Etapa de Operaciones Formales (12 a 15 años):

Meanwhile, with the flourishing of small film production companies in Hong Kong from the 1980s onwards, more and more Hong Kong filmmakers often found themselves engaging in transnational and/or border-crossing projects in order to secure enough initial investment capital for their films if local money was not enough. Their investors from neighbouring countries such as Taiwan and Japan also welcomed such cooperation opportunities, as they often found investing in Hong Kong films more profitable than their returns on investing in their own local productions. This was due mainly to the fact that Hong Kong films had already acquired long- standing local and overseas markets.102 More recently, investors from further afield such as the UK, France, Italy and the USA were also attracted to join forces with Hong Kong filmmakers. There were many exchanges during the course in areas such as film narrative, aesthetic values and talents among Hong Kong cinema and filmmaking practices of these countries. These transnationally produced films were effectively shot both within the Hong Kong film industry and in between systems of different countries, leading to enhanced film products through synergy. It is in this sense that they are interstitial, very similar to what Naficy says about ‘accented’ films:

To be interstitial, therefore, is to operate both within and astride the cracks of the system, benefiting from its contradictions, anomalies, and heterogeneity. It also means being located at the intersection of the local and the global, mediating between the two contrary categories, which in syllogism are called ‘subalternity’ and ‘superalternity’. As a result, accented filmmakers are not so much marginal or subaltern as they are interstitial, partial, and multiple.103

Coincidentally, many Hong Kong filmmakers involved in these transnational film projects are prominent transnational figures, who live as diasporic people relocated from their birthplaces in

Mainland China in their early childhood and have now established their homes in Hong Kong. They may or may not perform in their own films, but their experiences often add in their films a flavour of interstitiality and the ambivalence of their diasporic situations. Several of these eminent directors, whose films will be closely examined later in this thesis, are introduced as follows.

4.1.2.1. Ann Hui

Hui was born to a Chinese father and a Japanese mother in Manchuria in the Northeast of China in 1947. The Huis moved to Hong Kong when young Hui was five. She received colonial education there until graduating from the University of Hong Kong with a master’s degree in comparative literature. She later moved to London to receive filmmaking training before going back to Hong Kong to commence her directorship.

Hui, being one of the first Hong Kong New Wave directors in the late 1970s, has since been actively involved in both the domestic film industry and border-crossing projects. Renowned for her versatility, Hui often finds herself spearheading various genre films, such as melodrama, martial arts and horror. Many of her works convey her humanist stance and are attentive to human relationships from a female perspective rarely found in the male-dominated local film industry. Hui has worked with different small, local production companies since her début Feng Jie / The Secret (Ann Hui, Hong Kong, 1979) while simultaneously forging partnership with Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese filmmakers and investors. Boat People (1982), which will be discussed in Chapter 3, was Hui’s first border-crossing project. In 1997, Hui was credited as one of the writers and the associate producer for the Mainland Chinese historical epic Yapian

Zhanzheng / The Opium War (Xie Jin, China, 1997), a film that was endorsed by the Chinese government for celebrating the recovery of the lost territory Hong Kong.104

Besides cooperating with Mainland Chinese filmmakers, Hui has worked closely with Taiwanese filmmakers since the 1980s. For example, WU Nien-jen, who is one of the mainstays of Taiwan New Wave alongside his contemporaries like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward YANG, wrote the script for Hui’s Song of the Exile (1990), which will be discussed in Chapter 2. Hui made a cameo appearance in Taiwan post-New Wave director TSAI Ming-liang’s Heliu / The River (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 1997). She also employed Tsai’s long-term work partner/actor LEE Kang- sheng to be the male lead in her Ordinary Heroes (1999), which will be analysed in Chapter 4. Hui’s tactful and well-established connections in both Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese film industries allow her to blend in with both cinematic systems relatively easily while consolidating her base in Hong Kong.

4.1.2.2.Wong Kar-wai

Wong was born in Shanghai, China in 1958 and moved to Hong Kong with his family at the age of five. He could speak only Shanghainese dialect when he arrived and picked up the local Cantonese dialect in his early teenage years. The young Wong felt completely alienated in the new environment, a sentiment that eventually suffuses most of his works.105

Wong joined the local film industry in 1982 as a scriptwriter and scripted various genre films. He also worked in companies of different sizes. In 1988, Wong directed his first film Wang Jiao Ka Men / As Tears Go By (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong, 1988). The box-office success of this film allowed Wong to stay in the film business and make his all-time classic Days of Being Wild

