The Chinese Mirror

The Future of Hong Kong Cinema: a round table discussion (V)

Becoming a niche genre

Lie Fu:  Personally, I think Hong Kong films in the future will become a niche genre.

Mao Jian:  Local movies will be standard.  Many people online have quoted you (Lie Fu) as saying "Hong Kong cinema is dead."  Did you say that?

Lie Fu:  I wrote that in 1995.  But by "death" I didn't mean completely over and done with; rather, I meant the cessation of creativity, that no one would be carrying it onwards.

Mao Jian:  Did you feel this was the case in 1995, or were you making a prediction?

Lie Fu:  It was already the case.  I was still with "Ming Pao Monthly"《明报月刊》then, and I wrote a piece on how Hong Kong cinema was already in a bad way.  The editor decided to make it a cover feature, and we went with this sentence as a gimmick.

Moderator:  "Ip Man" just got the [Hong Kong Film] award for Best Picture; what do Hong Kong people feel about this movie?

Lie Fu:  That "Ip Man" is a Hong Kong film.  From Wong Fei Hong through Fong Sai Yuk to Ip Man, there have been a series of folk heroes who are a special part of Hong Kong movie culture.  There have been heroes who were not from Guangdong Province, such as Huo Yuanjia and Chen Zhen, who were created out of Hong Kong films.  And in the broader view, Hong Kong movies can still preserve and spread the Lingnan culture.  [Lingnan:  literally, "south of the Five Ridges," meaning the area covering Guangdong and Guangxi provinces]  Watching "Ip Man" is very comfortable:  director Wilson Yip didn't get fancy with his characters.  Of course, the Ip family descendants had certain demands, much like those of Mei Lanfang ["Forever Enthralled"], that their ancestor couldn't be turned into this or that.

Luo Gang:  There was also an easy way out there.  "Ip Man" took the national mood as the film's structure.  Of course, Hong Kong filmmakers have been more likely to use nationalistic sentiment, for example the Wong Fei Hong series, right up through the complexity of Dongfang Bubai. 

Lie Fu:  This began with Bruce Lee's "Fist of Fury."

Luo Gang:  This nationalistic sentiment is also more suitable for the mainland market, less likely to go wrong.

Moderator:  [Producer] Raymond Wong has attempted a lot of movies on the mainland in recent years, but it wasn't until "Ip Man" that he won some awards and praise.  But were you as surprised as many people were when "Ip Man" beat out "The Way We Are" for Best Picture at the Hong Kong Film Awards?

Mao Jian:  Not at all.  I felt quite comfortable with that, and welcomed it.  "Ip Man" most embodied the characteristics of Hong Kong cinema, and thought that in Donnie Yen's fight scenes they had really grasped the spirit of Hong Kong films. 

Lie Fu:  Since "City Entertainment" 《电影双周刊》ceased publishing, the Hong Kong Film Awards have been an industry award, and that has definitely encouraged commercial films.  

Mao Jian:  Otherwise, Hong Kong movies would have too small an audience, and we would be advocating the protection of Hong Kong commercial films.

Moderator:  But one can't just make artistic films, that's a dead end.

Luo Gang:  Hong Kong cinema is a rich genre in and of itself.  But the problem now is that commercial films are becoming overly reliant on the mainland market, without the success that came in the golden age.  There will all kinds of possibilities in the next decade, and the next generation of Hong Kong filmmakers will be growing up in this environment.

Moderator:  So are you saying that even without a censorship system, Hong Kong cinema could not be as dynamic as it was in the past?

Luo Gang: Yes. 

Moderator:  Was that due to Hong Kong directors misreading the mainland market?  Otherwise, why have most of the co-productions done so badly?

Mao Jian:  Possibly.  They couldn't find the feeling of mainland audiences.

Sun Ganlu:  There's another problem here.   Those small art films haven't taken the psychology of mainland audiences, their expectations, into account at the outset.  They've just centered on the director himself, so the main determinant of these films' rise or fall has largely been a measure of Hong Kong local creativity.  As for a movie finding a market, its integration into both the mainland and the Hong Kong markets certainly has an impact.  Before the mainland market opened up, Hong Kong movies were more aimed at the Southeast Asian and the Japan-Korea markets, but after so big a market as the mainland opened up, it couldn't help but have an impact of Hong Kong filmmakers' creative work.  But even without censorship Hong Kong filmmakers will still encounter problems. 

Mao Jian:  Much like John Woo making movies in the United States, that's all over with. 

Sun Ganlu:  It's a kind of customization, a customized structure, a customized market, even customizing oneself.  But Hong Kong filmmakers' image and understanding of the mainland market is definitely problematic.

Mao Jian:  So like Ang Lee, it's not easy.

Moderator:  So we've now discovered that John Woo's original understanding of the mainland market was that it was more difficulty to understand than the U.S. market.

Luo Gang:  He completely used "Troy" in filming "Red Cliff."

Sun Ganlu:  As a creative person matures, his reactions to his environment become increasingly complex, and there are more factors influencing him.  But we must not forget that he is still a creator, still growing, and are there problems in this growth?  "Red Cliff" was really bad, but if you say the environment was a factor in that, what does that have to do with him personally? 

A steadily narrowing road 

Sun Ganlu:  I think there's been a subtle change with Hong Kong filmsy.  I once saw a small film called "Love Story,"《恋爱物语》and Hong Kong films like that do not stress Hong Kong's identity, but just relate a story of everyday life, a relaxed state of mind.  But now in movies like "The Sparrow" we are seeing the first signs of a stress on Hong Kong characteristics in a genre that used to rely heavily of the use of force to tell their story.   

Lie Fu:  This is related to Johnnie To's own state of mind, with so many of his peers gone.

Moderator:  And Johnnie To has stayed in Hong Kong.

Sun Ganlu:  It's very difficult now to just look at Hong Kong films in isolation.  There is a latent power behind them. Hong Kong filmmakers are already considered to be "insiders" on the mainland.  Their standpoint and vision have changed.  

