DARKER THAN DARK: FILM NOIR in ITS ASIAN CONTEXTS Chapter Author(S): Stephen Teo
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Edinburgh University Press Chapter Title: DARKER THAN DARK: FILM NOIR IN ITS ASIAN CONTEXTS Chapter Author(s): Stephen Teo Book Title: International Noir Book Editor(s): Homer B. Pettey, R. Barton Palmer Published by: Edinburgh University Press . (2014) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt14brz6d.12 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to International Noir. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 155.69.24.171 on Wed, 06 Jan 2016 02:05:31 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 6. DARKER THAN DARK: FILM NOIR IN ITS ASIAN CONTEXTS Stephen Teo Chinese and Korean Noir This chapter focuses on film noir in the contexts of the Hong Kong and South Korean cinemas, two Asian film industries that have produced some of the most remarkable films noirs of the contemporary era. If Asian noir is seen as a later phenomenon in the development of film noir in world cinema, South Korean cinema has produced some of the most striking examples of neo-noir in the past ten years or so and it may be argued that South Korean filmmak- ers have inherited a wider tradition of noir cinema in the world and simply perpetuated it within their own industry. However, from an Asian cinema perspective, the South Korean films are part of a tradition that arguably stretched back to the Hong Kong cinema’s New Wave which materialised in 1979 through the first feature films of Ann Hui (The Secret), Tsui Hark (The Butterfly Murders), Alex Cheung (Cops and Robbers) and Peter Yung (The System). All of these are films noirs in their conscious conveyance of a ‘new mood of cynicism, pessimism, and darkness’, as Paul Schrader has defined noir in his seminal article ‘Notes on film noir’.1 The Hong Kong New Wave simply infused this mood into the Asian cinema mainstream which at the time was mostly dominated by Hong Kong martial arts pictures, comedies and roman- tic melodramas. So pervasive was the noir sensibility in the Hong Kong New Wave films that it was not so much a New Wave as a Noir Wave. The New Wave generation of directors sought to suture the tone and sensibility of noir into the body fabric of Hong Kong cinema as a kind of collective mood-motif 136 This content downloaded from 155.69.24.171 on Wed, 06 Jan 2016 02:05:31 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions PETTEY INTERNATIONAL 9780748691104 PRINT.indd 136 09/10/2014 15:44 FILM NOIR IN ITS ASIAN CONTEXTS which had not really been present before. Noir’s manifestation in Hong Kong cinema can be attributed to the fact that many of the New Wave directors were educated in the West and had brought back with them Western influences. The 1970s was a time of transition in which the dawn of the New Wave marked a modernist phase of development in Hong Kong cinema which had, after all, patterned itself after Hollywood. As noir took critical hold in the American critical discourse during the 1970s (Paul Schrader’s ‘Notes on film noir’ was first published in 1972), Hong Kong was affected one way or another. Noir was a ‘kind of modernism in the popular cinema’ that could spread across ‘vir- tually every national boundary and every form of communication’, as James Naremore tells us,2 and the Hollywood film noir, symbolised in the 1970s by Polanski’s very influential Chinatown (1974) and Scorsese’s equally influential Taxi Driver (1976), ‘is both a type of modernism and a type of commercial melodrama’3 which may best describe the kind of new paradigmatic formula that the Hong Kong New Wave filmmakers sought to introduce into their own highly commercial industry. Yim Ho’s Happenings (1980), Tsui Hark’s Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind (1980), Alex Cheung’s Man on the Brink (1980) and Patrick Tam’s Love, Massacre (1980) were just the kind of challenging works of the Hong Kong Noir Wave, suggesting a consolidation of noir sensibility in the indus- try as these young directors went about tackling sensitive material in a social if not political fashion by injecting an even deeper feeling of black funk into the system. This darker-than-dark sensibility went on to fructify around the specific genre of the jingfei pian (or ‘cops and robbers’ films) which mostly centred on the conflict between Triad gangsters and the Hong Kong police force. Johnny Mak’s Long Arm of the Law (1984) established the black-realist conditions of the confrontation between Triad gangsters and the police in the Hong Kong crime genre,4 but the latter films of John Woo and Johnnie To went on to develop the more abstract ‘cops and robbers’ strain of noir which Naremore