Into the past. Like many others in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and further afield, I became conscious of China’s film heritage in the 1980s, partly as a result of archival and retrospective screenings in the local film festivals. This period was also the golden era of Hong Kong movies, but in my personal opinion, the boom inversely sentenced the creativity aspect of Hong Kong movies to death. The export-led growth of Hong Kong movies forced producers to follow suit on successful movies only. For example, A Better Tomorrow by John Woo brought about a torrential production of heroic gangster movies. Likewise, Swordsman by Hark Tsui generated another overflowing production of costumed martial arts movies.
In the early 90s, because of doing research for Ruan Lingyu (aka Actress ), I had encountered the films of many older Chinese directors and discovered the golden era of China movies was in 1930s and 1940s, when the country was in great turmoil. These movies offered unprecedented realistic images of life, partly because of the directors were rooted in a stronger sense of their own cultural background.
The phenomenon was most outstanding in Shanghai films of 1930s and 1940s, and I would consider this period the most formative and experimental years of Chinese cinema. The broad vision of these Chinese directors certainly had for-flung and formative influence of the audience with regard to their own cultural awareness.
Looking back at Hong Kong films, we could find there indeed [a] similar kind of movement, but it only lasted for a short time. I worked as assistant director to many of the leading directors of the ‘new wave’ group, and felt close to their work from the time they started directing for TV. Their TV work stood in strong contrast to the Hong Kong films of the late 1970s, and they managed to carry their innovative ideas (and higher technical standards) into their movies when they shifted form TV to the film industry. For me, the key figures are Ann Hui, Allen Fong, and Tsui Hark. This new creative spirit prevailed for a time in the late 70s and early 80s, in films like Father and Son and Ah Ying by Allen Fong, The Story of Woo Viet and Boat People by Ann Hui and Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind and Zu by Hark Tsui. Their success might be partly because of the rising standard of the Hong Kong audience. They were no longer contented with seeing the artificial studio films.
These ‘new wave’ movies had revolutionized the screen image of Hong Kong as an urban environment and they made me and others in Hong Kong, on the one hand, more acutely aware of the ‘colonial’ nature of our culture than we had been before. On the other hand, they made us unearth our fear about Communist China, partly because of our limited knowledge about our motherland and partly because of the education we received was also colonial in nature.
In the 1990s, the cinemas of China and Hong Kong are reconverging………