tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84869066321427580492024-03-13T01:43:39.785-07:00Kung fu with BraudelA meditation on the politics of martial arts movies in the longue durée.Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.comBlogger46125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-12492504331594603222023-09-25T11:22:00.001-07:002023-09-25T11:22:46.736-07:00An Interesting Video on Kowloon Walled City <p> Anyone interested in histories of Hong Kong might enjoy this video about Kowloon Walled City which I've just watched on YouTube by architecture, design and urbanism vlogger Dami Lee. It's really insightful!</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="449" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WLn_QTFVZgE" width="540" youtube-src-id="WLn_QTFVZgE"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p>Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-74444178812208132002022-05-01T02:10:00.000-07:002022-05-01T02:10:24.980-07:00A Positive Review of Fighting without Fighting<p><i>Library Journal</i> has published a pre-publication review of my forthcoming book, <i>Fighting without Fighting: Kung Fu Cinema's Journey to the West</i>.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/fighting-without-fighting-kung-fu-cinemas-journey-to-the-west-1788797">https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/fighting-without-fighting-kung-fu-cinemas-journey-to-the-west-1788797</a></p></blockquote><p>According to its author, Terry Bosky, "White’s scholarly take on Hollywood’s infatuation with kung fu offers multiple entry points for readers, from film historians to sociologists. Action film fans will come away with a deeper appreciation of these films, and an expanded watch list."</p>Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-86506999818840141512022-03-27T05:10:00.003-07:002022-03-27T05:10:38.226-07:00Appearance on BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking<p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEici7-232cPB3px5f0M-Se1DfTxoTwg5GzNjEyW3-l7kOqLNI0za6Ky8S16Xh8vadLOYUGmKUjSXVsuedsZAZ1NmJ5aODoPeMgh7zJltoqWBzuNzN3EaJWG2k7_HEXi0rFi6xsP5hLwIIByfIEqrqsBjx2xljbVtwrZCGBQ3xYN-4gv9BqJMG9EPsNd/s1200/enter-the-dragon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEici7-232cPB3px5f0M-Se1DfTxoTwg5GzNjEyW3-l7kOqLNI0za6Ky8S16Xh8vadLOYUGmKUjSXVsuedsZAZ1NmJ5aODoPeMgh7zJltoqWBzuNzN3EaJWG2k7_HEXi0rFi6xsP5hLwIIByfIEqrqsBjx2xljbVtwrZCGBQ3xYN-4gv9BqJMG9EPsNd/w400-h225/enter-the-dragon.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bruce Lee strikes a pose in <i>Enter the Dragon</i> (1973)</td></tr></tbody></table><p>I've just recently taken part in a discussion of the impact and legacy of Bruce Lee and <i>Enter The Dragon</i>, to be broadcast as part of BBC Radio 3's arts/culture magazine programme <i>Free Thinking</i> on 29th March 2022. The discussion was hosted by Matthew Sweet, and the other guests were:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Matthew Polly (who has written <i>the </i>authoritative <a href="https://mattpolly.com/bruce-lee" target="_blank">biography</a> of Bruce Lee)</li><li>William Sin (who has produced some <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17511321.2020.1866055?journalCode=rsep20" target="_blank">fascinating work</a> re-exploring classic questions of ethics in Western philosophy through Chinese thought, including the philosophy of action we have in Bruce Lee films)</li><li>Xine Yao (whose podcast 'PhDivas', about 'academia, culture and social justice', has also included a <a href="https://soundcloud.com/phdivas/the-last-dragon" target="_blank">brilliant episode</a> on Berry Gordy's Motown–kungfu mash-up <i>The Last Dragon</i> (1985))</li></ul><div>During the programme, we discussed Lee's life and work, the impact of his films in American culture, the change in portrayals of Asian people within this, and the take-up of kung fu in Blaxploitation films and rap music, alongside questions of Lee's charisma and performance style, the ethical perspectives he offers on action, and his place in today's Hong Kong culture and identity.</div><div><br /></div><div>Aside from that, I think that only other thing that I can say is that <i>nunchaku</i> were involved in the recording of this programme...</div><div><br /></div><div>If you miss the programme, it will be available on BBC's iPlayer, and also through their 'Arts & Ideas' podcast. </div><div><br /></div><div>For more information, please see their website here:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p></p><div><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0015l7z">https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0015l7z</a></div><p></p></blockquote><p></p><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><p></p>Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-36067874753952488112022-02-27T05:41:00.000-08:002022-02-27T05:41:52.531-08:00Fighting without Fighting: Kung Fu Cinema's Journey to the WestMy forthcoming book, <i>Fighting without Fighting: Kung Fu Cinema's Journey to the West</i> (London: Reaktion, 2022), is due to be published in June, and is already available on pre-order.<div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg_manULZrrBlB1Cy_EW6jvgA0NAaPWaK9Yk5vm2d7ck5Fk5R5i2reiOPyXTzFG_eT37WYcUIIS85Ia3Xb5zQM0cb0ZXzDPdELjj2h72tx2l0j5UHUvKTw9z4AToUNsWfhCvqaPYicepkailFAajA9SEVXnNOAas9UOZ2zrQeNZYr-j6B1zrPTwLWlN=s499" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="318" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg_manULZrrBlB1Cy_EW6jvgA0NAaPWaK9Yk5vm2d7ck5Fk5R5i2reiOPyXTzFG_eT37WYcUIIS85Ia3Xb5zQM0cb0ZXzDPdELjj2h72tx2l0j5UHUvKTw9z4AToUNsWfhCvqaPYicepkailFAajA9SEVXnNOAas9UOZ2zrQeNZYr-j6B1zrPTwLWlN=s320" width="204" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>It looks at the history and legacy of the "kung fu craze" which swept America, Europe, and the broader world, in 1973–4. It lays out the background of the craze in Hong Kong's long history of martial arts cinema, and in the growing awareness of martial arts amidst changing ideas of China (and "The East") in Western culture in the 1960s and 1970s. I trace the unfolding of the craze and discuss some of its most important films, and explore the ongoing significance of the kung fu phenomenon. In particular, I explore the ways that the arrival of Bruce Lee and kung fu was bound up in changing (and challenging) traditional identities, both as gendered and raced, during this tumultuous period. A final chapter considers the return of martial arts in twenty-first century <i>wuxia</i> films, such as <i>Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon</i> (2000), <i>Hero</i> (2002) and <i>The Grandmaster</i> (2013). Throughout, I explore not just film history, but martial arts within a wider popular culture from rap music to kids' cartoons.</div><div><br /></div><div>See the publisher's page <a href="http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/display.asp?ISB=9781789145335" target="_blank">here</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Or Amazon<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fighting-without-Kung-Cinemas-Journey/dp/1789145333/ref=sr_1_1?crid=Z6YBA196UV4C&keywords=fighting+without+fighting+luke+white&qid=1645968724&sprefix=fighting+without+%2Caps%2C120&sr=8-1" target="_blank"> here</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's got some very generous recommendations!:</div><div><br /></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div><div>‘Fans and scholars alike will relish Luke White's remarkable exploration of kung fu cinema's explosive rise in the "West" and its ongoing influence in international culture. <i>Fighting without Fighting</i> is the definitive book on the subject.’ — <i>Matthew Polly, bestselling author of American Shaolin, Tapped Out, and Bruce Lee: A Life</i></div></div><div><div><br /></div></div><div><div>‘A comprehensive and exhilarating journey through the cultural history of “kung-fu fever”, showing how the Asian martial arts have permeated everything from Blaxploitation cinema and Hanna-Barbera cartoons to seventies disco tunes and Marvel comic books. White’s electric prose crackles with all the brio and rigour of a classic kung-fu throwdown.’ —<i>Gary Bettinson, editor-in-chief of Asian Cinema and author of The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai</i></div></div><div><div><br /></div></div><div><div>‘This engagingly written book will be of great value for the scholars of kung fu cinema and martial arts aficionados seeking to expand their horizons about the development of the genre in the past five decades. White’s insightful and nuanced analysis not only helps us re-examine the enduring impact of the kung fu craze in the 1970s, but also rethink the key role that the genre plays in transnationalising cinema in the era of globalisation. With its inviting style, this work will enhance both film and martial arts studies collections.’ — <i>Wayne K. T. Wong, School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield</i></div></div><div><div><br /></div></div><div><div>‘In <i>Fighting without Fighting</i>, Luke<i> </i>White explores the origins of the 1970s "Kung Fu craze" in Chinese culture, the resonances of "Eastern" and oppressed heroes and heroines, and the ways in which their spectacular bodies were dramatised in innovative cinematography. He describes their impact on feminism, Black American cultures, music, videogames and renegotiations of masculinity, showing how an opening up to aspects of the "Oriental" revised and enriched mid-twentieth-century sensibilities, and how revisiting them enlightens contemporary debates on decolonisation. He traces influences and echoes in contemporary world cinema and speculative fictions, where the magical and mystical meet with politics of race, gender and empowerment. This amounts to an expert and ambitious narrative that spirals outwards from the advent of Kung Fu in ’70s Hong Kong and Hollywood to encompass a wide historical, geographic and ideological scope in which Bruce Lee is a persistent presence, and has the last word.’ — <i>Barry Curtis, Professor at the University of the Arts, London, and author of Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film</i></div></div></blockquote><div><div><br /></div></div>Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-47198410504259799992022-02-27T05:20:00.000-08:002022-02-27T05:20:17.468-08:00Forthcoming essay: "Crippled Warriors: Masculinities and Martial Arts Media in Asia"I have an essay coming out in a fascinating collection to be published this May (2022) by Routledge.
The book is edited by Youna Kim and is titled <i>Media in Asia: Global, Digital, Gendered and Mobile</i>.<div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgYW1sm5e4_3Fp6MVt3UuK6zpD7Bcwhh9pVxYapySp09gacO8t2tnhCyTbd8cVXy9i8Hftfvo2LU4D-ztg_x2gpxGZ4qVb3G6ZjHaIxHQ_-79wXwSk4ZmPSxPIuG8xhHovc6hNkx7z0LBhCuK7waf7OeRXYvkVwhoblGA_Z5W76VLRfHYyRBiA9-cvc=s499" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="327" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgYW1sm5e4_3Fp6MVt3UuK6zpD7Bcwhh9pVxYapySp09gacO8t2tnhCyTbd8cVXy9i8Hftfvo2LU4D-ztg_x2gpxGZ4qVb3G6ZjHaIxHQ_-79wXwSk4ZmPSxPIuG8xhHovc6hNkx7z0LBhCuK7waf7OeRXYvkVwhoblGA_Z5W76VLRfHYyRBiA9-cvc=s320" width="210" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>My own contribution, "Crippled Warriors: Masculinities and Martial Arts Media in Asia," traces the recurrent image of the disabled, sick and mutilated martial artist's body across Asian martial arts media, but especially, of course, in Hong Kong cinema, as a means to explore changing experiences of masculinity in Asian culture. Amongst the films I discuss are the Zatoichi series, <i>One-Armed Swordsman</i> (1967), and the 2018 Indian action comedy <i>Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota / The Man Who Feels No Pain</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>You can find out more about the book on Routledge's website here: <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Media-in-Asia-Global-Digital-Gendered-and-Mobile/Kim/p/book/9780367672850">https://www.routledge.com/Media-in-Asia-Global-Digital-Gendered-and-Mobile/Kim/p/book/9780367672850</a></div><div><br /></div><div>And it's also available to pre-order on Amazon.</div></div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjYPT6OzimHFjcdjB4ntbtdil6MXCyynjp6jheJwPhQTxQQBizCZc3_BRo_nFOnA8c7VlccNz9RXxNDblNP66qG5sUeqsOt6DadaOcZfQEqbkAEI9haCrWhHp6HQA2GRjQtX5FV36w5WsxXVFZLm6jBNCLVGKpW9cIvaak9txUti87ikqz-rqny2TIK=s800" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="423" data-original-width="800" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjYPT6OzimHFjcdjB4ntbtdil6MXCyynjp6jheJwPhQTxQQBizCZc3_BRo_nFOnA8c7VlccNz9RXxNDblNP66qG5sUeqsOt6DadaOcZfQEqbkAEI9haCrWhHp6HQA2GRjQtX5FV36w5WsxXVFZLm6jBNCLVGKpW9cIvaak9txUti87ikqz-rqny2TIK=w400-h211" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Still from <i>The Man Who Feels No Pain</i>, 2018.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-25914591110213864162020-04-29T08:50:00.002-07:002020-04-29T08:50:52.710-07:00Legacies of the Drunken Master - book now out!With a big fanfare...<br />
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(and after a long period of basically ignoring that I even have a blog!)<br />
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... my book, <i>Legacies of the Drunken Master: Politics of the Body in the Hong Kong Kung Fu Comedy Films</i> is out from the <a href="https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/legacies-of-the-drunken-master-politics-of-the-body-in-hong-kong-kung-fu-comedy-films/" target="_blank">University of Hawai'i Press</a>, on April 30th 2020.<br />
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It primarily explores the politics of the performing body in the kung fu comedy genre that exploded in the wake of Jackie Chan's success in <i>Snake in the Eagle's Shadow</i> and <i>Drunken Master </i>(both released in 1978). Starting from there, it explores a range of films from the zany <i>Miracle Fighters</i> films directed by the 'Yuen Clan' (Yuen Woo-ping and his brothers), through the kung fu cop comedies of Jackie Chan (<i>Project A</i> is my favourite!) and the 'hopping corpse' (<i>jiangshi</i> / <i>geongsi</i>) movies of the 1980s / 1990s to the more recent work of Stephen Chow, amongst others.<br />
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The comedy genre interested me in particular because it's often a somewhat critically overlooked and marginalised one, even in the study of Hong Kong cinema and martial arts films. It's often written about as trivial or as a retreat from the stormy idealism or existential rebellion involved in Chang Cheh's swordplay heroes of the late 1960s (e.g. <i>The One Armed Swordsman</i>) or Bruce Lee's anti-colonial <i>Fist of Fury</i>. A range of writers have seen it as marking a new accommodation to the hyper-flexibility required of individuals under globalised capitalism, as it was being pioneered in Hong Kong in the late 1970s. It was a time when the island entered a post-cultural revolution era and when, as Akbar Abbas argues, politics 'disappeared', and consumerism took its place. But my book really started with the question of whether there is more to the politics of these films than this. I'm somewhat enchanted by the incredible mobility of the acrobatic kung fu comedic body, and this seems to me an image full of utopian promise and potential.<br />
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It's a very 'theoretical' book, with each chapter starting out with a particular theme or issue surrounding the films, and a different theoretical approach. Chapters examine the genre through:<br />
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<ul>
<li>an examination of its carnival qualities;</li>
<li>its relation to the 'utopias of the body' discussed by Walter Benjamin; </li>
<li>the way that violence is depicted in the films;</li>
<li>a postcolonial application of feminist rereadings of Freud's notion of hysteria and the hysterical body;</li>
<li>an examination of the thematics of masculinity.</li>
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There's also a final chapter which traces the reappearance of 'Beggar So' – the 'drunken master' who teaches Jackie Chan the 'eight drunk immortals' style in <i>The Drunken Master</i> – in films through the 90s and into the 21st century. The book's conclusion thinks about the ways that the films address us as spectators (as ourselves 'inheritors' of the 'legacy of the drunken master') in our moment of globalised popular culture.<br />
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One of the ways that I think that kung fu comedy genre is quite interesting politically is through the ways that it was involved in the development and articulation of a specifically 'Hong Kong' identity, distinct from that of mainland China, and in doing so separated itself from some of the more 'nationalist' modes of imagining the self that were involved in the earlier, heroic kung fu films. In this much, even if it does not seem directly 'political' in nature, the genre could be located as part of a broader explosion of local popular culture that seems to have laid something of the resources of cultural identity that underpin the recent protests in Hong Kong.<br />
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The book is already available on pre-order from most online booksellers!<br />
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There's also an interview with me talking about the book on YouTube, here:<br />
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Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-88867715462348382852017-12-21T08:12:00.001-08:002017-12-21T08:12:20.567-08:00Toward an Aesthetic of Weightlessness: Qinggong and Wire-fu" <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A while back I contributed an essay for the catalogue of artist susan pui san lok's exhibition, at Derby Quad, entitled "<a href="https://spsl-studio.com/roch-fans/" target="_blank">ROCH Fans and Legends</a>." Susan's work in the exhibition works with video footage, primarily found on fan sites, to explore the cultural translations of Jin Yong's famous <i>wuxia</i> ("swordplay") novels as they migrate across cinematic and televisual cultures and transnational sites of reception and fandom. Doing this, the work also provides a meditation on forms of diasporic cultural identity, and the transnationality of popular culture.<br />
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My essay ("Toward an Aesthetic of Weightlessness: Qinggong and Wire-fu")looked at the figure of the weightless body in <i>wuxia</i> wirework, seeking to understand some of the differences between this and the muscular bodies of the "classic" kung fu films of the 1970s.<br />
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The catalogue is now available as an ebook, available here:<br />
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<a href="https://spsl-studio.com/roch-fans/rochfansandlegendsfreeebook/">https://spsl-studio.com/roch-fans/rochfansandlegendsfreeebook/</a><br />
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The book is a really fascinating, rich, multimedia product – a work of art in itself – which pushes the medium to its limits.<br />
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As well as giving a much better account of Susan's work than I can in this brief post, it also includes essays by Alice Ming-Wai Jim (University of Concordia, Montreal), Jean Hui Ng (Research Curator, CFCCA), Marquard Smith (Piet Zwart institute, Netherlands / UCL, London), Henry Tsang (Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Vancouver), Andy Willis (University of Salford, Manchester) and Wayne Wong (University of Hong Kong / Kings, University College London).<br />
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<br />Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-52479636272252416822017-12-21T07:51:00.000-08:002017-12-27T08:11:44.148-08:00Ben Judkins's review of the conference in Korea<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Ben Judkins, in his blog Kung Fu Tea, wrote a short report on the conference in Korea, at which I recently spoke, including brief and generous mention of my own paper.<br />
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<a href="https://chinesemartialstudies.com/2017/12/01/a-kung-fu-pilgrim-travel-community-and-the-production-of-knowledge/">https://chinesemartialstudies.com/2017/12/01/a-kung-fu-pilgrim-travel-community-and-the-production-of-knowledge/</a><br />
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His observations on some of the differences between "martial arts studies" in the West and in Korea seemed very pertinent to me.<br />
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<br />Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-37105184743985374582017-11-03T04:51:00.000-07:002017-11-04T20:53:11.974-07:00Youth, Rebellion and the Kung Fu Comedy<div style="font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Jackie Chan as a kung fu 'brat' in <i>Drunken Master</i> (dir. Yuen Woo-ping, 1978). Video still.</span></td></tr>
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Today I’m in Cheongju, South Korea, where I’ve come to give a paper at a conference on martial arts. This is being held in conjunctionwith an international, inter-style martial arts tournament, the ‘Youth Martial Arts Masterships’. It seems to me that this event – posited around friendly international competition, comparative testing of national traditions or cultures, and fostering a healthy ‘body politic’ through youth-physical-educational projects – sits squarely within modernising traditions of martial arts (and more broadly sports) reform of the early twentieth century. This would certainly be the case, at least, in the account given of the Chinese context by Andrew Morris in his influential book <i>Marrow of the Nation</i>. Here, organisations like the YMCA pioneered sporting cultures which were taken up enthusiastically by urban middle class intellectuals as part of a programme to ‘modernise’ China and challenge its status as the ‘sick man of East Asia’.</div>
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My paper will engage some of these contexts. The conference theme – loosely – is around <i>youth</i> and the martial arts, and so I will be exploring the representations of youth in the Hong Kong cinema that I have been writing about, and in particular in the kung fu comedies that have been the focus of the book I completed over Summer (currently still in the process of peer review with a publisher!). At the heart of these is a figure who becomes popular in the 1970s, the unruly kung fu <i>xiaozi</i>, the bratty or (in American slang) ‘punk’ kid, who was ubiquitously the hero of the first wave of kung fu comedy films at the end of the 1970s. (Think Jackie Chan before he took on the role of the dutiful cop; think Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Elton Chong, Leung Kar-yan, Gordon Liu, Wong Yue... Think <i>Drunken Master</i>, <i>Knockabout,</i> <i>Magnificent Butcher</i>, <i>The Prodigal Son, Mad Monkey Kung Fu</i>...)</div>
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The question of youth in these films interests me because in many ways it is little discussed – youth takes a back seat in thinking about cinema with regards to the categories that cultural theory has tended to see as more fundamental, with analyses of cinema revolving in particular around the classic variables of gender, sexuality, national identity or class. Of course, within the original moment of cultural studies, generational identity, especially in relation to popular music and youth subculture, was also a primary interest, so it’s interesting that youth is so little discussed in relation to martial arts cinema – which is (or was), after all, a cultural phenomenon profoundly linked to such youth subcultures. Youth also, it struck me after the invitation to the conference, is a persistent and central thematic of martial arts cinema, even stretching back beyond the period in which 'youth subcultures' grew up into prominence.</div>
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My overall analysis, as I will present it in my paper later today, will begin by historicising the notion of ‘youth’, which I locate as a peculiarly modern idea (a by-product of the ‘invention of childhood’ discussed by Philippe Aries and Hugh Cunningham amongst others), and an idea in fact profoundly intertwined with how modernity itself is constructed. Youth for us is, after all, aligned with the future, in opposition to old age’s association with the past and with tradition. I sketch 'youth' out as an ambivalent concept perched between sociological anxiety about the effects of modern, urban life (juvenile delinquency, etc.) and a Romanticism: for many (including the early Walter Benjamin, to name just one example) youth is the explosive energy which will bring about utopian transformation. Such Romantic ideas of youth were embedded in the Wandervogel movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in the birth of artistic ‘modernism’ in movements such as Jugendstil. The youth movements and the pedagogies that surrounded them were often deeply intertwined with ‘physical cultures’; the active body was central in modern society’s production of ‘youth’ as a category and an experience.</div>
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This, of course, was brought into the modernising martial arts movements of early and mid twentieth century East Asia. In the Chinese context (which is the one I know most about), ‘youth’ was a central motif, I argue, in the ‘May 4th’, 'student’ and ’New Culture’ movements, which sought a radical nationalist and anti-colonial politics through a programme of modernisation. </div>
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This radicalism and its images of youth can be traced forward even into films like Bruce Lee’s <i>Fist of Fury</i> (dir. Lo Wei, 1972), which locates its plot in this very movement of early twentieth century martial arts reform and nationalist self strengthening. As I’ve discussed elsewhere in this blog, it includes the iconic image of Lee in his white ‘student suit’, resisting colonial domination with his transformed kung fu body.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Bruce Lee's white student suit in <i>Enter the Dragon</i> (dir. Lo Wei, 1972)</span></td></tr>
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Lee’s youthfulness – and that of many of the stars (both male and female) who were his contemporaries in the late 1960s and early 1970s – stands in contrast to the most iconic figure of the martial arts cinema of the preceding moment, Kwan Tak-hing, who played the character of Wong Fei-hung in some 80 films during the 1950s and 1960s. Kwan was already in his late forties when he first took up the role, and Kwan's performance of it exudes nothing else but a patrician maturity.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Kwan Tak-hing as Wong Fei-hung, during the 1950s</span></td></tr>
