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Tsui Hark by Grady Hendrix Grady Hendrix is one of the founders of Subway Cinema, a film programming collective in New York City dedicated to increasing exposure for popular Asian movies neglected by Western critics and audiences. |
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| When it rains it pours and for five years in the mid-1990s Hong Kong
cinema was swamped by a flood of critical enthusiasm that managed to be
refreshing and patronizing at the same time. Looking back at the raves and
the cover stories one reads of a Hong Kong film industry that has no independent
identity, just a more extreme notch on a dial where Hollywood is the “normal”
setting. Described as the id to Hollywood's super-ego, Hong Kong was seen
as a land of noble savages making primitivist movies that were valuable
only in their inadvertent transgressions or excesses. Those who appreciated
Hong Kong's industry on its own terms were regarded as hick fans, girly
sentimentalists or humorless, anti-Hollywood multiculturalists who just
didn't “get” the glib, party hearty film writing that carried
the day. But Hong Kong's film industry is more than a playground for cultural gatekeepers on vacation. The twentieth century shattered Chinese identity, forcing overseas Chinese who longed for a collective homeland to look beyond the China of the Communist party to a pre-Revolutionary, pre-Republican China. The Chinese Nation, so mistreated by its twentieth century custodians, was placed for safekeeping in the hearts and minds of dreaming Chinese all over the world. So while Hong Kong's film industry was on the one hand a slick, sophisticated machine that exported itself internationally, it was also the only agent of Chinese culture that could move freely between overseas Chinese communities. Consequently, it became the keeper of the flame, the custodian of a mythic Chinese identity. No one takes this curatorial job more seriously than Tsui Hark. Called “the Steven Spielberg of Asia”, at this point in his career, Steven Spielberg should be so lucky. As a director and producer, Tsui has made 54 films, directing 31 of them, producing blockbusters in every genre known to man, and creating most of the stars in the Hong Kong heavens (John Woo, Chow Yun-fat, Jet Li, Ching Siu-tung, and Brigitte Lin all owe their current careers to Tsui). (1) The genres most identified with '80s and '90s Hong Kong film (heroic bloodshed, fantasy swordplay, ghost romances, period martial arts) were genres he created. His Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) created, from scratch, the modern Hong Kong special effects industry, and his A Chinese Ghost Story: The Animation (1997) built an animation industry from the ground up. You'd think a guy like this would be sitting behind a desk with his feet up, puffing on a big cigar, but Tsui Hark struggles. He believes that he is the only person who understands the wonders of Chinese culture and history and that with his great understanding comes great responsibility: he must save it. Tsui looks at Chineseness and sees a neverending source of ideas, a river of strength that will never run dry. People dismiss this and it drives him crazy. He wants to knock off the dust and kick out the jams. And he's been surprisingly successful. He's revitalized almost every major trope of Chinese popular culture and, if background counts, he's barely even Chinese. No one becomes a patriot like an immigrant and Tsui, born in Vietnam, learned about China from secondary sources: books, movies, comics. He moved to Hong Kong when he was fourteen, lived there for only three years, and then moved to Texas to study film. Eight years later he wound up back in Hong Kong, via New York, and was hired by Selina Chow to direct television at TVB, the petri dish in which a modern Hong Kong identity was crafted.
Foreign-educated students flocked to TVB under Selina Chow's guidance: Tsui, Dennis Yu, Ringo Lam, Ann Hui, Patrick Tam, Yim Ho, Kirk Wong, Alex Cheung, Allen Fong, Shu Kei, and Eddie Fong, among others. These pointy-headed intellectuals, rigorous filmmakers, and cultural omnivores turned out the most popular television in Hong Kong history. When Selina Chow left TVB for upstart station, CTV, she took them with her and there Tsui made his landmark 52 episode Gold Dagger Romance (1979). Going over-budget before he shot the climactic duel, he just turned out the lights and staged it in pitch darkness. Intellectuals swooned and film offers followed. The next few years saw the collapse of CTV (TVB eats its young) and all these bright young directors started erupting into feature films, dazzling local and foreign critics. Social agendas worn on their sleeves, they welded Western forms to Chinese stories and placed them in shrieking confrontation with the modern world. Critics foamed at the mouth, and Tsui leapt into the fray with Butterfly Murders (1979), We're Going to Eat You (1980) and Dangerous Encounters – First Kind (1980). Mondo psychotronic genre pieces whose crude political allegories are misted with arterial spray, all three movies were flops. The New Wave was an injection of fresh blood but its long-term effects were merely stylistic. As it flashed and sizzled the novelty of seeing social issues onscreen briefly captured the public imagination. But people don't go to the movies to learn lessons, they go to be entertained. Cantonese comedy quickly emerged as a guaranteed moneymaker and Cinema City, feeding off the freshly killed corpse of the New Wave, became the leader of the production house pack.
