Coda to a coda: on Ip Man and the Velvet Prison

I have been asked to reflect on my paper 'Return of the Dragon: Handover, Hong Kong Cinema and Chinese Ethno-Nationalism', to bring it up to date for publication. The paper deals with the spectral presence of Bruce Lee in post-1997 Hong Kong martial arts films. My argument is that the interest in Ip Man and Chen Zhen, etc., in the wake of the handover of Hong Kong to China was part of a work of ideological 'bonding': the success of Bruce Lee stood in for the success of Hong Kong; his teacher, Ip Man, thereby 'proves' the value of 'China' in being able to produce such a shining light as a son. The paper is, as mentioned, here. It concludes with a discussion of the antagonisms and animosities on the ground and in the public domain between Hong Kongers and mainland Chinese. But, given the time that has elapsed since my first draft of this paper, and the emergence of new Ip Man films, which treat the character differently, I have now added this coda to the conclusion (which was already a coda!):

Of course, antagonisms are never permanent, and history moves in ways that are not always recorded in ways that register in the pulse of daily life. Soon, the relations between Hong Kong and China will change, and in ways that may obfuscate, complicate and even diminish any recent sense of recent or current mainlander and Hong Konger difference. This is perhaps registered in film too. The recent Ip Man: The Final Fight (Herman Yau, 2013), for instance, does not obviously allegorize the trinity Ip Man-Hong Kong-China. Rather, it aims for a kind of 'realism' in its downbeat representation of Ip Man as a mortal being, like the rest of us, combined with a clear nostalgia for Hong Kong of the 1940s and 50s. Bruce Lee appears briefly, as a hotshot ex-student, but Ip Man is unmoved by his former student's television and film success. This emphasizes features such as Ip Man's modesty and the domestic day-to-day focus of his life.

Indeed, the difference between the 'real man' and the 'public image' is arguably the major 'theme' that Ip Man: The Final Fight explores. The film is considerably less (allegorically) 'about' something to do with 'China' than it is a (psychological) biography organised by exploring the difference between the myth and the man. In this thematic exploration there are moments when the film flips from its nostalgic 'realism' into animated sequences. These take place when Ip Man's street fights are witnessed by a journalist and subsequently written up as newspaper stories. The drama of the fights is exaggerated in the journalistic narrative, and the film switches to animation as we enter into the fantasy creation of the author.

However, although in this way the film thematizes the media production of myth, the psychological focus of Ip Man: The Final Fight not only makes the film resistant to an allegorical reading but also depoliticizes it. The critical reception of The Final Fight included voices noting that if the director had wanted to recreate Hong Kong life in the past, then the political situation from the late 1940s to the political unrest of the 1960s should not have been so heavily elided. Of course, political unrest does feature in the film, but the character of Ip Man himself is made to relate to conflict in the mode of a wise elder of the community. But this means that, very much like the other Ips that the series of Ip Man films has thrown forth, Herman Yau's latest Ip is fundamentally interested in the community, but not macro-politics or even the wider world. The film still needs Bruce Lee, even if the character Ip Man doesn't: we see Lee performing on Hong Kong television early in the film, and Ip seems unmoved. When Lee takes him out to dinner and attempts to wow him with his money, he remains uninterested.

Even less interested in Bruce Lee is Wong Kar-wai's film featuring and Ip Man character, The Grandmaster (2013). This film is less interested in Bruce Lee – who does not feature in any clear register – perhaps because it is less interested in Ip Man himself. That is to say, the film is less interested in biography than it is in its own aesthetic, and its own aesthetic has much more in common with the cinematic traditions that Lee and post-Bruce Lee action cinema moved away from.

However, what is interesting is that Wong's film, whilst moving away from 'realism' and whilst focusing so centrally on constructing the beauty of each scene, each sequence, even each frame, nevertheless seems to open itself up deliberately for an allegorical and even a political reading. It does this by placing Ip Man not as the sole figure in the centre of the film, but as a player in a movement of relations whose centre is the quest to produce a centre, to occupy it, and to create stability. In the film, Ip Man is called into a role as an ambassador in a project to unite Northern and Southern schools of kung fu under one authority and one institution. And this is clearly very easily allegorizable as the nationalist project: how to unite such a vast and complex heterogeneity of spaces and places into one.

Read as a very knowing national allegory, however, The Grandmaster seems to offer a very subversive message: the nation cannot easily be united or stabilized. There is always a threat and a likelihood of factions emerging, divisions, and their fragmenting in relation to other parts of the institution, and even scattering away. Indeed, as Ip says in an early discussion with Gong Yutian (the master who is seeking to extend his institution up and down and across all of China), he would not want to be limited or organised in anything he does by nationalistic thinking; the world is bigger than China.

 The world is bigger, and so is the film. The Grandmaster deals with the fragmenting, scattering and transformation of its initial nationalising dream. It is a global or transnational film, which aims at, refers to and draws intertextually on a world wider than the borders of China. But still, even if the film seems to escape any direct reference to or reliance on Bruce Lee, and even if its focus is exquisite visual beauty and heroic tragedy rather than 'reality', its world is also arguably quite contained comfortably within the velvet prison.