An outstanding director from Hong Kong

In some of my earlier columns I had discussed the work of a number of important Chinese filmmakers such as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yomou (China), Wong Kar-wai (Hong Kong), Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang (Taiwan).I have had the privilege of meeting all of them.

In today’s column I wish to discuss the cinema of another Hong Kong film maker who has made a deep impression both nationally and internationally - Stanley Kwan. He is a Hong Kong filmmaker who has imaginatively extended the discourse of cinema both in terms of content and style. We in Sri Lanka can learn a great deal from his innovative creations.

A number of filmmakers from Hong Kong have succeeded in imparting a new vitality, sense of purpose and direction to Hong Kong cinema. Stanley Kwan is one of them. He joins the galaxy of a number of other famous directors such as Ann Hui, Allen Fong, John Woo, Tsui Hark, Wong kar-wai, Fruit Chan, Johnny To, who have shaped the forward vectors of Hong Kong cinema in interesting ways. Staney Kwan was born in 1957 in Hong Kong.

Communications

He studied communications at Hong Kong Baptist University. After graduation he found employment as a production assistant in the Hong Kong Television Broadcast Company. In 1979, he left the station and began work as an assistant director to such highly esteemed directors as Ann Hui, peter young, Patrick Tam, Yim Ho and Ronnie Yu.

At the age of twenty-seven, in 1984, Kwan directed his first feature film titled Women. This is a film that seeks to explore the lives and loves of a number of career women. It is the intention of the filmmaker to focus on the psychological complexities associated with the lives of women in modern societies. Evidently, the weight of despair that is invariably attached to the lives of these women is an area of great interest to Kwan. Some film critics thought that the film was too male-centered to do full justice to the chosen theme of the director.

Successful

In 1986 Stanley Kwan made a film titled Love Unto Waste. This was indeed a much more accomplished work of cinematic art. The true talents of Kwan as a film director begin to make their unmistakable presence in this film. Kwan sees this film as among his most successful.

Film directors, as a general rule, select materials for their work from the worlds that they are most familiar with and transform these into memorable cinematic experience using all the resources available. Love Unto Waste clearly bears testimony to this fact. Once again it is the sad predicaments of women that engage Stanley Kwan’s deepest interests.

This work, in many ways, reminds one of Federico Fellini’s great work of cinema La Strada. As in that work, the idea of decadence and the complex ways in which inflects human behavior is pivotal to the narrative discourse of live unto waste.

Two years later,’ Stanley Kwan made what I think is his most memorable film, Rouge. It is indeed a film that has delighted international audiences with its unusual narrative and vivid visual registers. Rouge is based on a novel of the same name by Li Bihua.

He is an author who has written about a dozen popular novels that owe their vitality to the Chinese literary tradition. This film contains two topics that characterise traditional Chinese literature – the ghost story and the encounters between literary scholars and courtesans. The film, by means of a series of carefully designed flashbacks, recounts the tragic fate of a couple – the rich and flamboyant Chan, who is also referred to as the twelfth master and the beautiful courtesan.

They are deeply in love; however they cannot marry because of staunch opposition from the families. Therefore, they resolve to commit suicide by swallowing poisoned opium. She dies and he survives, Rouge succeeds in capturing the opulence as well as the decadence of Hong Kong of 1930s with remarkable narrative energy and visual power. The background to the story provides an attractive setting in which the practices and rituals, the romance and he suicide, can be represented exotically but credibly.

Images

The juxtaposition of memorably dramatic images reconfigures for us a in all its hypnotic power the face of Hong Kong some eight decades ago. In many ways the more important part of the story takes place in contemporary Hong Kong; here the host of the dead woman decides ti come back to Hong Kong from the other world in search of her lover. All of a sudden, she materialises in a newspaper office to place a notice, and this arrival leads to an unanticipated intervention in the lives of a journalist and his girlfriend with unplanned consequences.

The way realism and fantasy interacts in this film is largely responsible for its popular appeal. In addition, the blending of the past and the present, the natural and supernatural, gives the film its distinctive texture and imaginative reach. What invests Rouge with a special resonance is the conviction that the past inhabits the present just as much as the supernatural inhabits the natural. Stanley Kwan, it seems to me, adroitly introduces the idea of a film-within a film, with all the artifice of popular culture evoked imaginatively to underline its constructedness another interesting facet of this film is the way in which it focuses on the contested and fissured cultural space of modern Hong Kong. Unlike in the original novel, which focuses largely on the supernatural, the film seeks to call attention to the strangeness in the natural.

What is interesting to note is that one of the most popular in fantastic genres in the Chinese tradition of story-telling is deployed to depict the complexities associated with the cultural space of modern Hong Kong.

Rouge, then, is an imaginative and stylish film that has generated a great deal of interest both among local and international audiences. What is remarkable about this film by Stanley Kwan is the play of imagination that orchestrates with a light, but deft. touch the apparent irreconcilables, the sworn enemies, of realism and fantasy; past and present, melodrama and gravitas and natural and supernatural.

