On February 27, the well-known Hong Kong actor Wu Mengda died of illness. On March 3, the family issued an obituary, and the funeral was scheduled for the farewell ceremony and cremation on the 7th and 8th. Uncle Da's death has evoked the old memories of many film fans, and has also triggered the nostalgia of many filmmakers, including Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, and there are also media and public figures who have voiced their condolences.
Former Malaysian Prime Minister mourns U Mengda
Uncle Da's life of turning away is like a microcosm of the golden age of Hong Kong cinema that is gradually fading away. The films he has participated in and the classic roles he has created have long been engraved into the hearts of a generation of Chinese. These Chinese audiences are not limited to Hong Kong, but also radiate to Chinese mainland, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and other countries. The Southeast Asian media and people's admiration for Uncle Da is the echo of this former influence. Now that the Si people have gone, the prosperity is no more, the blood and memories of that year have long been put into the past, and how can it not make countless movie fans sigh.
Thai netizens mourn Wu Mengda
Southeast Asia: The most important overseas market for Hong Kong films in the past
Today's audience may not imagine that in the 1950s, when Hong Kong cinema was booming, Southeast Asia was the most important export market for Hong Kong films.
At that time, Chinese mainland had just come out of the smoke of the revolution, and most of the Hong Kong films were not allowed to be imported. In order to help the film industry open up a larger market, the British government in Hong Kong naturally set its sights on Singapore and Malaysia, which are also British colonies. In addition to being subordinate to the British government behind them, the Singapore and Malaysia areas themselves are also inhabited by overseas Chinese compatriots in Nanyang in the early years, and for Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong films, it can be said that there is a natural sense of intimacy and identity from the cultural and emotional point of view. In addition, at that time, Singapore and Malaysia built a large number of cinema lines, but there was no professional film production industry; there were no films in the city, which paved the way for the entry of Hong Kong films.
Under the influence of multiple factors such as politics, culture and commerce, the Singapore and Malaysia regions in the 1950s and 1960s soon set off the first round of Hong Kong film fever. In the mid-1950s, Malaysia imported more than 200 Hong Kong films every year, which not only had a considerable number but also a high unit price, surpassing other Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Vietnam, as well as europe and the United States. At that time, the pre-sale price of Hong Kong films in North America was only HK$1,000 to HK$2,000, and in Thailand and Vietnam, it was only HK$1,000, but in Singapore and Malaysia, the price could reach HK$4,000 to HK$5,000, and its profit was several times that of the former. It was during that period that Hong Kong films invented a unique "selling film flower" system, that is, in the case of only story synopsis, directors, and actors, Southeast Asian filmmakers could be required to pay a deposit of 30% to 50%. Often the film has not really been put into filming, the cost has been fully recovered, and even there is a surplus.
In the context of the increasing importance of the Southeast Asian market, major film companies have also begun to enthusiastically invest in the production of a large number of Nanyang style films. With the popularity of the melodrama "Malaya Love" (1954), cathay pacific, Shaw, Guangyi and other film companies began to invest heavily in the production of "Nanyang Style" films filmed in Southeast Asia and telling the life of overseas Chinese, and Shaw and Guangyi also launched their own "Nanyang Trilogy". The filming locations of these films are no longer limited to Singapore and Malaysia, but are spread throughout Southeast Asia such as Thailand and Cambodia.
Stills from the 1954 film Malaya Love
Moreover, since the 1950s, cathay pacific, Shaw and Guangyi have successively set up production companies in Hong Kong. Cathay Pacific reorganized its original Hong Kong distribution company International into Denmao, and Shaw directly sent Run Run Shaw to Hong Kong to establish shaw brothers; in the following ten years, it created the largest film set in Asia, like the film kingdom of Hong Kong Island.
From the 1950s to 1985, the Shaw brothers produced more than 1,000 films, not only crushing other Hong Kong counterparts in terms of output and output value, but also using the Asian Film Festival they initiated, the influence of Hong Kong films quickly expanded to Japan, South Korea, Myanmar, Vietnam, the Philippines and other countries, and eventually entered the European and American markets. Known as the "Hollywood of the East", Shaw became synonymous with Hong Kong cinema in the 1960s and 1970s.
Logo of Shaw Brothers (Hong Kong) Limited
Conquest of Japan and Korea: Jackie Chan and Zhang Guorong
For most mainland Hong Kong film fans who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, the first batch of Hong Kong films they came into contact with and were most familiar with just missed Shaw's golden age. However, Hong Kong films, represented by Wu Yusen, Xu Ke, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Chow Yun Fat, Chow Sing Chi, Zhang Guorong and others, ushered in the most brilliant peak during this period; not only in the Chinese-speaking area, but also in Southeast Asia and Japan and South Korea. In the first few years of the 1990s, the export value of Hong Kong films exceeded their local box office every year, and in addition to the traditional export destinations in Southeast Asia, Japan and South Korea became the more important overseas markets for Hong Kong films during this period.
