“You wouldn’t see many ghosts, spirits, hopping vampires, flying monks, and cross-dressing in major American motion pictures, or any other industry. The highest grossing films throughout Hong Kong history—noirs, comedies, pulp science fictions, wuxia—are what would be underground, B-level pictures anywhere else. This subversiveness in their filmmaking did not happen in a vacuum.” // HEADER VIDEO: Trailer for Executioners (現代豪俠傳, 1993) © Paka Hill Productions

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essay, aug 24, anniversary issue

Being the editor of a speculative fiction magazine, it may come as no surprise to know my favorite films are largely in the genre movie category, or “B-movie,” as they are both affectionately and derisively called. B-movies are marked by low budgets and the occasional bad acting, but are also vehicles for stories too sordid to be told by mainstream cinema. Think Frankenstein (1931) and how terrified contemporary viewers were of the gruesome, post-scientific creature. Think The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the groundbreaking German film which the emergent-Hollywood labeled endemic of a “foreign invasion,” later attempting to picket and ban the film’s release.

While popularity for B-movies grew, they were still by definition, an alternative product. Quick production; sensational themes; explicit romance; nonconformity; violence; won’t be played in any of the big theater chains: these attributes define the B-picture. But when one looks through the many storied films of Hong Kong cinema—from the action-comedic mastery of Jackie Chan to the grimy, low-budget works of Wong Kar-Wai to the high-flying martial arts of Shaw Brothers productions—one sees the prominence of pulp and B-movie tropes. This has not been by accident.

The same genres that the west regard as “low brow,” or middle-class, are the same modes of storytelling that the majority of the eastern world prize. Subtlety, realism, and sophistication are qualities constituting great literary or cinematic works by western sensibilities, while genre works are “mindless” and mass-market. The opposite of this is what we see in so much of Asian cinema. The most obvious example is the “more is more” philosophy of Bollywood, with its romance-action-song-and-dance formula seen as lesser, populist entertainment by even some of the subcontinent’s own contingent.

With the growth of India’s middle class and increased investment, Bollywood produced more and more of the type of film their audience wanted: the genre movie. Theirs became a colorful, outrageous, and reality-bending formula for film. And over time, we saw less of the slow-paced, European-inspired prestige dramas, and more of the mass market films of outlandish plot twists and breakout musicals.

The cinema of Hong Kong developed much in the same way. Their biggest films defied western conventions of pacing and realism, like the smash hit The Love Eterne (1963), a gender-bending, female-centric fantasy-musical. But while Bollywood films were produced with sizable budgets and a strict adherence to censor laws, Hong Kong filmmaking saw low budgeting, no direct government influence, and soundless filming (until recently, Cantonese films were shot without sound; the overdubbed dialogue and even scripts were typically written collaboratively during and after shooting.) Many of the industry’s greatest actors were Cantopop singers who relied on improvisation and experimentation, like the androgynous and boundary-pushing Anita Mui or Leslie Cheung, the latter of who improvised an entire sex scene with Tony Leung in Happy Together (1997).

You wouldn’t see many ghosts, spirits, hopping vampires, flying monks, and cross-dressing in major American motion pictures, or any other industry. The highest grossing films throughout Hong Kong history—noirs, comedies, pulp science fictions, wuxia—are what would be underground, B-level pictures anywhere else. This subversiveness in their filmmaking did not happen in a vacuum.

A rebellious streak runs through these films—as well an inclination for courting controversy. Go see a Hong Kong movie and you’ll see characters distrustful of the police, of the government, of authority. You’ll see a shocking desensitization to violence and a need to fight back. You’ll see martyrdom of the cinema’s biggest heroes; Bruce Lee’s Chen Zhen is famously gunned down by police at the end of Fist of Fury (1972).

All this is not without reason. Since 1841, Hong Kong has been under British, Japanese, and now Chinese rule. Hong Kong has never been an independent state.

The social resistance of Hong Kong cinema

As popularity for cinema grew in the 20th century, so too did the desire for each nation to have their own. Hong Kong, then a British colony, found its footing in film in the 1960s, with the Shaw Brothers (romanization of Shao) producing popular wuxia films (a mixture of fantasy, martial arts, and historical fiction.) These films began to eclipse the mainland’s in terms of popularity—prompting the Nationalist Party of China once to ban wuxia films for promoting superstition and anarchy, proposing even a “Mandarin-only” policy on China’s filmmaking.

In so many wuxia—films, though the stories are ostensibly set in ancient times—the villains are a Japanese or imperialistic Chinese force. And there was the antagonistic white man here and there, too—all in vile and brilliantly reductive roles—a practice that never quite went away. In 1996’s Comrades: Almost a Love Story, a white man (Christopher Doyle) abruptly announces, “I might have AIDS.”

Hong Kong increasingly made films in their own image and to their own satisfaction. From kung fu to ghost stories (which were similarly banned in the mainland), the country’s cinema delivered a strikingly different and alternative offering. All this as mainstream Hollywood veered toward romanticized realism, Japan relied more on gritty jidaigeki dramas, Italy had their neorealismo, and France ushered in their navel-gazing nouvelle vague.

