79.
Trinh Minh-ha, "Who Is Speaking: Of Nation, Community, and First Person Inter-view," in Laura Pietropado and Ada Testaferri, eds., Feminisms in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
URBAN CINEMA AND THE CULTURAL IDENTITY OF HONG KONG
Leung Ping-kwan
In discussing Hong Kong culture, critics are often in discord in their various attempts to define the cultural identity of Hong Kong. Whereas some insist that Hong Kong has developed a unique form of culture that is different from Chinese culture, others deny the existence of a separate identity and merely recognize it as one part of Chinese culture not unlike other regional cultures, all sharing the overall national characteristics. Among those trying to draw the dividing line, some point to 1949, the year the People's Republic of China was established and a generation of exiles began to immigrate from China to settle in Hong Kong. This was regarded as the beginning of the crucial break between a socialist China and a capitalist colonial city. There are also others who see a more important break emerging in the years between 1966 and 1976 during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution in China, especially when the extreme leftists in Hong Kong, under the influence of those in China, turned social unrest and demonstrations into organized violent actions.
This chapter tries to approach the complexities of Hong Kong's cultural identity through a series of films. It attempts to establish that one main characteristic that distinguishes Hong Kong from mainland China is shown in its formation of urban culture since 1949, especially during the 1960s, and aims to scrutinize films from the 1950s to the 1990s, which focus on the city of Hong Kong so as to examine how cultural workers define and rethink their cultural identity through the construction of various narratives about and images of their city. Besides its differences from China in political and social features, Hong Kong also developed a cultural imagination and artistic forms to represent itself, which are both similar to and different from those in mainland China.
In its discussion of the relationship between the city and cinema in Hong Kong, this chapter is trying to extend and supplement previous discussion of Chinese urban cinema.1 I understand that there are recent film theorists who, in the discussion of the relationship between cinema and the city, see cinema as simulacral rather than representational.2 Although I agree with the discus-sion that cinema reproduces a virtual space, in the following discussion on how cinema expresses or even shapes the views of the city, I do not necessar-ily dismiss the representational aspect in Hong Kong cinema because I rec-ognize that it does play an important part in the formation of Hong Kong's specific culture as well.
THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY IN THE CINEMA OF THE 1950s
One of the main features we find in the mainstream literature and cinema in the 1930s in China, especially in those within the leftist ideology, is a clear-cut dichotomy between the city and the country. Through the very rigid distinction between the former, which represents temptation, corruption, vice, and cunning manipulation, and the latter, which represents innocence, upright-ness, and fraternity, there is shown a strong preference for the country over the city.
One filmic representation of this binary opposition in Chinese cinema can be found in the opening scene of the impressive work Street Angel (Malu Tianshi, 1937) by the talented director Yuan Muzhi. After a juxtaposition of a series of shots that depicts the various aspects of life in the city of Shanghai, the credit sequence ends with a track shot panning from the top of the Shanghai and Hongkong Bank building down to the underground lives of the poor. The mise-en-scene here is used with the montage to show a contrast between high and low, rich and poor, so as to impose a criticism.
The literature and cinema in Hong Kong in the 1950s continued with such binary opposition in their attempts to depict the city, as in works such as Space Is Gold discussed later, but this opposition has also undergone reex-amination and modification in works to follow. What is significantly shown in the group of films made in Hong Kong in that period is that the opposition between city and country, other than representing the ideological split pro-posed by leftist critics since the 1930s, also highlights an actual political choice imposed on the people between staying in Hong Kong and returning to mainland China. The choice between the city and the country has become the first crucial issue in defining the cultural identity of Hong Kong.
The multiepisodic film Kaleidoscope (Renhai wanhuatong, 1950) produced by the South China Film Worker's Union, especially the first episode SpaceIs Gold (Cunjin chitu), offers a typical example of a negative depiction of Hong Kong's urban space with particular emphasis on its poor living condi-tions and the avarice and selfishness of the residents in a capitalist society.
Directed by Lee Tit and written by Ng Kei-man, Space Is Gold opens with a shot panning from a window hanging with laundry to the landlady saying her prayers. The camera focuses on her to bring out her relationships with the tenants, who include dockyard workers, hawkers, a "social butterfly," and other unemployed characters. The camera follows the landlady as she asks tenants for an advance of their rent, revealing her greed. On the other hand, with the mise-en-scene, the director also emphasizes how small and narrow the flats are. Such a crowded living environment, with many lower class people living together creating conflicts, was a scene commonly seen in the films of the 1960s and 1970s. But Space Is Gold, filmed in the 1950s, was suggesting a specific political solution to deal with the adverse living condi-tions.
In the movie, Cheung Ying, the dockyard worker, has a friend who has just come from "up there" (meaning the mainland). He is the one who recommends the products from up there, saying how inexpensive and good they are. He also reappears at the end of the movie to propose solutions to the damage caused by the landlady who cunningly rents the dockyard worker's room to another single woman when he is not around. His solution is not to suggest cooperation and tolerance, concepts usually advocated in later Canton-ese movies, but to advocate that the ills lie in the society and that everybody should move back up there and spare themselves from the expensive rent here in Hong Kong.
In Kaleidoscope, urban space is always represented negatively, as in the opening scene of the second episode, Blaming God and Man (Yuantian youren). The shot of a high-rise hospital building exposes it to be a resting place for only the rich and powerful. In Space Is Gold, the mise-en-scene and structural compositions tell of the crowded environment, as in the scene when we see a close-up of Leung Sing-por eavesdropping on the landlady and the single woman. Another example is the scene when people are conversing under the hanging laundry. These all emphasize the unfavorable living condi-tions of Hong Kong, thereby denying the urban space as a space fit for human survival. Shots as such attempt to focus on the lack of a sense of belonging for people living in Hong Kong, implying a denial of a Hong Kong cultural identity independent from that of China.
However, this is not necessarily the popular attitude. We found different depictions of the opposition between the city and the country in films adapted from popular media such as radio stories. A Hymn to Mother (Cimu Song, 1956), directed by Chu Kea with a script by Ng Dan adapted from a story by popular radio idol Lee Ngo and originally broadcast by the Macau radio station, tells of the toils of a mother in bringing up her child. The film positively advocates traditional Chinese morals and its values of filial piety, a very popular theme at the time. But under such a convention, the film stands out in its indirect depiction of the urbanization and modernization of Hong Kong in the 1950s. The transition from the first half to the second half of the story reveals the differences between the country and the city, helping us see the director's interpretation of rural and urban cultures.
The film opens with the wedding banquet of Sheung Do-sang (played by Ng Cho-fan) and Chuk Wai-ching (played by Pak Suet-sin). We see the village tyrant Shu Ken (played by Lee Peng-fei), an uninvited guest, breaking into the wedding banquet. As someone who has always been attracted by Chuk's beauty, he becomes a thorn in the couple's side, harassing them continuously. Finally, he plots against Sheung by indirectly employing him to deliver goods. On the way, a hired killer murders Sheung's companion, then accuses Sheung of committing the murder. Sheung is thrown into prison, where he dies after being tortured. Shu Ken uses his influence and money to bribe the village chief so that Chuk cannot voice her grievances. To protect her unborn baby, she is forced into an agreement to marry Shu after the baby is born. On a stormy night Chuk runs away with her newborn baby to hide in another village.
The tragic tone in the first half of the film changes into a mood of relief in the second half. The first and second halves are separated by a shot panning over Hong Kong harbor. Although the mother in the movie indicates that she has moved to the city to seek a better living and educational environment for her son, there is no mention of Hong Kong as the city. The shot of the harbor and following shots showing old residential blocks, fresh vegetable markets, and the Hongkong Bank's front entrance hint that the city is in fact Hong Kong.
The first home where the mother and son reside also houses a family that enjoys playing mah jong all day long. The background soundtrack is com-posed of a variety of noises from hawkers and children playing and fighting, indicating the city as a place of hustle and bustle. After several attempts to move to a decent neighborhood (following the traditional story of Mencius' mother moving three times to find a better environment for the education of her son), they succeed at last despite the prejudices of the residents. The director suggests that there is higher mobility in the city, as well as more choices and privacy. Eventually, the mother is introduced by an old friend to a clerical job. The arrangement shows that there are greater upward mobility and job opportunities in the city than in the country. More important, the city provides a better chance for more comprehensive education for the future generation. Human relationships, not strained in a patriarchal and authoritative ambience, are shown as more diverse and sophisticated. The film contains two scenes of courtship: The first takes place in the aforementioned wedding banquet when the unwelcome village villain forces his way in and reveals his lust for Chuk, which leads to his plot to harm Chuk's husband. The second scene occurs at a party in the city, when Chuk's friend, Tarn Kwun-wai (played by Lee Ngo, the original writer of the radio script) reveals hesitantly his love for Chuk. She rejects both men, but Tarn transforms his passion into friendship, and provides help and support for Chuk and her son.
The greatest difference between the city and the country as highlighted here is the rule of law. In the village, when accused of murder, Sheung shouts, "Is there no law and justice in this world?" He is told there is nothing he can do because even the village chief must obey the tyrant. In the latter half of the film, even though the villain Shu Ken has become a rich merchant, and again uses his power, a gun this time, to terrorize the mother and her son, he cannot get his way as he did when he was in the village. The family lodges a complaint with the police, and they arrive at the scene almost immediately. It is their belief that all illegal acts will be punished under the law. Chuk teaches her son to avenge his father's death, but the film does not preach the message of a tooth for a tooth. On the other hand, by showing Shu Ken's gun backfir-ing and then revealing his crimes with a montage of the newspaper headlines, the film proclaims that indeed justice is possible in the urban city with its legal system and modern forms of communication.
Unlike Space Is Gold, in this film the city is represented as a lawful, just, rational, and dynamic place where diverse attitudes could be accepted. This Utopian version again is balanced by yet another type of representation of the city in the 1950s, which can be seen in Mok Hong-si's "Broker Lai" series, adapted from Ko Hung's (Sam So's) newspaper serial novel The Diary of Broker Lai (Jingila riji). This third type of film does not portray city life as bad as in Space Is Gold, which shows only its evil and greed, nor as ideal as in A Hymn to Mother, which emphasizes only the rational and orderly aspects. It proceeds as a satirical comedy to represent funny and sympathetic individ-uals who seek survival in the commercial world.
Ko Hung's serial novel follows the tradition of Huang Guliu's The Story of the Shrimp Ball (Xiaqiu chuan, 1947), which depicts the life of lower-class people in Hong Kong but without the latter's political inclination and critical approach. It has a stronger local flavor that focuses on the period of the 1950s as Hong Kong enters into the early phases of industrialization and commer-cialization. The main character, Broker Lai, from a new profession emerging in this transitional period, has links with various social classes and directly gains or loses in the changing society. For instance, in the third film of the series, entitled Mis-setting the Love Trap (Baicuo Mihunzhen, 1950), which features Lai and another broker Fei-tin Nam, Lai introduces himself to the big boss as "someone who gets involved with everything, from real estate, prop-erty, to all kinds of commodities including cars and clothes, as long as profits can be made." Broker Lai is of course a product of the 1950s, a time when enormous capital moved south after the Communist takeover in 1949 and when the Korean War broke out leading to the trade embargo imposed by the United States during the Cold War. The broker is neither the big boss nor a man from the grassroots. He belongs to the "sandwich-class" created by trade and commerce. By means of the Broker Lai character, the film takes us to hotels, clubs, teahouses, big mansions, squatter areas, and other urban locations.
