Made in Hong Kong: Geoffrey O'Brien on the films of Shaw Brothers studio

ArtForum, Sept, 2004 by Geoffrey O'Brien

AT THE DAWN OF THE 1960S, on the shore of Hong Kong's Clearwater Bay, a world capital of sorts came into being: Movietown, the production center of the seemingly unbeatable Shaw Brothers Ltd., a company that had parlayed a movie-theater business in prerevolutionary Shanghai into a global concern dominating both production and exhibition in Chinese-language markets. Looking in aerial photographs like a cross between a low-income housing project and a theme park crammed with ancient Chinese motifs, Movietown was in its heyday a self-contained filmmaking universe open around the clock and churning out as many as seven features at a time--some three hundred were made in the studio's first twelve years--to fill the screens of Hong Kong and Taiwan and Southeast Asia, and beyond that all the screens of the diaspora of London and New York and San Francisco and every other city with a Chinatown.

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Movietown's standing sets, employed in movie after movie, would become a familiar alternate world: a phantom China whose temples and palaces, taverns and brothels, labyrinthine fortresses, picturesque rock formations, and subterranean canals provided the setting for an endless succession of combats, conspiracies, rigorous apprenticeships, bloody sacrifices, and displays of extravagant skill both martial and supernatural. Even though geographically and temporally inaccessible, this lost China--destroyed by history and thereby permitted to flourish as myth--asserted its undying presence through vibrant color schemes and rousingly noisy music and sound effects. The movie offered not just a story but an extension of place to alleviate the claustrophobia of exile. The screen was like a window or a harbor front opening into a past that signaled its defiant robustness with overpowering displays of physical energy, leaps above treetops, high-speed attacks and evasions, fight scenes in which (as in the finale of 1972's Boxer from Shantung) a wounded warrior could keep knocking down dozens of opponents for ten minutes with a hatchet embedded in his stomach.

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The wuxia pian ("films of chivalric combat") that in the late '60s and early '70s dominated Shaw Brothers' releases embodied the oldest of traditions, extending from classic novels like the seventeenth-century Water Margin (to which Shaw Brothers paid tribute with a 1972 film version followed by the 1973 sequel, All Men Are Brothers) and the melodrama and acrobatics of Chinese opera to the swordplay and displays of magic that became a staple of Chinese movies from the silent era on. From those early sources the movies preserved not only a repertoire of devices and situations but, beneath all the heroic fantasy, an ancient harshness grounded in political realism. In the absence of reliable, uncorrupted law enforcement or any notion of popular sovereignty, heroic action was an improvisational kind of justice, created ad hoc in the midst of emerging confrontations and shored up by whatever loyalties were available to be called upon.

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But Shaw Brothers movies were also harbingers of the modern. Their dazzlingly bright colors and expansive Shawscope compositions revamped the inherited inventory of adventure stories into artifacts that seemed futuristic: the products of a China yet to be, streamlined and globally competitive, not a version of Hollywood, but an alternative to Hollywood. Soon enough, with the advent of Bruce Lee and the triumph of kung fu, Hong Kong filmmakers would look beyond Chinese-language audiences, leading the way to the gaudy era when Tsui Hark, John Woo, and their colleagues briefly made Hong Kong movies into a world model for genre filmmaking--faster, wilder, and more flamboyantly stylized than the American competition.

By then, the splendor of the earlier films was just a memory. In Chinatowns all over the world, movie theaters were shutting down one by one, Movietown had begun its long decline, and the widescreen epics of great directors like King Hu, Zhang Che, and Chu Yuan survived, if at all, as truncated, faded, panned-and-scanned, horribly dubbed videos, interspersed indistinguishably with far cruder and cheaper martial-arts fodder and valued chiefly as a source of motifs and samples for hip-hop records. The movies of a lost world were themselves consigned to a lost world; there were even rumors of negatives faded beyond restoration.

But now, in an unanticipated bonanza, we have been witnessing through the good offices of Celestial Pictures in Hong Kong a flood of digitally restored items from the Shaw Brothers catalogue, with the promise of many more to come: The library amounts to some eight hundred movies. These reissues as they proceed over the coming years promise to expand drastically our sense of the generic and stylistic range of Hong Kong filmmaking. The Film Society of Lincoln Center, which premiered a good number of the new prints last summer, will include a Shaw Brothers retrospective in the New York Film Festival next month. The festival will focus especially on the newly revealed splendors of the late '50s and early '60s, a period dominated by sumptuously artificial opera films like Li Han-hsiang's The Kingdom and the Beauty (1959) and Beyond the Great Wall (1964) and heart-wrenching romantic dramas like Chin Tao's Endless Love (1961). (All three of those films are marked by the indelible presence of Lin Dai, an actress whose tragic roles were echoed by her own suicide at thirty.) The process of excavation is only beginning.