时间：2022-06-20 11:24:54
Abstract：Hollywood's movies have always been the dominant power in today's movie world and its culture makes deep impact on films around the world, while at the same time, Hong Kong exerts the oriental cultural influence on the west world, especially the Hollywood's movies.
Key words：Hollywood movies, cultural interaction, film makers, martial arts films, overseas Asian audiences, immigration and nostalgia, profit centres.
As the outcome of the upgrading of motion picture theatres, the spread of cable and satellite services, the emancipation of state-controlled broadcasting, and the pent-up demand for entertainment of all types, Hollywood oversea market grew quickly during the 1980s, with its tentacles reaching every corner of the world. As the economical centre of Asia, with the huge audience market, Hong Kong stands in the collision between Chinese tradition and Hollywood's wave. "Increasingly, dangerous movements across space, transgressions of norms and good taste, and tweaked, nihilistic visions of the past and the present have become regular screen features to induce odd and new sensations in a young generation of image users."(Yau, 2001)
Hollywood's movies and culture make deep impact on Hong Kong; at the same time, Hong Kong exerts the oriental cultural influence on the west world. Being tired of the similar Hollywood style, the western audiences tried to find something fresh and new, so Hong Kong became a special tourist attraction and the subject of exotic stories. This kind of situation gave Hong Kong's talented film makers excellent opportunities to make their own films. According to Abbas, alert and reflective, exceptional film directors and literary writers such as Wong Kar-Wai, Stanley Kwan, Clara Law, Ye Si(also known as Leung Ping-Kwan), and Xi Xi have used images, poetry, and fiction to evoke this unique culture and to capture their responses to reality that constantly outpaces conventional awareness(Abbas, 1997). They made some of the most outstanding Asian films which were imported into a global Hollywood market soon, and made Hong Kong cinema a mainstay among a large and growing cult of American fans since the 1960's.
Yau argues that the basic considerations for Hong Kong cinema in the global and local contexts can be summarized in the following points: (1) Hong Kong films are produced in a city that was of immense geopolitical (or U.S.- Asian) significance both during and since the cold war years, and social orientation in this regional financial center has been consciously world oriented, profit driven, and time competitive; (2) Hollywood productions and American popular culture remain dominant, while Japanese popular culture has shaped the tastes of most adolescents; (3) the dependence on overseas audiences has contributed to the large number of action genres such as martial arts films and thrillers; (4) the films articulate a Hong Kong identity that is connected with and detached from both the Western world and the Chinese world, and they often refute the official "success" story while attempting to construct a native memory. Based on these arguments, we will identify A Chinese Ghost story as an example for Hong Kong cinema in the global markets.
A Hong Kong Cinema in Global Context
A Chinese Ghost story [Qiannu Youhun] (1987) is one of the most successful Asian cinemas in 1980s, directed by Ching Siu-tung and produced by Media Asia, imported and distributed by Tai Seng in the US. The filmmaker Tsui Hark is internationally well-known for his iconoclastic style, solid storytelling, and tightly maintained pace. He has worked in the industry as an actor, a producer, an editor and, first and foremost, as a director. And it finally became an A Chinese Ghost story series which is a landmark example of the Hong Kong "magical-action" genre, having its roots within both Chinese legend and spectacular martial arts choreography.
A Chinese Ghost story is a love story between ghost and human beings: In ancient China, Ning Tsei-Shen (Leslie Cheung) is a young tax-collector on his way to Kwok Pak village. He's caught by a rainstorm, and when he arrives at the village after the downpour, he finds all his notes soaked and the ink faded. Unable to collect his taxes and thus out of money, he decides to stay in the remote Lan Ro Temple for the night. When he finally reaches his destination after dark, he arrives in the midst of a fierce battle between a Taoist Monk and a noble warrior. Distracted by the intrusion, the fighters quit their test of skills and depart while Ning prepares for the night in the abandoned and spooky temple.
