The decline of Hong Kong cinema0

With the arrival of July 1^st, a mas­sive dis­play of fire­works light up the Victoria Harbor once again in Hong Kong, as the region cel­e­brates her 10^th year anniver­sary since the Joint Declaration was announced with the People’s Republic of China in 1997. What more an appro­pri­ate time than this, for us to think back on whether Hong Kong’s film indus­try has changed since China came into place, and ask our­selves, “Is the rea­son why Hong Kong cin­ema is declin­ing in pop­u­lar­ity got to do with the 1997 handover?” Ever since the offi­cial han­dover in 1997, Hong Kong’s film indus­try has under­gone trans­for­ma­tions not only economically-wise, but aes­thet­i­cally as well. Hong Kong has seen a con­tin­u­ous drop in her out­put depart­ment, and a fall in her box-office rev­enue. Many say that the Hong Kong film indus­try is long past its prime. Tracing to its ‘begin­nings’, is the 1997 han­dover the major cause for the start of the decline of Hong Kong cinema?Indeed, it is not hard to notice that the impend­ing han­dover had not been warmly wel­comed by many Hong Kongers, and per­haps, has caused a domino effect in var­i­ous sec­tors of the econ­omy, in this instance, the once-thriving film indus­try. Apprehension towards a life under the new rule of the Chinese resulted in what was known as the “1997 men­tal­ity… take the money and run.”(Stokes and Hoover, 1999, p257). Many Hong Kong cit­i­zens sought to mak­ing a quick buck and leav­ing before they were taken con­trol of, or so they feared. There was a loss of tal­ent pool, as many play­ers in the indus­try chose the path of emi­gra­tion, just as direc­tors Clara Law and Eddie Fong did. In an inter­view, Law explained that “to be hon­est and very frank, I would not like to be under the régime of the Communist government.”(Dannen, 1997, p109). While there were those who had no qualms about hid­ing their dis­plea­sure by leav­ing, oth­ers who remained released their unhap­pi­ness in another form of out­let — film. Sentiments of pes­simism could be seen early before the actual han­dover in the works of sev­eral direc­tors, such as in Patrick Yau’s The Longest Night. The Longest Night was unusu­ally dark and brood­ing, where sus­pi­cion and betrayal from author­ity under­lined the film. In the film, the mas­ter­mind behind all killings was depicted as an old man clad in a tra­di­tional Chinese gown who had returned to Macau after decades of absence, and his return only caused more uncer­tainty and fear. The avoid­ance of direct asso­ci­a­tion of Hong Kong’s fate with a ‘return­ing’ China was made through the sub­text of using the film’s two pro­tag­o­nists as rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Hong Kong and Macau. Lau Ching Wan rep­re­sented Macau whereas Tony Leung rep­re­sented Hong Kong. Tony Leung’s char­ac­ter shaved his head bald towards the end of the film to look iden­ti­cal to Lau Ching Wan, and was killed off too at the end after Lau, by the same ‘old man who had returned’, sig­nal­ing how Hong Kong too would suf­fer a same fate with Macau with the return of China (Pun, 2005, p 85).So what exactly has this ‘old man’ killed off about Hong Kong? As the ter­ri­tory uni­fied with the mighty China, Hong Kong’s world of movies under­went a ‘ref­or­ma­tion’, like a play­ful child brought into the new world where it is no longer just about you and your play­ground. Gone are the golden days of flam­boy­ance and good thrills. Faded into our mem­o­ries have the bright lights upon the float­ing Jumbo restau­rant in ‘The God of Cookery’, where the King of Comedy — Stephen Chow would once be whip­ping up both slap­stick moves as well as dishes with the most ridicu­lous names. No more sex and booze from direc­tor Wong Jing, no more cool dudes with sleek longs hair and leather jack­ets along the streets of Mongkok.Instead, Hong Kong had in return, her newly-acquired sta­tus as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China. Yet, she has found her­self hav­ing to col­lab­o­rate with a Mainland part­ner in order to reach out to the one bil­lion audi­ences in China. Hopes were dashed when China retained its pol­icy of restrict­ing imported films to ten per year whereby Hong Kong was not an exemp­tion. Filmmakers who thought that they were ensured a def­i­nite larger mar­ket after the han­dover real­ized that poli­cies had not changed, and was in fact a pre­lude to the many more that lay install for them. China has since tapped on this advan­tage of co-production and its access to Hong Kong actors, who have been wooed into star­ring in Mainland pic­tures as the