Mis-setting the Love Trap shows the problems of cramped living spaces, but it does not provide a political solution. On the contrary, it only observes and comments practically within the situation of Hong Kong. In the opening scene, Broker Lai's third uncle and aunt come to Hong Kong from China, but they seem to cause rather than to solve problems for their relatives. They occupy Lai's home, creating a conflict between Lai and his wife, who is also competing with him to be a broker. At the end, despite Lai's efforts to play up to the boss by helping him buy a car and a house, and even introducing a girl to him, Lai fails to get anything. He even loses his own home.
The image and behavior of Broker Lai may lead critics to regard him as a typical product of capitalism and free enterprise.3 However, I would rather argue that in Mis-setting the Love Trap, the writer and director reveal many composite and compromising aspects of a transitional society. In the opening sequence, Broker Lai regards himself as the traditional "master of the house," but he becomes a helpless figure when confronted by his wife who is finan-cially independent and much more sophisticated as a broker. She rivals him and beats him in a business deal. Eventually she moves away from him to stay in a hotel, forcing him to face reality and compromise. Money plays a significant role in the human relationships of the movie. Lai has to pay the bills every time he loses to his wife. Money also affects human relationships: When Lai eavesdrops on his wife as she is negotiating a business deal, he misunderstands and thinks she is being unfaithful to him. However, this also shows paradoxically that Lai does not view money as the most important and ultimate solution to any problem. He still maintains old-fashioned values, such as tolerance toward family members, and he tries to preserve his mar-riage. Even when Kitty Lam, another woman, jokingly asks him to stay in her house for the night, Lai sleeps on the sofa at his own house. The film starts and ends with a pan-shot of a "home sweet home" sign hanging on the wall of the house. Although the characters are already in the early phases of capitalism, they still emphasize the importance of kinship. They are greedy and cunning only in small ways; they are not the devil incarnate. They try to cheat both sides for a small profit but end up losing everything. The film does not reprimand them heavily; it chides them gently, laughs at them occasion-ally, and mildly disapproves of their methods.
Though the backdrop of the small cafe in the film is a Coca-Cola advertise-ment with the slogan "tasty and refreshing," in reality, the life of Fei-tin Nam is quite the contrary. He sits there for three hours paying thirty cents and has to borrow from others from time to time. Lai appears to drive a car with a beautiful woman in tow, visiting all the wonderful sites in the city. But in fact, he is only test driving a car for his boss, and when he runs into his wife, he has to hide and finally pays a heavy price to have his problem solved.
In Mis-setting the Love Trap, there's a sequence at a club with a "singsong girl" who performs a song called "Wonderful, Glamorous Hong Kong," accompanied by postcard shots of Hong Kong scenery. This could be seen as a good example of the cinematic representation of Hong Kong in the 1950s, yet it is shown with a certain sense of ambivalence. The lyrics and the images show a Repulse Bay full of swimmers, the spacious and quiet Castle Peak Temple, Aberdeen with pretty lights on fishing boats, the merry-go-round at Moon Garden Playground, and the Central District's beautiful neon lights. All of these shots seem to represent a glamorous modern city. However, the lyrics and images also reveal the singer as a "lonely and solitary wanderer" singing about a "showgirl" who is "so sad when the show ends." This episode, like the film, displays the bright images of urbanization, yet at the same time provides an audio self-critique with a stereotypical image of a pitiable song-girl. It seems to reveal a shadowy dark side under the glamour of commerce. Yet any severe criticisms such as those dictated in Space Is Gold are deferred. Here we find an ambivalent attitude toward the city, between a hymn and a condemnation enmeshed in a self-mocking comedy full of irony.
DESIGNING WESTERN AND CHINESE IDENTITY IN THE CINEMA OF THE 1960s
In Mis-setting the Love Trap, Lai's girlfriend, Kitty Lam, gives herself an English name and lies in bed reading the Readers' Digest in English. Foreign influence was extremely strong in the 1960s. Western movies, TV series, books, and magazines were very popular; Western pop music particularly reached a climax in the mid-1960s with the visit of bands such as The Beatles. Various students of Hong Kong culture since the 1980s have commented on the development of the 1960s and 1970s, seeing that as extremely crucial to the formation of local culture.4 We can see that not only was the city's outlook changing, but the lifestyle and the way people thought about themselves were changing as well.
Matthew Turner, though not the first to draw attention to the importance of the 1960s in the development of Hong Kong culture, was one of the most thorough in his analysis. As the main curator of the exhibition DesigningIdentity: Hong Kong 60s at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 1994, he made the observation that after the unrest of 1967, the government had consciously organized events such as the Hong Kong Festival, pop parties, fashion shows, the Miss Hong Kong Pageant and so on, to design a modern, westernized image for the people of Hong Kong, in order to make the residents of the colony identify less with its mother country.5 His thesis is a sophisticated examination of the relations between culture and politics, which contains criticisms of the "designs," and certainly does not encourage political sepa-ratism as some critics tried to accuse him of in a later period of changing political atmosphere.6 His thesis works out well, especially in the fields of graphic design and visual arts. However, when we turn to literature and films, the question becomes more complex. The colonial government's policy and actual promotion of its design of cultural identity did not necessarily lead to a smooth acceptance without queries by the common people, nor to easy adop-tion in the art forms. In literature and film, this examination of cultural identification usually has to go through complicated processes, and the sophis-ticated art forms do not allow superficial endorsement.
Two movies from the 1960s, Teddy Girls (Feinu zhengzhuan, 1969) and A Purple Stormy Night (Zise fengyuye, 1968) provide different perspectives for further investigation into the issue of mixed cultures in films about the city.
The shots of cityscapes in Teddy Girls, directed by Lung Kong, mainly focus on scenes in bars and cafes, otherwise they are crowded party scenes. It is at these locations that the girls are being harassed and forced to fight their battles. They are finally sent to the modern Rehabilitation Institute, which again seems to fail to serve its function, and the girls eventually have to get back to the city to take their revenge. The story is said to be adapted from a foreign movie. In an idealistic way, the scriptwriters have included a humani-tarian and open-minded chief of the institute (played by Tsang Kong), and these renderings further remove the film from local problems and indigenous situations. The director seems to present a more westernized version of life in Hong Kong during the 1960s.
One of the scenes in Teddy Girls that seems to show the westernized aspects of youth culture is the fashion show at the Girls' Rehabilitation Institute. Josephine Siao, Sit Kar-yin, Yip Ching, Lydia Shum, and Mang Lei play the bad girls of the institute. They learn fashion design, and in this scene they act as models, exhibiting their own works. The M.C. describes their dresses as being influenced by the latest fashions in the West. At the show, all the parents are fascinated, despite criticism by a guest regarding the girls as "teddy girls" (feinu). An enthusiastic parent comes to their defense by explaining how Western fashion is popular so as to reinforce its value. This scene could very well serve as an illustration to Turner's thesis: the teenagers' enthusiasm in fashion as a response to the Government's promotions of the Fashion Festival and the Hong Kong Festival demonstrates unconditional identification with the West.
However, this is not the whole picture. In the next scene, the camera moves backstage to show the well-groomed models now change back into the uni-forms of the institute. And it is in this scene backstage that someone informs Josephine Siao of the death of her mother, who has committed suicide after being deceived by her lover. The film tries to move beyond the glamorous westernized fashion world to reveal a different layer of local life.
If we see Teddy Girls as a movie showing a Western identity that at times reveals deeper layers of local flavor, then A Purple Stormy Night directed by Chor Yuen is an interesting contrast because although it tries hard to show us a distinctive Chinese identity, the director's approach unconsciously reveals other hidden and heterogeneous aspects.
A Purple Stormy Night can be seen as a declaration to preserve the tradi-tional folk style. Man-sing is a young composer whose greatest wish is to bring Chinese music to the world, but his music has never been sold, which makes him doubt if it is of any value. However, he has luck on his side. His mentor, whose daughter is engaged to him, recognizes his talent. In addition, on a stormy night, he has the good fortune of running into the star of the Purple Swallow Dance Group, Purple Swallow herself. On the recommenda-tion of the director, the boss of the group agrees to play his music. He becomes famous overnight, but problems arise after his good fortune. Too many compliments and social functions keep him from his mentor and his fiancee. In the creation of art, he is then shown to pursue too obsessively the Western concepts of beauty and abstraction, giving up the passionate and moving Chinese music. He writes a banal "Four Seasons Love Song." He is so busy socializing that he misses his last chance to see his mentor on his deathbed. Finally, he repents and leaves the stage, gives up his chance to go abroad, and settles down by marrying his mentor's daughter. At the last episode of the film, Purple Swallow sends a card from abroad. We find out that two years have passed, and we see that the mentor's daughter has given birth to a child. Man-sing has framed his mentor's teaching and hung it on the wall. He has chosen the "right" path: to be a loyal disciple, a faithful and moral husband, and a national artist who claims to promote Chinese aesthet-ics. The brave and beautiful Purple Swallow, who has made the wise decision to leave him, is dedicated solely to her art and is also complimented for her decency and her virtue.
Paradoxically, this declaration of traditional Chinese values is written in a very westernized style. From the very beginning of the film, we see that the city space displayed is a urban night scene with many Christmas lights and gifts at the shop windows. Man-sing takes his watch to the pawn shop to buy a gift for his fiancee, but his fiancee buys him a watch chain, a plot with details obviously lifted out from one of O'Henry's short stories. Then Man-sing gives his fianceea kiss, a very Western form of expressing affection indeed! Later in the film, strangely enough, the "Four Seasons Love Song," which has been criticized as banal and vulgar, is played in its entirety, exceeding in length and elaboration the musical A Purple Stormy Night, which is composed in Chinese style with the politically correct theme of mutual support among the poor that is supposed to be the focus of the film. We can also see that the character Purple Swallow, who stands for the urban lifestyle, is linked with success and draws all the attention. In the movies, there is a shot of the city landscape and then one of Man-sing's letters of compliments, as if to link the city with the modern lifestyle and success. This is also the world Purple Swallow inhabits. She stands for the fancy world of Western music and dance. At the end, though Man-sing chooses the mentor's daughter for his wife, Purple Swallow actually is still the real focus of the film. Even in the last shot, we see Purple Swallow dancing out from the card she sends, in a kind of dream-like atmosphere, indicating that the magic of the movie is still very much with her. The contradiction in this film is shown in subtle ways. On the one hand, it denies success in an urban setting, but on the other hand, it also consciously creates it. It denies the West both in moral and artistic terms, but it sings its praises in the most unexpected ways. It pays lip service to poverty and brotherhood, and it tries to affirm the Chinese ethnic role and cultural identity, but these themes are not what the film elaborates on. The two films Teddy Girls and A Purple Stormy Night, with their compli-cated layers of cultural references, seem to illustrate the fact that it is impos-sible to understand the city of Hong Kong and its cultural identity by means of solely Western or Chinese models.
