In 23 years, Hong Kong has never had a gangster movie as experimental as "The Birth of a Word" with the characteristics of "overheating and madness".
This pioneering work of Galactic Image, the theme tone is black and absurd, the character design is unusual, using the avant-garde lens language to express absurd group portraits, subversively interpreting a new underworld story, running through the fatalism that Wei Jiahui and Du Qifeng have been expounding, and thus establishing the creative concept of Galaxy Image "expressing themes with creativity and style, and conveying ideas with images and structures".
This work, which was born in 1997, is not well-known and has poor box office results, but it is one of the dividing points of the transformation of Hong Kong gangster film style, which completely subverts the classic Hong Kong gangster movies of the 80s and 90s represented by "Hero Nature" and "Lame Hao", opens up a new road, and provides sufficient inspiration and nourishment for new gangster films such as "Infernal Affairs" and "Underworld" after the new millennium.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >01 Meticulous absurdity and surprise, a complete subversion of Hong Kong gangster films</h1>
(1) Subversion of narrative structure
"The Birth of a Word" is the first in Chinese films to break the linear narrative structure, using the repetitive narrative time and space structure used by the film master Kieslowski in "Blind Hit by Mistake", while director Wei Jiahui's innovation lies in the use of virtual assumptions and segmented narrative methods, 2 years earlier than the similar method of "Lola Run", which was very pioneering at the time.
The whole movie is divided into three parts, the first 30 minutes, Liu Qingyun played by Huang A Dog is a 32-year-old gangster who still has nothing to do, timid, confused, followed several accomplices to Zhanjiang to seek wealth, the result was a tragic death; in the middle 50 minutes, Huang A Dog was righteous and courageous, and took two assassination tasks in Taiwan, and finally turned the danger into a disaster, seriously injured but became the gang boss with the word "one"; in the last 10 minutes, the movie flashed back to the fortune-telling link at the beginning of the film, and returned to the starting point of the two paths. Hints at a new beginning.
If the traditional narrative structure is to pursue the audience to "enter the play" as soon as possible and empathize with the whole story, the narrative style of "The Birth of a Word" is to pursue the "separation" effect, stripping the audience of the familiarity with the characters and events themselves in traditional gangster films, in order to create consternation and novelty, thereby increasing the absurdity of the film and allowing the audience to have a new viewing experience.
(2) Subversion of character design
The main characters such as Huang A Dog in the movie, Ah Cat played by Wu Zhenyu are the low-level characters in Hong Kong society, these Cats and Dogs have entered the year of standing, but they do not even have money to eat and bathe, they describe obscenity, chaotic thinking, obedient behavior, and frustration everywhere, the development of the whole story is caused by this group of rabble-rousers who have no money to pay for massage fees, and there is no such classic characters as Xiao Ma Ge in "The True Colors of Heroes", Chen Haonan in "Ancient Puzzle Boy" and other classic characters such as Dashing and Calm, Righteous thin and cloudy style. Through realistic techniques, the film descends the gangsters who have always appeared heroically to the lowest level of society, and knocks the gangsters from above to the ground, and this deconstruction process contains a double satire of traditional gangster films and real society.
(3) Subversion of audiovisual language
The audiovisual language of the whole film is full of experimentation, and you can see all kinds of wide-angle lenses, rotating lenses, handheld moving lenses, loose and random follow-up shooting, irregular compositions under large-angle overhead shooting and upward shooting.
The shaking of handheld photography brings a special feeling of immersion, and several rotating shots appear in the confrontation and fight at the massage parlor, creating an upside-down visual effect that reflects the chaotic psychological state of the characters in the film. The scene of eating in a restaurant is a very characteristic long shot of rapid shaking plus upward shooting, and the audience follows the camera to shift their attention to one talking character after another, as if they are in the role. In the plot part of Taiwan, Wei Jiahui "adventured" using a lot of wide-angle shots, many scenes took place in empty outdoor venues, the characters were stretched and deformed, and these novel photography techniques brought an unusual experience to the audience.
In addition, the combination of music and pictures is also unique. In the fortune-telling plot at the beginning of the film, the director deliberately increased the volume of the variation of the soundtrack, and the audience could hear the noise around them, but could not hear the dialogue between Huang A Dog and the fortune teller, which increased the suspense of the opening chapter. The whole film is dominated by electronic synthesis music during the fight, and the mood is gradually progressive under the fast-moving camera until the rhythm is controlled by the rapid drum sound, which sets off the tense plot atmosphere.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >02 Behind the avant-garde image is a city's unique identity and anxiety of the times</h1>
If you think of "The Birth of a Word" as a simple gangster movie, it is too much to underestimate it. The film's production in 1997 is by no means accidental, and the sense of fatalism that runs through it from beginning to end is actually an allusion to the city of Hong Kong's special historical node, the search for identity and the ubiquitous sense of anxiety.
A cross-cutting metaphor of time and fate. The Tudor watch of Huang A Dog is the key clue throughout the film, telling the story from the close-up of the watch, and it is also the symbol of the film's division between paragraphs, which represents everything back to the beginning state and starts again. The watch is a key link between the two destinies, and it indicates that the characters in the film are nothing more than playthings that are teased by time and fate. Time and fate are interrelated, time is irreversible, and although the film gives Huang A Dog a second chance after his death, it does not reverse the story but happens in parallel. At the same time, fate is also irresistible, and a person's change will eventually affect the change of the people around him, and the change of the people around him will in turn affect the change of this person.