mar­ket is promis­ing there. This has resulted in the cur­rent pop­u­lar trend of big-budgeted co-productions between both regions star­ring some of the regions’ biggest names. Hero and The Banquet have done excep­tion­ally well at the box-office, and it is largely due to the attrac­tion of being able to watch many stars in one movie. These co-productions result­ing from the closer ties between Mainland China and Hong Kong have cul­ti­vated a shift of taste in audi­ences. Majority of audi­ences have higher expec­ta­tions and now choose grand-wuxia epics or any big-budgeted co-production over the usual Hong Kong films. As Tsui Hark men­tions, “peo­ple now choose what to see based on its pro­duc­tion value” (Stokes and Hoover, 1999, p257), why pay to see one actor when you could pay the same amount to see five all in one movie? Local movies are los­ing their audi­ences to the grand Chinese movies. Take for com­par­i­son the two films of Asian box-office mag­net Andy Lau, one being a huge-scale wuxia epic made in China and the other a home-made Hong Kong romance com­edy with Sammi Cheng. Both released in 2004, House of the Flying Daggers, raked in US$3.2mil in its first week at the local box office whereas Yesterday once more by Johnnie To took in less with just US$1.8mil.( http://www.boxofficemojo.com/intl/hongkong/?yr=2004¤cy=us&p=.htm). While these big bud­geted co-productions have ben­e­fited China by rais­ing Mainland direc­tors like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige to the inter­na­tional pedestal, and cat­a­pulted main­land actress Zhang Ziyi to inter­na­tional star­dom, it has done lit­tle in improv­ing the state of the Hong Kong film indus­try even though they star some of Hong Kong’s biggest names. In fact, the increas­ing pop­u­lar­ity of these big-budgeted Mainland films has stolen away the atten­tion that Hong Kong cin­ema used to enjoy in the 1980s and before.Due to the Joint Declaration and what is known as ‘one coun­try, two sys­tems’, Hong Kong direc­tors find them­selves hav­ing to adopt cer­tain mea­sures in order to appease or secure the Mainland mar­ket. Local actresses find them­selves los­ing roles to their main­land coun­ter­parts, even in local films. Derek Yee’s Protégé starred rising-star Zhang Jing Chu from Mainland China and Xu Jing Lei landed the role of Tony Leung’s wife in Andrew Lau’s cop-thriller Confession of Pain. Many Hong Kong films have under­gone the cut­ting blade as China is strict on cen­sor­ship laws as Hong Kong pro­ducer Ng See Yuen divulges, “China sees films as pro­pa­ganda. If the divorce rate is going up, word comes down to make fewer films with extra­mar­i­tal affairs” (Stokes and Hoover, 1999, p266). In fact, a total of 18 min­utes of footage was cut out from The Soong Sisters (1997), as the China cen­sors were unhappy with a scene of a Soong sis­ter defend­ing a Nationalist leader. Director Cheung Yuen Ting laments, “(Making the movie) was like a dream come true, until the day I had to face the Chinese censors.”(Stokes and Hoover, 1999, p267). Similarly, direc­tor Wai Ka Fai and the Milkyway Creative Group had to churn out an alter­nate end­ing for Running on Karma in 2003 before it could be allowed in China as the Mainland cen­sors were skep­ti­cal towards the film’s Buddhist sen­ti­ments. Making a com­par­i­son in her encoun­ters with film cen­sors, Ann Hui shared that a board of appeal exists for the cen­sor­ship bureau in Hong Kong, whereas in China, she just gets “a sheet of paper telling [her] what to cut.” (Dannen, 1997, p54). Certainly China has become, not only a form of guide­line to suc­cess­ful movie-making but also to cer­tain extent, a hin­drance in mak­ing films in Hong Kong. However, the newly acquired rela­tion­ship with China is not the sole rea­son that has led to the down­turn in Hong Kong’s film indus­try. There are sev­eral other fac­tors that con­tribute to it and though some may be of indi­rect rela­tion to the han­dover, they still ought to be viewed as a sep­a­rate matter.The major off-set has prob­a­bly got to be the Asian Financial Crisis and the ram­pant piracy through fake VCDs. These have been the great­est causes for the dive in audi­ence atten­dance and box-office rev­enue. When the finan­cial cri­sis occurred, the Hong Kong stock plum­meted by half and the retrench­ment fig­ures were high (Bordwell, 2000, p 31). During such cir­cum­stances, cit­i­zens earned less so they had less money to spend on enter­tain­ment. As such, many turned to buy­ing boot­leg copies of the films play­ing in the cin­e­mas. Piracy was ram­pant about the city as even the “pro­jec­tion­ist or