Lie Fu:  It's just as Joe Ma (马伟豪) said in an interview, I worry that we will all run to Beijing, and the only Chinese movies left will be northern ones.

Moderator:  China's most popular directors have basically all come from north China.  Since Xie Jin (谢晋) there really haven't been any good directors from Shanghai or south China.  Will Hong Kong directors going north form a distinctly southern counterbalance to that?

Lie Fu:  What worries me is whether Hong Kong will take the same road Shanghai did.

Sun Ganlu:  It could be that a small part of Hong Kong cinema will continue to exist, and  one movie may stand out from time to time, but the overall pattern might not go that way.  In addition, as far as film production is concerned, "going north" may well be the trend.  It's like Hollywood movies, with the investment pressures so great, that may be the only choice.  Otherwise, it will be like movies from Denmark or Norway:  there are some, but by having to fend for themselves they don't have a global impact, and not even much regional impact.

Luo Gang:  The road will get steadily narrower.  Making movies today requires so much financial support, there are so many things to do.  With funding, a director can assemble the very best team.  Directors realize that if they can't assemble that team, it's useless.

Moderator:  Funding now comes primarily from the mainland, since there is very little Hong Kong money for investment in motion pictures.  And since the investors are from the mainland, it naturally follows that the mainland side will control production of the film.

Lie Fu:   There aren't many Hong Kong studios left, and it seems as if Johnnie To is about the only one who can still get funding from abroad.

Sun Ganlu:  If you look at the current situation for actors in the three cross-straits locations, it's clear that if you don't come to the mainland to act, sing or appear on TV, you have no hope.  

[End of Part V and discussion]  Part I  Part II  Part III  Part IV  

The Future of Hong Kong Cinema: a round table discussion (IV)

 Either go north or wait for death

 

Moderator:  There are very few purely Hong Kong films right now, but there are quite a few Hong Kong-directed co-productions with the "north," but they're also not acclimatized. 

 

Luo Gang:  Many Hong Kong directors are making movies of inferior quality in order to accomodate the current mainland market.  Take Wang Jing for example.  He's really a very interesting director, but if he wanted to make money on the mainland he would have to make what they wanted there, and his original style would be lost completely.  His work has a delightful and comic sort of ribaldry, but how do you play this sort of comedy on the mainland?  You can't. 

Lie Fu:  With compromise, there is no creativity.

 

Moderator:  I was at a film forum in Hong Kong not long ago, where everyone was saying "it's either go north or wait for death."  But looking back on these past two years, as far as the work of Hong Kong directors goes, it doesn't look like the two are that far apart.

 

Mao Jian:  Go north, or you're road kill.

 

Moderator:  Peter Chan's two co-productions, "Perhaps Love" and "The Warlords," were fairly successful.

 

Lie Fu:  Chan was very clever:  "Perhaps Love" was unrealistic, and "The Warlords" a costumer.

 

Sun Ganlu:  This is very important.  Some stories must be placed in the context of a specific time, in order to have sufficient dramatic tension. Those earlier films which were adaptations of martial arts classics needed the pretext of a dynasty; if you placed the story in an empty environment, that kind of conflict would certainly not stimulate a strong reaction in the hearts of the audience, it just wouldn't be dramatic enough.

Luo Gang:  When Tsui Hark was first making "A Chinese Ghost Story," that turbulence was the most important factor in the movie, and when it was integrated into that fantasy movie with various other factors it maximized its effect.  There was also "The East is Red," in which a woman played something other than the customary female role, creating a new identity problem.  These films all had great projections behind them, for without these projections stirring ideas in people's heads, how can you make a good movie?  So all we're seeing is a bunch of lousy movies like "All About Women."  Tsui Hark has become a synonym for lousy movies.  

 

Sun Ganlu:  For a film to have impact, there has to be some sort of projection. The creators themselves may not even be aware of it, but in a specific time context, some things will certainly be taken from it.  But if you say these channels have not been established, then no one will have a reaction to it. 

 

Lie Fu:  Speaking of joint productions, there was a film in the 90s called "A Moment of Romance 3," which co-starred Andy Lau and Wu Chien-lien.  I've seen it occasionally on TV,  and it is totally different from "A Moment of Romance I."  That was also a Hong Kong co-production, with the Changchun Film Studio, and it had absolutely no Hong Kong identity, just a China of the imagination.  In those years no one had any criticisms or comments about these "joint productions," nor that they "lacked any Hong Kong flavor."  I feel this should be looked into further.

 

Mao Jian:  The stars had a particularly prominent Hong Kong identity, so the picture didn't have a co-production image. 

 

Moderator:  This issue wasn't very sensitive at that time because there were few co-productions.  And their directors might not have taken mainland tastes into account, just followed their own concerns.  Now, while Hong Kong directors may have their own concerns, they always take mainland tastes into consideration. In fact, when they were filming "Ip Man," mainland audiences' tastes were taken into account.  Outside of 2009 Hong Kong movies made as joint productions, were there any self-invested movies?

Lie Fu:  Yes, Wong Jing made two Category III films.  After the CEPA [Closer Economic Partnership Agreement] was signed in 2003, permitting co-productions to be treated as domestically-produced Chinese films, many Hong Kong directors went north.  but there were also Hong Kong directors who opposed CEPA, such as Herman Yau, Johnnie To and Pang Ho-cheung.  Herman Yau may be the most home-grown Hong Kong director.

 

Moderator:  His work has never been released on the mainland.

 

Sun Ganlu:  The impact of joint production movies was just mentioned, and in that light I think we should review the issues around Peter Chan's co-operation with the mainland,  which can actually be packaged as one identifical issue.  He chose a costume theme last time [The Warlords], but his new drama "Bodyguards and Assassins" is a story about Sun Yat-sen, set in Hong Kong.  Actually, the characters could be completely changed, to Chiang Kai-shek or Zhang Xue-liang, but they're both off limits.  So the choices he made here were not accidental, but were choices fitting to this day and age.  Of course, by making these choices, he contributes to the development of commercial films, technically proficient, a star-studded cast, and ever higher quality films.  But for those native Hong Kong directors who are relatively creative, who aim their films at smaller, artistically-oriented audiences, could this sort of filmmaking environment be destructive, or even deadly?