THE POLITICS OF PLACE: THE FORMATION OF HONG KONG URBAN CINEMA
Since TVB started broadcasting in November 1967 and eventually established itself as one of the leading popular media in Hong Kong, it has assisted in the promotion of a Cantonese pop culture. Early TV drama series such as Hotel (Kuangchao, 1976) with an urban background won great popularity. It at-tracted the audiences of the cinema house, and gradually replaced the Canton-ese cinema that was already in decline. The TV drama series also produced popular theme songs, which helped to raise the status and popularity of Cantonese pop music. And this in turn attracted more young singers to "Canto Pop," creating a brand new trend. A new generation of singers continued to enrich the style of Canto Pop and developed other urban forms and themes. But the greatest achievement of TV at that time was to have nourished a generation of postwar-born, local-raised, foreign-trained film directors. After acquiring sufficient skills at TV stations such as TVB (Hong Kong Television Broadcast Ltd.), RTHK (Radio Television Hong Kong), and CTV (Commer-cial Television), these directors began to produce their first movies around 1979 to 1980, and were dubbed the Hong Kong New Wave Directors.7 They secured their training in the television stations and learned their trade in shooting documentaries, news features, police stories, and other drama series with social concern. These experiences had provided them with a more sensi-tive awareness of the social situation of Hong Kong in the 1970s, and when they began to make their first movies, they produced works that were very different from those studio productions in the 1960s, (e.g., the martial arts films, comedies and musicals from Shaw Brothers). Their films differ in their venture into new genres and new topics, in their use of on-location shooting, amateur actors and actresses or a new generation of young actors and actresses trained by television stations, and in their keen awareness of a developing urban environment.
Unlike previous generations of Chinese and foreign directors, these young directors represented Hong Kong with a different attitude and passion. Their concerns and practices in the representation of the city and the culture of Hong Kong filled in a gap that had not been examined in the thesis of Turner. Yet Turner's thesis is useful in understanding the efforts of the colonial government to design Hong Kong's identity, efforts that the new directors eventually try to question. The best examples can be found in the documen-taries about Hong Kong. An article in the exhibition catalogue of DesigningIdentity: Hong Kong 60s examines in detail the Hong Kong Today series produced by the Government Information Services in the 1960s that were made by British directors trained in Britain in documentary production and sent to the colonies to shoot the local situations. The finished documentaries were later released in Britain.8 One such example is an episode called Report to the Gods (Xiangshen binggao) featuring the famous Cantonese comedian Leung Sing-por as the Kitchen God. According to Chinese myth, at the end of every year the Kitchen God would examine the living conditions of the people and report back to the gods in heaven. The documentary reveals Hong Kong to be a place going through the process of modernization (as a contrast to traditional Chinese cities, which are considered relatively backward), where all work extremely hard and feed themselves well. Therefore, the message reported back to the gods, which is the conclusion of the documentary, is that all is well. In fact this documentary was made around 1967, a time of great turmoil in Hong Kong when riots broke out, but nothing adverse was shown. Everywhere, peace and stability reigned. In this case the director is not unlike the Kitchen God, who acts as the messenger between the rulers and the ruled, but he reports only what is good. In the documentary, Leung's dialogue is dubbed into English, and no Cantonese or Chinese is used in the narrative at all,9 indicating clearly the true objective as well as the target audience of this kind of documentary film.
With this in mind and using it as a base for comparison, we can appreciate how the generation of local New Wave directors broke from such mentality and practice, and refused to take on the identity designed by the government. I would like to cite Allen Fong's documentary drama Song of Yuen Tsau Chai {Yuanzhouzi zhi ge, 1977) made for the RTHK series Under the Lion Rock (Shizi shanxia), as an example for comparison. The very fact that Allen Fong made his documentary-drama for the same government television station that had previously produced Report to the Gods will help us see how the treat-ment and perspective in the two works are obviously different. Because Fong was filming for the government's TV channel, he had to present certain messages usually expected from this kind of production. Here the original assignment was to provide certain explanations or propaganda for the govern-ment' s community development program, or in more specific terms, to advo-cate a policy of resettling boat people on shore. But the director adopted a more complex approach in tackling the issue. He developed a more touching drama by bringing in the boat people's family conflicts, the quarrels among couples, the concern of the husband who has a passion for gambling but no skills to work on shore, and the sufferings of the wife who works hard to bring up the children but faces the brutal and uncaring treatment of her unreliable husband. Most significant is the way the focus is slowly transferred to the wife: The final scene sees her washing her children's clothes in frustra-tion under the tap on the street, irritated by the tourists' cameras, which treat her as yet another exotic spectacle. This becomes the director's unique state-ment of irony and sympathy. The film ends with a frozen shot showing the wife's expression of helplessness and fear. It is a pose captured by the cameras of foreign tourists who happen to come upon her, and it is also the ending shot of the documentary-drama to protest on behalf of this silenced and marginalized victim.
Although the documentary might have a certain assignment to fulfill, it does not become a propaganda tool of the government by simply advocating for the merits of community development. On the contrary, it is presented from the angle of the underprivileged, expresses the need for social change, detects problems from an everyday situation, and portrays local characters with psychological understanding. If the British director of Report to the Gods used the camera as a propaganda tool to report only good news back to the colonizers and the rest of the world, here Fong used the camera critically to reveal issues that were deliberately concealed by the previous generation of directors and to examine at the end in a self-reflexive way the documentary camera's potential danger of generalizing and marginalizing the "other." The director criticizes the intruding shot for its hunt of the exotic, scrutinizing self-consciously the camera's limitations in representing reality.
It is this kind of self-awareness of the city and its representation that could help us map out a gradual and complicated formation of urban culture in the 1960s and 1970s, and significantly contribute to an examination of the cultural identity of Hong Kong, which would otherwise maintain very close links to Chinese culture in many other aspects. Discussions have shown that various facets of Hong Kong culture, especially its literature, have begun all kinds of experiments at the portrayal of urban life and culture, before those attempts in films. From the end of the 1960s to the mid-1970s, one witnessed the emer-gence of new kinds of poetry, prose and novels, as well as new works from other fields of popular culture, all engaging in the exploration of the new urban environment and the change of attitudes toward values, ethics, customs, and lifestyle. As in pop music and television production, new models in literature emerged to be very different from former ones. In themes and genres as well as in the methods of expression, one sensed a more conscious consid-eration of the local community, and a shift in artistic presentation. Some of the major changes in perspectives as well as in presentations shown in the literature emerging in the mid-1970s are similar to those in the new wave cinema that followed.10
The clear-cut dichotomy between the city and the country as shown in Street Angel as discussed earlier, is often used to show binary opposition, to contrast the high with the low, the rich with the poor, and eventually to impose a criticism. The literature and cinema in Hong Kong in the 1950s continued with such binary opposition, as in works such as Space Is Gold, but this opposition has undergone new examination and modification in later works. One feature of the much-discussed new literature emerging in the 1970s in Hong Kong, as exemplified in works of fiction such as Intersection (Duidao, 1975), My City (Wocheng, 1975) and Paper Cutouts (Jianzhi, 1977), demonstrates similarities in their attempts to focus on the emergence of the city and its cultural identity. Though very different as individual works,11 they share in particular the use of multiperspective narrative to explore (rather than binary opposition to condemn) the ever-changing reality of the city. These shifted modes of representation are again seen in the new cinema that emerged in the late 1970s, and they form some of the main characteristics that distin-guish them from later examples of urban cinema that have appeared in main-land China since the mid-1980s.
The new directors surfacing in the 1970s also employed double or multiple perspectives in their narratives to examine Hong Kong's urban space. Tsui Hark's Dangerous Encounter of the First Kinds (Diyi leixing weixian, 1980), for example, develops one line of narrative around the rebellious and anarchic teenage girl (played by Lam Chun-kei) and her gang; and another around a group of retired military men who smuggle arms into the territory. Moving from indoors to outdoors, from the crowded urban scene to the deserted graveyard in the suburban area, the director juxtaposes the daily random domestic violence with the organized crime of arms smuggling and the organ-ized violence it elicits. He presents Hong Kong as a crowded, violent, no-way-out urban space. At the end of the film, the news clips of Hong Kong's unrest in the late 1960s do provide the audience with the political and social contexts for a better understanding of the anger and anxieties expressed in the film and the raw yet daring efforts of the director to define the urban space of Hong Kong.
Allen Fong, the director who had gained recognition through his previous documentary work for the government station RTHK, continued to make films that are engaged with the social reality of Hong Kong. His debut, Father and Son (Fu zi qing, 1981), though less angry and biting than Tsui Hark's early works, is nonetheless equally innovative in different, if not more subtle, ways. It is a film made in the tradition of the Cantonese family drama, at which previous directors excelled in movies such as The Great Devotion (Kelian tianxia fumu xin, 1961) by Chor Yuen, and Parents' Hearts (Fumuxin, 1955) by Chun Kim. Fong paid homage to his predecessors while distinguishing himself by focusing on and identifying with the younger generation (the directors from the 1950s would always tell the story from the perspective of the loving parents). The film begins with the death of the father and the return of the son to Hong Kong after graduation. He reflects upon his father's life through a series of flashbacks. Via the juxtaposition of the past and the present, current events and memories, reality and fantasy, the film also con-trasts the differences in values, attitudes, and perspectives between the first generation of refugees living in squatters who burdened themselves with materialistic concerns, and the second generation of local-born Hong Kong Chinese growing up in resettlement housing estates who ventured abroad to study for more idealistic pursuits. To Fong's credit, he does not simplify this into a story of progress.
The multiple perspectives help to illustrate the fact that the son's advanced study is very much dependent on the feudalistic actions of the patriarchal father in sacrificing the career of the daughter to help the son, and this is the reason why the son can never be rid of the sense of guilt and a mixture of love and hate he felt toward his father. A scene that contains these complexi-ties is one in which the son fantasizes the father as a figure from the anti-Japanese comics, Uncle Choi, being tied up to face the firing squads and he himself as the executioner. This, when read in isolation, could show the son's renunciation of the father's values, but in the context of the film, it reveals the son's worry that he has hurt his father's feelings, and this crucial scene leads to the son's compromise in accepting the father's arrangements. The son's memory of his father is narrated with a mixture of affection and criticism, just as the urban space of the 1950s and 1970s is depicted in the film not to show a self-congratulatory attitude toward progress but rather to reveal a nostalgic though critical attitude toward the past, which breeds the present.
