City on Fire: Comments by Lou Proyect

Dennis R Redmond dredmond at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
Tue Sep 21 14:34:31 PDT 1999


On Mon, 20 Sep 1999, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


> HK films look (to us) more over-the-top and comically so than
> run-of-the-mill Hollywood stuff, because cultural differences (from our
> viewpoints) are added to self-conscious parody (of Sergio Leone, Sam
> Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Samuel Fuller, _Casablanca_, _Dirty Harry_ movies,
> more traditional Westerns, gangster films, film noir, etc.) at work in many
> of them.

There's also the fact that the HK films were tied to a cultural diaspora (Shanghai professionals emigrated to HK and thence to the USA) and could draw on the resources of hundreds of years of Chinese opera, dance and musical traditions, all at once. It's fascinating to consider the difference between HK and Singapore, another largely Chinese city-state; Singapore, for various reasons, never developed the, shall we say, Chungking Express which rocketed Hong Kong into the 21st century (British colonial traditions, but also great theatrical and televisual traditions; plus, an expatriate West Coast community). Bruce Lee made it big as a HK expatriate returned from America (i.e. able to speak English), and the chopsocky films made a mint in US export markets. Dialectics, dialectics...

Let's not forget that mainland China has some astounding film traditions of its own, too (especially the Fifth Generation filmmakers), but these are explicitly national or neonational allegories.

-- Dennis



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