[In Part 5:  Finances will determine the future]  Part I   Part II   Part III

The Future of Hong Kong Cinema: a round table discussion (III)

The mainland's "acceptance of history"

Moderator:  Left-wing films were the first to enter the mainland, which gradually opened it up for more Hong Kong productions.

Luo Gang:  Li Han-hsiang's "The Burning of Yuan Ming Yuan"《火烧圆明园》and Hsu Hsiao-ming's "Mirage"《海市蜃楼》were the first mainland-Hong Kong co-productions.  Of course, we are talking here about the mainland angle, and while they might have been unimportant in Hong Kong, they had a very great impact on the mainland. 

Sun Ganlu:  Hong Kong movies really spread on the mainland after the ban on them was lifted in the 80s. Li Han-hsiang's co-production was very important for re-establishing mainland-Hong Kong filmmaking co-operation.

Mao Jian:  The Hong Kong industry itself was developing very well at that time:  the 80s were their golden age, the peak era for the Hong Kong movie genre.

Sun Ganlu:  But for mainland audiences, Hong Kong movies in that era were on video, not in theaters.

Luo Gang:  Yes, for instance, we never saw films like those of John Woo and Tsui Hark on the big screen, everyone just saw them on video tape.  Actually, they weren't from official channels, just pirated. Sometimes, exhibiting Hong Kong movies and TV series entering the mainland at that time wasn't that open, and were viewed in videotape halls.  

Mao Jian:  In fact, Hong Kong videos were inverted in time.  Hong Kong films shown here on the mainland back then were reordered, and weren't brought in according to the time the films were made.

Moderator:  We could say that the mainland acceptance of Hong Kong films, and Hong Kong films themselves, were not entirely the same thing.

Luo Gang:  Yes, and movies like Stephen Chow's "A Chinese Odyssey"《大话西游》were phenomenal on the mainland, but not so popular in Hong Kong.

Lie Fu:  When you all saw "A Chinese Odyssey" for the first time was it on videotape or VCD?

Moderator:  It was released in theaters, but did poor box office.  Most mainland viewers can still see it on DVD.

Lie Fu:  I wrote an article in 2007 in which I discussed how there was probably a misreading of Stephen Chow's film culture.  Why is he so popular on the mainland?  Because none of you [mainlanders] have seen Michael Hui's movies.  You had no awareness, no experience of the filmmakers of his generation, so when you suddenly saw Stephen Chow, it was like discovering a new continent, you felt it was very special, very innovative.  His influence in Hong Kong has not been as strong as it has been on the mainland, but he didn't create this effect, it was because the earlier work of Michael Hui was inconceivable to them.  

Moderator:  He has also been popular in Hong Kong, but he's just one of many, while on the mainland, he's been raised to heaven, completely "deified."

Luo Gang:  On the mainland, Stephen Chow is a symbol of youth culture.  If you had people compile a list of who they thought had the greatest influence on young people since the 1980s, Chow would certainly be in the top 10.

Mao Jian:  It wasn't that we hadn't seen Michael Hui, it was just that by that time we had reached the stage where we needed something "inconceivable."  If we had seen Michael Hui before, it wouldn't necessarily have lit a fire, because our time for that hadn't yet arrived.  When Stephen Chow came out with "Flirting Scholar"《唐伯虎点秋香》in 1993, it wasn't popular, we just thought he was silly.

Moderator:  We originally thought movies like his were a mess, and didn't watch them.  But when the right time arrived, we were suddenly able to accept them, that he was ahead of the game.

Mao Jian:  It was the social atmosphere, or the time had arrived.

Luo Gang:  After we entered a commercial society, our young people had certain psychological needs, and they projected their needs onto Stephen Chow.

Moderator:  I remember when Wang Meng (王蒙) [Chinese author] advocated "avoidance of the sublime," (躲避崇高) it touched off quite a controversy.

Sun Ganlu:  Hong Kong movies were a pleasant surprise.

Luo Gang:  Also, Stephen Chow's fans on the mainland have a relatively high level of culture; Stephen Chow is greatly respected by students at many of the country's colleges and universities, .

Sun Ganlu:  This is very closely related to the cultural ecology of the mainland.  Stephen Chow offered a kind of movie rarely seen on the mainland.  But young people on the mainland had a natural demand for these, so there was a strong response to his movies, he became the voice of young people.  In the first Stephen Chow movie I saw, he had a supporting role, playing a naive young man being used by his older brother.

Luo Gang:  When he came out with "All for the Winner" in1990, people evaluated him as a "poor imitation of Chow Yun Fat."  But by the arrival of "A Chinese Odyssey" he was deified.

A sense of identity

Moderator:  Gambling films are a special class of Hong Kong films, and together with  gangster films and action films have special characteristics.

Luo Gang:  The Hong Kong film genre is very well developed, but that particular thread has had relatively little influence on the mainland.  I personally am fond of the "Milky Way Image" films of Johnnie To and Patrick Yau, but these movies have not basically been screened on the mainland.  Like "The Longest Nite" had a fast-clipped style, which affected later films "The Mission" and "PTU."  Through their use of cops and robbers films as a metaphor for the 1997 return [of Hong Kong], they showed a strong political consciousness.  The Hong Kong movies of that time were an upgrade:  in the 80s, John Woo and Tsui Hark had developed this type of film to a mature stage, but by 1997 or so, a great many Hong Kong filmmakers were inspired by a "Hong Kong consciousness."  

Sun Ganlu:  At the beginning of "Infernal Affairs 2," Eric Tsang opened a door, and in the lens there was a shot of the fireworks during the 1997 return.  This sort of shot turned up in a lot of the films of that period.

Moderator:  This expressed a sense of history, but also a sort of desolate and disturbed mentality.