Later that night, he hears music and a female voice singing from somewhere. Intrigued by the beautiful and alluring sound, he follows it to its source and meets the ethereal Nieh Hsiao-Tsing (Joey Wang). Instantaneously, the two of them fall in love with each other. There's a catch, though… Ning doesn't know that Nieh is a lady ghost. She is just a lesser spirit, under the spell of a much stronger and more powerful being, Lau Lau, a true vampire. Nieh is responsible for luring men to certain death with her beauty, making them prey for the vampire. In order to save Ning's life, Nieh has to betray Lau Lau, incurring the powerful demon's wrath. From there, the story deals with Ning's efforts to save Nieh from her arranged marriage to hideous demon lord.
In many Hong Kong films, experimental syncretism is pursued with an irreverent playfulness that puts less emphasis on experimental cinematography and more on special effects and unexpected juxtapositions (Yau 2001). A Chinese Ghost Story is highly conscious of genre conventions but at the same time keeps a close eye on style and exotic sensuousness. Art direction, special effects, kinetic choreography, and star personae all enjoy primary importance in the creative process. The film's juxtaposition of multiple references and temporalities combines a seventeenth- century literary classic by Pu Songling and comic book horror with ghost films from Japan- including Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari (1953)- and a Cantonese precedent, Li Han- hsiang's The Enchanting Shadow [Qiannv youhun] (1960), from which A Chinese Ghost Story drew its Chinese title. Local critics at the 1989 Hong Kong International Film Festival commented on the film's hyperactive rhythm and packed special effects and likened it to a "[television] commercial" (Li 1989). But one may add that the fantastic or ghostly dimension as rendered by special effects has benefited from George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) and Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), just as its mood and visual imagery are inspired by King Hu's wuxia or swordplay film classics The Dragon Gate Inn [Longmen Kezhan] (1967) and Legend of the Mountain [Shanzhong Chuanqi] (1979).
The importation of Hong Kong cinemas into Hollywood and their success in the global market largely attribute to the Chinese immigration wave all over the world, especially in US. In a quickly developing environment, the disintegration of their local notions, their obvious relations to the past, and their strong feelings of nostalgia are both provoked and absorbed by consumer culture. Elements in A Chinese Ghost Story such as the film's rich colors and the female ghost's excessive capacity for faithfulness in love make up a romantic ethnography involving fantasy and fiction which is easily accepted and understood by a Chinese.
We should also pay more attention to Ning, who also represent the typical ancient Chinese scholars: reading a lot of books but incapable, timid and weak, but filled with courage when he decides to achieve a goal. His behaviors usually make us Chinese smile with understanding. According to Chow, rather than expressing a desire to return to a simpler past or revealing the social hardships of the past, through nostalgia film a materially affluent society conjures up a tragic but beautiful mythic community (Chow, 1995). There are many films riding the wave of immigration and nostalgia in addressing local audiences. Linda Chiu-han Lai identifies the films that cite and re-encode popular Cantonese and Mandarin film conventions. In Peter Chan's He Aren't Heavy, He's My Father! (Xin Nanxiong Nandi 1993), Derek Yee's C'est la vie, mon cheri (Buliao Qing 1993), and Clifton Ko's I Will Wait For You (Niannian you Jinri 1994), Lai finds nostalgia intertwined with a sense of local community and faith in modern progress. Because of Hollywood's ambition in dominating the global market and the largest Chinese audience market, it is not surprising that American filmmakers borrow ideas, scenes and full shot sequences from Hong Kong movies openly. Like so much HK cinema, there's a chop-suey approach to the plot: there are nifty martial arts fights, horrible slayings, a mistaken identity subplot (standard), love scenes, a scene inspired by bedroom farce, a Tao flavoured rock music and mystical battles.
