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Trivisa
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Three Kings
1. The Face and the Image
The opening scene of Trivisa – functioning as a prologue set in 1988 – offers us a brief
flurry of actions in only 13 shots, covering almost exactly one minute of
screen time.
The first shot pans down from a clear sky into an
ordinary street; the same shot zooms in to isolate a man walking casually,
wearing a dark coat and cap. He can be seen only from the back, with no face
recognition. It would seem to be a very typical and conventional establishing
image to “ease in” a narrative; it is by far the longest shot of the scene in
its relatively leisurely duration of 22 seconds.
Shot 2, however, immediately introduces us (in what is
a minor, elliptical shock cut) to more urgent action: three cops in
plain-clothes (pointedly not seen in shot 1) instantly stop the man glimpsed in
the previous shot. Shot 3, closer in and taken from behind the cops, at last
gives us a brief look at the man’s face, but he immediately uses his cap to
obscure his features from both the cops and us. Now changing to a side-on angle
for shot 4, the man fishes out his ID as requested – but still keeps his face
more or less hidden from view. The background of this shot stresses, again, the
unphotogenic ordinariness of the surroundings: cars passing by on a bridge, a
few out-of-focus trees.
Back to the same angle as shot 2, but with a
difference created by movement: the female cop moves away to contact
headquarters on her walkie-talkie and check the ID; while the man under
suspicion casts a checking-out look down the street – in search, no doubt, of a
handy escape route. The film keeps wheeling through its already established camera
set-ups, with dynamising variations: next, we are in a continuation of the
angle of shot 3, but with only the chief cop (soon joined by his male
colleague) demanding to see the contents of the man’s bag.
Cut to a totally new image: the ID card and the hand
holding it are the only elements in focus, with the grey ground and the woman’s
profile both rendered in a blur. Another zoom, in the context of this more
minimal image, takes us closer to the black and white photo of the man – clear
face recognition this time, but displaced from the reality of the scene to a
posed, processed image – as well as creating an aura of suspense, an
anticipation of impending violence.
For shot 8, we return again to the camera set-up of
shot 3, as the man still subtly shields his face. Shot 9, insert detail: the
man’s hand fishes around inside (at what, we cannot see), and suddenly a bullet
fires through the black fabric. Shot 10 is from the same set-up as shot 4: the
two male cops are shot. Shot 11 gives us a new angle, and an unforeseen element:
in the right-of-screen foreground, a bystander (turned away from us) witnesses
the third murder, but does not react or intervene. Shot 12 happens in slow motion:
the man picks up his ID card. In shot 13, he runs down his previously
scoped-out escape path, as sound from the following scene, a TV broadcast, is
overlaid. As the man, now safely indoors, watches TV, he burns his ID.
The opening scene
is certainly brisk and economical: adding it up, 9 camera set-ups are used to
generate 13 different shots in editing. The scene takes us from a casual, apparently
non-action-based opening to the near-immediate eruption of violence in an
everyday street situation. But is there more going on here? This action film
sets up, in its opening minute, a certain circulation of elements: bodies,
faces, identities, places, media representations (such as still photography).
The face of a central character – soon to be identified within the plot as the
criminal Kwai Ching-hung (Gordon Lam) – is withheld from clear, decisive
recognition in the face-to-face situation with police, but is “caught” on the
all-important (and, moreover, fake) ID card.
The same theme – with the same stylistic configuration
– is then reprised in the very next scene, situated nine years later in 1997.
Yip Kwok-foon (Richie Jen) and his men also watch a television broadcast (this
one is about themselves, and the footage will return much later in the film,
being fast-forwarded on video by another gangster – and it will be given
another twist near the very end when Kwai reveals his hidden role in these
proceedings), while their various wounds are patched up and tended to. Yip is
strikingly characterised (unlike Kwai) by a strong, brooding close-up – but
this image is immediately juxtaposed with his representation on the TV news,
where is identified as “Most Wanted” and pictured in a more youthful, black and
white mug shot. Trivisa is thereby
planting and foreshadowing a specific dynamic, which involves a back-and-forth
between the states of visibility and non-visibility, concealment and
recognition, public view and flight.
The opening of every film poses for us – quietly or
loudly, explicitly or implicitly – a certain drama or dilemma of recognition:
who are these people, these places, what are these actions that interrelate
people (in this case, violently)? (For more on the process of narrative
exposition and opening scenes in cinema, see Martin 2008.) We are at the
opening gateway of the film, its threshold as Alain Masson (1994) calls it. At this initiating stage, the film can clarify
some relations between elements, while letting others “float” in undecidability.
