Beyond Bruce Lee by Paul Bowman

Author:Paul Bowman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, ART057000, Art/Film & Video
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

EXCESSIVE LEE

To bring such a complicated theoretical apparatus to bear on Bruce Lee films may seem excessive. This will be especially so because, as Kwai-Cheung Lo argues, most dubbed and subtitled martial arts films from Hong Kong, China or Japan have traditionally been approached not with cultural theories to hand but rather with buckets of popcorn and crates of beer, as they have overwhelmingly been treated as a source of cheap laughs for Westerners (2005: 48–54). Indeed, as Leon Hunt has noted, what is ‘loved’ in the ‘Asiaphilia’ of kung fu film fans is mainly ‘mindlessness’ – the mindless violence of martial arts. Like Lo, Hunt suggests that therefore even the Asiaphilia of Westerners interested in Eastern martial arts ‘subtly’ amounts to yet another kind of Orientalist ‘encounter marked by conquest and appropriation’ (2003: 12).

Lo’s argument has an extra dimension, however, in that as well as focusing on the reception of these filmic texts in different linguistic and cultural contexts, he also draws attention to the realm of production. Yet even this, in Lo’s terms, is far from theoretically complex: in Hong Kong film, he writes, ‘the process of subtitling often draws attention to itself, if only because of its tendency toward incompetence’ (2005: 48). Nevertheless, he suggests, ‘as a specific form of making sense of things in cross-cultural and cross-linguistic encounters, subtitling reveals realities of cultural domination and subordination and serves as a site of ideological dissemination and its subversion’ (2005: 46).5 For Lo, then, despite a base level of material ‘simplicity’ here, complex issues of translation do arise, and not simply with the Western reception of Eastern texts, but actually at the site of production itself, no matter how slapdash. As he sees it,

Unlike film industries that put a great deal of care into subtitles, Hong Kong cinema is famous for its slipshod English subtitling. The subtitlers of Hong Kong films, who are typically not well educated, are paid poorly and must translate an entire film in two or three days. (2005: 53)

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