Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 36, October 2003
Karen Fang
The Poverty of Sociological Studies of Hong Kong Cinema:
Stokes and Hoover's _City on Fire_
Lisa Odham Stokes and
Michael Hoover _City On Fire: Hong Kong
Cinema_ London: Verso,
1999 ISBN
1-85984-203-8 372 pp. _City on Fire: Hong Kong
Cinema_ is an avowedly Marxist analysis of the vibrant Asian
film industry, whose dynamic visuality withstood Hollywood
imports for years, and which is now a major influence in
American and worldwide filmmaking. The volume may be the
most extreme of the studies in English on Hong Kong film
that have appeared in the past decade, which have for the
most part all pursued similar emphases on the cultural and
industrial factors of the cinema. [1] Although such
a materialistic approach to movies may seem antithetical to
the more philosophical inquiries of a journal such as
_Film-Philosophy_, in fact the volume, by Lisa Odham Stokes
and Michael Hoover, a humanist and a political scientist
respectively, is a powerful flashpoint for examining why a
non-western cinema repeatedly attracts this particular
perspective in western criticism. The reason for this is
that the globalization processes that surrounded the height
of the Hong Kong film industry and the western discovery of
the cinema revealed a western inferiority that was
compensated for by an aggressive application of western
theory, which accords the Asian cinema a status as an
interesting socioeconomic specimen but not as a product of
artistic ambition. This marginalizing position betrays
western desires for cultural authority and fears of eclipse
in the age of globalization. Stokes and Hoover's
approach is to see Hong Kong films as direct representations
of the economic conditions in the territory: 80s and 90s
'gambling movies' directly reflect Hong Kong's economic
transformation and their inahbitants' anxieties over
reunification with China (219); John Woo's romantic gangster
movies are nostalgic depictions of a culture that no longer
exists -- that is, one of 'non-acquisitiveness' (40); and
the dysfunctional families that are often the subject of
comedies released for the Chinese New Year (the territory's
highest moviegoing period) are outcomes of the crass
commercialism and consumer society that is the very reason
for moviegoing and the targeting of that audience at that
time (205). By the same token, the authors argue that the
highly commercial Hong Kong film industry is an index of the
territory's ambitious society and expansionist economy in
general: the frequency of production is emblematic of a
'tiger' economy, just as Ann Hui's 1996 film _Ah Kam_, about
a stuntwoman in the local film industry, is 'a disturbing
visual reminder of Marx's words', as scenes of the character
being pushed onto a truck by the director 'have a striking
similarity to Marx's description of the transformation of
the laborer into a workhorse . . . neglecting safety rules
in production processes pernicious to health' (27). (The
connection is rendered all the more obvious in the outtakes
that show actress Michelle Yeoh injured in the filming.) All
of these aspects of Hong Kong film and culture interest
Stokes and Hoover because it so perfectly illustrates the
fierce conditions of industrial capitalism that Marx
describes. In fact, for Stokes and Hoover, Hong Kong film is
such a striking instance of Marxian phenomena that plot
summaries or dialogue from the movies can be used to
exemplify economic theory and vice versa. The authors
repeatedly lift sentences from Marx and insert them, without
elaboration, in their descriptions of the movies, such as in
this discussion of the 1997 action film, _Beyond
Hypothermia_, which sketches the psychology of the main
character, an assassin: 'She is . . . aloof and
unresponsive, contextualized . . . by the squalor from which
she came . . . Her only connection to humanity is through
the noodles she likes . . . For the most part, she is her
job. 'In its blind unrestrainable passion, its werewolf
hunder for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the
moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the
working day.' Her work follows her' (166). Or, to provide the reverse
instance, in the discussion of Peter Chan's popular film,
_He Ain't Heavy, He's My Father_ (1993), the authors quote
the opening voice-over in the movie (in which a character
claims his failure is due to the poor example of his father)
in order to show how Hong Kong movies repeatedly reveal
local culture to be dictated by consumer society. Although
these questions of envy and possessions are touched upon in
the monologue, the authors' discussion of the it claims a
more extensive responsibility, above and beyond what exists
in the monologue. According to Stokes and Hoover, the main
character represents: 'the man of the fetished
world, who can cure his disgust with the world only in
intoxication, who seeks, like the morphine addict, to find a
way out by heightening the intensity of the intoxicant
rather than a way of life that has no need of intoxication'
(211). Such an insistently
materialistic emphasis on Hong Kong film has its merits. As
the authors state in their Introduction, their aim in the
volume is to highlight Hong Kong as a profoundly modern
place, providing extensive description of plot, scenario,
visual setting, and editorial style in Hong Kong film as
cinematic corroboration of the scholarly and theoretical
accounts of Hong Kong stemming from prominent geographers
such as David Harvey, Manuel Castells, and Saskia Sassen.