Let us recall Masson’s earlier formulation (1981: 48) of structure, style and
form in the medium of cinema:
What is form in a film? In order to remain faithful to the cinematic
art, we must include at least three elements in this determination of form.
These elements can be rightly characterised by their various kinds of mobility within a mode of representation
where movement constitutes the principal authority. The first of these domains,
which provides repose, is the décor, the ensemble of objects defined as
habitation or simply place, on which the camera angle confers a particular
configuration. The second domain, open to specification by the possibility of
spontaneous action, is roughly that of the characters (human or not), who only
become intelligible through being followed. Third, camera movements,
apprehended in their continuity or discovered across the intervals that
separate successive shots, which are dependent on either the inevitable presence
of a world (as implied by décor), or the free exercise of a subject (as implied
by the action of characters). Form results from the changing relations between
places, gestures, and camera viewpoints.
Masson’s description (inspired by Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, 1980) is not specifically about the action
genre, but it proves useful for my analytical purpose here. I would like to
make clear what my essay is not: it is not a symbolic or metaphoric reading of Trivisa; nor does it address the
socio-political and historical context (i.e., the handover of Hong Kong to
mainland China) which is so evidently an important level of the film, and has
been handled very perceptively and comprehensively by Tom Cunliffe (2018). (For
an even broader perspective on Milkyway Image’s cultural role and intervention
in the post-handover production landscape, see Sun Yi, 2018.)
My aim is to stay inside the genre – to respect its dictate for, precisely, action – but, at the same
time, open up its mechanisms so as to appreciate the properly formal and figural dimensions of their working, not
to leave this action film within a simplistic plot-and-character framework. In
this goal, I am inspired by the pioneering mid 1990s work of the Admiranda collective in France, as well
as building on my own previous work in relation to both the Australian Mad Max series (2003), and Hong Kong films directed by
Johnnie To, Tsui Hark and others (2005).
Ultimately, the overarching shape of Trivisa is structured by a scene that we
will see three times over – our three main criminal characters at a restaurant
– but, until the end, we are not handed the necessary perceptual or narrative
cues to construe these three versions as occurring precisely at the same place
and at the same time, as constituting the one, unitary scene. The film
announces, at the outset, that it is about the simultaneous building and
erasure of identities: faces, names, photos, cards, media reports. We not need
to think of this as a supposedly deep-and-meaningful theme in order to grasp
its efficacy and interest as a dynamic system of filmic representation that is
partly reflexive (as many fine action films are), unostentatiously turning the
ways and means of storytelling inside out.
2. The Singer and the Song
As a Milkway Image production, Trivisa is naturally enough in the school or house style of Johnnie
To. Three young directors – Frank Hui, Vicky Wong and Jevons Au – were given
the opportunity to direct the separate strands of the film, as their advanced
training ground. That they have successfully worked within the limits of the
project is evident: it is quite impossible to discern three different
directorial styles or signatures; the film is a successfully blended whole. Certain
motifs – such as the ubiquitous presence of cash bundled into plain brown
envelopes – help unify the three major strands of the plot. Recurring stylistic
devices such as deft widescreen compositions and handheld, slightly shaky
shot/reverse shot dialogue exchanges do their standard generic work of keeping
scenes nervy and on the move. Striking overhead images (such as when Yip
theatrically empties his bag of gold bars onto a table, or Kwai stabs his
accomplices), low-angle circular tracks around characters facing-off, and
choreographies of mise en scène (Yip’s
men gathering into a mass behind him to back up his power) punctuate and
amplify otherwise dialogue-driven scenes. Shared gestures between characters, such
as the lighting of someone else’s cigarette, recall the mythos of Jean-Pierre
Melville’s crime films – a legacy already well utilised by John Woo in his career.
Trivisa is in the School of To in
other ways, as well. As in the Election films (2005 & 2006), the monetary flows of crime must be submitted to
endless, intricate market negotiations: nothing is ever simply taken or given,
it must be laundered, substituted, invested, traded, fenced. Yip is told that,
in the modern world, “stocks and real estate” are safer terrain for crime than
stealing gold bars or money. A striking nocturnal scene juxtaposes Yip,
suspicious of strangers and standing on his boat ready to wage old-fashioned
battle with his machine gun, with the motorboats that simply sail by him
serenely, off to sell extravagantly marked-up electrical appliances on the
mainland. “Cash keeps rolling in!” Yip is breezily told, as he stares at his
(in this instance) useless, anachronistic weapon.
