Stephen Yiu-wai Chu
This section has discussed the critical geographies of Hong Kong cinema, going beyond the confines of the city, its identity, and its thoroughly analyzed relationship with Hollywood and with China. These chapters focus not on the filmic representations of space but on the new geopolitics reconfigured by the rapidly changing mediascape in the new millennium. Hong Kong’s unique history and geographical location as a region marginal from China, an imperial outpost, a British colony, and a trading center enabled it to develop into a filmmaking capital. For more than a century Hong Kong cinema has been famous for its distinct identity internationally and domestically. In recent years the economic geography of Chinese cultural industries has changed drastically, exerting a profound impact on not only Hong Kong cinema but also Hong Kong culture and society. On the one hand, the film industries of Asian countries have begun gathering momentum; on the other hand, the field of cultural production in Asia has been reconfigured by the unexpectedly swift growth of the mainland market. According to the Baseline Study on Hong Kong’s Creative Industries, a study commissioned by the Central Policy Unit and conducted by the Centre for Cultural Policy Research of the University of Hong Kong (2003: 107–108): “Hong Kong is now challenged by other Asian players in the field. Korean film is renowned for much variety as well as quality of production lately, and their exports to the mainland are competitive. Other regional markets meanwhile witness the trend of localization of film services.” At the same time, “[t]he gradual opening of mainland’s film market is indeed the future for Hong Kong” (107). The changing geographies at this particular juncture should contribute an important dimension to the study of Hong Kong cinema.
“Of all the affairs we participate in, with or without interest, the groping quest for a new way of life is the only thing that remains really exciting,” Guy Debord wrote (1955 / 2008: 23) in his monumental “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.” This is equally true of Hong Kong cinema, which is also desperate to find a new way of life. Debord turned to psychogeography because aesthetics and other disciplines had proved glaringly inadequate in this regard. While I believe that the aesthetics and other studies of film have something to contribute to the quest for a new way of life, the critical geographies of Hong Kong cinema do have an important dimension to offer to the study of not only Hong Kong movies but also the city per se. In Spaces of Capital, a seminal work in the field of critical geography, David Harvey (2001: x) noted that his project centered on “the role of geographical knowledges in the perpetuation of political-economic power structures and in transforming by opposition the political economic order.” The most important transformation of political-economic power structures in regard to Hong Kong, if not the world as well, is the rapid rise of China and its soft power in the new millennium. Hong Kong, having a historical role as a meeting place of East and West, lost its unique, prolific place between China and the world shortly after its reversion to China. When Ackbar Abbas suggested that the possibility of a new Hong Kong subjectivity after 1997 would be predicated on a “process of negotiating the mutations and permutations of colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism” (cited in Chapter 5 by Olivia Khoo), he probably could not have predicted that nationalism and capitalism would become hopelessly entangled for Hong Kong, as it has been forced to lean towards the enormous market on the mainland.
Before “going north” became the seeming panacea for the problems of the shrinking market, Hong Kong filmmakers tried exploring inter-Asia possibilities in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis. Hollywood has long been the dream market of Hong Kong cinema. Notwithstanding successful transitions including, among others, Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat, and John Woo, Hong Kong cinema came to realize that going west to Hollywood was a venture restricted to a few selected superstars. At the turn of the new millennium, inter-Asia collaborations appeared to be the future of Hong Kong cinema. As lucidly noted by Cindy Hing-yuk Wong in Chapter 8, uncovering the expansion of creative cinematic geographies of the world through programming in the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF), the Festival “acts not only as the Western gateway for the East, but also as [the] Northernmost point of the (Asian) South and regional centre for wider and less than cogent fostering of the Asian century.” After the opening up of the mainland market, the role of Hong Kong between East and West and North and South has changed, leading to a new strategy of promoting the Hong Kong brand, which, if successful, “can differentiate itself in becoming the agency of such trends and markets in ‘the East’ or ‘Asia.’” The strategy of the HKIFF – in conjunction with co-curricular fora like Asian Film Financing Forum – falls in line with the entire agenda of the Hong Kong government to brand Hong Kong as “Asia’s World City,” which, as noted by Wong, has been framed by the two contrasting tourist discourses that the Hong Kong Tourism Board circulates for mainland and Western tourists, “portraying the city both as a modern Western capitalist consumerist landscape and an exotic stage for Oriental tradition.” However, the remarkable rise of the Korean film industry, together with the swift development of the Chinese market, has made Hong Kong filmmakers realize that they are no longer at the center of Asian cinema. The political economic order shaped by the new geopolitics of Asian and Chinese cultural industries has proved to be too strong for Hong Kong cinema to transform.
