Even at the height of mid-80s paranoia, when Hong Kong was known as one of the most single-mindedly commercial film industries on earth, it was still possible to explore public anxieties about the looming handover to China in popular gang films like Johnny Mak's Long Arm of the Law / Sheng Gang Qibing (1984) and its sequels, about the impact of criminals seeping over the border from the Mainland, and Alfred Cheung's underrated On the Run / Wangming Yuanyang (1988), which Teo justly calls "an excellent noir thriller with overtones of the 1997 syndrome." The paranoid conventions of noir were a perfect fit for a decade of high anxiety.
Even John Woo's Hard Boiled / Lashou Shentan (1992), often praised in the West simply as a slam-bang generic action flick, can be seen as a late manifestation of this trend, a response from a gifted genre specilialist pushing toward the intersection of moral and amoral behavior, as an increasingly freaky wave of "mad dog" criminal activity swept Hong Kong in the run-up to '97. "In both a positive and a negative way," Teo suggests, "Woo does not flinch from showing what is elemental or crude in his own society, for Hong Kong, like most developing Asian societies, is a place of extremes. ... Without the softening effects of middle-class placidity, venality and vanity are the norm. Woo's florid style or his tendency for excess cannot therefore be dismissed as mere indulgence. ... He is not the only director to reflect the basic nature of Hong Kong society in the movies. But he is the one who has won the admiration of cineastes all over the world for essentially showing man rising just above his baser instincts." Very few Western critics, I think, would have dared to suggest such a thing, even if it had crossed their minds. On the contrary, most of us are so paralyzed by PC that observations inimical to a foreign culture don't even rise to the surface of our consciousness. Instead, they remain submerged and contribute to a crippling self-consciousness.
As is evident from this example, even when Teo praises filmmakers that have won favor in the West, he tends to do so in bracing and surprising ways, to focus upon aspects of the work that have so far eluded us. John Woo, he informs us, was redefining a venerable central concept that had animated not just Chinese but all Asian action movies since the 1960s: "Western audiences may recognize the term from its deployment in Japanese yakuza pictures, where it functions as giri, translated as 'duty' or 'obligation.' Giri stems from the Chinese word yi, signifying justice or righteousness ... an unwritten code originating from the ancient practice of knight errantry in China .... The final showdown [in a Woo film] is, in essence, a battle between the traitors and loyalists of the code of yi." Teo helps us to grasp an important distinction; that while the Japanese prefer stories about men wrestling with questions of duty within highly structured social systems, struggling to balance one kind of obligation with another, the Chinese, at least since the days of the "noble outlaw" sagas inspired by The Water Margin (Shui Hu Chuan) in the 12th century, are more comfortable with Robin Hood-like stories of men who stand outside any established social structure and serve as an alternative to its inbred corruption. The issues of right and wrong tend to be more clear cut in Chinese than in Japanese genre fiction. As the novelist Louis Cha (aka Jin Yong) explains, in his introduction to the recent English translation of his wu hsia ("martial chivalry") classic The Deer and the Cauldron, " The Chinese have no pronounced religious sense. They have to decide for themselves what is right. If something is not right, if there is injustice, the weak may submit to it. But the strong will resist, they will often come to the aid of others, and be willing to sacrifice themselves in so doing. This is spirit of the Chinese knight-errant."
Like any first-rate critic, Teo can move us to add films to our mental "must see" lists: just because of the crisp phrases he employs to describe them. Thus, Fei Mui's Borzagian domestic drama Small City / Xiao Cheng zhi Chun (1948), "the master piece of the wenyi ["literary melodrama"] films and one of the greatest Chinese movies of all time," is described as "a chamber work with a quintet of players ...[that] deploys a strict formal code of presentation, the prime element of which is rhythm, with pauses and timing as crucial dramaturgical elements." (In Silver Light, Paul Fonoroff canonizes the same film, under its alternate English title Springtime in a Small City.) Teo also makes a strong case for the work of horror specialist Ma-Xu Weibang, the director of Song at Midnight / Yeban Gesheng (1937) and Haunted House aka A Maid's Bitter Story / Qionglou Hen (1949). (With his "singular obsession [with] the face and its disfigurment," Ma-Xu sounds intriguingly like an Asian blood brother to America's Todd Browning.) Tang Shuxuan 's The Arch / Dong Furen (1970) is "a wonderful, intricate movie suffused with subterranean emotions and indirect nuances." (An early Hong Kong art film, released long before there was any niche for such things in the local market, The Arch was not a commercial success, and Tang's career was cut short as a result.).
