Arresting Cinema by Karen Fang

Author:Karen Fang [Fang, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503600706
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2017-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

FOUR

“REPRESENTING THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT”

HONG KONG UNDERCOVER IN AN AGE OF SELF-CENSORSHIP

SURVEILLANCE REMAINS A CRUCIAL ASPECT of contemporary Hong Kong cinema, even despite the cinema’s decline and China’s subsequent emergence as a global film market. In fact, through the tangible form of censorship and self-censorship, surveillance has arguably never been greater in the history of Hong Kong cinema, as the hypercommercial and once relatively uncensored industry has reshaped itself around a series of Chinese government policies that since 2003 have enabled foreign filmmakers to bypass state quotas on import films by incorporating a required component of mainland talent, locations, and financing.1 As a result, film industries in Hong Kong and throughout the world now register a distinct tendency to cater to a state characterized by its strong surveillance powers. The dramatic uptick since reunification in coproductions between Hong Kong and mainland Chinese film companies is an obvious manifestation of this phenomenon, as is the general pandering among industries and filmmakers eager to enter the lucrative Chinese market.2 Much attention has already been paid to Hollywood pictures like Iron Man 3 (2013) and the Red Dawn remake (2012), which were reedited for Chinese distribution, but a similar conflict occurred much earlier and much closer to home when the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs was recut for China with a drastically different ending.3 Abruptly truncating the original film’s tragedy by depicting the gang mole’s swift punishment and the protagonist’s survival, the mainland version of Infernal Affairs has none of the original film’s ambiguity and cynicism. While Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning Hollywood adaptation, The Departed, maintains much of the Hong Kong original’s moody sensibility, the recut mainland version exhibits the distributors’ consideration of mainland demands that films not “endanger social ethics” or otherwise “instigate crime.”4

Interestingly, however, neither film nor surveillance studies explores this connection between surveillance content and context that shapes movies such as the mainland version of Infernal Affairs. While censorship, self-censorship, and other forms of artistic collusion or catering to centralized power are established topics of film history, they are strangely absent in most studies of surveillance cinema, whose typical focus on film image, style, and narrative tends to favor diegetic content over extradiegetic context such as production and reception.5 In the case of Hong Kong surveillance cinema in particular, this silence is especially egregious given China’s influence over the current industry and Hong Kong’s historical role as a former regional cinematic leader. Although much can be said about the symbolic irony of Hollywood’s waning hegemony evident in the rewriting or editing of big-budget action spectacles to appease Chinese power, Hong Kong’s three Infernal Affairs films provide a more subtle but no less important instance of cinema’s adaptations to the constraints and pressures imposed on film by tangible surveillance policies. For example, in addition to the altered ending in the mainland version of Infernal Affairs, the second film in the series is a prequel whose handover setting provides an evocative backdrop for the series’ covert operations plot. In the final film—a coproduction between

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