has rather shrewdly observed is ‘inflected by the French New Wave’s fascination with noir’.5 Indeed, it is this very strain that is now the most closely identified with Hong Kong cinema’s noir sensibility. Johnnie To is the one director who has done most to engender the neo-noir sensibility in the Hong Kong-style jingfei genre. In fact, To has been the most distinctively creative of the jingfei directors, and his films of the last ten years or so con- stitute some of the foremost neo-noir works of Asian cinema. They include PTU (2003), Breaking News (2004), Election (2005), Triad Election (2006), Exiled (2006), Mad Detective (2007), Sparrow (2008), Vengeance (2009), Life without Principles (2011) and Drug War (2012). In addition, To’s work has influenced a whole series of Hong Kong jingfei films including the Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002–3), One Night in Mongkok (2004), Confession of Pain (2006), The Detective (2007), Protégé (2007), Shinjuku Incident (2009), 137 This content downloaded from 155.69.24.171 on Wed, 06 Jan 2016 02:05:31 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions PETTEY INTERNATIONAL 9780748691104 PRINT.indd 137 09/10/2014 15:44 INTERNATIONAL NOIR Overheard (2009), Accident (2009), Punished (2011), Overheard 2 (2011), The Detective 2 (2011), Nightfall (2012) and Cold War (2012). The Hong Kong films noirs are overwhelmingly concentrated on the jingfei genre to the point that the whole recognition of Hong Kong noir depends on this one spe- cific genre, although it is possible to detect the noir sensibility in other Hong Kong-style genres.6 In South Korean cinema, the neo-noir sensibility was inducted into the main- stream industry through two milestone works in the late 1990s, Lee Myung- se’s Nowhere to Hide (1999), which is today regarded as a cult masterpiece, a more stylish variation of the typical Hong Kong-style jingfei genre, and Jung Ji-woo’s Happy End (1999), a blackly realist ménage à trois melodrama that helped to establish the violent persona of its male lead, Choi Min-shik, who later evolved into one of the nastiest of noir monster-protagonists in world cinema. Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, South Korean cinema has produced a steady stream of compelling, if also highly disquieting, neo-noir works including Park Chan-wook’s ‘Vengeance’ trilogy – Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003) and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005) – and Bong Joon-ho’s superior Memories of Murder (2003). These films are the more internationally known works of the South Korean neo-noir cycle which has otherwise developed in a more local fashion, demonstrating itself as a powerful, obsessive and unremittingly violent energy field through a brilliantly sustained series of works: Bad Guy (2001), Public Enemy (2002), A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), Hypnotized (2004), Spider Forest (2004), The Scarlet Letter (2004), A Bittersweet Life (2005), Bystanders (2005), A Dirty Carnival (2006), Puzzle (2006), Voice of a Murderer (2007), Black House (2007), A Love (2007), Seven Days (2007), The Chaser (2008), Handphone (2009), Breathless (2009), Mother (2009), Secret (2009), No Mercy (2010), Secret Reunion (2010), Parallel Life (2010), Bedevilled (2010), The Man from Nowhere (2010), I Saw the Devil (2010), Enemy at the Dead End (2010), Yeouido Island (2010), The Yellow Sea (2010), Hindsight (2011), Silenced (2011), Nameless Gangster (2012), Helpless (2012), The Thieves (2012), Pieta (2012), Confession of Murder (2012) and New World (2013). The Korean noir cycle is more varied than the Hong Kong cycle in the genres represented: many belong to the cops and robbers category or the gang- ster genre (A Dirty Carnival, Breathless, Nameless Gangster, New World) but quite a few are gothic, psychotic thrillers (A Tale of Two Sisters, Spider Forest, Black House, The Chaser, I Saw the Devil) with a subset that also contains a supernatural theme (A Tale of Two Sisters, Hypnotized, Spider Forest, Yeouido Island); some are social-critical in intent (Breathless, Silenced, Nameless Gangster) while others contain a mixture of dark social realism and pure action melodrama (A Bittersweet Life, The Yellow Sea, The Man from Nowhere). There is a psychiatric strain (Hypnotized, Spider Forest, Black 138 This content downloaded from 155.69.24.171 on Wed, 06 Jan 2016 02:05:31 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions PETTEY INTERNATIONAL 9780748691104 PRINT.indd 138 09/10/2014 15:44 FILM NOIR IN ITS ASIAN CONTEXTS House), and one involving femmes fatales (Hypnotized, The Scarlet Letter, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Black House, Helpless).