Compared with those traditional Art Films, this film's "light doses of Chineseness" can be a panacea for those seeking alternatives to Hollywood fare and for homesick overseas Asian audiences. Circulating in the far-reaching networks already established by immigrant businesses and economic Diasporas, Hong Kong movies can appear provincial yet also Hollywood-like; they have become the cultural counterpart of the cosmopolitan capitalist undertakings that many Asians, especially ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs, have launched since the nineteenth century." (Hamilton 1999) Only displaying Chinese culture superficially, this film has a modern, worldly sensibility that is part sentimentality and part rationalism, but obviously fantasy oriented. We should not take this adjustment as the cause of their inability, but as their efforts to make the movie fit for the global market, and to gain more profit. There are also technical improvements in this movie, such as improved dubbing surround sound effects, original and classical music, and more flexible camera techniques. These improvements represented a modernization of film language and techniques.
A New Animation Movie
Based on his original live-action A Chinese Ghost Story, which is released in 1987, and pacing with the latest computer graphics, Tsui Hark and his group produced an animation with the same name in 1997. In the new animation movie, Ning becomes a young man who was recently rejected by his heart-throb Siu Lan, wanders the world along with his dog, Solid Gold. There is an interesting factor which we should notice: in fact, people never regard dogs as pet in Chinese history. In Chinese history, dog can be a guard, sometimes can be food for the hungry people, but it can never be a pet in ancient China. Regarding dogs as pet is Western life style, not Chinese style.
In the interview section of the DVD, Tsui Hark says his intent was to show some of the wilder ideas he couldn't fit into the live-action version, and also to give the infant Hong Kong animation industry a kick-start. But when we think about the case in depth, we may find it an inevitable consequence of globalization in film markets. Especially with the spread of VCRs all over the world, when given a choice, consumers preferred entertainment with greater appeal and more variety than their state broadcasting monopolies provided. In 1978, VCR sales totaled around 500,000; by 1987, sales topped 40 million, or nearly one-third of all households. Like their counterparts in the United States, European VCR owners not only wanted to time shift programming to suit their own schedules, but also to enjoy different kinds of programming , particularly Hollywood movies (Watson 1992). The message was clear: a lot of adjustment need to do in order to suit the Hollywood market and to suit the global market in the long run.
It's better to say that A Chinese Ghost Story: The Tsui Hark Animation tried to imitate the Disney model than that it draws inspiration from Disney animations: The Chinese countryside comes alive with backgrounds that are computer generated, reminiscent of video game FMV sequences. Well-placed musical numbers adorn the fairy-tale love story, as well as fast-paced magical action sequences, not to mention a constant barrage of stunning CG work that has only recently been improved upon. They are unmistakably Chinese in content (performed by popular Chinese artists) and tempo, but Disney in model and American in techniques. As Manalone Ho argues that the introduction of computer animation is driven by an adventurous spirit, in much the same way Tsui Hark pioneered the use of Hollywood-style special effects in Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain more than ten years ago. So A Chinese Ghost Story is the marriage of the animation styles of Hong Kong, China and the 3-dimensional visual effects as well as the use of colour are indeed astonishing (Ho 1998). And we may notice that the English dubbing is pretty decent, albeit in this case the Mandarin track (if watching the DVD) would give you a more authentic experience. ACGS also gives you a brief glimpse of the intricate and interesting world of Chinese mythology.