Luo Gang:  The most typical of this mentality was Stanley Kwan's "Rouge."

Lie Fu:  Wong Kar-wai's "Days of Being Wild" was like that too, with the big clock.  Speaking of Hong Kong movies' "golden decade" (early 80s to early 90s), the great development of movies during this era certainly had a political background to it, and to a considerable extent the return of Hong Kong could be said to have triggered the creation of such a golden age.  At the same time, "New Wave" filmmakers were symbolic of a quest for identity, nostalgia and attitudes about the city of Hong Kong.  This is why Shaw was weeded out of competition:  it had no feeling for the city, making very few modern dress movies, they were mostly ancient costume films.  But the "New Wave" emerged with Hong Kong as the theme:  on the one hand, there was a new generation of filmmakers who grew up there, and had a passion for Hong Kong; on the other hand, when Sino-British negotiations [for the return] began in the 80s, Hong Kong people were excluded, filmmakers grasped this feeling and projected that turbulence into such films as "A Better Tomorrow."  In the early 90s there emerged a large number of fiercely ambitious movies like "Lord of the East China Sea," "Lee Rock" and "To be Number One," in which the filmmakers were searching for a kind of dream, and projected their own emotions into their films.

Mao Jian:  The current decline of Hong Kong movies is also related to this, an indistinct sense of identity.

Luo Gang:  After the return of Hong Kong, society entered a normal condition.  How was this normality expressed?  Johnnie To tried to express it afterwards in "Election," but the sympathetic response wasn't as strong as it had been with earlier Hong Kong films.

Sun Ganlu:  It's very interesting that so much of the content of Hong Kong films has been committed to the cops and robbers genre.  The "PTU" series later on had a lot of confrontations among the internal staff of police stations, and this could also be seen a projection.  Earlier, similar films had talked about the external pressures, but with "PTU" the choice was for internal pressures, and not talking about good guys and bad guys, but the choice of a particular incident could slide into some sort of crime.

Luo Gang:  Part 1 of the "PTU" series was shot completely in darkness, with no distinction between police or bandits, between good or bad, but driven by some fortuitous events, all wrapped into the story line. "Infernal Affairs" was also in such a chaotic state.

Mao Jian:  Which can be seen as suggesting some kind of Hong Kong identity.

Luo Gang:  There was also such an arrangement in "Beast Stalker," for which Nick Cheung won an award, when right at the end we discover that everything that happened was because of a traffic accident, and a crook becomes a most pitiable character. 

[In Part 4: "Going north" is the only alternative]  Part I   Part II  

The Future of Hong Kong Cinema: a round table discussion (II)

"Hong Kong films" enter the mainland 

Moderator:  During the mid-60s Hong Kong movies entered the era of Shaw Brothers dominance, from King Hu's "Come Drink With Me" to Chang Cheh's "One-Armed Swordsman."

Luo Gang:  Shaw at that time was walking on two legs, one was the martial arts genre, the other was movie musicals and romances.

Lie Fu:  Chang Cheh's "One-Armed Swordsman" was made earlier than the romances of the 60s and 70s. Li Han-hsiang (李翰祥) left Shaw in the early 60s for Taiwan's developing industry, and Loke Wan Tho was the force behind that. But when Loke was killed in a plane crash, Li lost that support, and his only recourse was to go back to Shaw Brothers. Run Run Shaw's reply to his request was, OK, but this time you'll be making money for me, so you can't go back to just making whatever you want to make. So romances were the only choice for Li.  It was not until his films became profitable that Shaw gave him the money to make movies Li himself liked, "The Empress Dowager"《倾国倾城》and "The Last Tempest"《瀛台泣血》.

Moderator:  But we had no way of seeing these films from that time.  A great many Shaw films from even later were available to mainland audiences only on videotapes and DVDs.  There was a period of time when the mainland had no access to Hong Kong films, and it was not until the 70s and 80s that we could see them again.

Sun Ganlu:  After the "Cultural Revolution" was over on the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan movies were again available, and for mainland people they brought a sort of exotic air with them.  Another lure was that these films had been inaccessible for so long. 

Lie Fu:  Another very important factor in the attraction of Hong Kong films was their urbanism, their city sensibility.  Mainland movies had urban themes, but no city feeling. That urban sensibility and feeling of the city in Hong Kong films was a very important factor in their popularity.

Mao Jian:  When we watched Hong Kong films on the mainland in the 80s, we felt they were exotic.

Luo Gang:  The most important thing was they way they incorporated the feeling of the city into the form of movies, such as "Chungking Express"《重庆森林》.  Hong Kong movies could draw you a map of the city.

Lie Fu:  They all had very specific locations, like Wan Chai, Central, Tsim Sha Tsui... They filmed each location's special characteristics in such detail.

Luo Gang:  At the end of the 70s, the early 80s, the first Hong Kong movies shown in mainland theaters were "Qu Yuan"《屈原》and "Three Charming Smiles"《三笑》.  Chen Sisi (陈思思), Xia Meng (夏梦) and Zhu Hong (朱虹) became the most popular Hong Kong actresses on the mainland at that time. 

Mao Jian:  Mainland audiences were less familiar with the previous generation of Hong Kong stars, like Josephine Siao (萧芳芳) and Connie Chan (陈宝珠), because they hadn't seen their movies. 

Lie Fu:  The Hong Kong movies and stars that entered the mainland at that time all came from "Great-Phoenix-New" (长凤新).  Hong Kong movies were divided into left and right factions.  On the left were the Great Wall, Phoenix and New Alliance studios, and they had a very close relationship with the mainland.  We called them "Great-Phoenix-New," and they merged in 1981.  The other Hong Kong studios, including Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest, did not have such a close relationship with the mainland.  They needed the Taiwan market, and the Taiwan authorities demanded that they join the "Hong Kong-Kowloon Film and Drama Free Trade Union" before the authorities would give them the credentials to exhibit their films in Taiwan.  In order to market their films there, they had to agree, so objectively they were more pro-Taiwan.   

