Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment

by David Bordwell

In Planet Hong Kong David Bordwell trains virtually every critical weapon in the cinema studies arsenal on a film industry that has, ironically, been marginalized by its own popular success. Film scholars will be grateful for its theoretical breadth and acuity; film fans will be happy with the graceful way Bordwell weaves into his chapters an extraordinary amount of telling anecdote; and filmmakers will be thrilled with his wonderfully revealing frame-by-frame analyses of Hong Kong cinema's most exemplary moments.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, China, Art, Media Tie In

352 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2000

About the author

David Bordwell, Jacques Ledoux Professor at the University of Wisconsin, is arguably the most influential scholar of film in the United States. The author, with his wife Kristin Thompson, of the standard textbook Film Art and a series of influential studies of directors (Eisenstein, Ozu, Dreyer) as well as periods and styles (Hong Kong cinema, Classical Hollywood cinema, among others), he has also trained a generation of professors of cinema studies, extending his influence throughout the world. His books have been translated into fifteen languages.

Reviews

[Julesreads · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want an introduction to a film topic, and David Bordwell has written about it, fella, read that book. I did not finish this book. I got too desperate and started watching Hong Kong films like a crazy lunatic.

[CM · Rating 4 out of 5]

How wrong I was to assume it's a film history text!! It turned out to be a wide-ranging, meticulous analysis on the styles and characteristics of Hong Kong films with a few chapters on the history and development. For a film buff, nothing can be more enjoyable than seeing Dr Bordwell analyzing films you have watched. In between chapters, a director's oeuvre is scrutinized and explained, especially editing. With all the photos (including multiple shot-to-shot full-page film-still collages) and the commentary on why the executions of techniques are praise-worthy, this book is probably the best book on film appreciation, even better than the standard Film 101 text* in which the author introduces the techniques with little comment.

That being said, an engaging piece of scholarship is still a piece of scholarly work . Even with this translation into my first language (and the fascinating films in my memories), it can still take considerable effort to follow the author, a testament to the rigour of the analysis doubling as a delightful challenge for readers.

A must-have book for every viewer once charmed by HK cinema.

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So how did HK become the Hollywood of the East and then decline in the 90s? As it happened, the answer was unexpectedly straightforward: postwar HK was actually very similar to Hollywood, being the destination of moving talent and capital, and with them, the oversea markets. When these favourable conditions ceased to exist, that's the end of the industry as our market is too small to sustain it.

Given the instability of the postwar Asia-Pacific region (China in civil war, Japan then occupied) , the special status of a British capitalist colony, closely associated with the communist China, has attracted tycoons and talents of various sectors in the region, moving into this tiny area called Hong Kong. These tycoons didn't just come with truckload of cash: they owned cinema chains in Shanghai and Malaysia, meaning the giant overseas Sinophone market. Such market was so huge that a majority of HK cinema was once produced in mandarin. As studio could raise more fund with oversea markets in mind (or simply raise the fund from these markets), HK films were often more flashy and engaging than their competitors. It created an upward loop where capital and talents drove the rising profit and popularity of the industry, which only made HK even more attractive to everyone not already in this business.

It all changed in the early 90s. Non-China oversea markets vanished owed to a mix of socio-economic events and flops in the area**. The trend of multiplexing (turning cinema from 1 screen to 4 or more)eventually led to cinema chains more open to Hollywood productions and "Jurassic Park", the kind of spectacle that fits the local audience perfectly but too advanced and expensive to be produced locally, came along to shatter any resistance to subtitled films with kids-friendly CGI blockbusters. Talents in their prime were either recruited by other industries (first by Hollywood, and later Beijing) or in their way to leave Hong Kong after Beijing's bloody June in 1989. Market share of local films in our box office took a long dive from 70% (1990) to 13.5% (2019) . The industry that once charmed the world is no more.


*Film Art : an introduction, the most widely used textbook on film studies, also by Bordwell.
**The loss of Taiwan, a key oversea market, was owed to the decades-long oppressive business practice of local production companies and the democratization process that allowed showing of Hollywood films.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bordwell is one of the most respected and quoted film scholars in the United States, has written a couple of standard textbooks in wide use, has published books on Eisenstein and Ozu, on film theory and audience reception, on Hollywood--he really covers the waterfront. And he is a stone fan of Hong Kong movies. Part of his method is to use standard film theory/criticism tools in discussing various movies but without bogging things down with discussion of theory itself. He simply does it--shot by shot analysis, narratology, diegetic time-space analysis, blah, blah, blah-allowing the reader to deal with the work on whatever level best suits him.

