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Yet none of these films (with the possible exceptions of THE SWORD and MY HEART…) are mere genre exercises—it's more like he's tinkering with his most private attempts at striking that ever-so-precarious, often-elusive balance between high modernism and socially alert realism, experimentation and agitation, while using a few genre tropes and signifiers. This torn, shredded, break-beat poetry of expressive tensions—a sequence of questions and possibly unrelated answers—wasn't to be expected from the beauty of Tam's earlier achievements in television. But it was there—just elusive.

This is why it is important to not overlook Tam’s groundbreaking work in television in the late 1960s and 1970s, before he achieved fame as a filmmaker. Signs of his later genius can be found in television series like Seven Women (1976) and 13 (1977)—milestones of their form.

First and foremost, the Hong Kong New Wave was an expression of a sense of place and culture; a language; an experiment in belonging. And Tam, like so many of his fellow New Wavers, used his apprenticeship in television as research into the sounds and shapes of his city, and most importantly, its mores—for Tam this often meant a glimpse into the lives of women. It’s logical that (more or less) true crime was one of the New Wave's genres of choice—how better to traverse classes and boroughs, sketch a time's likeness? There was ICAC and C.I.D., Dragon, Tiger, Panther, Police Drama, and Operation Manhunt; more generally, realist series like Social Worker, The Underdogs, or Seventeen often told stories of individual collapses, violence, ruptures in the social fabric.

Despite being the brainchild of writers/researchers Ma Tsoi Man, Chung Chai Sum, Ng Ho, and Wong Chee, C.I.D., in its early stages, was defined by Patrick Tam Kar Ming. The famed "Missing Girl" episode of C.I.D. sets the tone: a sensuously surreal prelude with a blood-splattered man running through a downtown crowd, his thoughts flowing stream-of-consciousness like the paranoid free jazz so much New Wave works riff on. From there, a somewhat cozy beginning, with a senior police officer—the elder of the four-man squad at the heart of C.I.D.—being asked by a friend to look for his missing daughter; soon, on a parallel track, the daughter's story enters—how her delinquent boyfriend coaxes her into turning tricks, and how she leaves him for the boss of a rival gang. It all climaxes in a bloodbath between the two gangs, with Pink Floyd blaring and the camera rising high above the carnage, contemplating this picture of downfall children felled. (Might the man in the prelude be a survivor, the film an abstract flashback?).

Save for Tam's final, finely fragmentary C.I.D. masterpiece, "Dawn, Noon, Dusk, Night"—four instances of ordinary abuse, absurd violence, melancholia, loss, and an overall sense of futility—none of his other episodes, "The Robbery," "Two Teddy Girls," or "Wai Chai," comes close to the aesthetic schizophrenia of "Missing Girl.” Above all, it seems to set the general tone for the whole endeavor, to bitchslap the viewers into realizing that all bets are off—even if the story itself is all about upholding rules.

Tam's finest C.I.D. episode, "Two Teddy Girls"—an offhand homage to Lung Kong, Tam's main source of inspiration for his work on this series—is probably his most perfectly-realized piece of realist filmmaking pre-AFTER THIS OUR EXILE. But there's little in Seven Women and 13 as well as his two excellent guest-directing stints on Social Worker ("The Girl Who Disappeared," 1977) and The Underdogs ("The Story of Ah Suen,” 1977), not to mention his feature films from the 1980s, which are so decisively on-the-edge. Nothing rivals this gem's pitch-perfect sense of flow, its seemingly instinctive grasp of every essential detail, its general unease, with sorrow looming.

Tam's last major work for television was 13, a series of explorative plunges into madness, with stories about the disintegration of the ordinary, reality's ruptures. The stories come straight from the pulp fiction arsenal, even if they're based on random news items or literary classics: a religious, challenged girl terrorizes a lodger until he leaves ("A Saintly Girl"); an obsessed photographer stages scenes of violence but feels he has to face death for real ("Suffocation"); a doctor worshipping the corpse of his dead wife grows obsessed with a student who looks exactly like her—it’s like vertigo at the altar of the dead ("Flower Calamity"); and a violated daughter slaughters her rapist father, then plots to fell her mother, the crime’s silent accomplice ("To Murder Father").

At first glance, Tam seems to have achieved an equilibrium between modernism and realism: 13’s glory is its generally detached sense of direction, Tam's cool mastery of the craft. A work like "Suffocation," a vignette on existential angst at its most claustrophobic, is as flawless and economical as it gets. Yet Tam seems to choke, caught in his own maze of despair and delusions, of paranoia as reality: Tam seems to feel a need to rip apart the all-encompassing, vain opaqueness of his own mastery, and like the photographer at the center of “Suffocation,” one guesses Tam doesn't like what he feels either. So, even if Tam claims otherwise, the awkwardness of 13’s tenth and final episode, "Traces of Her"—so many women vanish in Tam's TV-works—seems premeditated, including the spiritually frigid socialist realist solution which finds the girl working as a teacher in the countryside. In contrast to the other episodes, "Traces of Her" doesn't really tell a suspense story: a girl is missing and three people close to her voice their suspicions, if indeed they care to have any. For example her ex-boyfriend—played, significantly, by fellow director Yim Ho, is a brainlimpdickish intellectual who got his kicks from projecting Godard-stills onto her body—couldn't be bothered.

After C.I.D., Tam created and directed the series he's best known for: Seven Women (save for episode five, which was directed by Law Kar). Conceptually speaking, Seven Women is similar to the series in which Tam debuted, Superstar Special (1975): each episode is a showcase for an actress to whose personality each screenplay is tailored.

As a whole, Seven Women is a kind of kaleidoscope of women and styles. Tam, it seems, had a high old time with his innermost cinephile passions: Tam went all-out Godard with episode two, "Miu Kam Fung," until the show turned into an implicit vivisection of his master's tropes, a meditation on the applicability of modernism under Hong Kong’s colonial conditions. Tam played Hitchcock—and/or Chor Yuen, perhaps—with episode six, "Lam Kin Ming," a tight thriller about a woman under the influence of a recording which seems to know every step she takes, not to mention her doubts and feelings, in advance—it is a nasty little parable about patriarchal powers; with episode seven, "Lisa Wang," Tam pays homage to—and hemorrhages—Bergman. Episode four, the shot-in-a-day-on-video digest of August Strindberg’s Fröken Julie "Lee Si Kai," takes on the whole nineteenth-century-Scandinavia-complex, maybe in praise of Lee Sun Fung; episode three, then, "On Sai, Yeung See Tai, May Lee," is the series' summary (wasn't it Godard who said something about beginning-middle-end—but not necessarily in that order?), with three stories about divorce and desire which may or may not comment on each other, all told in different degrees of realism; episode one, finally, "Liu Wing Seong," is the only straightforward realist narrative in this whole jolly mess—and the only one (except for, maybe the "Yeung See Tai" segment) in which the woman gets what she desires: both her men. Mark the arc: from happiness and progressive enlightenment, a life of possibilities, to madness and damnation, an existence in a paranoia-loop.

What is quite remarkable about this construction is the notion that realism alone seems capable of speaking sensibly about emancipation, while modernism, in the now classical sense, can only talk about suppression, subjugation, and sublimation; at best, the modernism of Godard et.al. can make an ass of men and a wise-ass of women while realism, at its best, can talk about the way things could and should be. Significantly, Tam's work in cinema can be described as a quest for realism: from the formidably formalist prelude THE SWORD to AFTER THIS OUR EXILE’s realism as reconsidered/reinvented through the experience of modernism.

Olaf Moeller. Colognian. Writes about and presents films.