The old world of criminals and power – such as we know
it from the classic gangster films of the 1930s – has now had to make room for
a cumbersome layer of middle management: accountants, brokers, paid informants,
tax specialists, and so on. (For a reflection on these and related issues of
crime/gangster cinema in both Hollywood and Hong Kong contexts, see Martin 2018/2020.)
And, inevitably, the greater the number of connections there must be involved
any given deal, the higher the risk of betrayal or double-dealing. In this new
milieu of omnipresent negotiation, moments of waiting and tense decision-making
that we are permitted to share via POV editing – such as Yip’s “fence”
contemplating the hidden gun in his drawer, before opting to simply pick up his
bunch of keys instead – also return us to the type of terse cinematic universe
that To has branded as his own terrain.
The style of the film does not alter between its major
strands, but the production design moulds itself to the diverse milieux of the central
characters. Around eight minutes in, we are introduced to Trivisa’s third major criminal player, Cheuk Tze-Keung (Jordan Chan).
The colours and props surrounding him are as extravagant and garish as the man
himself: loud, histrionic, even effeminate (a somewhat surprising detail in this
masculinist genre), self-absorbed in his own sense of privilege. His sadistic
streak – expressed in gestures such as twisting his opponents’ ears – aligns
him with Dennis Hopper’s menacing madman in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). A large team of financial workers arranged
comically in a hierarchy along the space of an office can hardly pull Cheuk’s
attention away from his favourite karaoke entertainment. When Cheuk, in his
bright orange jacket, sings along to the karaoke image (yet another variation
on the ubiquitous TV screen), sunlight from the window fills the frame and
colour flares cascade across the camera lens. But when Cheuk at last settles
down to puff on his cigar and do a deal, he knows perfectly well what his price
is, and how to secure it.
The figure of Cheuk offers a lively new variation on
the film’s matrixial elements as listed above. He does not need to flee the
scene of his violence, burn his fake exposed ID card, or hide out on a boat at
night. (Even his more private torture, later on, of an official, takes place on
open cliff rocks above the sea, in broad daylight!) On the contrary, he flaunts
his visibility – and the visibility of others, whom he forces to strip (in a
sequence mid-way through) before he pays them for information. Cheuk even
blurts out his crime of kidnapping in front of the cop who is tailing him,
before forcing “Mr Tycoon” to withdraw any accusation of guilt.
The scene introducing Cheuk is an excellent
illustration of Masson’s contention that cinematic “form results from the
changing relations between places, gestures, and camera viewpoints”. His
actions not only announce the type of character he is, and add further details
to the ongoing portrait of a complex criminal world; they also alter and
complicate the mapping and unfolding of the structures of visibility and
audibility, concealment and revelation, in Trivisa.
The scene concludes with a lively montage of Cheuk laughing gleefully at the
wheel of his equally brightly coloured yellow car, burning down the highway
with all his criminal gains wrapped in red, white and blue bags and bundled,
for all to see, on top of the vehicle!
3. The Giver and the Gift
New scene, new passport (from Canada), and a new
photographic image, this time in colour, of Kwai seen in close-up – and we are
not yet even 15 minutes into the film. Interviewed at the Customs clearance
desk of the airport, we notice a different Kwai: clean, casual, seemingly
innocent. The precise date – 26 May 1997 – is literally stamped onto the film,
as afforded by this setting. A clever transition takes us into Kwai at his
hotel room in Guangzhou – where, on a tabletop, we spy, sprayed out, his many
ID cards, passports and fake personalities. His dexterity with switching the
circuitry in mobile telephones is also noted.
Yet Kwai still has an old-fashioned gangster aura: he
physically counts out his money, and sticks (as we will soon learn) to plans of
grand heists. A crucial contrast is developed: the intense air of solitude and
privacy around Kwai (another nod to Melville’s 1960s-era Samourai) is immediately
compared to the public show involved in Yip’s complex negotiation with Chief
Chen (Yuen Fu-wah) – a sloppy, gregarious character complete with an
actress-mistress in a bright red dress by his side – at a restaurant meeting. Here,
everything is manners, gifts, display, rituals (such as group drinking) to
which all present must conform.
