Marginal Cinema, Minor Transnationalism

In contrast to the hegemonic operations of “global Hollywood,” Hong Kong martial arts films of the late 1960s and 1970s exemplify a case of “minor transnationalism” in adhering to more “lateral” and nonhierarchical network structures and modes of exchange. This can be seen not just in the way Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan film culture in the period, one with a strong presence of American, Japanese, and European cinema, provided an array of ideas and styles which local martial arts films drew upon in developing a new idiom for the articulation of the complex experience of modern life. No less important are the micropractices of transnationality in the other direction: the efforts to open up regional/international markets, and the interactions with other “minor” action genres. As a “contact zone,” martial arts/action cinema of the era constituted a symbolic space of exchange in which films from diverse national origins, often with different textual, cultural, and ideological materials, met and acted upon one another to produce not only new hybrid texts but also new forms of identification that actively negotiated with national, racial, and other types of identity boundaries.

Body Semiotics

This chapter considers how the (male) action bodies in martial arts cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s, posed between mastery and vulnerability, served as a site/sight through which the aspirations and anxieties of Hong Kong people living in the flux of a rapidly modernizing society were articulated and made visible. Specifically, it identifies three types of action body—the narcissistic body, the sacrificial body, and the ascetic body—and discusses how each crystallized out of the changing social and ideological dynamics of Hong Kong during the period. As socially symbolic signs, these diverse but interrelated representations of the body are extremely rich in meanings, inscribing within themselves not only fantasies of nationalist pride and liberated labor but also the historical experience of violence, in the form of both colonization and unbridled growth, that lay beneath the transformation of Hong Kong into a modern industrial society.

Epilogue

An underlying premise of this book is that Hong Kong martial arts cinema from the mid-1960s through the end of the 1970s, marked by new aesthetic and thematic directions as well as by new practices of transnationality, is best conceptualized as a cultural counterpart and response to processes of modernization and modernity that were shaping the former British colony. But despite its specific time focus, the issues explored in the book have broader significance and are useful for understanding martial arts films of more recent times. Without doubt, Hong Kong continued and intensified its march towards urban-capitalist modernization throughout the 1980s, the 1990s, and beyond. The pace of growth—economically, socially, and demographically—showed no signs of slowing during the period. On the one hand, the population expanded from 4 million in 1970 to 6.7 million in 2000. On the other hand, although the economy underwent a process of restructuring in the 1980s when the “Open Door” policy of post–Cultural Revolution China and other factors resulted in the relocation of Hong Kong’s industrial sector to the mainland and triggered its transition from labor-intensive manufacturing to finance- and service-oriented industries, the city continued to enjoy great prosperity and had by the mid-1990s established itself as one of the world’s foremost centers of international trade and finance. Rapid growth spawned more transportation, shops, infrastructure, entertainment, and commodities. As a result, the city became more congested, frantic, and noisy—in short, perceptually busier and more intense—than ever before. Meanwhile, gender relations and identities were also in constant reformulation as both men and women tried to negotiate the changing social, economic, and political contexts of Hong Kong....

The Difficulty of Difference

Eschewing a reductive reading, this chapter considers the complex and often ambivalent gender politics associated with the woman warrior figures—or nüxia, meaning literally “female knights-errant”—in Hong Kong martial arts films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In particular, it argues that the truly transgressive aspect of these fighting female characters lies not so much in their taking on of qualities (such as violent physicality) historically aligned with men; rather, what is potentially more radical is their adeptness in assuming and performing multiple gender identities, from female masculinity (the appropriation and refunctionalization of hegemonic masculine norms) to the feminine masquerade (the deliberate flaunting of femininity). Such gender play bears a more destabilizing potential by virtue of its ability to bring about a blurring of gender identities, and thus to undermine and challenge the notion of masculinity and femininity as fixed, immutable categories.

Introduction

Made at a time when confidence was dwindling in Hong Kong due to a battered economy and in the aftermath of the SARS epidemic outbreak,1 Kung Fu Hustle (Gongfu, 2004), the highly acclaimed action comedy by Stephen Chow, can be seen as an attempt to revitalize the positive energy and tenacious resolve—what is commonly referred to as the “Hong Kong spirit” (...

Myth and Masculinity

This chapter examines the rise of the yanggang (“stanch masculinity”) martial arts films from the late 1960s on, focusing in particular on the recurrent motif of male bonding—not only the horizontal bonding between sworn brothers but also the vertical one between masters and disciples. In imagining and valorizing an exclusively male realm seemingly able to transcend both women and other antagonistic forces in society, this fixation on male homosocial relationships constituted in many ways an attempt to cope with the increasing threats to hegemonic masculinity posed by the rise of female social power and by the growth of a ruthless capitalist order in a rapidly modernizing Hong Kong. These threats, however, were never completely contained, and this explains why the prevailing male order needed to keep reinventing itself, through cinema and other means, to maintain and reaffirm its semblance of control.

In the Realm of the Senses

This chapter investigates how, in the context of Hong Kong’s rapidly growing urban-industrial modernity of the 1960s and 1970s, the proliferation of sense stimuli and sense activities had radically altered the sensory-affective experience of the real. This, in turn, is shown to have a paradigmatic impact on the martial arts film, which was rapidly embracing a new, unprecedented level of sensationalism—or “sensory realism,” that is, a mode of realism grounded not so much in visual resemblance between image and world as in the correlations between a film’s sensory and visceral stimulations and the viewer’s real-life sense experiences. It is from this perspective that martial arts films of the period can be seen as bringing a “modern” or “modernist” style to Hong Kong cinema—a style predicated on speed, impact, and new forms of cinematic materiality and tactility.