[Weekly Update] Hong Kong Film Archive is Amazing!!

Two explanation marks!! That's how amazing it is!!

Channel update

First thing first: Patreon has enabled a new service: Free Trial. One enabled, patrons will have the option to test out all the perks for 7 days before paymemt. Would you be interested in free trial? How would a free trial affect your decision to support a creator?

Since I'm currently in Mainland China with no VPN, my ability to work is limited. For the next two more weeks, there should be no changes to our upload schedule. I'll continue to prepare for the Ong-bak retrospective, as well as finally talking about the last bad Chinese movie from the unholy trilogy: Switch.

Finally, our Patreo bonus video is up. This month, we are talking about The Bruce Brothers, a beloved comedy that I, too, liked, but am not sure why.

Media Talk

Hong Kong Film Archive isn't actually some tourist destinations. It isn't a museum you can go in and have a whole day worth of amusement. It is actually a government funded archive that perserves Hong Kong film history. Currently, it is doing a year long screenings of Leslie Cheung movies. If you are in Hong Kong, check to see if there are screenings happening in the near future. I heard the screenings are all done in 35mm film projections. Would've been an amazing experience!

Anyway, so he day I went to the archive, there was sadly no screening. Nevertheless, I visited their library, which is small but packed with documents.

The document that caught my eye is their entire collection of City Entertainment. This is a biweekly released film focused magazine from Hong Kong. And if you watched our video on High Risk, you may also remember that it is the magazine where we can find one of the earliest instances of Jackie admitting to using stunt doubles.

So, I dug through every single 1985 issue, and finally found the passage in the last issue of that year. What I said in my video was indeed correct. In an interview with Jackie Chan promoting Police Story, Jackie says he also used stunt doubles. But he insisted on doing the dangerous stunts, because that's what the audience want from him.

However, I also found the surrounding context very fascinating:

Apparently, the audience at the time were shocked by the real injuries within the films. Some felt like they were watching a softcore snuf film, one which the film's credit made certain you know it is real blood and injury. When comparing to what came before: the largely sanitized acrobatic wuxia films, it's understandable why people would find Jackie Chan's movie shocking.

But another rather interesting debate also arose from Jackie's practice. Critics, on more than one occasion, questions the ethics of putting his life at risk for a movie. Great magician Houdini once said he wouldnt do anything more dangerous than sitting in his living room. He saw that as a moral obligation to not start an magic arms race that puts people's lives in danger. Jackie and Sammo, however, started this race. And they are keep racing ahead.

It's a miracle that so few deaths had happened over the years. And with today's film industry safeguard and regulation, this discussion is entirely moot. Nevertheless, it is interesting to think about philosophically.

Finally, and perhaps the least interest point brought up by critics of the time: some think Jackie's appeal to realism and stunt works lacks the poetry of cinema. I'm paraphrasing here, but the critic essentially says cinrma is about camera work and how it paints a story, and implies that Jackie Chan movies fail at it. I'm sure we can all have a good laugh at how critics never changed in 40 years.

And that was the summary of my finding in Hong Kong Film Archive. Sadly I wasn't able to spend much time there. If I live in Hong Kong, I'd stay here every Tuesday, because it is so helpful for this channel and also just for my curiosity about film history. If you ever get a chance to visit, go visit!

Anyway, that's the update for this week. I still have 2 more weeks to spend in the East, and I'll let you know if anything fun happened!