The relationship between Japanese and Hong Kong films has always been relatively close. In general, before the 1980s, Hong Kong films mainly drew experience and nutrition from Japanese films; in the 60s and 80s, Hong Kong was always willing to introduce excellent Japanese genre films. Later, Cai Lan, who was well known as a writer and gourmet, was one of his daily tasks at Shaw's to supervise the printing and proofreading of imported films. In addition, Hong Kong has also actively invited Japanese directors and technicians to come to Hong Kong to make films and learn from them. Japanese sword and sword films and Renxia films have had an undeniably huge impact on hong Kong's most important martial arts films and gangster films, and Japanese pink films (erotic films) and fantasy action films have also inspired the creation of similar films in Hong Kong.
The Hsu brothers, who promoted a new film in Japan in 1979
But since the 1980s, Hong Kong films have increasingly fed back to Japan. First of all, Xu Guanjie's works such as "Half a Pound, Eight Two" (1976) and "Deed of Sale" (1978) unexpectedly won the strong pursuit of Japanese audiences, and then Jackie Chan's "Snake-shaped Executioner" (1978) and "Drunken Fist" (1978) completely won the love of Japanese audiences. Both of Jackie Chan's kung fu comedies grossed more than 3 billion yen in Japan, and by the time of The Later Plan A (1983), they had swept the country. Throughout the 1980s, Jackie Chan's films were shortlisted in the top 10 at the Japanese box office almost every year, and so far his films have accumulated 60 billion yen at the Japanese box office, and Jackie Chan has been named Japan's most popular artist for ten consecutive years. Jackie Chan went to Japan to participate in the event, and fans from all over Japan would come from all directions like a pilgrimage, which was magnificent and spectacular.
Jackie Chan in 1983 in Japan
If Japanese audiences love Jackie Chan the most, then Korean audiences are obsessed with Jang Kwok-young. In 2003, the Korean movie channel OCN cooperated with 21 movie networks to hold the "Top 100 Movie Stars" selection, and the first overseas movie star in the end was Jang Guo-young. In 2009, Seoul, South Korea, even held a film festival named "Jang Kwok-young" to commemorate it. In many Korean film and television dramas, including "Please Answer 1988", the name "Jang Guo-young" is perhaps the most frequently mentioned among non-local stars. Jang Kwok-young's "The True Colors of Heroes" and "Ghost of a Woman" are the most well-known films in South Korea, the former being released in South Korea for a year and a half, and the latter also having as many as nine months. There is even a saying that the most favorite plastic surgery template for Korean women is the heroine of "Qiannu Ghost", Wang Zuxian. In addition to Zhang Guorong, the new generation of stars emerging in Hong Kong in the 80s has considerable recognition in South Korea, and Chow Yun Fat, Andy Lau, Jackie Chan, Lin Qingxia and others together constitute the youth memory of the 70 generation in South Korea.
In 1998, Jang went to South Korea to promote records, and 17-year-old Jeon Ji-hyun interviewed him
When the Korean film industry began to rise around the new century, Hong Kong films naturally became frequently imitated. South Korea's most high-profile commercial film genres in the past 20 years - action movies, crime movies, gangster movies, all have extremely strong traces of Hong Kong films, and many Korean directors have even imitated Hong Kong films to shoot a large number of gambling films ("Lao Qian" series), bandit films ("Treasure Hunting Alliance", "Seoul Robbery") and other sub-genre films. Hong Kong films, which have a high reputation in South Korea, such as "The True Colors of Heroes", have also begun to be remade in South Korea.
Korean version of the "Hero's True Colors" poster
If Korean films since the new century are considered to be moving closer to Hollywood because of their increasingly complete industrial system and production standards, their most direct teacher is not Hollywood on the other side of the ocean, but the former "Hollywood of the East" - Hong Kong.
Today, it seems that a rather ironic and rather surprising fact is that before the arrival of the "Harbin-Japan" and "Kazakhstan-Han" trends that began to sweep in the mainland in the late 1990s, Japan and South Korea actually preceded "Harbin Port". However, this wave soon faded with the decline of Hong Kong films in the mid-1990s, and the cultural import of Japan and South Korea soon became cultural output.
"Going North": "Hong Kong films" and "Hong Kong films" after 1997
In the mid-1990s, due to the blind pursuit of the production strategy of "how fast and good to save" for a large number of Hong Kong films, they often simply repeated the existing routines and models, the quality was poor, coupled with the economic damage caused by the Asian financial crisis, and in the face of confusion after the "97", the output and output value of Hong Kong films quickly declined. By 1996, before Hong Kong's return to the motherland, compared with 1992, the domestic box office had nearly cut through the waist, from HK$1.24 billion to HK$660 million. This year's overseas revenue fell off a cliff, from HK$1.164 billion in 1995 to HK$435 million.
Around the new century, representative figures of the peak period of Hong Kong films, such as Wu Yusen, Lin Lingdong, Jackie Chan, Chow Yun Fat, Jet Li and others, left Hong Kong and tried to find a new way in Hollywood. After the new century, the situation deteriorated, and the annual output of Hong Kong films fell below 100 for the first time in 2003, with only more than 70. By 2013, there were only 42 (including co-productions), the lowest in more than half a century — in the early 1990s, that number was more than 300.
In the former export cities of Japan and South Korea, Hong Kong films have long since ceased to be brave.