Moderator:  What was the local Hong Kong situation regarding these two studio factions?

Lie Fu:  Leftist films were still very popular before the "Cultural Revolution."  The Phoenix studio's "Golden Eagle"《金鹰》was the first Hong Kong film to do more than a million at the box office, it was a story about ethnic minorities in Inner Mongolia and was filmed in a mainland location.  Great Wall's "The Jade Bow"《云海玉弓缘》was the first Hong Kong film to use wire technology.  With films like this, the leftist movies made great contributions to Hong Kong films.  But when the "Cultural Revolution" came along, the situation steadily worsened, and the more the leftist studios busied themselves with backing that campaign, the less influence they had with Hong Kong people.

[In Part 3:  Post-Cultural Revolution developments]  Part I

The Future of Hong Kong Cinema: a round table discussion (I)

[2009 was celebrated as the 100th anniversary of Hong Kong movies, although as the following discussion points out, there was some controversy about that. On the occasion of the centennial, the Shanghai magazine "Xinmin Weekly" (新民周刊) convened a panel of experts for a free-ranging roundtable discussion of Hong Kong's film industry, to assess its glorious past and current state of decline, and speculate on its future.  The following is a translation of the transcript of that discussion.  The original was published in the Xinmin Weekly, June 3, 2009, and the original is online.  Any further use of this translation should cite the original as well as The Chinese Mirror.  For readers who want further data on specific films or filmmakers discussed, I have provided links to their Internet Movie Database entries, if contained there.  Parenthetical comments were added to the transcript by the original Chinese editor, while bracketed comments like this paragraph have been added by the translator when he thought further explanation was desirable.  Because of the length of the transcript, it will be posted here in five parts.]

At the centennial of Hong Kong films, is creativity dead? 

Moderator's Introduction:  What is up with Hong Kong cinema?  What led its past glory to its present decline?  Will there still be a purely "Hong Kong cinema" 20 years from now?  On the occasion of the centennial of Hong Kong films, "Xinmin Weekly" brought in experts to take the pulse of Hong Kong cinema in a free-ranging round-table discussion of its pluses and minuses.  

Our Guest Panel:

Lie Fu 列孚 (Hong Kong veteran film critic, film journal editor, author)

Sun Ganlu 孙甘露 (famous author)

Mao Jian 毛尖 (columnist, film scholar, East China Normal University Professor of Chinese as a Foreign Language)

Luo Gang 罗岗 (East China Normal University Professor of Chinese literature)

The Moderator:  Qian Yijiao 钱亦蕉 (journalist); final editing by Wang Qian 王倩 (journalist) 

The Origins of the "Hong Kong Film" 

Moderator:  This year, the movie centennial is being marked everywhere in Hong Kong; does Hong Kong film really have so long a history?

Lie Fu:  Whether Hong Kong films do have a 100 year history is still controversial. "Stealing the Roast Duck"《偷烧鸭》(1909), which was funded by American Jew  Benjamin Brodsky (the owner of the Shanghai "Asia Film Company"), and filmed by Hong Kong people, is generally accepted as the original Hong Kong film; but strictly speaking, it was "Rouge" [aka "Love is Dangerous"]《胭脂》(1925). 

Mao Jian:  To our way of thinking, Hong Kong movies didn't really emerge until after the 1950s.  Hong Kong had been making movies, but until then there had not been an explicity "Hong Kong movie" concept.

Lie Fu:  From the mainland perspective, the idea of "Hong Kong film" was indeed a post-1950s idea. Prior to that there had been no talk of Hong Kong film or non-Hong Kong film. The Nationalist government prohibited dialect movies for a time, but after Hong Kong and Guangdong filmmakers resisted this, they laid that policy to rest, especially in the Guangdong region where Hong Kong movies were being released constantly.  Contacts between those two places were still very frequent at that time, with no talk of Hong Kong-Guangdong entry or exit, and contacts were the same as they were between Shanghai and Nanjing.

Mao Jian:  For me, Hong Kong's earliest [movie] era consisted of Cantonese films and Huangmei.  [黄梅戏:  one of China's five major opera schools; also called "tea-picking opera"] And when Kwan Tak Hing (关德兴) began the "Wong Fei Hung" series in 1949, the "Hong Kong film" concept appeared clearly.

Luo Gang:  Most of those early Hong Kong movies had little influence on the mainland because of the restrictions of the Cantonese dialect.  At the end of the 1940s, many mainland filmmakers went to Hong Kong, and by taking their previous professions with them they established a mainland-Hong Kong relationship. 

Lie Fu:  The filmmakers who went to Hong Kong back then fell into two subsets.  One group went there during the Anti-Japanese War, and most of them went back when the war ended. During the Nationalist-Communist civil war, another group went to Hong Kong, that would have been around 1947-1948.  Later, some filmmakers were deported back to mainland China by the British authorities in Hong Kong due to their being "pro-Communist," for example, Cen Fan (岑范), who was sent back after he filmed his Shaoxing opera version of "Hong Lou Meng"《红楼梦》[Dream of Red Mansions]. 

Moderator:  Why were they expelled from Hong Kong?

Lie Fu:  It was during the Korean War, so the British government took this action.

Luo Gang:  They were all left-wingers.

Twin Cities:  Hong Kong-Shanghai exchanges 

Moderator:  Before liberation, Shanghai was China's movie center, and then in the 1950s a lot of Shanghai filmmakers remained in Hong Kong.  

