Infernal Affairs Research Articles

Moving between worlds: Performance, the scene of empathy and flexible identity in Infernal Affairs

This article explores the bodily and psychological dimensions of Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s performance in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s urban noir thriller, Infernal Affairs (2002), as a way of trying to comprehend the actor’s flexible, transnational stardom. Through a textual analysis of a pivotal scene from the film, the article argues that Leung’s facial acting facilitates an embodied and empathetic connection between the actor and the spectator, effectuated through cinematic techniques such as close-ups, editing and music. An embodied understanding of Leung’s facial work in the close-up thus challenges the existing scholarship that limits Leung’s transnational appeal to a restrained or minimalist acting style. A greater appreciation of Leung’s modulating, flexible and multi-layered performance is also illustrated through the scene’s juxtaposition of narrative and spectacle. The rupturing of the spectator’s empathetic and bodily engagement with Leung’s character during the spectacle sequence encourages the actor to shift his emotional response and bodily expressivity towards a performance delivery dictated by a flexible identity, thus bringing into relief the film’s preoccupation with a postcolonial identity crisis.

영화 <무간도無間道> 시리즈와 홍콩의 정체성 문제

영화 <무간도無間道> 시리즈와 홍콩의 정체성 문제

Shuangyin Wang.

"The secret of being a successful scientist is to do your own and labeled research … In my first experiment I unintentionally functionalized carbon nanotubes, on which Pt nanoparticles were deposited uniformly. Luck is part of research …" Find out more about Shuangyin Wang in his Author Profile.

An interview with Hong Kong sound designer Kinson Tsang

Abstract This is an interview with late veteran Hong Kong sound designer Kinson Tsang about his experiences working in the Hong Kong film industry. Tsang entered the industry in the mid-1990s and quickly made a name for himself with award-winning soundtracks for The Stormriders (1999) and Purple Storm (2000). Since then, he has become the most successful sound designer in Hong Kong (in terms of awards), and his credits include Infernal Affairs (2002), Shaolin Soccer (2002), SPL (2005), Initial D (2006), Ip Man (2008) and The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014). He sadly passed away from cancer at age 59 on 7 September 2017. The present interview dates from 15 December 2015 and discusses Tsang’s experiences in the industry and his views on the sound aesthetics of Hong Kong cinema in the past few decades.

A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Infernal Affairs and The Departed

There is currently a bifurcation in the theorizing and practicing of comparative narratology that reflects a larger division in postclassical narratology between structuralism and contextualism. My article proposes to bridge their gap by considering a geohistorically variable cultural narrative as a constitutive structure of all individual narratives, constantly engaged in dialogic interactions with its host narratives. I offer a comparative analysis of Infernal Affairs and The Departed to illustrate how such an understanding of narrative structure informs interpretive practices by inviting investigations on the dynamic interactions between individual and cultural narratives. Specifically, my analysis demonstrates how cultural narratives strongly influence the narrative as well as stylistic choices of the filmmakers, hence their differences in the representation of essentially the same story, and how both films reinforce or challenge their cultural narratives in return.

Masculine Performance in Hong Kong Crime Films from Post-Bruce to the 2000s

Masculinity, in Lacan’s sense, is an imagination. To specifically theorise Chinese masculinity, Kam Louie examined the elements of wen (cultural attainment) and wu (martial valour) rendered through historical or artistic images, and Song Geng and Derek Hird guide the discussions about Chinese manhood represented in everyday life. With a Marxist perspective, Lo Kwai Cheung illustrated the dissolvability of Chinese masculinity under international capitalism. With reference to Aristotle, it is supposed that Chinese masculinity, similar to ‘tragicity’ in nature, can be represented through imitating actions and hence be perceived. Based on Aristotle’s understanding, we can regard actions as ‘iterable’ media (like Derrida’s understanding of written texts) which engender performances according to the genealogy of quantitative mimesis. Integrating theoretical discussions with a chronological approach, my full paper will go through following points in order to summarise the changes in Hong Kong crime films from the post-Bruce Lee era to the 2000s: (1) Hong Kong crime film inherited the martial side of masculinity from action films and became a popular genre since A Better Tomorrow was well received in the mid-1980s. (2) Many directors diversified the interpretation of crime in the late 1980s and the 1990s, but remained a focus on the strength, nimbleness and boldness of men. (3) After the decline of Hong Kong film industry for several years, Infernal Affairs’s success renewed the representation of manhood. (4) From the 2000s to now, male characters in crime films are preferably intelligent and wisely-romantic, like the fragile scholar in ancient China. (5) While globalisation seems to be eliminating the Chineseness of Chinese masculinity, I argue that geographical specificity and different speed of cultural development lead to the impossibility of synchronic masculine similarity. (6) Through a brief discussion concerning Hollywood’s adaptation of Hong Kong films, I argue that local masculinity is not transformable.

