Content area
Full text
THE CRISIS CINEMA OF JOHN WOO
The cutrent era represents a Dickensian "worst of times" for Hollywood cinema. Within a decade soon to celebrate the "birth of cinema," studio executives will undoubtedly envisage some form of tacky retrospective, similar to the Reagan era's celebration of the Statue of Liberty's centennial. Once exemplifying the best of what Andre Bazin tetmed "the genius of the system," most Hollywood movies now reproduce the unimaginative and corporate assembly line products Robert Altman's supposedly ironic (but hypocritically complicit) The Player (1992) celebrates. A similar lack of vitality affects European productions, which now either replay insipid versions of the "cinema of quality" that Cahiers du Cinema once rallied against 01 approach past historical crises via evasive spectacular, melodramatic, or erotic depictions such as L'Amant (1991), Indo-Chine (1992), and Germinal (1993). Confronting such a situation evokes despair, unless one looks outside to interesting achievements within other national cinemas.
Whether phrased in the postmodernist discourse or not, the current decade exhibits a "crisis" aura, politically and artistically. It is unnecessary to embrace entirely the writings of Lyotard and Baudrillard to realize that the contemporary situation illustrates a lack of confidence, despair, artistic bankruptcy, lack of faith in progress, and the loss of certainties guaranteed by old "master" narratives. Although the "fin de siecle" mood characterized previous decades, the present era undoubtedly reflects crisis-ridden apocalyptic scenarios, often mediated cinematically.1
Despite its doom-laden aura, the apocalyptic is not totally nihilistic. As Lois Parkinson Zamora notes, the concept is a dialectical one, balancing crisis and renewal, tribulation and triumph, chaos and order, death and rebirth. This creative tension has roots within the prophetic and eschatological discourse strongly inherent within cultural productions.2 Although an apocalyptic climate may breed a cinema of nihilism influenced by updatings of Daniel Bell's 1960 "end of ideology" thesis, renovated by capitalism's supposed "victory" ovet communism, it may also exhibit creative tensions containing seeds awaiting a positive environment, or better tomorrow. One contemporary example is the work of John Woo and his association with Hong Kong cinema.
Since 1986, Woo has produced some of his most dynamic and exciting work, equivalent to Sergio Leone's work within the western, rejuvenating the gangster genre as his idol Jean-Pierre Melville once did. It is...