lab staffer would smug­gle out a print to be dupli­cated” (Bordwell, 2000, p78). Video Compact Discs (VCDs) were cheap and enabled mass repro­duc­tion with effi­ciency and a pirated copy was only half the price of a movie ticket. This gen­er­ated a new habit of ‘home-viewing’, where cit­i­zens would buy pirated ver­sions of the local flicks and cir­cu­late them around their neigh­bors and friends. Although the pirated ver­sions of the movies were nowhere in qual­ity to the actual the­atre expe­ri­ence, with often a few coughs and heads pop­ping up against the screen, Stokes and Hooves (1999) points out that they man­aged to cap­ture up to “40 per cent of the industry’s busi­ness” (p293). Till this day, it is still dog­ging the indus­try and more piracy has caught up through ille­gal online down­load­ing websites.“If you want to cre­ate a film indus­try, then you’ve con­sciously got to encour­age stars to emerge” notes one Hollywood pro­ducer (Bordwell, 2000, p 156). Failure to nur­ture new stars and inject fresh blood has added to the weight of the issue. Since the 1980s, the same play­ers have been in the mar­ket in Hong Kong, with Andy Lau still reign­ing as the highest-earning celebrity. For every year since 1997, it has always been the same con­tenders Francis Ng, Anthony Wong, Andy Lau, Lau Ching Wan and both Tony Leungs vying the spots for the Best Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards. Hong Kong has yet to nur­ture enough suc­ces­sors to take over its stars that have been around as long as the 1980s. Efforts have been made by cre­at­ing teen-idols such as Edison Chen, Shawn Yue and the Twins, and they too have con­tin­ued the craze their seniors like Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung had enjoyed, such as fan mag­a­zines, posters, albums and sticker cards. A rather suc­cess­ful groom­ing has to be Daniel Wu, who has been praised for being not just a pretty face, but also a rather promis­ing actor. Yet, although he and his peers can make hearts aflut­ter, they have yet nei­ther the charisma nor power to lead the box-office on their own as Chow Yun Fatt or Stephen Chow did in the 1980s. Their star power is also restricted in Hong Kong, as fans from other regions seem more inter­ested in Taiwan pop-idols like Jay Chou or Korean heart-throbs like Kwon Sang Woo.“It isn’t’ only faces that recur in Hong Kong movies – so do plots.”(Dannen, 1997, p 9). One of the biggest rea­sons for the slump in Hong Kong movies is the fail­ure to come up with new sto­ry­lines. Audiences, both locally and inter­na­tion­ally, have lost antic­i­pa­tion for repet­i­tive themes the mar­ket is churn­ing out, mostly films about tri­ads or under­cover cops; or feel-good love-comedies star­ring Miriam Yeung. Movies which have man­aged to make their mark crit­i­cally and com­mer­cially such as films like Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer and Kungfu Hustle, the highly-acclaimed Infernal Affairs tril­ogy and many films made under Milkyway Image such as The Mission and Running On Karma trace their suc­cess to being highly script-driven. Director Peter Chan feels that “the writ­ing cul­ture is nonex­is­tent in Hong Kong.”(Dannen, 1997, p68). There is evi­dently a lack of com­pe­tent screen­writ­ers in the indus­try and more effort is being needed to train for them for the indus­try to take flight once again. In the mid-1990s, the Milkyway Image Company, hired an American script-doctor to intro­duce screen­writ­ing tech­niques to improve Hong Kong films, and since then it has been the only film com­pany in Hong Kong to house a Milkyway Creative Team of screen­writ­ers who spe­cial­ize in writ­ing screen­plays for direc­tor Johnnie To (Stokes and Hoover, 1999, p292). These efforts have paid off as Milkyway screen­plays have become inter­na­tion­ally notable films like Breaking News and Election, and have been reg­u­lar win­ners at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and com­peti­tors in Cannes. One of the Milkyway writ­ers– Yau Nai Hoi, has even gone on to direct his first fea­ture Eye in the Sky, which has gar­nered good reviews.One of the ear­li­est cat­a­lysts that kicked off the down­turn of the indus­try was cre­ative flight in the depar­ture of the industry’s major play­ers and most bank­able stars like John Woo, Tsui Hark, Chow Yun Fatt, Jackie Chan, Ronny Yu, Stanley Tong, Ringo Lam and Michelle Yeoh. Directors such as Woo and Tsui are able to bring in over­whelm­ing box-office returns through their widely-adored films such as A bet­ter tomor­row and The killer, and can be largely cred­ited for pro­mot­ing Hong Kong cin­ema