The Study Of The Hong Kong Gangster Cinema

Hong Kong, "Hollywood of the East", has fruitful film output and abundant film genres. For instance, the Huangmei Opera film in 1950s-1960s, the emprise film and the horror film in 1970s, and the comedy as well as the gangster film in 1980s, are all recording the resplendence of the cinema of Hong Kong. In number of different film genres, which one can most likely represents the spirit of Hong Kong is becoming people's hot discussion. Some of them point that Hong Kong's cinema is just the product manipulated by the commercialization with entertainment and amusement as its fundamental features; others said that real-life oriented is the tag of Hong Kong's cinema. By analyzing the representation of characters in Hong Kong's cinema, we can find that the destiny and low life of small potatoes is the crux to make it vigorous. The rise of the burgertum makes burghers to be the main audience in the cinema, and they need to find their self-identity and the way of emotional release in the screen, thus the scene that reflects the low life can be shared with the audience most easily. The gangster film that is against with the mainstream society system is the best representative of the low life in Hong Kong. Not the defiance of the system, the focus to the tragic life of the marginalized group, and the physical release arose from the shocking audio-visual feeling only accord with the entertainment feature of Hong Kong's cinema, but they also symbolize burghers'thinking.Hong Kong Triad movie has the strong regional characteristics, which is the localized expression of the gangster film in Europe and America. It stemmed from the martial arts film, developed in the heroic bloodshed film, boomed in the "Triad kids" film, fell into a decline in the counter-gangster film, and boomed again in the cops-and-criminals film and the black film. During the 1900s, it raised the second upsurge of watching gangster film by characterizing a high amalgamation and absorbing the essence of various subgenres. The common ground of these subgenres is that the backgrounds of the stories can be all traced back to a place called "Jiang Hu". This paper will focus on this imaginative word, "Jiang Hu", to exhibit the romantic feature of the Hong Kong gangster cinema, with the image of "Jiang Hu" as a basis and unscrambling the meaning of "Jiang Hu" as a goal. This paper analyzes the romantic feature of the Hong Kong gangster cinema from three aspects:the first is the origin of the Hong Kong gangster cinema culture, which is the Confucianism; the second is noumenal aesthetic qualities of the black image, which are the freehand image style and way of characterization; the last is the acceptance approach for the entertainment of the cinema. It is expected that the paper would give a comprehensive and multidimensional explanation of the Hong Kong gangster cinema as a particular cultural phenomena. It theoretically summarizes the development of the cinema of Hong Kong, and then can better satisfy the guidance requirements of making a film in real life.