph Estrada was elected president, and censorship was further weakened. Producers began cranking out lucrative sex pictures. Soon, however, terrorist attacks by Muslim separatists discouraged filmgoing and reduced production output. At the start of the new century, despite the perseverance of Mike De Leon and other veteran directors, the Filipino cinema was facing a grim future.
The most successful and influential Asian cinema outside Japan and India was located in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. During the 1930s, Hong Kong had been a refuge for Chinese filmmakers fleeing the war-torn mainland, and by the 1950s several studios were operating there. Hong Kong’s was a regional industry, providing comedies, family melodramas, Cantonese opera films, and swordfight movies to South China and Chinese populations throughout East and Southeast Asia.
Shaw Brothers and the New Wuxia Pian One company emerged to rule the market. The Shaw Brothers firm had established an entertainment empire in Singapore. The indefatigable entrepreneur Run Run Shaw decided to use Hong Kong as his production base and in 1958 built a studio there. The Movietown complex held ten shooting stages, numerous backlots (including an artificial lake), an actor’s training school, laboratory and sound facilities, and even dormitories and apartments for the employees. Shaw Brothers was vertically integrated, owning distribution agencies and theater chains throughout East Asia. The firm emphasized production in Mandarin, the most common regional Chinese dialect.
During the 1960s, Shaw pioneered the revision of the martial-arts film (the wuxia pian, or “film of martial chivalry”). Borrowing from Peking-opera acrobatics, Japanese samurai films, spaghetti Westerns, and even James Bond films, Shaw’s swordplay film became a dazzling spectacle. Zhang Che, the most successful practitioner of the genre, turned The One-Armed Swordsman (1966), The Assassin (1967), and Golden Swallow
(1968) into violent spectacles (26.22). Zhang’s assistant directors and instructors went on to become important directors in the 1970s.
More innovative and widely renowned was King Hu, whose Come Drink with Me (1965) marked the emergence of the new martial-arts trend. Set almost wholly within an inn, Come Drink with Me builds its action out of intrigues, masquerades, and flare-ups among the guests. Hu’s rapid editing, sweeping widescreen compositions, and Peking-opera acrobatics shaped the martial-arts film for decades. “Working on that film,” he recalled, “I began to realize that if the plots are simple, the stylistic delivery will be even richer. ” 4
Hu left Shaw Brothers for Taiwan, where he produced Dragon Inn (1967) and A Touch of Zen (1970). The latter project was on a scale unprecedented in the wuxia pian. Three years in the making and based upon intricacies of Buddhist philosophy, the original version ran three hours. A Touch of Zen pushes stylization to new extremes. While “flying swordsmen” were already a convention of martial-arts films, Hu intensified the urgency of the action. His warriors execute fantastic leaps, hovering to slash or punch before landing gracefully, already coiled for a new encounter (Color Plate 26.14).
Hu’s later films, such as The Valiant Ones (1975, coproduced in Hong Kong), and Raining in the Mountain (1979) amplify the balletic excitement of A Touch of Zen. Nimble performers hurl themselves over rocks, ricochet off walls and tree trunks, and swoop down from the sky. In Hu’s work, the martial-arts film achieved a new kinetic grace, and his Taiwanese productions had an enduring influence on Hong Kong directors.
Bruce Lee and the Kung-Fu Film A new martial-arts cycle developed under the auspices of Raymond Chow, who served as head of production for Run Run Shaw. In 1970, Chow broke away to found his own company, Golden Harvest. Chow aimed his product at a broad international market. He found immediate success in films starring the Asian martial artist Bruce Lee.
Born in California, Lee had been a popular child and teenage actor in Hong Kong, but he found only minor roles in U. S. films and television. Then Golden Harvest’s The Big Boss (aka Fists ofFury, 1971) burst onto screens. It propelled Lee to stardom and made kung fu, the art of punching and kickboxing, a worldwide fad. Chow built upon Lee’s success with Fist of Fury (aka The Chinese Connection, 1972) and The Way of the Dragon (aka The Return of the Dragon, 1972), each of which broke Hong Kong box-office records. Lee appeared with minor Hollywood actors in the bigger-budget Enter the Dragon
26.22 The villain is punished appropriately in The New OneArmed Swordsman (1970).
26.23 In Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee licks his own blood to fuel his rage.
26.24 Fist of Fury: in slow motion, Lee leaps into the air and kicks to pieces a sign reading “No Dogs or Chinese Allowed.”