This negotiation scene is further compared with two
others, in fairly rapid succession, all of which take place during shared
meals: Cheuk’s planning session with his associates; and Kwai’s rigorous
selection of accomplices for his heist job (where one can even detect a
reflexive joke concerning Milkyway Image’s own appointment of three young
directors!). The mood, style and staging of these three scenes is subtly
differentiated – here, within the overall formal unity of the Trivisa project, the varying tones allowed
to each of the directors are permitted to work into the unfolding texture. Yet
the overall montage resists what must have been the facile temptation to
rapidly intercut between these three restaurant-room vignettes (as many an
American crime movie or TV episode would surely have done); it works better for
the overall form and structure of Trivisa to maintain the possibility of a total separation in time and space between
these scenes, as we shall soon see.
Many details in this complex and central concatenation
of three restaurant meeting scenes return to the matrixial elements identified
above, particularly that of real and fake identity. Yip has both a new
businessman look and a new name; Kwai, likewise, has re-emerged as “Big Bro
Chiu” – a name that his associates begin to suspect immediately, raging about a
“sly old fox who changes his identities”. He is said to resemble Kwai – but, on
the other hand, Kwai has always been “the invisible King of Thieves in Hong Kong” (my emphasis). His status as a character is thus paradoxical:
Kwai disguises himself insufficiently but then, again, does an invisible King
even need to manipulate his outward appearance? The core question or dramatic
problem here will be, exactly, for how long (and to what extent) his
invisibility can be maintained – and that will never be forever in a
crime/gangster picture! (Compare, for instance, the depiction of Christopher
Walken’s master-criminal character of Frank White as both vampirically hidden
in the shadows and socially hyper-visible in Abel Ferrara’s masterpiece King of New York [1990]).
It is almost 20 minutes in that Trivisa begins to weave its central, structural conceit, which will
only be fully revealed at its ending: the simultaneous presence of the various
key criminal players (Kwai, Yip and Cheuk, plus their assorted associates) all
at the same Fengman Restaurant. The three dining-meeting scenes play out across
an almost ten-minute span and, as noted, no cross-cutting gives away the strict
relationship between them. The fact that we are not allowed to initially grasp
this simultaneity puts a new spin on Masson’s triad of places, gestures, and
camera viewpoints. The film has worked an ingenious disarticulation of its elements of space, time, narration and
bodily presence. In this, it can be related to many films since the 1990s (by
Quentin Tarantino, Bryan Singer, Brian De Palma and others) that play with
chronology – frequently within a multi-strand or network/mosaic narrative – in
order to at first conceal and later unveil certain key links and causal
connections between the various pieces of the plot.
In Trivisa,
the simultaneous connection of the characters is less central to narrative
logic – beyond the plot function of initiating the widespread rumour in the
criminal underworld of a likely “Three Kings” combined operation that was
launched at Fengman Restaurant, something that is taken as outlandish gossip by
all three of them (in a sequence that, wittily, does use the intercutting device deliberately suppressed earlier).
Rather, the coincidence functions more as an elaborating surplus comment on the
paths of crossover destinies – a somewhat melancholic, grace-note way of
underlining the film’s comparison between these different criminal styles in
their specific historical and social context.
4. The Dreamer and the Dream
It is always interesting to look at the large-scale
structure of a narrative film. After its approximately 25 minute opening movement, Trivisa takes us in a new and
hitherto unexpected direction. Kwai visits his old pal Fai (Philip Keung), and
quickly moves in with this family of three. While the spectator is allowed to
grasp Kwai’s ulterior motive – to have the best vantage point from which to
study the Gold Shop opposite – his hosts are, at first, none the wiser. Their
innocence offers, in fact, a general semantic value in the overall scheme of
the film, and adds a layer of (again melancholic) ambiguity to Kwai’s temporary
integration into a family unit. For everything on the level of the social
manners that we have so far witnessed in the film – the posing, gamesmanship, rituals
of courtesy, hiding – is turned upside down in this modest, working-class
milieu. Respect is given freely, jokes abound, playfulness between the little
girl and the adults is paramount.
As distinct from what Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon
(1980) once called the “fantastic invincibility” of action genre heroes, pointed
reference is made in this part of the film to Fai’s health problems (he is “on
dialysis”) and his position as a “house husband” – everyday matters far removed
from the usual glamour of movies (especially in the action genres). Moreover,
small-time theft is a thing of the past for Fai: “Our life was insecure … We
didn’t earn that much”. And, although Kwai’s secret plan aims higher than that youthful
level of criminal achievement, the comparison the film makes between him and
Fai underlines, once more, the almost nostalgic, backward-looking nature of his
ambitions in the context of a rapidly changing, high-finance world.
