Just for a second or two, no longer than it takes to pull out a machine gun and mow down five or six people, School of the Art Institute Film Center director Barbara Scharres sounded like Monica Lewinsky. It happened while Scharres was attempting to explain her attraction to Hong Kong cinema, which, she says, has a certain irresistible energy. “It’s like falling in love,” Scharres said. “You can’t predict who or why, you just know it when you see it.”
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Scharres was smitten the first time she laid eyes on a Hong Kong movie, at a foreign film festival in the early 1980s. After this initial encounter, “I started seeking out more,” she says. “I started going to Chinese video stores in Chicago and programming Hong Kong films here at the Film Center. At the same time, I began making business contacts in Hong Kong. I got to know a lot of people and was able, through the Film Center, to give them a showcase.”
“You ever thought about leaving Hong Kong?” is the question on everyone’s lips in director John Woo’s 1992 cops-and-gangsters film, Hard-Boiled. The reply, “I was born in this place and I’ll die here,” is a prophecy that comes true for anyone who doesn’t flee in the film’s over-the-top hospital-shoot-out conclusion. In fact, this was the last film Woo made before joining the brain drain that afflicted Hong Kong as the 1997 takeover by China drew near. Now former Hong Kong luminaries like Woo and actor Jackie Chan are working in Hollywood. While they’ve become household names in America, the Hong Kong film industry that nurtured them “has suffered a major decline,” Scharres says. You can’t attribute it to any one factor–in addition to the Chinese takeover and major emigration, the Asian economy caved. “I don’t mean to say there aren’t still some very talented people working in Hong Kong films,” she adds, “but it’s not the kind of critical mass that it was in the 80s.” Not to be melodramatic about it, but–at least for now–the Hong Kong cinema’s glory days are over.