[2] The volume, published in 1999, precedes David
Bordwell's 2000 study _Planet Hong Kong_, and is chock-full
of statistical and demographic data to help contextualize
their study and introduce the territory to western readers
less familiar with Hong Kong, and, as a relatively early
work, appears to benefit from extensive access to local
filmmakers. The volume is rich in unprecedented commentary
from first-person interviews with numerous luminaries, all
providing first-hand glimpses into the procedures,
motivations, and decision-making processes of local
filmmaking. For the readers and viewers new to Hong Kong
cinema the volume is, like the literal translations of
Chinese movie titles that it provides along with the English
title, a valuable glimpse into the modes of production and
reception that would otherwise be invisible to Hollywood
consumers. Most interesting about the authors' insistent
return to aspects and rhetoric of Marxian thinking in
relation to the territory is that it raises the question of
how these capitalistic conditions in the current Hong Kong
film industry -- or the territory in general -- originate in
the imperial capitalism of the nineteenth century, the
period in which Marx was writing and in which the colony of
Hong Kong was founded. If Hong Kong film is indeed the
exemplar of Marxian dynamics as the authors suggest, then
much interest must lie in the historical continuity of
mid-nineteenth century British theory in late-twentieth
century global examples. This connection would be
interesting because it further substantiates the relevance
of the postcolonial moment upon which most studies of Hong
Kong film are focused. The automatic critique of
methods like Stokes and Hoover's, usually coming from
practitioners of traditional studies of national film, is
that their account, despite its commitment to cultural
contextualization, cannot be expert because the authors are,
as they acknowledge, new to Hong Kong and Asia in general
(viii). The point has some validity, as their descriptions
of characteristics of local film sometimes cannot
distinguish between the unique, the banal, and the
widespread. For example, on different occasions the authors
claim that families 'come in all shapes and sizes',
storytelling 'is celebrated in Hong Kong movies', and that
eating is perhaps the 'single phenomenon that is common to
all [Hong Kong] movies' (205, 169, 237). These
observations are not wrong, but are they really specific to
Hong Kong culture and film alone? More disturbing about this
apparent inability to sense what matters in the movies is
evident in the range of films that they discuss: the authors
move with little discretion from discussions of little-known
movies and box-office busts to historic, record-shattering,
and trend-setting films such as John Woo's _A Better
Tomorrow_, conveying a false sense of the cultural landscape
because the movies they cite as representative of society
had no earnings to suggest the social identification that
authors presume. For example, the intimate 1993 film, _Roof
with a View_, which the authors discuss at length, did
little at the box office, ranking a dismal 47th in the year
of its release. To accord it the same importance as a
Stephen Chow comedy, which regularly tops the year-end box
office, must be inaccurate, especially given the materialist
and sociological criteria of their study. Instead of Stokes and
Hoover's outsider status, however, it is precisely their
willingness to see Hong Kong film as unknown and foreign and
their reliance upon their own western theoretical training
that is most problematic. Any study which sees epiphenomena
such as eating and family structure as unique to a film
tradition must bear questioning. Similarly, in a discussion
of gender relations in Hong Kong cinema and how they reveal
those 'patterns of behavior, thoughts and feelings' of
economic self-interest that the authors feel typifies Hong
Kong culture and cinema, their discussion of the Chow
Yun-fat comedy _Diary of Big Man_ (1988) notes that women
are portrayed as objects or commodities like 'honeymoon
souvenirs' (229). As Gayle Rubin -- whom the authors cite --
would ask about this scenario: what is unusual about such
traffic in women? Part of the insights of the work Harvey,
Castells, and Sassen is to show that Hong Kong, if different
from the west in any way, represents a modernity that is
more advanced than ours; their work presents Hong Kong as
different from the west only in the sense that it is the
west's future. But instead, the aspects that Stokes and
Hoover point towards as part of our divide are almost
otherizing gestures that suggest that such basic social
features as food, family life, and gender relations are
profoundly unusual in Hong Kong. This should be familiar as