Through her meticulous analysis of the Hong Kong body vis-à-vis exotic Asian bodies, Olivia Khoo examined its reconfiguration within a broader regional frame. This body, as argued in Chapter 5, “is being transformed by new representational tactics and debates into the twenty-first century that are shifting the terms of reference outside of the Hong Kong–China and Hong Kong-and-the-West double-bind where it has remained for some time.” While the three examples used in the chapter, Shinjuku Incident (2009), After This Our Exile (2006), and Himalaya Singh (2005), “locate and imagine a complex, heterogeneous Asia through a range of industrial and representational tactics,” it also has to be noted that they did not fully succeed in going beyond the Hong Kong–China and Hong Kong-and-the-West double-bind. In the inter-Asia collaboration of Shinjuku Incident, what the lead actor and producer Jackie Chan wanted to convey to the Chinese diaspora is the message that “no country is like home” – to borrow Khoo’s words, “nationalist politics remain insurmountable.” As astutely noted in Khoo’s chapter, the film “forecloses the possibility of imagining Asia differently, in more inclusive regional terms,” and in this special context Hong Kong bodies are literally “out of place” not only in the enticing metropolis of modern-day Tokyo in the film, but also in Asian cinema in reality. Patrick Tam’s award-winning After This Our Exile, an “Asian film” as defined by the director, makes “secreted, oblique references to a regional ‘home’ for Hong Kong cinema within Southeast Asia,” but the alternative “home” in the end lies not in Asia but in the mainland. Despite its great success at local as well as Asian film festivals (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor, and Best New Performer in the 26th Hong Kong Film Awards; Best Feature Film, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor in the 43rd Golden Horse Awards; Best Artistic Contribution and Best Asian Film in the Tokyo International Film Festival), this film remains, so far, the most recent work of Tam. Meanwhile, after the release of Himalaya Singh, the director Wai Ka-fai and his business partner, Johnnie To, briefly returned to the local Hong Kong market with The Shopaholics (2006), The Mad Detective (2007), and Written By (2009) before formally entering the mainland market with Don’t Go Breaking My Heart (a.k.a. Single Men and Women) (2011). Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, according to Wai, was Milkyway Image’s first attempt to test the waters of the mainland market (Wei 2011). I have argued elsewhere that the career of Peter Ho-sun Chan, who is famous for his pioneering imaginaries in developing his film career across boundaries, represents an exemplary story of the success of the Hong Kong mode of flexible identity: from Hong Kong to Hollywood to Asia to the mainland (Chu 2013: 109–110). Following Lai-kwan Pang’s observation that “local Hong Kong becomes most concrete when Hong Kong becomes most transnational and dispersed” (cited in Chapter 5), Khoo brings forth “another perspective on the transnationalization and dispersal of local Hong Kong identity… through the cinema’s active participation in a regional conceptualization of Asia.” With the benefit of hindsight, it is safe to say that Hong Kong cinema has not become more transnational; on the contrary, it became more “national” after its active participation in a regional conceptualization of Asia fell short of expectations, at least in terms of the box office.
That the “early optimism towards pan-Asian success in the cinema has not been fully realized” (Khoo) can be attributed to the new cultural geopolitics over the past decade. Wong’s inspiring analysis of the HKIFF (Chapter 8) is illuminating in this regard. The HKIFF, as a platform that “premieres the breadth of Chinese cinema and showcases Asian talents,” has been facing a new situation in the new millennium. “HKIFF maps dual functions that reflect – or perhaps invert – Hong Kong’s historical role as a meeting place of East and West,” noted Wong, and “the East of the HKIFF encompasses the local (Hong Kong), the national (China), the cultural (greater China), and a wider political economic sense of Asia.” In addition, “the ability of the HKIFF to bring Asian cinema, more specifically Chinese cinema and Hong Kong cinema, to the West defines its unique cinematic geography, not unlike the city’s traditional role of an entrepôt, or a door to the East.” According to John Agnew’s nuanced account of the critical geopolitics reshaped by an emerging China, “recent Chinese economic development is seen in China as largely the product of globalization rather than national development per se,” and the growing prosperity of China depends on its participation in global and regional institutions that facilitate its growth (Agnew 2010: 578). In this special context, China does not rely solely on the entrepôt of Hong Kong to export its culture any more, and this has placed Hong Kong into a difficult situation. On the one hand, the HKIFF is still promoting world-class films and Asian talents under the European gaze; on the other hand, “the changing roles of China in the twenty-first century continue to remap relationships.” As cited in Chapter 8, the occasion of the 35th HKIFF (2011) identified China as the “800-pound dragon,” and “[e]veryone at the festival, filmmakers and producers alike, seemed to be talking about it.” The Festival highlighted Wai Ka-fai as the featured director alongside Kuei Chih-Hung, a Shaw Brothers studio director in the 1970s. One of the opening films, Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, was provided by Hong Kong, but, as mentioned above, it was ironically considered an attempt by Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai to test the waters of the mainland market.
