Kenneth E. Hall,
John Woo’s The Killer.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009.
ISBN: 978-962-209-956-2
HKD135.00 (pb)
125pp
(Review copy supplied by Hong Kong University Press)

Fifteen books in Hong Kong University’s reasonably priced New Hong Kong Cinema series have been published to date. Each interprets an individual film from the fragrant harbour according to each author’s critical preferences, much in the manner of the Film Classics series from the British Film Institute.

The series currently covers a five-decade period stretching from A Touch of Zen (Taiwan 1969) to the Infernal Affairs trilogy (Hong Kong 2002-03). Likewise, it encompasses a broad range of film types, including low-budget independent movies like Made in Hong Kong (Hong Kong 1997), special effects extravaganzas like Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (Hong Kong 1983), edgy art films like Happy Together (Hong Kong 1997), and violent action movies like Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (Hong Kong 1986).

Fascinatingly, despite such diversity (or perhaps because of it), editors Ackbar Abbas and Wimal Dissanayake make negligible effort in the series preface to define the film movement in question. They do, however, assert that “New Hong Kong cinema came into existence under very special circumstances, during a period of social and political crisis resulting in a change of cultural paradigms” (p. ix). You might expect these “very special circumstances”, simply as a function of their uniqueness and importance, to be articulated to the reader in a clear and succinct way. Instead, the editors flimsily cite the oft-repeated issue of the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China in 1997, as if this one event (if only all its implications and contradictions could be unravelled) consolidates every possible concern about contemporary Hong Kong culture, including the motivations and undertakings of the entire Hong Kong film community and the popular and critical reception of Hong Kong films to Chinese-speaking and other audiences locally, regionally and globally.

Hall’s account of John Woo and his widely admired The Killer (Hong Kong 1989) can’t escape this narrow framework centered on handover anxiety, but thankfully does go beyond its limitations.
Hall is the Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages at East Tennessee State University and author of another book about Woo. He has drawn on his own personal correspondence with Woo and cinematographer Peter Pau to usefully take authorial intention on board to explain certain aspects of The Killer’s construction.

He divides his account into six chapters. The first briefly summarises Woo’s personal and professional background, including his work as an assistant to Chang Cheh and his admiration for Jean-Pierre Melville. Also highlighted are some of the thematic notions evident across Woo’s oeuvre, but especially in The Killer: heroism, loyalty, chivalric tradition, integrity, generosity, faith. Hall often returns to these and similar motifs throughout his text, linking them with much of Woo’s stylistic decision-making.

The next chapter contains an all-too-brief three-page account of the film’s production history. We gain some sense of the juggling required to set-up and fund the picture as a co-production between Tsui Hark’s Film Workshop, Golden Princess and co-star Danny Lee’s Magnum Films, but the creative differences between Woo and Hark are glossed over. After The Killer, Woo formed his own production company for his next picture, Bullet in the Head (Hong Kong 1990), while Hark directed the third instalment of the previously Woo-directed A Better Tomorrow series for Film Workshop. Strangely, Woo claims to Hall that The Killer “was one movie where I had total creative freedom” (p. 82), a rather hyperbolic statement possibly calculated to deflate producer Hark’s contribution to not just The Killer but also Woo’s sudden mid-career blossoming as a commercial director. More certain is Woo’s revelation to Hall that he was provided with an ample 90-day shooting schedule, a substantially longer duration than was typical for the period and budget scale. However, we aren’t provided with any fine detail about how the longer schedule influenced Woo’s shooting methods and staging techniques, e.g. for some of the picture’s complex and lengthy action scenes like the final battle at the church or the assassination during the dragon boat race. This chapter might also have benefited from a discussion of Chow Yun Fat’s immaculate and invincible star persona at the time of The Killer‘s release, especially since it is Chow’s hero in The Killer who embodies many of the thematic virtues that Hall claims Woo wishes to express. (It’s hard to imagine anyone else invoking so much dignified authority as Chow does when he simply sits in an armchair and gazes at a wall a thousand miles away as smoke slowly rises from his dangling cigarette.)

The third chapter deals with style and narrative structure, drawing on a wide array of reference points to advance The Killer as “a salient example of cross-cultural influence in Hong Kong filmmaking” (p. 23). In short order, Hall compares aspects of The Killer with elements from a gamut of movies, including French and American films noir, classic and spaghetti westerns, Hong Kong wuxia and oddities like The 400 Blows (France 1959) and The Shining (UK/USA 1980). Such is the breadth of Hall’s comparative analysis it’s a little surprising that he doesn’t call attention to the influence on Woo of any Japanese yakuza films in this context. (Perhaps accessibility was a limiting factor. The fairly minor influence of Kurosawa’s widely available samurai films, on the other hand, is briefly discussed in the first chapter.)

Hall is quite concerned to delineate “signature” (pp. 24, 43) moments that highlight Woo’s original deployment of multitudinous stylistic motifs and flourishes gathered over decades of movie consumption. He elaborates key differences in the similar plots of The Killer and Melville’s Le Samouraï (France/Italy 1967) and considers how the totality of Woo’s predilection for techniques like slow motion, “a mobile, circling, zooming camera” (p. 33), insert shots, rapid cutting, overlapping shots, and so on equates to a distinctive personal aesthetic. In other popular fan culture terms that Hall avoids, a “heroic bloodshed” or “bullet ballet” aesthetic.