Tough choices at the crossroads. The plot repeatedly mentions that 32 years old is a threshold, several characters either go to Zhanjiang to develop, or go to Taichung to find a way, combined with the current politics of the time, it is not difficult to find that this movie tells a story of a choice with a deep meaning. The return of Hong Kong in 1997 is a pass, the return is an established fact, the road is already in front of us, how to go? The panic and anxiety of the film characters explain the uneasiness of Hong Kong people about the unknown life during the institutional alternation period, and restore the psychological struggle process of Hong Kong people.
At the end of the movie, Huang A Dog, who became the eldest brother, chose the "one" character in the plaque "One Heart" on the wall of the hotel as the name of his church. There are actually multiple meanings here: First, the point of the question, tells the audience how the title "a word" was "born". The second is the determination to break the old and build a new one, representing that Huang Agou and Hong Kong are about to bid farewell to their past, as Wei Jiahui said in an interview: "No matter which way you go, it is a choice in fate and cannot be skipped." Third, the film prescribes its own prescription for the anxiety of Hong Kong people: "one heart". Everyone is small and powerless in the big environment, powerless to control the overall situation, facing the wandering and anxiety of social transformation, and the most important thing is to move forward. The fortune teller said to Huang A dog: "The failure of wealth and nobility actually lies in whether you can find yourself, depending on what kind of person you want to be." "Maintaining oneself means maintaining the local character of Hong Kong, which is both an idealized expectation for society and film.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >03 The past and present lives of the Galaxy Image correspond to the inheritance, subversion and confusion of Hong Kong gangster movies</h1>
In 1996, the shocking headline "The Death of Hong Kong Cinema" appeared in The Ming Pao Monthly in Hong Kong. The output of Hong Kong films fell from a few hundred to less than 100 a year, and it was also in this year of the overall decline of Hong Kong films that Du Qifeng chose to join Wei Jiahui and You Dazhi to establish galaxy image film company. The reason why galaxy image was created is more like Du Qifeng's idea of "desperate life":
"At that time, it was as if all the movies were not working, every road was wrong, and I was thinking, since the previous experience did not work, then we might as well make a difference." 」
"The Birth of a Word" came out in a sluggish atmosphere of Hong Kong films, adding rich humanistic connotations and philosophical thinking to the unique elements of the original Hong Kong films, which is not only the image of a subversive, but also the meaning of inheritance. Just like fatalism is the label of Galaxy Image and Du Qifeng, but this is not their first, "Lame Hao" has talked about it, "Hero Nature", "Blood Double Male" have all talked about it, the difference is that fate in the above movie is only one of the themes, and Galaxy Image regards it as the core theme. If you deeply analyze the content of "The Birth of a Word", although so many postmodern techniques are used, righteousness and interests are still one of the main lines of the plot, and the crazy and funny portrayal of the plot is also an important element of the old Hong Kong film, it can be said that it is still a kind of inheritance of Hong Kong gangster movies to some extent.
In addition to inheritance and subversion, another big question is confusion: where should gangster films go from here?
The first is the confusion in content. If the Hong Kong gangster films of the 1980s and 1990s completed the transformation from the sublime to the critical moral deconstruction, from traditional concepts such as morality to modern consciousness, the Hong Kong gangster films after the new millennium have undergone another painful transformation. "Infernal Affairs" explores the dialectical relationship between "black and white", the "Underworld" series shows the erosion of human nature by the sense of power and the destruction of the rules of the jianghu, after these two mountains, the repetition of themes and the lack of creativity have become the biggest problems, and the dilemma in the content of gangster films cannot be solved for a while.
The second is the confusion in production. Around 2003, a group of Hong Kong filmmakers such as Wu Yusen, Wang Jing, Du Qifeng, Liu Weiqiang, Anderson chose to go north to cooperate with the mainland to produce films, and co-productions have become the main trend and direction of the development of Hong Kong gangster films in the past decade or so. In addition to a few successful works such as Du Qifeng's "Drug War", the phenomenon of "Hong Kong films are not Hong Kong" and "co-production discomfort" is very obvious, the level of co-productions is uneven, even Du Qifeng has "Threesomes" such as "Threesome" such a word-of-mouth box office has been a fiasco, Wu Yusen and others have almost destroyed decades of accumulated word of mouth. The reason is, on the one hand, due to the restrictions of the mainland film market, resulting in Hong Kong directors in many cases have nowhere to exert efforts, can only adapt to the compromise in the creation, and finally make the standard of the finished film unsatisfactory; on the other hand, it also reflects that with the passage of the times, the audience's taste changes, the creative energy and creative attitude of many Hong Kong directors are far from keeping up with the times, the actors who can support the box office are always those old faces, and the loss of personnel in front of and behind the stage has become a very prominent problem.
Of course, it's not just Hong Kong gangster movies that have these problems, Martin Scorsese's 2019 $175 million blockbuster "The Irishman" has been called "the golden age of cinema and the elegy of gangsterism" by film critics, and there is a theme in the movie: time is the biggest enemy of gangsters. No matter how many scenery there were, it could not withstand the changes of the times, if it were not for the support of rich and willful Netflix, this movie that had been delayed for nearly a decade could not be completed, and the ten nominations at the Oscars were not also implied the fate of gangster films.
It can only be said that the current Hong Kong gangster movie may need another "The Birth of a Word" to boost morale and regain glory than it did more than 20 years ago.
Thanks for reading.