The rupture in Hong Kong cinema: Post-2000 Honk Kong cinema(s) as both a transnational cinema and a national cinema

This paper traces artistic and ideological discrepancies between the young generation of Hong Kong filmmakers and their predecessors – the established generation who contributed to the glory days of Hong Kong cinema during its economic boom. By tracing studies of national cinema and transnational cinema in the last three decades, the author argues that current Hong Kong cinema has split into two: a transnational cinema represented by the established generation of filmmakers; and a national cinema that is driven by the emerging generation who struggles for better preservation of Hong Kong local culture and their own cultural identities. To conduct the research, 47 people were interviewed including13 established filmmakers, 16 young filmmakers and18 film students from 3 universities in Hong Kong. The three groups of respondents generally represent three perspectives: that of the established film practitioners, who have a vested interest in the current co-production era; that of the emerging young film practitioners, who above all crave a flourishing local film market and whose productions exhibit stronger Hong Kong cultural identities; lastly, that of the, who were predominantly born in the 1990s and have the most extreme views against mainland China and whose filmmaking ideologies and practices foreshadow the future of the industry.


Palavras-chave
Nova Onda da RAE de Hong Kong; Indústria Cinematográfica; Cinemas Transnacionais; Cinema Nacional; Cinema de Hong Kong. Hong Kong cinema in the recent two decades has featured two intertwining yet contradicting powers: the domination of Hong Kong/Mainland co-productions and the emerging of many critically successful local productions. The two forces of power are led by two generations of Hong Kong filmmakers separately -the established generation whose career started from the 1970s to 1990s and the young generation who entered the film industry after the 2000 when Hong Kong cinema has gradually turned to the co-production era. Szeto Mirana May and Chen Yun Chung term the rising cinematic impact as the "Hong Kong SAR New Wave," wherein the directors are seeking an alternative route out of the hegemonic co-production ecology and dedicating to the production of local films (SZETO; CHEN, 2012). When compared to their predecessors, the younger generation of filmmakers after 2000 shows greater engagement with civic issues, less consideration of the mainland market and capital, and stronger desire to tell local Hong Kong stories. Particularly, a sense of antimainland sentiment and a "Chinese takeover fear" are also commonly embedded in their film texts.
It is intriguing to investigate how precisely the young generation formed film making ideologies entirely different from, or even opposite to those of their predecessors. The generational gap will be scrutinized from three major dimensions: economic, cultural and political.

Economics as a fundamental difference
It took only about 100 years to turn Hong Kong from an unknown fishing village to a bustling cosmopolis. The established generation of filmmakers was mostly born in the 1950s and 1960s, and worked actively from the 1970s to 1990s. During their childhood and adolescence, millions of mainland Chinese refugees were fleeing to Hong Kong to escape the Communist regime, bringing an abundance of cheap labour to support the local manufacturing industry. Yet most residents were still experienced poverty and substandard living conditions due to the city's difficulties in coping with the booming population, especially in terms of housing, medical services and education. From the late 1960s to 1990s, Hong Kong's surging economy made it one of the "Asian Tigers" by taking advantage of the transfer of labour-intensive industries from developed countries to developing ones. The heyday of the Hong Kong film industry in the 1970s to mid-1990s also bought numerous career opportunities. It was not uncommon to see first time directors make their first feature film in their early 20s, as well as freelancers working for multiple projects at the same time or without a tourist destinations such as Japan or South Korea as Hong Kong is losing its status as a shopping paradise due to growing anti-mainland sentiment, a strong local currency, and high rental and staff costs (SUN, 2016).
The IVS has had a deeper impact on Hong Kong society than the abovementioned inconveniences imposed on local Hong Kong residents. The great numbers of Mainland tourists with increased buying power pouring into Hong Kong has changed its urban landscape. The local business that catered to underpaid Hong Kong residents were elbowed out by luxury stores that meet the shopping demands of mainland travellers.
Unquestionably, the real estate owners were more than happy to increase the rent to push out the local shops with their meagre profits and offer the locales to richer renters.
Hong Kongers, especially the younger ones who do not benefit from the booming retail business, have bemoaned the neglect of their own needs and the disappointing transformation of their communities. This is compounded by concerns that essential products, such as milk powder or diapers, and public resources, like hospital beds for pregnant women in labour, all being snatched by mainland outsiders.
The current economic situation has prompted strongly negative emotions among the youth. Compared to established filmmakers, the lives of their emerging young counterparts are full of frustrations caused by the overall economic downturn, the weakening of their local industry, and the imposition of mainland economic forces. It is no wonder that these sentiments are reflected in their films. Beyond that, differing cultural affinities of the two generations have also contributed to the discrepancy of their filmmaking styles.