Chapter 6, by Kimburley Wing-yee Choi and Steve Fore is a good example of showing the inclusion of mainland China in an expanded geography. The animation series McDull was famously local when it first attracted the limelight. As clearly outlined in Chapter 6, the shift of the series from “100% Hong Kong” to a Hong Kong–China co-production tells an interesting story about the delocalization and relocalization of Hong Kong culture. The first episode, My Life as McDull (2001), was widely recognized as a representation of local Hong Kong culture, thanks to, for instance, the punning games with Cantonese, Putonghua, and English. If My Life as McDull is seen as a chronicle of McDull’s life from birth to adulthood, a mid-life identity crisis surfaced in McDull Prince de la Bun (2004). Through the city’s ongoing struggles with identity formation, Prince managed to show, as argued by the authors, “local uniqueness and specificity and its constructedness.” But just five years later, McDull Kung Fu Ding Ding Dong (2009) had to face the music, delocalizing itself to go north in the age of mainland–Hong Kong co-productions. It is easy to understand that in the northern venture, local Hong Kong cha chen teng food such as a pineapple bun was replaced by Wuhan noodles and duck neck, and the non-translatable Cantonese slang and puns were considerably reduced. The function of the first two episodes as powerful reservoirs of local cultural memory was jeopardized by the audience’s demand for and / or official censorship of a different market. Despite the disapproval of local Hong Kong film critics, McDull’s northern journey went on in McDull: The Pork of Music (2012). However, due to the changing role Hong Kong has played in co-productions since 2009 (see below), Hong Kong filmmakers have realized the importance of relocalization in co-productions. The Pork of Music preserved a number of identifiable Hong Kong elements. In their perceptive account of the songs used in the movie, the authors touched upon the use of Hong Kong pop songs. In the midst of different types of songs, including Western classical music, a British folk song, a Japanese pop song, and a Taiwanese Southern Min folk song, Love in the Snow, a golden Cantopop hit in the 1980s originally sung by Michael Kwan and also performed by the legendary Leslie Cheung, played an exceedingly important part in the movie. This “relocalization” – or the injection of local elements into co-productions – was part of Hong Kong filmmakers’ test of the supposedly more relaxed attitudes of the mainland censors with regard to co-productions. In this regard, Choi and Fore made an important observation in their chapter: “[t]he dynamics of the McDull co-productions have not led simply to renationalization or delocalization (the effacement of ‘Hong Kong’ as a place).” For Choi and Fore, what has to be underlined in the series is “a disruption of place-based identity, a confusion of local boundaries, and a multiplication of horizontality and the translocal imaginary without losing sight of the importance of place-making in people’s lives.” In other words, it is the fluid and expressionistic portrayal of Hong Kong life that matters.
In fact, Hong Kong cinema is not unfamiliar with co-productions. Chapter 7, by David Desser, re-historicizes and theorizes the transnational making of Hong Kong cinema by considering its connections with Japan since the 1960s. The chapter’s conclusion will prove to be very important for the future of Hong Kong cinema: “How much of the Japanese presence in these films accounts for their global popularity is debatable. Not debatable is the manner in which Japan underscored Hong Kong’s rise to global cinematic success less than two decades after their march to international recognition began.” Desser reminds the audience that the globalization of Hong Kong cinema was realized owing to the “Japan Option” – “[the] former East Asian enemy provided a number of object lessons that ultimately enabled the Hong Kong Chinese cinema to surpass their former role model in commercial success and transnational influence.” In a sense, Hong Kong has taken up the role of Japan in mainland–Hong Kong co-productions. If “the dominance of Japan in the early days of the Asian Film Festival clearly encouraged MP&GI and Shaw Brothers to upgrade their films both technically and narratively in terms of story and characterization,” as argued by Desser, the production of Chinese cinema has been upgraded through mainland–Hong Kong co-productions. In less than a decade the mainland film industry has matured enough to surpass Hong Kong in commercial success and transnational influence. As I noted elsewhere (Chu 2013: 111), Yu Dong, president of the Beijing Polybona Films Distribution Co. Ltd., made it clear that “2009 marked a new beginning of an era dominated by mainland productions,” and “Hong Kong filmmakers are commissioned to produce films of mainland themes and stories.” It should be against this backdrop that the Hong Kong director Pang Ho-cheung’s Weibo – the Chinese version of Twitter – remark on co-productions is to be understood: “I am not opposing co-productions, but objected to Hong Kong only having co-productions” (Pang 2013). Pang made this remark after his Vulgaria (2012) was lambasted by mainland critic Jasmine Jia in her award-winning essay as a work of unerring bad taste. In his inspiring analysis questioning Han Chinese normativity, Evans Chan (Chapter 9) puts Vulgaria’s presentation of Hong Kong–PRC relations in the context of a long history of skirmishes between the Sinitic North and South. According to Jia, the demonization of mainland Chinese in Vulgaria can be attributed to “the Hong Kongers’ inability to adjust themselves to their reversed role vis-à-vis the mainland.” But as Chan argued, “The trajectory of the exclusion of Hong Kong from Chinese (Han normative) culture places Hong Kong cinema solidly in a postmodern condition at the outset,” and “the idea of a postmodern Hong Kong cinema being the enchanter, and a modernist PRC cinema as disenchanter may be too simplistic a dichotomy.”