(1973), a coproduction with Warner Bros. Lee’s death under mysterious circumstances in 1973 made him a cult hero.
The most famous Chinese star in history, Lee played a key role in opening foreign markets to Hong Kong films. He also saw himself as an emblem of the excellence of Chinese martial arts, a point made explicit in Fist of Fury, which celebrates Shanghai’s resistance to Japanese occupation during World War II. Lee’s films, enjoyed throughout the Third World, were often taken as symbolizing the rebellious pride of insurgent Asia.
Although Lee directed only one film, The Way of the Dragon, he controlled his star image carefully. Typically he played a superman, unquestionably the best fighter around but keeping his full force in reserve until the explosive climax (26.23). Lee insisted on more realistic combat scenes than were the norm in Hong Kong films, displaying his skills in longish takes and long shots. Some moments of spectacle, however, are intensified by camera tricks and editing (26.24).
After Lee’s death, producers cast about for substitutes (often named Bruce Le, Leh, or Li), but the kung-fu
26.25 Michael Hui gets the better of his brother Sam in The Private Eyes (1976).
26.26 In Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, Jackie Chan practices his “snake” attack on unsuspecting eggs.
Film rapidly declined in quality. Nevertheless, foreign audiences had embraced the genre, and Raymond Chow’s enterprise grew. By the mid-1970s, Golden Harvest and Shaw Brothers produced about one-third of Hong Kong films. Chow controlled the largest theater circuit in the colony and 500 other theaters across Asia. The martial-arts film, as developed under Shaw and Chow, contributed conventions to action-based genres around the world and won Hong Kong films a high place in international markets.
Breakthroughs in the 1980s Even with the expansion of output in small Asian countries, Hong Kong films dominated the region. In the colony, the local product overwhelmed imports at the box office. The genres and stars were hugely popular throughout Asia, as well as in Africa, Latin America, and Asian communities in Europe and North America. Vertically integrated companies like Shaw Brothers and Chow’s Golden Harvest kept production costs down while supplying their own theaters with a staple product.
Some directors, such as Lau Kar-Ieung, sustained the martial-arts genre in Spiritual Boxer (1975) and The Eight-Diagram Pole Fighter (1984), but, on the whole, swordplay and kung-fu films declined. Police thrillers, contemporary comedies, and underworld action films became the major genres of the 1980s. For many critics and audiences, the new genres reflected the city’s modernizing, westernizing culture. New stars also emerged. The television comedian Michael Hui formed his own company with Golden Harvest for a string of successful slapstick films (Games Gamblers Play, 1974; Security Unlimited, 1981; Chicken and Duck Talk, 1988). Hui played grasping merchants and boorish professionals, types readily associated with the new mercantile Hong Kong (26.25).
The success of Hui’s comedies accelerated the rise of another performer, Jackie Chan. Chan began his career as a Bruce Lee imitator before mixing acrobatic kung fu with breakneck comedy in Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow (1978; 26.26), Fearless Hyena (1979), and Young Master (1980). Chan soon became the biggest star in Asia. Refusing to use a double, he executed astonishingly risky stunts while giving himself a screen persona reminiscent of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd—the diminutive, resourceful, never-say-die average man. Chan also shifted genres rapidly. Sensing that pure martial art was waning in popularity, he combined it and physical comedy with histori-
26.27 Chan in an awkward defensive position (Armour of God).
26.28 The Hong Kong journalist with the Vietnamese children he tries to rescue in Boat People.
Cal intrigue [Project A, 1983), the cop thriller [Police Story, 1985), and swashbuckling adventure modeled on Raiders of the Lost Ark [Armour of God, 1986; 26.27).
The Hong Kong New Wave The sense of a cosmopolitan Hong Kong identity was an important ingredient in the New Wave of the late 1970s. A new film culture emerged with the establishment of the Hong Kong Film Festival (1977), industry-related magazines, and college courses. Several directors, often trained abroad and starting out in local television production, won international recognition. Some remained independent filmmakers, while others quickly became central forces in the industry—the Hong Kong equivalents of the Hollywood movie brats of the 1970s.