Orientalism, which in its importance in the conceptual work
of the volume is far more disturbing than the occasional
lapses into Orientalist rhetoric that the volume also
contains -- e.g. 'Watching a Stanley Kwan film is like
opening a Chinese box' (160). What is unusual about this new
form of Orientalism in comparison to those studied by Edward
Said and Lisa Lowe, [3] which crystalized in the
imperial rhetoric of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, is that the language of Stokes and Hoover shows
the Asian place to be more modern than the west that it
opposes. With regard to the
volume's unequalled commitment to reflectionist strategies,
the heavy reliance on Marxian interpretation often does
nothing to illuminate the films themselves. While this fails
to fulfill the authors' own concerns for using the films to
understand Hong Kong culture and economy, the approach
completely neglects to address visual analysis, an issue
that would seem to be primary to film studies. This is
unfortunate, as the chief traits of Hong Kong cinema, as the
other English studies by Bordwell, Ackbar Abbas, Stephen
Teo, and Esther Yau (as editor) remind us, are the disparate
and dynamic film styles it inhabits, ranging from martial
arts and full-throttle action spectacles, to the languid
cinematography of art filmmakers Stanley Kwan and Wong
Kar-wai, and the recent yoking of verbal comedy with digital
effects in the latest films from Stephen Chow. [4]
(For scholars seeking theoretical discussion of the visual
stylizations in Hong Kong film, seek out the work of those
scholars and critics mentioned above.) More importantly,
though, by failing to provide any significant visual
analysis in their Marxist study, Stokes and Hoover pass up
the opportunity to link Marx's vivid and metaphor-strewn
language with the political and economic questions he
considers. This could have conclusively justified the
rigorously materialist approach in _City on Fire_, and
provided a powerful and unique insight into Hong Kong
film. Of course, what is
interesting about such tendentious critical interest in
economics is what it reveals about the criticism, and not
the films themselves. In the case of _City on Fire_, Stokes
and Hoover's emphatically materialist, arguably reductive
Marxism has the effect of depicting Hong Kong cinema as an
object of only socioeconomic interest, rather than the art
form that cinema is. There are two advantages to such an
approach. First, the aggressive whole-quotation-lifting of
Marx that the authors adopt to illuminate Hong Kong film
counteracts its focus on an eastern accomplishment by an
obsessive celebration of a western contribution. Marxian
economics thus start to appear as much an object of praise
as the nominal focus of the volume, almost to the point of
obscuring the actual subject of film. Indeed, upon
reflection the volume seems to endorse an implied hierarchy
in which the achievements of western economic theory are
thought to be more valuable than the cultural artifacts of
the east that the theory illuminates. This is the second
objective of the style of criticism in _City on Fire_: by
using Marx to discuss Hong Kong cinema the authors position
themselves to 'understand' Hong Kong film in a way that
local scholars and critics, who may use economic theory in a
more naturalized, less aggressive way, do not -- implicitly
suggesting that Hong Kong cinema had not been adequately
theorized until the introduction of a specifically western
voice. [5] Moreover, the difference between theory
and the status of cinema as art form and cultural site
further corroborates this hierarchy. In this hierarchal
construction Stokes and Hoover participate in the
longstanding notions of eastern simplicity: while for them
Hong Kong has produced, almost accidentally as it were, a
vibrant and visually innovative cinema, the fierce Marxian
voice in _City on Fire_ repeatedly implies that
accomplishment is limited to this form of organic beauty and
that the society is not incapable of scientific
thought. Where does this dismissive
position as regards Hong Kong film come from? Paradoxically,
from a position of western inferiority, as manifested by the
vitality of Hong Kong film at its height, when the local
cinema not only resisted Hollywood imports but was
increasingly being seen as a crucial source of invention and
inspiration for western filmmakers. The background to this
history is globalization, the worldwide consolidation of
economy and culture that all studies of Hong Kong film must
acknowledge. Hong Kong occupies an important role in this
history, and it was in the 1980's and early 1990's (the
years now cited as the advent of globalization) that the
colony became a financial center for the world:
'capitalism's major success story . . . with a higher per
