When Ridley Scott envisioned Blade Runner's set as "Hong Kong on a bad day," he nodded to the city's overcrowding as well as its widespread use of surveillance. But while Scott brought Hong Kong and surveillance into the global film repertoire, the city's own cinema has remained outside of the global surveillance discussion.
In Arresting Cinema, Karen Fang delivers a unifying account of Hong Kong cinema that draws upon its renowned crime films and other unique genres to demonstrate Hong Kong's view of surveillance. She argues that Hong Kong's films display a tolerance of—and even opportunism towards—the soft cage of constant observation, unlike the fearful view prevalent in the West. However, many surveillance cinema studies focus solely on European and Hollywood films, discounting other artistic traditions and industrial circumstances. Hong Kong's films show a more crowded, increasingly economically stratified, and postnational world that nevertheless offers an aura of hopeful futurity. Only by exploring Hong Kong surveillance film can we begin to shape a truly global understanding of Hitchcock's "rear window ethics."
When Ridley Scott envisioned Blade Runner's set as "Hong Kong on a bad day," he nodded to the city's overcrowding as well as its widespread use of surveillance. But while Scott brought Hong Kong and surveillance into the global film repertoire, the city's own cinema has remained outside of the global surveillance discussion.
In Arresting Cinema, Karen Fang delivers a unifying account of Hong Kong cinema that draws upon its renowned crime films and other unique genres to demonstrate Hong Kong's view of surveillance. She argues that Hong Kong's films display a tolerance of—and even opportunism towards—the soft cage of constant observation, unlike the fearful view prevalent in the West. However, many surveillance cinema studies focus solely on European and Hollywood films, discounting other artistic traditions and industrial circumstances. Hong Kong's films show a more crowded, increasingly economically stratified, and postnational world that nevertheless offers an aura of hopeful futurity. Only by exploring Hong Kong surveillance film can we begin to shape a truly global understanding of Hitchcock's "rear window ethics."
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Overview
When Ridley Scott envisioned Blade Runner's set as "Hong Kong on a bad day," he nodded to the city's overcrowding as well as its widespread use of surveillance. But while Scott brought Hong Kong and surveillance into the global film repertoire, the city's own cinema has remained outside of the global surveillance discussion.
In Arresting Cinema, Karen Fang delivers a unifying account of Hong Kong cinema that draws upon its renowned crime films and other unique genres to demonstrate Hong Kong's view of surveillance. She argues that Hong Kong's films display a tolerance of—and even opportunism towards—the soft cage of constant observation, unlike the fearful view prevalent in the West. However, many surveillance cinema studies focus solely on European and Hollywood films, discounting other artistic traditions and industrial circumstances. Hong Kong's films show a more crowded, increasingly economically stratified, and postnational world that nevertheless offers an aura of hopeful futurity. Only by exploring Hong Kong surveillance film can we begin to shape a truly global understanding of Hitchcock's "rear window ethics."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781503600751 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/11/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Arresting Cinema
Surveillance in Hong Kong Film
By Karen Fang
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0075-1
CHAPTER 1
WATCHING THE WATCHMAN
MICHAEL HUI'S SURVEILLANCE COMEDIES
HONG KONG'S IDIOSYNCRATIC APPROACH to surveillance culture and film is apparent in the cinema's formative years as well as many of its leading figures and texts. The multitalented comedian Michael Hui, for example, whose directorial debut in 1974 succeeded The House of 72 Tenants at the top of local box office, is often cited alongside this film as a key factor in local cinema's emergence as a predominantly Cantonese-language film tradition made by, for, and about local Hong Kong culture. Although surveillance has never previously been noted as a defining aspect of the star's film oeuvre, such an affinity between this landmark movie and those of the iconic comedian invites questions about their thematic similarities. Hui emerged as director, screenwriter, and star in five consecutive number-one surveillance films, including Games Gamblers Play (1974), The Private Eyes (1976), and Security Unlimited (1981). Like The House of 72 Tenants, these movies' explicit depiction of surveillance technologies and practices portrays surveillance as a constitutive attribute of Hong Kong culture and society. Additionally, Hui's home genre of comedy intensifies the lighthearted and affirmative surveillance imagery that The House of 72 Tenants presents more sentimentally. While a purely Hollywood-focused study of surveillance cinema such as Norman Denzin's The Cinematic Society claims that movies cannot portray surveillance with humor unless in the satiric manner of Rob Reiner's 1982 noir parody Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, Hui's films show Hong Kong cinema's sustained exception to Denzin's claim that surveillance and comedy are mutually exclusive.