After the 1990s, most Hong Kong films imported into Japan took the route of small-scale limited release, and some simply distributed videotapes directly. The "Wong Fei Hung" series starring Jet Li is only a small limited screening in places like Shinjuku and Ginza; as for the literary and art films shot by Wong Kar-wai and Kwan Kam Peng, they can only be screened in a smaller amount at film festivals. Even Jackie Chan, who had unlimited scenery in the 80s, could hardly regain its former glory. After the new century, only a few blockbusters such as "Shaolin Soccer" and "Kung Fu" have received considerable box office in Japan.
In 2002, Stephen Chow promoted Shaolin Soccer in Japan
The situation in South Korea is even more bleak. At its peak, Hong Kong films once had a market share second only to Hollywood films in South Korea, but now they are not even 1%. The rapid rise of Korean films has a higher and higher market share in the local market, while the predecessors of Hong Kong, not to mention overseas, are difficult to hold on to their own local markets, and their share has fallen from 40% at the beginning of the new century to 12.4%.
With the implementation of the Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement in 2004, the trend of Hong Kong films is destined to be a co-production of increasingly close cooperation with the mainland. Most of the first-line directors and actors have begun to "go north", and the mainland, which has a large population and a huge economy, has soon become the most important export market for Hong Kong films.
In the past decade or so, the status of the mainland and Hong Kong film industries seems to have completed some kind of reversal. In the 1990s, the barren and weak mainland films, with almost no decent film industry, were still cultivating the artistic soil of films by a very small number of directors in the form of workshops crafted by craftsmen in the old days; at that time, Hong Kong had already formed a mature industrial system with amazing efficiency and volume. Now, on the other hand, Hong Kong cinema is like a vassal of the huge mainland film industry, with a large number of front-of-the-scenes and behind-the-scenes staff hired by the mainland, and the film production centers in the entire Chinese-speaking region have long been relocated from Hong Kong to Beijing.
In recent years, as Hong Kong-mainland co-productions have become more and more in-depth, the local color of Hong Kong in co-productions has become more and more faded; the so-called co-productions can basically be regarded as mainland films, but there are only a certain number of Hong Kong filmmakers involved in the cast. Directors including Xu Ke, Chen Kexin, Lin Chaoxian, Liu Weiqiang and other directors have begun to direct the main theme films in the mainland; in their works, there are almost no traces of Hong Kong films. Pure-blooded Hong Kong films are now basically left with low-cost and newcomer works shot in China.
Liu Weiqiang, who once directed "Ancient Puzzle Boy" and "Infernal Affairs", directed the main theme movie "The Great Cause of Building the Army" after "Going North"
Behind all this is undoubtedly related to the drastic changes in the economic volume of Hong Kong and the mainland after the reversion. An intuitive comparison: In 1997, Hong Kong's GDP accounted for 18% of the mainland's GDP; by 2019, it accounted for only 2.6%. In contrast to the huge disparity in the data, there is a huge difference in the economic growth rate between the two places, with Hong Kong's GDP only more than doubling in the past 22 years, while the mainland is nearly 15 times that year.
Deeper changes have come from the transformation of the rules and order of the East Asian region and the entire world economy. The take-off of Hong Kong's economy in the 1960s and 1970s depended on the unique political landscape and surrounding environment of that year. With the mainland still not yet reformed and opening up and the world in a Cold War pattern, Hong Kong relies on its position as the largest free trade port in the Far East, attracting passengers and business flows from all over the world. For quite some time, Hong Kong was actually a springboard for exchanges and contacts between the West and the outside world with the mainland. The passive non-intervention policy adopted by the British government in Hong Kong has also laid the foundation for the prosperity of cultural industries such as film.
However, with the acceleration of the mainland's reform and opening up process and globalization, Hong Kong's unique advantages in the past, such as "freedom" and "openness", have gradually become dividends that the mainland and other neighboring countries can share. The former dazzling "Oriental Pearl" is doomed to be difficult to maintain its former glory in the later starry sky.
Over the past half century, the rise and fall of Hong Kong films has actually been highly synchronized with the ups and downs of the Hong Kong economy. The great influence of Hong Kong films is actually a visual portrayal of Hong Kong's influence in the Far East. As we all know, countries and regions with relatively underdeveloped economies will always yearn for more advanced countries and regions, and when this economic difference is gradually smoothed out, the past look-up mentality will naturally change.
Hong Kong has gradually evolved from an exotic "capitalist" bustling city in the 1980s and 1990s to a duty-free shopping paradise that everyone can fly to. However, even in the case of tax exemptions and low prices, there are more and more latecomers catching up, and Hong Kong has long ceased to have an irreplaceable attraction.
Correspondingly, it is the attitude of mainland audiences towards Hong Kong films: from the fengwei Guigao in the past to the abandonment of the present. In addition to the mainland-led co-productions, the local Hong Kong films shot in Hong Kong every year have almost no one interested, the mainstream audience's interest is in domestic films and Hollywood blockbusters, and the high-cold niche film fans also respect European and Japanese and Korean films. The word "Hong Kong film" often means that there is only a lamentable feeling left.