Above all, Teo stimulates a new hunger to see the few surviving works of pre-communist Shanghai cinema, and the films that ex-pat Shanghai filmmakers made in Hong Kong in the immediate post-war period. Many were melodramas of great elegance with their roots in popular "middle brow" fiction or Chinese opera, shot in a chiaroscuro of sable blacks and glossy grays that put the palette of film noir to shame. Such, at least, is the impression Teo conjures of films like Yue Feng's Blood-Stained Begonia / Xieran Haitang Hong (1949) and Fang Peilin's Song of a Songstress / Genu zhi Ge (1948), with its smoky central performance by the legendary Mandarin torch singer Zhou Xuan.
And he makes a passionate case for the work of pioneer Patrick Tam Kar-ming, "one of the most underrated directors of the new wave," known at the time for his bold stylistic experiments, and today mostly as the mentor of art house lion Wong Kar-wai. Tam's moody, broody swordplay thriller The Sword/Ming Jian (1980) has been a favorite of mine for years, but Teo is even more impressed by Nomad / Liehuo Qingchun (1982), a tale of alienated middle class youth flirting with gang involvement that predates not only such serious "neo-realist" efforts as Lawrence Ah-mon's Gangs / Tong Dang (1986) and Wong Kar-wei's As Tears Go By /Wangjiao Kamen (1988), but the string of buzz-cut teen-gang sagas, beginning with Andrew Lau's flashy comic book adaptation Young and Dangerous / Guhuozai (1996) and its three sequels, which have been among the most popular HKof the past two years.
As good as it is, Hong Kong Cinema is also a contradictory object: a book about a visual medium that has no visual component. Its fortuitous pairing with Fonoroff's sensuous appreciation makes both accounts seem richer. Two of the most vivid stills reproduced in Silver Light are from Ng Wui's Prodigal Son / Bai Jiazai (1951), a key example in Teo's discussion of the father/son theme that is cited by Fonoroff for avoiding "the excessive sentimentality that too often permeated Cantonese drama." A father who has spent twenty years in America, making money to send to his family, returns to Hong Kong to find that his wayward son has gambled it all away. In one still the wayward son (Cheung Ying) lounges sullenly in his pajamas, while the father (Lo Tun) looks on sadly, leaning against a doorframe for support. The windowed partitions of their open-plan Chinese apartment provide a graphically striking criss-cross backdrop. What we get from a still like this is something that even a critical account as eloquent as Teo's can't provide: a sense of the state of the entire Cantonese movie industry of the period, as it was reflected in a particular top-drawer production; the production values and visual idiom, the emotional gravity of its themes, the expressiveness of its performers.
Most of the items displayed in Silver Light are from Fonoroff's own legendary collection of Hong Kong and Chinese movie memorabilia, with additional material provided by the Hong Kong Film Archive. In his introduction (a revised and updated reprint of his article "A Brief History of Hong Kong Cinema," originally published in the magazine Renditions in 1988), Fonoroff explains that he began collecting this material because it was the only way to study a cinema great chunks of which are simply missing. ("Today, there are prints of only four of the over 500 films produced [in Hong Kong] in the pre-war era.") In effect he became an archeologist of Hong Kong cinema, piecing together an account of its vanished past from the evidence provided by its tattered artifacts.
Where Stephen Teo, crafting a critical history and naturally emphasizing pictures that he can see and evaluate, devotes only a few pages to the pre-war period, almost half of Fonoroff's account is structured as a memorial to films now lost. At the same time, because Fonoroff's collection consists largely of film stills and promotional material, the figures that emerge most strongly are the performers, great stars in their day whose work is now little more than a rumor even to most Chinese. Because the graphics and clothing in many of these images evoke the period so vividly, we begin to get a sense of how the film scene looked and felt to filmgoers at the time. The images prove beyond a flickering shadow of a doubt that these were "real movies," with glossy professional production values, and give us a fleeting glimpse of what the pictures must have meant to their original audience.