A Chinese Ghost Story: The Tsui Hark Animation made its U.S. theatrical premiere at San Francisco's Four-Star theatre in March and is then making its way to movie theatres across America. This film's fast acceptance and absorption by Hollywood can be regarded as Hollywood studios partnering with other producers and distributors. During the 1960s, motion picture companies were either taken over by huge multifaceted corporations, absorbed into burgeoning entertainment conglomerates, or became conglomerates through diversification. The impetus behind this merger movement was to stabilize operations by creating numerous "profit centres" to protect against business downturns in a specific area (Balio 1985). Acquiring theatre chains was an extension of this philosophy, and Hollywood's cooperation with other producers is a manner to strengthen its distribution, to control the world entertainment market. As film industry analyst Harold Vogel put it: "Ownership of entertainment distribution capability is like ownership of a toll road or bridge. No matter how good or bad the software product (i.e., movie, record, book, magazine, TV show, or whatever) is, it must pass over or cross through a distribution pipeline in order to reach the consumer. And like at any toll road or bridge that cannot be circumvented, the distributor is a local monopolist who can extract a relatively high fee for use of his facility." (Vogel 1989)
On one hand, Tsui Hark hoped his film copies to be sold all over the world, or at least acquire a good reputation in America, so he had to cater the Hollywood taste to pass over or cross through its worldwide distribution pipeline; on the other hand, Hollywood want to take this opportunity to expand its influence over Asia, and because A Chinese Ghost Story: The Tsui Hark Animation was basically a Disney movie, it is also an opportunity to show Hollywood cultural superiority, so their cooperation is predictable.
Why did Tsui Hark decide to make an animation with the same name as his original live-action A Chinese Ghost Story? One possible answer is that Disney only recently visited ancient China with 1998's Mulan, maybe the time is finally right for Asian international cinema－ specifically animated international cinema－ to come into its own. But why did he make these Chinese films in completely Hollywood style? The only answer is "economy of desire". Arjun Appadurai has identified imagination and media literacy as shaping migration and the formation of new ethnoscapes as people negotiate the uneven conditions created by global and regional flows of finance, technology, information, images, and ideas, both within and across national boundaries. Imagination in the era of globalization, moreover, adapts and processes images and forms that are already in circulation (Appadurai 1996). The subjective realm is increasingly articulated through technology and individual consumption, giving rise to the notion of an "economy of desire" (Jameson and Miyoshi 1998; Negri 1999).
"When one speaks of globalization," Antonio Negri posits, "one really speaks of it in a double sense: extensively, as the global enlargement of the productive fabric through markets; and intensively, as the absorption of all social life within capitalist production" (Negri 1999). In the extensive sense, mobility and interchangeability are key terms for understanding the operations of productive forces and labor power that have been mobilized and absorbed by more-abstract forms of finance capital. In the intensive sense, culture, traditions, and innovation that were once considered "subjective" realms outside of capital are now reconstituted by an "economy of desire". With consumption replacing production as the motor for market expansion, "affect" and "sentiment" have become economically viable terms in a postmodern conception of an "economy of desire" that revises the modernist notion of political economy (Negri 1999). The profit or "economy of desire" of cultural production and consumption and the time inscribed in a Hong Kong film are generally in sync with the speed and amount of investment, return, and financial trading that occur all over the world, in a number of big cities.
In the beginning of this film's production, Hark was faced with an imposing series of obstacles: "There were computer problems and there was a lack of qualified people in the field in Hong Kong," he says. "On top of that, I couldn't find any sponsors and I had to buy the computers myself. The equipment alone cost over 10 million H.K. dollars." Work started on the animated Chinese Ghost Story in 1993. Top Hong Kong actors were hired to provide character voices including Anita Yuen (The Chinese Feast), comedian Erik Kot (Lawyer, Lawyer), and heartthrob Jordan Chan (the Young and Dangerous series). The final bill for Hong Kong's first domestically produced animated feature for quite some time came out to around US$7 million, an enormous investment during a tough time for the Hong Kong film industry. It is obvious that without such an enormous investment, there would be no such a success.
Conclusion
The cross-cultural communications have benefit both Hollywood and Hong Kong film market, and there always exist interactions between them: on one hand, not only Hollywood's action movies integrate Hong Kong action choreography into the American commercial mainstream to make movies such as Mortal Kombat (1995), Lethal Weapon 4 (1997), and The Matrix (1999), but also Hollywood drew inspiration form Chinese stories to make movies such as Mulan (1998); on the other hand, not only action choreographers such as Yuen Wo- ping and his crew, but also the directors and stars of action movies, including John Woo, Ronnie Yu, Chow Yun- fat, and Jet Li have been hired by Hollywood.
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