The Secret (Feng jie, 1979) directed by Ann Hui is particularly worth investigating as an example of the kind of urban cinema that has taken shape since the late 1970s in Hong Kong. In the very beginning of the film, the subtitle on screen indicates not only that the story is based on a double homicide that took place at Dragon Tiger Hill in 1970 (this use of news items is an approach Hui learned in her apprenticeship at documentary production in television stations such as TVB and RTHK) but also that it is going to provide an interpretation different from the police's official version. This other side of the story is viewed and reviewed from the perspective of the girl next door. Apart from adding to the film's suspense, it also foregrounds the con-flicts between the individual's perspective, which is not contained smoothly within the social consensus, and that of the world. This naturally follows the attempts in modern cinema, such as Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), to give up the omnipotent viewpoint as taken by previous film narratives, and places emphasis on the individual's perspective and the limited and relative facets of reality presented.
The film begins with a traditional ritual of sublimating the dead by burning paper figures. When two paper figures fall down in flames,a shot shows the sweeping of fallen leaves in the old Western District, and then the camera moves indoors to a modern woman, Lee Jan (played by Teresa Chui), who participates in a traditional Chinese ritual to present tea to her grandmother on her birthday. When the phone rings, the shot then cuts to two new charac-ters Yuen See-chek and Lin Ching-ming, who are at different locations, before showing Lee letting the cup slip in panic. In creating suspense, the camera also links different, unrelated urban spaces.
Western District of Hong Kong plays an important role in the movie. This was not only a place where refugees in transit lived in crowded conditions in the 1940s and the 1950s and the backdrop for romance or drama of designed identity, it is also an area that has developed its own history and taken on a more distinguished outlook. It is therefore also a place that many choose to live in and develop as their own community, and to observe its traditional customs and rituals. It is a place that a younger generation finds oppressive and therefore demands for its morals and ethics to be reexaminated.
Ann Hui has used a modern film language to reexamine this mixed urban space. The Western District, as represented in The Secret, includes, on the one hand, all the traditional customs and superstitions, old values, and morals upheld in the neighborhood by the older generation without much doubt, yet on the other hand, it also includes modern university students, medical doctors in training, modern-style parties, and their evolving lifestyles. Lee Jan's trag-edy results from her plight in which she finds herself trapped between the tradition of old customs and the promiscuity of her modern boyfriend. She becomes pregnant but her boyfriend has no intention of marrying her. Her body, like the Western District where the old and new coexist, is the battlefield where various forces of the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, the violent and the rational, struggle for power. All these different forces cannot be harmonized, just as the divergent perspectives and fragmented narratives refuse to be easily unified, but it is exactly through their conflicts that the complex hybrid nature of the urban space and the cultural identity of Hong Kong are revealed. Starting with The Secret and other works by the new directors in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, such as The Imp (Xiong bang, 1981) by Dennis Yu, Nomad {Liehuo qingchun, 1982) by Patrick Tarn, Lonely Fifteen {Liang meizai, 1982) by David Lai, Coolie Killer (Shachuxiying pan, 1982) by Terry Tong, and Ah Ying (Banbian ren, 1983) by Allen Fong, we see the formation of a Hong Kong urban cinema with distinctive features and outlooks.
THE ALLEGORICAL PLACE OR THE COMMON PLACE? UTOPIA OR DYSTOPIA? THE POSTMODERN OR THE POSTCOLONIAL?
In the period between the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984 and the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, some of the anxiety and uncertainty was expressed in films which treat the city allegorically, and try to project the mixed and undefined sentiments into a tangible narrative form. The Boat People (Touben nuhai), originally produced by the leftist film company The Sil-Metropole Organization Ltd. in the early 1980s in compli-ance with the Chinese foreign policy at that time to condemn the Hanoi government, eventually metamorphosed in the hands of director Ann Hui and script writer Qiu Gangjian into a film showing the pathos of people living under a totalitarian government. When it was released in November 1982, it was unexpectedly well received by the general public and film critics as an intended allegory of the future condition in Hong Kong after 1997. The film was read allegorically. Exactly because it had hit upon the fragile nerve of Hong Kong at that historical moment, it aroused a lot of responses and became a box-office success, much to the embarrassment of the film company that had produced it.
Among Hong Kong directors, Tsui Hark is the one most obsessed with and skillful in making films into political allegories. In films he produced or directed, in his retelling of old tales as well as in his play with mixed genres, he always weaves in indirect political commentaries as well as references to contemporary issues.
One of the classic examples that render Hong Kong as an allegorical place is the film The Wicked City (Yaoshou Dushi, 1992) produced by Tsui Hark and directed by Mak Tai-wai. Adapted from a Japanese comic book, the film shifts its narrative to bring Hong Kong to the central stage as soon as it develops. With the night scene of Hong Kong on the screen, the voiceover informs us that because 1997 is approaching, all kinds of monsters have gathered in Hong Kong. We follow the young police investigator (played by Leon Lai) through his investigation of the Rapters, who intend to control mankind through a drug called Happiness, and his desperate fight against them. In the process he encounters the girl he used to love but who is now controlled by the monsters, and a colleague who struggles with his ambivalent half-human/half-monster condition. Regrettably, this has not contributed to complicate the search for identity, nor to problematize the dichotomy between man and monster. Rather the dichotomy is used to generate successive dra-matic scenes of visual spectacles, including a climactic combat in which the people are fighting the monsters hiding in their headquarters in the city. The audience burst out laughing when they see that the gigantic Bank of China building in the Central District is the monsters' home base!
Tsui Hark is skillful in channeling the general anxiety of the people in Hong Kong into his films and in manipulating the audiences' responses. His allegorical city is rich in visual spectacles, and the successive eye-opening visual effects evoke emotional appeal, yet as the drama unfolds, we also see that it is weak in creating more complicated characters or providing perspec-tives that could exceed the framework of binary opposition. His sensitivities toward the domination of time as represented in the fight against the clock, is in need of further development. All the visual and audio effects work toward an effort to build up the allegory of the monster city. This is of course a far cry from the rational and civilized city envisioned by 1950s films such as A Hymn to Mother. In the spectacular dramas orchestrated by Tsui Hark, we see the city as dystopian rather than Utopian.
Yet this negative depiction of the "wicked city" is again very different from those demonstrated in critical realist films from the 1950s such as Kaleidoscope. Not only does it not focus on practical issues such as poor living conditions or trace the problems to the ills of capitalism, but also it deviates obviously from the mimetic mode of representation upheld by those early films. Even contemporary films such as Cageman (Longmin, 1992) that intend to follow this mimetic mode and pay homage to the tradition of Cantonese cinema such as Kaleidoscope and especially The House of 72 Tenants (Quishier jia fangke, 1973) in depicting the crowded living conditions of Hong Kong with a humanistic attitude that affirms the uprightness and the sense of brotherhood shared among the lower class, have to add an allegorical figure of a Daoist and an ambiguous concluding scene in the zoo, as if it is also aware of the limitations of realistic representation and tries to break away from it.
For other efforts that try to break away from the monolithic representation of urban space, we should look at Rouge (Yanzhi Kou, 1987), a film that follows the journey of a prostitute who returns from the underworld to search for her lover whom she parted in death fifty years ago, so as to contrast the present of the 1980s with a past of the 1930s and highlight changes in urban spaces as well as sentiments. Within the plot of a romance story, it also contains elaborations of details of the old brothels in the Western District of Hong Kong, and has great success in creating a nostalgic trend in the popular culture of Hong Kong in the 1980s.12 In one of the key scenes, the present-day newspaper editor encounters the girl in the tram car, and after finding out she is a ghost coming back from the past, he tries to run away and cries out in fear, "Don't frighten me! I used to fail in History in my school exams!" Later, through the perspective of the female ghost looking out the window of a passing tram car, we follow the director's use of dissolves to see the old brothels and eateries replaced by present-day supermarkets and kindergartens. The film language constructs a version of history and tries presumably to relate to a particular identity of the city. Nostalgia, of course, does not point to history but the disappearance of history, yet it seems to be a popular sentiment that captures the feeling of Hong Kong people who at that moment of uncertainty and anxiety are desperate in their search for an identity.
Juxtaposing the past with the present is one way of including more than one perspective to examine the present moment and location we dwell in, as well as the cultural identity we are afraid to lose or are trying to construct. We finda more comic kind of juxtaposition in 92 Legendary La Rose Noire (92 Heimeigui dui heimeigui, 1992), a film that started a new mode of films in its playful engagement with the past. Actors and characters from the films of the 1960s, especially the popular series of Black Rose, featuring Chan Po Chu, are the objects which the contemporary nonsensical (wu lei tou) comedy refers to with in-jokes and fantastic variations. The urban space is more self-revealingly a constructed one, which is very closely associated with the experience of cinema viewing, as well as the perspectives the community developed under influences from experiencing the popular movie.
If we identify the urban space in Rouge with reference to the Western district in Hong Kong, we could only identify the urban space of 92 Legen-dary La Rose Noire and He Ain't Heavy, He's my Father (Xin nanxiongnandi, 1993) with urban space in Hong Kong cinema. These films play on old movies, and they do not claim to represent realistically any district of Hong Kong. The Spring Breeze Street road sign in He Ain't Heavy, He's my Father is only a souvenir collected in the father's chunk of old curios. Though the film is also situated in a ghetto community with crowded living conditions as shown in a lot of films from the 1950s, it plays with the old models to develop new varieties. The spaces in these films are hyper-real and simulated spaces. In these two films, the time of the 1960s and the space of Hong Kong are occupied by characters from old Cantonese movies, film actors and actresses as well as historical, social, and political figures. The films, while paying homage to the old models, do not necessarily follow their messages and their mode of representation. These two films tease the simple righteous didacti-cism as well as the proclaimed realism in the old models, and respond to them in postmodern playfulness.
This kind of playfulness, and the diversity and multiplicity we find in other Hong Kong cinema, could easily lead us into defining its similarities to a postmodern culture. Yet in detailed examination, we also see that in spite of the similarities, there are obvious differences as well. Wong Kar-wai, the director whose aesthetics of pastiche, fragmentation, and nonlinear narratives have earned him the label of a postmodernist, can be taken as an example to further examine these duel characteristics. Here I would like to focus espe-cially on the film Chungking Express (Conqing senlin, 1994) which, in com-parison to his other films, has a more direct dialogue with the urban space of contemporary Hong Kong,
The opening chase scene shot with hand-held camera and shown in stop-motion effects with syncotated blurs highlights the paradox of the speedy motion captured with the still-like quality of static shots. In this scene the first policeman tells us that an unknown girl he now passes by on the street will be the one he falls in love with 24 hours later for no special reason at all. The postmodern rendering of urban space, as well as the affective pattern in human relationship happening within this space, are full of chance elements, random-ness; they are fragmentary, unpredictable, out of any rational speculation. There is only the surface, and one better not look for any significance in depth. The girl wears a wig, dark glasses, and raincoat in preparation for the unforeseen misfortune that she will encounter. The policeman has met his share earlier. Facing the fact that his girlfriend has left him, he makes silly phone calls, eats tins of pineapples, which also have their expiration dates, and takes up jogging to get rid of surplus water in him to prevent it from turning into tears. The two stories in the film may be related or not; the director edited the film in such a way that fragmentary shots from the second story already appear while the first story is still going on. They could be different stories happening to the same person, or they could be variations of the same story. The first policeman and the second policeman, this air hostess and that air hostess, this girl with the wig and that girl with the wig all seem to be interchangeable. This kind of emotional configuration should be appre-ciated on the smooth surface, but would resist entanglement that demands the recognition of depth. It seems to be difficult to talk about a stable or consistent subjectivity. In such a postmodern text, the different urban and social sites, as well as the various characters passing through, all seem to be interchangeable.
