Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 37, October 2003
Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover
Comments on Karen Fang's Review of _City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema_
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 In the Epigraph to our
book, _City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema_, we quote Hong Kong
filmmaker Peter Chan: 'When you make a movie you can't
really expect anything from the audience . . . I don't get
frustrated when people interpret my movies because, when
you've made a movie, your movie is not your movie anymore --
it's theirs.' The phenomenon that Chan describes applies to
other artistic and cultural works, including our book. We
think that films are 'serious fun' in that entertainment and
social commentary or political relevance are neither
counter-posed to, nor mutually exclusive of one another. We
generalize about 1997, a generalization borne out by many
Hong Kongers whom we interviewed, and the marker to which
Tiananmen (among other things) pointed. Ours is a 'political
reading' revealed by subtexts, issues, conflicts, and
allegories. In contrast, some reader-reviewers suggest that
we are 'too serious' in considering Hong Kong films to be
more than 'sheer fun' escapism and fantasy (a view we
believe slights those who make the movies from which we
derive much pleasure). Others criticize us for 'seeing 1997'
everywhere; still others take us to task for 'injecting
politics' into everything. Karen Fang is among the
_City on Fire_ commentators (whether favorable or not) who
have noted both its wealth of first-hand source material and
its heavily-researched and well-documented secondary source
information. We quote sundry sources from personal
interviews and correspondence, as well as from numerous
publications throughout the book. On the one hand, we use
theoretical propositions and empirical evidence alongside
anecdotal material to try to make the latter representative;
on the other, we employ anecdotes to support theoretical
statements and empirical data. Towards these ends, we cite
many theorists, critics, and filmmakers; for example, we
turn to Karl Marx in our discussions of alienation,
commodification, early capitalist accumulation, and social
relations in Hong Kong and in Hong Kong films. After all,
the former British colony (now Special Administrative
Region) has, in many ways, unfolded like so many pages of
_Capital_. While Marx's appearance
has uniformly drawn the critics' greatest ire (to the best
of our knowledge, no one has objected to the multiple
quoting of a number of other persons), we have not been
surprised by the antagonism (and sometimes even hostility)
that he has engendered. In fact, we prefigure as much in our
book: 'the concept of class in
much film criticism and theory is marked by the presence of
its absence . . . Contemporary cultural studies has judged
class analysis as reductionist; many film critics and
scholars practice self-contained readings of film
narratives; and the concept of class challenges the cultural
production process, of which intellectual labor is part, of
late capitalist society.' (306) Our comparison of working
conditions in the Hong Kong film industry to Marx's
characterization of the capitalist workplace merits specific
mention because of the way that several reviewers have used
(misused, in our opinion) the passage. Here is Fang's rather
tortured account and quotation of what we write: '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). A more complete, and
certainly more correct allusion to what appears above would
begin with Chow Yun-fat discussing the making of about 70
films in ten years: 'It is one kind of way to survive in the
Hong Kong film industry . . . Sometimes everyone is proud of
themselves when they make twelve films in a year, but on the
other hand, there is a sadness, I feel shame that we have
been working like a dog.' The actor then says: 'in Hong
Kong, our buildings, our rooms are narrow . . . we're always
breaking the law, shooting on the streets without a permit'
(27). We suggest that Chow's words bear similarity to Marx's
description in _Capital_ of: 'the transformation of the
laborer into a workhorse, [which] is a means of
increasing capital, or speeding up the production of
surplus-value. Such economy extends to overcrowding close
and unsanitary premises with laborers . . . to crowding
dangerous machinery into close quarters without using safety
devices; to neglecting safety rules in production processes
pernicious to health.' (27) We should point out that
when we quoted this passage in _City on Fire_ we framed it
with both the actor Roy Cheung talking about sitting in
stinking water for three days and nights (without adequate
ventilation) on the cramped set of Ringo Lam's _Prison on
Fire_, and the _Ah Kam_ incident to which Fang
refers. Fang acknowledges in a
footnote to her review that there are Chinese scholars and
critics of Hong Kong cinema who have adopted Marxism.