As mentioned earlier, Hall does partially follow the tendency of many scholars of Hong Kong cinema to find within the textual characteristics of individual movies evidence of anxiety regarding social upheaval and change in Hong Kong. Hall links The Killer to the 1997 handover and the more proximate civil unrest at Tiananmen Square in 1989 by contending that the film was “conceived, made and released within a national and international context of potential and actual violence and disruption” (p. 36). Given such loose parameters, I hope it’s fairly self-evident that the same could be said of any Hong Kong movie made in the late-1960s or early-2000s to cite just two periods where local and global events of consequence disturbed the fabric of society. Having said that I suppose it’s only a matter of time before someone connects Come Drink With Me(Hong Kong 1966) to anti-colonial civil unrest in Hong Kong in the mid-1960s, or weaves an account of traumatic post-911, post-SARS life in Hong Kong through a ‘reading’ of Running On Karma (Hong Kong/China 2003).

Hall continues, suggesting that elements of Hong Kong society resented the colonial authorities for allowing the handover to occur and he links this Zeitgeist to the local cinema by honing in on the theme of betrayal that is “common in films of the period, including The Killer” (p. 36). My response to this is threefold. First, betrayal is an exceptionally common theme, universal to all cinema, anywhere, from any period. Second, even if themes of betrayal were asymmetrically dominant in Hong Kong cinema during the 1980s and 1990s, there are other credible reasons beyond the ‘handover anxiety’ thesis why this might have been the case. Stephen Teo, for instance, has cited Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (Italy/USA 1984) as a seminal influence on Hong Kong gangster movies, “particularly in its theme of loyalty and betrayal which understandably evokes a great sense of empathy with Hong Kong filmmakers who saw in the theme parallels with the code of yi” (p. 184). Finally, since The Killer also explores redemption and forgiveness for those that betray us, how are those particular themes supposed to represent Hong Kong’s social reality with respect to the handover?

There’s a sense in chapter four that Hall is equally attentive to Melville as he is to Woo. Here we’re taken deeper into the former’s influence on the latter. As Woo explains about Melville, “it’s his way of staging action, of making sequences last until the action explodes,” (p. 51) that has reverberated and found its way into Woo’s work. The lesson here is not to slavishly imitate another director’s formal approach, but to learn in what contexts a certain set of techniques maximally function and then to find fresh ways of combining and incorporating them to serve new and distinctive interests. As Hall explains in several places, Woo deals in melodramatic excess and he prefers emotion to rise. Quite the opposite to Melville’s cynicism and starkness. Yet both have a predilection for elongating sequences to concentrate and practically meditate on small details and physical process of action (Woo just cuts faster and with less respect for temporal continuity).

Of course, influence is a two-way deal. Along with Hard Boiled (Hong Kong 1992), The Killer is among the most well known, admired and, inevitably, influential of Woo’s Hong Kong films. Hall appraises how Woo’s visual and narrative style in The Killer has subsequently been inherited by a new generation of filmmakers in the book’s fifth chapter. His coverage encompasses a wide and flavoursome bunch from the East and West: Johnnie To and Patrick Leung from Hong Kong, Luc Besson, Jim Jarmusch, Robert Rodriguez, and South Korea’s Park Chan-wook and Kang Je-gyu.
At this point in the book I would have liked the discussion of The Killer as a transnational beacon to turn to the effect it has had on audiences. Only a modest box office success in Hong Kong, it had immense cult popularity across the region and of course put Woo on Hollywood’s radar thanks to screenings at the Toronto and Cannes film festivals. The text may have benefited from highlighting trends in the reception and distribution of Hong Kong films in regional markets to help explain The Killer’s phenomenal success.

The final chapter mounts a defence of Woo’s Hollywood films, which with the possible exception of Face/Off(USA 1997) have generally not been well received. After citing Woo’s lack of interest in retreading old creative turf, Hall briefly argues that the war film Windtalkers (USA 2002) represents “a valiant attempt . . . to renew and recast his filmmaking within another context” (p. 75). Operating with the assumption that The Killer is a pinnacle of Woo’s career, Hall draws similarities between it and the way Windtalkers is constructed stylistically and thematically to demonstrate that Woo might not be as different in Hollywood as he was in Hong Kong after all.

I imagine it’s a small regret of Hall’s that his text was finalised prior to the release of Woo’s two-part historical epic, Red Cliff (China 2008-09), the first Chinese-speaking features Woo has made since 1992, which together show how his career has once again made a left turn.
Despite my personal reservations with the New Hong Kong Cinema series’ insistence on a reflectionist approach to cinema that overstates textuality and interpretation, Hall’s insights about The Killer comprise a very welcome addition to an expanding sphere of English-language film studies. With two additional books in the series devoted to Woo, there’s now a much richer source of material available about this commercial yet uniquely expressive filmmaker.

James Brown,
Flinders University, South Australia.

References:

Kenneth E. Hall, John Woo: The Films, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999.
Stephen Teo, Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions, London: British Film Institute, 1997.

Created on: Sunday, 18 April 2010