Yet within these kinds of postmodern outlooks, we also sense a counter-force at work, especially in its efforts to draw our attention to specific urban spaces in Hong Kong. The title of the film is already a paradox: ChungkingExpress is a postmodern pastiche of Chungking Mansion in Tsimshatsui and a fast-food place called Midnight Express in the Lan Kwai Fong area in Central. The pastiche of the names of places in the title, like the pastiche of the two unrelated stories in the film, helps to blur geographical divisions and discredit referentiality. Yet the use of the actual names of these two places, as well as the sensitive lingering of the camera and the attention to details in art direction, also redirect our attention to the specific urban sites in Hong Kong. Chungking Mansion was originally a habitat for a large number of Indian residents famous for ethnic food and fabric, which eventually grew into a place famous for inexpensive lodgings for visiting backpackers. Lan Kwai Fong, on the other hand, has developed from a quiet residential area and flower market into a yuppie district with a variety of international restaurants and bars frequented by young people and expatriates. The area immediately next to Lan Kwai Fong, an old residential and market area, has also grown popular, with new Western bars and eateries since the building of the escalator going up hill in the early 1990s. In Chungking Express, shots from the apartment (said to be the apartment where the cinematographer Christopher Doyle resides) looking out the window onto the passengers on the escalator, reveal to us an up-to-then totally new spectacle of the city. The film is of course not an actual reproduction of the urban space in Hong Kong, but neither does it present a universal or postmodern space with all culturally specific features leveled out.
Instead of passively recording the changes and trying in vain to be the "true reflection" of the city, cinema suggests new angles and (in)sights of the city, and eventually changes people's perspectives of their city. New urban cinema from Hong Kong in the 1990s such as Chungking Express is engaged with a city of changing sentiments as well as architectural outlooks, and it tries to develop a form that could address these complexities rather than simplify them. The film does not create a postmodern city with no "differ-ences"; it creates a world that includes different values and attitudes (even in its ways of dealing with emotions and relationships) that is full of conflicts and inconsistencies. The film itself is created within the commercial film industry of Hong Kong, and it in no way pretends to transcend these limita-tions. To go back to the film language, the stop-motion effects used in the beginning to capture the speed of the chase as well as to still it, to depict graphically yet to blur, to specify and to generalize, to entertain while delaying the pleasure respond to these complexities and do not eliminate them.
To look at Hong Kong cinema within a spectrum of diverse representations of urban space, we find different efforts from one extreme of allegorical space to the other of realist space, and in between the search for identity in nostalgic, hyperreal, and simulated space. In recent years directors have also tried to return to a sense of place with a renewed awareness of the relationship between cinema and the city, making particular references to the issue of cultural identity.
Derek Yee Tung Shing's inconspicuous C'est la vie, Mon Cherie (Xinbuliaoqing, 1993) is a remake of an older tear-jerking romance Love Without End (Buliaoqing, 1961) produced by the Shaw Brothers Studio to make interesting attempts to look at the configuration of urban space in relation to the cultural identity of Hong Kong in a contemporary context. The film begins with an obvious homage to the old story by having the successful singer Tracy (played by actress Lau Kar-ling) singing the old theme song. Yet what follows is that the singer's boyfriend, Kit (played by Lau Ching-wan), who is com-mercially less successful but has greater faith in independent music, escapes from this glamorous world so lavishly elaborated in the previous Shaw Broth-ers production. This film moves to construct alternative urban spaces that would have been rendered invisible in the old romance. Kit moves into the Temple Street area in Yaumatei and comes into contact with an assortment of people and music.
In the film, various kinds of music from different urban spaces are linked to the exploration of cultural identity. The theme song from the old film Love Without End is a typical example of popular Mandarin songs used in the film. On Temple Street we see outdoor performances of Cantonese street songs, and in pubs we see a smaller group of musicians interested in jazz and alternative music. These various forms of music are indicative of the various layers of cultural formation of Hong Kong. Looking back at the development of popular songs in Hong Kong from the 1950s to the 1970s, we remember how the trends have shifted from the vulgar Cantonese songs and elegant Cantonese operas to Mandarin songs from Taiwan, to various kinds of western music from the United States and Great Britain.
What we notice is that these musical cultures from different urban spaces in the film are not necessarily isolated or compartmentalized. Rather, there could be crossover, with conflicts as well as communications going on. The young musician Kit is someone who crosses over. He moves from the affluent world of success in the industry of popular music to discover energy and strength in the street music performed by the family of Min (played by Anita Yuen), the girl he meets in the less glamorous part of town. There are yet other kinds of crossovers as demonstrated by Cheung Po-chai (played by Chin Pui), the uncle of Min, who is originally a jazz musician and now earns his living by mixing with street performers to play tunes from Cantonese operas, or with Philippine musicians to entertain in nightclubs. The uncle, as an elder and more mature musician, again challenges the self-enclosed territories in music as well as in culture. As the narrative unfolds, the old story line of the ill-fated love of a girl with a fatal illness somehow gives way to, or is balanced by, a story about music.
The young musician impressed by the people he encounters in ignored social spaces, such as the optimistic street singer Min and her mature and open-minded uncle who does not mind adjusting his jazz music to a more general audience, reflects on his previous prejudices and begins to accept and appreciate other forms of manners and music, and even suggests collaborating on a new song with the street singer.
At the end of the film, the death of Min from a fatal illness is not depicted in tear-jerking drama as in the old version of Love Without End. Instead, it is replaced by a scene of Kit searching for Min's favorite street food, intercuts with her mother performing on the street singing a Cantonese song, which rises from the usual street humor to an elegant lyric full of compassion that brings consolation. The interesting aspect of this film is that in an adaptation of the romance of the 1960s it has renewed familiar tourist sites such as Temple Street and cultural signs and shows a sophisticated understanding and rendering of the multiple layers of Hong Kong culture.
This noticeable characteristic of Hong Kong cinema in the 1990s to move from sensational allegory to practical examination of the present situation, has won popular support from the audience. Ann Hui, after a series of unsuccess-ful commercial attempts, returned with Summer Snow (Nuren shishi, 1995), a film well received for its comic treatment of a story about a common house-wife's fight against all kinds of misfortune that happened to her. The protag-onist Ah Ngo (played by the versatile actress Josephine Siao Fong-fong), struggles to make ends meet as she takes care of a family of three and works in a very demanding job at the same time. Things turn worse as she has to take care of her father-in-law, old Mr. Sun (played by the late Roy Chiao), after her mother-in-law passes away. The father-in-law is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and has become quite impossible to live with. Yet Ah Ngo survives with her quick wit and sense of humor, quite unlike the tragic heroine Tou Ngo in the famous traditional Chinese drama The Injustice Done to Tou Ngo (Tou Ngo Yuan by Yuan dramatist Kuan Hanxing), who is wrongly accused of murder and could only pray for the fall of snow from heaven in June to prove her innocence. The summer snow in the title of Hui's film, refers to a scene when she and her father-in-law pass through old trees with flower petals falling like snow, which brings a moment of serenity and relaxation that is rare in this life of hardship.
Knowing that she could not rely on heaven above, Ah Ngo, like most Hong Kong people, handles a sudden crisis with daily domestic wisdom. The film begins with a scene of Ah Ngo at the fish stall in the newly developed satellite town Tai Po where her family resides. She waits for a fish to die so as to get a cheaper price, and then when the hawker refuses to give a discount for the fish, which is still struggling, she secretly hits it on the head while the hawker's back is turned. When faced with great crisis in the family, we later discover, she also relies on various tricks and flexible manners to deal with it. She pretends to fight the Japanese Army with her father-in-law when he has his sudden attacks of war fantasy. Her ways of dealing with difficulties in life, rely more on malleable tactics in daily situations than on a whole set of strategies.
The urban space constructed in the film highlights this kind of daily negotiation. The mixed and transitional characteristics of Hong Kong architec-ture are emphasized. The family lives in a vernacular building (Tong lau) built before the war, which has a shop on the ground floor and residences from the second floor upward. Their parents-in-law live in the building next to them, so it is convenient to take care of each other. On the other hand, the two apartments are not linked together, and one has to pass through the shop downstairs to get to the other building, so there remains a certain degree of privacy for both families. The art director of the film,Yank Wong, has done a good job in showing these vernacular buildings as negotiations between the old and the new, the Chinese and Western ways of life.
The newly developed satellite town of Tai Po is an appropriate site used here to suggest these characteristics of cultural negotiations. There is a scene in the film in which Ah Ngo is alone on the roof drying laundry. She stops to think about her beloved mother-in-law who just passed away and reflects on her present hardship in life in a moment of grief. The camera focuses on her in the foreground, with the new high rise buildings in Tai Po at the back-ground. The film frames Ah Ngo in such an urban space to present an identity that is caught in the middle of various forces: She is a traditional middle-aged housewife in her forties, tending an irrational patriarchal figure on the one hand and a teenage son growing up with youth problems on the other; she is also a modern career women working for an old-fashioned male boss and competing against the threat of younger female colleagues with physical charm and computer skills. This film in no way presents a postmodern Hong Kong; rather, it projects characters on a newly developed and transitional urban space with all kinds of problems that they encounter in daily life and must handle with their street wisdom and daily tactics of negotiation.