It is evident that the author of this film is keen to shuttle back and forth between two distinctly different cultural worlds – the Hong Kong of 1930s and that of 1980s – yet the two places are connected by a single minded and well-focused quest. Stanley Kwan’s gift for establishing the feel of place and atmosphere through the adroitly controlled flow of images adds immeasurably to the power of the film.

Exploration

In 1989, Kwan made another widely-discussed film, not necessarily in positive terms, Full Moon in New York. Kwan has always displayed a predilection and flair for selecting new areas for cinematic exploration with each new film. He once remarked that he has been influenced by Ann Hui’s admonition that, ‘a director should treat each of the films he makes as the last chance given in experimenting with filmmaking.’

Full Moon in New York, to my mind, is not an accomplished work of cinema in the way that Rouge was. It had many deficiencies. Commenting on his film, Kwan said that, ‘my fourth film was a project assigned to me by an independent producer who had lined up three famous actresses from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland china for a Chinatown story. I feel deeply for the Chinese who have migrated.They will always feel anguished about being Chinese. Despite the fact that they will never return, leading a better life overseas, they cannot forget the past and nothing is forgiven.’

Full moon in New York enters into the space of cross-cultural interaction. The need for cultural adjustment, the importance of cultural identity and its problematic nature, and the salience of notions of freedom and memory play a significant role in the cinematic discourse. Three characters from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong meet in New York and they become friends. These three women, it is apparent, share very little in common except their obvious Chineseness. As the film progresses, we become aware of the fact that even this is more problematic and complicated than one would have anticipated. In a way, the three women are intrigued by the new environment in which they find themselves, and they interact more with that setting than with each other. Although they seem to exult in the new found freedom, emotional as well as sexual, the imperatives of being a Chinese and the diverse ways in which Chineseness has been inflected in their respective homelands, have been emphasized throughout the film, giving the film its energy and direction.

The tension and the urgency of the cinematic discourse are in part derived from this fact. Although the experience itself clearly contains many possibilities, and incipient narrative trajectories, the director has opted not to follow the deepest insights of this problematic. Had the director chosen to pursue this line of activity more resolutely, it is my judgment, that this film would have been a much greater work of cinematic art. However, the director’s desire to explore a novel area of experience should be lauded.

Maturity

In 1991 Kwan made Centre Stage, a film that to my mind reflects his growing maturity of outlook and his sensitive deployment of the medium of cinema. Center Stage was honoured with the Golden Horse Award at the Taipei film festival. This film is very different from Kwan’s earlier creations. It represents the amalgamation of the documentary and the fictional. At a deeper level of artistic apprehension, however, one finds in it a number of discursive threads that run throughout Kwan’s work; an extreme sensitivity to nuances if interpersonal relations, the despair and suffering that seems to be endemic to female experiences, the quest for newer understandings of human living and a desire to provide society with compelling reflections of itself.

Centre Stage narrates the short and famous life of Ruan Lingyu, possibly the most well-known star of Chinese silent cinema. It is evident that the director has chosen to blend fact and fiction, documentary and narrative styles, in order to present to us a more complex awareness of this actress and the demands of her time. Black and white footage of the director and his cast talking about their roles and their valuations are interpolated with the basic narrative of the actresses life.

However, it is important to note that there is a kind of role reversal in the employment of documentary and narrative. What we see is how the fictional or narrative segments recounting the known facts of her life while it is the documentary segment that provides us with elements of speculation.

Sensitivity

Ruan, who was generally regarded as Greta Garbo of China, brought a special aura of sensitivity and sensuality to her depictions of tragic characters. Her own personal life, in many ways, manifested the tragic experiences embodied by the characters whom she portrayed. In 1935, at the young age of twenty five, force of circumstances led to her suicide. A dark despair and insurmountable pain pervaded her life. Given the prestige she enjoyed and the tragedy of her life, it is scarcely surprising that she became a compelling subject for cinematic representation. In Centre Stage, however, Kwan has given the story as we know it a new inflection. Centre Stage, it has to be emphasized, constitutes an audacious attempt in its desire to incorporate documentary footage into the flow of narrative.

The self-reflexivity, introspection and the imaginative amalgamation of forms serve to lend the experience a depth of perception and critical distance, as it faces up to certain dominant and ingrained ambivalences of society. The skillful and inspired performance by Maggie Cheung as Ruan adds greatly to the final impact of the film.

Despite the fact that Centre Stage clearly seeks to present the biography of Ruan, the aim of the director extends far beyond that; in fact, one can discern a larger ambition in the film. Stanley Kwan is keen to investigate cinematically into the complex and unanticipated ways in which legends, particularly those associated with public performers and celebrities are produced and circulated in society, highlighting certain deeply –formed desires. Centre Stage, in my judgment, is a mature, intelligent, insightful film that bears witness to the talents of a film director who is in full possession of his powers.