This paradoxical fusing of surveillance with comedy in Michael Hui's films cannot be overstated, and further augmenting the comedian's importance within local film and surveillance cinema in particular is the fact that at the height of his career, Hui was also popular in markets throughout Asia and even in Europe (Fig. 1.1). Although such international distribution is not unusual for Hong Kong film, it is striking because comedy's dependence on linguistic and cultural context typically obstructs its exportability. That Hui — like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, his contemporaries at then leading new upstart film distributor Golden Harvest, where the comedian started his directorial career — was able to transcend his local market suggests that his films contain qualities that are not only specific to Hong Kong but also of great relevance to audiences beyond. As this chapter shows, in Hui's films, surveillance is further important as the universal attribute that unifies the star's movies and presumably helped make his films popular abroad. Indeed, as a distinct and recurring theme of the self-authored and self-directed films that Hui made after joining Golden Harvest, surveillance also becomes a vehicle of artistic and creative ambition and a motif by which Hong Kong cinema's unusually sanguine or affirmative perspective on surveillance is further demonstrated by Hui's own professional history.
Although it may seem unusual to devote an entire chapter to the film oeuvre of a single figure, this approach is legitimated by Michael Hui's centrality within the local industry and his films' engagement with the cinema's recurrent surveillance themes. His 1982 hit, Security Unlimited, provides a particularly vivid instance of both his surveillance themes and the peculiarly positive cast by which surveillance appears in his films and throughout Hong Kong film as a whole. At the time of its release, the film about a small private security detail was the highest-grossing local movie in Hong Kong history, and it is often credited with spawning a number of copycat comedies starring Michael's brothers, Sam Hui and Ricky Hui, that loosely resembled Security Unlimited in blending sight gags and spectacular gadgetry with plots of upward mobility. While these accounts justly highlight Hui's commercial influence and that of Security Unlimited in particular, by overlooking the significance of that film's specific surveillance subject, these accounts ignore the film's continuity with similar themes throughout his oeuvre and its contrast with the canon of world films on the same subject. By ignoring Security Unlimited's explicit depiction of Hong Kong's participation in the massive expansion of privatized policing that Alison Wakefield, Clifford Shearing, and Phillip Stenning identify as a major attribute of First World economies throughout the 1980s and 1990s, more general understandings of Hui's influence miss his film's address to the same artistic and cultural topic previously portrayed in such canonical world surveillance films such as The Conversation. It overlooks how Hui's signature comic genre presents a radically more sanguine approach to surveillance than that typically associated with such classic Western surveillance movies.
Later in this chapter, I will say more about how Security Unlimited and other Hui films' seemingly oxymoronic fusion of surveillance with comedy is founded on a pragmatic view of surveillance practices that presents Hui himself as its chief beneficiary. First relevant here, however, is how Security Unlimited and other Hui films mobilize both local and global surveillance cinema traditions to position a profoundly local movie as relevant to the world at large. Security Unlimited's Chinese title, Mo deng bao biao/Mo dang bou biu, literally translates as "modern security guard" and merges an antiquated term for bodyguard (bao biao/bou biu) familiar from wuxia films with an English loan word commonly used in Chinese since the 1930s to denote a modernity specifically identified with Western culture. Understanding the full extent of Hui's contribution to both local and global surveillance cinema mandates a similarly hybrid, multilayered approach, beginning with recognizing surveillance as a crucial element of the social realism for which his comic films have long been famed but also exploring how that recurrent motif merges local and global surveillance themes ultimately to promote the artist himself. As this chapter shows, although Hui's incongruously comic approach to surveillance may seem almost unique in world surveillance film, Hui's surveillance comedies figure the artist himself as the personification of the upwardly mobile benefits enabled by surveillance cooperation. Long before Stephen Chow and Ronald Cheng — two younger comedians also deeply identified with Hong Kong culture and entertainment — Hui positioned himself as a "Hong Kong everyman," and his singular, seemingly idiosyncratic tendency to use surveillance motifs to showcase himself exemplifies the lateral gaze that distinguishes Hong Kong surveillance cinema.