It would be difficult to claim any conscious postcolonial awareness in films produced before and after 1997, especially because Hong Kong cinema has always been commercial in nature with less emphasis on scripts with social concern. During the economic recession that occurred after the handover, there have been, of course, even more limitations posed on individual film production. Yet among films that have been produced in recent years, espe-cially with dramas in urban settings, we do see new attempts not quite unlike Ann Hui's in exploring the marginal and alternative spaces of Hong Kong, such as Stanley Kwan's Hold me Tight (Yue Kuaile yue duoluo, 1998) which is set in the newly developed area of Tin Shui-wai in New Territories; Fruit Chan's Made in Hong Kong {Xianggang zhizao, 1998) which presents an antiheroic drama at the poor housing estate districts, where a lot of the new gangster movies with youth violence are set; and Yu Lik-wai's Love Will Tear Us Apart (Tian shang renjian, 1999) which claims to tell the stories of a new breed of "nomads" in post 1997 Hong Kong, who wander through the underworld of prostitution and violence in Mongkok. Quite unlike films with big production budgets made to uphold the myth of national unification (such as The Opium War, Yapian zhanzheng, 1997, directed by Xie Jin) or to create a nostalgic romance of the good old days of the elite in a colonial past (as in City of Glass, Boli zhi cheng, 1998, directed by Mabel Cheung), the afore-mentioned films reexamine the less glamorous urban spaces with new ques-tions that challenge the past representation of various minority communities: the gay community, the youth in the poor housing estates, the prostitutes from the north. In their new explorations of the underrepresented urban spaces and communities and in their subversion to old myths and stereotypes, they are also redefining the cultural identity of a city and its people that is changing.
The films by Fruit Chan and Yu Lik-wai mentioned earlier, could be said to be loosely related to a reemergence of a small independent film movement in Hong Kong that involves institutions such as the Zeman Media Centre of the Hong Kong Art Centre, "Ying-e-chi" formed by a group of indepen-
dent film and video artists to promote and distribute their works, and alterna-tive screening venues such as the Broadway Cinematheque and Cine Arts. That the films by Fruit Chan and Yu Lik-wai have succeeded in obtaining financial support and participation from famous screen figures such as Andy Lau or Tony Leung, indicates a new kind of collaboration and crossover of talents and audiences. This will not only change the nature and scopes of the urban cinema in Hong Kong, it may eventually change peoples' attitudes in viewing the cinema and the city of Hong Kong itself.
NOTES
1.
See, for example, Fredric Jameson, "Remapping Taipei," in New Chinese Cinema, Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 117-150; and Chris Berry, "Chinese Urban Cinema: Hyper-realism Versus Absurdism," East West Film Journal, 8. 2 (July 1994): 76-87.
2.
See David B. Clarke, ed., The Cinematic City, (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).
3.
Film critic Sek Kei in "The City and the Village," Traditions of Hong Kong Comedy (The 10th HKIFF catalogue), writes: "Broker Lai and the smart Fei-tin Nam . . . completely removes any country characteristics and contradictions between country and city, and totally emerges into the market rationale of open competition, no matter win or lose, they will not retreat."
4.
For more discussion on Hong Kong culture, interested readers should consult the following publications: Lo Kwai-cheung, Mass Culture and Hong Kong Literature (Dazhong wenhua yu Xianggang wenxue), Hong Kong: Youth Literary Book Store, 1990; Stephen Sze and Ng Chun-hung, Studies on Popular Culture in Hong Kong (Xianggang puyiwenhua) (Hong Kong: Joint Publications, 1993); Ye Si, Hong Kong Culture (Xianggang wenhua), Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1995; Elizabeth Sinn, ed., Hong Kong Society and Culture (Xiangang shehui yu wenhua) (Hong Kong: Centre for Asian Studies, 1995), Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora (Xie zuo jiaguo yiwai), (Hong Kong: Oxford, 1996).
5.
Matthew Turner and Irene Ngan, eds., Hong Kong Sixties: Designing Identity, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1995, 13-34.
6.
See the series of attacks launched in the summer of 1996, especially: Lam Yuen, "Hong Kong People Ruling Hong Kong? Who is Hong Kong People? -The Cultural Identity of Hong Kong People" (Gangren zhi gang, shei shi gangren:tan xiangangren di wenhua shenfen), Ming Pao Monthly (August 1996).
7.
See Law Kar, "The Shaolin Temple of the New Hong Kong Cinema," and James Kung and Zhang Yueai's "Hong Kong Cinema and Television in the 1970s: A Perspective," in HKIFF catalogue, A Study of Hong Kong Cinema in the Seventies, Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1984. More recent discussion could be found in the new Hong Kong International Film Festival catalogue on a retrospective of Hong Kong New Wave: Hong Kong New Wave: Twenty Years After (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1999).
8.
Turner and Ngan, Hong Kong Sixties, 92-98.
9.
Turner and Ngan, Hong Kong Sixties, 92-98.
10.
I have tentatively tried to map out this study in an article: "Urban Culture: Space, Identity and the Politics of Representation," in The Metropolis: Visual Research into Contemporary Hong Kong 1990-1996 (Jiuqi yingqing), Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1996, 36-41.
11.
See Elaine Yee Lin Ho, "Women in Exile: Gender and Community in Hong Kong Fiction," The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XXIX. 1 (1994): 29-46; and Louis Dung, "The Empirical Experience and the Textual Experience of the City: A Reading of The Drunkard, My City and Paper Cutouts," (Chingshi di xianshi jingyen yu wenben jingyen: yuedu jiutu, wocheng yu jianzhi) in Transit, 2 (May 1995): 15-22.
12.
For further discussion on Rouge and nostalgia, see Ye Si, Hong Kong Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1995), 38-46; and Rey Chow, "A Souvenir of Love," in Ethics after Idealism, Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 133-148.
REWRITING HISTORY: HONG KONG NOSTALGIA CINEMA AND ITS SOCIAL PRACTICE
Natalia Chan Sui Hung
Hong Kong 1990: a place caught in postcolonial nostalgia, the simulacra of late capitalist technological advancement, the terror of Communist takeover in barely seven years, the continual influx of unwanted refugees, the continual outflow of prized citizens.1
I begin this chapter by invoking Rey Chow's description of Hong Kong's social scene in the transitional period in order to explicate its situation of postcoloniality. Chow's statement, to a certain extent, brings out the political as well as the social dimensions of Hong Kong since 1984 when the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed. Postcolonial nostalgia, here, can be interpreted in two aspects. First, it refers to the social phenomenon that has arisen since the mid-1980s. Nostalgia, in its various forms of practice (e.g., filmmaking, fashion, popular music, literary, and historical writings) has ini-tiated a significant trend in which the social feelings of discontent, depression, and yearning for the past has been found. Second, it relates to such cultural issues as the 1997 handover, rewriting history, cultural identities, and collec-tive memory of the past that are dominant in both literary and cultural artifact in the transitional period. At the same time, the statement of "the simulacra of late capitalist technological advancement" as claimed by Chow, opens the discussion of the postmodernity of Hong Kong culture in the 1980s and the 1990s. On the other hand, it also relates the social phenomenon of nostalgia to the advancement of technology and late capitalism. As a form of popular culture, how does filmmaking respond to the historical situation of the 1997 issue in its cinematic representation? As a commercial product, what kind of social reception can be traced from the masses? As a subject of cultural
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference on Hong Kong Cinema: History, Arts, and Identity, 1900-1997, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October 1997. I would like to thank Nancy Abelmann, James Hay, and Poshek Fu for their valuable comments.
studies, how can scholars and film critics open the possibilities of their readings? As a cinematic world of imagination, how can nostalgia cinema rewrite the history and collective memory of the people of Hong Kong? As a representation of the historical past, how are nostalgia films different from historical films? These are the crucial issues covered in this chapter. My discursive analysis, in fact, is an attempt to contextualize Hong Kong nostal-gia cinema in its sociopolitical setting.
CONTEXTUALIZING HONG KONG'S POSTCOLONIALITY AND THE 1997 ISSUE
On December, 19 1984, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Margaret Thatcher, and the Prime Minister of the People's Republic of China, Zhao Ziyang, acting on behalf of their respec-tive governments, signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration on the Future of Hong Kong. The agreement declared that China would restore sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997. To maintain its prosperity and stability, China decided, according to the declaration, to establish Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region. Using the name Hong Kong, China, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) is directly under the authority of the Central People's Government of the PRC. However, the HKSAR enjoys a high degree of autonomy, and its economic systems remain unchanged. At the same time, the National People's Congress of China will set up a Basic Law of the HKSAR, and it will be remain unchanged for fifty years. In addition, during the transitional period between the date of the entry into force of this Joint Declaration and June 30, 1997, the British government was responsible for the administration of Hong Kong with the objective of main-taining and preserving its economic prosperity and social stability. These are the main issues of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on the future of Hong Kong.2 It is this agreement that opens a new historical page of the city on the one hand, and on the other, throws a cloud over the future of the colony. The Joint Declaration is significant in many aspects. First, it legitimatizes China's takeover of Hong Kong and brings out the 1997 issue, which concerns the future development of the colony. Second, it starts the transitional period during which political conflicts and arguments have occurred between the two powers, Britain and China. Third, it signifies various kinds of social sentiment, political anxiety, and cultural response of the people of Hong Kong in the period before 1997 and beyond. Fourth, it formulates a new Hong Kong-China economic and cultural relationship. Fifth, it is an anomaly in postcolo-niality in which the decolonization of Hong Kong will not be completed in the form of independence. The 1997 issue, in this context, cannot be inter-preted simply as a political event. It not only symbolizes the change of political culture of Hong Kong after 150 years of colonial rule but frames the sociocultural transformation of the city in the transitional period that began in the mid-1980s.
The process of modernization of Hong Kong started in the 1950s. It turned the island from a fishing village into a metropolis. The 1950s are the turning point of Hong Kong's historical development. It was not only the golden age of industrial growth of the city but also of modernization, urbanization, and commercialization. It is undeniable that the modernization of Hong Kong is a result of the British colonial rule, yet, China also played a significant role. When the Japanese occupation ended in 1945, Hong Kong was left a hollow and broken shell. How to recover Hong Kong's prewar stability became one of the major political and economic concerns of the British. In 1949, when the People's Republic of China was set up in the mainland, a large number of refugees fled to the island to escape the terror of communist rule and to search for political security and economic prosperity. The newcomers, who included capitalists, industrialists, businessmen, professionals, and skilled workers, bringing with them new ideas, new technologies, new capital, and a new labor force from their hometown, built the base of Hong Kong's modernization.3 As a result, the industrial development of the colony, especially textile and electronic manufacturing, was accelerated. However, serious riots in the 1950s and the 1960s, and the trade barriers in the late 1950s4 against the thriving textile industry exposed Hong Kong's inadequacies, both in administration and in economic development. The British government initiated a series of new policies in the 1970s to help Hong Kong adapt to the situation and to secure Britain's economic interests in the Far East. Not only had the British government carried out a series of legislative reforms and opened more politi-cal chance to the Chinese elite, it also initiated different kinds of economic reform, urban planning, and social and cultural activities to divert attention from social discontent. Indeed, the 1970s were booming days of social con-struction and economic transformation. The Hong Kong government launched the Ten Years Housing Scheme to provide housing for lower-class people, improved the facilities of transportation by constructing double-deck high-ways, tunnels, and the mass transit rail system, and attacked official corruption by establishing the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in
1974. Under the doctrine of laissez-faire and "social noninterventionism" of the colonial policy, in the meanwhile, Hong Kong enjoyed freedom of speech and trade. Consequently, it led to the economic prosperity of Hong Kong in the 1980s and the 1990s, and turned the colony into an international center for finance and commerce.
