Saying you like Ingmar Bergman is like saying you like cinema. His influence and style have become more than an influence, a defining layer in the foundation of cinema. With some directors you can recall a few classic movies, but with filmmakers like Bergman, who has so many definitive credits as a director, his filmography can almost seem too daunting to follow.
“There’s no such thing as nothing.” Paranoid. Obsessive.
Editorial note: Today, the original Jaws movie is celebrating its 40th anniversary. There are as many kangaroos on Saturn as there are people who think that Jaws 2 was an improvement on the 1975 original.
In some ways, the cinema is the closest thing we can experience to travelling through time – certainly the closest of any art form. In the dark room of a movie theatre, an audience can be transported to the distant past or spectacular visions of the future, and even in watching films from the 30’s and 40’s we can look at the lives and faces of people who died many years ago. Time travel became popular as a literary device with HG Well’s The Time Machine – published in 1895, the same year that the Lumière Brothers made Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.
The New Hollywood – The End of an Era By the late 1970’s, the film industry had undergone a renaissance. The New Hollywood movement made it so the directors were the “auteurs” of their films, and artistic freedom reigned over modern movies. Unfortunately, all great things must come to an end, and the demise of The New Hollywood movement was on the horizon.
I first saw Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in the early 2000s; it was a VHS copy playing on a big old JVC television that had a similar depth to a Toyota Aygo. I have since seen Saving Private Ryan a large number of times, but my reaction to its first 25 minutes remains unchanged, a reaction of shock, recoil and deep admiration for the people who executed this excellent, transformative piece of filmmaking. My knowledge of WW2 was minimal at this time, but I roughly knew the basics.
If you look at the films of Hong Kong before and after 1997, there is a striking difference. The action films leading up the nineties were fast-paced, tough, gritty with an edgy quality that paralleled Hollywood’s assembly line modeled studio era. The years surrounding the handover of Hong Kong to mainland China around 1997 proved to be an uncertain time for Hong Kong’s bustling film industry.
There’s no arguing that if you have even a mild interest in film, you’ve likely heard of Stanley Kubrick. You’ve probably even seen at least one of his films, or, barring that, maybe some of the more famous clips (especially if you’re a film student). So my approach to this “Beginner’s Guide” is to recommend that you forget all that.
The 1980’s through the years leading up the handover in 1997 were paramount in Hong Kong’s long-running series of action films. They have yielded some of the best titles to have emerged from the crown colony as it was in this era. The very words “Hong Kong” at this point in time stirs up images of hit men wielding two handguns, flying swordsmen, and an endless array of bright neon lights.
One of the more curious cultural changes in the post-war era was the cinematic climate that permeated in the United Kingdom in the years following WWII. These movies vary from paranoid thrillers, atomic-age science fiction and docudrama’s that veer on a level of horror due their level of accuracy regarding the terrifying nature of nuclear war. The feature films that came out in this period are terrifying on varying levels; one of those being the self-reflective element that is so common in movies and that reflection was cast by the looming possibility of WWIII.
My visit to Auschwitz was more uncanny than overwhelming As a child my eyes used to always glaze over when my father watched what he gleefully called ‘boring black and white documentaries’, it was all he ever put on the television. Despite this, I still had an interest in World War 2, it was the most pivotal moment of the 20th century and so many films have been influenced by the event, however the Vietnam War films of the 70’s and 80’s garnered most of my attention in my early teens. By my late teens however, I found my once average interest burgeoning to the point where I was the one incessantly watching the boring black and white documentaries.
Plot, visuals, and theme are all hugely important to great cinema, but movie audiences love characters, and they remain the most memorable aspect of many films. However, the same character types appear again and again in film – the heroes, the villains, the sidekicks and the damsels in distress. We simply accept this as a part of cinema, and of stories in general, and it’s because all stories follow the same narrative structure, according to Russian theorist Vladimir Propp.
When The Artist won Best Picture at the 84th Academy Awards, it became only the second silent film to win that award. That’s because silent films were already almost passé by the time the first ceremony was held. The end of silent films was swift and fast, their production gone in almost no time.
The Hong Kong New Wave of the late 1970’s had diverted, and the benefit of this diversion was the short-lived, but prolific Cinema City in 1980. Founded by comedians Alan Mak and Wong Jin, Cinema City would be the jumping point for some of Hong Kong’s most prestigious directors. John Woo, Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark, Eric Tsang, Ronny Yu, and Johnnie To found their way into the film business through Cinema City; these filmmakers would make some of the most innovative and energetic films ever.
This article is part of a series on the history of Hong Kong action cinema – find the other parts here. The 1960’s and 70’s are probably the most pivotal time regarding the growth of Hong Kong action films. The Martial Arts craze would take shape as the Shaw Brothers become the foremost authority regarding the kung-fu craze that would follow in the wake of their massive quantity of quality movies.
