pistolwink wrote: Tue Dec 31, 2024 11:17 pm
feihong wrote: Wed Dec 04, 2024 11:22 pm
When I used to frequent Hong Kong-er and Taiwanese video stores in Alhambra and Monterey Park, you could tell there was simply a different set of market values, reflecting different viewing priorities in the Taiwanese, Hong Kong and Southeast Asian home video market––a preference for immediacy over quality. Not sure I've told the story of an elderly gentleman who saw me with the VHS of Once Upon a Time in China, took the tape out of my hands, put it back on the shelf, and led me to the new release section, where he handed me Once Upon a Time in China VI. I asked him if it was important to know the story in order to see this new one and he put OUATIC VI in my hands, saying: "This one is new. New is better." I waited until the guy left the shop to reclaim the tape I'd spent nearly an hour searching for.
Is this an "Asian" thing or just a "normie" thing? I find it's pretty common for people to think of, say , a remake of or even a sequel to a film not as just another version of a story but as a
superseding film, rendering the older one(s) irrelevant. Or simply to think of newer films as better. Indeed, I think this was and to some extent remains a default attitude in the entertainment industry (albeit one in which aesthetic preference follows commercial imperative) — one reason why, when a studio either bought the rights to or simply set out to make a new version of an old story, they would often withdraw the older films from circulation.
Sometimes when I'm teaching a film course I find a few students who say of whatever is the most recent film on the syllabus "It's amazing to see how far film has come!" (with the implication that the older films we've seen are invariably worse and, at best, "good for an old film"; keep in mind that for undergrads of the 2020s, anything before 2010 is an "old film"). Of course, I die inside a little bit each time this happens, but it's a nearly ubiquitous sentiment.
I see what you mean, but I wonder if that reflects attitudes towards media in the west catching up to attitudes towards media that have been imported from Hong Kong and Taiwan, say? What happened in my recollection took place back in 1997, and the attitude that was expressed to me surprised me in the way it would have if someone at my local Blockbuster Video wanted to rent Back to the Future Part III before seeing either of the first two films. I feel like back then there was a sort of perceived cannon of films that were understood to have value that surpassed most new releases. I remember around the same time in Blockbuster Video they would run an in-store commercial where they asked a group of commercial actors what their favorite movie was (presuming Blockbuster had it in stock at the time). The one that really threw me was a 20-something-year-old man claiming his favorite movie was "Dr. Zhivago––in the Ice Caves!" For years that made me wonder if there was some kind of action sequel to Dr. Zhivago I just hadn't located yet on the shelves. At the time of the commercial Blockbuster wanted all the 20-something-year-olds in the store to rent a 32-year-old film, and it was understood to have some lasting value––though its' maybe a little ironic how the value of that particular film has depreciated for me since seeing that commercial, and subsequently the film.
When I used to rent Hong Kong movie it was primarily from a video store in Alhambra, California, called ES: Entertainment Superstore. The owner introduced the place to me, pointing out a few shelves. "Here's Jackie," he said, pointing to a couple of rows of Jackie Chan films. "Here's Chow Yun-Fat. Here's Andy (he meant Andy Lau), Stephen Chow...Here's the new releases..." here he gestured to a breakout shelf in the middle of the store, and then he spun around and gestured to the row after row of double-stacked VHS tapes. "And here's the rest of the store." Nothing but the movies of the big stars and the new releases were organized. To find movies I had to sift through row after row, taking out each tape, or set of tapes (any hit movie would be split over two VHS tapes to maximize profits––even though almost all Hong Kong films in that era were roughly 90 minutes, or edited down to that length for home video), and finding the English-language title somewhere on the box––or contextual clues to what movie I was looking at. The tapes in the front row were not the same films as the tapes behind them in the back row. The place was huge, and I would spend hours in there...and I was the only person I ever saw renting anything from that backlog of earlier movies. Whereas in Blockbuster people used to pick up a lot of movies that were perceived to be perennial, like Halloween, or Kramer vs. Kramer, or Dr. Zhivago in the Ice Caves, apparently, or Grease, or My Dinner with Andre, or Carrie, or what have you. There was definitely a palpably different attitude––at least at that time––in the video stores renting Hong Kong movies. And in terms of preservation––I feel like I ought to point out––there wasn't a single movie available to rent that had come out before about 1983. The Shaw Bros. catalog was in vaults somewhere and hadn't been seen for years, there were no pictures from Cathay or pre-80s Golden Harvest, no King Hu or Li Han Hsiang films. Because in that media culture at that time there seemed to be little appetite for those older films. In the aughts this changed considerably, because cable and satellite TV entrepreneurs needed back-catalogs of content, and––probably at the same time as western film viewers began thinking of films as content, classic movies re-entered the Chinese-language market as a form of nostalgia content.
In the aughts, when I worked briefly programming film screenings of Asian movies in Los Angeles, we encountered a similar sense of relative disposability in the Hong Kong film market. Most Hong Kong movies we licensed through Tai Seng. They would charge almost nothing for screening permissions––I think it was something like a $75 flat rate per screening, something in that ballpark; they just wanted us to pick up the prints from their office in San Francisco. South Korean companies would often pay out of pocket to ship their films to us for one-off screenings. And Japanese companies would ask hundreds of dollars for a single screening. Then the Hollywood remake of The Ring became a huge hit. Japanese companies raised their single-screening price to thousands for dollars. All the South Korean companies immediately stopped taking our calls. And the Hong Kong films remained the same price, same deal as before. The other companies suddenly perceived a much higher value they could generate from keeping these films off the market and available for remakes; the Hong Kong movie companies really did not care, did not make any adjustment (there were a few exceptions; the principal one I can think of was Johnnie To's The Mission, which got optioned for a remake by Robert De Niro and was taken completely off the market for years as a result). By and large they seemed to regard their past product as worth very little. And I'd say that the long-running popularity of the VCD home video format in Hong Kong and Taiwan––an MPEG-1-encoded compact disc that played crunchy, bleary little home video images––spoke somewhat to a comparative disinterest in the image and sound quality of the home video experience––at a time when Hollywood movies were being released on DVD with quality standards which seemed to be continuously advanced––and being advertised as such (things like Superbit DVDs never caught on in Hong Kong).
This reminiscence goes a bit all over the place, but to me there was significant contextual clues all over the place that the Hong Kong film companies and the viewing public had a palpably different attitude towards the disposability of a film––viewing it as a product with an expiration date. That might have become the case in western media as well, but I think culture in the west has arrived at that place, rather than it always having been there.