capita income than in the USA' (205). This historical moment
is important because it not only shows the spread of global
trade from metropole to former periphery, but the
reappearance of the periphery as the new metropole, with
money that the erstwhile home country can only envy. For the
heavily economic perspective in _City on Fire_, Hong Kong
film exemplifies the expansionist acumen in the local
economy at large, and hence is an object of both admiration
and envy. Not surprisingly, then, western interest in Hong
Kong film reflects this ambivalence, as the strange fact of
a bastion against global Hollywood hegemony makes Hong Kong
cinema worth noting. By limiting its relevance to the
economic arena, however, the approach also diminishes its
importance at the very moment that it acknowledges it. This
strategy of limiting the subject to the arena in which the
west is most threatened (economics), enables the authors to
mount a defense against the west's eclipse. Most importantly, _City on
Fire_ falls short of exploring the visual and temporal
components constitutive of cinema, and therefore misses the
potentially most intriguing aspect of a materialist
examination of Hong Kong film. As most of the other studies
of Hong Kong cinema are careful to note, the evanescent
vitality of the local film has been all the more poignant as
the industry has since been cannibalized by Hollywood, and
the Hong Kong economy as a whole has fallen victim to the
slump currently endured throughout Asia. This failure to
elaborate on the value of film as a metaphor for Asian power
is symptomatic of the unfulfilled potential of _City of
Fire_, whose rigidly Marxist study of Hong Kong cinema does
not explore the significance of the illusoriness of filmic
representation. Like a bad reading of Marx's _Poverty of
Philosophy_, the crucial work leading up to Capital, but a
study whose thesis and title are too easily parodied, _City
on Fire_ is an unsubtle application of economic analysis
whose suggestion that abstract approaches to cinema are
simpleminded only betrays the poverty of that
approach. Texas, USA Footnotes 1. For characteristic
studies, see Stephen Teo, _Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra
Dimension_ (London: British Film Institute, 1997); Ackbar
Abbas, _Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of
Disappearance_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997); Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., _The Cinema of Hong
Kong: History, Arts, Identity_ (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000); David Bordwell, _Planet Hong Kong:
Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment_ (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); and the essays in
special issue of _Post Script_, vol. 19 no. 1, Fall
1999. 2. David Harvey, _The
Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change_ (New York: Blackwell, 1989); Manuel
Castells, _The Rise of the Network Society_ (Malden, Mass.:
Blackwell, 1996); Saskia Sassen, _The Global City: New York,
London, Tokyo_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001). 3. Edward Said,
_Orientalism_ (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Lisa Lowe,
_Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms_
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 4. See Esther Yau, ed.,
_At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World_
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2001). 5. This is not to say,
however, that Marx has never been adopted by Chinese
scholars and critics of Hong Kong cinema. Hong Kong-born
scholar Rey Chow, for example, has been writing (in both
English and Chinese) on postcolonial traumas in local
culture for some time; her work is an astute mix of
empirical knowledge and theoretical precision that conveys
the artistic and emotional depths of Hong Kong films, a
depth that _City on Fire_ can only allude to by reference to
colorful quotations from Marx. See Rey Chow, _Ethics After
Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity_ (Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press, 1998). Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Karen Fang, 'The Poverty
of Sociological Studies of Hong Kong Cinema: Stokes and
Hoover's _City on Fire_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 36,
October 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n36fang>. Read a response to this
text: Lisa Odham Stokes and
Michael Hoover, 'Comments on Karen Fang's Review of _City on
Fire: Hong Kong Cinema_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 37,
October 2003 <http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n37stokeshoover>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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