Luo Gang:  During the time of competition between MP&GI and Shaw [mid-1950s to 1960s], Eileen Chang wrote many scripts dealing with the relationships between Shanghai people and Cantonese people.  In “The Greatest Civil War on Earth"《南北和》(1961) and "The Greatest Wedding on Earth"《南北一家亲》(1962), it was like Hollywood movies in which white families have a black son-in-law, only these had a Guangdong girl finding a Shanghai guy.  Actually, a large number of Shanghai people settled in Hong Kong, and while movies mixed together a lot of Cantonese speakers and Shanghai dialect speakers, they also showed how Shanghai people in Hong Kong looked down on the Cantonese.  Why else would Huang Biyun (黄碧云) [Hong Kong woman writer] express so much disgust with Eileen Chang's [novel] "Little Reunion"?  Shanghai people who went to Hong Kong at that time all boasted they were "high-level Chinese," while Cantonese speakers were at the bottom level of society.  This was a clear psychological advantage, and this kind of advantage led directly up to Huang Biyun.  Later, when Wong Kar-wai had characters speaking Shanghai dialect in "Days of Being Wild," it also expressed a kind of identity.  At that time Shanghai was still the center, and Hong Kong may not yet have emerged as so lively.

Lie Fu:  I don't believe in this comparison of the Shanghai and Cantonese dialects, nor do I think Shanghai people looked down on the Cantonese.  There did exist an upper class of Chinese in Hong Kong, such as Ho Tong (何东) (the richest Chinese person at that time, and the largest shareholder in the Xinmin Company, Ltd., the first Hong Kong corporation totally invested by Hong Kong people), and he was a Cantonese speaker.  At the end of the 1940s many Shanghai people came to Hong Kong, bringing with them capital and technology.  And while the industrial development of Hong Kong was indeed related to the Shanghai people who came south, I don't think there was any "looking down on" situation.  It was much like the scene in "The Greatest Wedding on Earth," where a Shanghai boy and Leung Sing-po's [梁醒波] daughter are talking romance, and Leung just has a very provincial attitude:  how can a Cantonese girl marry an outsider?  And the young man still wants in any way possible to get together with the Cantonese girl.

Sun Ganlu:  This was really part of the social background behind the development of Hong Kong cinema. Did social change and mutual exchanges between the mainland and Hong Kong only affect Hong Kong cinema in capital and technology?

Lie Fu:  Talent was very important.  For instance, the directors at Shaw Brothers and at MP&GI at that time all had filming experience in Shanghai, at least as log keepers or assistant directors. Before their arrival Hong Kong films were still pretty crude, their production unrefined.  They brought with them a strict system, and later formed the Shaw Brothers and MP&GI onto a larger scale, and more streamlined. They brought in the industrial concept, the idea that talent is very important to the film industry. Before that, the older generation of Hong Kong filmmakers were more profit-oriented, so they practiced what was called the "seven-day film" (turning out one movie a week).

Moderator:  The arrival of Shanghai filmmakers was really a stimulus for the maturation of Hong Kong movies.

Lie Fu:  The Shaw Brothers, who had been making movies in Shanghai for some years, [as the Tianyi studio] left the mainland earlier to operate mainly in Southeast Asia as the Nanyang (南洋) Film Company, then changed their name in 1950 to the Shaw Brothers and Sons Film Company for their Hong Kong operations.  Shaw Brothers and Sons became a theater operating and film distribution company, with Shaw Brothers providing production, distribution, and film studio "one stop" services. MP&GI had gone into Hong Kong a bit earlier than the Shaw Brothers, with their operations there headed by the Lu family of Malaysia's eldest son Loke Wan-tho (陆运涛), and had nothing to do with Shanghai as far as investment was concerned.  Recently the Hong Kong Film Archive held an Evan Yang (易文) film retrospective.  Yang was from the start the commanding general at MP&GI, his chief subject matter being middle class urban life.  Evan Yang had been educated in Shanghai, went to Taiwan after 1949, then went to Hong Kong to make movies. Other directors who came from Shanghai, like Zhu Shilin and Fei Mu, also made a lot of movies in Hong Kong.

Moderator:  In other words, Hong Kong production studios at that time were mainly from Southeast Asia, while the filmmakers were from the mainland.

Mao Jian:  Before liberation a lot of Shanghai studios had branch offices in Hong Kong.

Lie Fu:  There were also plenty of companies that were first in Hong Kong, then went into Shanghai.  For example, the Minxin company was established first in Hong Kong, and Li Minwei opened a Shanghai branch soon after that.  Later, his company merged into the Lianhua Film Company in Shanghai, and the Minxin studio in Hong Kong became a Lianhua subsidiary.  So the relationship between Hong Kong movies and Shanghai movies was a very close one, right up until Hong Kong Mandarin films disappeared. 

[In Part 2:  Hong Kong films enter the mainland market]

1930: Ruan Lingyu and Jin Yan Perform the First Movie Song

    By the end of the 1920s, sound film productions from US and European companies were rising rapidly, but for technical reasons the only talkies available to Chinese film fans were those from America.  However, some Chinese studios were able to utilize sound to a certain degree by accompanying their silent films with music.  This experiment may initially have been just a temporary expedient to please audiences, but it actually resulted in making movie songs widely popular, a trend which continued into the sound era.
     The first recorded movie song was a wax disk dubbed onto a 1930 silent, performed as a duet by its costars.  Ironically, the female half of the duo was an actress who never made a sound film -- China's greatest silent diva, Ruan Lingyu.  This was the first time Chinese audiences had heard the voices of Ruan and her co-star Jin Yan.   In the ensuing decade, the output of China's top composers became a standard part of popular music, and as in the West, provided a springboard for sheet music and recording sales as well as opening up recording careers for the actors and actresses performing them.

The golden age of film songs begins

    "Wild Flower Among the Weeds" may not have been one of Sun Yu's most important productions, even though it included such soon-to-be ingredients for success as the "Emperor" Jin Yan, and his popular leading lady Ruan Lingyu.  Fundamentally a remake of Dumas fil's "La Dame Aux Camélias" and the American film "Camille" the plot offered nothing new.  But the film is still memorable and noted by film historians if only for its having initiated a new cinematic era:  beginning with "Wild Flower," Chinese movies had their own music and songs.