Hong Kong's rise as an international financial center is a consequence of the economic growth dating back to the 1970s and 1980s. In the early 1970s, the industrial sector of manufacturing continued to grow. At the same time, trade and trade-related services, such as transportation and communication, provided for most of the remaining increase in employment. Although the world economy went through an energy crisis and the postwar recession in the 1970s, the high rate of growth of Hong Kong's economy at that time was still remarkable.5 Hong Kong was at a crucial moment in the 1980s when the 1997 issue emerged. Aside from the consequences of brain drain and social anxiety, Hong Kong's economy progressed steadily under the influences of China's marketization, decentralization, and open door policy. As an interna-tional financial center, Hong Kong has stepped into, in Jameson's sense, the stage of development of late capitalism since the 1980s. Transnational and domestic financial growth, the information revolution, financial innovations, the process of urbanization and commercialization, technological progress, and infrastructure investment are all the factors and forces that helped shape the global character of Hong Kong as a world city.
As a metropolis, Hong Kong constructs the kaleidoscopic images of itself in mass media and popular culture. The historical pictures of 1960s Hong Kong in nostalgia films, the configuration of the city as the "Pearl of the Orient" in popular music, the yuppie lifestyle of the middle class in romances, the classical martial arts world depicted in television and comic books, the materialistic scene of fashion shows and the like are all images of the imagi-nary space of Hong Kong culture. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of colonial buildings, modern and postmodern architecture, the slums, and refugee camps compose the mixed structure of Hong Kong's urban landscape. It is a city that holds a population of more than six million people in 400 square miles. It is a city saturated with the flow of information and materialism. It is a highly commercialized city with an uncertain future. Hong Kong's postmodernity and postcoloniality, in this context, is represented in its cultural production as well as its urbanity.
As mass media grew out of the technological advancement of the late capitalist period, film production is an ideological apparatus from which social consciousness as well as collective behavior can be measured. The nostalgia cinema of Hong Kong that began in 1987 when Stanley Kwan's Rouge(Yanzhikou) was released provides a way of seeing this change. Rouge recon-structs 1930s Hong Kong by telling a love story of a ghost who searches for her lover in the 1980s. The prostitute, Ruhau, committed suicide with her lover Chen Zhenbang in the 1930s and waited for him for fifty-two years in the underworld. Without seeing her beloved in the underworld, she came to the human world in the 1980s to look for Chen. She finally retreated when she discovered that her lover had survived his suicide attempt and married his cousin. It is a story about forbidden love and betrayal. It is also a historical journey of the nostalgic image of Hong Kong. In the film, 1930s Hong Kong is reconstructed through a series of montage images. It is embellished in golden color through which a sense of nostalgia is conveyed. The film sharply contrasts the "1930s-ness" and the "1980s-ness" of the city to present a sense of loss. It is a loss of the historical past of the colony in which its historical fate cannot be determined. Hong Kong nostalgia films, in this sociopolitical context, can be regarded as a critical response to the 1997 issue in the 1980s. The yearning for yesterday in nostalgia film serves not only as a possible way for the people of Hong Kong to escape the uncertainty brought about by the 1997 issue but also as an alternative form of the colony's history. In this sense, what is the generic difference between nostalgia film and historical film?
GENERIC DEFINITION: NOSTALGIA FILM AND HISTORICAL FILM
Nostalgia film is different from historical film, and their definitions are signif-icant in explicating the sense of historicity of both genres.6 Historical film, in a general sense, refers to the genre of documentary in which authenticity of historical reference is emphasized. Although this authenticity is constructed through image and sound from the point of view of the director, the selected historical events, the setting, the costume, the dialogue, and the acting are always presented in a genuine way in order to convince the viewers. In nostalgia films history is represented in a stylized or allegorical form, and it may be placed on an imaginary plane. The sense of history in nostalgia genre refers not to the genuineness of what exactly happened in the past, but to the imagination of human history. In other words, there is an imaginary sense in the historical world of nostalgia films. The historical past in nostalgia film is reconstructed not to produce a sense of authenticity as historical film does but to remake the past from the present time in order to foresee the future. I will discuss the temporality of nostalgia cinema later in this chapter. Here, The National Opening Ceremony (Kaiguo Diadian, 1989) directed by Li Qiankuan and Xiao Guiyun, and Once Upon a Time in China II (Wong feihung, 1992) by Tsui Hark are two films that demonstrate the differences between the two genres. The former is a historical film, an official documentation of the foundation of the People's Republic of China. The latter is a nostalgia film. It is a biography of Wong Fei-hung, the kung fu master who was born in southern China. It is also a kung fu film that rewrites the history of the premodern China without regard for history. The configuration of the histori-cal figures and the presentation of the historical events of the two movies are different. Such political figures as Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping in The National Opening Ceremony are historicized in terms of their usual ways of dressing, talking, acting, and lifestyle in the 1950s. However, the stories of Sun Yat Sen, who is the father of the Chinese Republic, and Wong Fei-hung, who is the kung fu master of Guangdong province, in Once Upon a Time in China II are fictionalized. These two historical figures encounter each other in the movie, although they never met in history. In this sense, historicity in historical film refers to the rearrangement of the historical events from the present point of view, but in nostalgia film, historicity includes fabrication -it is the imagination, the fantasy, and the fictional performance of human history.
Nostalgia cinema of Hong Kong flourished in the late 1980s. Not only did it quickly turn out to be a popular genre in filmmaking and film marketing within a short period of time, but it also became one of the dominant forms of postmodern culture of 1980s and 1990s Hong Kong. In Jameson's words, it is the cultural product that emerges from postindustrial society, consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society, or high tech.7 The 1980s was the heyday of Hong Kong filmmaking, and nostalgia cinema is one of the most profitable genres. With high technical production values and the wide spread of electronic media and mass culture, nostalgia cinema is a significant postmodern practice in everyday life. The nostalgia films of Hong Kong can be categorized into four groups. The first group reconstructs the history and social scene of 1960s Hong Kong. Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild (A Fei Zhengzhuan, 1990), Lawrence Liu's Lee Rock (Leiluozhuan, 1991), and Poon Man Kit's To Be Number One (Bohao, 1992) are some representative examples. The second group includes those films that represent 1930s Hong Kong and China, such as Stanley Kwan's Rouge and Center Stage (Ruan Lingyu, 1992). The third group refers to those that recycle the film titles or story events of 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong cinema. Joe Chan's 92 Legendary La Rose Noire (92 Heimeigui dui Heimeigui, 1992), and Peter Chan's He Ain't Heavy, He's my Father (Xinnanxiong Nandi, 1992) are examples. The final type aims to re-create the ancient history in China in terms of the costume genre, and Tsui Hark's series, Once Upon a Time in China (Wong Feihung, 1991-1997), is the most successful one. Among these nostalgia films, the 1950s and the 1960s Hong Kong are the most significant historical settings. They represent not only the beginning of Hong Kong's history, but also the "golden age" of the colonial time. I will discuss the issue of historical time in nostalgia cinema later in this chapter.
Regarding the studies of Hong Kong nostalgia cinema, some critics asso-ciate their observations with the Western theories of postmodernism. They either explain the features of nostalgia films by applying such concepts as pastiche and schizophrenia, or they define the cinematic representation as a hyperspace in which a historical depthlessness is presented.8 I am concerned not only with the question of traveling theories advocated by Edward Said but the practices of theories in East-West comparative studies, as well as their relationships to different social contexts. Like people and schools of criticism, Said explains in his widely known article, "Traveling Theory," ideas and theories travel from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another. However, in the process of these different forms of ac-knowledged or unconscious influence, creative borrowing, or wholesale ap-propriation, the application of theory complicated the account of the transplan-tation, transference, circulation, and commerce of theories and ideas.9 How to deal with the gap or the inappropriateness between theory of the West and the context of the East is the major consideration in comparative studies. Con-cerning the studies of Hong Kong nostalgia cinema, some critics merely focus on how the application of Western theories of postmodernism helps to analyze the cinematic features, but ignore the social context of the genre, as well as the differences between the East and the West. My analysis focuses first on the forms, features, and characteristics of Hong Kong nostalgia films in terms of Fredric Jameson's theory of postmodernism as well as Jean Baudrillard's idea of simulacra. I then illustrate the social reception, collective memory, and unconsciousness of nostalgia cinema in terms of the sociopolitical context as a point of departure to challenge Jameson's theory. My tactic of interven-tion is to open a critical terrain for the theory and the practice of postmodern-ism in terms of the cross-cultural studies of Hong Kong nostalgia cinema.
PASTICHE AND SCHIZOPHRENIA: POSTMODERNITY OF NOSTALGIA CINEMA
Nostalgia films restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto a col-lective and social level, where the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the emergent ideology of the generation.10
As the cultural logic of late capitalism, Jameson defines the features of the postmodern by laying out such cultural phenomena as depthnessless, pastiche, and schizophrenia. Nostalgia cinema, in Jameson's conceptualization, is one of the dominant forms of postmodern culture. It reconstructs, or reproduces, the past through a series of images without historical depth. Not only does it change the ideas of time and space of cultural life through the simulacrum, it also subverts the meaning of historicity through the intertextuality of the time past and the time present. Nostalgia cinema, in other words, is the product of postmodernism in which the historical past is reproduced by the media and high tech. Jameson's critique of nostalgia films is helpful in understanding the characteristics of the postmodern culture, as well as the apparatus of filmmak-ing and ideology. However, Jameson's theory needs further elaboration and modification, especially when it is applied to the study of Hong Kong cinema. In this section, I explain the cinematic features of Hong Kong nostalgia cinema in terms of the concepts of pastiche and schizophrenia, and challenge the theoretical framework of Jameson's discourse.
One of the most significant features of postmodern culture is pastiche, claims Jameson in 1987 "Postmodernism and Consumer Society."11 Pastiche is the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language. Pastiche imitates the past, for example, the histor-ical setting, the language, the mood, and the costume of a particular style in a particular time, and projects all these stylistic or aesthetic features on a flat screen or in literary writing without regarding the historical depth. Nostalgia cinema is one of the best examples of pastiche. The "1930s-ness" or "1950s-ness" of nostalgia films is, according to Jameson, the glossy qualities of the image reconstructed by the simulacrum with the loss of "genuine historic-ity."12 Simulacrum, referring to Jean Baudrillard's definition, is the generation by models of a reality without origin or reality, that is, a hyperreality P It is the vehicle conveying the truth and the reality on a control screen without the original copy. Hyperreality, in this sense, bears no relation to any reality whatever; it is its own simulacrum.14 Thus, Jameson's critique of nostalgia films is negative in two aspects. On the one hand, it is only a yearning for a simpler and a more humane social system of the past.15 On the other, it is a decoration of the past in which all social and racial inequalities are erased.16 In this regard, nostalgia cinema is only a copy without origin of the historical past through image and sound.