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The emphasis on youth in the Bruce Lee era, however, marks change as well as a continuation of the way it is envisioned around the martial arts. A new context is opened by the growth of the youth subcultures (and counterculture) that appeared in the wake of post-war consumerism. This is dealt a further spin in the Hong Kong context, where increasingly identity (in the context of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, just across the border) is drifting away from the ‘national’ as a pole of identification, and towards the international flows of money, culture and people in which Hong Kong was increasingly becoming a key node. In such conditions, the ‘nationalist’ body no longer provides an appealing figure of modernity through which to imagine the self.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Youth and the kung fu star. From left to right – David Chiang, Lo Lieh and Wang Yu, who all paved the way for "Little Dragon" Bruce Lee (Li Xiaolong).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Josephine Siao, who engineered a star persona that spanned contemporary 'youth films' and period swordplays.</span></div>
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And this, of course is where the kung fu comedy enters the picture, with its more anarchic figures. Jackie Chan’s version of Wong Fei-hung in<i> Drunken Master</i> (dir. Yuen Woo-ping, 1978), in contrast to Kwan Tak-hing’s is a troubled and delinquent teenager, not an upright and adult exemplar of manly virtue. In contrast to Lee’s ‘rebel with a cause’ in <i>Fist of Fury</i>, furthermore, Chan’s characters are apolitical and even for some commentators (prominently Leon Hunt) entirely amoral.</div>
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The argument I’ll set out in my paper today, however, (perhaps too much for a blog post) is that the <i>xiaozi</i> of the kung fu comedy not only accedes to the expectations and virtues of the new order of globalised capitalism and flexible accumulation (adaptability, lack of respect for tradition, cunning, etc.), but also seeks a source of value beyond this, that can neither be found in tradition (in Wong’s father's brutally authoritarian and patrician attitude to bringing up his son) nor in capitalist modernity (embodied in Wong’s arch-foe, the mercenary and cynical Thunderfoot), but entails a rebellious re-working of human relations. Jackie Chan's young Wong Fei-hung manages this by building a genuinely warm friendship (and discipleship) with the unorthodox ‘drunken master’, Beggar So. In this regard, the rebellion of youth in <i>Drunken Master</i> retains – at least to a degree – the utopian charge of its modernist predecessors.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jackie Chan and Simon Yuen as Wong Fei-hung and Beggar So in <i>Drunken Master</i>.</td></tr>
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Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-56461214601463340452016-08-21T13:48:00.000-07:002016-08-21T13:49:14.183-07:00Hysterical Film Style in the Kung Fu Comedy – Drunken Master Slippery Snake (1979)As my recent post on Jackie Chan and the body has mentioned, I'm currently working on Kung Fu comedy. As part of this, I'm examining whether the notion of hysteria might be a useful one in understanding the features of the kung fu comedy style. My argument is that in spite (and perhaps precisely because) of its many problems, hysteria seems indeed to be a helpful idea in thinking about kung fu comedy. Further theorising the notion of hysteria, and further examining the questions around the ways that it might be a useful way of discussing the complex politics of the body in 1970s Hong Kong action cinema will have to wait for another moment – and perhaps for the actual essay I'm currently working on – rather than this blog post. For now, interested readers might look at two attempts to use this concept in relation to martial arts cinema – Bhaskar Sarkar's 'Hong Kong Hysteria: Martial Arts Tales from a Mutating World' and Mark Gallagher's 'Masculinity in Transition: Jackie Chan's Star Text'.<br />
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Instead, in this post I wish to look a little more empirically at the film style of the genre itself, and the ways that editing and the body interact, and to thinks about the ways that this might entail a 'hysterical' film style. To do this I'm going to dissect a single sequence from the film <i>Drunken Master Slippery Snake</i> (dir. Ho Meng-Hua / Yu Cheng-Chun, 1979, also known as <i>Mad Mad Kung Fu </i>and <i>Ol' Dirty Kung Fu</i>).<br />
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<h3>
<b>Hysterical Kung Fu Comedy</b></h3>
First I will at least have to sketch at least briefly and descriptively some of the attributes that I will be associating with the 'hysterical'. Hysteria, though largely rejected as a diagnosis today, had its heyday in the nineteenth century and primarily designated mental illnesses whose symptoms played themselves out in the <i>bodies </i>of patients. As grasped by psychoanalysis, hysteria entailed repressed material that, unable to come to representation otherwise, presented itself in what seemed like inexplicable and causeless physical illnesses. Hysterics presented fainting fits, epilepsy-like seizures, catalepsy, blindness or deafness, tics, paralysis or weakness, sudden rigidity of the body, vomiting, phantom pains, uncontrollable tears or laughter, and many other things besides.<br />
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Often suffered by those who were most silenced by society – young women living under Victorian patriarchy – the body was converted into a medium for the expression of otherwise buried, unconscious trauma and desire; hysteria was, as one theorist put it a <i>maladie par representation</i> (a 'sickness by representation'). [1] This sense of the body as possessed by the representation of traumatic memory or repressed desire is one of the things that makes it, perhaps, a useful idea for thinking about martial arts cinema, and for thinking about the 'madcap' genre of kung fu comedy in particular. Kung fu comedies also, of course, involve an amplified 'theatricality', and other accounts of hysteria have emphasised this 'theatrical' and even 'pantomimic' – or, to highlight the kung fu connection, <i>operatic </i>– aspect of hysteria. Jean Baudrillard, for example, has described it as 'the pathology of the exacerbated staging of the subject, a pathology of expression, of the body's theatrical and operatic conversion.' [3]<br />
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As it has entered a more 'everyday', non-technical discourse, hysteria tends to suggest the excessive, (over-)emotional and unrestrained (or even unrestrainable). All this may well match the anarchy, melodrama and corporeal excess of the kung fu comedy – in terms of its manic visual style, its disorderly narrative form, and its exaggerated acting and performance style, which consistently seeks out the extreme.<br />
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Whilst we tend to think of hysteria in terms of tears, feinting and of 'weak', overemotional women (it is a highly and problematically gendered concept, though further discussion of this, too, will have to wait for another moment), hysteria also involved peculiarly athletic symptoms. Elisabeth Bronfen has described one phase of the hysteric attacks diagnosed by the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, as: 'a period of <i>grands mouvements</i>, of contortions and bodily dislocations [...] [In these,] the hysteric would exhibit an extraordinary expenditure of muscle power. In this phase Charcot thought to have detected eccentric body turnings and grotesque postures, marked by an unusual flexibility, mobility, and sheer physical force.' [4] Charcot's description, certainly as recounted by Bronfen here, could well describe the performance and choreographic style of Jackie Chan or Sammo Hung. In Charcot's account, the fits of such patients often resembled 'an embittered battle with an imaginary enemy'. Furthermore, just as the kung fu comedy often involves a 'becoming animal' as one learns mantis, monkey, snake, cat, crab or other exotic and preferrably bizarre martial arts, Charcot also 'emphasised the similarity in this phase between the hysteric and the animal, as if the body had transformed into a dislocated and foreign body.' [5]<br />
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A relation to kung fu comedy might further be suggested by the fact that Charcot called such seizures 'clownism'. For Allon White, this emphasised a historical relation between hysterical symptoms and the 'grotesque body' of European carnival, with the former carrying the latter on after its repression by the stiff and idealised body of the bourgeois era. [6] We might also read it in terms of the tradition of (martial and acrobatic) opera clowning on which the kung fu film draws, and on the older, ritual, grotesque inversionary forms of the body that this has entailed in Chinese as well as Western culture. Again, however, this is starting to take us elsewhere than can be contained in this post.<br />
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<h3>
<b>Film Analysis – <i>Drunken Master, Slippery Snake</i> (1979)</b></h3>
In all of this, then, we might find a series of analogues between kung fu cinema and notions of hysteria. I will turn now, however, to look at some of the ways that this 'hysterical' style is manifested in a fight sequence from <i>Drunken Master, Slippery Snake</i>, examining in particular a short section of a scene of combat (about 45 minutes in) between the film's protagonist (played by Cliff Lok) and two villainous henchmen. I'm interested in the ways that the film's camerawork and editing support and emphasise a vision of the body in excessive, hyperkinetic, 'hysterical' motion.<br />
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<b>Shot 1</b><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_QYOHL3zpHLrRv14WQ06NTa4RFXg2UR-6KQfv3q_xakTcjG1AZ1MZfg3Uai_kJbsRtHKG7HWBL0oAC2mNdXB5IomTbq8MrYeUezRyl5TZnWIJyBUhOcNyrJsEQnme6C63UKx7R2kd-JI/s1600/2.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_QYOHL3zpHLrRv14WQ06NTa4RFXg2UR-6KQfv3q_xakTcjG1AZ1MZfg3Uai_kJbsRtHKG7HWBL0oAC2mNdXB5IomTbq8MrYeUezRyl5TZnWIJyBUhOcNyrJsEQnme6C63UKx7R2kd-JI/s320/2.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
Setting the scene we have the 2 villains, who block our hero on a path, setting up the confrontation, and starting a shot-reverse shot sequence. The angle is low, looking up at the henchman who speaks, adding 'drama' to the scene. The other villain, lounging in the foreground emphasises this low angle of view. Such low angles – taken to further extreme – would become a staple of the overwrought cinematic style of the swordplay films of the 1990s, which Sarkar treats in terms of 'hysteria' in his essay (mentioned above). The unusual angle – which doesn't directly present us with the point of view of the protagonist perhaps suggests a psychological state in which the villains loom as a threat, rather than describing the space. Its drama breaks with what's necessary in terms of storytelling, and already marks a form of cinematic excess, one located in relation to the body of the performers. It marks, already, the ostentatious, gratuitous stylisation typical of the genre – an aspect, again, taken forward in the 1990s swordplay.<br />
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<b>Shot 2 – reverse shot</b><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3g-HWImGNTnrsBOhPf9Glm6mUHx4R72Z9rMZ29ojmezGOFbsMOQKHS3SfHBDDS4OPR1yy3AGN_NxnFZhFvJspOCF_fVxebo2B31oFQJOD4JWhyphenhyphenYPC2wXu4zfUDuoHf2OseNOAVEfcPo0/s1600/3.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3g-HWImGNTnrsBOhPf9Glm6mUHx4R72Z9rMZ29ojmezGOFbsMOQKHS3SfHBDDS4OPR1yy3AGN_NxnFZhFvJspOCF_fVxebo2B31oFQJOD4JWhyphenhyphenYPC2wXu4zfUDuoHf2OseNOAVEfcPo0/s320/3.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
Reverse/reaction shot, of the protagonist. A series of unstable emotions play across his face – surprise, anxiety, bravado – the expressions exaggerated in 'operatic' rather than 'method' style – in spite of the director's use of a technical device (the close-up) which allowed this more nuanced and subtle, 'naturalistic' acting style to develop. The head-shot allows the magnification of this already magnified expressivity.<br />
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<b>Shot 3</b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5RIPNsNTIkg4KUdO5BqAJMQGwia8KMVYSZokOQNf_3zrH0NJ71E0bWeIZdyMM_Yxj2KWPm2ENqiVUJS2nw4OgxalDmpGMDEg0KpuPcOJNYRyRu9qwKJiHiTCSa7b3cZsQgf_GxgeM7U8/s1600/4.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5RIPNsNTIkg4KUdO5BqAJMQGwia8KMVYSZokOQNf_3zrH0NJ71E0bWeIZdyMM_Yxj2KWPm2ENqiVUJS2nw4OgxalDmpGMDEg0KpuPcOJNYRyRu9qwKJiHiTCSa7b3cZsQgf_GxgeM7U8/s320/4.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSj0zEavEfKHEEduSyzf5CWkstu4cTgX_ZhfFO75QCu22hF1eDmcr4mEZFgQoXaBTLg1SpI15mp9YZjgBJXjiGW5ufiDrX12A3aVyfXVVqO5QO5rvhamRbJliBLSJ5gWeDR23QLjylI_E/s1600/5.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSj0zEavEfKHEEduSyzf5CWkstu4cTgX_ZhfFO75QCu22hF1eDmcr4mEZFgQoXaBTLg1SpI15mp9YZjgBJXjiGW5ufiDrX12A3aVyfXVVqO5QO5rvhamRbJliBLSJ5gWeDR23QLjylI_E/s320/5.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOQh_LfYGMBCj9W8Ok7lGrEwwbGIUYoN5VFhS2rhvnb7CfwJQnQs-BYPNRIy6qB51A5lAMdbCvrx5oKYqwPpwlKVkOT0_Kw0qd5aqkXC7Tu_FafUr-GH6UeRlmmxj5cBPhCHjXrrx_J-Q/s1600/6.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOQh_LfYGMBCj9W8Ok7lGrEwwbGIUYoN5VFhS2rhvnb7CfwJQnQs-BYPNRIy6qB51A5lAMdbCvrx5oKYqwPpwlKVkOT0_Kw0qd5aqkXC7Tu_FafUr-GH6UeRlmmxj5cBPhCHjXrrx_J-Q/s320/6.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
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The angle is reversed again, now looking over the shoulder of the hero, giving a head-and shoulder shot of the villain. The subtle shift between this and the previous low camera angle underscores a mobility of the camera, which in the sequence will be rapid and hyperactive. As the villain speaks, the camera zooms suddenly out into a half-figure shot, and the other villain stands up, emerging into the frame. Utilising the potential of the recently available hand-held camera for such zooms and to make the viewpoint mobile had become a trademark device in Hong Kong action and martial arts cinema, a marker of its stylistic excess that was taken to the point that the 'over-used' snap zoom has been repeatedly satirised. The use of such technology was pioneered as early as 1967 by Chang Cheh for <i>The Assassin</i> and <i>One-Armed Swordsman.</i> I have argued elsewhere that this allowed Chang a new energy and dynamism in his depiction of , the camera itself becoming choreographed, its mobility mirroring that of the frentic Jimmy Wang Yu as he leaped around the sets, placing the viewer's gaze and imaginary body in motion, too. [7] Whilst Chang's <i>Assassin</i> held this within the limits of a certain classicism, and whilst the action sequences contrasted to the slow pace and static camerawork of the other scenes, by the late 1970s, in the kung fu comedy, such questions of 'taste' were largely jettisoned for the dizzying effects of a saturation of rapid camera movement. The zoom is a prominent device within the upcoming sequence.<br />
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<b>Shot 4</b><br />
<b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiITUlPXYHtbOmNFQVtqQwdHCx7L24s5dYBY1EFC6zGuEG6GeJ1X6U5fMhwpIzVwYSgfksC_HYMn6sYRRnp2-AXEXttsdvfc6ffq45QxyqkE3EORckoGwB_z_AwgTI04ckpdk1-TUe5Kv8/s1600/7.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiITUlPXYHtbOmNFQVtqQwdHCx7L24s5dYBY1EFC6zGuEG6GeJ1X6U5fMhwpIzVwYSgfksC_HYMn6sYRRnp2-AXEXttsdvfc6ffq45QxyqkE3EORckoGwB_z_AwgTI04ckpdk1-TUe5Kv8/s320/7.jpeg" width="320" /></a></b><br />
A final reverse shot, before the action ensues. Again this is framed differently for our first reaction shot of him.<br />
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<b>Shot 5</b><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0J2A6_iGFbKnQQ-W5p4BAYuUePWk9u_U1HB7NifKs83nyIXUC2cRywbnwRgZ_DzIaDfoqiFoCrPLUnrPX3oqRjupCNwElvYnWoQoJeNcS50ItYilQbjP7jqgHRFwKxFmRMWXW1k08O2c/s1600/8.jpeg" imageanchor="1"></a><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0J2A6_iGFbKnQQ-W5p4BAYuUePWk9u_U1HB7NifKs83nyIXUC2cRywbnwRgZ_DzIaDfoqiFoCrPLUnrPX3oqRjupCNwElvYnWoQoJeNcS50ItYilQbjP7jqgHRFwKxFmRMWXW1k08O2c/s320/8.jpeg" width="320" /><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCvAHGEtNMzVvDux7ETvkZpf7axoV7hHJ-bYghP6g25QDdh4t_0GO1S9qWVSnUC-V5oYHdHU3umR1N_GVtd2MKrG5q1eDPhLhZlXnIRzohFuvdJxNarcnHFUI3GKUYA69m5VhNu4JSx8E/s1600/9.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCvAHGEtNMzVvDux7ETvkZpf7axoV7hHJ-bYghP6g25QDdh4t_0GO1S9qWVSnUC-V5oYHdHU3umR1N_GVtd2MKrG5q1eDPhLhZlXnIRzohFuvdJxNarcnHFUI3GKUYA69m5VhNu4JSx8E/s320/9.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCvAHGEtNMzVvDux7ETvkZpf7axoV7hHJ-bYghP6g25QDdh4t_0GO1S9qWVSnUC-V5oYHdHU3umR1N_GVtd2MKrG5q1eDPhLhZlXnIRzohFuvdJxNarcnHFUI3GKUYA69m5VhNu4JSx8E/s1600/9.jpeg" imageanchor="1"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1w9moFAGYjIy5mm4yiFElc6B1lMSJ0VT7MwmPeqtDZ4SnVNsSRSLuAMZYhh-9qehSlV4Kw-lrFsfxKfYDKS1rWDIakgY6l9fmsD3VuMa0uOvsN_NuhTLSx-hbOR3GqVPhS4rYhpuE-sI/s1600/11.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1w9moFAGYjIy5mm4yiFElc6B1lMSJ0VT7MwmPeqtDZ4SnVNsSRSLuAMZYhh-9qehSlV4Kw-lrFsfxKfYDKS1rWDIakgY6l9fmsD3VuMa0uOvsN_NuhTLSx-hbOR3GqVPhS4rYhpuE-sI/s320/11.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL5kgnRXYEv0duDaSnnp_Cyfdf99yPEzeOEK9-UwtahxGd6_-6KyNh1ScBCZ-F-HR6_iM_IdxGtTojwzz2sLtwYP64gOC14ltUYHo9tExo1X7jwoJjr48BPWQjUXuGrFt6TbjSPjxPJN0/s1600/12.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL5kgnRXYEv0duDaSnnp_Cyfdf99yPEzeOEK9-UwtahxGd6_-6KyNh1ScBCZ-F-HR6_iM_IdxGtTojwzz2sLtwYP64gOC14ltUYHo9tExo1X7jwoJjr48BPWQjUXuGrFt6TbjSPjxPJN0/s320/12.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO5rn2GUfeQ14GVutU7rTVT1jEyE-GIATik8MPQNSvvhh-MXhpXVeJG5WFk19FGou3NBVg3ACXgNM7cGbD4MWA-j-qyxWaH0Dr5UukhI5w4eZ7it04qdlighGzhYfTwnMGPfssOJuNLio/s1600/13.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO5rn2GUfeQ14GVutU7rTVT1jEyE-GIATik8MPQNSvvhh-MXhpXVeJG5WFk19FGou3NBVg3ACXgNM7cGbD4MWA-j-qyxWaH0Dr5UukhI5w4eZ7it04qdlighGzhYfTwnMGPfssOJuNLio/s320/13.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHK5ofte-TrHnSTWKJ0GRHGoP9RdBfwPEPVmfKUz7jtCeYgC9P0Hq2bdAkBKxu4ghxJoCVerT-viQE0v0821FZZH7CpFU2bJP1qIRtyApRddtCIEXF0Zly2PsY_TZ6YEq2u8CwimbVeBU/s1600/14.jpeg" imageanchor="1"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY-6YEB7PKJzmHFIwugKsIc_ia3PR3ajcrxeEbGVqj2XhkMZMSwz0jfebNJeSyOVE2blQAEmJtx2Osc-1PzgyILRA37sWxMEkmPZjs-wBD8LW3WsHRnP1RY9Gc0FEtHBOE4J2oOiuMYy8/s1600/16.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY-6YEB7PKJzmHFIwugKsIc_ia3PR3ajcrxeEbGVqj2XhkMZMSwz0jfebNJeSyOVE2blQAEmJtx2Osc-1PzgyILRA37sWxMEkmPZjs-wBD8LW3WsHRnP1RY9Gc0FEtHBOE4J2oOiuMYy8/s320/16.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNQ_zv8yGUkapEi4On6m1F1OenK6BEO-EpfZwAOV6ePfUQcVsomWfgsBfXM-mMch7zGn7189Q93pxgRr0PHdNDJYLJl3Q52M-WEOvLLXXm5l8gdNeJqUY_CO6nM5qVWiqfMC1GNz-BkiQ/s1600/17.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNQ_zv8yGUkapEi4On6m1F1OenK6BEO-EpfZwAOV6ePfUQcVsomWfgsBfXM-mMch7zGn7189Q93pxgRr0PHdNDJYLJl3Q52M-WEOvLLXXm5l8gdNeJqUY_CO6nM5qVWiqfMC1GNz-BkiQ/s320/17.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
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A full-figure long shot establishes the space of combat. The viewpoint is from right angles to the previous sequence of reversals. The camera is unusually still for the combat that follows, but this allows a frenetic movement of bodies within the frame – drawing on the style developed by Lau Kar-leung and which sought to present the 'authenticity' of the movements of performers to their maximum. One villain leaps with a flying kick from left of right of screen, and the hero dodges first into the depth of the frame and then towards the camera and to its left, establishing a diagonal movement. He then crosses between the two villains to be in the front right of the frame, on the other diagonal. The movements rapidly map a series of different spatial relations, with the bodies – espcially that of the protagonist, spinning through space to do so. In an 'elastic' relationship, the bodies are drawn together and thrown apart repeatedly in the sequence.<br />
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<b>Shot 6</b><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE4olKHX9FfmHXM5hbZ54qx4nYoX4Q7D9d0LJpno32Nyjq90E7Dg4xeACmYxFLj5Jmj7IeO23zPWgGIliDm8uShYNXqvgKxZU5OKRG9-MiksJoqKrnIyPRld25d5lKSAkgsi7Vjejntc0/s1600/20.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE4olKHX9FfmHXM5hbZ54qx4nYoX4Q7D9d0LJpno32Nyjq90E7Dg4xeACmYxFLj5Jmj7IeO23zPWgGIliDm8uShYNXqvgKxZU5OKRG9-MiksJoqKrnIyPRld25d5lKSAkgsi7Vjejntc0/s320/20.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKS_HGXp3gCgKaJXjFtul8YTchTNJPLijIxNURxk-h6KR1K2fTQxq6CxgK1Hcm_rTg7ZEc1efBaoVx16WsVXsx0BmhMMQbj900QuIpbEP8mwuEqrIPq7HnEgkh0QuKcjaAXp3h7y6Z-z8/s1600/21.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKS_HGXp3gCgKaJXjFtul8YTchTNJPLijIxNURxk-h6KR1K2fTQxq6CxgK1Hcm_rTg7ZEc1efBaoVx16WsVXsx0BmhMMQbj900QuIpbEP8mwuEqrIPq7HnEgkh0QuKcjaAXp3h7y6Z-z8/s320/21.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkOhT4_OwlBpHdXxXoOe7K9j24KBgl68BsxNiEz2hyphenhyphenTKCHLnQPnv1NLBiD3YJmBHQ5Tf6A_lQVjBlD0pDbY-PYP0RsDyA7aG3b40yo1pcT3JtxwSinDRtTHz4eH7s5T2YUM1IZm0NhXFU/s1600/22.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkOhT4_OwlBpHdXxXoOe7K9j24KBgl68BsxNiEz2hyphenhyphenTKCHLnQPnv1NLBiD3YJmBHQ5Tf6A_lQVjBlD0pDbY-PYP0RsDyA7aG3b40yo1pcT3JtxwSinDRtTHz4eH7s5T2YUM1IZm0NhXFU/s320/22.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJMGO4i6d7x-0EN5mY4vaNtp18Tldh4_eYzGDAA1blxCPLxtHypFe_09NrmaFvbveNrpbx84YPwXVVkR6QYFaf1z0tzqVmqdUP88UkI3s6nlGcLBYGf8nycPah8o9aOqjL1hsh4MU8eEI/s1600/24.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJMGO4i6d7x-0EN5mY4vaNtp18Tldh4_eYzGDAA1blxCPLxtHypFe_09NrmaFvbveNrpbx84YPwXVVkR6QYFaf1z0tzqVmqdUP88UkI3s6nlGcLBYGf8nycPah8o9aOqjL1hsh4MU8eEI/s320/24.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<br />
As he's thrown backward, the camera cuts to a close up of the protagonist, again rotating 90 degrees from the previous shot. The close up emphasises the bodily effect upon him, eliciting a mimetic effect in the audience. Close shots are often used in the sequence to magnify a sense of the effect on a body. The moment of cutting also cuts out some time – cuts often happen before a movement ends to emphasise the sense of continual motion and increase the impression of frantic speed and movement. As the hero moves back across the frame one of his antagonists follows him into shot from the left, with wildly flailing arms (Choy Lee Fut style) clashing dramatically. As it pans across to the right tracking the protagonist, it begins to pull its zoom outwards – the hero pulls one attacker past him but the other is drawn into the shot as it comes out and the protagonist is assailed on both sides. The antagonists seize him. Space seems to be fragmented in a number of these sideways cuts – on inspection, though the orientation of bodies and velocities seems to hold us within a defined space, the background to the scene often seems unrelated to that which we see in the previous shot. The effect is a peculiar spatial drift or dislocation.<br />
<br />
<b>Shot 7</b><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVqSO7-wfyjOs-BU4qxO_uDAf2pzxb_viZyrBwJjXPpcucbKsyusyYUSs7zcyamp1LxxUUYraoQxeZ9co8J43JrmS6ccahMTUhpABtDCCoTmeYQIGdYUu3Ifo4Tf9aIGvMBViPjkGpZY4/s1600/25.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVqSO7-wfyjOs-BU4qxO_uDAf2pzxb_viZyrBwJjXPpcucbKsyusyYUSs7zcyamp1LxxUUYraoQxeZ9co8J43JrmS6ccahMTUhpABtDCCoTmeYQIGdYUu3Ifo4Tf9aIGvMBViPjkGpZY4/s320/25.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWuM7CuHadVC7_AGOESJ5ebZgdIkVa1CDfNdwbdR5zorDRZNlwKafQ3ks5lr3KZrYumfFJjtnQF53l1_2TNflw_ybvuAlEgdvHUMGGYreXcChSxm7zkFse9RpgJNJGWnaxMNjVO2fOPO0/s1600/26.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWuM7CuHadVC7_AGOESJ5ebZgdIkVa1CDfNdwbdR5zorDRZNlwKafQ3ks5lr3KZrYumfFJjtnQF53l1_2TNflw_ybvuAlEgdvHUMGGYreXcChSxm7zkFse9RpgJNJGWnaxMNjVO2fOPO0/s320/26.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgikGQ62ArmXjHvhEkDWBbGe5aZ9G7ctNSLHUX1m5lEG0NjZSeXgsxM27fJkpw4A5ByLjuK3rGjfmRDoZiocIBymO8daa7ngw1eD7ZGPz9jKFKfHop4yRpcmHRAkrRJs5c6sfOmes9OSvM/s1600/27.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgikGQ62ArmXjHvhEkDWBbGe5aZ9G7ctNSLHUX1m5lEG0NjZSeXgsxM27fJkpw4A5ByLjuK3rGjfmRDoZiocIBymO8daa7ngw1eD7ZGPz9jKFKfHop4yRpcmHRAkrRJs5c6sfOmes9OSvM/s320/27.jpeg" width="320" /></a></b><br />
<b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIqNZ4kSimUOAgwquJEtVPXhWyTlKg7Cyr68vQjV9rqORe_GpD_s1-IcG3WhA-_ifetYGI-DfG47scvbsbCfXDKur0mhWG5VX7PmVbfhF_L16QRroeVFAGg2vJS5AYLOyuctt0uo1R-do/s1600/29.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIqNZ4kSimUOAgwquJEtVPXhWyTlKg7Cyr68vQjV9rqORe_GpD_s1-IcG3WhA-_ifetYGI-DfG47scvbsbCfXDKur0mhWG5VX7PmVbfhF_L16QRroeVFAGg2vJS5AYLOyuctt0uo1R-do/s320/29.jpeg" width="320" /></a></b><br />
<b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRBzNqfLufwKsc-awXxGFZp981O1vpwY3Qa-27LjDRaMo9aPipBQztn-zg20-FrK2ZLhzhIVEkTfEp6e1moFPoq5-LcGrpBo5ox4amo9n35YWJSL3PpjFf7Lzm0iOKscRC9d1po_UiWTs/s1600/30.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRBzNqfLufwKsc-awXxGFZp981O1vpwY3Qa-27LjDRaMo9aPipBQztn-zg20-FrK2ZLhzhIVEkTfEp6e1moFPoq5-LcGrpBo5ox4amo9n35YWJSL3PpjFf7Lzm0iOKscRC9d1po_UiWTs/s320/30.jpeg" width="320" /></a></b><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPgtb0sjBnvVBS5EcxCikPZkUx0B-bs-vRrvt2XSNDCXYx6OQEILohFTc-P1cf7oeu7M_T8o0v3q7C6S4dISVMcahfFTKzQ-2W49KbwNoB9j0GQJd0cc1h8FkxUan__s7fg0GVfKpmEC4/s1600/32.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPgtb0sjBnvVBS5EcxCikPZkUx0B-bs-vRrvt2XSNDCXYx6OQEILohFTc-P1cf7oeu7M_T8o0v3q7C6S4dISVMcahfFTKzQ-2W49KbwNoB9j0GQJd0cc1h8FkxUan__s7fg0GVfKpmEC4/s320/32.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ_Kd1X9VidVRbfsZlKUOMgf7lvKUl7wd0imVw4NJDQgpGHGB1vEX9jvvAYsApHIW_iJKg_HZRXlJBz1VqhGkiR6irQTbvz0JEUvjMxcgwp98PLcYBYzFv7X1OK_05IxSxeaYoE7naoLY/s1600/33.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ_Kd1X9VidVRbfsZlKUOMgf7lvKUl7wd0imVw4NJDQgpGHGB1vEX9jvvAYsApHIW_iJKg_HZRXlJBz1VqhGkiR6irQTbvz0JEUvjMxcgwp98PLcYBYzFv7X1OK_05IxSxeaYoE7naoLY/s320/33.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8TtWeFbYgqm_cWxKIpLEjzLl2udoSwYEr6OazCbpxzo1rFXrOXgfPDbj60pYHwiGqerLes125GnFUTx-RsEkZMekBr_OvSyfhrnvwSHSYCwLzNhxAVoPEhEVN3A1OCbNu5He2RWLPf2w/s1600/34.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8TtWeFbYgqm_cWxKIpLEjzLl2udoSwYEr6OazCbpxzo1rFXrOXgfPDbj60pYHwiGqerLes125GnFUTx-RsEkZMekBr_OvSyfhrnvwSHSYCwLzNhxAVoPEhEVN3A1OCbNu5He2RWLPf2w/s320/34.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2UfbfDTGCVMA3Jze8vL4aaAqAFfyKplciZVTm5m3-0hpS8CAAdXE9z_OVBME0l9TZPkU1RlVE17xBRRvaxUbMlFaq8DXtTE6It2IL0RtRKYMWW2f_kyQ_Y49s0I-r3I1Nw8Du2Ogxiwc/s1600/35.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2UfbfDTGCVMA3Jze8vL4aaAqAFfyKplciZVTm5m3-0hpS8CAAdXE9z_OVBME0l9TZPkU1RlVE17xBRRvaxUbMlFaq8DXtTE6It2IL0RtRKYMWW2f_kyQ_Y49s0I-r3I1Nw8Du2Ogxiwc/s320/35.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
