ghost dog/crouching tiger hidden dragon

[c. jacqui chen]

The crucifix of Hollywoodized epic Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon 
must carry leaves me bemused. Hong Kong film aficionados 
and scholars deride its stylistic resemblances to Merchant-Ivory 
productions or Pier-1 decor (according to some first-time connoisseurs) 
as rendering a culturally pungent product more odorless for general 
American consumption. Martial arts or wuxia films, made in the frantic 
Hong Kong style, or better in the cannon of King Hu, speak strongly of 
a sense of ownership in aesthetic traditions and identities. Yet this idea of 
a cinematic and cultural authenticity has little tolerance for the
growing hybridity we see in the array of films collectively called Chinese
cinema, the one increasingly made by Pan-Asian/international collaborations and
filmmakers like Ang Lee who are fashioned by multiple cultural centers and 
wear Chineseness proudly on their lapel.

It's strange to me that Ang Lee's trilogy on the Chinese family
(Pushing Hands, Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman) do not have
this issue of compromised authenticity as CTHD, when the trio employ
styles and narrative conventions that are as much melodramatic comedies
of manner as they deal with changing structures of the Chinese family
(often laid out against "un-Chinese" phenomena as Diaspora, homosexuality or
assertive women wearing the seductive scent of modernity.) Any way you look
at them (as the crude gazes from East and West), the trilogy does not have
an immediately recognizable difference that CTHD has. It's this difference,
the shock of feeding something sacredly Chinese and Chinese cinema through 
a hybridized process (in both symbols and dollars) that gets the war room
going. It does seem these conversations are converging on the good old 
us-them definitions. 

Dave Kehr's "Asian invasion" previously discussed here maintains the same 
body vs. technology/spiritual vs. material dichotomies when he tries to 
capture that different aura which sets Asian cinema apart. He cites
CTHD and Jackie Chan as the body quotient in the cinema supreme (which
professor Murphy helpfully explains as a nostalgia for the 70s 
melodramatic aesthetics that postmodern American ironists can no longer 
produce as well as ascendant economies in Asia.) As mentioned at the start of
my rant, to Asian cinema fandom it is in fact that other technology quotient 
in CTHD that pronounces it a traitor, a westernized sellout, of the martial arts genre.
So to each his own...

Jacqui


--- "d. freire" <drainer at mpinet.net> wrote:
> But the direction and cinematography of  "crouching tiger..." is so
> Hollywood... almost like an American attempt at a Hong Kong film.
> Even whatever was coherent of the plot also seemed like a formulaic approach
> to Hollywood success. The end, however, distinguishes itself, with the
> deaths and the assumption of guilt... where the viewer does not leave with
> such a happy ending (but perhaps it is supposed to illicit some sort of
> supernatural belief that dreams come true?)
>  It did have some token distinctions that all kung fu movies have... (for
> example, where people in the theater laughed while characters flew, etc...)
> Of course, the filmmaker cannot take time to explain all Chinese myths
> before screening a picture.
>  It wasn't bad, maybe if I watch it again I will like it more. But I do feel
> slightly disappointed... a similar story to Hong Kong movies, in parts; but
> a production straight out of California.
> 
> 
> -d.freire
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jasper Sharp" <j.sharp at publitec.vnu.com>
> To: <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2001 4:10 AM
> Subject: RE: ghost dog
> 
> 
> > I have not seen it, but I have heard on the grapevine that it lifts a
> > sequence from
> > Seijun SUZUKI's BRANDED TO KILL - the assination attempt foiled by
> > butterfly.
> > As for American genre bending, I think the success of CROUCHING TIGER,
> > HIDDEN DRAGON
> > all over the world shows that there are an awful lot of people getting
> sick
> > and tired
> > of the same old Hollywood product being churned out year after year.
> >
> >
> 
> 


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