After directing in television, Ann Hui entered feature production with The Secret (1979), a murder mystery using an unprecedented number of women in production roles. Her The Spooky Bunch (1980) helped revive the ghost-story genre, and The Story of Woo Viet (1981) looked forward to the “hero” crime films. Hui’s international reputation rested upon more somber dramas reflecting on postwar Asian history. Boat People (1982) explains the political oppression that drives Vietnamese to emigrate to Hong Kong [26.28). Song of the Exile
(1990) traces how a young woman comes to understand the complex past of her mother, a Japanese woman treated harshly by her Chinese husband’s family.
Other filmmakers contributed to the New Wave. Shu Kei’s Sealed with a Kiss (1981) details a love affair between two handicapped adolescents. Allen Fong, who studied filmmaking at the University of Southern California, also specialized in intimate human dramas. Rejecting the flamboyant spectacle of commercial cinema and often obliged to shoot in 16mm, Fong made Father and Son (1981) in a bittersweet vein reminiscent of Francois Truffaut.
The sobriety of such works identified the Hong Kong New Wave with social commentary and psychological nuance. But this side of the trend was quickly overwhelmed by a rapid-fire revamping of popular genres. Central to this development was Tsui Hark. Tsui studied film in the United States before taking directing jobs in television. He entered theatrical features with a futuristic wuxia pian, The Butterfly Murders (1979). After some violent satires, Tsui turned abruptly toward family entertainment. He helped launch a cycle of “supernatural kung fu” with Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain (1982), and he gained still more recognition with Shanghai Blues (1984) and Peking Opera Blues (1986).
These dazzling, frantic mixtures of action, comedy, and sentimental romance borrow openly from the New Hollywood. Tsui’s scenes are busy to the point of exhaustion: the camera rushes up to the actors, wide-angle setups multiply rapidly, and fighters soar endlessly through space. In a characteristic scene from Shanghai Blues, several characters dodge one another, popping up in unexpected crannies of the frame (Color Plate 26.15).
Like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Tsui became a powerful producer. His company, Film Workshop, produced several of the all-time successes of the Hong Kong cinema. John Woo’s gory A Better Tomorrow (1986) made television star Chow Yun-Fat sensationally popular and founded a cycle of hero films featuring sensitive, romanticized gangsters [26.29). Tsui also produced Ching Siu-Tung’s A Chinese Ghost Story (1987), an extravaganza of supernatural martial arts, and the key Jet Li vehicle Once upon a Time in China
(1991) —both of which spawned numerous sequels and clones. Tsui’s success with spectacle-centered entertainment signaled the end of the New Wave and created a vogue for flashy, fast-paced movies.
26.29 In the midst of a gunfight, two gangsters join forces with the cop, bound to them by blood and love (A Better Tomorrow).
26.30 Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee discuss matters in The Killer.
Films like Tsui’s, with their flamboyant style and an unapologetic appeal to emotion, began to be recognized in western film circles. European and North American distributors circulated Woo’s The Killer (1989), in which the gangster-hero cycle reaches delirious heights. In the middle of almost unremitting carnage and sentimental scenes of manly devotion, conversations are conducted at gunpoint (26.30). The U. S. Majors began hiring Woo (Hard Target, 1993), Tsui (Double Team, 1997), and other Hong Kong directors. (Only Woo became an A-list Hollywood presence, helming megapics like Face/Off, 1997, and Mission: Impossible 2, 2000.) Ironically, the worldwide appreciation of Hong Kong cinema coincided with a downturn in the industry’s fortunes.
The 19905: A Better Tomorrow? In the early 1980s, the United Kingdom had agreed to return Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997. The movie industry shifted into high gear, pumping out films to make as much money as possible in the face of an uncertain future. A star might perform in over a dozen pictures per year, shooting one in the morning and another in the afternoon. The criminal gangs known as “triads” intensified their involvement in the industry by forcing stars to play in quickies. By the early 1990s, production soared to over 200 features per year—a reflection of the popularity of the films throughout East Asia. Hong Kong producers accordingly raised their budgets, paying for the films by presales to overseas distributors.
In the flurry of production, several unusual films were made, including “art films” like Stanley Kwan’s graceful ghost romance Rouge (1988; Color Plate
26.16) and his biography of Ruan Lingyu (p. 258), Actress (aka Centre Stage, 1991). The most original art movies came from the former scriptwriter Wong Kar-wai. After a success with the Mean Streets variant As
Tears Go By (1988), Wong made Days of Being Wild (1990), a milestone in Hong Kong cinema. The film used a retro-1960s look to tell the linked stories of several people whose lives are touched by a cold, manipulative young man. No Hong Kong film before had been so formally daring and psychologically dense.