Cutting to another right angle, in a long-shot, we see the two protagonists throw our hero, as he somersaults through the air to land on his back. The villains follow up their attack whilst he is on the ground, rushing after him, but he flips up athletically sending them flying back. Landing, he immediately springs through the air in a full backward somersault to land on his feet, the circle he describes neatly contained within the frame of the shot. As he lands the furthermost attacker assaults with a flying kick, throwing the hero's body flying upwards through the air again and towards the camera, hitting the ground in the start of a roll. Here, an unusually still and distant camera angle is used to make clear the extent of the acrobatic movements of the figures. The emphasis has been on a series of aerial flips and spins in the protagonist. This use of the longer shot to underscore aerial virtuosity echoes the flying kick of the attacker in the opening shot of the sequence. David Bordwell has noted the preference in Hong Kong cinema to show the whole of an action as clearly as possible, rather than, as in Hollywood, to imply it. [8] Here, however, (and in much of the comic repertoire) such shots, which impress us with the unthinkable skill of the performer, are mixed with much more mobile and 'impressionistic' shots that emphasise affect, and involve the movement of the camera and viewing subject, too.<br />
<br />
<b>Shot 8</b><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHDzdy7XaE2HDH6wvt0qbx4P36z-529Fmt7GJdFPy-9W84rWXcoPN9uporSttDhTH0PBQx0JoviVrcq1ArghZ1jW-rolx_BKZk2_9oh-0aJioMTLe0oOo9rg3AKqrQ_THM6eyCghRbWXU/s1600/36.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHDzdy7XaE2HDH6wvt0qbx4P36z-529Fmt7GJdFPy-9W84rWXcoPN9uporSttDhTH0PBQx0JoviVrcq1ArghZ1jW-rolx_BKZk2_9oh-0aJioMTLe0oOo9rg3AKqrQ_THM6eyCghRbWXU/s320/36.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxNJ4ZRlDpeZNI3BfZIUQ4TVPEix7sAICiyAQVgsmm0zBz61r4B3LtjRRr616Uo8R2eQYhbgK8DQlk0ALIzExpSk6-FYQYSYVGLn2dT2usS1KISRjr9hXD5h3BuV9UUrUsgchX5Iwysa0/s1600/37.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxNJ4ZRlDpeZNI3BfZIUQ4TVPEix7sAICiyAQVgsmm0zBz61r4B3LtjRRr616Uo8R2eQYhbgK8DQlk0ALIzExpSk6-FYQYSYVGLn2dT2usS1KISRjr9hXD5h3BuV9UUrUsgchX5Iwysa0/s320/37.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIFIVKtLXqSN-YN5Gh0_xo5Jfm-Fu3sAOjzIfttW8ImiU_C-QMd7YAMS4OWF1TrYn1OsyQ89-bg4QnQRC0gSyiracd1vMshfLSbOFFaQiEOhb9RjF1HhrOIvSNi_HdQOOqANHxjI2A1Xg/s1600/38.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIFIVKtLXqSN-YN5Gh0_xo5Jfm-Fu3sAOjzIfttW8ImiU_C-QMd7YAMS4OWF1TrYn1OsyQ89-bg4QnQRC0gSyiracd1vMshfLSbOFFaQiEOhb9RjF1HhrOIvSNi_HdQOOqANHxjI2A1Xg/s320/38.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcuLawUWxZ98thASmTAMpNiV6Mng8QOIOW_Atmb-OWaMLtcfyvXBlPPfhYx4TguSQNsm1lHvioJUdsLbLbuYOvQqL6vKqX1_LOIRMMmtwZcAwIXYp0KXL_XsNl4DOT_96iGP9DYvo8IbI/s1600/39.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcuLawUWxZ98thASmTAMpNiV6Mng8QOIOW_Atmb-OWaMLtcfyvXBlPPfhYx4TguSQNsm1lHvioJUdsLbLbuYOvQqL6vKqX1_LOIRMMmtwZcAwIXYp0KXL_XsNl4DOT_96iGP9DYvo8IbI/s320/39.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnk7Eovd7E7W-dVD_ATMo9bpP0hQetU6NhLYmnCOvinO8rVv2T0d73CfrbOJpF8sNFfTtJE6zLA-MlreTJ0CnGJOMjbenq-f7U0hH7kgo5uKorM1yi113XHZwg8vGRQhPqHgIYWP_laC8/s1600/40.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnk7Eovd7E7W-dVD_ATMo9bpP0hQetU6NhLYmnCOvinO8rVv2T0d73CfrbOJpF8sNFfTtJE6zLA-MlreTJ0CnGJOMjbenq-f7U0hH7kgo5uKorM1yi113XHZwg8vGRQhPqHgIYWP_laC8/s320/40.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd9A28U4-7FFPKZcH8Ut8XnY5VBz_YB2yHuAeKZSgsCDqcOTYTwL0wqpxkc14OwUzD_AXcKb2iZN1fiJ9ewH90b5LOMT35NcZBhLTWnAtGtKMAYvCQDNcToNoDTYS0Z4922gSz3HdCwIQ/s1600/41.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd9A28U4-7FFPKZcH8Ut8XnY5VBz_YB2yHuAeKZSgsCDqcOTYTwL0wqpxkc14OwUzD_AXcKb2iZN1fiJ9ewH90b5LOMT35NcZBhLTWnAtGtKMAYvCQDNcToNoDTYS0Z4922gSz3HdCwIQ/s320/41.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCW73Ojneg2mnF3eeBO5PGFla6_QVc_BwRbIxhukxjHVkAL6dAsKLxBx_e_HE-uwLZNgBvEm_krJcVnIq6hYtQ_UjW4tiIlArIikaaMcPDaymlKlJukEJLHSQl4npyYEFF4qnq8pWhAcY/s1600/43.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCW73Ojneg2mnF3eeBO5PGFla6_QVc_BwRbIxhukxjHVkAL6dAsKLxBx_e_HE-uwLZNgBvEm_krJcVnIq6hYtQ_UjW4tiIlArIikaaMcPDaymlKlJukEJLHSQl4npyYEFF4qnq8pWhAcY/s320/43.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<br />
Again, a close-up (this time without a change of angle) allows impact to be registered, and as the protagonist rolls toward the camera, it zooms rapidly outwards. The villain in black executes an inside lotus kick that sends the protagonist staggering backwards to the right of the frame and into the arms of the other opponent, who holds him for his partner in crime to hit. The dark-costumed attacker shifts to a pantomime/comic mode, rolling up his sleeves; and as he approaches, the camera zooms back in. There's a shift in register here from the acrobatic fighting to a sort of slapstick, and this changes the 'pace', offering a pause amidst the burst of manic activity. This (repeated) switching between 'action' and 'slapstick' within a sequence is, again, typical of the genre. In keeping with the exaggerated, comic mode of performance, Lok's body ripples exaggeratedly with the impact of the strike.<br />
<br />
<b>Shot 9</b><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXLdL5B3Hh3lcn9e5vUrTc-56uYIOZVymF4UOrKa4TkSKjED69pZmSTleXHGsg3FD-BwnYALV_LZnGmO1n8VlFA1naYQuv63kttm0CUR5wahfccV_j4NHKQcGxz5LpnxuyHRwHhEenNXA/s1600/44.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXLdL5B3Hh3lcn9e5vUrTc-56uYIOZVymF4UOrKa4TkSKjED69pZmSTleXHGsg3FD-BwnYALV_LZnGmO1n8VlFA1naYQuv63kttm0CUR5wahfccV_j4NHKQcGxz5LpnxuyHRwHhEenNXA/s320/44.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDuE3fYMZdrBCmpSxuVhIN18sikHcM92RxIj3M1nfiOXsd3En8HaSdkVtK3-zHtZ-POTZKlPpuDwR1ZXq563BwQvCPSFyVBUnN4xPeAKKfkY9KT0THYZS7j6BNtsWbWELTBCKGgYtRpvY/s1600/46.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDuE3fYMZdrBCmpSxuVhIN18sikHcM92RxIj3M1nfiOXsd3En8HaSdkVtK3-zHtZ-POTZKlPpuDwR1ZXq563BwQvCPSFyVBUnN4xPeAKKfkY9KT0THYZS7j6BNtsWbWELTBCKGgYtRpvY/s320/46.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-NOBgrlb6FDeOZBTkkfR_gnbRCXlJmxcPc6vk-f0fgvi7jn1w3vYoZiE0gLXUlD3WPrLNIpUO_xTBRyjKk7evPlboCPmR7qjENMT_wzFXrlerw0c5fShZa8i3OTW_RMSm9VMCKD28jZM/s1600/48.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-NOBgrlb6FDeOZBTkkfR_gnbRCXlJmxcPc6vk-f0fgvi7jn1w3vYoZiE0gLXUlD3WPrLNIpUO_xTBRyjKk7evPlboCPmR7qjENMT_wzFXrlerw0c5fShZa8i3OTW_RMSm9VMCKD28jZM/s320/48.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9_TwOIxYbZHUpiX06ZVsXUA3pt6Do7CT-vfvcjF8bwHB7eBjXeHjgO_rb0u79xbhNRoVyLnLRpvM6hPL_ZeTGhVkzsYWQoxYmcgaX-p3evZCfrNzPPphCaSMa9pObTcGmPAzMfrgHDSM/s1600/49.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9_TwOIxYbZHUpiX06ZVsXUA3pt6Do7CT-vfvcjF8bwHB7eBjXeHjgO_rb0u79xbhNRoVyLnLRpvM6hPL_ZeTGhVkzsYWQoxYmcgaX-p3evZCfrNzPPphCaSMa9pObTcGmPAzMfrgHDSM/s320/49.jpeg" width="320" /></a><br />
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<br />
Lok's body still ripples with impact as the camera cuts, at a right angle again, to a closer shot, emphasising Lok's overwrought reactions and clownish grimmaces. Again, in pantomime slapstick mode, the villain looks at his fist, spits on it and winds up to punch Lok in the face. With a look of mad panic, Lok drops down out of the bottom of the frame, escaping the clutches of the man holding him, who unwittingly takes the telegraphed blow of his opponent.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<h3>
Conclusions</h3>
The fight, of course, carries on. Comic close-up reaction shots show us the two attackers bemoaning their fate, the first looking bemusedly at his fist and the second rubbing his nose, before the sequence turns once again to acrobatic violence. This continues to be depicted with the same mixture of mobile hand-held camerawork, rapidly shifting point of view, snap zooms in and out (mainly out, blending a reaction shot registering impact into the continuation of combat), with longer shots used to showcase virtuoso leaps, spins and flying kicks and mid-shots allowing the maximum impact of flailing arms and punches to the body. There's an extreme mobility of performers across the space delineated in the shots, constantly changing direction. Fighting and slapstick alternate, mixing pain and laughter, courting inconsistency and fragmentation. Operatic reactions are telegraphed to the audience. Good taste or measure is given up in order to pile on kinetic and kinasthetic effects and to elicit 'Carpenter effect' responses from the audience. The theatricality and artificiality of the style are underscored by the soundtrack – dramatic music and the percussive special effects of thwacks, whooshes, yelps and thuds that accompany the action. The affective register here is a piling on of excess on top of excess, sunk deeply into both viewers' and performers' bodies. The technical effects of cinema used here seem calculated to further exaggerate this load that the body takes on within representation.<br />
<br />
All this of course, may offer what is hopefully a fairly convincing 'match' between the use of body and cinematic apparatus in the kung fu film and qualities that might be described as 'hysterical'. But this in itself can only be a part of an analysis – it is far from exploring what such a match might mean. If we are dealing with 'hysteria' in some form, what might be the repressed trauma or desire at stake within these representations? <i>Why </i>might hysteria be a useful concept in thinking about these films? What might it actually explain about them, rather than simply offering or fleshing out a descriptive term for their qualities? All this, of course, is beyond what I can deal with here today...<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<h3>
<b>Notes</b></h3>
<br />
[1] Bhaskar Sarkar, 'Hong Kong Hysteria: Martial Arts Tales from a Mutating World', in Esther C M Yau (ed.), <i>At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World</i> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 159–176; Mark Gallagher, 'Masculinity in Transition: Jackie Chan's Star Text', <i>Velvet Light Trap</i> 39 (Spring 1997), pp. 23–41.<br />
<br />
[2] Pierre Janet, cited in Elizabeth Bronfen, <i>The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents</i> (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 58.<br />
<br />
[3] Jean Baudrillard, 'The Ecstasy of Communication', in Hal Foster (ed.), <i>The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture</i> (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), p. 132.<br />
<br />
[4] Bronfen, <i>Knotted Subject</i>, pp. 180–1.<br />
<br />
[5] Bronfen, <i>Knotted Subject</i>, pp. 181.<br />
<br />
[6] Allon White, 'Hyseria and the End of Carnival: Festivity and Bourgeois Neurosis', in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (eds.), <i>The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence</i> (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 157–170.<br />
<br />
[7] See Luke White, 'A "Narrow World, Strewn with Prohibitions": Chang Cheh's <i>The Assassin</i> and the 1967 Hong Kong Riots', <i>Asian Cinema</i> 26.1 (2015), p. 92. (Full article: pp. 79–98.)<br />
<br />
[8] David Bordwell, 'Aesthetics in Action: <i>Kungfu,</i> Gunplay and Cinematic Expressivity', in Yau (ed.), <i>At Full Speed</i>, pp. 74–6. (Full essay: pp. 73–94.)Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-7071675068978538322016-06-10T04:59:00.000-07:002016-06-10T05:04:43.636-07:00The body in Jackie Chan's Project A<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEQaOsruS-qk7Ona-iAykXTURljlfR25PCF3Uy6cr2rL0pmt_nUfk50A0tFKXDgrRyb-7Ol0K1tEV4vwFz1j4rzT0CHApGEyjuur8kQFFUUAvDrtg4WhvYE2Cuqk_EFg7J2dWlKHly2g8/s1600/Screen+Shot+2016-06-09+at+22.31.55.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="167" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEQaOsruS-qk7Ona-iAykXTURljlfR25PCF3Uy6cr2rL0pmt_nUfk50A0tFKXDgrRyb-7Ol0K1tEV4vwFz1j4rzT0CHApGEyjuur8kQFFUUAvDrtg4WhvYE2Cuqk_EFg7J2dWlKHly2g8/s400/Screen+Shot+2016-06-09+at+22.31.55.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Colonial Comedy Kung Fu – the opening shot from Jackie Chan's <i>Project A</i> (1983). Video still, from the Hong Kong Legends 3-disc 'Project A Collection' DVD set, 2005. </td></tr>
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I’m currently working on some writing that attempts to think
through the kung fu comedy film, and its rise in Hong Kong during the mid
1970s. I’m interested in writing about this genre in part precisely because it
is one that has been relatively overlooked, and relatively undervalued. The
epic martial arts film – clearly often nationalist or anti-colonial in its
content – is relatively easy to understand as ‘political’, and hence for academia
to valorise as ‘important’ and worthy of scrutiny. Relatively speaking the
martial arts comedy is less easy to read in terms of a political ‘content’ or
‘position’. Its lack of ‘seriousness’ makes it harder to think about as a
worthy topic of analysis – though perhaps a more positive way to think of this ‘un-serious’
nature would be to count such films as irreverent. <o:p></o:p></div>
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A number of authors – including, for example, Leon Hunt
(2003, p. 102) – have thus proposed that whilst still in the shadow of the
decolonisation movements of the 60s, the Hong Kong Riots, and the turmoil of
the Cultural Revolution, Hong Kong’s martial arts cinema, in its heroic mode,
expressed something of this heavily politicised moment; but they argue that the
rise of kung fu comedy in the mid 1970s marks a depoliticisation of the genre,
reflecting the increasingly ‘taboo’ nature of politics in the colony during
this period. In my recent article on Chang Cheh’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Assassin</i> (White, 2015), I came quite close to making such and
argument myself.<o:p></o:p></div>
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However, I’m ultimately not convinced that these comic films
are ultimately any less worthy of a political reading than their tragic-epic counterparts. A certain
radical ‘redemption’ of these films seems to me to be in order. After all, they
surely constitute the most ‘popular’ form of martial arts cinema, and, for a
left-wing critic, the popular has to count for something. My proposal is that
in such films, made as they are at a moment of rapid social change (one that it
might once have been fashionable to mark as the moment of the rise of the
‘postmodern’), politics simply migrates ‘somewhere else’ from where it had been
previously.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What’s interesting about working with these films is that
one is thrown increasingly away from narrative readings and forced to engage
with aspects of the visual, the cinematic, and perhaps in particular with
aspects of performance. This in itself might mark a certain resistance in them
to ultimately ‘bourgeois’ forms of narrative, marking the appearance of a cinematic
‘excess’ (Thompson, 1977) in relation to such structures. It seems to me that
the various images and fantasies of the body that are represented in these
films are central to how we might negotiate them critically.<o:p></o:p></div>
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At the moment I’m working on a section of the writing that attempts
to think about these films in relation to Walter Benjamin’s writings about
Mickey Mouse and Hollywood slapstick; and Jackie Chan is the main figure I’m
thinking about. As part of this work, I’ve just been re-watching Chan’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Project A </i>(1983), and, I might add, with
huge pleasure.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It seems to me to be the film where the political stakes of the
body in kung fu comedy emerge most clearly, largely because of a prominence of
historical reference that is unusual in the genre. This historical reference
brings the film close to a kind of political and social satire. I’d argue that
some of the politics that attains this unusual visibility in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Project A</i> is in fact merely more latent,
less explicit in many other kung fu comedy films, and that it helps us understand
the broader signification of the body in a genre that had been under
development since at least Lau Kar-leung’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spiritual
Boxer</i> (1975).<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Project A </i>– made
towards the start of a period that has often been understood by critics as always
overdetermined by the looming of the 1997 hand-over of the colony to Chinese
ownership – is set back in ‘old Hong Kong’, in what seems to be the late
nineteenth century, in the heyday of unreconstructed British colonial rule.
Though perhaps in some ways somewhat tender and nostalgic in its recreation of
the past, there’s a strong strand of satire, which mocks the general chaos,
ineptitude and corruption of the colonial regime, as exemplified by both its
British and Chinese representatives. The plot is ultimately not terribly
relevant for our purposes here, but revolves around the rivalries between the
coastguard and the police force, and the attempts of the former to capture a
band of pirates who are halting trade to and from the island.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What was most striking to me in rewatching the film,
however, was Chan’s famous ability not just to stage fights but to work
creatively with the environments and objects in which he sets his characters –
something, of course, that is hardly a new observation about his comic or
choreographic style. It has, however, been argued that something very similar
was at the heart of Charlie Chaplin’s comedy, which often built its humour out
of the transformation of objects from their mundane uses to new and surprising
ends, based not on convention, but on the morphology of the object itself,
presenting us with a rehumanisation of the alienated world of things as
produced by capitalism, and a new mastery of the modern environment (Clayton,
2007, pp. 32–3). <o:p></o:p></div>
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This all happens, in hyperbolic form, in the action scenes
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Project A</i>. A chair is no longer an
object that rules, determines and orders the human body through our very use of
it. (If you are anything like me, you will remember well the constant commands
from childhood: ‘sit up straight!’; ‘don’t tip the chair backwards!’; ‘Don’t
put your feet on the table!’; ‘stop shuffling and sit still!’; etc., etc. In
this, the chair is not just a chair, it’s a tool for the discipline and
socialisation of the body.) Rather than something to be sat on in the ‘proper’
manner, a chair in Jackie Chan films is also for leapfrogging over, rolling
across, or even for a momentary headstand. With a strike coming towards one,
the body may well spin around to lie on the chair, ducking underneath the
strike. And tipping the chair back in what would normally be a disastrous fall,
the acrobatic kung fu comedic body might turn the chair into a form of shelter
in which the body might momentarily nestle, before rolling away, or flipping it
around yourself to move into a new point of attack or retreat. Wielded in the
hands of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung or Yuen Biao, the chair is no longer a chair,
but a shield, a tool for disarming or trapping an opponent, or a heavy
bludgeon. Tucked rapidly under the body, it might become, again, a launchpad,
or kind of a perch on which to posture and pose before the next exchange with
an opponent.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">When is a chair not a chair? When it's in a Jackie Chan movie... Stills from <i>Project A.</i></td></tr>
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Similarly in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Project A</i>,
coat-stands become tridents; vases become boxing gloves; bamboo poles are no
longer for hanging washing on, but become a jousting lances for knights mounted
on bicycles; bedpans become missile weapons, fired with a flick of the foot
using a bicycle wheel as a launching device; tables become battering rams or
vaulting benches; windows become portals to exit and enter a space. Banisters
are for vaulting over or sliding down; flagpoles are for climbing up, out of
harms way; awnings break your fall; chandeliers are useful to swing from…</div>
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We are thrown into the anarchic and surrealistically
re-enchanted world, in permanent flux, which Benjamin (1931; 1933) lauded in
the first Mickey Mouse cartoons. If machinery and capital had set the world
into a state of permanent, disorientating change – and one which more often
than not was experienced as a violence on the human subject, its body and its
capacity for experience – Mickey Mouse, for Benjamin, also revealed the
dialectically complementary side to this. The cartoon imagination foregrounded an
underlying utopian desire for the power to transform the world that Benjamin
saw modern technology itself as expressing, if in distorted form. In early
Disney animations (and in the Hollywood slapstick of Chaplin, Keaton and
Lloyd), this power was envisioned as re-rooted within the body itself. This
power was rehumanised, bracketed off from a capitalist use of technology that
had been turned away from the benefit of humanity and placed in the hands of a
small elite who – as Benjamin suggested first in ‘Experience and Poverty’
(1933) and then more emphatically in the final version of the ‘Artwork’ essay (1992
[1939]) – used it not to liberate but to exploit, and perhaps ultimately
annihilate, the rest of humanity. This rehumanisation might be read as
entailing a reconciliation between the body-intensive nature of Benjamin’s
archaic ‘first-technologies’ and the modern forms he termed ‘second
technology’, the true essence of which, he proposed, lay not in their
alienating use for war and capitalist organisation, but rather in the
institution of ‘play’ between humanity, technology and nature. (For more on Benjamin
on first and second technologies – and their relation to such corporeal arts
such as yoga, as well as his pursuit of the erotic, drugs and ‘running
downhill’, see Hansen, 2002, pp. 52–3.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0YF6rjXJplgSzRQmNA5k-5wrmDtqadOG2E8hB6lkKY_08Pua5Mxp_2qMrk2UJusddNSlyJOi89lGkLTAekY_1JeUN2S0vCuS2sxTpWxTew0eeg1btsKxLGdSMmYrl9VRN8YvmUcXFj4Y/s1600/Screen+Shot+2016-06-09+at+23.14.41.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0YF6rjXJplgSzRQmNA5k-5wrmDtqadOG2E8hB6lkKY_08Pua5Mxp_2qMrk2UJusddNSlyJOi89lGkLTAekY_1JeUN2S0vCuS2sxTpWxTew0eeg1btsKxLGdSMmYrl9VRN8YvmUcXFj4Y/s320/Screen+Shot+2016-06-09+at+23.14.41.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A bedpan used as a projectile weapon, fired with a flick of a bicycle wheel. Video still from <i>Project A</i>. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Chan’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Project A</i>
was made at a time in Hong Kong of rapid modernisation that competed with the
Europe of Benjamin’s day or the America of Buster Keaton (Duncan, 2007), and
seems to envision something of the same re-appropriation of the alienating
world of things that Benjamin saw in the cinema of his own time. Through the re-enchanting
magic of their transformation, humanity reasserts a creative mastery over the
objects about him. However, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Project A </i>this
takes on a very particular significance in terms of the film’s re-imagination
(and re-appropriation) of an emphatically colonial landscape. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Frantz Fanon, describing the colonial experience, proposed
it as a ‘narrow world, strewn with prohibitions’ (Fanon, 2001, p. 29). If 1970s
Hong Kong was not the most nightmarish of colonies (involving an altogether
‘softer’ form of colonial governance than the French-held Algeria that Fanon
knew), with its crowded urban spaces it at least made Fanon’s figure of speech
a matter of literal, physically experienced constraint, and this surely forms a
significant context for Chan’s corporeal art. Walking in Hong Kong’s bustling
streets even today, or looking up at the huge and tightly packed vertical
towers of tiny apartments, a visitor to the island gets some kind of small
insight into such an experience. Fanon makes much in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wretched of the Earth</i> of the ways that the colony is structured
around spatial exclusion and control. It is around such spatial organisation that
colonial violence is instituted and made a part of the everyday, embodied
experience of the ‘native’. Much of Chan’s physical performance in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Project A</i> involves a renegotiation of
such spaces, bringing an anarchy into them through his physical traversal and
refunctioning of their logic. This is perhaps most spectacularly envisioned in
the bicycle chase through old Hong Kong’s narrow alleyways, where the
protagonists have to zig-zag their ways through the cheek-by-jowl lives of its
inhabitants, navigating impossibly tight right angle turns as fantastical
leaps, or climbing up walls to escape speeding pursuers. Here the relation
between the human body and the bicycle becomes radically refashioned to make
them tools for a superhuman traversal of the colonial metropolis.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipoyYogdQ0Ry5X_2C3yywameywQDixS1Q42HzPz7QzJbTZ5Xp-RX7Ff5rUvdRGEdw9laPP_612Et1ek8TKItSU1eZ3ODhngTi0ZswJ04oLdjMKC3UuA-O7rA8_QB9Lo0120rv93sBBE2w/s1600/Screen+Shot+2016-06-09+at+23.15.31.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipoyYogdQ0Ry5X_2C3yywameywQDixS1Q42HzPz7QzJbTZ5Xp-RX7Ff5rUvdRGEdw9laPP_612Et1ek8TKItSU1eZ3ODhngTi0ZswJ04oLdjMKC3UuA-O7rA8_QB9Lo0120rv93sBBE2w/s320/Screen+Shot+2016-06-09+at+23.15.31.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The 'narrow world' of Hong Kong's alleyways reconfigured in a new composition of architecture, bodies and bicycles. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This logic that pits the body against the colonial
organisation of space is even set up in the opening sequences of the film, for
example, as we see Chan, in his colonial coastguard uniform, rushing to a
meeting at the police and coastguard headquarters. After leaping from his
still-moving bicycle, which crashes madly into the bicycle rack, disintegrating
as it does so, Chan rushes up the evocatively colonial staircase of the
building and along its wooden balconies. Chan vaults and spins over a handrail
to get past oncoming employees within the narrow space available, without
breaking his stride, defying the ‘proper’ function of the Western architecture.