Therefore, the second major movement of this compact
narrative (between opening and closing credits, it runs for about 91 minutes)
is driven by a new theme: the dream.
Kwai’s low-level vision of theft – mocked even by the two street criminals he
hires to help him execute his plan – is immediately compared with Cheuk’s
extravagant dream of high-level kidnapping, something he broods on all night
before announcing it to his cohort by the sea. These two instances are
compared, in turn, with the implied pangs of nostalgia for violent action felt
by Yip in his sedate, factory-like work setting – pangs that are heightened
once he has to undergo a difficult and humiliating bargaining process with Customs
officials to win back a confiscated load of goods. This process involves a comical
reprise of the plot device of a vase gift introduced earlier in the film – a
further sign of humiliation. This sequence of events is clinched when Yip finds
himself lighting other people’s cigarettes like a lowly, grovelling servant.
And all this turns out to be a slow burn, in terms of narrative suspense, for
what becomes the film’s dramatic mid-point (I am making use here of Kristin
Thompson’s model of mainstream narrative, 1999): the further hijacking of Yip’s
goods, as he hopelessly runs down the road pursuing the truck.
In the final 30 minutes or so of the film, its action
threads begin to pull together, as is typical of the action genre, and of
classical narrative construction in general. The reflective and preparatory
plot plateau opened up by Kwai’s staying with Fai and his family is forcibly
closed off when Kwai is asked to pack up and leave. Likewise, Cheuk’s
frustrated search for Kwai (in order to unite the Three Kings) comes to an
impasse – not only when a cop declares that every call Cheuk receives is being
monitored, but when, in one of the movie’s wittiest moments, Cheuk throws away
the mobile phone on which, at that very moment, Kwai is trying to reach him.
Yip, as I have noted, has also arrived at a dead end. A montage at the 64
minute mark – just before the aborted Gold Shop robbery – clinches this overall
pause moment of impasse, intercutting (at several reprises) between the three
central characters in their respective situations of waiting. Thus, the film is
now ready for a new turning point that will launch its ultimate chain of
interrelated actions.
5. The Caller and the Call
Trivisa is recognisably an action
film. But how violent is it? It is a mistake to always associate action with
violence – and this is among the lessons that Johnnie To’s illustrious work in
the genre has taught us, especially in the Election series. There, action has more to do more tension, waiting, negotiations and
decisions than with prolonged scenes of cataclysmic violence (see Álvarez López
& Martin in Martin 2018).
Let us mark the graph of the film’s action structure.
In its first minute, a gun is fired three times through a bag. Around ten
minutes in, Cheuk bends a few ears but threatens rather than causing real
physical damage to another person; the same pattern later applies to his
treatment of his victim by the sea. At the 56-minute point, a suspense issue
that has been brewing for most of the film – will Yip ever step out from behind
his mask of petit-bourgeois pale civility and again express his rage? –
explodes in a scene of physical beating in a restaurant.
Other moments of violence are either displaced (as
when they are shown as distant TV footage), dissipated (Yip on the boat lowers
his machine gun) or avoided altogether (a pistol is not taken from a drawer). Even
the beating scene just mentioned happens mostly off-screen, rendered
semi-comically – and this event, too, concludes with another gun that is
pointedly not picked up or used by Yip.
The filmmakers have made the decision to reserve more
conventional climaxes of violence mainly for the final movement of the
narrative. And it is in this final section that, as well, intercutting between
the three plot strands will become pervasive, and the dramatic, almost elegiac
part of Nigel Chan’s musical score (reminiscent of the use and placement of
music in Michael Mann’s mythically-proportioned crime movies) will come into
full effect.
At its 67th-minute point, Yip is, in an
explicit fashion, returned to his former self: like earlier, he is again on a
boat, loading and examining his machine gun. He decides to call Cheuk.
Meanwhile Kwai, waiting with his two accomplices on a pier, takes sudden,
surprising and decisive action: he kills them both and drops them in the water
– a more violent variation on Cheuk’s earlier taunting of a kidnapped and bound
official. Then Kwai performs a hopeful act of reparation – giving money to Fai,
who has by now twigged to the robbery plan – without realising that the bills
carry the traces of murderous blood stains (Fai’s reaction to this sight is
juxtaposed with images of the innocent daughter clutching her teddy bear). Yet,
as Kwai sets about contacting Cheuk by phone, he also disturbingly clutches a penknife,
and checks in several times on Fai (who is nervously pretending to sleep) – as
if about to kill him and dispose of any evidence of his true self, motivation
and plan.