When we gweilos started investigating Hong Kong cinema in the '80s, one of the most appealing factors was the ubiquity of English subtitles on films produced after the '60s; this gave us access to films at every level of production, from the egregious to the sublime, from the art house to the grind house. Theoretically, we could see everything, not just the cream of the crop as skimmed-off by programmers and critics and subtitled for foreign festivals. In its own way, an account like Teo's skims-off the top layer, too. Hugely popular performers who appeared mostly in mid-level entertainment productions, like Tso Tut-wah, for Fonoroff "the master detective of post-war Cantonese cinema," tend to get short shrift in Teo's account, which to that extent conveys a misleading impression of the yearly ebb and flow of the output of the industry. Fonoroff offers a corrective. He gives us a delicious two-page spread on the trenchcoated Tso in "B" hits like Horror by the Sea / Haijiao Jingun (1964), and Man Killer Against the Tricky Man / Sharen Wang Dazhan Niuji Shen (1961), with additional sections on the Hong Kong versions of Tarzan films, Charlie Chan mysteries, and James Bond spy thrillers. The lively Mandarin "youth musicals" of the '50s and 60s, like Mambo Girl / Manbo Nulang (1957), with the radiant Grace Chang (Ge Lan), and Teddy Girls / Feinu Zhengzhuan (1969), with Josephine Siao Fong-fong, cry out for immediate bookings in American rep houses---which is not likely to happen as long as the fanboy preferences of the HK cinema cultists holds sway
The impact of these books upon Western readers who are already in love with Hong Kong cinema is bound to be complex, as disorienting as it is stimulating. In discussions of artists like John Woo and Tsui Hark, they allow us to infer that the "discovery" of HK cinema by Western film critics in the mid-1980s was no accident, that there really was something special about those explosive films. At the same time, they force us to admit that we embraced those films so readily in part because the artists, mostly either educated in West or influenced films, were turning out work that was far less overtly (or off-puttingly?) Chinese than any the colony had produced before. To some extent, Teo suggests, we were responding happily to spotting our own reflection in a foreign mirror.
Teo and Fonoroff open up a much wider and deeper vista of Hong Kong film than any we've been able to contemplate before.The unique situation of Hong Kong as a point of convergence for many forces, where the decline of Western imperialism, and the rise of the "forgotten" nations of Asia as major economic powers, found expression in a local culture with unique double-edged characteristics. The forces that shaped its personality were huge, but the place itself seemed invitingly small and self-contained, an artificially becalmed political lagoon collecting refugees in successive waves, that could be held comfortably in the mind and contemplated as a whole. In the wake of these books, that will never be true again. Hong Kong movies have been stripped of their quaintness, once and (I hope) for all.
Stephen Teo leaves open the question whether Hong Kong cinema as a distinct entity will soon cease to exist altogether. After a section detailing a rising trend toward co-productions with Mainland companies, he drops the big one:: "As the Shanghai cinema indisputably gave form to the Hong Kong cinema, it is now set to return to the fold of the industry on the Mainland and perhaps to be brought back to the cradle of Shanghai, the original Hollywood of the East." Hong Kong, however vivid its personality, was an accident of history, for all its economic might a makeshift political and social entity whose distinct outlines are already dissolving, becoming increasingly hard to grasp. I can't think of another book of film history that gave me cold chills as often as this one did.
Teo and Fonoroff together confirm a sense that has grown upon all of us who have continued to explore this cinema: that the human values of the films are in the end perfectly accessible, that in our thinking about them we often assume a degree of foreigness that does not in fact exist; that we engineer our own alienation. If there's a new exhilaration associated with the experience now it's in the realization that we were right all along, that the films hold up, that if anything they look even better when placed in a wider context and seen in this new, mellower light. Perhaps, after all, Hong Kong movies will outlive the cult of "Hong Kong cinema."
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