A City Filming Its Own Disappearance

Hong Kong in the late 1980s knew its clock was running. The 1997 handover to China loomed at the end of every decade-long lease on the present, and the cinema of the period is shot through with disappearance — borrowed time, the ache of the about-to-be-lost — even when it is ostensibly about cops and triads. Out of that pressure came two filmmakers who turned motion itself into meaning, and who pointed it in exactly opposite directions.

John Woo took the gangster film and choreographed its violence into ballet. A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Hard Boiled — slow-motion doves, a pistol in each hand, the gunfight staged like a love scene and the love between men staged like a gunfight. Woo's "heroic bloodshed" treated combat as ritual and as feeling, the action-image pushed to operatic excess until it was closer to the musical than to the crime film. Around him the wider industry roared: Jackie Chan's body-as-cartoon in Police Story, Tsui Hark's flying swordsmen in Once Upon a Time in China — a cinema of pure kinetic invention, made fast and made cheap.

Wong Kar-wai took the same city and the same sense of vanishing and slowed it to a wound. Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, In the Mood for Love, 2046 — step-printed motion smearing into neon, lovers missing each other by minutes, Christopher Doyle's camera drunk on longing and clocks. Where Woo accelerated, Wong suspended; where Woo's bodies collided, Wong's never quite touch. And yet they were filming the very same thing — time running out on a place — one as kinetic ecstasy, the other as exquisite, unbearable delay. The deadline produced both the explosion and the held breath.

And then 1997 came, and instead of ending, Hong Kong cinema emigrated — straight into Hollywood's bloodstream. Woo went to America in person; far more consequentially, his grammar did. The Wachowskis built The Matrix on Hong Kong action choreography — they hired the legendary Yuen Woo-ping to train the cast — and bullet-time is, at bottom, Woo's slow-motion gunfight rendered in spinning digital. Tarantino's Kill Bill is a love letter to the whole tradition. Wong's smeared-neon melancholy, meanwhile, became the visual language of a thousand music videos and art films; In the Mood for Love is now among the most imitated looks in world cinema. The city that spent a decade filming its own disappearance disappeared more or less on schedule — and its way of seeing went everywhere, which is its own kind of survival. The handover took Hong Kong. It could not take the motion.

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The line: A Better Tomorrow → The Killer → Days of Being Wild → Chungking Express → Hard Boiled → In the Mood for Love → 2046 → The Matrix

This line crosses:

• The Myth Made in Italy — the other cinema of stylized violence-as-ritual that fed Tarantino and reshaped Hollywood; Leone's held duel and Woo's slow-motion gunfight are the same discovery — combat slowed into ceremony.
• The Screen That Thinks — The Matrix is the hinge: Hong Kong action choreography became the body of the digital cinema-of-the-brain, and bullet-time is where this line crosses into that one.

Read through: David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment.

A note on the argument: the history is documented (the 1997 anxiety, "heroic bloodshed," the Yuen Woo-ping/Matrix connection). The framing of Woo and Wong as "two opposite masters of motion filming the same disappearance" — acceleration and suspension as twin responses to the same deadline — is this essay's reading.