His wild running contrasts to the neatly regimented marching columns of his
colleagues, and, as he reigns himself in in front of a superior officer, his
mode of propulsion is clearly a transgression of correct protocol. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The architecture of the colonial police headquarters is also
renegotiated by Chan’s coastguard hero later in the film, when he decides to
spy on his superior officers, hoping to hear good news about the reinstatement
of shelved plans to attack the pirates. Chan transforms a chimney into a tunnel
that takes him into the heart of the administration, bypassing the normal
security that keeps social inferiors away from the private discussions of their
superiors. Chan, however gets more than he bargains for when the (English)
Governor steps aside from his (Chinese) commanders into a side room to do a
deal with a wealthy businessman who is in fact in league with the pirates. The
Governor’s inner-sanctum-within-an-inner-sanctum sets up a further spatial
divide in rank and privilege between him and his high-level subordinates. Chan,
however, has come into this very room, and it is his illicit eavesdropping on
this conversation, discovering his superior’s guilty secret – and his superior’s
discovery that he has done so – that allows him direct access to the ears of
the very highest level of authority. Being in the centre of the administration,
Chan gets the privilege of putting the moral case to the Governor for fighting
the pirates rather than doing a deal with them. Chan’s physical renegotiation
of the environment thus becomes a parallel challenge to the normal hierarchies
of the film’s world, which are realised in the architecture of the police
headquarters and its regime of physical exclusion.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijMrbPzmMOhOIjz8O-GQq3bubS9muyLd-uxM82plAP-Pa8M1a8MULi93hF275TCwu1YSywvo1LYo2knYW3H0b-GyCtb0TJnqb7H464XTRC4Q-Y9SQJiFYJR8gO0jPoydsKla6UnMrLH_g/s1600/Screen+Shot+2016-06-09+at+23.25.20.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijMrbPzmMOhOIjz8O-GQq3bubS9muyLd-uxM82plAP-Pa8M1a8MULi93hF275TCwu1YSywvo1LYo2knYW3H0b-GyCtb0TJnqb7H464XTRC4Q-Y9SQJiFYJR8gO0jPoydsKla6UnMrLH_g/s400/Screen+Shot+2016-06-09+at+23.25.20.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chan turns a chimney into a passageway to enter into the heart of the spaces of colonial privilege.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of the key fights in the film takes place in a
high-class club, where the police have gone to arrest a suspect harboured by
the club’s well-connected owner. The film labours the fact that this is a space
from which the police are normally economically excluded (as well as
linguistically so – the head waiter insists on talking to them in English).
Then, when the fight breaks out we have a tour-de-force of the transformation
and re-use of its fittings and furnishings, from the Rococo-style staircase
through the antiques which litter its walls, to the furniture itself, as all
these things are, in their turn, transformed into weapons. The scene is one
where Chan’s stunt team get to ‘do their stuff’, performing a series of the
spectacular falls for which they are so well known, crashing the human body
(thrown, spinning, often from great heights, and with great kinetic force) into
the various props or scenery provided. In most cases, though the body certainly
gets an awful punishment, it is ultimately the club itself which comes off
worst, the high-class environment being reduced, by the end of the scene to
little more than fragments of wood, ceramic and plaster. If this was a space of
colonial (and class) exclusion and privilege, a kind of a ‘kung fu revenge’ has
been waged upon it in the scene through the collision of the environment with
the rubbery bodies of the stunt team and their cartoon-character-like
resilience. In fact, the film overall seems to have a point to make through our
extra-diegetic response to performance, in the ways that (even where taking a
thrashing) the performers’ bodies take on new, fantastical relationships to
their environment, performing unusual forms of movement through it at new
velocities.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjjZkDjDGTL78hnlz_CspJErR1DltqRBBylQszPipPju7slriiTAXyrTBPFxA66bxNxhEYThmgaZxWOg5tSULEZskGkdXGuHVPumGpqD_KCLfW54kBZk8HxZqVLFxaXiVq74o8Xj4w5xM/s1600/Screen+Shot+2016-06-09+at+23.05.49.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjjZkDjDGTL78hnlz_CspJErR1DltqRBBylQszPipPju7slriiTAXyrTBPFxA66bxNxhEYThmgaZxWOg5tSULEZskGkdXGuHVPumGpqD_KCLfW54kBZk8HxZqVLFxaXiVq74o8Xj4w5xM/s400/Screen+Shot+2016-06-09+at+23.05.49.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Colonial space being reduced to rubble in <i>Project A</i>, as Chan hurls an opponent through and over the balcony of the exclusive club.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the light of such a reading, the theme established
through the early part of the film of the discipline of the body makes another
kind of a sense, too. When Chan’s rather anarchic and incompetent squad of
coastguards are disbanded and sent back to train with the police, this is to
instil in them physical discipline, such as standing straight to salute, in the
proper (Western) military manner. The training itself, however, becomes
peculiarly subversive or carnivalesque in nature. When two recruits on parade
are discovered mouthing a lewd comment about a passing woman, they are punished
by having to repeat the comment <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ad
nauseam</i>, only serving to multiply, rather than negate its obscenity. A
further recruit, who fails to salute correctly, is made to salute repeatedly, but
this makes the gesture of deference into an absurd and mocking simulacrum of
itself. The recruits are stood on alert in the middle of the night by an
officer who claims to be concerned that they have drunk too much soup, with
Chan having to call a militaristic ‘charge’ to the latrines. The next day
involves the recruits stripped to shower, and interrupted, half soaped, and
called out of the showers with only water ladles to protect their modesty. The
whole training section (a peculiar parody, perhaps, of the training montages
that had already become a staple of the kung fu comedy) serves to re-libidinise
colonial discipline and to re-inject a sort of anarchy into it, through a
failure of the ‘proper’ mimesis of the colonial masters. This ‘failure’ to
conform seems to be celebrated throughout the film, as a productive, creative
and ultimately transgressive and liberating act. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">References<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Benjamin,
Walter (1931) ‘On Mickey Mouse’, in Jennings, Eiland Gary Smith, eds. (1999),
pp. 545–6.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Benjamin, Walter (1933) ‘Experience and Poverty,’ <span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">in in Jennings, Eiland Gary Smith,
eds. (1999), pp. 734–5.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Benjamin,
Walter (1992 [1939]) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’,
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Illuminations</i>, ed. Hannah Arendt,
trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, pp. 211–244.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Clayton,
Alex (2007) <i>The Body in Hollywood Slapstick.</i> Jefferson, NC: McFarland.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Duncan,
Sydney (2007) ‘The Traditional Thing in the Modern Age: Contextual Perspectives
on Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan’. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New
Review of Film and Television Studies</i> 5.3 (2007), pp. 353–367.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Fanon, Frantz (2001) <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i>.
London: Penguin. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Hansen,
Miriam (2002) ‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street’, in Gerhard Richter,
ed., <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Benjamin's Ghosts: Interventions in
Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory.</i> Stanford: Stanford UP, pp. 41–73.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hunt, Leon (2003) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kung
Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger. </i>London: Wallflower.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Jennings, Michael,
Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, eds. (1999) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings</i>, vol 2, part 2, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">1931–1934</i>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Thompson, Kristin (1977) ‘The Concept of Cinematic Excess’. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ciné-Tracts: A Journal of Film,
Communications, Culture and Politics</i> 1.2, pp. 54–64.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
White, Luke (2015) ‘A “Narrow World, Strewn with
Prohibitions”: Chang Cheh’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Assassin </i>and
the 1967 Hong Kong Riots’. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Asian Cinema</i>
26.1, pp. 79–98, doi: 10.1386/ac.26.1.79_1.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-13942923238245018492016-02-07T08:07:00.004-08:002016-02-07T08:07:39.397-08:00Martial Arts Studies and Gender (University of Brighton, 5th Feb 2016) On Friday, I had the fortune to attend the UK Martial Arts Studies Network's first event, down on the Eastbourne campus of the University of Brighton, ably organised by Alex Channon and Chris Matthews, so though this edges off at a slight tangent from most of the posts on this blog, I thought I'd jot down a few thoughts that have occurred to me after the day.<br />
<br />
During a fascinating event, which brought together academics and martial arts teachers/practitioners, we heard papers on and discussed a range of issues around inclusion and exclusion of groups in participation in martial arts and combat sports, and also examined the possibilities – and limits – of their use in reducing crime. Chris Matthews examined the ways that the design of spaces and the cultures they foster might include or exclude different groups, discussing their historical creation of a distinct masculine (macho) culture in boxing, and we were presented projects by the Eastbourne Boxing Club to open up a more inclusive environment.<br />
<br />
Anna Kavoura and Catherine Phipps explored the ways that exclusion works in particular with regards to the different needs of LGBT+ participants.<br />
<br />
Deborah Jump offered a provocative paper, from a criminological perspective, suggesting that the kinds of culture of toughness and strength fostered by boxing gyms often only reinforces the self-narratives of young men tied up with violent crime, rather than challenging this, and can simply reinforce the cycles of violence fostered by a culture of masculinity centred around notions of 'respect' and 'shame' rather than (as many boxing outreach projects hope) ending them. The hard, muscular body of boxing functions as a kind of armour through which vulnerability is denied and violence is normalised as a way of solving problems.<br />
<br />
The highlight for me, though, was a fascinating paper by Kath Woodward which looked at the changes hopefully sown by the high-profile media coverage of women's boxing in the 2012 Olympics. Woodward's argument was subtle in binding together media representations and everyday embodied physical practice – something that the interdisciplinarity of 'Martial Arts Studies', I feel, is at its best suited to do. Woodward argued that it is precisely the repetitive, everyday nature of martial arts practice that makes it such a potentially socially transformative activity. But the logic of her paper perhaps also implied that it was the way that such everyday practice was tied into the more spectacular and cultural aspects of cultural representation that contributes to its potency. What was interesting form me about her discussion of everyday, embodied practice was that it also encompassed practices of viewing (rather than just participating in) martial arts/boxing. What she thought was particularly important in the 2012 Olympic coverage – especially that of the Nicola Adams fights – was that though the discourse around the women's boxing events initially placed gender central (with a media panic around such questions as: should women box? is it bad for their health? does it open up unsavoury voyeuristic pleasures?), once the competition began commentary increasingly 'forgot' about Adams's gender, presenting her fights in the same way as it would men's boxing – i.e. as a spectacle in which her gender was largely irrelevant.<br />
<br />
Woodward offered up an interesting conceptualisation of this, looking at the ways that spectators – like athletes – often seem to enter the ecstatic, timeless time of the "zone" in their spectation. She discovers in this a reason for the depth and power of the effect of such specatorship. This seemed provocative in its implicit contrast to cinematic representation. Is there a difference between watching sport and watching a movie? The difference was not fully explored, but opened up much potential for further thinking. In an exchange afterwards about this issue after her paper, Woodward seemed to suggest that movies don't draw us into the "zone" in the same way as sport, since narrative holds open a different experience of time. However, I wonder about whether some of her ideas in fact make sense the particular experience of spectatorship of martial arts cinema, which, counting as a 'body genre' (like the hollywood musical) often explodes the time of narrative to throw us into the "now" of performance. Some Hong Kong films of the late seventies (I'm thinking of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, the "Venoms Mob", etc.) in their temporally extended and impossibly physical finales offer something more like the sporting event than what is presented by the usual requirements of Hollywood narrative. And interestingly enough, kung fu cinema (with its own frequent narratives of personal and occasionally collective transformation) seems to have a particularly strong effect in sending people to gyms or dojos, suggesting something special in the relation it forges between on-screen and off-screen bodies.<br />
<br />
Woodward's paper was also enthralling in presenting a model of how change in such things as gender norms may actually may happen – incrementally and through moments of reiterated, humdrum behaviour. But the question I found myself asking at the end was the old one about revolution or reform. Is what we see in the changes in gender norms really just a matter of chipping at the edges of a patriarchal order, whilst leaving its essential structures in place? Although women's increased participation in things like martial arts or boxing seems an incredibly positive development, signalling some very big changes in the way women are seen and the behaviours that are open to them, are martial arts (and society as a whole) still primarily dominated by a patriarchal/phallogocentric order of gender that remains in its essentials untouched? At what point might all the little changes actually amount to a core transformation, and how might the two (quantitative and qualitative change) be articulated?<br />
<br />
I did find myself, at the end of the day, also asking a wider question of the event, that I think emerges from this same concern. During the day, we spoke repeatedly about the gender and sexual identities of marginalised groups – women, ethnic minorities, LGBT+ constituents, and lower class / criminal young men – but the missing issue was that of the more 'mainstream', ordinary, middle class – and ultimately privileged – forms of masculinity which are invested in the martial arts, too. I think this is not a poor reflection on Channon's and Matthews's curation of the event, but rather on the kinds of things that Martial Arts Studies itself currently seems to encompass.<br />
<br />
I found myself increasingly wondering about the men in that very room where the seminar took place (including myself), and the kinds of ideas or experiences of masculinity that drew us into the martial arts. How might these ideas, fantasies and so on – perhaps, although seemingly far less "problematic" than the young offenders discussed in Jump's paper – in fact lie at the core of what's wrong in terms of gender construction around the martial arts? Travelling home, I found myself thinking about Benedict Anderson's notion of "banal nationalism," which allowed him to think of nationalism not in terms of its extreme, pathological and spectacular varieties (when countries declare war on neighbours, or skinheads attack immigrants), but rather in the tiny, everyday ways that people are encouraged to take the nation as a reference point for their identities (from, for example, the clockface on the news that promulgates a shared experience of time to the logo-isation of national maps in the depiction of transport networks or the assertion of a standardised national language over and against local dialects). I wonder if Martial Arts Studies needs to turn to similarly "banal" aspects of gender. And I wonder if, in order to address the core from which forms of exclusion emerge, it needs to study not marginal "others" but those at the symbolic centre of the social order.<br />
<br />
I also then found myself wondering about <i>Martial Arts Studies itself</i> as a gendered space. As part of our explorations in the day, we thought in some detail about the ways that women, or those from the LGBT+ community, are often excluded by aspects of the environment and ritualised behaviour of gyms and dojos. But what about our academic Martial Arts Studies events? How welcome do they feel there, and how deeply has that been considered by us? Though the event at Eastbourne – with a fantastic mix of people attending – felt very inclusive, my feelings about the conference in Cardiff last Summer were rather different. I spoke to a number of women attendees afterwards who pretty much all told me that they had found it a rather uncomfortably "male" space. And indeed, it struck me strongly that there was a certain machismo that surrounded a lot of the socialisation that took place around the conference. Often the first question asked was not (unlike most academic conferences!) what your paper is about or some such thing, but about whether you practiced a martial art, and if so what style. The effect of such a question can, perhaps, be a little like the aggressive questioning that Bruce Lee is subjected to by a white martial artist on the boat on the way to a martial arts contest: "What's your style?" In the film, it wasn't just a polite inquiry, it was also a challenge. In the conference, the question was clearly less intrusive, but I wondered how non-practitioners may have experienced this kind of question. Did it imply less of a right to be there? Some of the papers, too, seemed to include hints about "martial credentials" that came close at points to masculine "posturing". One speaker (I shan't name him), after an explicit a denial of homophobia, followed this up, as evidence, with what was meant to be a joke but ultimately amounted to a homophobic comment. Were some of the gendered cultures of the training hall entering into the spaces of academic debate, too? It's often small, banal, everyday, overlooked performances that inscribe gender on a space – often much more subtle than directly homophobic or sexist comments, often far more everyday than the spectacular examples of subproletarian boxing gyms discussed at Friday's event, and often far more inscribed into the "normal" behaviour of "upright" citizens – and it seems to me that in order to safeguard not only the spaces in which we do martial arts, but also the academic spaces where we discuss them in this fledgeling discipline, we need a vigilance not so much on the "other" but on ourselves.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-36969923587240341742016-01-15T13:26:00.002-08:002016-01-15T14:58:07.973-08:00RIP David Bowie ... Martial Artist?<h3>
Introducing an Implausible (But Compelling) Conjunction – Bowie and the Martial Arts </h3>
<br />
As I write, it is the week in which David Bowie died, and the media has gone into paroxysms of mourning for him – and quite rightly so, in my humble opinion. I'm quite happy to add to the mountain of obituaries – as a popular cultural figure he's one of the few, perhaps, about whom it would be impossible to write too much. Given the subject of this blog – martial arts cinema – I can perhaps only, however, hymn him as a figure in relation to the martial arts, rather than as a pop star.<br />
<br />
But – <i>David Bowie as a martial artist???????</i> Isn't that – well – rather preposterous?<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPlBdL3uZQN1lT1TBQy_VHgry2FESI1uASehcNgppEPF96AyCz9RBIbl0x0opC6zoW1JWdBj3hIWwWxzMHMQyG2O8pTOGqfHMnpyjrLZhJv1FGBMTMDFESl3Y9EtQ5WF_sM5ftOI6bbNo/s1600/Bowie-kungfu.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPlBdL3uZQN1lT1TBQy_VHgry2FESI1uASehcNgppEPF96AyCz9RBIbl0x0opC6zoW1JWdBj3hIWwWxzMHMQyG2O8pTOGqfHMnpyjrLZhJv1FGBMTMDFESl3Y9EtQ5WF_sM5ftOI6bbNo/s320/Bowie-kungfu.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">What's this? Bowie-style high-kicking action? Can it be?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
On the one hand, yes, it is a completely preposterous idea. But on the other, I have a certain faith that pursuing impossible conjunctions probably ought to be an important intellectual or academic method, certainly when it comes to the analysis of culture. Some impossible conjunctions (like the one that started me on the body of research of which this blog is just the occasional offshoot) have a power of compulsion behind them and in this case they surely take on the nature of the 'symptom' – the thing which in psychoanalysis calls for explanation and for some form of therapeutic 'working through'. The symptom marks the locus of a desire and a fantasy – and the very constitution of the subject itself. When we leave the analysts couch behind and start to look at culture, the questions might remain, of course: 'whose symptom?' ; 'which subject?' ; 'the symptom of what?' Perhaps the symptoms that I describe here are only mine and they are irrelevant to anyone except for me; but my wager is that they have a wider meaning than that. Perhaps if the paradoxical idea of David Bowie as Martial Artist has already drawn you thus far, through some rather dense academic prose, it suggests that it's your symptom too...<br />
<br />
The idea of posing a relation between David Bowie and the martial arts (and in particular Hong Kong martial arts cinema) was, in any case, the subject of a short academic presentation that I gave a couple of years back, in order to give a flavour of my research to colleagues. That paper was called (rather mischievously) 'Panic in Hong Kong, or, David Bowie's Karate Lesson', and it sought to sketch a suggestive network of associations between a European countercultural milieu, in the thrall of a cosmopolitan vision of the global village, which might provide a figure for the valence of Hong Kong cinema as it was taken up in the West in the early 1970s. If it doesn't tell us 'what such films meant' as such, it certainly gives us an image of a set of relations and associations that we can interpret them as having entered into.<br />
<br />
In the last few days, as Bowie songs have been going around and around my head, I've found myself thinking about this presentation again. But after all, the figure of return is also another marker of the symptom. So here goes a kind of self-analysis, which will start with me and open out to propose a set of wider cultural significances. <br />
<br />
<h3>
Panic in West Hampstead</h3>
<a 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" style="height: 168px; margin-top: 0px; width: 168px;" width="320" /></a>Perhaps the origin of this presentation – and of the strange conjunction of Bowie and the martial arts as a compelling (if implausible) one for me – lies in my own martial arts training, and in some things that might, if you want to dismiss my association of the two, be put down to accident. (But as Freud notes – there are no accidents in the unconscious.)<br />
<br />
My own martial arts teacher is clearly a fan of Bowie, and he will frequently play Bowie songs during our classes. I remember in particular one class – one of the best classes I attended – in which, as we strove as students to draw martial spirit and martial awareness into our tai chi practice, he repeatedly played Bowie's 'Panic in Detroit' (again and again and again), stopping at one point to ask us about whether we knew what the song was about and to ask us why he might think it has something to do with the practice of martial arts. (Although, always enigmatic, he never directly answered that question himself, and left us to figure these things out). In any case, the thundering rhythm section of this song, for us in the lesson, stood the part of the war drums which I always imagine having accompanied military training in historical China. Some of Bowie's songs are simply great to do martial arts to – though that's far from a meaningful answer to the conundrum I'm setting. I think in many ways I 'found' David Bowie through my martial arts practice – as I've actually 'found' a lot of other music that I probably never would have become invested in had I not encountered it through this route. But my finding it is far from accidental. In some respects, I'd suggest, the music found me – there is an element of predestination in my seemingly random experience.<br />
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In one respect, well, I like Bowie – but so what? And my teacher's interest in Bowie, a skeptic will argue, may just say a lot about him, and about his particular tastes. There is no significance beyond that. But it also, to begin with, signals something about how old he is, having come into adulthood around the time that Bowie would have rose to fame. Here we are already edging beyond the accidental and the specific. This generational moment, which Bowie must surely signify for him, and from which his interest in Bowie (alongside many other musicians of the same era) must emerge already perhaps marks the conjunction as a significant one. And it is significant, too, in that my teacher belongs to a generation whose coming of age also coincided with the moment when Asian martial arts, too, were emerging (like rock) as a pursuit for disenfranchised youths, looking for meaning in their life. As well as Bowie, the transition from the sixties to the seventies was the moment of the rise of the kung fu film – alongside Bowie arrived 'Grasshopper' and Bruce Lee.<br />
<br />
Bowie's first (eponymous) album was released in 1967, the same year as Chang Cheh's breakthrough film, <i>The One-Armed Swordsman</i>, revolutionised Chinese swordplay films. In 1969, as Bowie was recording <i>Space Oddity</i>, King Hu would already have been in the midst of filming <i>A Touch of Zen</i>, which ultimately came to be the first Chinese-language film to win a Grand Prize at Cannes. In 1971, when Bowie released his next album, <i>Hunky Dory</i> (his first album to reach the top 10, climbing to no. 3), Bruce Lee also performed in his first starring kung fu role in <i>The Big Boss. </i>The 'kung fu' film proper had been born. In 1972, the first kung fu films reached the major distribution in America (<i>5 Fingers of Death/King Boxer</i> being the first to receive a screening), and Bowie released <i>The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars</i>. In 1973, when <i>Aladdin Sane</i> and <i>Pin Ups</i> were released, Lee starred in <i>Enter the Dragon</i>, the first 'Hollywood' kung fu film, and the genre's great global blockbuster. This was the year that 'Panic in Detroit', the song from which we drew so much in our lesson some time in the 2010s in a church hall in West Hampstead, was recorded.<br />
<br />
Bowie and martial arts, then, were contemporaneous, synchronous even, I would argue. However, what we might still need to start to think about is whether they were in any sense bound together; and if so, what on earth this unlikely juxtaposition might mean, beyond their simultaneous existence for an audience of young consumers of popular culture.<br />
<br />
<h3>
David Bowie's Karate Lesson</h3>
Let's jump then to a particular moment in the media, back in those glory days. David Bowie's Karate Lesson. Perhaps this gives us a snapshot of a kind of significance that Asian martial arts had within a particular nexus, and the way that they entered into a particular world of pop-cultural, subcultural and even countercultural meaning-making.<br />
<br />
The date is January 3rd, 1976, and David Bowie is appearing on the Dinah Shore show. Bowie is thin, suave, androgynous, debonair, seemingly shy, but nonetheless exudes a powerful charisma, a gentle grace and his hesitancy or shyness itself functions as a disarming charm. And – to join David, Dinah, the 'Fonz' and Nancy Walker – Bowie has brought on to the show his karate instructor, Dwayne Vaughn. Vaughn is super-fly, fast as lightening, proudly sporting an Afro, looking for all the world like the star of a blaxploitation film, though dressed in his karate <i>gi –</i> a real life 'Black Belt Jones'; or a carbon copy of Jim Kelly's character Williams in <i>Enter the Dragon</i>. (As Williams says of another character: 'Man, you come right out of a comic book!')<br />
<br />
No, it's not my fantasy, it really happened.<br />
<br />
As the interview unfolds, Bowie talks to Dinah Shore about his motivation for starting karate. It was because a number of friends and band-members were doing so. It was, it seems, in the air in rock'n'roll circles – even (especially?) the circles which must have surrounded as un-macho a form of music as Bowie's gender-bending performances. Bowie talks about the similarities between the discipline of mime he learned at theatre school and those of the martial arts. Karate, it turns out, is, for him, a kind of fast-motion mime. Bowie and Shore, echoing each other's movements, turn a karate block ('wax off'?), which Bowie points out resembles a mime artist running his hands against a pane of glass, into a sort of dance. Dinah adds in a wiggle of the hips, and then bumps hers against the Fonz's, karate providing an alibi for something that floats between an aggressive and a sexually provocative action (both perhaps somewhat taboo behaviours for a 'nice' lady, even in 1976). There's something complex going on here in terms not just of the layers of movement imagery that lie one on the other (dance-mime-martial art), but also of the pastiches of gender performance that aggression-as-flirtation-as-dance-as-karate-as-mime seems to involve. Bowie giggles a little, perhaps like the women professors discussed by Joan Riviere in her famous 1929 psychoanalytic paper on 'Womanliness as Masquerade', who were worried about having asserted themselves too 'masculinely' by being clever, and so feel a need to compensate with an extra, exaggerated show of the 'feminine'. To put it in another, more 'oriental', way, yang and yin need to be balanced in Bowie's complex play of personae.<br />
<br />
Next, Vaughan leaps onto the set, appearing on screen mid-way through a flying kick to tumultuous audience applause. Bowie is, he says one of his 'best' students. Vaughn and Bowie perform a miniature 'street defence' lesson, showing off the practicality of karate, where Bowie learns about being attacked by someone bigger than himself. Vaughn iterates the 'oriental' wisdom that the movement and force of the aggressor can be used against them even as they attack. Passivity, or non-aggression is a kind of advantage. When Vaughn opens a sentence, "If I was going to choke you like so..." Bowie cuts in, joking: "I would scream very loudly". The capacity for violence is performed and disavowed at the same time. Vaughn talks of distracting the opponent and then hitting them in the groin (Bowie laughs, and so do the audience at the suggestion of genetalia). Vaughn shows (with Bowie his training partner) a series of strikes – to the groin, kneck, eyes, shins, back – causing Dinah Shore to recoil in camped up mock horror, and the audience to laugh uncomfortably again at this spectacle of rather mild, choreographed violence that's been conjured into prime time television – the acted-out image of a killer art. To a contemporary eye, there's something of Master Ken in all this. (Watching it again today, I expect him to advise restomping the groin).<br />
