China spooked by Hong Kong's
films By Stefan Hammond
BANGKOK - Supernatural films are a staple genre
in the Hong Kong cinedrome. One recent success is The
Eye, from Hong Kong-based Applause Pictures. The
film - about a cornea-transplant patient and her eerie
post-surgery visions - was a smash hit at the Hong Kong
box office, and remake rights have been purchased by
Hollywood's Cruise/Wagner Productions.
But don't
search for The Eye at Beijing cineplexes any time
soon. Despite decades of economic and social reform, the
mainland maintains a cinematic nix-list: nudity,
homosexuality, extramarital affairs and supernatural
themes all remain verboten.
Why is
Beijing so concerned about ghosts and goblins?
Politically, secret societies based on arcane beliefs
have posed threats to China's power structure for
centuries. Socially, the shift toward a modern culture
has motivated Beijing to create a list of "approved"
religions and conveniently prohibit all else.
Why are mainland edicts important to Hong Kong
filmmakers? Largely because of CEPA - the Closer
Economic Partnership Arrangement - which took effect on
January 1. The pact - designed to boost trade between
Hong Kong and the mainland - allows Hong Kong films to
be released on the mainland as local productions as long
as they are co-produced with mainland partners and
conform to other criteria related to labor quotas and
content. Hong Kong's economic and cultural symbiosis
with mainland China means that the special
administrative region's filmmakers must accommodate
Beijing's dictates to reap CEPA's potential benefits
within the entertainment sector.
The Chinese
authorities firmly oppose mysterious cinematic
manifestations - even the cutesy family film Babe
(1995) was banned by Beijing because it displayed
talking animals. Science-fiction and horror films don't
officially exist on the mainland, although a wide
variety of films reportedly find their way onto Chinese
video screens via bootleg discs.
These
objections are puzzling. For centuries, Chinese texts
have reveled in ghost lore, and Hong Kong films
perennially replicate these stories. The period-costume
drama A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) starred Leslie
Cheung and Taiwanese actress Wang Tsu-hsien as
unrequited lovers: he's a human and she's a ghost. It's
a typical Hong Kong film plot - girl dies, decades pass,
girl's ghost meets boy, boy gets girl, boy loses girl.
Producer Tsui Hark adapted Western pacing to
help get the film into art-house cinemas and awaken
Western audiences to Hong Kong cinema that transcended
"chopsocky" stereotypes. But the story's not original:
it's adapted from the 17th-century Chinese text "Strange
Tales from a Chinese Studio". And that tale's been
lensed before, a 1959 film from Hong Kong's legendary
Shaw Brothers studio - The Enchanting Shadow -
varies not in plot but in production technique (the
Chinese titles for both films are identical). And it's
not the first time Tsui dipped into China's creative
past for inspiration - his film Green Snake
(1993) is a remake of the Madam White Snake legend.
So why does Beijing proscribe ghosts and
supernatural elements? The country's vastness and
multiplicity of ethnic and religious groups has made
central control a priority for Chinese authorities.
Challenges to authority are not welcomed. Societies
rallying under the banner of arcane beliefs have played
havoc with the power structure since at least AD 25,
when a Shandong province sect called the Red Eyebrows
(they painted their eyebrows crimson to mimic demons)
helped assassinate political figure Wang Mang and
establish the Eastern Han Dynasty. Since then, Chinese
secret societies have included the diehard White Lotus
Society, whose 14th-century uprising helped displace
invading Mongols and install Hung Wu, the first Ming
Dynasty emperor. After three centuries of Ming rule, the
superseding Qing Dynasty issued edicts against the White
Lotus Society and similar organizations including the
Incense Burning Society and the Origin of Chaos Society.
And the Boxer Rebellion of 1899 is the best-documented
example of a secret society causing a ruckus within the
framework of Chinese authority.