(1990), which will be discussed in Chapter 2. It was from this film that Wong started to build his unique film style in using devices such as circuitous plotline, expressive colours, non- conventional camera angles, jump cuts, stretch printing, extensive voice-over monologues, music montages, and so on.106

However, due to Wong’s notorious striving for perfection in his films at the expense of time, it took him years to complete some of his films, for example, two years for Dong Xie Xi Du / Ashes of Time (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong 1994) and about five years for 2046 (Wong Kar-wai, China/ Hong Kong / France / Germany / Italy / Netherlands /USA, 2004). This is not entirely acceptable in the fast-paced Hong Kong film industry. Yet his career has managed to flourish while the film industry went downhill.107 Teo names him the ‘perennial enfant terrible of the Hong Kong film industry’.108 One of the probable reasons for Wong’s commercial survival is that he always scripts his own films, which allows him to bring down the production costs even when he keeps changing the plot into the post-production stage.109 Wong has his own production company, Jet Tone Production, producing mainly his own works. His long-term partnership with art director William CHANG and cinematographer Christopher Doyle also ensures the artistic quality of his films.

Wong had not been involved in border-crossing productions before he made Ashes of Time

(1994), which allied him with Mainland Chinese production studios. Happy Together (1997), which will be analysed in Chapter 2, registers Wong’s entry into the Western film circle with investors and collaborators coming from as far afield as France and Italy. Internationally, Wong is thus far the most highly praised Hong Kong-based director. He is the first ethnic Chinese to win the Best Director Award at the Cannes International Film Festival (1997) for Happy Together and the first ethnic Chinese jury president (2006) in the festival’s history.110

4.1.2.3. Fruit Chan

Chan was born in 1959 in Guangdong, China. He moved to Hong Kong with his parents at the age of ten. Chan studied filmmaking at the Hong Kong Film and Cultural Centre under the instruction of the first Hong Kong New Wave directors, such as Hui and YIM Ho.111 Chan has worked in the position of assistant director for a long time.112 In 1991, he borrowed the costume drama setting of Tony AU’s He Ri Jun Zai Lai / Au Revoir, Mon Amour (Tony Au, Hong Kong, 1991) while it was taking a shooting break. There, Chan made his début Da Nao Guang Chang Long / Finale in Blood (Fruit Chan, Hong Kong, 1993), a romantic ghost story that is set in 1920s Hong Kong.113 It is thus clear from the outset that Chan can strive flexibly to sustain his filmmaking career within the system by making use of whatever means available to him.

Chan’s second film Xianggang Zhizao / Made in Hong Kong (1997), which will be discussed in Chapter 4, demonstrates fully Chan’s survival skills. In making this film, the director gave up the commercial practice of the Hong Kong film industry and worked on a modest budget. Together with the leftover film stock that the director had been collecting, a small crew of only five people without any professional actors in the cast, and a narrative that hit the nerve of Hong Kongers in facing the Handover, Chan became legendary in contemporary Hong Kong cinema.

Since then, Chan released one independent film every year up to 2002 (except 2001) to reflect on the socio-political effect of the Handover. They include the rest of his 1997 Trilogy (aka Hong Kong Trilogy) – The Longest Summer (1998) and Xilu Xiang / Little Cheung (Fruit Chan, Hong Kong / Japan, 1999), and his Prostitute Dyad – Durian Durian (2000) and Hollywood Hong Kong

Min Gong Che / Public Toilet (Fruit Chan, Hong Kong / Japan / South Korea, 2002) marks Chan’s last independent feature to date.114 Many of these films managed to secure funding from overseas sources such as Korea, the UK and France, and benefited from the exhibition channels through international film festival circuit. After Public Toilet, Chan moved more flexibly between local mainstream and independent film projects. He produced A1 Tou Tiao / A-1: Headline (Gordon Chan and Rico Chung, Hong Kong, 2004) and directed Gaau Ji / Dumplings

(2004) (feature and short versions), both targeting a much larger mainstream audience.115

These three Hong Kong filmmakers strive to carve their own niches in the Hong Kong film industry while always welcoming the opportunity to engage in transnational projects. In this respect, they can be regarded as interstitial in Naficy’s sense. Unlike typical ‘accented’ filmmakers from the Middle East who may have major political concerns because of their diasporic/exilic experiences, these Hong Kong filmmakers’ survival is less socio-politically driven than financial-oriented. Yet, this is exactly what they need to do if they hope to orient themselves successfully in an environment that requires them to do so. On this level of interpretation, they are not much different from their Middle-Eastern counterparts who work in the West.