<br />
Vaughn discusses the importance of relaxation in developing speed, discussing the wasted force of tensed muscles, and goes on to perform a lightning-quick, devastating-looking kata, full of power and explosive motion, to rapturous applause.<br />
<br />
David Bowie's karate lesson, within the space of prime-time chat-show television, has been a complex affair in which race is performed and negotiated, with Vaughn both expressing and in many ways transcending his 'blackness' through his mimesis of the gnomic and powerful Asian (rather than African) master. Masculinities, too (also in turn raced, and classed) are performed and transcended – the 'thin white duke' (as he was about to become) leaving aside his 'thinness' and 'whiteness' (and suburban Britishness) through the appropriation of the imagery of violence, through his play with pupillage in relation to an African-American karate instructor, and their shared process of 'turning Japanese'. The relation to violence and masculinity (and to a racialised image of the violence or militancy of black masculinity) are conjured onto the screen to be repeatedly disavowed or held within the safe confines of a giggly humour that holds it under erasure. Shore and Nancy Walker both mime out at once a fascination with a form of male potency and also an always-already erased female appropriation of this system of fighting, which no longer requires strength but skill, and so evades the brawn with which more typical forms of Western masculinity are associated. <br />
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<br />
<b>Panic in Hong Kong</b><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
He looked a lot like Che Guevara<br />
Drove a Diesel Van<br />
Kept his gun in quiet seclusion<br />
A very modest Man </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
He was the only survivor,<br />
Of the National People's Gang...</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>(opening lines of Bowie's 'Panic in Detroit' (1973)) </i></blockquote>
<br />
Bowie's 'Panic in Detroit' was written in 1973, and draws on Iggy Pop's memories, which he had recounted to Bowie, of the radical scene around Motor City in the era of the riots of 1967. The images are dark and despairing, looking back at a madly idealistic moment, in which people who 'looked a lot like Che Guevara' drove Diesel vans, were members of organisations (now stamped out by the violent reprisals of an authoritarian state) called things like the 'National People's Gang', and carried hidden weapons, dreaming of the violent overthrow of capitalism and the liberation of racially oppressed minorities, pot-smokers and the urban poor alike. The character described at the start of Bowie's song is often discussed as having been partially modelled on John Sinclair, manager of the MC5 and founder of the White Panther Party, an organisation that took literally Heuey Newton's suggestion that any white people who wanted to support the Black Panthers' cause should go and found their own version of his party. The White Panthers' ten-point manifesto propounded the 'total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets'. The imagery of the song fluctuates between a sort of utopian wish expressed existentially in violence, a melancholic nostalgia for such a lost moment of revolutionary explosion, and the threat of closure of the possibility of such a desire within the already post-modern moment that the transition from the sixties to the seventies seems to mark. The swirling, entropic guitar lines seem to speak of both the darker aspects of violent revolt, but also a pervasive nihilism that seemed to follow in their wake.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.china-mike.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/4-1967-hongkong-riots2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" class="irc_mi" src="http://www.china-mike.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/4-1967-hongkong-riots2.jpg" height="301" style="margin-top: 23px;" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Police in riot gear in Hong Kong, 1967.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
In 1967 Hong Kong, where the kung fu film would soon develop, saw its own riots, as pro-Maoist groups sought to capitalise on discontent with injurious labour conditions, inadequate social care and the (racialised) colonial hierarchies of the era. The Hong Kong riots, like those in Detroit, perhaps did not lead to the kind of radical utopia that some of their promulgators hoped for. In many ways, with Cultural-Revolution China as the alternative to colonial rule, the people of Hong Kong were lucky that the rioters failed to overthrow the Hong Kong state. In both cases, however, perhaps, the violence of the uprisings sent a shock into the system of colonial and capitalist cultures, and contributed to a loosening of a series of forms of repression that typified the world of that era – especially for those not privileged to be white, male, heterosexual, middle class and living in the global 'centre' rather than its peripheries. If they didn't trigger revolution, reform may well have been one of their longer-term consequences.<br />
<br />
Both elsewhere in this blog, and also in a <a href="https://www.academia.edu/15345506/A_narrow_world_strewn_with_prohibitions_Chang_Cheh_s_The_Assassin_and_the_1967_Hong_Kong_riots" target="_blank">longer article</a> (published last summer in <i>Asian Cinema</i> 26.1) about Chang Cheh's film <i>The Assassin</i>, which was made in their wake, I have argued in much greater length for the importance of the Hong Kong riots as a determining factor in the development of Hong Kong's martial arts cinema and the invention of the 'kung fu' film. Their images of violence, I argue run to the logic of the revenge fantasies of the colonial subject described by Frantz Fanon. Fanon's description of the role of violence within the psyche of the colonised subject might be useful in thinking about the nature of the Detroit riots too – and perhaps the need to appropriate and manage a violence which is normally aimed at one, from the outside, in African American appropriations of karate and the martial arts (as discussed, for example, in Vijay Prashad's fantastic book, <i>Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting</i>).<br />
<br />
In that article, I make much of a resonance between Fanon's description of the dreams and fantasies of fantastical physical strength and power that he found common amongst colonised peoples, as a symptom of the desire for metaphorical as well as corporeal liberation, and the kind of imagery so around which kung fu films are structured. Fanon describes dream imagery of being able to outpace lines of traffic in great leaps, and this is curiously echoed in American film critic David Bordwell's much-quoted description of his response to kung fu cinema, which often left him (though a portly academic) with the thrilling illusion as he left the cinema that he, too, could vault parked cars in the parking lot outside. Such car-jumping imagery is echoed once again in Bowie's vision of what's at stake Detroit. My favourite passage in the song runs:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Putting on some clothes I made my way to school<br />
And I found my teacher<br />
crouching in his overalls<br />
I screamed and ran to smash my favorite slot machine<br />
And jumped the silent cars that slept at traffic lights</blockquote>
The 1967 riots of Hong Kong and Detroit were both, perhaps, fore-echoes of the phenomenon that came to be the global unrest of '1968' and Bowie's songs and performances, too – with their audacious renegotiations of sexual, gender and even racial identity – are also a part and parcel of the era of rebellion that has come to be marked by that symbolic year.<br />
<br />
And kung fu, too, would fit into this picture if we read it through Bowie. That such a reading is plausible is supported by another, triangulating, narrative (which on its own, again, might be only anecdotal): when Felix Dennis turned away from the vanguard counterculture of <i>OZ</i> magazine (founded again in the magic year of 1967), to become a capitalist, the venture (in that other magically recurring year within my account here, 1973) that spanned his transformation of role from radical activist to publishing magnate was <i>Kung Fu</i> magazine. The craze for kung fu (and <i>Kung Fu</i>) seems to mark both the last glowing ashes of a radical project of anger, hope and emancipation, and its subsumption into a world of commercialised popular culture (rather like Bowie on the Dinah Shore show). The massive success of <i>Kung Fu</i> – largely a vehicle for Bruce Lee fandom – formed the economic ground of what would become a massive publishing empire.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikMO18mWvygohMVTTtOFVb8U_6hDb0mF7tMa1j5vNaZyqO4ZkdfFZX9gM5aKZ9F1-0mk1A00abi_jeGnZfXgx54fUt9eoS-cij6ov5UiviYRYOgxuPqOYG4F7uGEk0368d30HhBEEoVi4/s1600/Kung-Fu+Monthly+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikMO18mWvygohMVTTtOFVb8U_6hDb0mF7tMa1j5vNaZyqO4ZkdfFZX9gM5aKZ9F1-0mk1A00abi_jeGnZfXgx54fUt9eoS-cij6ov5UiviYRYOgxuPqOYG4F7uGEk0368d30HhBEEoVi4/s320/Kung-Fu+Monthly+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Kung Fu</i> Monthly, covers, with Bruce Lee.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<b>China Girl / Japanese Boy</b><br />
<br />
Bowie's lesson in kung fu also, perhaps, exists within a wider fascination with the Orient in his work. This in turn takes its significance within the context a wider interest of the countercultures – and the longer Western avant-garde with which the counter-cultures allied themselves – with images of the Far East. Bowie developed a complex, rich and rather nuanced (even, at its best, I think, self-critical, parodic) form of this orientalism, particularly focused around Japan – a form which allowed and opened up a space for the renegotiation of a series of traditional 'Western' cultural values and identities.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6qRsfXXBSRV4iIzsZS_glD_QDArn3-yJCtOfdn3Whi2bwNvIDeDVx1hJRWStQEFidMZ48b667yp2NTUOmwJVQgsKRpLVir7uTXfo8eEvL2_Pu3jbh4sr_tvd7sBT52JZpcyg_dnodFWo/s1600/Bowie+Space+Samurai.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6qRsfXXBSRV4iIzsZS_glD_QDArn3-yJCtOfdn3Whi2bwNvIDeDVx1hJRWStQEFidMZ48b667yp2NTUOmwJVQgsKRpLVir7uTXfo8eEvL2_Pu3jbh4sr_tvd7sBT52JZpcyg_dnodFWo/s320/Bowie+Space+Samurai.jpg" width="229" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bowie in a 'Space Samurai' costume, designed by Kansai Yamamoto, (I believe 1973).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Fashion historian Helene Thian, for example, has discussed at length Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane costumes. These were designed by Kansai Yamamoto. Some were given trimmings of chinoiserie; others formed kimonos covered in Japanese characters; others still were formed into full-blown 'Space Samurai' costumes, echoing in form the <i>hakama</i> still worn by Aikido students today. His performance style was influenced by an early interest in kabuki theatre and especially its <i>onnagata</i> (female impersonation) roles, which were fostered during his years as a drama student under Lindsay Kemp – an added depth of allusion, perhaps, buried in Bowie's recognition of mime in karate movements expressed on the Dinah Shore show. Kemp's version of mime – and his interest in play with gender – were strongly inflected by this fascination with the orient, and both Kemp's and Bowie's acts of redefinition of masculinity were surely both inspired by (their misreadings of) the differences between 'Western' and 'Asian' forms of masculinity – however layered these were by orientalist stereotypes going back to the nineteenth century. Even the famous lightening stripe on Ziggy's face (seen so many times in the press recently) riffed on the make-up techniques of the <i>onnagata</i> which Bowie studied in Kemp's school under Tamasaburo Bando; and Ziggy's quick changes within a performance might also be linked back to the lightening-change techniques of <i>kabuki</i>. <br />
<br />
<h3>
Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes</h3>
<br />
Asia offered Bowie (and the hippies more generally) a form of 'becoming-other' within which the self could be reformed. Even if the idealisations of Bowie's 'becoming-Japanese' did not end in Japaneseness as such, and often at the <i>very</i> least ran <i>very</i> close to reiterating dangerous and invidious stereotypes that others have to live with, they nonetheless offered forms of very real self-transformation that empowered young working class people (especially, perhaps, men) and allowed them to resist the forms of interpellation that British (and American) society had hitherto imposed. A very generous reading might suggest that such forms of renegotiation, in deconstructing or undermining the supposedly solid binaries on which the relations between East and West relied, set these relations back into play, opening them up into transformation. Bowie was a key figure in the popular renegotiation of the ideas of East and West – just as Paul Bowman has argued Bruce Lee was.<br />
<br />
Something of all this is, I would argue, at play in Bowie's karate lesson, in which, acted out on mainstream TV, a series of complex layers of racial, sexual and gendered identities are performed and renegotiated.<br />
<br />
What this might suggest, I hope (though I'm not sure that I can do more than offer a 'suggestive' reading) is a network of countercultural projects in the wake of the 1960s into which the Asian martial arts entered as they became absorbed within Western culture. These contexts were (I am proposing) instrumental in forming at the very least one kind of socio-political significance which martial arts took on in the identity politics of the 1970s (and beyond), and one kind of appeal that may have taken many people – David Bowie himself, but also perhaps a generation of young people across Europe and America – into movie houses and training dojos with the hope of self-transformation. Self-transformation, of course, is, above all, what Bowie has always been about; and it's also been at the root of the appeal of martial arts.<br />
<br />
As this is a kind of a tribute, the final words here should go to Bowie himself, along with a kind of toast to see him off. Here's to the hope that even in these difficult times, his project for countercultural change and challenge continues – and that images and practices of the martial arts continue to play a role in its unfolding...<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I watch the ripples change their size</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But never leave the stream</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Of warm impermanence and</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So the days float through my eyes</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But still the days seem the same</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And these children that you spit on</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As they try to change their worlds</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Are immune to your consultations</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
They're quite aware of what they're going through... </blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br />Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-45385069055446234532015-07-01T06:59:00.001-07:002015-07-01T06:59:17.268-07:00Wing Chun as Woman Warrior<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxJUtSswkogCe83qm9jgxXnsM7RNGS07ikulCyKuApv63G0b1iBnezLWzwlIb1DzEY3TdfWocZQlElEdOWMqYEoiLs1U2fsi1bX6vyTSJvrgXC_AOmmGUxz9MccKK1FqDSWtzQP6KNloo/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-12-28+at+20.09.36.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxJUtSswkogCe83qm9jgxXnsM7RNGS07ikulCyKuApv63G0b1iBnezLWzwlIb1DzEY3TdfWocZQlElEdOWMqYEoiLs1U2fsi1bX6vyTSJvrgXC_AOmmGUxz9MccKK1FqDSWtzQP6KNloo/s400/Screen+Shot+2014-12-28+at+20.09.36.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Michelle Yeoh as Yim Wing Chun in <i>Wing Chun</i> (dir. Yuen Woo Ping, 1994).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Last month I had the great pleasure of attending the first
Martial Arts Studies conference, run by Paul Bowman at Cardiff University. It
was a fascinating event, bringing together a range of speakers approaching the
martial arts from a dazzling array of disciplinary perspectives, including film
and media studies, anthropology and ethnography, sociology, medicine, sports
science and hoplology. Paul’s project – interrogated at length in his recent (and
excellent) book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.rowmaninternational.com/books/martial-arts-studies" target="_blank">Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries</a> </i>(London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015) – is to
start to investigate what’s at stake in such a trans-disciplinary object or
field of study, and to set up a dialogue between the very different – often
seemingly clashing – approaches to the martial arts. (Some of the keynotes are
available online <a href="http://martialartsstudies.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/martial-arts-studies-conference-keynote.html" target="_blank">here</a>.)
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the conference, I gave a joint paper along with my
colleague <a href="http://adri.mdx.ac.uk.contentcurator.net/lok-pui-san-dr-susan" target="_blank">susan puisan lok</a>, a fascinating contemporary artist and an insightful theorist of
visual culture in general and Asian diasporic experiences in particular.
(Susan’s current artistic project, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://susanpuisanlok.wordpress.com/roch-fans/" target="_blank">RoCH Fans and Legends</a></i>,
exploring Jin Yong’s Condor trilogy, its many cinematic/televisual adaptations
and their global cult following, is of particular interest to me…)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In our paper we looked at representations of gender and the
figure of the woman warrior (the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nüxia</i>)
in the film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wing Chun </i>(dir. Yuen
Woo-ping, 1994). It’s a great film, and stars the magnificent Michelle Yeoh at
her best. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Our starting point was a quote from actress Cheng Pei-pei,
who recounted in an interview clashing with director Chang Cheh during the filming of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Golden Swallow </i>(1968) when he directed
his male actors to leave a scene leaping through an open window, whilst he
expected Cheng to walk through the door. Cheng refused, insisting that her
character – a swordswoman – would leave through the window too. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVe9vPApaLeDhZF8nzmUZVGBEZreZ_KbTVGMZ8zNG16zZ1nMKhrNa-hQqHAadOA38NQjNlyQRW2YjjuvQeBBLdTbJ954A_YdJoBnUGpxN7BSoZN-prC5FVdXDfStqPhFi7FgxUcfa79zs/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-12-28+at+21.41.13.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVe9vPApaLeDhZF8nzmUZVGBEZreZ_KbTVGMZ8zNG16zZ1nMKhrNa-hQqHAadOA38NQjNlyQRW2YjjuvQeBBLdTbJ954A_YdJoBnUGpxN7BSoZN-prC5FVdXDfStqPhFi7FgxUcfa79zs/s400/Screen+Shot+2014-12-28+at+21.41.13.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cheng Pei-pei playing a cameo as Wing Chun's teacher, the Abess Ng Mui in W<i>ing Chun.</i> </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Entrances, exits and other interactions across windows also
seemed to us to be an insistent and structuring conceit in the construction of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wing Chun</i>, with Yeoh’s character, Wing
Chun herself, for example, leaping through a window to do battle with villains
in the very first scene. Our concern was not just with how Wing Chun moves
through these spaces, though, but also its other characters: its array of
clownish and inadequate men, who sketch out a patriarchal system of authority
in crisis, and the three sympathetic women who provide the core of
identification and moral value within its narrative. Wing Chun lives with her
Aunt Feng, a shrewd and entrepreneurial businesswoman, and they run a Tofu shop
together. They take in a third woman, Yim Neung, who has been widowed and
reduced to the point of selling herself for her husband’s funeral. Between
them, they seem to sketch out three potential strategies for women (in its
fictive world – and perhaps also in ours?) to make a living/life for
themselves, in Wing Chun’s martial skill and heroism, Aunt Feng’s economic
acumen, and Yim Neung’s “feminine” attractiveness. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAUHp5LC4sgfFgfTKYJnzkaQZFlU-LVX8e7IIs6EjQJFwLOwQyOtZjl8sjG11KcfPPgvYsDbXruMWaooKt1e-3WlC_gu15g2qrm4dBBM3EEATmxi5VFcpnC4heMDuvs8toB0e1RLhAl2g/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-12-28+at+20.56.43.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAUHp5LC4sgfFgfTKYJnzkaQZFlU-LVX8e7IIs6EjQJFwLOwQyOtZjl8sjG11KcfPPgvYsDbXruMWaooKt1e-3WlC_gu15g2qrm4dBBM3EEATmxi5VFcpnC4heMDuvs8toB0e1RLhAl2g/s400/Screen+Shot+2014-12-28+at+20.56.43.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wing Chun, Aunt Feng and Yim Neung discuss their negotiation of gender expectations.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Our visuals for the paper, as we presented it, re-edited and
slowed down all the scenes from the film where characters interact with windows
and doors, revealing another kind of cinematic “choreography” to the work than
fight choreography (though sometimes the two choreographies overlap). <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
These thresholds structure the space of the film (organised
concentrically around the inner sanctum of the home – gendered female – out
through the courtyard of Wing Chun’s house, through the shop-window which
interfaces with the male and public realm of the street and the market, and out
beyond the town into the wilderness in which bandits live. Windows, in
particular, seem to mark liminal zones through which one may pass
illegitimately with the athleticism of the warrior (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">xia/nüxia</i>). They are also implicated, as “framing” devices, in the
films scopic regimes, which are often phallocentric and voyeuristic, embodying
a male gaze that often seems to belie the extent to which the film askes us to
identify primarily with its female protagonists. But Wing Chun’s ability to pass
through the window perhaps also marks a degree to which she is able to subvert
and escape the framing power of such a gaze, and the normative social roles
that it imposes on women. The ability to leap through the window, we argued,
was related to Wing Chun’s propensity throughout the film towards cross
dressing – another passage from one gendered social “frame” to another: her
ability to step beyond the sanctioned social roles of femininity and embrace
the conventionally “masculine” powers of the warrior.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Using some of the now growing literature on this film (esp.
Sasha Vojkovic), some of the wider discourses on the figure of the woman
warrior in Hong Kong/Chinese cinema (e.g. Lisa Funnell), and on Chinese
masculinity/femininity in the wider sense (Kam Louie, Kwai-Cheung Lo) –
combined with discussions of “queer theory” insights into cross dressing
(Halberstam, Butler), we examined Wing Chun’s ability (and that of the film’s
other characters) to cross gendered roles and spaces. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The next step will be to turn this into a paper for publication
– but in the meantime, please feely free to contact me for further information
on the paper as it stands!<o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p>In the meantime, here's the trailer for the film!</o:p></div>
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Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-2825704728512644692014-10-01T15:44:00.001-07:002014-10-01T16:02:05.075-07:00Hong Kong Mega-protests: From the Leftist Riots of 1967 to Occupy Central, 2014 <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaIC4Ci_aK2jx6gqUWXVQ4L7Xpfs8JDvCAyp79PY2Z3CNM3crYGxYQ4SDTERTAV5bl8hyCueVfOoWjCbMnWH_Rx-b5XySubdwirXpt9-CAINR0-o0UFYIBjzqdeXualXuOC78kKIdBNwWR/s1600/200905282121238721-200765.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaIC4Ci_aK2jx6gqUWXVQ4L7Xpfs8JDvCAyp79PY2Z3CNM3crYGxYQ4SDTERTAV5bl8hyCueVfOoWjCbMnWH_Rx-b5XySubdwirXpt9-CAINR0-o0UFYIBjzqdeXualXuOC78kKIdBNwWR/s1600/200905282121238721-200765.jpg" height="257" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Police leap into action during the Hong Kong riots, 1967.</td></tr>
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Over the Summer I have been working on article on the relation between Chang Cheh's <i>The Assasin </i>(Da Ci Ke, 1967), and the Hong Kong Riots of 1967 - <a href="http://kungfuwithbraudel.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/chang-cheh-on-60s-wuxia-and-their.html" target="_blank">a connection which Chang himself has made repeatedly</a> in articles and in his memoirs. (The 1967 riots are a theme I've mentioned a couple of times here already.) However, just as I have been finishing my article with a view to sending it for publication, it's suddenly developed a new degree of topicality, what with the recent mass-scale protests in Hong Kong, and so I feel I need to do a little more untangling what and whether there is a relationship here. Cue the blog – whose immediacy might help me get together a few first thoughts about 1967 and 2104. Does it make sense to mention both in the same breath?</div>
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Of course, the two events were very different – the Hong Kong Leftist Riots of 1967 were, to start with, distinctly violent, and extremist, in contradistinction to the Ghandiist non-violence espoused by the leaders of the current demonstrations, who, in spite of the name "Occupy" which in the West is associated with a rather minority position at the leftmost edge of the political spectrum, are generally clearly very much political liberals. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Causeway_Bay_sit-in.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Causeway_Bay_sit-in.JPG" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Occupation in Causeway Bay, 2014, photo by Citobun, from Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 4.0 license. </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bc/29.9.14_Hong_Kong_protest_near_Tamar.jpg/1280px-29.9.14_Hong_Kong_protest_near_Tamar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bc/29.9.14_Hong_Kong_protest_near_Tamar.jpg/1280px-29.9.14_Hong_Kong_protest_near_Tamar.jpg" height="233" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sit-in in Harcourt Road, Admiralty, 29/09/14, photo by Citobun, from Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 4.0 license </td></tr>
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The Hong Kong Leftist Riots also developed in a very different context: that of colonial occupation, a systematically racist government, and startling inequality at a time when hundreds of thousands lived in Hong Kong's slums, some 45% were below the poverty line, with little healthcare or educational provision for the poor, and ultimately little protection offered to them by the forces of law and order. And definitely no democracy. [1] Triggered by a series of strikes over labour conditions and pay in Hong Kong's factories, the conflict of workers with the factory-owners and the Hong Kong authorities were escalated by Leftist groups who felt, in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution, that they would be remiss if they did not militate for revolution in the heart of a capitalist, colonial Chinese enclave, and it is clear that their final hope was that the Red Army would step over the border to give them aid, returning Hong Kong to the mainland. The '67 riots were a significant breach of order, and caused a draconian crackdown from the British authorities on Leftist and militant groups – a crackdown that makes the teargas and pepper spray used so far by the police in the current disturbances look decidedly mild. (I very much hope that the state violence against the current protesters does not escalate, though such hopes seem rather unrealistic. We can only cross our fingers.) As cited by Gary Ka-wai Cheung, the author of a book-length study of the 1967 Leftist Riots (<i>Hong Kong's Watershed: The Leftist Riots</i>), the official figures are a staggering 51 dead at the end of the disturbances, and 4,979 arrested. [2] Most of the dead here seem to have been Leftists killed in the police crackdown and in police responses to the riots; however, the movement was a distinctly violent one, turning (in response to brutality from the authorities) increasingly to terroristic means, with a series of bombings bringing the city to a halt and losing the campaign what legitimacy it had with the wide public.</div>
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I am generally unclear as to the extent of support for the 1967 campaign. As Cheung draws a picture of it, there was certainly some widespread enthusiasm and sympathy at the start, with regards to the demands of the striking workers, and also fuelled by an unrest at continuing colonial conditions. However, the general Hong Kong populace was suspicious of the extremism of the movement – and increasingly so as it unfolded. However, the scale of the riots seems to have been larger than the support base the Cheung seems to imagine for them, and the testimony he cites of the time suggests a certain amount of (sub-)proletarian rage being vented at the police during the disturbances, suggesting to me that we are not just dealing with a politically isolated pre-Beijing clique of militants, however much these groups may have attempted to steer the events. I find myself wondering whether there may be a kind of split between the polite opinion of the public sphere, to which Cheung seems keyed, and a lower sphere of "mass" response – and I am thinking here of the distinction that Chen Kuan-hsing makes between "civil society" (minjian shehui) and "popular democracy" (renmin minzhu). [3] This popular political sphere may be largely invisible in Cheung's account – but I am not a primary historian of the times and can only speculate on this…</div>
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In many ways, then the 1967 riots offer few clear parallels for the present situation, though it's perhaps worth noting that – certainly according to Cheung, who dubs them the "watershed" of modern Hong Kong history – they are the event above any other that established the (limited) freedoms and happinesses that Hong Kong citizens seem to be protesting to protect today. The initial political response to the 1967 riots was strong, with tight censorship over the press and the arts, but in order to forestall more thoroughgoing change, the British administration set about wide-reaching reforms of housing, healthcare and welfare. They established anti-corruption campaigns, started the negotiations with China for the return of Hong Kong, and, with a generally moderate response from the citizens of the island to the Leftists' call to arms noted, they started to introduce forms of public consultation, bringing the Chinese population more squarely into the civic processes of the colony, and fostering the development of institutions of the public sphere. The longer results, then were paradoxical – a society in which politics became something of a taboo, but where new political freedoms and participation were nurtured; the parallel growth of an identity of HK as a separate people to those in the mainland; increased cultural confidence; and the inclusion of poorer people within the economic part of the social contract.</div>
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However, one of the things that seems fascinating to me is that within the debates on the current protests, 1967 is so rarely mentioned. Newspapers (and, of course, my main source of information is Western newspapers) will often mention that political disturbances in Hong Kong of the scale of the current one are rare in the island's history, and some even paint them as unprecedented. In this regard – however qualitatively different the two events were – it seems striking that the last political disturbance that rivals (and even outstrips) the current events in scale is so very rarely brought up.</div>
