ABSTRACT
Hollywood has assimilated three kinds of ‘Hong Kong action’ – the high-octane gunplay of John Woo, the stunt-filled action-comedy of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, and the ‘wire fu’ of historical martial arts films like Once Upon a Time in China (Tsui Hark, Hong Kong (HK) 1991). It is the second and the third which interest me particularly here, because of their implications for how Hollywood films are made, the valuing of certain types of cinematic labour (choreography) and for culturally specific constructions of the ‘real’. But spectacle does not exist in a vacuum, and I
about the ‘in-between’, because Hong Kong-Hollywood can be seen to be positioned precariously between ‘Asiaphilia’ – ‘a deceptively benign ideological construct that naturalises and justifies the systematic appropriation of cultural property and expressive forms created by Yellow people’4 – and Asiaphobia. Both are evident in the first and most successful Hong Kong-Hollywood co-production, Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, HK/US 1973), which both fetishises the ‘Orient’ and replays ‘Yellow Peril’ archetypes. To some extent, Hollywood’s ‘Hong Kongification’ can be seen as the latest manifestation of America’s ‘Encounter with Asia’. And yet there are problems, too, with regarding certain cultural forms as off-limits, as the essential property of a particular group – Hong Kong cinema has, after all, had global aspirations for some time. Ding-Tzann Lii goes further by suggesting that Hong Kong cinema, at its peak, represented a form of ‘Marginal Imperialism’, which both reproduces the dynamics of traditional imperialism and poses a threat to it. On the one hand, Hong Kong’s Asian expansionism contributed to the underdevelopment of Taiwanese cinema, just as Hollywood did to Hong Kong itself after 1993. But Lii also argues that there are significant (cultural if not economic) differences between ‘core’ and ‘marginal’ imperialism – the latter represents a ‘rupture’ in global capitalism ‘where the peripheral “other” surfaces as a subject’5 – in this case, Hong Kong’s ‘localised’ media imperialism contributed to an ‘Asianisation’, blending into other Asian countries and ‘creating a synthesis-form with a higher cognitive order’.6 What happens when core imperialism seeks to incorporate its peripheral counterpart? Lii distinguishes between incorporation, where the ‘other’ is transformed by imperialism, and yielding, a ‘synthesis which transcends both the self and the Other’.7 Ackbar Abbas seemingly has something similar in mind for his hypothetical ‘third space’, where ‘East and West are overcome and discredited as separate notions, and another space or a space of otherness is introduced’.8 With this in mind, I shall be looking in particular at the Hollywood films of Jackie Chan and Jet Li, and the work of choreographer Yuen Wo-ping.