Subtle differences: Sonic content in ‘translation’ remakes

Abstract This article focuses narrowly on sonic content in matching scenes from various non-English films and their adaptations, made relatively soon after their success in regional markets, by Hollywood. It makes the case that whereas the most memorable scenes in the ‘translation’ remakes typically look very much like their models, often they do not sound the same. Based on close comparisons of matching iconic scenes in Nikita and The Assassin, Infernal Affairs and The Departed, Ju-On and The Grudge, and Låt den rätte komma in and Let Me In, the article suggests that even when differences in sonic content are subtle they might still be substantial, so much so that they perhaps influence how the films in their entireties are read.

A Study on the Connection between Genre Convention and Enjoyment through Genre Changes of Film Noir －Focus on 'L.A Confidential', 'Infernal Affairs', 'A Bittersweet Life'－

A Study on the Connection between Genre Convention and Enjoyment through Genre Changes of Film Noir －Focus on 'L.A Confidential', 'Infernal Affairs', 'A Bittersweet Life'－

The Analysis of the Phenomenon of Language Right Weakening of Cantonese Translated into English

A global society has made the communication and cooperation in politics, economy, culture and many different fields between countries booming. As a link in international communication and exchanges, translation has been playing an increasingly significant role. Translation is the communication of conveying the meaning of a source-language with target-language. However, in the process of translation, due to different language systems and cultures, when source language is translated into the target language, the meanings and culture elements cannot be fully kept, thus causing the loss of meaning. Language right is a part of human right. It refers that every human being or human group enjoys the right to freely use the language. It also refers that the used language enjoys the right to survive, develop and be fully transmitted. The loss of meaning in one language is the result that the language right of it is not guaranteed or weakened. This paper, researches on the characteristics of Cantonese, through the analysis of the English lines of the Cantonese movie The Infernal Affairs, presents the language right weakening of Cantonese translated into English. Some tentative strategies are hopefully to be discovered.

The Distribution and Exhibition of Chinese and Asian Cinema in the UK: a Chinese Film Forum UK symposium, Cornerhouse, Manchester, 28-29 March 2012

In recent film studies scholarship, political economy has become increasingly prominent as an approach that enriches our understanding of the multiple dimensions of cinema. Such notable examples as Michael Curtin's Playing to the World's Biggest Audience1 and Darrell William Davis's and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh's East Asian Screen Industries2 clearly demonstrate that cinema is not only an art form and sociocultural discourse, but also part of complex economic networks and activities.3 Among the research that treats cinema primarily as a creative industry, studies of East Asian film productions are flourishing. From these we have learned that martial arts films produced by Asian filmmakers have been finding enthusiastic audiences in the West since Ang Lee's Wo hu cang long/Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) broke box-office records while receiving critical acclaim and winning the Oscar for best foreign language film.4 Two years later, Zhang Yimou's Yingxiong/Hero (2002) also prevailed in both Asian and western markets.5 We are regularly reminded of the transborder pan-Asian initiatives that aim to break Hollywood domination. For example, Media Asia, founded in 1994 with the backing of a substantial multimedia distribution business, created a series of high-profile and high-quality films such as the Wu jian dao/Infernal Affairs trilogy (Wai-Keung Lau and Alan Mak, 2002 and 2003) and Tou wenzi D/Initial D (Wai-Keung Lau and Alan Mak, 2005). The original version of Infernal Affairs was remade by director Martin Scorsese and Hollywood A-listers Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio as the Oscar-winning The Departed (2006).6 Moreover, a Hong Kong-based film company, Applause Pictures, was established in 2000 to explore pan-Asian filmmaking. It also produced many successful projects such as the musical romance Ruguo ai/Perhaps Love (Peter Chan Ho-Sun, 2005) and the historical epic Tou ming zhuang/The Warlords (Peter Chan Ho-Sun and Wai-Man Yip, 2007).7