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Of course, there are different reasons for this. Within a Western media, "1967" doesn't mean much to readers who have never heard of it. And it's much more convenient to trot out stereotypes of the Hong-Kong Chinese as an orderly, peace-loving and business-minded people, generally not interested in politics. As much as some of this has factual basis, of course, it is also deeply in line with a set of orientalising stereotypes. The idea of these protests as "unprecedented" also plays well into discourses that would like to play up the exceptionalism of this as a moment. Such amnesia would also highlight what is new in the situation – Chinese Communist Party rule rather than the British – and serves to sever links between the present events and continuing traditions of unrest in colonial-era Hong Kong. This allows the Western press to paint a picture of British rule as implicitly benign and free – when in fact, as the 1967 riots highlight, there was certainly no democracy at all for most of the 150 years of colonial occupation, and only minor reforms offered in the final years before hand-over, and it was only serious rioting that forced the British colonial powers to give the mass of ordinary people of Hong Kong any kind of piece of the economic pie.</div>
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However, there may also be Chinese reasons why 1967 is rarely mentioned in the discourses around 2014. The historical amnesia about these events has in fact been more generally systematic. Cheung opens his book noting that in the Hong Kong Museum of History there is not a single exhibit or panel mentioning the Leftist Riots. The British government wanted to forget them for obvious reasons. The Communist Party in the mainland was never really behind the riots, and it is far from a glorious episode in revolutionary history for them, either. Plus which, the Party often does not want to foster modern forces of protest and revolt that it may not be able easily to manage. </div>
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In the present context, the demonstrators, too, may not want to look back at the Leftists of the sixties as their political ancestors, either: this would involve a certain paradoxical identification with the enemy (with Communists). Such an identification with a violent, and to large extent proletarian moment would also sit extremely uncomfortably with the moderate, liberal values which the current protest seems to embody. For spokespeople or supporters to make these comparisons may well seem like stirring up illegal revolt in a way that they would not like.</div>
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An interesting example of 1967-amnesia is a recent quote from Hung Ho-fung offered by a British newspaper, which I found very surprising because Hung is a scholar I respect very deeply, and who has looked into histories of Chinese protest going as far back as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and who has written specifically about the histories of the left in Hong Kong in the <i>New Left Review</i>. [4] From evidence of that article, Hung certainly knows quite a bit about 1967, and has been one of my own key sources in finding out about it. However, here he is in <i>The Guardian</i>: </div>
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“This is a watershed,” said Hung Ho-fung, of Johns Hopkins University. “This time people are using civil disobedience and setting up barricades. There’s also the disruptive aspect; in the past, they emphasised that demonstrations would not affect everyday life. This time they really don’t care. I really haven’t seen anything like this in Hong Kong history.” [5]</blockquote>
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It's interesting that Hung uses precisely the terms of the title of Cheung's book on 1967 – a "watershed" – to describe the current events. i would be very surprised if Hung does not know of this book, and wonder if it is an unconscious referent in his statement. The idea that disruption is a new thing would seem a striking idea here – certainly it seems new within recent demonstrations, but to then claim that such is a total novelty "In Hong Kong history" seems surprisingly to repress the memory of 1967. Of course, I may be reading far too much into an offhand media interview, and there may be an editor's or journalist's compression creeping in to distort what Hung actually said. He may mean, in his last sentence, simply that the event, as a whole, is a very new thing in Hong Kong – and with some of the major differences between it and 1967 which I've noted above, it certainly is that…. </div>
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<b>Notes</b></div>
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[1] For more on the situation in Hong Kong, in the sixty , see for example Poshek Fu, “The 1960s: Modernity, Youth Culture and Hong Kong Cantonese Cinema", in David Desser and Poshek Fu (eds), <i>The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity</i> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 73-4; Verina Glaessner, <i>Kung Fu: Cinema of Vengeance</i> (London: Lorimer, 1974), p. 15; Hung Ho-Fung, “Uncertainty in the Enclave,” <i>New Left Review</i>, no. 66 (Nov/Dec 2010), p. 57; and of course Gary Ka-wai Cheung, <i>Hong Kong’s Watershed: The 1967 Riots</i> (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009.</div>
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[2] Most of the material in this paragraph is drawn from Cheung's account. For the figures in question, see p. 123.</div>
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[3] Chen Kuan-hsing, <i>Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization</i> (Durham: Duke UP, 2010), p. 230. </div>
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[4] The article is cited in my note above!</div>
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[5] "Hong Kong: More Join Protests as Crowds Are Urged to Keep Going" <i>The Guardian,</i> 29 Sept, 2014, online ed: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/29/-sp-hong-kong-protests-more-join-crowds-urged-keep-going-national-holiday (accessed 1 Oct 2014).</div>
Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-90907560688286899622014-09-27T15:46:00.002-07:002014-09-27T16:07:05.568-07:00Hito Steyerl - November<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.goodtv.eu/bildshow/hito.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.goodtv.eu/bildshow/hito.jpg" height="107" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hito Steyerl, <i>November </i>(2004)</td></tr>
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Amongst many other things, Hito Steyerl's film <i>November</i> (2004) provides – within the realm of contemporary art practice – a startling reflection on some of the themes that I have been starting to explore on this blog.<br />
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The film traces the enigmatic figure of Andrea Wolf through a series of circulating media representations. Wolf - the film tells us - was a teenage friend of Steyerl, and the star of Steyerl's first movie, a home-made teenage feminist appropriation of martial art and exploitation tropes, shot on super-8 back in the 1970s. Only the action scenes were ever made, and the film involves a group of girls seeking out and beating up men for reasons that no longer seem clear to Steyerl herself, reprising imagery from Russ Mayer's<i> Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill!</i>, a film that Steyerl notes is "tacky," and which is ideologically dubious to say the least, but which nonetheless seems here to have provided a model of identification within which feminist (or at least proto-feminist) desires could be negotiated by the young, somewhat radical, women who took part in Steyerl's shoot.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A still from Steyerl's early movie, reproduced in <i>November</i> shows Andrea Wolf, age of 18. </td></tr>
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Wolf, however, also went on to lead a life involved in rather more actual radical politics, becoming involved in far-left groups in the orbit of the Red Army Faction, and ending her days in Turkey as a guerrilla with the Kurdish PKK. It was there that she met a tragic death, executed by the Turkish authorities. The fantasy violence of teenage identifications with media images are transformed into the messy real life violence of war. Wolf, however, was turned once again into a media image, in the guise of a political martyr, and made to circulate once more in the realm of imaginary identifications and kitsch fantasies.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kurdish propaganda poster celebrating Andrea Wolf (with her assumed Kurdish name of Sehit Ronahi) after her death as a revolutionary martyr. These images were used on marches by PKK-sympathetic groups. </td></tr>
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Within her exploration of the power of images – in their continual circulation and with their continual transformations of meaning, to feed into reality, producing myths that are then performed – Steyerl's film includes a meditation on the martial arts cinema with which she and Andrea Wolf alike were obviously so fascinated as youths – Steyerl making a home-made B-Movie homage to the genre as her first directorial experiment, and Wolf taking up karate as a part of her self-creation as a militant, as an act, if you like, of self-empowerment. In <i>November</i>, Steyerl also recounts the myth of Bodhidharma travelling from India to China and founding the Shaolin Temple, creating the archetype of the lone, wandering warrior, dedicated to truth and justice and fighting the strong and the tyrranical with bare hands alone. It was a myth spread globally by the martial arts movies that boomed in the seventies, even finding its way into avant-garde texts such as René Viénet's Situationist classic <i>Can Dialectics Break Bricks?</i> – a film I've started to discuss elsewhere on this blog, and which Steyerl quotes at a number of points in her own twenty-first century revisitation of the "kung fu" moment.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://fraser.typepad.com/a_girl_a_gun/images/62.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://fraser.typepad.com/a_girl_a_gun/images/62.jpg" height="244" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Still from Steyerl's early film, as reproduced in <i>November</i>.</td></tr>
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Of course, as much contemporary scholarship has set out to show, the story of Bodhidharma and the story of a Shaolin rebellion is so much <i>myth</i>, constructed largely only in the twentieth century, under the radical modernising programmes of the Nationalists and Communists, which sought to co-opt the physical cultures of martial arts into a nationalist revival of the body politic. Much of the discourse around the martial arts (and out of which martial arts cinema emerges) seems to hinge on the obsessive and contrary acts of making and unmasking myth. It has recently become something of an industry to debunk the Chinese martial arts' claims to older and more subversive histories, with writers in particular such as Peter Lorge and Stanley Henning in the forefront.<br />
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But this, for me, is where Steyerl's complex negotiation of the territory trumps the demythologisers. Her film at once criticises and lays bare the treachery of images and myths, their mutability, their seductive but dangerous power, and their ability to never quite mean what you want them to mean, even in your own acts of appropriation; but it also seems to embrace the productive power of myth, and of popular culture as a site of its circulation. Myth is the very power (the <i>puissance</i>, as Lacoue-Labarthe put it)<b>[1]</b> to produce a self and a position in the world, however compromised such a position may become by the instability of representation, and the powers that already colonise the image. The grasping and active, critical renegotiation of myth, rather than its simple rejection, becomes an important emancipatory activity.<br />
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In marking this complexity and ambivalence, Steyerl manages to avoid the trap into which the martial arts mythbusters fall. Such mythbusters fail to grasp the mythological power of their own acts of demythologisation. Thus when the Jingwu academy, back in the early twentieth century, broke the image of the Shaolin Temple as the fount of martial arts (a myth at that point not actually that old), it was only to replace it with the myth of the patriotic Huo Juanjia and his death at the hands of Japanese oppressors. And similarly it seems hardly co-incidental that at the moment when there is a rage for Western Scholars such as Lorge and Henning who (to put it a little crudely and to exaggerate just a little) deracinate the cultural aspects of Chinese martial arts in order to turn them into objects of comparative study, this is actually also the moment of the rise of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), perhaps one of the most reactionary forms of martial artistry since the kung fu craze, in its gender politics as well as its spectacularisation of violence as pay-per-view spectacle, and one that also pretends to a "scientific" and trans-cultural neutrality in order to assert its suppose superiority over backwards forms of ("foreign") traditional practice. Such a scientism is in its own way an ultimate form of magical and mythologising gesture, set now under capitalist imperatives for making money.<br />
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(Some interesting analysis of the mythical nature of MMA and the like has recently been given in the "Martial Arts Studies" edition of JOMEC, to which I also contributed – see in particular Paul Bowman's reflection on <a href="http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/jomecjournal/5-june2014/Bowman_Reality.pdf" target="_blank">"realism" in contemporary martial arts</a>, and Daniele Bolelli's <a href="http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/jomecjournal/5-june2014/Bolelli_Gladiators.pdf" target="_blank">analysis of the role of "Gladiator" movies</a> in the forming the nature of the visual spectacle of MMA. But I digress...)<br />
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Steyerl's film is called <i>November</i>. Within the film, the title is explained through the contrast to the revolutionary moment of October, a moment where things appear simple and true, and revolutionary action can be grasped confidently. By November, things are looking much more tangled and messy, the revolutionary enthusiasm shown as always already compromised by – and fallen into – the false images on which it depended. Steyerl doesn't retreat from problematising a radical legacy in her self-construction as a critical leftist, noting the ways in which in real history the "good guys" (even Andrea Wolf) are often not nearly as innocent or lilly-white as their mediatised images. November is a time of distrust and scepticism. It's a time when identifications need to be rebuilt, but also when they need to be guarded against.<br />
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It seems to me that martial arts cinema as a global phenomenon was always a cinema of "November" - a cinema of the aftermath – springing up in the wake of the global wave of decolonisation and the protests of "1968." It was always a cinema where the real had passed into its simulations and its uncanny (and untrustworthy) imagistic doubles. The question might remain, however, of the "truth" that such images nonetheless might carry into the present.<br />
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November, then is a time of haunting. A time, as Derrida might suggest, quoting Hamlet "out of joint." (See his <i>Spectres of Marx</i>.) Steyerl seems to capture this haunted and haunting quality of media images very well, neither there nor not-there. To live in the realm of media images is to live a haunted existence.<br />
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Perhaps this is the point, more generally, with the martial arts film, too. Even if the myths they recount don't simply tie us to a simple continuity with the past, in the way that official Chinese Communist Party histories sought to imagine the Boxers Rebellion, the Taiping Rebellion, the uprisings of the Hongmen (Tiandihui), or further back peasant revolts such as that of Li Zicheng, in their own image, there seems to me to remain the question of what it is that returns in them, what haunts them, from elsewhere, as it were.<br />
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Steyerl's film can be seen here:<br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/88484604" target="_blank">http://vimeo.com/88484604</a><br />
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<b>Note</b><br />
[1] According to Lacoue-labarthe, myth "is a 'power' [<i>puissance</i>], the power that is in the gathering together of the fundamental forces and orientations of an individual or a people, that is to say the power of deep, concrete, embodied identity." See his <i>Heidegger, Art and Politics,</i> p.93.Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-10327545048081292872014-09-08T11:33:00.003-07:002014-09-08T11:36:33.321-07:00Lau Kar-leung and Walter Benjamin <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg622bJgIsZ_3jPJfF3iYF4OziJ3Xjqm2NR-x1BrFY1HNuuqgSBViadp72JUJFswnVFZiQ3qxpnKh-ytdSK-XWap9vMfdAiy5O599aFYXC0TVZ2rMqwwuXVZQmzjDk5CHvCyhSbiKmnLjo/s1600/36thChamber-buckets.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg622bJgIsZ_3jPJfF3iYF4OziJ3Xjqm2NR-x1BrFY1HNuuqgSBViadp72JUJFswnVFZiQ3qxpnKh-ytdSK-XWap9vMfdAiy5O599aFYXC0TVZ2rMqwwuXVZQmzjDk5CHvCyhSbiKmnLjo/s1600/36thChamber-buckets.jpg" height="166" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An authentic and auratic performing body – Gordon Liu in Lau Kar-leung's <i>36th Chamber of Shaolin</i>.</td></tr>
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Having made two blog posts here recently, I realised that I should probably also add a link to my recent ("proper") article, "Lau Kar-leung with Walter Benjamin: Storytelling, Authenticity, Film Performance and Martial Arts Pedagogy," published in am exciting special edition of the journal <i>JOMEC</i> (<i>JOurnalism, MEdia and Cultural studies</i>) on the expanding new field of "Martial Arts Studies," edited by Paul Bowman.<br />
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The article is here:<br />
<a href="http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/jomecjournal/5-june2014/White_Authenticity.pdf">http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/jomecjournal/5-june2014/White_Authenticity.pdf</a><br />
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and the table of contents for the journal is here:<br />
<a href="http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/research/journalsandpublications/jomecjournal/5-june2014/index.html">http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/research/journalsandpublications/jomecjournal/5-june2014/index.html</a><br />
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There's some really fascinating material in the journal besides my own contribution!<br />
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<br />Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-61477697992916703172014-08-31T13:35:00.002-07:002014-09-08T11:39:38.993-07:00Pacific Rim (2013) and The Wolverine (2013) Part 2 – Pacific Rim<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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NOTE TO THE UNWARY– THIS ARTICLE <i>DEFINITELY</i> CONTAINS SPOILERS!</div>
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In my last post, I started a comparison of a pair of films:
Guillermo de Toro’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pacific Rim </i>and
James Mangold’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wolverine</i>. Both of
these were released in 2013, and both seem to articulate a shared fantasy space
of the global realm, articulated around the Orient as a locus of desire and anxiety.
The films, of course, were released at a moment when – at the very least in the
Western imagination – the political and economic hegemony of the West, and of
America in particular, were increasingly being challenged by the growth of
China and the “Asian Tiger” economies. Recently, for example, it has been
projected that the twenty-first century will be an “Asian Century” in the same
way that the nineteenth century was British and the twentieth was an American
one. [1] I would bet good money that a search under the keyword “China” on any mainstream
Western news site (the BBC for example) will easily confirm the pervasiveness
of this as a media narrative, with articles dealing with China consistently
focusing on its growth, industrialisation and supposed impending economic
dominance over the West – peppered of course with criticisms of its human
rights record – to produce an overall picture of a set of fears that perhaps
hasn’t moved on enormously since the era when “yellow peril” was a frequent
idea. Recently, however, more sober analysis in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Left Review</i> has highlighted the extent to which, in spite of
the tectonic shifts in the global economy caused by the shock of 2008, such
prognoses are a matter of the Western imagination rather than stark economic
fact, with Peter Nolan and Jin Zhang, for example, showing just how far behind
American dominance far-Eastern corporations are, and the extent to which the
current markets are still stacked to perpetuate this situation. [2] (I use
the metaphor of “tectonics” with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pacific
Rim </i>in mind, to which I will be turning shortly!).</div>
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The argument in my recent post, through a fairly basic
analysis of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wolverine,</i> has been to
suggest that the plots of some recent American action movies are formed as a
response to such anxieties. What ensues is a renewed sense of the East as a
privileged object or space of desire and mystery, and the revivification of a
hardly reconstructed orientalism. A further dimension is added to this by the
way that Asia’s growth as an economic and political power has been mirrored by the arrival of popular-cultural and cinematic forms (we are concerned here in particular with action cinema)
imported to the West. Such a process started, of course, with the arrival of the Japanese <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">chanbara </i>during the “economic miracle”
of the 50s and 60s, followed by the kung fu movie at the height of Hong Kong’s
1970s electronics boom, the appearance of Korean cinema with the rise of the
Four Tigers, and an interest in swordplay (<i>wuxia</i>) films such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hero </i>at the time when the PRC was coming to the fore as a global power. These genres,
rising to compete with Hollywood, have had a decisive impact on global cinema –
especially action cinema – and their tropes, images and ways of filming have
started to permeate Hollywood’s language, creating a situation where a cultural
as well as an economic hegemony seems to dissolve, and must be negotiated by
Western directors such as Mangold and del Toro. </div>
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In this post, I move on to look at how the same factors play
out in del Toro’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pacific Rim</i>.</div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pacific Rim</i>, to
give a brief overview, is set in a future in which giant Godzilla-like monsters
from a mysterious other dimension emerge from the intercontinental rift at the
heart of the Pacific Ocean, to attack humanity. (The monsters are named, after
the Japanese monster-movie genre, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kaiju.</i>)
To fight these monsters, humanity unites and builds a series of
hyper-technological giant robots, called in the film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jaeger </i>(the German for “hunters”), each piloted by a pair of pilots
whose minds are united to form a single consciousness through a
psycho-cybernetic link. However, the war is not going well for mankind. The
film’s hero, Raleigh Becket (played by Charlie Hunnam), is a washed up <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jaeger </i>pilot, who has lost his brother
whilst on a mission. He has a chance to prove himself once more, and teams up
with the mysterious Mako (Rinko Kikuchi) – a Japanese woman who was saved as a
child by an African-American <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jaeger </i>pilot,
Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), who now plays the role of a father-figure for
her, but also the General in charge of what’s left of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jaeger </i>programme. Mako and Releigh are each suffering too much from
a mental trauma to be fully trusted pilots – Raleigh’s brother has died whilst
he was in an electronic “mind-meld” with him, and Mako’s parents were killed in
front of her whilst she was still a child. This being a movie, earth’s last
stand will, of course, be left to them. </div>
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The film’s Pacific setting – tying it to the concerns of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wolverine </i>– seems, as the movie
progresses, to slide further and further East: the first monster attack, shown
at the very start of the film, is in San Francisco, and the final scenes are set
around Hong Kong, which is imagined in the mould of 1930s Hollywood Chinatown:
a dark and impenetrable world of criminal networks, money, and exotic
black-market commerce.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140626035257/pacificrim/images/6/6a/Hong_Kong_Concept_Art-03.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140626035257/pacificrim/images/6/6a/Hong_Kong_Concept_Art-03.jpg" height="248" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Concept art for the Hong Kong scenes in <i>Pacific Rim</i>.</td></tr>
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In many ways, del Toro’s film, then, reiterates a series of
the tropes that we are offered in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wolverine</i>.
At its core is an image of a “Pacific Rim” culture that might, perhaps, stand
in for the global and for contemporary processes of globalisation (and for a
dream of global reconciliation), and that connects, on the one side the
American Occident, and on the other the easternmost reaches of Asia. Like in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wolverine</i>, the fantasised Asian city in
which much of the film is set is a locus of crime, gangsterism and decadence.
Like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wolverine</i>, the film riffs on
Asian (and especially Japanese) cinematic genres, in particular this time playing
on and making a series of explicit intertextual references to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Godzilla</i> movies of the 1960s, but also
providing us with some spectacular – if CGI-heavy – martial-arts style
choreography, with giant anthropomorphic robots fighting monsters, and even a “dojo”-type
scene where the hero and heroine square off with staves. Like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wolverine</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pacific Rim</i> has a white American male protagonist, with the exotic,
oriental setting doubled by the prominence of an Asian female love interest.</div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pacific Rim</i>,
however,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>seems nonetheless a rather
different kettle of fish from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wolverine</i>.
It’s an altogether more subtle and complex cinematic experience, and much
harder to run the kind of crude semiotic-style analysis I have recently performed
on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wolverine</i>. Perhaps I’m being
overly harsh on the film, (I’d ove to read any kind of counter-argument!), but I’m
not sure that there is much to be found in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Wolverine </i>that lies in excess of the kind of analysis that I have run on it,
but del Toro’s offering would, I think, be far from exhausted by a similar
exercise. This may well make the analysis I’ll try and set out here a rather
more unsatisfactory one than previously, bit I’ll do my best to make some sense
of it here, in any case.</div>
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The first thing that probably complicates the picture is the
“authorial” nature of the work. I just admit to not knowing enough about de
Toro as an auteur to really push this kind of analysis, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pacific Rim </i>certainly reiterates many of
the themes and motifs that have interlaced his other work: for example, the
opening of a portal between this world and a hellish and daemonic “other”
reality, that might itself, especially in combination with del Toro’s
surrealistic visual language, be equated with the dark zone of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">id</i>. And perhaps, as with for
example <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pan’s Labyrinth, </i>the film is also concerned with the influences of such an <i>id</i> on the nightmare of modern history. There is certainly, then, a potential
for reading a degree of critical intent, and even self-reflexivity in del
Toro’s evocation of the Pacific Rim geography as the setting of his film.
Perhaps, however, we might need to consider the nature of the very gesture of locating the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">id</i>, and all the monsters
of the mind, in the Far East – its alterity transforming it into a kind of
space of projected Western nightmares.</div>
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In spite of the ways in which such a gesture might be
retrograde, Del Toro’s vision of the future is nonetheless altogether more
dystopian and critical in its relation to an American world order than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wolverine</i>. When aliens attack, and
humanity is finally united to fight them, the ensuing world, resembling as it
does the current global order of media image and free-market corruption, is
hardly benign. It is depicted as a militarised, quasi-fascistic order in a
state of economic and military crisis, sustained through the infantilising
media worship of a warrior class, and with war turned into a video-game
spectacle. (Does this sound familiar anyone?) This order is underpinned by the
hopeless and ultimately futile labour of a proletarian mass building walls
against the aliens. The divide between an exceptional military elite and
the wall-building workers is dramatised by the protagonist’s fall and subsequent
rise between these two classes. This world-state seems, in many ways, the
uncanny double of the monstrous <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kaiju </i>that
invade our reality from beyond, and the imperial dreams of their alien creators.
We can, of course, turn such a formulation around and find in the hellish
monsters the uncanny double of the imperialism of global capitalism. (An <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/luke-white-damien-hirsts-shark-nature-capitalism-and-the-sublime-r1136828">article
I published on the cultural history of sharks</a>, might suggest as much, in
any case!)</div>
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It seems to me that the question of trauma – and of the
forms of splitting or fragmentation that accompany this – lie at the thematic
heart of the film. Such a split, in geopolitical terms, might be at the core of
the film’s picture of Pacific space, with the global imagined as a space of fracture and conflict – an interdimensional war, no less, even if
this is one imagined in terms of a battle between an “other” marked with an
Asian name (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kaiju</i>) and a “self”
marked with a European word (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jaeger</i>).