The cinema halls of Hong Kong meanwhile packed films of fantasy, horror, action, erotica, and non-conformist expression. And decades before Hollywood, the cinema of Hong Kong allowed for female-told stories. Tang Shu Shuen, one of the earliest prominent women directors in Asia, made tradition-busting classics like China Behind (1974) and The Arch (1968)—the latter of which boasted Subrata Mitra’s radical cinematography, while the former was banned even from Hong Kong. Ann Hui made, and continues to make, striking and controversial films—none more controversial and urgent than 1982’s Boat People. Mabel Cheung helmed An Autumn’s Tale (1987), the beloved romantic-comedy blockbuster, as well as The Soong Sisters (1997), which reattributes the creation of the Republic of China to the three sisters who married its three founders.

My entry into Hong Kong cinema was through the ‘70s films of Jackie Chan and the Shaw Brothers Studio, but I gravitate now toward the many androgynous and adroitly anti-establishment stories Hong Kong produced in the next decades. Stanley Kwan, one of Asia’s first and few openly queer filmmakers, enlisted Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung in 1987’s Rouge, a ghost and romance story.

Rouge, lonely and sensual in its tale of lost love, splits its narrative between two timelines separated by 50 years, doubling as a story of the nation’s impending handover to China. And though the film’s two couples are heterosexual, in framing the story around the iconic and outspoken Cantopop star, Anita Mui (whose epicene fashion and onstage hip gyrations were deemed “spiritually polluting” and in violation of female propriety) as well as her male counterpart in Cheung, the film becomes not one story, or two, but multiple different things, open and ambiguous and androgynous.

Death of the golden age

In our current century, however, this great film industry has seen its ups and downs. Coinciding with increased censorship, failed protests for independence, and the 2020 criminalization of separatism advocacy, the cinema of Hong Kong has been unable to reproduce the last four decades’ magic. It has seen comebacks in recent times, with increased theater turnout following the COVID pandemic, and it has also faced difficulties and declines again and again. Demand for local films have been dying down in favor of mainland Chinese and western fare. The highest grossing films of Hong Kong now are Avengers and Avatar films, same as everywhere else.

“Eventually young filmmakers have to take their chances in the commercial market. Audiences are much more sophisticated these days,” reasons the secretary general of the government-established Film Development Council. “They want something that is more than just entertainment or pure excitement.”

Many of the great filmmakers of the ‘80s and ‘90s have similarly disappointed. Several have ventured overseas, or now make films for the mainland. Jackie Chan, since 2013, has been an advocate for the Chinese Communist Party. Every production of Wong Kar-Wai’s since his socio-political In the Mood for Love (2000) has been in association with China or strictly for mainland television.

Industry veteran John Chong, producer of the Infernal Affairs trilogy, tells The Hollywood Reporter: “The Hong Kong film industry has always made the entertainment factor a priority. This is why Hong Kong directors are sought after to helm these ‘main melody films.’ Some Hong Kong directors might have reservations about directing propaganda-type films, but many of them have no baggage.”

As Hong Kong falls more and more under Beijing control, the line between Hong Kong’s and China’s cinema continues to thin—that too with restrictive laws. In 2021, a film censorship bill was passed, banning all films deemed in violation of national security. Even the Amazon Prime TV series Expats (2024), about life in Hong Kong, has been barred from airing in Hong Kong.

The industry that once thrived in the face of Hollywood dominance has now dried up. The B-film archetypes that Hong Kong lovingly used are still seen today; they, however, are used to inject “entertainment value” for big-budgeted Chinese blockbusters. The highest grossing film in China was made a few years ago, and is a propaganda film co-directed by Hong Kong legend Tsui Hark.

As The Hollywood Reporter put it, “Why would any business-minded film financier bother investing in a Chinese-language film targeted toward Hong Kong, with its 7 million residents, when there is a potential audience of 1.37 billion just across the border?”

^{︎PHOTO: Hard Boiled (辣手神探, 1992) © Golden Princess Film Production}

The golden age of Hong Kong cinema may be over, but the legacy left behind is every bit as vital as its contemporaries’. Works like The Matrix (1999), Ghost in the Shell (1995), Deewar (1975), Battle Royale (2000), Enter the Wu Tang (1993), Dragon Ball, and Quentin Tarantino’s entire filmography would never have happened without the nation’s martial arts, wuxia, pulp, arthouse, and heroic bloodshed films. Hong Kong’s envelope-pushing, gender-bending, western sensibility-shattering films live on still; that spirit of rebirth and nonconformity.

No other major film industry dared to be as anti-authoritarian for as long. What modern, and western, replications like the John Wick films lack is that subversive streak. Maybe Hong Kong cinema will someday be allowed to have it again, to be their own again, and write their odd, strange, and unconventional stories. As Stanley Kwan puts it, “If there is a next life, I hope to be queer again.”

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