Remaking Chinese cinema: through the prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood

From melodrama to Cantonese opera, from silents to 3D animated film, Remaking Cinema traces cross-Pacific film remaking over the last eight decades. Through the refractive prism of Hollywood, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Yiman Wang revolutionises our understanding of cinema as national cinema. Against the diffusion model of national cinema spreading from a central point--Shanghai in the case--she argues for a multi-local process of co-constitution and reconstitution. In this spirit, Wang analyses how southern cinema ( huanan dianying ) morphed into Hong Kong cinema through trans-regional and trans-national interactions that also produced a vision of cinema. Among the book's highlights are a rereading of The Goddess --one of the best-known silent films in the West--from the perspective of its wartime Mandarin-Cantonese remake; the excavation of a hybrid genre (the Western costume Cantonese opera film) inspired by Hollywood's fantasy films of the 1930s and produced in Hong Kong well into the mid-twentieth century; and a rumination on Hollywood's remake of Hong Kong's Infernal Affairs and the wholesale incorporation of Chinese elements in Kung Fu Panda 2. Positing a structural analogy between the utopic vision, the national cinema, and the location-specific collective subject position, the author traces their shared urge to infinitesimally approach, but never fully and finitely reach a projected goal. This energy precipitates the ongoing processes of cross-Pacific film remaking, which constitute a crucial site for imagining and enacting (without absolving) issues of national and regional border politics. These issues unfold in relation to global formations such as colonialism, Cold War ideology, and postcolonial, postsocialist globalisation. As such, Remaking Cinema contributes to the ongoing debate on (trans-)national cinema from the unique perspective of century-long border-crossing film remaking.

Flânerie and acrophilia in the postmetropolis: Rooftops in Hong Kong cinema

ABSTRACTLiving in the spectacle of Hong Kong's skyscape, how often do its dwellers actually see, not to mention reach, its rooftops? Intriguingly, despite their apparent ephemerality and inaccessibility, the vertical fringes of the city feature frequently in Hong Kong cinema: the rooftop. In this article, we connect the cinematic trope of the rooftop to the anxiety of living in a postmetropolitan city like Hong Kong. We do so by walking with Georg Simmel's blasé attitude and Benjamin's flânerie in the metropolitan city, to meet Christoph Lindner's more (self-)destructive blasé individual trying to grapple with his postmetropolitan anxiety. Finally, we posit to understand the deployment of rooftops in Hong Kong cinema — in the crime thriller Infernal Affairs, the coming-of-age drama High Noon and the psychological horror Inner Senses — as a way out, literally and figuratively, a space where one negotiates and perhaps overcomes a blasé postmetropolitan individuality with moments of radical reconnection.

A Study of the Post-Handover Hong Kong Action Cinema 1997-2007

The action movie has always been a genre that Hong Kong cinema is proud of. Many symbolic figures of Hong Kong cinema arose from this genre. Examples include Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Yuen Woo-ping, John Woo, Jet Li, Johnnie To, and Andrew Lau. Some of them were invited to participate in Hollywood pictures, and a few of the movies such as Infernal Affairs, were remade into Hollywood versions which achieved box office success and recognition with film awards. Undoubtedly, Hong Kong action movies have received worldwide recognition, fulfilling the dream that Hong Kong filmmakers have been striving hard to achieve for years.

