Transborder assemblages: Johnnie To’s co-production action films in Mainland China

ABSTRACT

For Hong Kong filmmakers, co-productions with mainland China are transborder assemblages characterized by increasing territorialization and coding that impart to them a palpable crisis of losing locality. However, this crisis does not necessarily mean the loss of a critical perspective. Johnnie To’s three co-produced action films demonstrate his struggles to evade or even take advantage of the disadvantageous status of dislocality and work under restricted creative conditions to carve out a space for critical expressions. Drug War not only brings to the screen the arbitrary nature of state sovereignty by telling the story of a cross-border crime—one in which narrative doubling plays a key role—but also offers reflections on Chinese urbanization in its visual composition, which takes the style of a kind of suburban realism. Three and Chasing Dream represent To’s latest efforts to develop an aesthetics of the studio defined by a tendency toward abstraction such that he uses his dislocality as a basis for a critical perspective on Hong Kong society and, especially, contemporary Chinese neoliberalism. Intertextual allusions, whether large-scale plot structures and visual styles or small-scale features of characterization and dialogue, are pervasive in To’s co-productions. These allusions can and should, I argue, be drawn into the new context of To’s transborder assemblages for a better understanding of his work.

KEYWORDS:

• Hong Kong cinema studies
• co-productions
• Johnnie To
• transborder assemblage

Acknowledgement

I acknowledge Prof. Richard Allen, Prof. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Prof. Gina Marchetti, Prof. Louisa Wei and anonymous reviewers for their comments to improve this paper.

Notes

1 For example, Bettinson (2020, 20) writes: “Johnnie To conceived a devilish feint, plying SARFT with counterfeit screenplays. Wholly innocuous and sanitized, these ersatz scripts served their purpose by floating through SARFT’s approvals system unmolested. Once granted SARFT’s imprimatur, To ditched the faux screenplay and reverted to Hong Kong scripting practice.” Some other filmmakers like Peter Chan only conduct self-censorship during preproduction, granting themselves creative autonomy without restrictions during filming.

2 A case in point is that To and Milkyway Image in the 2010s had sustained its local production projects including Life without Principle (2011), Blind Detective (2013), and Trivisa (2016), even as the focus of production had gradually shifted to the mainland.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (20720241034).

Notes on contributors

Jinping Liu

Liu Jinping is an assistant professor of film studies at Xiamen University. He received his Ph.D. degree from School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Liu’s scholarly interests include film theory and Hong Kong action cinema. He is the co-author of The Revolving Prism: Six Cultural Dimensions of Hong Kong Cinema (Fudan University Press, 2020) and his articles have appeared in Chinese scholarly journals like Journal of Beijing Film Academy and Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art.