Monday, July 14, 2008

July's Screening: The Killer


This month, Raechy is bringing us John Woo’s classic Hong Kong action film The Killer (1989, 104 minutes.) Like Hitchcock, Woo often focuses on Man’s dual nature in his films. However, while Hitchcock constructed scenes with a meticulous mise en scene and traditional (for the most part) Hollywood editing, Woo incorporates amore modern shooting style that throws rules of editing, like the 180° rule, out the window in service of Woo’s poetic vision. In his book Planet Hong Kong, the eminent David Bordwell finds that in a scene between assassin, John (Chow Yun-Fat), detective, Li (Danny Lee) and (recently blinded) singer, Jenny (Sally Yeh), Woo uses framing and jump cutting to emphasize the dual nature of John and Li: “They are in the same situation and they’ve got the same feeling and they’ve got the same positions. It’s like looking in a mirror.” (Bordwell) Woo emphasizes throughout the film that killer and cop, John and Li, are both men with integrity, but simply on opposite sides of the law. This story becomes as hyperbolic as it sounds: naturally there’s some betrayal by the respective allies of both John and Li, and of course the criminal and the law bringer come to respect each other more than they’d ever thought possible. It is Woo’s visual splendor and bold telling that makes The Killer an epic story, rather than one with a predictable plot twist.

The Killer brought Woo overseas success, and introduced American audiences to a kind of Hong Kong action film that left behind campy Kung Fu of the 70s. Nevertheless, Woo’s films are hardly realistic, Bordwell aptly uses the term ‘hyperstylized’ to describe Woo’s shooting style. Renowned Hong Kong based film critic Li Cheuk-to suggested Woo’s over-the-top characters and visuals that drew American viewers to his films. In the early 90s he remarked: “A lot of times we cannot take the passionate action films of John Woo, but Western genre film fans love them precisely because such uninhibited wildness is almost impossible to find in Western genre films.” (Bordwell) Woo opened the floodgates for an American cinema of ‘uninhibited wildness’ and you can see his visual and narrative style reflected in the films of the Wachowski Brothers, Robert Rodriguez, and most blatantly, Quentin Tarantino.

photo from loveandbullets.com

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