Hong Kong cinema's identity crisis

[Takuma]

Interesting news bit / article:

http://www.filmbiz.asia/news/hong-kong-cinemas-identity-crisis

Speaking of which: can anyone shed light on how Hong Kong films were distributed in Mainland China back in the 60's - 90's? Were many extensively cut / altered. Were many not released there at all? I've understood that Police Story, for example, had to be altered for Mainland distribution. How about rougher stuff like Shaw horrors? Never released at all?

[Sheng]

Interesting news bit / article:

http://www.filmbiz.asia/news/hong-kong-cinemas-identity-crisis

Speaking of which: can anyone shed light on how Hong Kong films were distributed in Mainland China back in the 60's - 90's? Were many extensively cut / altered. Were many not released there at all? I've understood that Police Story, for example, had to be altered for Mainland distribution. How about rougher stuff like Shaw horrors? Never released at all?

Nothing new here, HK cinema's has been in the throes of an identity crisis since the late 90's, really... Which doesn't mean that great films are not made anymore, as some with a more defeatist mind-set would love to claim. HK film journo Perry Lam wrote an interesting (albeit highly subjective) book on the issue in 2011, "Once A Hero - The Vanishing Hong Kong Cinema". There's some very valid and thoughtfully expressed points to be found in it, although I found myself concurring only partially with the overall thrust of his argument. And Takuma, HK films were usually not distributed at all on the Mainland until Deng Xiao Ping took over the reigns of power and opened China to the world.

Matter of fact, some here seem to be oblivious to the fact that even the practice of Kung Fu was discouraged after the founding of the PRC because it was regarded as being representative of old dynastic China. The old masters were pretty much put in the same bag as former members of the gentry, "capitalist roaders" and other undesirable classes that needed to be "reformed". A lotta knowledge connected to KF vanished at the time and there are older sifus that believe some of it is extinct now. In the latter half of the 70's these excesses slowly abated and around 1980 the CCP's opinion of KF (or rather Wushu) underwent an about-turn. Actually the impetus for rebuilding the totally dilapidated Shaolin Temple in Henan was a mega-successful movie by a HK filmmaker (Zhang Xin Yen or Cheung Yam Yim in Cantonese), the 1982 Jet Li debut feature SHAOLIN TEMPLE.

And yes, a lotta movies had to be "altered" for Mainland distribution since the early 80s.

[Guest Markgway]

Many of China's 80s martial arts movies were, in fact, Hong Kong productions, or at least co-productions. Despite being China's biggest martial arts star for the past three decades, Jet Li has never made a pure Chinese film.

[Cold Bishop]

Speaking of which: can anyone shed light on how Hong Kong films were distributed in Mainland China back in the 60's - 90's?

It's my understanding that the only HK films distributed in the Mainland after the 50s were those made by the "left-wing" studios: Great Wall, Feng Huang, and Sun Luen. Officially, HK films were banned, but these mysteriously (I've never been able to find a clear answer into the process) would appear in Mainland theaters. In fact, they were a major source of contention amongst Mainland filmmakers, as they often outperformed local films. This lead to rumors in Hong Kong (probably true) that these studios received funding directly from the PRC's central bank so as to propagate left-wing messages to the colony.

Of course, Hong Kong went through a "red scare" in the 60s, which, along with the Cultural Revolution, pretty much brought an end to these studios in any major capacity.

Once the Mainland re-opened up, the three studios would merge into Sil-Metropole, which was exempt from bans against Hong Kong cinema and would prove crucial in bringing the kung-fu film to the Mainland