These figures of trauma are also mirrored in the psychic traumas of the
protagonists, of course. In the film the Asian-American transcontinental divide
is envisioned in the form of a volcanic fissure – the crust of the earth
opening up where plates collide – which also doubles as a kind of a rupture in
space and time through which the kaiju arrive. This is
located in the Mariana Trench, a place of enormous depth. If the Pacific is a
<i>human</i> place, the film seems to suggest, it is a place that exists only on a series of edges, and these
have between them a black gulf of division, which in terms of the film’s
imagery equates with the dark heart of the unconscious. The Pacific Rim, however, is also a place where humanity (its Eastern and Western halves) are brought together – with the ocean as much a space of interchange, trade and linkage as it is of division, separation and conflict. </div>
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The Marxist in me would suggest that, of course, it is the
traumatic nature of capital and its turbulent histories that might constitute the
trauma that lies at the heart of the film. More specifically, however, it is,
perhaps, the histories of Western colonialism and imperialism. Interestingly,
the three central protagonists of the film, Raleigh, Mako and
Pentecost, form a racialised trinity (African, Euro-American and Asian), and it
is only in their uniting as a kind of a family that the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kaiju</i> can ultimately be defeated. (Though we might ask about the
cinematic conventionality of the fact that this will also involve Pentecost’s
sacrifice. As L L Cool J wryly notes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Deep
Blue Sea </i>[dir. Renny Harlin, 1999], in a moment of cinematic reflexivity,
when being pursued by<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>giant
genetically modified shark, “I'm done! Brothers never make it out of situations
like this! Not ever!”) </div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130628105314/pacificrim/images/2/2c/Stacker_Pentecost%2C_Mako_and_Raleigh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130628105314/pacificrim/images/2/2c/Stacker_Pentecost%2C_Mako_and_Raleigh.jpg" height="223" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mako, Pentecost and Raleigh – three races working together in <i>Pacific Rim</i>.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></td></tr>
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A further answer to the nature of the trauma in question,
which once again propels the film into the familiar territory we found ourselves in with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wolverine</i>, might be the suggestion that this trauma is a matter of
the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. The film’s key movie reference is, of
course, the Godzilla story, which first hit the silver screen in 1954. This in
turn, it is often argued, was an image that formed in response to the anxieties
about radiation in Japan at a time when the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were still fresh, and in the wake of the “Lucky Dragon 5” incident in which
Japanese tuna fishermen were poisoned by the radiation produced by US atomic
tests in the Pacific. It is perhaps, then, significant that in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pacific Rim</i> the situation is only put
right by the insertion of a nuclear charge into the intercontinental fissure
from which the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kaiju </i>emerge – hence
symbolically closing the circle of a set of anxieties stemming from the US
atomic explosions of 1945. These explosions, furthermore, might also evoke a
whole Cold War history – Korea, Vietnam and the like – which has also
conditioned Hollywood’s vision of Asia as a zone of trauma.</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/x0G6mXiA33Y?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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The Pacific Rim also stands, however, not only as the image
of trauma, but also as a potentially utopian image, of redemption and the
restoration of wholeness and unity, an image of healing. Such wish fulfilment
can be seen on the one hand as carrying with it a progressive wish, but it can
also be understood as ideological in nature, staging a merely symbolic
resolution of real conflicts that its catharsis ultimately supports. In a film
named after an ocean, we might also think of this desire in terms of Freud’s
“oceanic” wish, the desire to be one with the cosmos, a deeply ambivalent
desire which is both about an absolute egoism in which the self swells to
encompass the Universe, but is also about the desire for a complete loss of the
self or ego.</div>
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This process of healing or uniting is thematised most strongly
in the figure of the “mind-meld” which is necessary to control the giant <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jaeger</i>. Wired together through the
neural “bridge,” the pilots find themselves “in” each other’s minds and
fantasies, feeling each other’s emotions. It is an erosion of difference, and
of the boundaries between self and other, an experience of absolute intimacy,
and a thematic opposition to the oceanic “rift” from which the film’s monsters
appear. The ability to form this bond between pilots seems to initially rest on
forms of similarity, shared experience and shared biology – that is to say, by
a form of shared identity. The film emphasises the importance of forms of
“compatibility” between co-pilots. One can bond with the “other”, this is to
say, only inasmuch as they are not really other at all. The first pilots we
meet, Raleigh and Yancy, are brothers. The film’s antagonist, Chuck Hansen (Rob
Kazinsky) is paired with his father (Max Martini), making a similar
familial-genetic (and all-male) bond. The Russians, if perhaps not family, and
if a male-female partnership rather than a homo-social one, are represented
with emphasised ethnic uniformity, making much of their linguistic difference, and
their shared “look”/haircut, etc. A Chinese crew, seen very briefly, also display marked facial similarities, and sport identical shaved heads. </div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn1.sciencefiction.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/pacific-rim-image04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://cdn1.sciencefiction.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/pacific-rim-image04.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Two pilots in harmony - undergoing a bridging of minds to control the <i>Jaeger </i>- video still from <i>Pacific Rim</i></td></tr>
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Interestingly, then, the key neural “bridge” of the film is between
characters with seemingly the most obstacles between their making this
connection: with Raleigh and Mako, it is a bridge between people with very
different experiences, races and a different gender, and even seemingly very
different temperaments. What Raleigh and Mako, perhaps share, is their status
as outsiders (i.e. their very <i>difference</i>) and, above all, their traumatised
pasts – their very fragmentation. This movement in the film, then, between characters who
bond through similarity (bond with “the same”) to characters who are able to
bond with those who are different from them could be understood in a series of different ways. It
might in some psychoanalytical readings equate to a certain maturation process,
recognising and coming to terms with difference, the existence of the other,
and the limits to the power of the self, and forming emotional and social (and,
ultimately sexual) bonds with “others”. [3] (One question might be whether such a
narrative, as presented in the film, is fundamentally hetero-normative.) such a
narrative might also be read on the geo-political level – given the
thematisation of such a space in the film, as marked by its very title. The
trauma, the scar, the rift which must be bridged is the gulf between East and
West. (As Kipling put it, back in the heyday of orientalism, “East is East and
West is West / And never the twain shall meet.”)</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://collider.com/wp-content/uploads/pacific-rim-charlie-hunnam-rinko-kikuchi2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://collider.com/wp-content/uploads/pacific-rim-charlie-hunnam-rinko-kikuchi2.jpg" height="212" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Charlie Hunnam as Raleigh and Rinko Kikuchi as Mako in <i>Pacific Rim</i>. </td></tr>
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What <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pacific Rim </i>does,
then, is collapse the social/sexual with the geopolitical – and again we might
ask whether this is a matter of a kind of utopian wish in a split world, or an
ideological image which actually amounts to a form of imperial culture. Perhaps
the answer is not either/or, but both/and. </div>
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Such a recognition of the collapse between the psycho-sexual
and the geo-political brings us to the character of Mako. In some
ways, it is striking how the same kinds of stereotypes as we meet with in the
case of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wolverine</i> are replayed here,
but it is also interesting the ways that del Toro’s film complicates the
picture.</div>
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Mako, then, may seem at first to integrate the two figures
of the Asian-woman-as-object-of-desire that are offered in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wolverine</i>, Mariko and Yukio. Like Mariko. she is at points
delicate, vulnerable and passive, especially as the girl who is rescued by
Pentecost, and with regards to him she is dutifully submissive, as dictated by
filial piety. On the other hand – as we see her, for example, in the “dojo”
fight/training scene – she is also the lethal and phallic woman warrior like
Yukio. She remains, as a character, almost entirely defined by the image of her suppoesd racial/ethnic/cultural characteristics. To a large degree, in spite of these contradictions, and despite having
a complexity far beyond the Mariko/Yukio pair in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wolverine</i>, Mako remains not a whole lot more than a cardboard
cut-out character. </div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130628110045/pacificrim/images/9/9c/Mako_Mori_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130628110045/pacificrim/images/9/9c/Mako_Mori_3.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mako strikes a martial arts pose during the "dojo" training scene in in <i>Pacific Rim</i> </td></tr>
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However, in spite of these limitations, Mako certainly has a
lot more agency in the film than Yukio and Mariko do, becoming very much a partner and
co-protagonist to Raleigh. In this much, we are already doing fairly well for
Hollywood in terms of gender politics. It’s also interesting that Mako in fact
becomes the only character actually endowed with the eroticised cinematic gaze,
in a scene where she watches a shirtless Raleigh through the keyhole of his room, with the
white male body turned into the erotic object for an Asian female looker – a
scene that must be something of a rarity in the history of American cinema. In fact, Mako fits into a
much longer standing fascination in del Toro’s films with active (if girl-like) female
protagonists, such as, most obviously, Ofelia in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pan’s Labyrinth.</i> This comparison might remind us to cast her as
a kind of fairy-tale princess. The nuances of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> a gender analysis </span>of this figure of the fairly-tale girl in del
Toro’s work – and in film and literature more generally – are definitely beyond
my present expertise, however.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140625092235/pacificrim/images/thumb/3/33/Mako_Still_03.png/800px-Mako_Still_03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140625092235/pacificrim/images/thumb/3/33/Mako_Still_03.png/800px-Mako_Still_03.png" height="225" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Pacific Rim </i>as fairy tale.</td></tr>
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The ending, of the film, then, in which Raleigh and Mako journey
together into the darkest depths of the Oceanic fissure (and, in fact, at the
same time into the dangerous “drifts” of their shared unconscious minds) to
destroy all monsters, and from which they emerge only by saving each other, to end
in a triumphal embrace, marks a real “partnership” in a very different form
from what we are offered in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wolverine</i>.
The fantasy that this final coupling entails is very much in harmony, overall, with the analysis that I have been presenting here: in many ways <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pacific Rim</i> hardly escapes the basic
cultural structures or fantasies through which Hollywood has negotiated the
collision of East and West. It is worrying, in terms of the film’s bid to do
more than fall into clumsy racial stereotypes and retrograde orientalist
fantasies, that ultimately its eroticised vision of the geopolitical hangs on
the all-too-familiar pairing of a masculine occident and a feminine orient. (I
wonder: how might the film be transformed if Raleigh were to be cast as a white
woman and Mako an Asian man?) But <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pacific
Rim</i> – even in offering us a different kind of partnership, and one that is
at least more fully human – certainly seems to take a step towards working away
at the contradictions of Western cinema’s fantasies of the orient, “traversing”
them, and re-positioning us differently within them. </div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzrb7Aui9TadvnVt1jc2TYj7A0ENN00oR5rtEIxhhB7WlD7pnzUf7qc-UGLeXG_bKQh39Zkq0kE02Z8oKKRM3sA0Jq9UtPddFgpyaC5xm4ptVYSx2IZA1hKkY-_VBNw8fKtt9UlgYpYFE/s1600/Pacific-Rim-Raleigh-and-Mako3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzrb7Aui9TadvnVt1jc2TYj7A0ENN00oR5rtEIxhhB7WlD7pnzUf7qc-UGLeXG_bKQh39Zkq0kE02Z8oKKRM3sA0Jq9UtPddFgpyaC5xm4ptVYSx2IZA1hKkY-_VBNw8fKtt9UlgYpYFE/s1600/Pacific-Rim-Raleigh-and-Mako3.jpg" height="225" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Raleigh and Mako at the end of <i>Pacific Rim</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br /></div>
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I’m pretty sure that this post has hardly “cracked” the
enigma of del Toro’s film, and I remain quite conscious that I’ve largely been
dependent on a fairly literal reading of its narrative and said little about
the cinematic and visual aspects that perhaps actually make it an interesting
film to watch. I’m also rather aware that it’s been something of a rambling and
over-long piece, so I hope that some readers get this far, to the very end! I hope,
however, that it has been of interest to a reader, and helps in some way in
furthering an understanding of, or the development of a critical angle on, the
film in question. </div>
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<br /></div>
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I’d also be very glad to hear from anyone with other ideas
about the film or if anyone has any comments on the argument I’ve made here.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>Notes</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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[1] See for example Michael Elliott, “China Takes on the World,” <i>Time</i> (11 Jan 2007) <a href="http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1576831,00.html">http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1576831,00.html</a>.]</div>
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<br /></div>
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[2] Peter Nolan and Jin Zhang, “Global Competition after the Financial Crisis,” <i>NLR </i>64 (July/Aug 2010): 97-108.</div>
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<br /></div>
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[3] I'm thinking primarily of the kinds of analysis offered by Melanie Klein.</div>
<!--EndFragment-->Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-3364872658515812862014-07-30T03:06:00.000-07:002014-09-08T11:41:36.352-07:00Pacific Rim (2013) and The Wolverine (2013) Part 1 – The Wolverine <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pacific Rim </i>(dir. del
Torro, 2013) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wolverine</i> (dir. Mangold,
2013)</div>
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<br /></div>
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<o:p>On this blog I've "started" a number of pieces of work with promises for continuation that have never been kept. Many of these are projects that are on the way to going elsewhere, possibly with views to future publication, so further posts on those projects here may well probably never see the light of day. Especially with the loads of teaching and administration that I seem to labour under these days. However, with the article started below I really do promise (honest!) to get a "part two"out during the Summer. It's even mostly written. And I've no intention of publishing this material elsewhere.</o:p></div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
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This piece of writing starts with a co-incidence – or rather
something that perhaps just seems like a co-incidence: a conjunction at the heart
of which lies a complex tangle of motivation that is both my own but also that of the contemporary American movie industry. On a long-haul flight from the UK
to America for a conference, I decided to dip into the in-flight movies. Over
the hours on the plane, not wanting to plump for the more exhausting fare of
the art-house offerings available, I found myself watching a couple of action
movies, and the films that I landed on (out of an admittedly huge choice) were
Guillermo del Torro’s distinctly auteurial spin on the popular generic effects
movie, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pacific Rim</i>, and James
Mangold’s rather less directorially distinguished <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wolverine</i>. What struck me was that in each of these films alike
I had been thrown into a Hollywood vision of the global which revolved around
the imaginary Far East as a locus of desire and a space of fantasy. Each (in
their different ways) reclaimed and reworked iconographic and technical elements
of Asian popular movies in their attempts to reinvigorate the phantasmatic
space of American action cinema. Each, I think, is also involved in a negotiation of cinematic language itself, as this has been reconfigured by Hollywood's brush with Asian film production. (The conjunction perhaps has a renewed interest at the present moment when a new remake of <i>Godzilla </i>has just been released...)</div>
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<br /></div>
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<o:p>First, them, <i>The Wolverine</i>.</o:p></div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgUwVSlckEbeQj06t9A1S2M2-zKGPmronWjdvGunLntN9c1eVo0dfbvMy4OS-vw4TUVO3tZD7pfuPdrs2t-o84p56vgTx_icEx4aZTWxlil0LJ1dcg9ebJGZURrIEN89i5ChJMxdWCJm5R/s1600/the+wolverine+movie+wallpaper2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgUwVSlckEbeQj06t9A1S2M2-zKGPmronWjdvGunLntN9c1eVo0dfbvMy4OS-vw4TUVO3tZD7pfuPdrs2t-o84p56vgTx_icEx4aZTWxlil0LJ1dcg9ebJGZURrIEN89i5ChJMxdWCJm5R/s1600/the+wolverine+movie+wallpaper2.jpg" height="225" width="400" /></a></div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wolverine </i>takes
us to Japan, rehashing an almost-unreconstructed set of orientalist stereotypes
and, over the course of the film, reasserting white/Western symbolic ownership
of the “action” genre, integrating motifs, from Asian genres, of the Yakuza,
ninjas, samurai, and so on, into an all-American superhero spectacle, at the
heart of which is the strong, masculine, “superior” white hero, who gets to
out-action the action specialists of the East, quite literally picking up their
weapons (the katana, etc.) and using them to defeat the “natives”. The
ideological message is clear: the American Way is naturally superior to its
alternatives. </div>
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<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn24.ne.be/contents/73546/the-wolverine-katana-et-griffes-600x280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://cdn24.ne.be/contents/73546/the-wolverine-katana-et-griffes-600x280.jpg" height="149" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wolverine (played by Hugh Jackman), gripping the Japanese katana in <i>The Wolverine </i>(2013)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
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Over the course of the film, the eponymous hero wins the
heart of not one but two Japanese women, each standing for one of the paired
stereotypes through which Asian femininity is represented. One the one hand
there is Mariko (Tao Okatomo): a delicate, vulnerable “butterfly”, marked out
in the film’s narrative through an association with “traditional” ways of life
and modes of femininity. She is the damsel in distress who seems for the body
of the film its preferred erotic object. On the other hand there is the
sword-toting, subculturally dressed bodyguard Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a
“kick-ass babe” in whose company Wolverine in fact metaphorically sets off into
the sunset at the end of the movie (flying West on a plane, rather than on
horseback). But this, it seems, in the film, is an altogether more Platonic
friendship than the association set up with Mariko. The movie gets it both
ways: the hero gets the (exotic) girl(s), but returns to his monadic, asexual
state (as is common in the superhero genre). In terms of its gender politics, the film gets to assert the triumph of
the “empowered”, modern, phallic (Asian) woman over her castrated double, but
only on the proviso that she becomes de-sexualised, turned into a “buddy”,
perhaps a partner in some cross-gender, doubly sublimated “bromance” rather
than “romance” per se… The threat to white-Western masculinity constituted by
this fantasmatic object of desire is thus neutralised on a number of levels.</div>
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<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://amokmagazine.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/rila-fukushima-wolverine-yukio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://amokmagazine.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/rila-fukushima-wolverine-yukio.jpg" height="320" width="274" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rila Fukushima as Yukio, in <i>The Wolverine</i> (2013)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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In the process of working out (winning and then rejecting)
these romantic attachments, Wolverine is contrasted with a series of
dysfunctional Asian masculinities – he defeats them through physical
superiority and moral integrity. These misfiring Asian men include Mariko’s
fiancée Singen. (This being a Hollywood representation of the East, this is an arranged
marriage of course). Singen is a corrupt politician who, even when caught in a
moment of heterosexual excess with two call girls, is nonetheless feminised,
wearing a pair of red “panties”. (One of the aforementioned call girls is, of
course, a blonde, raising the spectre of the yellow-peril “other” who threatens
the Western/white male’s possession of a racialised “womenfolk”.) There is the
tyrannical father who is jealous of the daughter’s inheritance and plots to
kidnap and kill her in order to take this over. Then there is the young ninja and
childhood sweetheart who is supposed to protect Mariko but in fact sells her
out to her enemies, ultimately more connected to an ethic of “family” and
“duty” than to one of personal romantic attachment and individuation, setting up a classic East-West binary. And finally
there is the sick and dying grandfather, Yashida, the originary point of the
film’s fantasy of the East as a decaying, monstrous patriarchy, which cannot
fully present a core of masculinity from which to order its gender-space. It is
from this network of representatives of corrupt masculinity that Wolverine
rescues the heroine (and ultimately thus an invidious “tradition” involving
duty, arranged marriages, and so on which they manifest). This, of course, is
the frequent orientalist trope: we must invade country X to protect the women
there from their misrule by primitive, corrupt, decadent, and thus improperly
manly men.</div>
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<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://uk.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/2013227/rs_560x415-130327085118-1024.wolverine.ls.32713.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://uk.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/2013227/rs_560x415-130327085118-1024.wolverine.ls.32713.jpg" height="237" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #7f7f7f; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;">Hal Yamanouchi as Yashida in <i>The Wolverine</i> (2013)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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The sexism of the film (and the racism involved in its
negotiation of gender) is doubled by a disturbing historical revisionism. The
film’s narrative spur – the cause for Wolverine’s visit to Japan – lies in a story
from the very close of the Second World War. Wolverine is held in a prisoner-of-war
camp and the guards are releasing the prisoners, recognising that defeat is now
certain. A guard lets Wolverine out of the bunker in which he is imprisoned,
and in return Wolverine prevents the guard from committing hara kiri. (Again,
then, we have an American saving the other from the barbarity of his/her own
culture…) At this instant we see, across the landscape, the dropping of the
atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Wolverine uses his mutant’s body – which has the
power to regenerate in response to any harm done to it – to shield his new
protégée, and when they emerge from the bunker, the entire landscape around is
in ruin. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The main events of the film take place years later, and the
one-time prison guard, Yashida, has become an industrial magnate, and it is his
invitation to visit to say goodbye before he dies that brings Wolverine to
Japan. At the heart of the film, then, is a complex of guilt and denial, with
the all-American hero on hand to save the Japanese other, and to be marked as
himself present at the scene as a victim (even a saviour) rather than an
aggressor. It is obviously (though this is not stated) the radiation dose that
the industrialist has received that is the cause of the cancer from which he is
dying. Yet it turns out that in fact he is the film’s real (hidden) villain,
who has set up the whole visit (including faking his own death) in order to
trap Wolverine, and rob him of his immortality, which Yashida seeks to
appropriate for himself. Turning the victim/perpetrator relationship around,
Wolverine appears as the wronged party in the film, with Yashida taking on the
role of a corrupt betrayer of American largesse – suggesting perhaps that the
film constitutes an expression of anxiety about the growth of the East as an
economic and political power in recent decades, marking a reversal and decay of
American (neo-)colonial mastery. The quest for immortality takes on, in
Yashida, the flavour of a sinister quest for power, in contrast to Wolverine’s
“manifest destiny” as an immortal. For Wolverine, in contrast to Yashida, his
special superpower is a “white man’s burden” that, unasked for, he must bear
stoically – the mark of a natural right and duty to rule and take responsibility for others.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The film can be read as telling of a renewal of this
(American) destiny. At the start of the film Wolverine has taken to the woods,
living amongst animals, withdrawn from society and its purposes. Perhaps we
might recognise the trope as an echo of the “Rambo-esque” retreat to the woods
in a range of post-Vietnam Hollywood offerings. Wolverine is drawn back into
the world of men first through his sense of justice: when a bear is killed inhumanely
by hunters he goes into town to take revenge for it. (Is this, then also a
vision of a corrupt order that needs renewal? A structuring trope of the film
seems to be this renewal or regeneration of moral and social orders – akin
perhaps to Wolverine’s own ability to heal his body. Wolverine taking his place
of leadership back in the world is a matter of rejuvenating both his own
society and that of the Asian “other”, with America unnaturally atrophied and
the rise of the “other” appearing as a kind of excessive, disorderly,
destructive cancerous growth, like Yashida’s illness.) But Wolverine’s sparking
of conscience is reinforced with the arrival of Yukio, who adds to the “quest”
the reappearance of an erotic dimension – the seduction of the orient. (Yukio,
of course, serves only as a step that leads him to the film’s key object of
erotic fascination, the wan Mariko.) This renewal of Wolverine’s warrior
charter and his erotic attachment in the gendered and raced other could easily,
of course, be read as a parallel to the return of an American interventionist
policy in the late twentieth century, a reversal of the isolationism that has
at other points marked its history. </div>
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<br /></div>
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The film, then – read at least in the rather crude ideology-critique/semiotic
analysis terms above – seems to make a kind of a claim to the importance of the
American hero’s warrior identity and destiny, as the natural leader and saviour
of all the other inhabitants of the world. But what interests me is the way
that this in its turn folds back into the very form of the film, and its
relation to international genres. Can the film be better understood as a kind
of an allegory of its own production, a fantasy of its own place in the
landscape of global culture? Is it American action <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cinema </i>whose destiny is reasserted in this film, which just like
Wolverine within the work, seeks to pick up the tools of its other – the motifs
and techniques of Japanese and Hong Kong cinema – and refashion them into an all-American
genre? Is this a reinvigoration of a moribund superhero genre, which perhaps has
had its period metaphorically isolated in the woods before its reinvention in
the movies of the noughties? (Especially after <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spiderman </i>[2002]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, </i>a film itself
made in the wake of the highly significant moment of 9-11, and which reminded
us, at a moment when America was stepping up as a global policeman, that “with
great power comes great responsibility”.) Like Wolverine, part of what brings
this popular-cultural genre back out into the light of day is the emergence of
a set of oriental objects of desire. These objects are the films of the
Japanese and Hong Kong New Waves of the eighties and nineties (and, before that,
the trans-national phenomena of “kung fu” and “chanbara”), and the absorption
of their action techniques and aesthetics into a mainstream Western
visual/cinematic language. The “orient” becomes a space of fantasy, desire and
identifcation through which such movies can re-articulate themselves. The only
thing that is, perhaps, notable in Wolverine is the extent to which this
becomes so visibly thematised within the film as well as forming its very form.