Political contexts are the key
The 150-year colonial history has left a complex legacy in Hong Kong. Lee (2013) summarized it as an aggregation of "a civic culture that is averse to radical politics, a polity of law-abiding and complacent citizens, and a pragmatic, versatile and non-unionized labour force at the service of a capitalist economy," and above all, explained that it produced a weakened sense of nationhood in the local people (LEE, 2013, p.5). The great disparities between the current capitalist system and the future governance by a socialist regime cause worry among Hong Kong residents about their own destiny after the handover: namely that their freedom, democracy, and personal rights might be infringed upon. These anxieties have caused waves of mass migration from Hong Kong, primarily to developed Western countries such as the U.K., Canada, and Australia. Those who could not afford to migrate feared less, as they "did not have China should be like that between a father and son in a traditional Confucian society.
Humiliating your own country is like humiliating your own parents, and it has to be punished. I do not understand why the younger generation is against its own country. They could choose to migrate to other places if they are unhappy. Shackles are not put on them by China. If they choose to stay, then respect the rules. When one is not supporting his own country, it's like a family that gets broken. Without a secure and peaceful home environment, how could you develop yourself well? ---Interview 22 (Ping, focus puller) The belief that one should respect the Chinese rules has been a repeated theme in the interviews with established filmmakers regarding their activities on the mainland. This stems not only from their law-abiding colonial legacy, but also out of a sense of connection with mainland China that drives them to minimize its political downsides and simultaneously be proud of its rapid progress.
On the contrary, lacking cultural affinity with and kinship bonds to the mainland, young people are more assertive of their own identities as Hong Kongers, without attachment to the country of China. As a consequence, this estrangement has brought about a more aggressive political attitude towards mainland China as compared to their elders. However, their overall political dissatisfaction with present-day Hong Kong society is two-fold: they both see mainland China as a malicious enemy, and the Hong Kong government as a useless puppet.
Having lost a sense of closeness to the mainland and being increasingly unwilling

Conclusion: Hong Kong Cinema(s) as Both a Transnational Cinema and a National Cinema
In Stephen Crofts' categorization of seven varieties of national cinemas, Hong Kong was considered to be one that ignores Hollywood and successfully builds a culturally specific cinema thanks to its popularity in the domestic market (CROFTS, 1993). In scholarly discussions, whether Hong Kong cinema is a national or a transnational is a much-debated question.
Despite the fact that it was previously a British colony, or its present unique states as an autonomous administrative region within China, Hong Kong has never gained the status of being an independent nation-state. In studying Chinese cinema, both Sheldon Hsiaopeng Lu and Zhang Yingjin have pointed out the inappropriateness of subsuming Chinese cinema within the paradigm of national cinema due to its cultural and geographical complexities (LU, 1997;ZHANG, 2004 Kong cinema as national cinema even though Hong Kong has typically not been considered a full-fledged nation (CHU, 2003;TEO, 2004 However, in other cases, Hong Kong cinema has been argued as a transnational one. As Lu contends, for decades, "Hong Kong cinema has been a regional and transnational cinema in a way that Mainland cinema could not be" (LU, 1997. p.15), particularly due to the fact that its fandom stretches across the global and the contributions that overseas box office revenues made to the Hong Kong film industry.
Therefore, it is misleading to see Hong Kong cinema as merely a local one (LU, 1997 Firstly, as Higson contends, "the concept of a national cinema has almost invariably been mobilized as a strategy of cultural (economic) resistance; a means of asserting national autonomy in the face of (usually) Hollywood's international domination" (1989:37). Roughly since 2010, local Hong Kong filmmaking has gradually begun manifesting an intentional resistance, though not one that primarily targets Hollywood blockbusters, but rather the domination of co-productions. This force, mainly driven by the young generation of film practitioners, has indicated some oppositional filmmaking ideas, in which the young people pick up what the established generation has discarded in order to cater to mainland censorship requirements, audiences, and investors. They purposely choose the genres that are not favoured by mainland audience or censors (political films, erotic films, realistic dramas, etc), while employing film techniques that traditional Hong Kong cinema was not renowned for (such as fast-cutting montages in action or martial art films), and subject matters somewhat estranged from mainstream audiences (for example, depicting poverty, The rupture in Hong Kong cinema: Post-2000 Honk Kong cinema(s) as both a transnational cinema and a national cinema sickness, the subaltern and the downtrodden), as well as rejecting mainland capital in favour of producing projects with smaller budgets. As the young people have contended, they make films for a Hong Kong audience that has long been overlooked by the established generation.
On the consumption side, the circulation of these films made by the young generation has mostly been limited to the local market, even though some have attended film festivals within Asia. It is unlikely that they will obtain overseas distribution and the domestic box office revenues are negligible compared to those of co-productions. Most important of all, a majority of these films are produced with subsidies from the SAR government, indicating an important feature of a national cinema, that state policies are used to contribute to the resistance of foreign films (in this case, co-productions). Another feature of national cinema is exhibited by Hong Kong's current shift towards collective acts of defiance against the co-production dominated film ecosystem and the increasing clout of the mainland on the part of the young generation. Preserving the local culture and thus the cultural identity of Hong Kong in the face of mainland's efforts at integrating the island city has become mission that young filmmakers' feeling obliged to shoulder.
Lu has famously spoken of Chinese cinemas in the plural due to its transnational complexity. In a similar vein, the term "Hong Kong cinemas" could also be pluralized, not only for its historical transformation from a relatively uniformly transnational cinema to the current situation of bifurcation, but also because the fact that both transnational and national features coexist within the filmmaking practises and consumption on the island. In the case of Hong Kong, particularly during the period in which the young generation emerged, the national/ transnational binary in film studies has proved to be untenable. Not only can they coexist, but they can evolve with each other, and in ways even more complicated than those abovementioned.