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No one takes this curatorial job more seriously than Tsui Hark. Consequently, it became the keeper of the flame, the custodian of a mythic Chinese identity. So while Hong Kong’s film industry was on the one hand a slick, sophisticated machine that exported itself internationally, it was also the only agent of Chinese culture that could move freely between overseas Chinese communities.
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The Chinese Nation, so mistreated by its twentieth century custodians, was placed for safekeeping in the hearts and minds of dreaming Chinese all over the world. The twentieth century shattered Chinese identity, forcing overseas Chinese who longed for a collective homeland to look beyond the China of the Communist party to a pre-Revolutionary, pre-Republican China. Those who appreciated Hong Kong’s industry on its own terms were regarded as hick fans, girly sentimentalists or humorless, anti-Hollywood multiculturalists who just didn’t “get” the glib, party hearty film writing that carried the day.īut Hong Kong’s film industry is more than a playground for cultural gatekeepers on vacation. Described as the id to Hollywood’s super-ego, Hong Kong was seen as a land of noble savages making primitivist movies that were valuable only in their inadvertent transgressions or excesses. Looking back at the raves and the cover stories one reads of a Hong Kong film industry that has no independent identity, just a more extreme notch on a dial where Hollywood is the “normal” setting. When it rains it pours and for five years in the mid-1990s Hong Kong cinema was swamped by a flood of critical enthusiasm that managed to be refreshing and patronizing at the same time. January 2, 1951, French Cochinchina (Vietnam)