ABSTRACT
In retrospect, it takes some effort to recall the initial novelty of the first few minutes of Suzhou he (Suzhou River; dir. Lou Ye), the stylish noir fantasy released in 2000. The images of the harsh life along Shanghai’s polluted creek fit easily into the gritty realist tradition of independent Chinese filmmaking of the preceding decade, but it was what happened between the images—a series of pronounced jump cuts—and on top of them—a self-conscious, first-person voiceover narration—that gave one the impression that this did not feel like a mainland Chinese film. Instead, both techniques immediately brought to mind the mid-1990s avant-pop aesthetic of Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong’s art-house export to the world. In films such as Chongqing senlin (Chungking Express, 1994) and Duoluo tianshi (Fallen Angels, 1995), Wong’s Godard-like experiments in cinematic technique and popular genre deconstruction were indebted simultaneously to a modernist art-film tradition and to the conventions of Hong Kong entertainment cinema. The jump cuts at the beginning of Fallen Angels, for example, had an artsy nouvelle vague quality, but they also departed not too far from the stylistic ostentation, including hyperactive editing, typical of Hong Kong’s commercial cinema. If anything, Suzhou River’s jump cuts seemed more unusual, given a mainland Chinese film tradition that had long favored various forms of realism and symbolism over the indulgences of seemingly unmotivated technical play. 1 With Suzhou River, in contrast, style at times appeared to stand on its own.