SURVEILLANCE AND HONG KONG'S EVERYMAN
Ironically, Hui's centrality within Hong Kong cinema history is a major reason why his sustained engagement with surveillance motifs has long gone unnoticed. Widely described as a "Hong Kong everyman," Hui is known for playing irascible, curmudgeonly characters whose cheap practicality but relentless schemes to get rich quick figure himself as an exemplar of existence within Hong Kong's fast-paced and fiercely capitalistic economy. All of his movies are set in specific and highly detailed industrial and professional situations, such as food service, entertainment media, and other consumer and service industries, and as might be expected of such a Fordist or Taylorist ethos, surveillance is a recurring aspect of such environments. However, its very ubiquity throughout Hui's repeated depictions of laboring individuals trying to survive in Hong Kong's then rapidly accelerating economy can obscure that otherwise unifying motif. For example, one of the two other top-grossing films with which Hui debuted in the 1970s as director and screenwriter as well as star, The Last Message (1975), takes place within the notably Foucauldian setting of a mental hospital and follows two opportunistic employees as they try to discover the location of an inmate's hidden treasure by using an EEG machine to record the man's brain waves and interpreting them as Morse code. Although such a premise may not invoke surveillance in the overt manner of a gambling or detective film, The Last Message hinges on data gathering and the institutional and technological monitoring of individuals — themes that also characterize The Contract (1978), a satire of television programming that includes a running gag in which network executives gather in the company boardroom to confront poorly performing producers with data regarding their recent ratings. In further demonstration of the pervasive or even compulsive surveillance within Hui's imagery, the film also shows the executives taking bets on how long it takes the disgraced show runners to throw themselves out the window and timing the event with stopwatches.
As The Last Message and The Contract show, surveillance is such a persistent and unifying aspect of Hui's oeuvre that it appears even in movies that are not as explicitly identified with the topic as Games Gamblers Play, The Private Eyes, and Security Unlimited. So central, in fact, are surveillance behaviors to Hui's incarnation of the Hong Kong everyman that the motif continues even in the comedian's films from the later 1980s and early 1990s, a period during which he had begun to retreat from multilevel creation. Like much Hong Kong film (and commercial film in general), Hui often repeats successful formulae, and his willingness to recycle effective gags is evident not only in his general socioeconomic focus but also specifically surveillance's frequency as a comic set piece. His films are full of moments in which characters are caught behind X-ray screens (The Last Message, Mr. Coconut); simulate telephone answering services (Inspector Chocolate, Mr. Coconut); and elude capture by hiding inside costumes, pretending to be statues, or otherwise hiding in plain sight (The Contract, The Private Eyes, Security Unlimited, Front Page). These sight gags and other surveillance-related jokes are but the tip of the iceberg in a deep and sustained comic investment in surveillance as a defining aspect of local society, as is apparent in some of his films' longer, favored set pieces.
The Private Eyes, for example, features Hui as a niggardly private detective who monitors his employees with the same intensity that he applies to his commissioned investigations, as he keeps a running a tab on his employees' debts and expenses. A similar joke recurs much later in Hero of the Beggars (1992), where Hui plays a mainland military captain adrift in Hong Kong who invokes the paternalist authority invested in his hierarchal authority to demand control of his underlings' wages, ultimately inciting a mutiny in which the subordinates organize against their superior. Similarly, Inspector Chocolate (1986) and Chicken and Duck Talk (1988) both include scenes where uniformed health and sanitation inspectors visiting restaurants or food purveyors come face-to-face with resourceful food-service workers who do everything in their power to obscure cockroaches and other consequences resulting from the shortcuts that optimize efficiency and enable affordable dining. Both a joke about the notoriously "dirty" nature of cheap Asian restaurants and an affectionate portrait of the bureaucratic institutions for oversight and enforcement that characterize prosperous modern Hong Kong, these repeated scenes of health and sanitation inspection in Hui's films exemplify the centrality of surveillance within his oeuvre as a whole.
As in The House of 72 Tenants, the film to which they are often compared, Hui's films depict surveillance as an inevitable attribute of Hong Kong social fabric, while also distinguishing themselves by exhibiting a realism and contemporaneity not present in the Shaw studio's period film. Hui's movies are set in bottling factories, hotel and restaurant kitchens, warehouses, and office back rooms, often shot on location, in a visual elaboration of the star's "everyman" quality that recalls the social realism of early Cantonese cinema while updating their content with explicitly modern scenarios. In a specifically autobiographical strain of Hui's detailed and realistic depiction of local surveillance culture, The Contract is just one of several movies set in media and entertainment industries whose depiction of audience testing and other forms of corporate data gathering is likely informed by the star's show business start in television. Similarly, in a more general instance of Hui's films depicting the variety of ways by which social, spatial, and data monitoring manifest in Hong Kong daily life, The Magic Touch (1992) depicts a deceptive and fraudulent fortune-teller under investigation by the Inland Revenue Department for underpayment of taxes. He earns his living not from any real gifts but through an elaborate con in which he culls personal data by exploiting his clients' habituation to the territory's ubiquitous watchmen and a municipal regulation requiring residents to bear and produce identification at all times.