Perhaps, however, it is not even unique here – think of the fetishisation of
martial arts in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Batman Begins </i>(2005)
or even <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Electra </i>(1996).</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The point behind this, too, of course, is the shift in power
away from the West and the rise of Eastern economic, political and cultural
power – a shift that has gathered momentum since the 60s and 70s when the
superhero comics of Marvel first had their day. Film form, content and economic
reality seem startlingly aligned in the anxieties that seem to be articulated
within this film.</div>
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<br /></div>
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In the next instalment, I'll be looking at the somewhat more complex and nuanced way in which Guillermo del Torro's <i>Pacific Rim</i> – released the same year as <i>The Wolverine</i>.<br />
<br />
<b>Part 2 is now online - available here:</b><br />
<a href="http://kungfuwithbraudel.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/pacific-rim-2013-and-wolverine-2013.html">http://kungfuwithbraudel.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/pacific-rim-2013-and-wolverine-2013.html</a></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-74303014037073618542013-12-02T05:21:00.004-08:002014-09-08T11:43:35.097-07:00Chang Cheh via Baudrillard <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLmZsTxmaKsvAalMPRhTCr7xTWBo8I5uLK7hvOXvVIWpiZms7YdqUlRteoscQf5Oav-mClottLvzPc4zOx1DwaEyUx1w_SUXnxXZLyRhziItHGuFjMZzrqREzNdEbSy8dxQWeXFBvMBj0/s1600/Picture+308.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLmZsTxmaKsvAalMPRhTCr7xTWBo8I5uLK7hvOXvVIWpiZms7YdqUlRteoscQf5Oav-mClottLvzPc4zOx1DwaEyUx1w_SUXnxXZLyRhziItHGuFjMZzrqREzNdEbSy8dxQWeXFBvMBj0/s400/Picture+308.png" height="167" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jimmy Wang Yu's sacrificial suicide in <i>The Assassin </i>(Chang Cheh, 1967). Entering a "symbolic" economy beyond the logic of rational exchange and accumulation. </td></tr>
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From the end of the first chapter of Jean Baudrillard's <i>Symbolic Exchange and Death:</i></div>
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"Since it [the system of contemporary society] thrives on my slow death [in labour], I will oppose it with my violent death. and it is because we are living with slow death that we dream of a violent death. Even this dream is unbearable to power." (p.43)</blockquote>
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Baudrillard isn't the most trendy philosopher any more, but the passage could be a way of interpreting the "dream of a violent death" proffered in, above all, Chang Cheh films. What matters in these, much more than beating the bad guy, or even winning history, is achieving a glorious death. And it is in such embrace of sacrifice that the films imagine the heroes – often class outsiders – as wresting back their subjectivity. It is also in such gestures that they keep alive the potential to reclaim the future from subjugation and domination. </div>
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Here we are back, of course, in the logic of sacrificial expenditure in the mould of Marcel Mauss, set against the accumulative logic of the acquisitive villains of the movies. The gift economy is set against the economy of calculation. Kung fu training as Bataille-esque expenditure.</div>
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Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-24249673034780325372013-06-05T13:51:00.001-07:002013-06-05T13:51:52.700-07:00Kowloon Walled City<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTAf0ksvBO6UtHt6QReLwiRXMwS0KKCVfTDOJQRHqk5aMyeUpdprWKvXQIb_nEUpIuibaaTkz2IXJKHKjd5ixaLjvCH-FuqW9YWuxTeXb6oekIrjOJZbQNRAJbPhXXaRrgjlmM8AbB-gg/s1600/walledcity.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTAf0ksvBO6UtHt6QReLwiRXMwS0KKCVfTDOJQRHqk5aMyeUpdprWKvXQIb_nEUpIuibaaTkz2IXJKHKjd5ixaLjvCH-FuqW9YWuxTeXb6oekIrjOJZbQNRAJbPhXXaRrgjlmM8AbB-gg/s320/walledcity.jpg" width="201" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo from Greg Girard and Ian Lambot's series of images of Kowloon Walled city. </td></tr>
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Andrew Osborne recently pointed me to the following link about Kowloon Walled City.<br />
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<a href="http://curbed.com/archives/2013/04/19/mapping-the-horrors-of-hong-kongs-lawless-walled-city-1.php">http://curbed.com/archives/2013/04/19/mapping-the-horrors-of-hong-kongs-lawless-walled-city-1.php</a><br />
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Kowloon walled city grew up in the no-man's land between the People's republic of China and Hong Kong. It started as a walled fort built by the British, but, abandoned, it was taken over by thousands of the poorest of Hong Kong, and grew into one of the densest slums anywhere in the world. It constituted 500 buiudings, built into 2.7 hectares, and at its height by 1990, it had 50,000 inhabitants - a population density of 1.9 million people per square kilometer - putting Hong Kong's overall figure of 6,700 people/sq. km to shame, and even out-doing Mongkok's 130,000 per sq. km figure by a factor of over 10.<br />
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Outside the operation of the legal system, KWC was rife with drug-dealing and prostitution, and was dominated by armed gangs. Its streets mixed markets with unlicensed doctors and dentists. There were no organised refuse or sanitation systems. The building towered up, beyond architectural control, so that aircraft landing at Kai Tak airport had to alter their flight paths to avoid it. But in site of its lawlessness, according to a recent article in the <i>South China Morning Post</i>, marking the 20th anniversary of its demolition in 1993, "many of Kowloon Walled City's former residents remember it fondly. It may have been a City of Darkness to outsiders, but to thousands who called it home, it was a friendly, tight-knit community that was poor but generally happy."<br />
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The article (and that little sentence in particular) remind me of the "Tenement Film" genre in Hong Kong cinema, which celebrated the humour, solidarity and resourcefulness of slum communities. Most famously, of course, <i>House of 72 Tenants</i>, both Chor Yuen's film of 1973 (which kept Bruce Lee's <i>Enter the Dragon</i> off the top spot at the box office that year), and the original of which it was a remake ten years earlier.<br />
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Here's a trailer for <i>House of 72 Tenants</i>.<br />
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Of course, this in its turn is the basis for "Pig Sty Alley" in Steven Chow's <i>Kung Fu Hustle</i> (2004):<br />
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"In a time of social unrest and disorder the gangs have moved in to consolidate their power. The most feared of them all is the Axe Gang. Only in the poorest districts, which hold no interest for the gangs can people live in peace ... PIG STY ALLEY"</blockquote>
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I also spotted this rather interesting page discussing the Tenement Film and its influence on <i>Kung Fu Hustle</i>:<br />
<a href="http://www.hkcinemagic.com/en/page.asp?aid=135&page=1">http://www.hkcinemagic.com/en/page.asp?aid=135&page=1</a><br />
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And Scott Spencer also shared this fascinating link about KWC:<br />
<a href="http://99percentinvisible.org/post/36086263396/episode-66-kowloon-walled-city">http://99percentinvisible.org/post/36086263396/episode-66-kowloon-walled-city</a><br />
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It includes a link to a rather interesting documentary:<br />
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Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-61121502598116843712013-05-27T03:59:00.002-07:002013-05-27T03:59:13.812-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMR9NN1m-rom0StxI-NovzLUNj9fJESRdjh5UrwZjf9sUfkWVz_eieZQdk62ZJBHB3H52PNzBhyphenhyphenSXrIeXZLBZN28-QdMrlGJ91S-VRpNgCSO3ScM7J-6kRomh5k3R50Fx-CLWnH-ioU_U/s1600/Rivera-theAgitator.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMR9NN1m-rom0StxI-NovzLUNj9fJESRdjh5UrwZjf9sUfkWVz_eieZQdk62ZJBHB3H52PNzBhyphenhyphenSXrIeXZLBZN28-QdMrlGJ91S-VRpNgCSO3ScM7J-6kRomh5k3R50Fx-CLWnH-ioU_U/s400/Rivera-theAgitator.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
Diego Rivera, <i>The Agitator</i>, 1926. Fresco, 8 ft x 18 ft. Autonomous University of Chapingo.Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-50725067951598953862013-04-17T13:34:00.000-07:002013-04-17T13:36:02.270-07:00Kung fu, Vampire and Capital (Part 1)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD8ZdoPdvd2SZjUzW_d-BQnRRs_S7zpgdyCJ2D7Fl_44JVR_C40i6mFIFG8_v2b5kCymgnqeZ61JHit1vpxS5iIF0fbuwRmm1zNfJKIRLaFguRTu0XfLoS5FcmRG8FWDpTexdDtlRprLs/s1600/Picture+77.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD8ZdoPdvd2SZjUzW_d-BQnRRs_S7zpgdyCJ2D7Fl_44JVR_C40i6mFIFG8_v2b5kCymgnqeZ61JHit1vpxS5iIF0fbuwRmm1zNfJKIRLaFguRTu0XfLoS5FcmRG8FWDpTexdDtlRprLs/s400/Picture+77.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Still from <i>Mr Vampire</i> (dir. Ricky Lau, HK, 1985)</td></tr>
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I have of late been reading David McNally's book, <i><a href="http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/Monsters-of-the-Market">Monsters of the Market</a></i>, a fascinating - if not methodologically unproblematic - exploration of the figures of the zombie and the vampire since early modernity, read in the light of the growth of capital. In McNally's reading, under conditions of capitalism, labourers are treated (and thus imagined in capitalist culture) as objectified, living-dead bodies, placed into a mindless, zombie-like regime of wage-slavery (or, in more recent days, consumption). Rather than such a figure of the zombie, other literature (and the literary texture of Marx's work in particular) registers and displaces the <i>vampire</i>-like qualities of capital, as dead labour dominating and sucking the life out of its subjects. <br />
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The rather unstable figure of the monster runs throughout the book, uniting these two figures of the undead – the vampire and the zombie – each forming an opposing pole of a single cultural complex. For McNally (at least as far as I understand the drive of his book), the 'monstrous' is an ambivalent category in modern culture, signifying on the one hand the monstrous and disordering powers of capital itself, but also projecting these onto the labouring classes as a formless, dangerous mass that threatens the law and the metaphysical order of the Universe and the social fabric. The monstrous body of the modern poor is a disordered, disarticulated, chaotic body, decomposing into its constituent parts. It's the body, of course, of Frankenstein's monster in Mary Shelley's famous book. Shelley's creature is itself a body – McNally's book insists – composed from the grave-robbed, undead, reanimated bodies of the criminalised working classes, subject as they were in the eighteenth century to being dismembered after death and set to work as objects of knowledge (and moral examples) at the hands of dissectors. Working class bodies were, furthermore, of course, already bodies 'dissected' and 'decomposed' into their constituent parts, by the processes of disciplined labour (the worker as a 'hand'), and by the processes of abstraction which robbed them of any organic unity. <br />
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In the last and most interesting chapter of McNally's book he turns away from European history to consider the contemporary phenomenon of an explosion of zombie myths in Sub-Saharan Africa. These, McNally insists, cannot be understood simply as some form of pre-modern throwback, a survival of old modes of superstition. In fact, McNally discusses the ways that contemporary narratives of witchcraft in Africa are radically discontinuous with older varieties of this, and whatever superficial similarities there may be between old and new iconographies, the meaning of such stories is now something quite different. McNally proposes that modern witchcraft and zombie stories should be read as an attempt to figure – in however a transformed guise – the horrors of globalised, neoliberal economics, as this reconfigures African cultures and societies. As such a figuration, there is a certain resistant value in vampire myth, as it makes uncanny that logic which capitalism would like to make normal, and which it has succeeded in the West as normalising to a far greater degree.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a9/Slaves_in_chains_%28grayscale%29.png/545px-Slaves_in_chains_%28grayscale%29.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="File:Slaves in chains (grayscale).png" border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a9/Slaves_in_chains_%28grayscale%29.png/545px-Slaves_in_chains_%28grayscale%29.png" width="289" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Slaves in East Africa, c.1900</td></tr>
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The zombie, in fact, he suggests is not an old figure in many of the cultures where it appears. Instead, it is a figure which arrives in the contemporary African vernacular primarily through Hollywood, and, in the longer run through histories of slavery in the West Indies (the slave as zombie - as a person without will or soul, reduced only to primary functions of work). What emeges in recent years in Africa are myths, urban rumours and popular literature or cinema about (poor) victims being resurrected by demonic (rich) sorcerers in order to be put to work, with the zombie-master accumulating all the wages earned by the possessed body. Other stories tell of enchanted bodies who open their mouths to vomit out coins, and are thus turned into "human cash machines" whose very material substance can be transformed into ready cash. For McNally, of course, these are to be read as allegories, metaphors or displaced expressions of fears about the exploitative nature of capitalism.<br />
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One of the questions that interests me is how McNally's schema might help us think about the rather different zombie/vampire bodies that became so popular in Hong Kong cinema during the late 1980s (and, I suppose, in the run-up to reunification with the mainland). <br />
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There are, of course, some small commonalities and some huge differences between Hong Kong in the 80s and twenty-first century Africa. The legacy of Western colonial and Imperial domination serving to form, to a certain degree, a baseline of shared experience, however different this historical trajectory has been in China and Africa. We might also note the 'belated' modernisation, industrialisation and urbanisation of both societies, with a significant load of cultural material being brought to Hong Kong in the 50s and 60s by its massive influx of immigrants, largely from still relatively 'traditional' rural societies. In both cases, and though at somewhat different moments, and with different effects, we are also dealing with the absorption of the culture in question with processes of globalisation and neoliberal accumulation. Hong Kong was an early 'globaliser', starting as it did as a colonial trading hub, and only then diversifying in the 60s and 70s as a manufacturing base. Hong Kong – even its poor inhabitants – also rapidly drew a large amount of wealth from its insertion into global markets, and by the 1980s was looking a quite different economic and social reality from the societies we would usually tend to imagine as 'Third World'... In this regard, the growth of cinematic stories of the supernatural in the eighties is interesting precisely with regard to this being a moment where a decisive distance is marked from 'traditional' culture, and (with a population largely born and raised on the island, quite probably for most people already at a generation's distance from mainland origins) in which Hong Kong's self-image is distictively 'urban', independent and autocthonous.<br />
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What to make, then of the films? Perhaps the place to start is with some more basic description of the genre in question - the 'hopping corpse' or <span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 16px;">殭屍 (</span><i>jiangshi</i> in Mandarin / <i>geongsi</i> in Cantonese) movie. <i>Jiangsh</i>i is usually translated into English as '(Chinese) vampire', or, somewhat less commonly, as '(Chinese) zombie'. The word, however, literally means 'stiff corpse' - and it is this stiffness (a rigor mortis that survives the reanimation of the dead) that determines the distinctive gait of the jiangshi, as it makes ungainly two-legged hops, hands rigidly outstretched in front of it - in pursuit of its victims.<br />
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Interestingly enough given McNally's typology, the jiangshi shares certain properties of both vampire and zombie, or exists within a continuum somewhere between the two poles of the figure of the monster. If the zombie is a will-less body controlled by another (or just rambling around without a master), and the vampire marks a kind of undead and absolute, demonic will, the jiangshi is both and neither. Uncontrolled, the jiangshi may be a kind of a terrible and monstrous demon; controlled it becomes a comic and ultimately pathetic tool, and the jiangshi switches easily from state to state (by applying or detaching a spell written on a sheet of paper to its forehead, for example). In this regard, it may at first sight seem to fit quite badly with a figure either of worker's body or the horrors of capital.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWNdmOUX_l4qtL6JHEMgD3rZJju-AoOz8IqIbVO78pt05-Npz7fl3jE3DezItZnDmIqcSupO338IqzuwpYs0qJLYOTkVMaDq8Cwms_kvNgpJ2Pq175t3LDLzPrAsCuy57Ghwbn88XB5JQ/s1600/Picture+55.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWNdmOUX_l4qtL6JHEMgD3rZJju-AoOz8IqIbVO78pt05-Npz7fl3jE3DezItZnDmIqcSupO338IqzuwpYs0qJLYOTkVMaDq8Cwms_kvNgpJ2Pq175t3LDLzPrAsCuy57Ghwbn88XB5JQ/s400/Picture+55.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jiangshi in<i> Mr Vampire</i> – the undead transformed into an army of docile, controlled bodies</td></tr>
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In relation to the question of the particular moment in which the vampire films appeared, described above as one at which the relation to the past was being released, at which Hong Kong identity was being set up as modern and Western in opposition to an imagined 'backward' mainland, and at a moment of the dim rise of anxieties about reunification with Communist China, it's interesting that the hopping vampire – usually clothed in the archaic funeral clothes of a Qing-dynasty official – seems to mark a complex and ambivalent relation to a past that is at once desired and hated, owned and disavowed. In this much it's interesting that the Chinese title of the most popular and genre-defining of the Vampire films of the 80s, which is translated into English by its distributors as <i>Mr Vampire</i>, is in fact better translated literally as <i>Uncle Vampire</i> (<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 3px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 3px; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px;">僵屍先生)</span>. This is a genre of film, then, which is profoundly about a relation to patriarchy and tradition.<br />
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Indeed, the first of the <i>Mr Vampire</i> films (it was a film so popular it spawned a series of sequels as well as a flood of imitations) is clearly set around problems of descent and the relation to ancestors (not to mention land and money). The heroes of the film are a long-suffering Taoist priest, Master Kao (played by one of my favourite actors and martial arts performers, Lam Ching-ying), and his rather unruly apprentices. He is called by a client, a rich businessman who is having problems with his business, to examine the burial of his father. On examination of the grave, Kao comes to the conclusion that the businessman's father had been given very bad advice in laying out the feng shui for his chosen burial site and that this is causing a problem. When he probes the matter, Kao discovers that the land for the grave had been bought from the same fortune-teller who had advised on the burial – and that underhand financial means had been applied to force him to sell the land cheaply. The bad advice on burying the body was the fortune-teller's revenge, and it is this that causes the dead patriarch to return from the dead to pursue his own descendants - killing and making a vampire first of his son, and then pursuing his niece (who the film's heroes endeavour to rescue), hence becoming the 'Uncle Vampire' of the original Cantonese title. What we have, then is a relationship to the past, to ancestors, and to a legacy (one which is both financial and familial, magical and cultural) that has become unnatural and toxic through the intervention of the distorting powers of money. In this regard, we are very close to many of the metaphors which McNally values so much in Marx (and which Marx in turn seems to draw from Shalespeare and from a Gothic tradition of literature), whereby money makes live things into dead ones, and animates the inanimate; where traditions are destroyed; where hierarchies are inverted; and order made basely disorderly.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lam Ching-ying strikes a pose as the Taoist priest in <i>Mr Vampire</i></td></tr>
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What perhaps complicates the picture here, however, is the relation to the 'mainland' and to traditional Chinese culture which seems to be set up. The Qing-dynasty costume of the undead seems to hint on the one hand at a history of colonial rule and foreign domination. The vampire in this sense is something 'alien'. However, it seems also to hint at an alienness which is intimately 'homely'. Might this remind us of Freud's discussion of the odd collapse of the difference between the <i>Heimlich</i> and the <i>Unheimlich</i> – whereby what is most terrible and alien turns out to have at its core something repressed that comes from within, and from the most private, primal and forgotten parts of the self which have only become so emphatically foreign because we cannot, on the most terrible pain, admit them into consciousness as a core of the self and its formative history. The Qing-era costumes of the vampire – and all the evocation of even older ancient myth and superstition that surrounds the vampire – seem to evoke a more diffuse sense of Chinese tradition – a set of beliefs that have been left behind (certainly enough to make them an entertainingly comedic spectacle) but which still haunt to the degree that unease can amplify the power of laughter. What, I wonder is the relation of the mainland to this figure – I cannot also help reading in these films the presence of China itself (in the guise of the PRC) as a land of forefathers for the Hong Kong people that also threatens to swallow up and suck the life from the 'young' and 'modern' (and capitalistic) island-city. But how would this square with a reading of the unease figured in the film, too about what I take as capitalist values?<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOYelIs0PDy5LgeLzPBhn_YXnuH6hjP14a3HszIEmXIsjnTaKS0GE7zMxJUjRom7m3sAogOCX5TU0BQ4TYLpr5mWi3txMdIt2CICd5qW9RbvI1_HSreONHvfXlfZjwGZOyk4dJk24yoiY/s1600/Picture+124.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOYelIs0PDy5LgeLzPBhn_YXnuH6hjP14a3HszIEmXIsjnTaKS0GE7zMxJUjRom7m3sAogOCX5TU0BQ4TYLpr5mWi3txMdIt2CICd5qW9RbvI1_HSreONHvfXlfZjwGZOyk4dJk24yoiY/s400/Picture+124.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wrestling with the Patriarch? Still from <i>Mr Vampire</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Any thoughts from anyone reading this would be gratefully received! Either pop them in the comments below or email me! Thanks!<br />
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(To be continued...)Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-58178802866802536472013-02-07T15:36:00.000-08:002013-02-07T15:39:03.078-08:00Fashioning the Kung Fu Revolution? Flowing Robes, Zhongshan Suits and the "Army in Black Pyjamas"This evening I attended a very interesting talk at Middlesex University (where I work), by Fashion Theorist / Design Historian Jane Tynan, whose research has mainly investigated military dress. Her talk was about the ways that the Irish revolutionaries of the abortive 1916 Easter Rising set out to create an identity for themselves through uniform. Though many of the leaders of the movement clearly had quite grand ambitions for fashioning their troops as a modern, disciplined force, in practice for activists on the ground uniform was necessarily a matter of sporadic, bricolaged elements, and the images that ended coming out of the rising were of a rather ragtag, motley, anarchic anti-colonial force.<br />
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The talk made me think of a paragraph that ended up on the "cutting room floor" of an article I've recently submitted to a journal. The paragraph was about the ways that dress in Hong Kong kung fu films, in the late 60s and early 70s, increasingly moved away from the flowing, aristocratic robes of the earlier wuxia films towards the peasant "black pyjamas" of Bruce Lee. Vijay Prashad has suggested in his fascinating book<i> <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Everybody-Was-Kung-Fighting-Connections/dp/0807050113">Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting</a></i>, that in the context of the anti-colonial unrest of the era, Lee's outfit was powerfully loaded in terms of class and anti-colonial identity – for Prashad (who was himself at the time of the release of Lee's films a teenager starting to become involved in an Indian Marxism profoundly influenced by Maoism), Lee's attire could hardly but remind a viewer of the Vietnamese "army in black pyjamas" that also repeatedly graced the screens of the era with images of Asian underdogs kicking US imperialist butt...<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzjUWHhmeyCEG8Z2Iv-kJA1O6x2Sw0Bqe2tdCdY-xeSCq52AJyKc7dCJp7AkJ0r-lhfzF6B9OUbOIOpA4DKP15clgV6iTkZxS9HGe_hkDePqbRty0Eg_Ia3yzCPl7kibizX6NpeuRvRlo/s1600/Picture+17.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="163" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzjUWHhmeyCEG8Z2Iv-kJA1O6x2Sw0Bqe2tdCdY-xeSCq52AJyKc7dCJp7AkJ0r-lhfzF6B9OUbOIOpA4DKP15clgV6iTkZxS9HGe_hkDePqbRty0Eg_Ia3yzCPl7kibizX6NpeuRvRlo/s400/Picture+17.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">(Bruce Lee in <i>Fist of Fury,</i> 1972 - kicking imperialist butt whilst wearing black pyjamas, the uniform of Asian anti-colonial resistance...)</span></div>
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This is also a kind of an imagining – or at least a re-imagining – of the "fashioning" of early twentieth-century revolt...<br />
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A further sartorial figure within this 1970s Hong-Kong attempt to imagine – and re-enact – the style of revolution was, of course, the <i>Zhongshan</i> suit that was worn so stylishly by Bruce Lee in <i>Fist of Fury</i> (1972). Lee's Zhongshan is white, which, of course, in China, is the colour of mourning. This, though, in the context of Lee's character's fury against the murder of his teacher by a foreign occupying power, is a peculiarly politicised, nationalist, anti-colonial kind of mourning.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWbTlFCHGRRZ9LixbEzyGDiJgiceinjfz0j1tvCuIpMLNhNk6oy4cJUpQqE6Fdt7k5l30iVnoZCxrc9KXp5GitKmJJiMJ-TMJ3ScuHqiYNKNtQfWHldJ3IUY-wB5lN965M9AsmPOrwoBk/s1600/Picture+14.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="162" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWbTlFCHGRRZ9LixbEzyGDiJgiceinjfz0j1tvCuIpMLNhNk6oy4cJUpQqE6Fdt7k5l30iVnoZCxrc9KXp5GitKmJJiMJ-TMJ3ScuHqiYNKNtQfWHldJ3IUY-wB5lN965M9AsmPOrwoBk/s400/Picture+14.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">(Bruce Lee's white Zhongshan in <i>Fist of Fury</i>)</span></div>
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The Zhongshan must have been a profoundly loaded piece of clothing in the early 70s. The Zhongshan suit, in fact, is named after the nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, whose most popular name amongst Chinese is in fact Sun Zhongshan (<i>zhong</i> means centre, and <i>shan</i> means mountain). The Zhongshan was a suit designed by the nationalist revolutionaries to express their political values immediately after the revolution of 1912. (Sun himself is said to have had a hand in its design.) It was, first and most obviously, a rejection of the Manchurian styles of dress of the Qing Dynasty, which had been used very much as a form of social control. The style of the Zhongshan seemed to borrow much from the Western suit, but clearly gave it an oriental twist, both making a claim for modernity, but also marking a difference to the hated Western powers which had beset China over the preceding centuries. In fact, the suit made a clear reference to contemporary Japanese military cadet uniforms, which Sun would have seen during the years of his exile there, with Japan also serving as the model of a successfully modernising East Asian nation. (I can hardly but make a nod here to Jane Tynan's discussion this evening of the militarisation which must have pervaded Irish society at exactly this point in time, with the development of the militias who she discussed in her talk, and who went on to take part in the 1916 uprising. The zhongshan was also a means to bring a military iconography into the everyday.)<br />
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The Zhongshan, however, is better known in the West now as the "Mao suit" – the Chinese communists took up the style during their alliance with Sun Yat-sen's nationalist party, and the fashion stuck with them. One wonders quite how Bruce Lee's (super-sylish, minimal and perfectly tailored) Zhongshan would have been read at what was still the height of the Cultural Revolution, where the Maoist Zhongshan (rather less fashionable though this version may have been!) was very much the uniform of the day for mainland males, made to symbolise the unity of the Chinese proletariat. In the wake, still, of the 1967 disturbances, and in the shadow of a continuing student movement, how would this clothing have made sense in Hong Kong in 1972?<br />
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<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Mao_and_Chiang1945.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="255" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Mao_and_Chiang1945.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">(Both Mao and Chang Kai Shek are pictured here wearing the Zhongshan.)</span></div>
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Interestingly, director Chang Cheh (<a href="http://kungfuwithbraudel.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Chang%20Cheh">discussed elsewhere on this blog</a>, with regards to the ways that his work was intertwined with the 1967 Hong Kong riots, and the ways his films are haunted by this radical moment) has claimed that Lee took these suits from his own prior film, <i>Vengeance! </i>(1970)<i>. </i>Indeed, in this, David Chiang also wears both black and white suits that Lee's own are very close to in style, and Chiang even perhaps outdoes Lee in looking dapper and stylish, the white Zhongshan, in <i>Vengeance!</i>, serving as a canvas for Chang's signature motif of a drenching in lurid red blood, the glamour of the garment gaining from Chang's tragic heroism.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6GSkuZq78x5JH5VbSe9-gYhpFkQWv79QRkcd_ODEp1XoSdBOFYf4-jrhpWe5TXJxy7Ehq2LDUZZdV9GIVIIkMe1b0Hiy9pjqOhnBX4cvihbByGsUMVT0WKqnJ2TspzzphtAvt1SDp2pQ/s1600/Picture+368.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6GSkuZq78x5JH5VbSe9-gYhpFkQWv79QRkcd_ODEp1XoSdBOFYf4-jrhpWe5TXJxy7Ehq2LDUZZdV9GIVIIkMe1b0Hiy9pjqOhnBX4cvihbByGsUMVT0WKqnJ2TspzzphtAvt1SDp2pQ/s400/Picture+368.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">(David Chiang's black Zhongshan in <i>Vengeance!</i>, 1970)</span></div>
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It's interesting that when Chang discusses the suit he (or at the very least his translator) calls it a "white student uniform (or Zhongshan suit)" [<a href="http://changcheh.0catch.com/ar/art4.htm">The Making of Martial Arts Films</a>, p.22] - making a connection to student movements. In this regard (and in particular in the light of Chang's attempt earlier in the same essay to link his films to the student movements of the 60s),<i> Vengeance!</i> starts to become legible as a kind of a political allegory, with David Chiang's youthful hero figuring as a terrible force of retribution. His individual struggle against the corrupt system of power, wealth and authority that has murdered his brother and attempted to cover up the crime starts to signify a larger failure of established hierarchies, and a youthful, iconoclastic revolt against these.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTI8thww1ZXxSFrg27k7nipdmkCR98tasIahwQb9ID06ghODLMuUmhL4oNXSxX71m-Wt5X1EXYk_O9BuLn-oc0fFiZlGCkGKfJOWQ8t8oE9MPQ-3lFUJ1tTAY2yYINGvyMHwc5dCYJ1kA/s1600/Picture+425.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTI8thww1ZXxSFrg27k7nipdmkCR98tasIahwQb9ID06ghODLMuUmhL4oNXSxX71m-Wt5X1EXYk_O9BuLn-oc0fFiZlGCkGKfJOWQ8t8oE9MPQ-3lFUJ1tTAY2yYINGvyMHwc5dCYJ1kA/s400/Picture+425.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">(When David Chiang wears white, you know things are about to turn sour for all involved...)</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj0HPKdLJC-u20eu12_YGT4ThKf7P-thSljNQM22toSg8h7Em4rTOv2W1JJ2_Vk6q00A11DkjBngpHbm7uIKz21MAywUr9c7zARK5UHEayMGAOslP6j1TGJt4AmOgd5GTQoN0cY8kmEy8/s1600/Picture+435.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj0HPKdLJC-u20eu12_YGT4ThKf7P-thSljNQM22toSg8h7Em4rTOv2W1JJ2_Vk6q00A11DkjBngpHbm7uIKz21MAywUr9c7zARK5UHEayMGAOslP6j1TGJt4AmOgd5GTQoN0cY8kmEy8/s400/Picture+435.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">(David, you'll never get the stains out of that!)</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnRvxHw4dnJJKXJF7fv78HJhV_F4lsanzJeewwkibO1eRL4-jK-bAyfoeqcdzyBCzvT7RWxpUFM3DguTNQAZmYJIZMfc5cC3BZimuCNwc2bnxx61iShQe4IgQOLrNjOkT46P-a0FWu_bE/s1600/Picture+443.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnRvxHw4dnJJKXJF7fv78HJhV_F4lsanzJeewwkibO1eRL4-jK-bAyfoeqcdzyBCzvT7RWxpUFM3DguTNQAZmYJIZMfc5cC3BZimuCNwc2bnxx61iShQe4IgQOLrNjOkT46P-a0FWu_bE/s400/Picture+443.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">(Is <i>anyone</i> going to be left alive at the end of this film???)</span></div>
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Of course, Jane's talk sent me back to look at other images I've come across – the old photos of the "Boxers" of the Yihetuan (Righteous Harmony Society) that shocked the West at the very start of the twentieth century.<br />
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<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/BoxerSoldiers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/BoxerSoldiers.jpg" width="269" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Boxer-tianjing-left.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Boxer-tianjing-left.jpeg" width="297" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">(images of the Boxer Rebellion, from Wikipedia)</span></div>
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Or the attempts in kung fu cinema to imagine the anti-Qing "Shaolin" rebels in the Shaolin cycle.<br />
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(lay students survive the burning of the Shaolin Temple, and prepare to spread out to start anti-Qing rebellion across China in Chang Cheh's <i>Shaolin Temple</i>, 1976.)</div>
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How do such films attempt to (re)imagine a past of revolution through costume, and how does this relate to the actual attempts of past radicals to figure themselves through dress? There could be a whole research project here...Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8486906632142758049.post-34728727029287605092012-05-07T16:00:00.002-07:002012-05-07T16:00:25.444-07:00Hong Kong Riots and Unrest 1966 and 1967 - continuedThe following has some colourful first hand accounts and photos of the riots in Hong Kong in the late 1960s.<br />
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<a href="http://www.britains-smallwars.com/RRGP/HongKong.htm">http://www.britains-smallwars.com/RRGP/HongKong.htm</a><br />
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I found the reference in an article on the history of Shaw Brothers films, which claims that:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"<span style="color: black;">Shaw
Brothers and Chang Cheh specifically tried to cater for the audience of
1960s Hong Kong by creating heroes and plots reflective of the times and
mood of the 60s [...] This can be pinpointed to 1967 with the Hong Kong
Star Ferry riots. </span><span style="color: black;">Hong Kong became [sic] a state of chaos and rebellion where violence and unrest
went on for seven months. Young people in particular were challenging dominant
patriarchs and rebelling against the system and the turbulence led to changes
in entertainment. The audience needed escapism from the anarchy in reality
but the current trends in romantic musicals could not possibly satisfy
this new rebellious audience that needed a hero to represent these uncertain
times.</span><span style="color: black;">"</span></blockquote>
<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://brns.com/shawbros/pages/shaw3.html">http://brns.com/shawbros/pages/shaw3.html</a> </span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><br /></span>Luke Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17320034086481704061noreply@blogger.com0