ABSTRACT
Hong Kong’s film industry entered the global cinematic limelight with the unexpected success of the gongfupian (kung fu film) with Bruce Lee as its key superstar. However, the ‘kung fu craze’2 of the early 1970s came to an abrupt end when Bruce Lee passed away in 1973 under unfortunate circumstances. Thereafter, the Hong Kong film industry struggled unsuccessfully to regain its global audience with a series of Bruce Lee clones. Against this backdrop, the Hong Kong New Wave reinvigorated the film industry in 1979 with a combination of overseas film school training, a passion to reinterpret and update Hong Kong’s cinematic and cultural heritage, and a desire to assert Hong Kong’s collective identity. Directors like Ann Hui, Tsui Hark, and Allen Fong engaged in challenging the cinematic and ideological classicalism of the older generation and received international film festival accolades in recognition for their achievements. Yet, when it comes to continuing the action cinema tradition of the gongfupian set to a more contemporary setting, the key Hong Kong director that emerged during the Hong Kong New Wave did not have any formal film school training at all but rather entered the film industry under the more traditional route of studio apprenticeship. Under this light, John Woo was more akin to those studiobased auteurs that the French New Wave directors cited in their auteur studies for Cahiers du cinéma such as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and John Ford.