These
spiritually based power-mongering sects have helped
shape the Hong Kong film canon. In the early 1990s, Tsui
Hark's seminal Creative Workshop studio re-created a
true Chinese hero and set him into action. Wong Fei-hong
(1847-1924) was a scholar and martial-arts hero whose
wisdom and leadership in the twilight years of the
Chinese empire were legendary. Wong has been
mythologized by writers and screenwriters and was first
played onscreen by Kwan Tak-hing, who portrayed the
scholar-warrior in an astounding 99 feature films
beginning in 1949.
Tsui updated the legend by
casting Beijing-born Jet Li as Wong in a series of films
called Once Upon A Time in China (1992) that pits
Wong against the White Lotus Cult, an energetic,
xenophobic mob who practice spiritual kung fu. They chew
burning incense sticks and assert magic protection from
blade and bullet. But while they claim to be
pro-Chinese, Wong Fei-hong sees them as anarchic
architects of pointless mayhem. It's an entertaining
film loaded with high-velocity martial action that
presents Chinese patriots opposing spiritually based
societies with rebellious agendas.
Nowadays,
China is dogmatically determined to upholding
conventional religious practices. A 1997 white paper
published on the website of China's embassy in
Washington gives approval to Buddhism, Taoism, Islam,
Catholicism and Protestantism. "Citizens of China may
freely choose and express their religious beliefs, and
make clear their religious affiliations," declared the
white paper, which also claimed that there are over
3,000 religious organizations throughout China and "74
religious schools and colleges run by religious
organizations for training clerical personnel". However,
all religions in China are currently governed by
"patriotic organizations", official bodies through which
the head of the religion answers to the government. This
means, for example, that the Chinese Catholic Church
maintains non-affiliation with the Vatican.
The
inclusion of Taoism (described in the white paper as
"native to China, [with] a history of more than 1,700
years") is of interest to Hong Kong movie fans who've
embraced Taoist priests as celluloid heroes. Hong Kong's
No 1 Taoist film champion was Lam Ching-ying, a peer of
heavyweight action star Sammo Hung. Lam's no-nonsense
witch-battling sifu (master) was the central
character of the wildly popular Mr Vampire
(1985), its sequels and knock-offs. Many of these films
also starred gyonsi: child-vampires. Rather than
the puberty-addled goths of Western teen-vamp films like
The Lost Boys (1987), Hong Kong's gyonsi
are cute dead tykes: animated corpses in Ming Dynasty
costumes. The movie-going public lapped it up, and the
child-vampires became so popular in Japan that toymakers
sprang into action, producing plush toys with cute
puddle-eyes and soft padded fangs.
The
vampire-minders in charge of the gyonsi (and
their less charming adult counterparts) were Taoists, as
were the priests who stepped in to restore order once
the adult vampires slipped their spells (yellow-and-red
paper charms affixed to their foreheads) and started
doing what vampires do. It's curious to see if a regime
that spurns talking piglets as spiritually hazardous
would cleave to child-vampire films on re-release.
It's only natural that Hong Kong production
houses target the mainland as a burgeoning market for
their Asian film products. Perhaps new mainland revenue
will change the overall financial picture, but as things
stand now, Hollywood remake rights are the plum prize
for Hong Kong filmmakers. The rights for Hong Kong's
biggest 2002 hit , Infernal Affairs, which
grossed more than US$7 million in Hong Kong alone and
won seven Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Picture
- have already been snapped up by Brad Pitt's Plan B
production company. Pitt is set to star with Martin
Scorsese tipped to direct - a production date has yet to
be announced.
But the original film didn't
receive mainland approval until a new ending was cobbled
together and stitched on. Although the revised finale
waters down the film's impact, it also pedantically
doles out justice to the film's evildoers. Would Pitt,
whose best work is in bleak, morally elliptical films
like Seven (1995) and Fight Club (1999),
prefer a sewn-up ending that imprisons all the bad guys?
And if not, would the remake play in Beijing cinemas?
Stefan Hammond is the author of
Hollywood East: Hong Kong Movies and the People Who
Make Them and co-author (with Mike Wilkins) of
Sex and Zen & A Bullet in The Head: The
Essential Guide to Hong Kong's Mindbending Films.
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