Bordwell's love for HK movies is on the same level as any true fanatic. This is from his article Aesthetics in Action: Kungfu, Gunplay and Cinematic Expressivity in Yau's book which is also on this list:

...my love for martial arts films goes back to the 1974 double feature of "Fist of Fury" and "Five Fingers of Death" in the Majestic Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin. As a film studies professor I find myself asking questions. How, for instance is it possible for Hong Kong actin movies to trigger such unbridled passion? How are they put together? What is the craft behind them? After you walk out of the best Hong Kong action movies you are charged up, you feel you can do anything. How can mere movies create such feelings?

[Quill · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great survey of what is surely one of the most exciting collisions of time and place in film history. I expected this to be more theory based than it is. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot to learn here though (however, I must note the most illuminating breakdown of editing and angles is a dissection of a scene in Michael Mann’s Heat, notably not a Hong Kong film). Much of Bordwell’s work here is putting into words what one feels when they encounter the cinema of Hong Kong and the varied directors/styles therein. As well, Bordwell handily traces the way mainland China and an American media influence crushed and destroyed what was once an incredibly vibrant artistic movement. The systematic destruction presages the way the entire theatrical system is being destroyed by Disney’s monoculture and the rise of streaming now. Anyway, for any lovers of Hong Kong cinema, this is a definitive chronicle.

[Jeffrey Powanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exhilarating survey of Hong Kong movies by a noted film scholar and an ardent fan. Originally published in 1999, right after the handover of Hong Kong to mainland China, this is a second edition that was updated in 2010. Since the publisher allowed the paperback to go out of print, rights reverted to the author, and I was able to buy the ebook version from Bordwell's blog (http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/) for just $15.

Bordwell is not interested solely in the hermeneutics--the philosophy and science of interpretation--of Hong Kong movies. Instead, he focuses on the poetics. He writes, "I ask about the principles that govern the making of the films. This frame of reference has many advantages, not least among them that it permits film criticism to mesh to some degree with the craft practices of filmmaking." One added benefit to this approach is that Bordwell gets to write about his personal experience watching four decades of Hong Kong movies, from the 70s up to 2010. He talks about the different techniques that Hong Kong movies employed that resulted in many experimental, stylish, and emotionally powerful movies that are not only popular but artistic.

Although Bordwell does not speak or write Chinese, he's visited Hong Kong frequently and is familiar with its movie traditions. Since this is not a history, Bordwell excludes whole genres and periods of Hong Kong movies that don't interest him: Cantonese Opera films, social realism movies of the 50s, musicals, comedies, and melodramas of the 60s, and "films of Sadean violence."

So what does interest Bordwell? Action movies, for sure. He fell in love with kung-fu movies in the 70s after seeing a double-feature of Five Fingers of Death and The Chinese Connection in a rundown theater in Madison, Wisconsin. There's a fantastic chapter on the art of the action film, which dedicates a subchapter to the works of martial masters Chang Cheh, Lau Kar-leung, and King Hu, whom Bordwell admires the most of the three.

Crime dramas also fascinate him. He provides lengthy analyses of the Infernal Affairs movies, the absurdly violent "gun-fu" films of John Woo, and the sophisticated triad movies of Johnny To.

Other Hong Kong directors who win Bordwell's fawning attention: Jeffrey Lau, Tsui Hark, Wong Kar-wai, Wong Jing, Stephen Chow, Bruce Lee, and Jackie Chan, a very male-dominated collection of auteurs. Perhaps more space could have been dedicated to a woman or two, such as Ann Hui and Clara Law.

I tend to share Bordwell's fascination with many of the movies and directors featured in his book. Many Hong Kong movies of the 80s and 90s are simply better than anything that came out of Hollywood. The book frequently celebrates vulgar, absurd, and grotesque Hong Kong movies (thus the lengthy profile of director Wong Jing). Bordwell writes, "Hong Kong film celebrates voluptuousness and grotesquerie it savors cleavage and penile bulges, comic warts and farts, mold-blotched vampires, greedy faces smeared with sauce and fat, and creatures with gigantic tongues. Nothing gorgeous or hideous is alien to this cinema."