    In discussing movie music, Isaak Dunayevsky (1900-1955), a prolific composer for Soviet movies in the 1930s and 40s, said that "Motion pictures, this great and popular art form, not only move forward with their songs, they also produce and popularize them."  Attracting the public's attention was not only the mission of movie music, but also its function, so movie songs became the best tool for popularizing those movies, and in turn the movies spread the songs' popularity.  The "Wild Flowers" selection "Seeking Brother's Words," was nothing outstanding in itself, a mourning for lost home and family, but its performance, particularly by Jin Yan (said to have a crystal clear voice in his youth), marked a milestone in Chinese film history as well as in his own career ladder.  (To give some flavor of what was popular in that past time and place, my own translation of Sun Yu's lyrics is at the end of this post with no guarantee of accuracy:  I don't usually do poetry.)

    "Wild Flower" came along more than a year prior to the actual start of China's sound movie era, but quickly became an unstoppable tide for China's entertainment media, igniting a wave of movie songs that strongly influenced that era's movie industry.  Two 1934 releases, "Twin Sisters"《姊妹花》starring Hu Die, and "Song of the Fishermen,"《渔光曲》starring Wang Renmei, featured songs which quickly caught the public imagination, and in turn gave an impetus to the market for these films.  Both films played to packed theaters, and many who saw the movies went right out and bought up the music.

    The success of these two, particularly "Song of the Fishermen," prompted filmmakers to focus on including a theme song in each major film, whether silent or sound, and the next few years brought such major movie songs as "Song of the Big Road" 《大路歌》 from "Da Lu" 《大路》[The Big Road], "Graduation Song"《毕业歌》from "Tao Li Jie"《桃李劫》[Plunder of Peach and Plumb aka Tragic Fate of College Graduates], and "Song at Midnight"《夜半歌声》from the movie of the same name.  But these are just a few of the most successful; there were many more popular songs paving the road to their film's commercial success.

    The general public in China today will usually recognize an old pop song when they hear it as being what in the West is called a "standard," although they may not know it was originally featured in a classic movie, let alone have an idea what that movie may have been.  This is true of audiences in the West as well:  many people will recognize such standards as, say,  "Thanks for the Memory" or "Night and Day," but how many could identify the movies that introduced them, without looking it up?  All they know is the song is a standard and has a nostalgic aura to it.    

    Although Chinese film music today is of a fairly high standard, there is a consensus among Chinese film historians that the 1930s were the Golden Age of Chinese film music, and no era since can compare to it.  I find this much like the situation with film music in the West:  for although an Oscar for Best Song is still awarded every year, when was the last one anyone would recognize?

"A Searching Brother's Words"

I left home to join the army
Returned to emptiness and desolation, my parents dead
Our home in ruins, the family tomb overgrown with weeds
My little sister wanders, homeless and destitute!

Ten years ago, home was like a jade palace
Now my little brother and sister are both homeless
I must find my brother, find my sister
And bring them home!

The windswept skies are gray, the snowflakes swirl around me
The nights are cold, but I still find voice to sing
My brother, can you hear my voice?
I scan the horizon, seeking the homeless!

Snowflakes fly, scattering the fallen blossoms
Over thousands of mountains, across ten thousand waters
I seek my brother and sister, and if it takes ten more years
We will be reunited, and give thanks to heaven! 

Xu Qinfang and the 1925 Demonstrations

A recent article in this space profiling the actress Xu Qinfang mentioned that Chinese sources refer to her being a real-life heroine for actions she took during the May, 1925 student demonstrations in Shanghai.  As I wrote at that time, I would update that article when I found more information.  It turns out that Xu did save the day for a film crew and for her studio's first filming effort, although her action was not so much heroic as quick-witted.

For background, I refer readers to the Wikipedia article on the incident.  One hour after the massacre, director and Youlian studio founder Chen Kengran and a cameraman rushed to British police headquarters to film what they could.  Arriving on the scene, they found policemen washing blood from the ground in front of the building.  The police were taken by surprise, and when they noticed the filming approached the crew intending to confiscate their film.  Thinking fast, Xu grabbed the camera and hid it on her person, correct in believing they would not search a woman.  The camera was undiscovered, and in the coming days the Youlian crew added to it footage of the wounded in hospitals, operating room scenes, destruction in the surrounding area, campuses shut down by Chinese authorities to appease the British and British troops debarking at the Shanghai dock to reinforce the concession police.  The film was edited into a three-reel documentary entitled "Wu Sa Hu Chao" 五卅沪潮 (The May 30th Movement in Shanghai).  The film could not be shown in the foreign concessions, but was screened in a number of small Shanghai theaters outside and in Suzhou.  

The protests continued, and spread to Canton (today's Guangzhou) and Hong Kong, where it ignited a general strike having far-reaching implications for the film industry there, shutting it down for several years until it was almost single-handedly resurrected by Li Beihai. 

For further reading:

Fang, Fang (方方).  Zhongguo Jilupian fazhan shi 中囯纪录片发屒史 (History of the Documentary in China).  Beijing:  China Theatrical Press, 2003, pp.40-43. 

1926: Continued Growth

[left, Tianyi studio entrance]

  Chinese studios completed 98 films in 1926, only a few of them shorts, reflecting the changing tastes of film audiences.  Mingxing again led the way in individual full-length releases with 11, but in another new trend, the Shao (later Shaw) Brothers Tianyi studio produced a few multi-part films which brought their actual total to 13 feature length releases in just their second year of operation.  The Da Zhongguo (Great China) studio, also in just its second year, came in a close second with 12, which also included several multi-part productions.  Six other studios had 3 or more productions in 1926, while the remainder were scattered among 26 other studios in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing.
    Another batch of new faces appeared on screen for the first time in 1926, including future matinee idol Gong Jianong, beginning a career that would last through the 1960s, as well as future male leads Sun Min, Yuan Congmei and Wang Cilong.  Future female stars debuting in 1926 were Chen Yumei, Li Dandan, Li Manli, Liang Menghua, Liang Saizhen and the woman now regarded as China's greatest actress of the silent era – Ruan Lingyu.
    Two notable directing careers began in 1926, writer/director Bu Wancang (who had earlier credits as a cinematographer) and writer/director Shen Fu.
    Most of the newcomers will be dealt with individually in future posts, either in full profiles or brief biographies.

