FRUIT CHAN’S Made in Hong Kong Esther M. K. Cheung Hong Kong University Press The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong www.hkupress.org © 2009 Hong Kong University Press ISBN 978-962-209-977-7 All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound by Pre-Press Ltd. in Hong Kong, China Table of Contents Series Preface ix Acknowledgements xiii 1 Introduction: History beyond the Death Trips 1 2 Authenticity and Independence: Fruit Chan and 21 Independent Filmmaking 3 There Are Many Ways to Be Realistic 39 4 The Art of Détournement 53 5 In Search of the Ghostly in Context 79 6 In Search of the Ghostly in Urban Spaces 101 7 Epilogue: Grassrooting Cinematic Practices 125 ● viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Appendix 1: Interview with Fruit Chan 129 Appendix 2: Funding Sources and Awards 145 Notes 151 Credits 167 Bibliography 171 ●1 Introduction: History beyond the Death Trips The imagination is always at the end of an era. — Frank Kermode1 A typical story of disaffected youth and the morbid trips they take, Made in Hong Kong (1997) narrates the tale of four youngsters coming from the lower sector of Hong Kong society. Moon (Zhongqiu/Chung-chau), Ping (Ping/Ping), Sylvester (Long/Lung), and Susan (Shan/San) are all subject to the cruel realities of life in a big city.2 Like many Hong Kong lower-class inhabitants, they reside in the public housing estates known for their dismal living conditions. Moon and Ping both grow up in families where irresponsible fathers have run away from home. Their mothers are neither courageous nor enduring. Sylvester, a mentally handicapped young man who is abandoned by his family and society, befriends Moon and Ping. The school girl Susan cannot bear the disillusionment which results from her failed romantic relationship ● 2 FRUIT CHAN’S MADE IN HONG KONG with her teacher who shirks the responsibility of admitting their relationship, and commits suicide by jumping off the roof of a Hong Kong high-rise building. After Sylvester has picked up Susan’s dead letters and has given them to Moon, the latter seems to be possessed and erotically aroused by Susan’s ghost night after night. Ever since then, their deadly destinies are tied together. Sylvester ends up being killed by gangsters, Ping dies of an incurable kidney disease, and Moon commits suicide at the end of the film. Now often hailed as a story about grassroots people by a “grassroots director,” Made in Hong Kong excited both local viewers and international spectators as Fruit Chan’s powerful independent debut in an eventful year.3 In the history of world cinema, the disaffected youth is a well-recognized trope to refer to symptoms of the problems of contemporary cities. An effective figure in the tradition of social realism, this character suffers from urban alienation, economic inequality, the feeling of loss, and disorientation when one is coming of age as well as the predicament of being abandoned in the adult world. Like other films in this tradition, Made in Hong Kong is an indictment of a society where youth express their urban angst and disillusionment. While the “cruel tragedies of youth” are fundamental to any big city, they always embody local specificities.4 The youngsters’ death trips allegorize the concluding chapter of British colonial history in Hong Kong. Chan once said that their deaths signified the need to turn over a new leaf when Hong Kong re-entered China’s political and cultural realities.5 It is this allegorical reference to the 1997 handover that places the film in the category of “New Hong Kong Cinema.”6 The 1997 handover, as Walter Benjamin would have called it, is a “moment of danger” when filmic images “[flash] up at the instant when it can be recognized.”7 The trope of the disaffected youth merges the general condition of urban alienation with specific symptoms of a society at a historical moment of drastic transition. Its coming-of-age theme at “a moment of danger” INTRODUCTION ●3 embodies the common impetus among many filmmakers of the New Hong Kong Cinema to narrate their stories of growing up. Chan’s passionate engagement with Hong Kong as a locality adds an indispensable dimension to this tale of disenchanted youth. When it emerged in 1997, Made in Hong Kong was initially denied formal entry into the Hong Kong International Film Festival. With the help of distributors like Shu Kei and Daniel Yu Wai-kwok, it was later screened in Hong Kong and circulated in many international festivals. The film then went on to win numerous awards, including Locarno’s Special Jury Prize (Switzerland), Gijon’s Grand Prix (Spain), Nantes’s Grand Prix (France), and Best Film and Best Director at the Hong Kong Film Awards. It signals an important turn in the history of Hong Kong cinema and in Chan’s own career, as a landmark of “independent filmmaking.” There is no doubt that alternative and experimental filmmaking had existed in Hong Kong for a long time before the emergence of Made in Hong Kong. Nevertheless, Chan’s own forthright assertion of the film as an “independent” production inspired a number of similar endeavors in that direction.8 The revival in independent filmmaking in the late 1990s in Hong Kong was also in constant interaction with the so-called Sixth/Urban Generation of filmmakers in the People’s Republic of China. Some critics suggest that Chan shifted back to the mainstream with Hollywood Hong Kong (2001) and Dumplings (2004), but it is not an uncommon practice for filmmakers to have parallel developments in both mainstream and independent filmmaking. His short film named Xi’an Story (2006) was sponsored by a mainland Chinese media company with the aim of providing entertainment for mobile-phone users. It has never been available in Hong Kong commercial cinemas and was only circulated through the international festival circuit.9 Chan’s constant cross-over between the mainstream and the independent cinemas has sparked public discussions concerning the relation between cinema and its publics. Analyzing his explosive ● 4 FRUIT CHAN’S MADE IN HONG KONG independent debut of Made in Hong Kong, we can explore how cinema functions as a form of public criticism. Apart from being both art and industry, cinema is defined by specific relations of representation and reception in what Miriam Hansen calls the “social horizon of experience” grounded in “the context of living.”10 While the title of the film undoubtedly connotes a sense of place which is most local, the cultural issues it evokes are best understood within the context of globalization.11 The interest lies in the film’s double-coded meaning of the specific and the universal, and the ways in which it was received and circulated across geo-political boundaries. Observation of the global-local connection textually and contextually provides us with greater understanding of the deterritorialized structures of public life in our contemporary world. In such instances, we can witness the pressure of the grassroots and the insertion of personal meaning by social actors in the vast, fluid, and anonymous global space of flows. In this process of what Manuel Castells would call “the grassrooting [of] the space of flows,” Chan’s cinematic practices enrich our public culture by his constant efforts to bring about the contestation of public opinion.12 Made in Hong Kong and New Hong Kong Cinema The making of the film On various occasions, Chan claimed that the film was made to launch a revolution. He spoke with revolutionary rhetoric as a filmmaker who had worked in the film industry for more than ten years. Chan was born in Guangzhou, China in 1959, and moved to Hong Kong at the age of ten. Chan studied filmmaking at the Hong Kong Film Culture Centre set up by Tsui Hark, Ann Hui, Yim Ho, and others, and worked as an assistant director in the industry for many years. Before his independent debut, he had the opportunity INTRODUCTION ●5 to make two mainstream features. While Finale in Blood (produced in 1991 and released in 1993) turned out to be a box-office failure, Five Lonely Hearts (1991) has never been screened in Hong Kong. In the mid-1990s when the Hong Kong film industry sank into a slump, Chan was frustrated by his inability to get industrial sponsorship for his film. He then decided to go “independent” to make a film of immense significance at a historical moment of transition. Chan said that the film was intended to be revolutionary in both the context of Hong Kong history and its film history: I wanted to revolutionize my life. I had been working in the mainstream industry for a long time, but if I had continued conforming to its norms, I wouldn’t have shot Made in Hong Kong. Suddenly making an independent production is a revolution for each and every filmmaker in the mainstream. Moreover, the content of independent films usually subverts institutions and that’s revolutionary to me as well.13 The making of Made in Hong Kong does have a legendary story to tell. Throughout his years of toiling in the industry, he raised about half a million Hong Kong dollars and relied on a crew of only five people to accomplish his production.14 With Lam Wah-chuen and O Sing-pui as cinematographers, Chan directed and scripted the film.