7 - Jumping on the Bandwa gon: The Ensemble of Hong Kong Film Directors

Summary

‘How do we know there's no hope if we don't try?’

— John Woo, The Crossing

Introduction

As mentioned in the Introduction, the commercialisation of main melody films can be traced back to Feng Xiaogang's war blockbuster Assembly (2007), and Hong Kong film directors’ participation in this genre began with the ‘privately run’ main melody film Bodyguards and the Assassins (2009), a film that paid homage to the Xinhai Revolution in 1911. Jackie Chan's 1911 (2011) was also made in commemoration of the 100Thanniversary of this revolution, which overthrew China's last imperial dynasty. On a diff erent but related topic, Herman Yau's The Woman Knight of Mirror Lake (2011) was a mainland–Hong Kong co-produced biopic about Chinese revolutionary heroine Qiu Jin. The 2010s then ushered in a decade of commercial main melody blockbusters, in which the genre was diversified in order to attract more young local, and hopefully overseas, audiences. Main melody blockbusters were no longer restricted to the nation, the Party and the Army. Thanks to the commercialisation and diversification of main melody blockbusters, more and more Hong Kong film directors had an opportunity to helm these kinds of big-budget, high-concept films, as it was no longer possible to make such films in Hong Kong because of market considerations. In a sense, the situation was similar to the quickly expanding film market in Hong Kong in the late 1970s and 1980s, when Hong Kong film directors had more scope to try diff erent genres. Of course this time, mostly, if not only, well-established Hong Kong film directors had the opportunity to go north. Previous chapters have discussed the participation of diff erent generations of Hong Kong film directors in main(land) melody blockbusters, and their contributions to the genre as well as, possibly, to Hong Kong cinema. Besides the main(land) melody films that had a great impact, there were also other less successful examples by other Hong Kong directors. In this chapter, I will move on to discuss some of these examples, through which other perspectives on how Hong Kong directors sang the main(land) melody will be exposed.