Tsui is an omnivorous re-maker, mining Chinese history and culture for some of its most unpromising material and transforming it into panting pop masterpieces, crackling with relevancy. Lung Kong's Story of a Discharged Prisoner (1967) becomes A Better Tomorrow (1986). Chang Cheh's macho One Armed Swordsman (1967) is super-heated and reshaped into The Blade (1995). King Hu's Dragon Gate Inn (1967) is turned into Dragon Inn (1992). Touchstone Hong Kong comic books, Master Q and Uncle Choi, are remade as Master Q 2001 and The Raid (1991). Martial arts novelists Jin Yong and Huanzhu Louzhu are given an upgrade in Tsui's Swordsman (1990) and Zu series, respectively. The creaky black-and-white film serial, Burning of the Red Lotus Temple, is blasted with hard radiation until it mutates into Burning Paradise (1994), and the 100-film Wong Fei-hung series becomes Tsui's landmark Once Upon a Time in China films. Chinese folktales provide the fodder for Green Snake (1993) and The Lovers (1994), both of which Tsui strips of decades of fusty traditionalism until he finds the bloody meat beneath their skin. But while offering the stability of historical continuity with one hand, he takes it away with the other. His movies exist in a perpetual state of flux, where the only constant is change. Immigrants know the bitter taste of premature partings and the absurdity of keeping a place in their hearts for a homeland they barely remember. They know that borders make all the difference and that citizenship is destiny: a chemical engineer in Bombay is a cab driver in New York; a screw-up in London is a bank manager in Hong Kong. A Better Tomorrow III (1989) takes place in Vietnam and never has so much apocalyptic angst been unleashed in an airport departure lounge. Dragon Inn wrings 88 minutes of pathos and paranoia out of a single attempt to cross a border without a passport. Tsui's characters are neither here nor there, subject to sudden, traumatic changes in status and identity. Demons become human, men become women, swordsmen become monks, criminals become heroes, and heroes become villains. Shape-shifting aliens become bangable pinball machines, robots turn into sexy sirens, human bodies are pulled apart, hung from hooks, deflated, de-faced, skinned alive, castrated, amputated, and exploded. Twins and endlessly replicating time travelers proliferate exponentially.
Even the production process is a victim of this dynamic. Films are never finished until the day of their release, and even then they're often re-made. Tsui's a fan of re-editing, re-shooting, re-writing and re-dubbing right up until the eleventh hour. The term “lip rape” (dubbing new, plot-altering lines over an actor's dialogue) was coined for him. All of his collaborators over the years feel that his movies would be better if he focused on fully expressing one idea rather than several, but Tsui doesn't have the time. He's saving China from extinction and if he has a thousand ideas in the three months when he's making a movie, then that movie will contain a thousand ideas. But there are constants. Tsui's plots feature good guys on one side, bad guys on the other, and the protagonists caught in the middle, just trying to keep their heads down and attached to their necks. He often turns off the dialogue and allows the imagery to build into musical interludes that can wring tears from the most grizzled Chinese granddad. His happy endings are qualified to the point of tragedy, and he knows that every Chinese understands the heartbreak of leaving home. Our heroes are caught in a maelstrom, briefly colliding, endlessly parting. Ning is eternally pursuing the reincarnation of his ghostly lady love. Ling and Kiddo will always be riding for Ox Mountain. Like an arrow through the heart, our heroines in Peking Opera Blues are captured in a freeze frame as they scatter. If anyone deserves a happy ending, they do. But Tsui just takes a cruel breath before he reveals the nasty surprises history has in store for them. His most recent major film, Legend of Zu, aimed to build a new world onscreen. Using more special effects shots than even Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, a massive crew (many of whom were hospitalized for exhaustion) and a year of post-production, he smashed these elements together, hoping to create something truly new. As he says, “The aim…is to build a new world where there's harmony between heaven and earth.” Film by film, Tsui Hark has been building that world. It's a China that Chinese, from Hong Kong, to Canada, to Malaysia and Australia, can enter and leave without passports, where there are no borders and no border guards. He's built it out of light and it travels at 24 frames per second. It's his greatest achievement: an alternate universe that makes good on the promise of a better world. © Grady Hendrix, June 2003 Endnotes:
Filmography As
director:
The
Master (1992) also producer
A
Better Tomorrow II (John Woo, 1987) producer Bibliography Sam
Ho and Wai-leng Ho, The Swordsman and his Jiang Hu: Tsui Hark
and Hong Kong Film, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Film Archive, 2002
Articles in Senses of Cinema
Web Resources Asian
Week.com
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