to the inter­na­tional audi­ence. Jackie Chan and Chow Yun Fatt are regarded as icons for Hong Kong, and even the Chinese race. Woo, Lam and Tsui went on to direct Jean-Claude Van Damme actions, and though these works have gained mas­sive rev­enue, such as Face/Off which has earned $225million world­wide, Bordwell (2000) laments that “no film mea­sured up to any director’s best Hong Kong work”(p85). Their sud­den absence from the local scene meant less out­put in pro­duc­tion, dip in earn­ings at the local box-office and a major essence of Hong Kong cin­ema in itself – death-defying stunt sequences, had gone to Hollywood, so inter­na­tional audi­ences thought “why look to Hong Kong when you could have all of that in Hollywood?”Last but not least, we can­not ignore the fact of Hollywood’s push to cap­ture a larger por­tion of the Asian mar­ket. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, local fare reigned supremacy over Hollywood prod­ucts because they con­tained what audi­ences could not find in over­seas’ prod­ucts –films that were uniquely Hong Kong-flavored. Yet by the 1990s, as Hollywood began to adopt more of Hong Kong’s sell­ing points and began to import tal­ents like John Woo and Jackie Chan over to make films, the dis­tinc­tion between the two were but a fine line. This was accom­pa­nied by the open­ing of more screens for Hollywood prod­ucts in Hong Kong, as the per­cent­age of their screen­ings rose from 10 in 1992, to almost half at 49 in 1997(Stokes and Hoover, 1999, p 257). Audiences were open to choices, and nat­u­rally, they chose to watch Hollywood block­busters over their home-grown flicks due to the higher pro­duc­tion val­ues as seen in Jurassic Park and Titanic. This change in expec­ta­tions was appar­ent not only in the local mar­ket, but also in the regional mar­kets that Hong Kong depended on such as Malaysia and Singapore, where audi­ences aimed to get the most of their money’s worth.Thus, we can see that the 1997 han­dover and a new joint rela­tion­ship with China is not the sole fac­tor for the decline of Hong Kong’s film indus­try. However, we must admit that it has cer­tainly caused a huge change in Hong Kong cin­ema– the way it is run and its direc­tion towards the future. Players in the film indus­try too, have had two vary­ing opin­ions towards the han­dover. One side of the camp is made up of opti­mists, such as movie-mogul Charles Heung, who strongly believes, “The China mar­ket is our future.”, whereas the other con­sists pri­mar­ily of those who make the best of they can by rec­og­niz­ing that even though the reuni­fi­ca­tion may not be the most desir­able of sit­u­a­tions, it is still “a very impor­tant step in the right direc­tion” as Raymond Chow him­self admits (Dannen, 1997, p54-55). The han­dover has after all, pro­vided a base for an under­ly­ing theme of many note-worthy Hong Kong films, such as Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together and Johnnie To’s Expect the Unexpected etc. Some express opti­mism towards the han­dover, such as Happy Together, where in the final scene Tony Leung boards the train as it speeds into a bright future, whereas some take on a darker out­look towards the future like the anti-climatic end­ing where all char­ac­ters die in Expect the Unexpected. Be it a pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive out­look towards the issue, the under­lin­ing fact is that a great film can still be made regard­less of whose side you take.One could adapt to the cur­rent trend of co-productions with the Mainland (Peter Chan’s Perhaps Love), or could con­tinue to make qual­ity Hong Kong films that hit straight to the locals’ hearts( Johnnie To’s Needing You). At the end of the day, Hong Kong cin­ema has had its glo­ri­ous days and the sit­u­a­tion can only get bet­ter with those that know how to play accord­ing to or around the rules.

References: Bordwell, D ( 2000). Planet Hong Kong: Popular cin­ema and the art of Entertainment. United States of America: Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Dannen, F & Long. B(1997). Hong Kong Babylon: An insider’s guide to the Hollywood of the East. Great Britain: Faber and Faber Limited. Hong Kong box office index 2004(2004) Retrieved 7 July, 2007, from Box Office Mojohttp://www.boxofficemojo.com/intl/hongkong/?yr=2004¤cy=us&p=.htmPun, L (2006). Milkyway Image Beyond Imagination: Wai Ka Fai + Johnnie To + Creative Team (1996−2005). Hong Kong: Joint Publishing (H.K) Co Ltd.Stokes, L.O & Hoover, M(1999). City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema. Great Britain: Bath Press.Ltd. Written by Joanne Lee Jieying