The next film of Kwan was Red Rose White Rose. In this film, the director was seeking to explore feminine psychology guided by his own definite views on the subject. The film is based in a well-known story by the celebrated writer Eileen Chan, and the story as it is told in the film bears the distinct imprint of Kwan’s personal vision of feminine sensibility. Red Rose White Rose went on to win five awards at the golden horse film festival in Taiwan and was nominated for the golden ear award at the 1995 Berlin film festival. Through the narrative and observations rendered by a male voice, the film aims at exploring psychological dimensions of Chinese femininity. However, the interpretive trajectory of this work moves more in the direction of Freud than traditional Chinese understandings.

Objective

Stanley Kwan has said that, in making this film, his objective was to provide audiences with a new vision of femininity. He feels that the idea of femininity has been distorted in traditional Chinese culture.

As the film unfolds we begin to recognise the fact that red rose stands for male sexual fantasy and white rose for the social and familial role expected of a wife in traditional Chinese culture; they are now converted into two psychoanalytic facets of femininity. It is Kwan’s intention to put into ply a new understanding of human relationships.

It is interesting to note that Stanley Kwan in an interview maintained that all of his films are centrally concerned with the re-envisioning of human relationships in their most raw and unembroidered ways.

In this regard, he says openly that he has been influenced by the great Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu – the author of such films as Tokyo Story, Late Spring, Early Summer and An Autumn Afternoon.

It has to be stated that in Stanley Kwan’s films, there is in evidence a rare intelligence, and human empathy and boldness of outlook that are wholly admirable and that go to form his cinematic signature. The deep concord between form and content which is not always evident to a superficial gaze, the stylistic hybridity which releases energy, the calculated counterposition of feeling and moral imagination, the constant focus on the predicament of women are distinctive features that mark his cinema.

Kwan is the author of about 13 films. In this column, I chose to focus on four of them, mostly associated with his early phase, that allow us to probe his distinctive ambitions and achievement; these films reflect his directorial preoccupations as well as the stylistic innovations he introduced to Hong Kong cinema. Each of his films is different from the previous one, thereby manifesting his innovative tendencies and experimental agenda. Through these diverse films, winds a readily identifiable pattern that is linked to the imaginative and sympathetic probing into the suffering of women. This consistency has the effect of generating a moral admiration for his work.

In one sense, it can be plausibly argued that Stanley Kwan’s films are moral chronicles in which private anguishes have their public reverberations. Indeed, it is on women characters, throughout his films, that he has chosen to bestow his most memorable cinematic care. And it is those episodes and sequences that underscore the privations and dilemmas of women that command the greatest authority; in these instances one observes how he has succeeded in exhibiting his complex representational energies to the greatest effect.

Desideratum

The troubling and inescapable truths of life need cinematic witnesses, and Stanley Kwan has stepped forward as one who can fulfil this desideratum most effectively. What he has consistently aimed to do, even in those works that do not quite reach his intended mark, is to offer complex re-articulations of human problems and predicaments whose full force we often fail to recognise through lack of empathy and understanding. Through these means, one can say that Kwan has been able to sponsor a cultural diagnosis that is allied to a deep moral imagination and that avoids undue simplifications.

Earlier on I commented on the importance of Kwan’s film Centre Stage. One of way of contextualizing its significance is by locating it in the tradition of documentary filmmaking in Hong Kong. Despite the salience of films such as leaving in sorrow and sunless days, there has not been a vigorous tradition of documentary filmmaking in Hong Kong, although the last few years have seen some change.

It seems to me that one useful way of understanding the significance of Kwan’s centre stage is by situating it in the documentary tradition of filmmaking in Hong Kong. Until he made this film, he was primarily interested in feature films with a marked emphasis on emotionally charged narratives. In that sense, centre stage signifies a new direction for him. This film, it can be said, was different from the generality of Hong Kong films. The way the resources and the representational strategies of the documentary were mobilised by Stanley Kwan testifies to his innovative cast o mind.

Film scholar

In this regard I wish to call attention to the eminent film scholar and my former colleague at the University of Hong Kong, Mette Hjort. ’Kwan’s ingenious insistence in centre stage on the dynamics of belief and, more specifically, on the problems of distinguishing between unfounded and justifiable beliefs, was to make elements of documentary form salient in ways that were groundbreaking in Hong Kong by virtue of the absence of a vigorous documentary tradition, and certainly of documentary filmmaking in a reflexive or poetic vein.

And these same elements would certainly define centre stage as an innovative work within the largely transnational framework of the biopic’s characteristic genre formulae.’ Stanley Kwan, it seems to me, is a highly talented filmmaker who is unafraid to chart new territories for cinematic representation. We in Sri Lanka can learn some valuable lessons from his efforts.