So central to Hui's oeuvre, in fact, are these pointedly local and self-consciously realistic depictions of surveillance that they are present literally from the beginning of his directorial career, as evident in the opening sequences to Games Gamblers Play. In this film, like The House of 72 Tenants' use of the tenement genre, Hui's use of the gambling genre takes up a local film tradition closely associated with monitoring but immediately announces his stylistic difference from its precursor through the pre-credit sequence. This starts with an exterior establishing shot of Hong Kong's iconic skyscrapers and colonial buildings once typical of Hollywood images of Hong Kong, such as those in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) and The World of Suzie Wong (1960). No sooner does that image appear, however, than it is ironically replaced with a swish pan to an ugly quarry, where mining operations are staffed by convict labor. But rather than rest with this visual gag that Hong Kong is a prison, the sequence emphasizes the irrepressible optimism of Hong Kong people's faith in observational speculation. As the camera zooms in on two convict laborers (Hui and character actor Tsang Cho-lam), the film shows the two men betting on their meager lunch. Thus announcing the movie's positioning within gambling genre traditions, the scene also uses Hui's signature comedy to suggest a ludic and often specifically affirmative depiction of surveillance culture characteristic of Hong Kong culture in general.
Similarly, in the sequence that immediately follows the film's opening credits, Gamblers continues to play with gambling movie traditions by following a down-on-his-luck gambler (Michael's brother and popular pop star Sam Hui) whose fortunes suddenly turn for the better when he accidentally discovers a dishonest croupier in the process of stealing chips. Both engaging and upending gambling genre conventions, the film complicates the expected focus on gaming table surveillance to instead highlight other circumstances by which a gambler's observational acuity pays off. Typical of Hui's ludic twist on local surveillance cinema conventions, the set piece climaxes when the gambler's triumphant demand that he share in the illicit cache is interrupted by the casino's security manager, whose oversized glasses and imperturbable demeanor embody the intrusive and impersonal affect of institutional surveillance. Thus juxtaposing several forms of surveillance (including fish-eye lens shots that simulate the optical distortion of CCTV), the set piece uses the multilayered gags of traditional physical comedy to playfully illustrate Hui's vision of Hong Kong as an intensely surveilled society.
WATCHING OTHERS WATCH
As the preceding examples suggest, another site of Hui's unsurpassed cinematic study of Hong Kong surveillance culture is his frequent emphasis on second- and third-order monitoring, as depicted in the many scenes in which characters monitoring other characters are themselves subject to observation. Rarely unilateral, often triangulated, and never limited to top-down, repressive forms of intrusion and control, surveillance in Hui's comedies invariably is portrayed as a granular behavior equally deployed by individuals as a means of one-upmanship or of gaining dividends and benefits for themselves. This witty reenvisioning of surveillance is a far cry from Western cinema's ominous institutional or otherwise formidably impersonal depictions of surveillance, and it often derives its comedy by exploding cultural and cinematic conventions about surveillance customs and implications. Mr. Coconut (1989), for example, includes an early sequence on the subway in which two men's furtive glances and nervous shifts in body position initially figure them as sexual perverts, but this ultimately is revealed as the machinations of a relentless salesman and his unwilling mark. The set piece plays on capitalism's conditioning of individuals to both surveillance monitoring and the measures by which one can turn the tables on such practices. This play then becomes the premise of the film's central plot, which tracks a family's efforts to deceive insurance investigators in order to profit from a mistakenly awarded payout. In what will become characteristic of Hui's films and many Hong Kong movies in general, surveillance in this film is economic rather than political. Moreover, although Hui's movies portray surveillance as inevitable and pervasive, his films' emphases are consistently affirmative, subversive, and focused on opportunities for individual and personal profit. For example, in Hui's Tampopo-inspired film, Chicken and Duck Talk, about a local vendor of traditional Cantonese-style roast duck challenged by the arrival of a new Western-style fried chicken fast-food chain, the small-time restauranteur played by Hui ultimately adopts the very practices of rationalized labor, monitored production, and consumer service that he had initially criticized about his competitor (Fig. 1.2). In one memorable sequence, the film shows the surveillance measures that the proprietor undertakes not to compete with a more powerful international franchise but to foil his ambitious underling, a dishwasher who hopes to steal his employer's secret recipe. Through a mock heroic send-up fusing corporate espionage and spy films, Hui uses a rip-off of the James Bond films' globally recognized musical motif to orchestrate the dodging and feinting between himself and the wayward employee.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: A Race of Peeping Toms? "Rear Window Ethics" in Hong Kong chapter abstractWorld film is rife with surveillance motifs, but the current canon of surveillance cinema is, like surveillance theory, overly Western-centric. The Introduction exposes and amends this problem by presenting Hong Kong cinema's rich tradition of surveillance motifs. Exploring local film traditions such as gambling and tenement movies, this chapter shows how and why Hong Kong cinema often depicts surveillance with a tolerance and enthusiasm very different from that of the best-known Western movies on the same subject. Using fascinating local films such as a 1955 Hong Kong remake of Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window, this chapter tracks surveillance's shaping role in the aesthetics and narratives of one of the world's most vibrant cinemas outside Hollywood.
