Anyone even slightly familiar with Hong Kong cinema has heard of the Shaw Brothers. However, until recently, scholarship was impeded by the unavailability of the films. The successive release of dozens of titles on DVD has changed all that. China Forever is the first English-language anthology on the topic. Taken together with Wong Ain-ling's generously illustrated bilingual tome, The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2003), it provides a well-informed and analytical introduction for both the specialist and general reader, and also enables courses on Shaw Brothers' films at all levels. China Forever is eclectic in the types of essay included. They range from a delightful memoir by Cheng Peipei, the Shaw star who returned to the screen as Jade Fox in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, to critical appreciation, history, business studies, genre analysis and case studies based on individual films. There should be something for everyone.
As Fu explains in his introductory overview essay, the title, China Forever, invokes the exile consciousness of Shaw Brothers films after the 1949 Chinese revolution confined the company and its audiences to the diaspora. Wong Ain-ling explores this further in her essay on Shaws' Mandarin-language wenyi films (sometimes translated as ‘melodramas’) which is reprinted from her Shaw Screen volume. At their best in the 1950s, these relatively unknown and unavailable Mandarin-language films focused on the travails of the refugees and migrants to Hong Kong. They then went into decline as they became more generic.
However, as Paul Pickowicz argues rightly in his consideration of Hong Kong Nocturne, in today's era of globalization, it is not nostalgia but Shaw Brothers' various trans-border corporate incarnations that attract interest. Forty years ago, the sophisticated hybridity of a film like Hong Kong Nocturne was something to be dismissed as inauthentic and Hong Kong cinema was bourgeois compared to the seemingly exciting Cultural Revolution opera films of the mainland. Today, this early instance of the transnational is current.
As a much larger picture of Shaw Brothers is emerging, ironically, it is the world of Shaw Brothers beyond “China Forever” that dominates the book. Hong Kong Nocturne is an example of the Hong Kong musical genre that emerged as the wenyi films went into decline. In a sophisticated analysis of Shaw Brothers' contributions to the genre, Siu Leung Li argues that they mark a move away from the China Forever consciousness and towards an emergent local identity that found itself precisely in the appropriation of Hollywood forms and American consumerist values. Similarly, where Wong Ain-ling's essay focuses on the Mandarin films of the 1950s, her Hong Kong colleague Law Kar's essay introduces the equally little known Cantonese productions of the same era, which also contributed to the creation of a locally distinctive modern self-image for Hong Kong.
If Shaw Brothers are conventionally associated with Hong Kong, Yung Sai-shing's and Timothy P. Barnard's essays remind us that they were also responsible for a large number of productions in Malaya, including Malay-language productions. Barnard provides a history of their local studio, Malay Film Productions, founded in 1939. Yung's essay is a cultural analysis of Shaws' broader business activities in Southeast Asia, including their theatre chains, amusement parks and more. He argues that at the same time as they pursued territorial expansion, they localized their activities, creating arenas in which globalized modernity met local values and cultural traditions. This theme of a tension between internationalization and localization also structures Lily Kong's “Shaw Cinema Enterprise and Understanding Cultural Industries.” As the title suggests, Kong pursues a broad business analysis of Shaws' history.
Shaws' transnational ambitions extended beyond the Asian region from the 1960s, when they started sending their higher budget productions to film festivals around the world, in the hope of getting them into theatres patronized by a wider audience. As David Desser has pointed out in earlier research, Chinese martial arts films have been particularly successful with the African American community. Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua offers a detailed analysis of the factors that could account for this appeal. These include a black nationalist consciousness that was also strongly internationalist. Cha-Jua locates appeal in a leftist appropriation of Hong Kong cinema, which is ironic given that so many Hong Kong filmmakers were fleeing from Communism. In contrast, Fanon Che Wilkins argues that the more recent appropriation of Shaw Brothers' kung fu films by hip hop musicians such as Wu Tang Clan has been more spiritually inspired.
The back story to this martial arts success is the earlier efforts to break into the general American market with historical epics and musicals. This is recounted here in Ramona Curry's careful and detailed analysis of Love Eterne, the 1963 Li Hanxiang film recently remembered and extolled by Ang Lee in the New York Times around the time his Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was released. As she points out, the combination of gender play, engagement with modernity and nostalgia for Chinese tradition that made the film a phenomenon in the Chinese diaspora did not find favour with American audiences, and so the studio were learning by trial and error at this point.
By tracing the wide historical and geographical parameters of the phenomenon that was Shaw Brothers, China Forever effectively lays down a solid foundation for further research. If I have a bone to pick with this book, it is that with one or two exceptions (notably Siu Leung Li's and Ramona Curry's essays), there is not a lot of close cinematic analysis of films in the book. Without communicating the power of Shaw Brothers' productions in the process of analysing them, they may remain a little distant for readers who are not already admirers. But the broad foundations need to be laid first, as they are done here, and no doubt China Forever will inspire and enable more detailed analysis of more individual films in the near future.
