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Stephen Teo, Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film, Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 2007, 294 pp.
One of the most prominent directors in Hong Kong at the moment, Johnnie To Kei-fung, has over the past few years been receiving more attention at film festivals globally with films such as Breaking News (2004), Election I & II (2005-2006), Exiled (2006), The Mad Detective (2007), and most recently, Sparrow (2008). Sometimes referred to as the post-1997 poet of Hong Kong, To has a career that actually goes back as far as the 1980s, and as one of the few directors to keep up a high output even after the local film industry started to decline, his CV now boasts close to 50 films. Writing a monograph on To is therefore no easy task, and there are few people as qualified to attempt it as Stephen Teo, who previously wrote an important history of Hong Kong cinema and studies of other Hong Kong directors such as Wong Kar-wai and King Hu.(l)
Teo's main theoretical concern - outlined in the first chapter - is how to accommodate genre theory with auteur theory to explain To's somewhat paradoxical position as an auteur working in the often disdained action genre. Teo proposes to consider To's "auteur function," a term derived from Michel Foucault's work that, in Teo's words, refers to "those functions specific to the auteur and his role in mediating, altering and transforming the codes of genre" (p. 14). To is therefore an "enunciator of pre-existent material," which makes him somewhat of a paradox: he seemingly submits to the system and questions it at the same time. This makes his films very complex, a complexity that also stems from their idiosyncrasy: To's films "all exert a certain quality that can only be identified as the personal touch of To" (p.16). Since Teo considers idiosyncrasy as essentially cultural, he also aims to pinpoint the cultural specificity of the mutual relation between To and the action genre. This cultural specificity "determines the way the films respond to the specific urban culture of Hong Kong, and how...