Patrick Tam is a legendary figure in Hong Kong cinema, and one of the least known. Before his return to the big screen in 2006 with After This Our Exile, he made seven films, between 1980 and 1989. Before that, he had made almost thirty TV movies. But the latter, until recently, have only rarely been seen in the West. And the situation regarding the first seven films is a desperate one: lost, re-cut, censored reels, in need of restoration, or quite simply, that they have never been subtitled into a Western language.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Tam was the subject of some of the fiercest discussions between Hong Kong film critics. His TV movies and films, despite not enjoying enormous success, provided training material and a model for generations of directors to come. Without Tam, Hong Kong cinema, including the elements much-loved by Western festivals, would not be the same. The fact that the majority of his films are hard to find on the home video market has certainly limited their accessibility to a wider audience. But this is one of the reasons behind retrospectives: the hope of plugging gaps and correcting mistaken historical notions. This year, the FEFF wishes to celebrate the new film of a maestro, while at the same time exploring one of the richest and most interesting chapters of Hong Kong cinema: the New Wave, the foundations for which were laid in the mid-Seventies, by television productions which were innovative, bold and, still today, astounding.
The TV movies that we have uncovered include the series C.I.D. (1976), five detective episodes (one of which was literally forgotten) dedicated to four Hong Kong officers (one is played by a very young Simon Yam). The opening sequence of the first episode - a plane sequence of a bloody youngster running through the streets of Hong Kong - is enough to give the idea of how innovative this TV movie was, and of how shocking it would have been for the viewing public at the time. The realism in the films of Kirk Wong and Alex K.M. Cheung (even before Ringo Lam) was born here. And Tam is not afraid to tackle the most uncomfortable and shocking issues. The six episodes of Seven Women (1976) were the definitive consecration of the director: let us at least remember the Liu Wing-seong (which caused a scandal due to its uninhibited representations of new sexual freedoms), the second Miu Kam-fung (an homage to Godard and a ferocious and ironic representation of the consumerist bourgeoisie) and last but not least, Lisa Wang, tragic and Bergman-esque. We have only uncovered four episodes of the series 13 (1977), and this is a crying shame: it is noir in tone and often dripping with black humour. But there are also astounding episodes, beyond classification in any genre, such as Suffocation (with a young Chow Yun-fat, addicted to sadomasochistic rituals, a cross between Antonioni and Ferreri) and the Bresson-esque To Murder Father. Another two gems are the individual episodes of the series The Underdogs (The Story Of Ah Suen) and Social Worker (The Girl Who Disappeared): in these, we discover a Tam who is less formalistic and full of love for solitary, defeated characters.
In the light of these TV movies, the director’s cinematic output assumes a different form: on the one hand, it is easy to pick out elements of continuity which re-emerge after many years (the last two TV movies mentioned, for example, are the direct forefathers of After This Our Exile), while on the other, those clichés (experimentalism, formalism), which are so often used to describe his work, can be seen in their context. Tam has always attempted to integrate the reasoning of form with that of the story, and would get upset when production circumstances forced him to begin filming - as has almost always been the case in Hong Kong - with screenplays that had yet to be fully developed. An exceptional connoisseur of all aspects of the cinema - from editing to set designs, from music to photography - Tam would often take on genres (the wuxiapian: The Sword; the thriller: Love Massacre; the comedy: Cherie; film noir: My Heart Is That Eternal Rose), often turning them completely on their heads (Nomad, Final Victory). He created unclassifiable works that were almost always commercially unviable, whilst never compromising his perfectionism. And seeing his TV movies and his films together for the very first time allows us to understand the unique path he trod in the history of cinema from Hong Kong, both solitary and isolated, but also deeply immersed in the culture of one of the most fascinating cinemas in the world.
Alberto Pezzotta