Despite his fascination with Hong Kong's vulgarity, Bordwell also extends generous praise to stylish directors such as King Hu and Wong Kar-wai, whose movies are among the most gorgeous ever made. Bordwell notes that sometimes even a formulaic movie made in an assembly-line system can be made with such skill and ingenuity that it turns cliché on its head.

Unlike many other books on Hong Kong movies, Bordwell examines box office receipts, taking a serious look at the business of Hong Kong cinema. The state of the business is not good. After the handover to China, the Hong Kong movie industry went into a tailspin. Production decreased dramatically, financing vanished, budgets shrunk, regional export markets (such as Taiwan) vanished, China imposed strict import quotas on Hong Kong movies, video piracy surged, and Hollywood (i.e., Disney) made significant gains. The glory days of Hong Kong movies, the 80s and 90s, are long gone.

This is a large format book, and there are dozens of color still photos from the movies. If you enjoy Hong Kong movies, you will certainly enjoy this book. Bordwell's enthusiasm is contagious, and I will seek out many of the movies he praised that I have not yet seen.

For my reviews of other Hong Kong cinema books and documentaries, see my blog:
https://coollimabean.wordpress.com/20...

[Keziah · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the few books on this topic which is academic and yet remains open to the lay person with an interest in Chinese-language cinema

[Galen Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It can be a bit dry in parts (as Bordwell tends to be), but absolutely nobody does a better job of exploring how the material realities of filmmaking affect the art.

[Jerstyn Morehay · Rating 5 out of 5]

This goes straight to my "read" pile, and refers to this out-of-print study of popular Hong Kong cinema's online second edition, which I've been slowly chipping away at over the past few weeks whenever I had access to a computer monitor. (Usually at work or on days off at the library.) The late David Bordwell undertook this work in the late '90s just as the handover of the former British colony to mainland China put a big ? on the direction Hong Kong cinema would take. Would it survive, or be subsumed/altered by the directives of the mainland? In addition to giving a definitive history of the traditions and strategies of this robustly regional cinema that gained an international audience, reaching a peak of expressivity, originality, and creativity during the eighties and early nineties, Bordwell shows how the cinema changed and adapted during the first decade of the 21st century in his updated second edition. I haven't seen many of these movies at the time of writing, but I will be frequently referring back to PHK as I gain greater familiarity.

[Kieran · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books on film that I have ever read.

While Bey Logan still has the definitive book on HK action cinema, Bordwell presents us with a fascinating examination of Hong Kong cinema as a whole. Both scholarly and wildly readable, this book has it all: a history of the HK film industry, in-depth examinations of the film-making process, exploration of popular trends, and deep dives into notable filmmakers such as Wong Kar-Wai, Jackie Chan, John Woo, Tsui Hark, Lau Kar-Leung, and many more.

I can’t imagine any book presenting a more informative and engaging overview of HK cinema. It’s one of those special books where you can feel yourself learning as you read. As Roger Ebert said, “Bordwell is the most valuable and readable film scholar in America. He makes a persuasive case for Hong Kong movies as great entertainment and sometimes great art.” I wholeheartedly agree.

[Kseniia Isakova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though David Bordwell is highly celebrated (and rightfully so) for impeccable writing about cinema, I'm a bit underwhelmed with the chapters and passages on Hong Kong action films; it might be due to the fact that it is tough to fully capture the brilliance of this genre in words. Still, his chapters on avant-pop and Wong Kar-wai are excellent. I wasn't big on Chungking Express before (compared to other Wong's films), but Bordwell's analysis made me appreciate this movie tenfold.

[Markle]

Essential, at least to outsiders such as myself.
Provides the background on HK film and popular cinema, and builds a solid foundation upon which in depth analyses of trends, tactics etc. is carried out.

[时间的玫瑰 · Rating 4 out of 5]

不读此书意识不到自己看了那么多的香港电影。列举的一众导演我最不喜欢王家卫，然而却又是对他的那章解读看得最详细。叹作者太高雅(人家是分析艺术你还想怎样)，我喜欢的僵尸片和风月片都是一笔带过，阅毕着实不过瘾唉。

[Kristof Boghe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Read it twice, just because Bordwell's enthusiasm for Hong Kong cinema is so incredibly infectious.

[Dreamersemporium]

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[Lisa]

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