Regarding scholars, we would point out that Marxism was the
ideology of choice for most twentieth-century intellectuals
throughout China and East Asia in that it offered those who
rejected Confucianism both a path to modernization and a way
to oppose capitalism and imperialism. The more recent past
has witnessed both a turn to various post-Marxist theories
and to a neo-Confucianism aligned with modernization but
critical of liberal individualism and free markets. As for
critics, we should include among the Marxists some members
of the Hong Kong Film Critics Society who utilize a
framework similar to our own, in they that read films as
more than textual signifiers in and of themselves, and they
understand cinema as more than simply a commercial or
technological industry. Furthermore, Fang has a go
at us for being less than 'expert' (whatever that means)
because 'the authors are, as they acknowledge, new to Hong
Kong and Asia in general'. However, we nowhere state this;
rather, we note that 'we have remained aware . . . that we
write as Hong Kong outsiders' (vii) -- a quite different
sentiment and state of affairs. Fang's commentary ostensibly
exposes our naivete when she claims that we consider 'eating
and family structure' (storytelling as well) to be 'specific
to Hong Kong culture and film alone'. Again, we nowhere
claim that such 'epiphenomena . . . are unique to [Hong
Kong's] film tradition'. Regarding food, we do quote
director Stanley Tong at some length on why he thinks that
food features prominently in Hong Kong films -- the
city-state's status as a gourmand's paradise and the film
industry workers' desire for a good meal. More damning,
according to Fang, is our 'inability to sense what matters
in the movies'. The problem in this instance stems from our
'indiscriminately' discussing 'historic, record-shattering,
and trend-setting films' such as John Woo's _A Better
Tomorrow_ alongside 'little-known movies and box office
busts' such as Tony Au's _Roof With a View_. Fang proceeds
to make the quite remarkable -- and reductionist --
statement that films generating little revenue are not
'representative of society [because they have] no
earnings to suggest the social identification the authors
presume'. Meaning as the 'cash nexus'! Fang's apparent coup de
grace is charging us with 'Orientalism' (of a neo-kind) in
her contention that we see objectified and commodified
gender relations as 'profoundly unusual in Hong Kong'. She
both misreads and overstates here, in the manner of her
earlier comments about food and family life; we make no
claims of particularism or of exoticism. The allegation does
warrant attention as Fang variously depicts _City on Fire_
to be representative of 'western desires for cultural
authority and fears of eclipse in the age of globalization',
'obsessive celebration of a western contribution', and 'a
defense against the west's eclipse'. What is this 'west'
into which Fang places us? Much as the term 'euro-centric'
is problematic (although we agree with the late geographer
Jim Blaut that the concept is the 'colonizer's model of the
world'), certain applications of the term/concept 'west'
flattens the complexity of European/western culture and
history's peripheral regions, social classes, and
marginalized and stigmatized peoples. Simple inversion,
turning the colonialist model on its head, makes Orientalism
and post-colonialism two sides of the same coin. Postcolonial theory was
largely generated by Third World scholars in western
universities as a means of cultural resistance to 'dominant
discourses'. Along with poststructuralism and postmodernism,
postcolonialism has attracted 'leftist' adherents and
advocates in the wake of Marxism's supposed exhaustion. The
theory has had -- and rightly so -- a powerful impact,
ranging from its critique of 'authentic past' (a point made,
for what it's worth, by Marx in _The Eighteenth Brumaire_)
to its focus on displacement and migration. Consistent with
other post-Marxist approaches, however, class is often
missing from postcolonial discourse. Additionally, the
theory's origins have made certain terms and concepts --
such as 'ambivalence', 'difference', and 'globalization' --
vulnerable to fashionable academic use. Most importantly,
postcolonial theory has offered little in the way of
practical political struggle; neither de-centering unitary
Enlightenment discourse nor renouncing Euro-centric models
are likely to liberate oppressed peoples or overturn the
exploitative programs of international finance. Historical
materialist/class analysis informs and structures _City on
Fire_, but we rely on other perspectives: including
postcolonial, gender, and identity theories as well as
poststructuralism, psychoanalytic criticism, and some
formalist and textual analysis (surely someone should call
us 'intellectual tourists'). We appreciate cinema's
complexity as technology, practice, and imaginary. Thus,
contra Fang's assertion that we offer no visual examination
(read: aesthetics of film), we do so in support of our
thesis and approach -- see our discussions of Ronny Yu's
_The Bride With White Hair_ and Wong Kar-wai's _Ashes of
Time_, to identify but two examples. Fang ends her review by
suggesting that our book is akin to a 'bad reading of Marx's
_Poverty of Philosophy_'. We confess to being unsure what
she means; our understanding of this work -- which Marx
suggested could be read along with the _The Communist
Manifesto_ as an introduction to _Capital_ -- is that it is
a refutation of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis view of
history commonly attributed to Marx. Perhaps we have read
Marx poorly. But then, maybe Karen Fang hasn't read us too
well either. Florida, USA Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 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_
salon, and receive the journal articles via email as they
are published. here
Save as Plain Text Document...Print...Read...Recycle
Film-Philosophy (ISSN 1466-4615)
PO Box 26161, London SW8 4WD, England
Contact: editor@film-philosophy.com
Back to the Film-Philosophy homepage