Hua Mulan: a screen chronology

    The big film news in China this past week was the announcement that casting is at last set for a new treatment of the story of woman warrior Hua Mulan, and that filming will begin soon in Hubei.  It has been known for some time this was in the works, but casting of the title character was undetermined.  The rumors swirling about that casting decision at times resembled those around the casting of Scarlett O'Hara:  Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, the winner of the Chinese counterpart of "American Idol" ... these were just a few of the names rumored as possibilities.  Last week it was confirmed that the new Mulan would be Vicki Zhao Wei 赵薇.  The Chinese blogs have reacted to this news with considerable enthusiasm, which the editor shares, although tempered with caution:  while the lovely and charming Ms. Vicki is one of a handful of performers he would cheerfully pay to see even if she did nothing more than read selections from the Beijing telephone directory for 90 minutes, he has never thought of her as a wudan, especially not in the sort of gender-bending roles Brigitte Lin did so well in the 1980s and 90s.  We will see how it turns out.
    The announcement of a new recounting of the legend brings to mind the numerous past filmed versions of Hua Mulan.  While moviegoers in the West may be familiar only with the 1998 Disney animated feature "Mulan", and perhaps its 2004 straight-to-video sequel, the tale of the filial daughter disguised as a boy who goes to war in her aging and infirm but heirless father's stead has been presented countless times:  on stage as drama, ballet and opera, on large and small screen, computer games ... virtually every form of popular entertainment.  Mulan has been considered a plum role for generations of Chinese actresses, much as every actor in the West supposedly nurses a secret desire to play Hamlet.
    Since Mulan's story had been a subject of Chinese opera for many years, it makes sense that the first filmed version was a segment of classic opera.  In 1926, the Minxin studio released a two-reeler "The Stage Art of Mei Lanfang", in which the immortal Beijing opera artist  performed excerpts from a half dozen of his classic roles.  "Hua Mulan Cong Jun"  花木兰从军 (Hua Mulan Joins the Army) was the first of the scenes presented.
    The first full-length dramatic film treatment came the following year from Tianyi, the Shao (later Shaw) Brothers original Shanghai studio.  The Chinese title again was "Hua Mulan Joins the Army", but was released outside of China with the English title "Maiden in Armour".  The title role was played by Hu Shan 胡姗, younger sister of Chinese movies' "Empress" Hu Die.  While none of Hu Shan's movies seem to have survived, from all contemporary accounts she was a fine actress who was always overshadowed by her more famous sister.

[right, Hu Shan as Mulan, in a tough spot]

    Minxin brought out its own dramatized feature a year later, in 1928, this time with Li Dandan 李旦旦 in the title role.  Li Dandan was one of China's most popular young stars of the late 1920s.  She retired early from movies when she married and moved to Europe, but had a later, second career as one of the first Chinese female aviators.

[left, Li Dandan as Mulan]

    The earliest version we can see today is the 1939 Hong Kong sound version, "Lady General" starring Chen Yunchang 陈云裳 (aka Nancy Chan) as Mulan.  Two versions were filmed, in Cantonese and Mandarin, with the bilingual star acting the title role in both.  (Hu Die did this in several Hong Kong films.)  Since this version still exists, we will discuss it in a future retro review. 

                                        [right, Nancy Chan as Hua Mulan]

    There were several remakes in the 1950s and 60s from Hong Kong, both straight narrative and operatic, some in Cantonese and some in Mandarin.  The most honored was the 1964 Shaw Brothers production, in Mandarin and with Ivy Ling Po 凌波 in the lead, and released internationally as "Lady General Hua Mulan".  (Ling's performance won the Best Actress award at the 11th Asian Film Festival.)  In vivid color, with a stellar cast and direction by veteran Griffin Yueh Feng 岳枫, plus added music, it was an entertaining 106 minutes of action and story.

[left, poster for the classic 1964 Shaw Brothers version, with Ivy Ling in the title role]

    With any legendary figure, especially one from nearly two millenia ago, the question always arises as to how much of the legend is based in historical fact and how much is fabrication.  The Chinese seem to believe there is at least some truth to the story:  after she retired from military service as a general, a grateful emperor gave her a comfortable retirement home, complete with fully stocked goldfish pond (she is said to have been fond of them) and military guard to watch over and keep her company.  The home has been restored and is a popular Chinese tourist site, a beautiful place the editor visited in the 1990s.  Did Mulan really exist?  I don't know, did King Arthur really exist?  Did Robin Hood?  Hopeless romantic that he is, the editor likes to think so.  But then, he also likes to think of himself as George Clooney's identical twin ... and married to Vicki Zhao ... hey, it could happen.  Couldn't it?  Please?

[Presenting the next Hua Mulan, Vicki Zhao Wei.  In full armor, courtesy of Photoshop]

1925: a Pivotal Year

    By 1925, China’s young movie industry was emerging as a major source of urban entertainment, and showing signs of maturing as a truly competitive industry.  With bustling Shanghai having no lack of well-heeled entrepreneurs and investors eager to get into the game, film studios were beginning to proliferate:.  While the Mingxing studio continued its numerical dominance, with 9 movies released that year, all full length features, others were getting into the game, with 14 more studios producing 2 or more films, and 15 “poverty row” studios jumping in with one each.  Of the 62 films released and exhibited in Shanghai in 1925, 54 were features, the first time full length productions outnumbered shorts. 
    In addition to product statistics, the industry was showing other signs of healthy development, such as the opening of movie houses, theaters built specifically for showing movies, not adapted stage venues.  The most opulent of these were large facilities intended to exhibit the Western motion pictures which still predominated, but there were countless smaller facilities set up to show Chinese productions.  But perhaps the most outstanding sign of development was the infusion of new talent, both before and behind the camera, that the various film schools that emerged in the early 1920s were beginning to turn out in batches, removing the dependence on veteran stage and operatic artists that had been the standard in the earlier years.