Chan’s perceptive account has brought forth another interesting example related to the cultural conflict between the mainland and Hong Kong. In 1999, Wang Shuo, an influential Beijing writer, branded Jackie Chan films, Jin Yong novels, TV soap operas inspired by the Taiwanese romance writer Qiong Yao, and the Cantonese popular songs of Four Heavenly Kings as the “four great vulgarities.” Chan uses this as an example to show how Wang used resplendent “Chineseness” to berate vulgar and inauthentic Hong Kong (and Taiwan). Interestingly, the four great vulgarities have been incorporated into mainland culture in the new millennium. Jackie Chan has shifted his focus from Hollywood to the mainland; Jin Yong novels and Qiong Yao’s romances have generated a hot wave in the mainland television industry; the Four Heavenly Kings have been playing a series of concerts in various mainland cities; and Cantopop has now been taken over by Mandopop. Hong Kong (and Taiwanese) vulgarities have become an integral part of the mainland culture, so to speak. Jia’s critique of Hong Kong cinema can be seen as a similar endeavor to keep Chinese culture “pure” by expelling the inauthentic and vulgar Hong Kong (and Taiwan) in the new cultural geographical configuration of the new millennium – in this sense, the disease originated outside mainland China. Chan’s conclusion is particularly illuminating in this context: Vulgaria, “a smart film arriving at the most sensitive moment of a socio-political tug-of-war between Hong Kong and the mainland, the South and the North, since the inception of Chinese cinema(s).…has become a specimen of a critical geo-cinema vis-à-vis the PRC.” This observation echoes well with the notion of Sinophone cinemas, developed from the emerging field of Sinophone studies, that suggests a methodological shift “to re-engage new sites of localization, multilingualism, and difference that have emerged in Chinese film studies but that are not easily contained by the notion of diaspora” (Yue and Khoo 2014: 5). According to the founding theoretician Shu-mei Shih, Sinophone, a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness, is a method that “unsettles binaries [of Western theory vs. Chinese reality] and offers in their place the far richer potential of multidirectional critiques” (Shih 2010: 482). Although Hong Kong cinema has lost its in-betweenness, it can still exert its function as a site for multidirectional critiques. Roger Garcia rightly underlined the importance of re-thinking our map of the world in terms of cinema. Hong Kong has to “seize on those moments when markets emerged [such as South America and other parts of Asia], in terms of cinema,” according to him, and make good use of its position to “bring people together to take advantage of those opportunities” (cited in Chapter 8). Equally important to audience-building is the rethinking of the position of Hong Kong cinema, which is well-placed to serve as a site of multidirectional imaginaries, in the map of the world in term of critical geographies.
To conclude, the chapters in this section have had a double objective: to understand the new configuration of critical geographies of Hong Kong and Asian cinema and to designate “critical geographies” as a method. “Critical geographies” as a discipline emerged in the age of globalization to stress the role of dominance in the production of space, challenging and resisting dominant meanings as a response to concerns of both cultural homogenization and neocolonialism. As these challenges and resistances “occur in space and many are fundamentally about space itself,” to borrow the words from the conference “Constructed Places / Contested Spaces: Critical Geographies in Korea” held on 14–16 May 2004, at the University of California, Los Angeles, “the way that people interpret the space around them is a critical issue in our understanding of the current changes in Asia” (cited from http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4877; see also Tangherlini and Yea 2008). The way that Hong Kong cinema transforms with the space around it could also shed light on our understanding of the current changes in Asian cinema. The purposes of the Hong Kong Critical Geography Group listed on their website can in this sense be applicable to the study of Hong Kong cinema:
This has come to a time when Hong Kong cinema has to search for alternatives and identify possible measures of transforming itself. As aptly put by Jennifer Robinson (2006: 142) in her Ordinary Cities, which guides readers to imagine the possibilities of multiple becomings of cities, “Without a strong sense of the city’s potential dynamism and creativity, imaginations about urban futures are truncated, perhaps by consigning futures to the limited imagination of developmentalist interventions, or through a narrow focus on globalizing sectors of the economy.” This can be applied almost verbatim to the situation of Hong Kong cinema. One of the most important lessons told by critical geographers is that “all cities ought to have the right to shape distinctive futures whatever power position they hold in relation to other places” (Fraser 2006: 195). The chapters in this section have contributed important insights into how to understand and shape the future of Hong Kong cinema.