From China with Love: Hong Kong Movies

Résumé du document

Dianying' is the Chinese translation for movies. It literally means 'Electric shadows'. To me, this term is particularly meaningful and suggests that movies are the shadows of real life and offer a clear reflection of a society or a culture. My topic here is Hong Kong cinema, the fourth biggest movie production unit in the world (some say the third, after the United States and India). Therefore a mention of motion pictures coming from Mainland China or Taiwan will not be made in this essay, except in the following history of Chinese movies.

Extraits

[...] These legends also have a cathartic function so these stories have some hidden meaning that sometimes needs explanations and a bit of imagination. Thus, the idea is to stimulate the imagination, not to guide it. And there're practically no limits to imagination. So, an easy formula could be used to qualify these films: films of Hong-Kong do not have limits”. The special effects are innovative. Just like the Hong Kong city, which inherited both Eastern and Western cultures, Hong Kong cinema is often a daring fusion of the two cultures. [...]

[...] In China the defeat further discredited the ruling Qing (Manchu) dynasty and accelerated political developments toward revolution. Dramatized in such movies as Once Upon a Time in China. (Information reprinted for academic purposes only from the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia, 1998 Microsoft) Buddhism .It is an Asian philosophy and religion that takes many forms, adapting to the countries and their culture. For example, Japanese prefer Zen, a meditative and minimalist form of Buddhism. The main principle of Buddhism is that the way to happiness is constituted by wisdom, realisation of moral action and the mental discipline which allows to reach a state of “awakening”. [...]

[...] Will the Chinese idols ‘invade' the Hollywood cinema brain drain for Hong Kong?) First, I would like to focus on the Chinese movie stars. A particularity of the Asian star system is that actors are also pop stars. This is why Jackie Chan**, Leslie Cheung**, Andy Sally Yeh( the very one starring as Jenny in Woo's the Killer), Faye Wong(originally a singer , she was seen in Wong Kar Wai Chungking Express), Chow Yun-Fat** and so many more, have their pop music albums. [...]

[...] In this scene, Jet Li fights over ladders and uses them as weapons to get rid of his enemies. D'Artagnan actually does exactly the same thing Dracula 2001 is also a recollection of Hong Kong movies. In both cases, it was an attempt to spice up the original script. To my mind, it wasn't worth the try: those two movies are terrible. It proves that the Hong Kong recipes are not a remedy to bad scripts which lacks of ideas. [...]

[...] In the middle of this multitude of small films, the directors are free to express themselves. That allowed the emergence of geniuses like John Woo or Tsui Hark. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, these methods made miracles: Hong Kong cinema reached new heights in productivity. After 1992, the film industry entered a period of crisis, because of rising ticket prices, lack of new stars, (the old ones fleeing to America), a growing grey market* and strong competition from American blockbusters. However, the other side of the coin was felt these last years. [...]