Introduction: Hong Kong Neo-Noir

Summary

‘Film noir’ is now such a common term in cinematic analysis that another book on the subject, especially in its neo-noir development, may appear superfluous. Yet discoveries are occurring all the time, necessitating the rewriting of assumptions in film history, and this is especially true of other national cinemas, especially Japan and Korea, that have their own versions of noir and neo-noir. Despite the seeming redundancy of the term ‘national’ in an era of globalisation and transnational changes, the ‘local’ always adds some distinctive nuance to a style that may be borrowed from outside. Hence the importance of critical voices to define what distinctive nuances may exist especially in a supposedly globalised era. To cite any examples of national noir remains a problem since the national variations often reworked outside influences for their own particular concerns. Concerning three aspects of different national cinemas, America, Britain and France had their distinctive nuances and styles more often than not influenced by cultural and historical changes. Classical American film noir extended from 1940 to 1958, affected by the historical turmoil of wartime and post-war development. British film noir began earlier, in 1937, with The Green Cockatoo directed by the American William Cameron Menzies and photographed by Mutz Greenbaum (Max Greene), a refugee from Nazi Germany, with the story written by Graham Greene. Like its American counterpart, British film noir reflected post-war concerns, especially the beginning of the end of Empire, austerity, rising crime rates, and the developing problem of juvenile delinquency infected by what was then regarded as degraded American popular culture. French film noir had a more tortuous development. Influenced especially by French poetic realism initiated by Le Rue sans Nom (Pierre Chenal, 1934), the style really took offas a result of the humiliation of the French Occupation and continued into the post-war period, reaching a culmination in the work of Jean-Pierre Melville, who fought in the Resistance and the Free French Army. Hong Kong film noir had its own set of historical and cultural developments that go back to post-war Shanghai cinema and developed in its own particular way during many changes in Hong Kong society, as seen in Lung Kong's The Story of a Discharged Prisoner (1967), which influenced John Woo's A Better Tomorrow (1986) twenty years later.