However, the expensive Days of Being Wild was a fiasco and drove Wong out of directing for several years. He returned with a string of films that won him worldwide attention at film festivals: Ashes of Time (1994), Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), Happy Together (1997), and In the Mood for Love (2000). Honored with several Cannes prizes, Wong became the most artistically respected Hong Kong director. He drew upon the elements of commercial cinema—big stars, pop sound tracks, romantic situations, violent confrontations—but poeticized them with a freewheeling, lyrical style. Writing his script day by day, he improvised on the set, discarded previously shot scenes, used a free-roaming hand-held camera, and played music during filming to evoke an emotional atmosphere.
The result is a sketchy, digressive, sometimes selfindulgent, but often exhilarating cinema. Plotlines split off and converge unexpectedly. In Chungking Express, the story starts with one couple and segues to another, never returning to the first but inviting us to compare their attitudes to time and love (Color Plate 26.17). Against the frantic pacing and ultraviolence of 1980s Hong Kong film, Wong favored languid scenes and wistful imagery reminiscent of French Impressionist cinema
(26.31). Even Ashes of Time, his version of a wuxia pian, dwells on swordsmen meditating on the women they have lost. Wong’s innocents yearn for romance, all the while sensing life’s transience. Through muted dramas and vivid images Wong seemed to be seeking a cinema of pure, instantaneous rapture.
26.31 Chungking Express: the fast-food countergirl, now a
Flight attendant, waits for the man of her dreams.
Wong’s films, widely distributed in Europe, Japan, and North America, were not local hits; the domestic audience preferred Jackie Chan, still turning out topgrossing adventures, as well as comedian Stephen Chiau and action star Jet Li. But even the popularity of these foolproof stars began to wane as the regional market felt a surfeit of Hong Kong films, and Hollywood films spread through the Pacific. The 1997 handover of Hong Kong to the PRC coincided with an economic crisis throughout Asia, leaving Hong Kong cinema in perilous condition.
Even while the industry was faltering, however, new forces emerged. Peter Chan, a U. S.-trained director, developed a strong following with his comedy He’s a 'Woman, She’s a Man (1994) and the drama Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996). Tsui Hark, ever the entrepreneur, provided The Blade (1995), a shattering remake of Zhang Che’s The One-Armed Swordsman, and a computer-animated version of A Chinese Ghost Story
(1997). And new, robust production companies began turning out stylish genre films. Most notable was Milky-way Image, led by veteran Shaw Brothers director Johnnie To, and writer-director Wai Ka-fai. Together they produced a string of piercing, neo-noir crime dramas: The Longest Nite, Expect the Unexpected, and A Hero Never Dies (all 1998). To’s The Mission (1999), with its cryptic plot centering on hitmen hired to guard a triad boss, promised to redefine the Hong Kong action film (26.32). Once again, this hyperkinetic cinema refused to stand still.
In 1982, Taiwan was an unlikely source of innovative filmmaking. Its products were notorious for being either stultifyingly propagandistic or rudimentary, low-budget entertainment. Yet, in the 1980s, Taiwanese cinema became one of the most exciting areas of international film culture.
Taiwan was colonized by the Japanese in 1895, and not until World War II were they driven out. But native Taiwanese were not to enjoy independence long. In 1949, Jiang Jie-shi’s (Chiang Kai-shek’s) Guomindong troops fled Mao’s revolution, bringing 2 million mainland Chinese to the island. The mainland emigrants took control and created an authoritarian state, on the grounds that Jiang, China’s rightful leader, would someday retake the mainland. Martial law was declared for the indefinite future.
Initially, filmmaking was under control of the government, principally through the Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC). The CMPC and other agencies concentrated on anti-Communist documentaries. Commercial firms copied the costume operas, comedies, and love stories brought in from Hong Kong.
During the 1960s, the success of imported martial-arts films spurred Taiwanese producers to imitate them, sometimes by welcoming Hong Kong directors such as
26.32 Shootout in a shopping mall: suspenseful and dynamic use of wide-screen space in The Mission.
World History