1Watching the Watchman: Michael Hui's Surveillance Comedies chapter abstractComedy is as underrepresented in surveillance cinema as are non-Western movies, facts that underscore the films of beloved Hong Kong comedian Michael Hui. His chart-topping hits like Games Gamblers Play (1974), The Private Eyes (1976), and Security Unlimited (1982) display an unusually lighthearted view of surveillance and were popular throughout Asia and Europe. Providing one of the most-focused studies in Western writing on Hui's film oeuvre, this chapter claims that what appears to be a specifically Hong Kong emphasis on enabling surveillance was instrumental to the comedian's international success. Recalling Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) in their ability to fashion comedy from industrial and capitalist surveillance, Hui's films exemplify the "vernacular modernism" of early American silent comedy and present the star himself as the preeminent example of Hong Kong cinema's frequent emphasis on surveillance's economic and professional opportunities.
2On the "China Watch": Prosperity and Paranoia in Reunification-Era Cinema chapter abstractThe action and crime films at the industry's height in the 1980s and early 1990s are perhaps the best-known examples of Hong Kong film and provide an obvious site of local cinema's surveillance imagery. Although rarely noted as surveillance per se, its resonance with Hong Kong's impending 1997 reunification with China was often the focus of critical interest in the genre, which exhibited an anticommunist Sinophobia subsequently rejected by an alternative critical emphasis on other genres and local contexts. This chapter revisits these films and critical debate by showing how the original interest in surveillance was correct in intuitively recognizing surveillance themes present in local culture and cinema since the Cold War. Tracing contrasting surveillance regimes both in action and crime movies and in other prominent nonaction films from the era, this chapter argues that reunification intensified surveillance themes long central to Hong Kong and Hong Kong film.
3"Only" a Policeman: Joint Venture Cinema and the Mediatization of the chapter abstractAlthough police plots and cop images are global film conventions, as a form of surveillance cinema their intersections with actual police practice are little documented. Hong Kong, however, has long harbored a Dragnet-type police-media symbiosis, as this chapter shows by tracking diverse official and commercial media such as Jackie Chan action movies, a mid-1970s-era police recruitment film, and a cycle of reunification-era movies about collaborations between Hong Kong and mainland Chinese police. Exploring this well-known but undertheorized history of Hong Kong's mutually beneficial relationship between police and entertainment, this chapter shows how Hong Kong's cinematic police images are themselves symptoms of the force's success in normalizing surveillance into daily life.
4"Representing the Chinese Government": Hong Kong Undercover in An Age of Self-Censorship chapter abstractRecent studies of Hong Kong cinema's fate in the face of China's emergence as the world's largest film market emphasize a dialectical choice between collaborative dapian (big movie) that promote Greater China or much smaller movies targeted only at local Hong Kong audiences. Such accounts, however, overlook local cinema's tradition of globally accessible but locally resonant undercover-cop movies, which since Infernal Affairs continue to be a lucrative subgenre. This chapter explores recent Hong Kong undercover movies such as Overheard and Drug War and an as-yet-unremarked subgenre dubbed "period undercover" to show how the cinema subverts current Chinese political and economic ascendancy. Tracking how recent Hong Kong undercover movies fuse highly local content with a Hollywoodized accessibility, this chapter claims that despite the industry's initial decline and subsequent retraction Hong Kong film continues to be at the forefront of global cinema and surveillance trends.
Conclusion: Toward a Global Surveillance Cinema chapter abstractHong Kong cinema exemplifies the insights that arise when the existing surveillance cinema canon is expanded to encompass the full range of world film. Although few film industries outside Hollywood can match Hong Kong's in its productivity and global influence, film cycles and subgenres throughout a variety of cinemas in Spain, South Korea, and Bombay show how surveillance ethics and aesthetics are experienced in spaces outside a dominant culture. The Conclusion reviews the prescience by which Hong Kong's seemingly idiosyncratic surveillance cinema engages global surveillance culture. Touching on a 2010 film, 72 Tenants of Prosperity, and connecting it to both the 2014 Umbrella movement and Edward Snowden's 2013 flight to Hong Kong, the Conclusion uses Hong Kong to advocate for a more diverse canon of world surveillance cinema.