Spuren einer Post-1997 Identität im Hongkong Kino

(T. Hwa)

Wie bereits an anderer Stelle kurz angedeutet, musste ich während meines Aufenthaltes in Hongkong feststellen, dass die einst extrem produktive lokale Filmindustrie, die in den 30ern nach der Besetzung Shanghais durch japanische Truppen durch den Exodus der dortigen Studios entstanden ist, sich heute in einem Stadium der Auflösung befindet. Auch ohne allzu voreilig zu dem Euphemismus „Neuorientierung“ zu greifen, lassen sich an aktuellen Produktionen aus Hongkong Tendenzen ablesen, die es nötig machen in anderen Kategorien als denen der postkolonialen Theorie zu denken, welche so lange für die Betrachtung des Kinos dieser Region prägend waren. Hier einige Ideen zu einer solchen post-postkolonialen Sicht, die im Rahmen eines Seminars an der City University of Hong Kong entstanden sind. (Ich habe leichte Veränderungen und Ergänzungen vorgenommen und mir erlaubt die Literaturangaben auszulassen.)

Issues of identity have been a strong focus of scholarly writing about Hong Kong Cinema. Deriving its name from the date of the handover set by the 1984 Joint Declaration, the ‘1997 syndrome’ has been variously evoked as the defining and unifying collective experience of Hong Kong film makers, combining post-colonial attempts to define an autonomous identity with an at times almost millennialist feeling of anxiety. Facing the perceived historical deadline, the construction of a post-colonial identity that acknowledges the “composite nature of Hong Kong’s cultural identity” and would serve to normalize the ambivalent relation to the mainland constituted a major social issue. “[A]ddressing the ‘1997 consciousness’ of its spectators” – openly or in their subtexts – the products of the local film industry would thus be part of a collective social and psychological process of self definition. While 1997 as an analytic concept still continues to reverberate, a new approach to conceptualize questions of Hong Kong identity should be proposed to describe the situation twelve years after the handover.

This conceptual approach can not be rooted primarily in the dichotomies (between nation states, ideologies, etc.) implied by the ‘1997 syndrome.’ While it could be argued that some processes associated with the term ‘globalization’ might have to be conceived of in different terms for Hong Kong than in other cultures and societies, the ‘indigenous’ identity of Hong Kong often being described in terms of a syncretism of Eastern and Western influences or of ‘hybridization’, it is not necessary to subscribe to the enthusiastic or horrifying notion of a homogeneous world culture to expect a convergence of mainland Chinese and Hong Kong culture. The growing intensification and mutual influence between Hong Kong and the People’s Republic with all its implications should be the focus of critical attention of a contemporary description of Hong Kong Cinema.

Examples for the way in which the intensified cultural and economic presence of mainland China has influenced the output of Hong Kong’s film industry can serve to illustrate this idea of a ‘post-1997-syndrome.’ The thriller MOU GAAN DOU / INFERNAL AFFAIRS (HK 2002; D: Wai-keung Lau, Siu Fai Mak), while representing a much appreciated success for a film industry that is often depicted as a victim of globalized phenomena such as Asia’s financial crisis and Hollywood’s global hegemony, was marketed with an alternative ending in China. This ending reverses the main premise of the movie, the deeply rooted corruption in the police force, in an unmotivated deus-ex-machina resolution that involves a largely anonymous team of investigators, placating mainland authorities’ uneasiness about the potentially subversive effects of the film’s plot.

Economical and political considerations on the level of production go beyond alternate versions for the mainland market. After the critical and commercial success of WO HU CANG LONG / CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON (2000; Ang Lee), a multinational collaboration that involves production companies and personnel from Taiwan, Hong Kong, the U.S., and mainland China, co-productions with the emerging Chinese film industry that target the much coveted market there seem to represent an attractive new possibility for Hong Kong film makers. Films like TAU MING CHONG / THE WARLORDS (PRC, HK 2007; D: Peter Chan) or SAAM GWOK DZI GIN LUNG SE GAP / THREE KINGDOMS: RESURRECTION OF THE DRAGON (PRC, RK, HK; D: Daniel Lee) emulate the new generic model of the monumental, neo-folkloristic ‘wuxia pian’ [”martial arts/swordplay film”] as exemplified by Zhang Yimou’s films since YING XIONG / HERO (2002), itself another example of a co-production between Chinese and Hong Kong film makers. If Ang Lee’s film can be accused of synthesizing a pan-Chinese visual space equivalent to the ‘Euro-pudding’ of multinational productions in Europe, the underlying paradoxes of Hong Kong’s (re-) appropriation of the contemporary wuxia genre with its revisionary, nationalist tendencies seem worth exploring.

The take of Hollywood reject John Woo on the genre can serve as an interesting example for this process. His 2008 film CHI BI / RED CLIFF (PRC) dramatizes a conflict in the historic “Three Kingdoms period,” a setting that has been popularized through popular novels and folkloristic tales and which features in a number of current historical films. The significance of this period in the collective imagination can be compared to that of the Civil War in the U.S. or the Hundred-Years War in Europe; it provides the often violent, mythic narrative on which nation-states depend on for legitimization. In contrast to this tendency of the setting, the narrative sides with the underdog Southerners (the Cantonese, significantly the later inhabitants of Hong Kong). While the corrupt, Machiavellian general, waging war as a prelude to a coup d’etat, is surrounded by largely anonymous and numerically superior subordinates and troops, the Southerners are portrayed as an alliance of individualistic, heroic characters. The use of both northern-tinged Mandarin and Cantonese dialect on the soundtrack further heightens the differences in mentalities. RED CLIFF is a big budget blockbuster “made in China” to be marketed in mainland China - just like Zhang’s filmic celebrations of nascent nationalism - and superficially conforms to the conventions of “neo-folk-wuxia.” At the same time, the parable of a group of Southern Chinese standing their ground against overwhelming forces from the North (and their film industry?) seems quite apparent. The film thus retains a spirit that is not subversive, but at least defiant in its insistence on local origins and identity.

In a more apparent contrary movement to the convergence of both markets and film aesthetics, Johnnie To’s MAN JEUK / SPARROW (HK 2008) celebrates a local conception of Hong Kong through both their subject matter, the title being a Cantonese slang term for a pickpocket, and the familiar setting of the city’s streets. Pang Ho-Cheung’s sex-comedy A.V. (HK 2005) is set in an even more specific setting - among the students of the universities located around Kowloon Tong [the immediate environment of City U]. This ‘localist’ tendency might be seen as a paradoxical effect of globalization, with To’s film playing to an international audience at the Berlin film festival, but as well as a survival strategy of an industry that reacts to a diminishing market with ‘small’ films that cater to an audience’s pleasure in recognizing locations and elements of their daily life on the big screen.

Contemporary films made in Hong Kong have to be seen in a context of interconnected political, economic, social, and cultural factors, that goes beyond the clear cut dichotomies of East and West, Communism and Capitalism. I have tried to delineate through my examples that the borders between nations (or, as in the case of Hong Kong S.A.R., between territories) can no longer serve as precise analytical demarcations. Today, Hong Kong, which has been attributed with being post-colonial even before attaining independence from the colonial power, is confronted with a China that exhibits traits of post-colonial processes without having ever been a colony. Rather than clinging to the idealized notion of a homogeneous identity implied by the ‘1997-paradigm,’ the focus should lie on the process of retaining and redefining traces of the local both in regard to a growing presence of the mainland, and within an increasingly global context. For Hong Kong cinema, as can be argued for much of today’s festival circuit “world cinema” (a term which epitomizes the underlying paradox I try to address), the local is global.