Besides Fists and Blood: Hong Kong Comedy and Its Master of the Eighties

Abstract

The Image of Hong Kong Cinema in the United States. Hong Kong cinema began to gain popularity in the United States in the seventies primarily through the English-dubbed versions of Kung-fu films. Before that time, Kung-fu films were attractive only to a relatively small audience of martial arts fans and Chinatown immigrants, who managed to provide a stable market for these inexpensive films. Even though by 1979 the genres of Kung-fu (and Wu-Xia)' had been largely replaced by comedy in Hong Kong, they continued to be the Hong Kong cinema best known to the general audience of the United States up to this date. During the early eighties, several film festivals in the West, including the Edinburgh Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, discovered a few interesting films from Hong Kong. In 1982 Boat People (directed by Ann Hui), which was already a box-office hit in Hong Kong, reached the screen of the New York Film Festival and elicited unusual attention from critics for its (perceived) political content and its production quality. The film is the story of a Japanese journalist's unsuccessful attempt to rescue a South Vietnamese Chinese woman on the eve of the communist takeover of South Vietnam. By taking on a wartime melodrama the film exhibited a non-Kung-fu version of Hong Kong cinema unfamiliar to Western spectators. Subsequent to the discovery of director Ann Hui (and director Allen Fong in Edinburgh through his work Father and Son), critics suddenly recognized a Hong Kong cinema quite distinct from their earlier impression, one which its local critics have named the Hong Kong New Wave since 1979. In the years that followed, early New Wave films characterized by their modernized techniques and social realism, such as The Secret (Ann Hui, 1979), The Story of Woo Viet (Ann Hui, 1981), Father and Son (Allen Fong, 1981), Nomad (Patrick Tam, 1982), Last Affair (Tony Au, 1983), Ah Ying (Allen Fong, 1983), and Home Coining (Yim Ho, 1984), became frequent items in the festival/center circuits in the United States. Almost all of the New Wave directors learned their basic craft from the Western world. Their ease with modern production equipment and their interest in modern special effects (versus traditional special effects) created some innovative