The meeting of the Three Kings happens only in an ironic
fashion, and even then partially and indirectly – both Yip and Kwai ring Cheuk
simultaneously, and engage in different conversations with him. It is simultaneity
in time, but (to refer again to Masson’s schema) a non-coincidence of place: they
cannot easily bridge distances and unite, so the conversations end with a banal
“call you later” sign-off. Cheuk now has his own situation to face, escaping in
a truck (carrying dynamite) from the gang that hoped to corner him in a ruse. However,
in an echo of Henri Georges-Clouzot’s classic The Wages of Fear (1953), this nocturnal path is fraught with
obstacles and delays – including, finally, the military police who arrest
Cheuk, preventing any violent ending to his story thread.
At the same time as Cheuk’s story plays out, Yip
confronts a tricky moment with police on the street, recalling Kwai and his ID
from the opening minute. Responding to a racist slur against “mainlanders”,
Yip’s blood boils and he recklessly kills the cops, triggering a shootout
between his henchmen and a police team. He brings about his own death as he
cries, “I’m Yip Kwok-foon!” (an echo of Tony Montana facing the limit of his
own “fantastic invincibility” in De Palma’s Scarface,
1983 – see Martin 2018/2020), and crawls uselessly on the ground toward his
weapon.
Kwai’s tale has an unexpected but fitting conclusion.
For this character who has hidden, waited and paused for so long (probably too
long), it is an everyday moment of rest – dozing on Fai’s couch – that allows a
troop of police (presumably alerted by Fai) to surround and ambush him. The
film has introduced – or rather, re-introduced – another motif to cohere this
interweaving of gangster destinies: the TV signal, broadcasting a test pattern
or (in the very final image) static snow, another variation on visibility and
invisibility, as well as private and public spheres. Kwai realises that the
family has (in a clever ellipse on the film’s part) fled, and left the “dirty
money” behind. But what Kwai can see and understand in a split second can no
longer save him.
It is at this precise point that Trivisa cuts away from its expected bloody finale and reveals the
three-in-one flashback of perfect coincidence in time and space: Yip, Kwai and
Cheuk crossing paths, in close proximity, at the Fengman Restaurant. The very
last move of the film is away from the characters altogether: another TV news
clip documenting the historic handover, and a cut to static expressing the
abrupt, rude end of an era.
This essay was originally commissioned for the 2nd issue of the Hong Kong Academy of the
Performing Arts (HKAPA) Film and TV Journal,
which has yet to produce a 2nd issue after its inaugural appearance in 2017.
REFERENCES
Collective. Admiranda,
no. 11/12, 1996.
Cunliffe, Tom. “Money Makes the World Go Round: Trivisa” (2018). Unpublished.
Durgnat, Raymond and Simmon, Scott. “Six Creeds that
Won the Western”. Film Comment, Vol.
16 No. 5, October 1980, pp. 61-70.
Martin, Adrian. The
Mad Max Movies. Sydney: Currency Press, 2003.
Martin, Adrian. “At the Edge of the Cut: An Encounter
with the Hong Kong Style in Contemporary Action Cinema” (2005). Available as
part of Level 6 bonus PDF, The Place of
the Spectator, at the author’s Patreon campaign: www.patreon.com/adrianmartin.
Martin, Adrian. “What’s Happening? Story, Scene and
Sound in Hou Hsiao-hsien” (2008). Forthcoming in Martin, Certain Dark Corners of Modern Cinema (Contra Mundum Books, 2022).
Martin, Adrian. Mysteries
of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982-2016.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 (hardcover), Perth: University of
Western Australia Publishing, 2020 (paperback).
Masson, Alain. “Le boxeur transfiguré (Raging Bull)”. Positif, no. 241, April 1981, pp. 48-51.
Masson, Alain. Le
récit au cinéma. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1994.
Sun Yi. “Renationalisation and Resistance of Hong Kong
Cinema: Milkyway Image’s Journey to Mainland China”. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 19 No. 2, 2018, pp. 220-233.
Thompson, Kristin. Storytelling
in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique. New
York: Harvard University Press, 1999.
© Adrian Martin August 2018 |