Hong Kong undercover: an approach to ‘collaborative colonialism’

Early Hong Kong colonial history offers a distinct angle for understanding the exceptional circumstances in which a place was colonized by both the British and their Chinese collaborators. The term ‘collaborative colonialism’ characterizes a political‐cultural formation where descriptions of flows and trajectories of forces may be more helpful than history in illuminating the colony’s murky pasts. Full of treacheries, conspiracies, betrayals and mistrust, such pasts can also help to explain the popularity of ‘undercover’ figures in Hong Kong’s movies. At risk of losing his true identity, the undercover figure was received as a social victim in the early 1980s’ ‘new wave’ that followed the legacy of social realism. To feed the appetite for gang heroism, this ‘victim’ soon transformed into a tragic hero agonized by moral anxieties. Yet the frame imposed by the police‐gangster genre did not stop it from being used as a vehicle to reflect on Hong Kong’s geo‐political situation: a place located in‐between different political projects beyond the locals’ control, and gripped by the relentless march of policed‐managerial modern order. A twist in the 1990s gave the undercover figure a cynicist and comedic turn. Postmodern celebrations of witty betrayal can be read as rewriting the undercover story to reinscribe Hong Kong’s fate: released from narcissistic heroism, new undercover images responding to the 1997 transition took identity less as a matter of authenticity than of performance. Unravelling this historically‐embedded structure of feelings shows how the way had long been paved for the success of the award‐winning series Infernal Affairs, extending a deeper reach into the local politics of memory and time.

Dying to belong: gangster movies in Hollywood and Hong Kong

Acknowledgments. List of Illustrations. 1. Immigrant Movie Gangsters: The Outside Story. 2. A Frankensteinian Frenzy: Gangster Identity, Hollywood. 3. Gangster Identity, Hong Kong: A Taoist Code Warrior. 4. Hollywood: The Void of Material Success. 5. Dark Laughter at The Materialist Illusion: Hong Kong. 6. East Meets West: The Sopranos, Gangs of New York, Infernal Affairs. Afterword. The Lesson: From Here to Modernity. Appendix. Interview with David Chase (Excerpts From the Transcript). Notes. Bibliography. Filmography. Index

Schizophrenic Hong Kong: Postcolonial Identity Crisis in the Infernal Affairs Trilogy

Michel Foucault avers: «one should totally and absolutely suspect anything that claims to be a return. . . . there is in fact no such thing as a return.» It is, however, in rigid irredentist claims of the return that Hong Kong was handed over from British to Chinese rule in 1997. To the natives of Hong Kong, this postcolonial turn is actually less a decolonization than a recolonization of the capitalist Cantonese city by the mainland Mandarin master. They find themselves helplessly trapped in the dual nationality of overseas British and Chinese nationals. This existential agony is deftly cinematized in the Infernal Affairs trilogy under the disguise of a police epic. The 2002 box-office success and its 2003 prequel and sequel tell a story about an undercover cop and a mafia mole. A crisis of consciousness arises from both the former’s desire to regain his true identity and the latter’s struggle to become a real cop. The identity crisis is not only about, as critics suggest, split personalities between good and evil, but also political tensions between the colonized and colonizers. This paper argues that the collective failure of identity change before and after the fin de siecle changeover characterizesthe Special Administrative Region’s schizophrenic return.

Exporting the Nation

In 2003, the Media Development Authority of Singapore (MDA) unveiled a blueprint (Media 21) which aimed to stimulate the media industry on a transnational level. Its emphasis is on co-productions and its definition would include international collaborations such as The Eye (2002) and Infernal Affairs II (2003), widely perceived as Hong Kong films, although they are partially funded by Singaporean production companies. While this new policy may stimulate the Singapore’s film industry and export its products to broader markets, it also becomes vulnerable to what O’Regan (1996) calls the “problemitization of nationhood”. The implementation of the Media 21 film policy raises debate about the concept of national cinema and questions its identity in the age of international co-productions. Will transnational film policies work against the presentation of local stories in an international marketplace? This paper investigates what constitutes a “Singaporean” film, arguing for the support of a national cinema, acknowledging the critical role that film, policy, filmmakers and audiences play in the process of national myth-making in the face of transnational pressures.