The characteristics of pastiche in Hong Kong nostalgia film can be traced in two aspects: the imitation of the historical setting of the 1960s and the adaptation of cinematic style, dialogue, and plot of 1950s and 1960s cinema. As mentioned before, the 1950s and 1960s were Hong Kong's golden age of social progress, economic growth, and cultural change. It is the turning point of the historical moment of the city, for it symbolizes an epoch full of hardship and opportunities. It also marks the beginning of the development of Hong Kong film industry. Over two hundred local films were produced and consumed every year, most of them Cantonese movies in black and white.17 Major film companies, such as Guang Yi Film Company, Ling Guang Film Company, Shaw Brothers Studio, Motion Picture and General Investment, and Union Film Company, produced various kinds of genre films, including mu-sicals, melodrama, romance, gangster, horror, and martial arts movies.18 It was the golden age of Hong Kong cinema, for it set up the classical model of filmmaking in terms of technique, characterization, camera movement, and generic form. It also inspired the reproduction of the old genres and the making of the nostalgia film later in the 1980s and the 1990s.
The gangster movies To Be Number One and Lee Rock are two of the best-known examples of Hong Kong nostalgia cinema. They reconstruct the legend of the heroes by situating them in the 1960s social plane in which social disorder and official corruption provide the opportunities for them to establish their careers. Lee Rock is a story adapted from the biography of Inspector Lu Lok, who was born in 1921 and was the most powerful person in the police force of the colony in the 1960s. Originally named Lu Mo Lok, Lu Lok joined the police force in 1940 and was promoted to the top rank as the chief supervisor in 1962. He made use of his official power and political influence to organize a new order for the gangster society in 1960s Hong Kong. He is the head of the Hong Kong police force, but at the same time, he is also in charge of establishing the corruption laws. He retired in 1969 and later moved to Canada. However, he was brought up on a charge of corruption by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in 1974. To avoid prison, Lu Lok exiled himself to Taiwan for more than twenty years. Ng Kwok Ho, the protagonist of To Be Number One, is a well-known gangster who trafficked in drugs in the 1970s. He was born in mainland China and fled to Hong Kong in the 1960s. Later, he built his empire by smashing his partners and corrupting the police, and named himself as the head of the gangster society. The Hong Kong police arrested him in 1974. In Lee Rock and To Be Number One, the two protagonists are portrayed as admirable heroes, and their legends are read as the history of 1960s Hong Kong. The directors in a way to highlight their heroic performance modify the biogra-phies of the two gangsters. The 1960s, in the movies, are a time full of chances and possibilities. The historical past is embellished with the golden color of the picture, the emphasis on brotherhood and personal loyalty in the story plot, and the heroism of the characters. Social issues such as the housing problem, crime, unemployment, sexism, and poverty are all ignored. The history of the 1960s is, in this sense, displayed like a flat screen, a glossy mirage, or a simulacrum, without any introspection.
In adapting the cinematic style of 1950s and 1960s cinema, 92 Legendary La Rose Noire and He Ain't Heavy, He's My Father are the most successful attempts. The former imitates The Black Rose (Heimeigui), directed by Chor Yuen in 1965, and the latter alludes to the plot and the characters of In the Face of Demolition (Weilou Chunxiao) directed by Lee Tit in 1953. The Black Rose is a detective story about two female Robin Hoods in the 1960s who rob the rich to feed the poor in stern opposition of the Royal Hong Kong Police.19 It stars the famous 1960s female idol Chan Po Chu, whose femininity presents a certain kind of righteousness and toughness. In the Face of Demolition is, on the other hand, a melodrama about the daily life and the struggle for survival of the lower-class people in 1950s Hong Kong. These two movies represent not only the Cantonese classics of Hong Kong cinema but the moral values and the social expression of the 1950s and the 1960s. Their story plot, characterization, cinematic feature, and mise-en-scene set the tradition of Hong Kong's filmmaking as well as the norm of social reception. In other words, it is the filmstyle of these two movies that signifies the social setting of 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong. When the young directors recycle them in the 1990s, they recall a sense of the past that is easily recognized by the local audiences. 92 Legendary La Rose Noire and He Ain't Heavy, He's my Father are two examples that demonstrate such cinematic adaptations.
92 Legendary La Rose Noire, directed by Joe Chan in 1992, starts with an adventure of the male character, Lui Kei, in an old house when he tries to rescue his lover, Butterfly Wong. He encounters a sudden spatial displacement and a temporal dislocation when he is locked in the old house where all the furniture and internal design are set in the 1960s style. At the same time, two old style women, Pei Hung and Yim Fan also mistakenly recognize him as a former lover from the 1960s. It is a romance of purchasing love between the two protagonists, Lui Kei and Butterfly Wong. It is also a comedy about the search for identity of Pei Hung and Yim Fan, who always live in their memories of the 1960s. He Ain't Heavy, He's my Father tells the story of a son who goes back to 1950s Hong Kong to research the personal history of his father. The son, Chor Yuan, is accidentally brought back to 1950s Hong Kong, and he meets his parents in their youth. It is a journey of the past in which the son undergoes the everyday life and struggle of the 1950s and thus comes to know more about his father's life experience. He finally bridges the generation gap with his father when he comes back to the 1990s at the end of the movie. Both movies transplant the dialogue, costume, and ways of acting, setting, characterization, and narrative strategy from various film genres of the 1950s and 1960s. For example, the characterization of the male protago-nist of 92 Legendary La Rose Noire is adapted from the figure of a popular male star, Lui Kei, who always plays Prince Charming in the 1960s. The manner in which he dresses, he speaks, and he acts, are exaggerated by the actor, Tony Leung, in a comical form. The acting of Leung, however, is not intended to represent the real life or the real performance of the character in the past. On the contrary, he intends to bring a distance to his imitation as well as a comical effect to the audience. Another example is the main char-acter, Chor Yuan, also played by Tony Leung, in He Ain't Heavy, He's myFather. It is modeled on a character from In the Face of Demolition who represents the moral values of 1950s Hong Kong society. The setting of the movie is composed in a nostalgic way. The story is set in a crowded apartment shared by a number of tenants. It brings out the mood as well as the moral value of the past without regard for any genuine reference to history. The dialogue, the costumes, and the way of acting become the signifiers of the cultural codes of the past. They are used to signify the taste and the atmo-sphere of the 1950s. History is, here, stylized, intertextualized, and defamiliar-ized. It helps to bring forth, in Jameson's words, "a new kind of flatness or depthnessless, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense."20 The historicity -the sense of the past -generated in the two movies is discontin-uous, fragmented, and artificial.
The intertextual referentiality of 1950s and 1960s cinema in nostalgia films constructs the mixed style that we call pastiche. The historical setting of 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong in the movies is only a hyperreality that is conveyed by the simulacrum. It is a hyperspace constructed by the imaginary and cinematic sign. History turns out to be an illusive phantasm of all styles of the past that can be reproduced and consumed in the commodity market. The past, present, and future are no longer unified. Jameson writes,
If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical
experience or psychic life. With the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time.21
Jameson's comments on the feature of schizophrenia help to explain the post-modernity of nostalgia cinema. In this context, schizophrenia originally refers to the Lacanian concept of language disorder. Because of the breakdown of the relationship between signifiers, people are no longer able to construct their own sentences, histories, and identities. Schizophrenia is, however, in Jame-son's sense, "an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers that fail to link into a coherent sequence."22 Thus, the pastiche of different styles, cinematic effects, and historical settings of the past in nostal-gia films represent the schizophrenic structure of postmodern culture.
The schizophrenic structure of Hong Kong nostalgia cinema can be exam-ined in terms of its shifting of spatial logic. The shifting from the 1990s to the 1960s in He Ain't Heavy, He's my Father, for example, shows the frag-mentation and the discontinuity of historicity. Paraphrasing the narrative struc-ture of the Hollywood movie, Back to the Future, He Ain't Heavy, He's myFather tells the story of a journey of the 1950s in which a son rediscovers his father's past. At the end of the movie, the father of the 1950s, who is then twenty years old, is accidentally brought back to the 1990s. The spatial structure of the movie is disrupted and incoherent. History does not exist in a diachronic form, but instead, it presents itself in spatial difference. It can be cut or interfered with by the different spatial experiences of the character in the movie. This is what Jameson describes as ' 'the displacement of time, the spatialization of the temporal" in his article, "Postmodernism and Utopia."23 The journey of returning in He Ain't Heavy, He's my Father in its own temporal displacement shows the spatialization of time. In its form of cine-matic setting and the mannerism of the characters, 1950s Hong Kong is represented as a sociocultural space in which the nostalgic feeling is regis-tered. Another example, the consciousness of time in 92 Legendary La Rose Noire is schizophrenic in a psychological way. The two female protagonists live in their own personal memory and imagination of the past, especially their romances in the 1960s. History is recycled again and again in a form of personal memory and psychological imagination. They dress and perform in 1960s style without regard to the change of time. The schizophrenia of the two characters, that is, their failure to unify the past and the present, and the mental disorder of time, shows the schizophrenic structure of the movie. The second part of the movie is structured by the fantasy of these two characters when they meet the male protagonist, Lui Kei, whose appearance recalls their memories of their former lover. They lock Lui Kei in their old house and try to recover the past romance. Their failure indicates the impossibility of return-ing to the past.
Historicity in nostalgia cinema represents itself as a mixture of the past styles and a rupture of temporal order. In the postmodern age, the develop-ment of the culture of the image or the simulacrum resulted in the weakening of historicity. As Jameson points out, "the new spatial logic of the simula-crum can now be expected to have a momentous effect on what used to be historical time."24 History is miniaturized as scenes that appear or disappear automatically on screen. The ideas of pastiche and schizophrenia, undoubt-edly, are appropriate to formulate the cinematic features of the nostalgia films, however, their critical frameworks do not provide a thorough investigation of the ideological apparatus of film reception, or the viewing experience of moviegoers. The waning of historicity of nostalgia films in the postmodern sense, paradoxically, implies a new reading of the past in the present time. If we shift our focus of the study of nostalgia cinema from its features of postmodernity to its social reception, we may discover that the historical discourse in nostalgia cinema is an allegorical writing of the past. In nostalgic performance, Jameson further states that "what is mourned is the memory of the deep memory, what is enacted is a nostalgia for nostalgia."25 Jameson's statement, in terms of a sociopsychological perception, points to a considera-tion of the collective unconsciousness of film viewing. "What is mourned is the memory of the deep memory, what is enacted is a nostalgia for nostalgia'' means, in its paradoxical sense, the relation between nostalgia and the art of memory. Here we come to my second argument, that is, the social reception and the collective memory of nostalgia cinema.
SOCIAL RECEPTION AND COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF NOSTALGIA CINEMA
Historicity is, in fact, neither a representation of the past nor a representation of the future (although its various forms use such representation): it can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history; that is, as a relation-ship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective.26
To define historicity as "a perception of the present as history," as Jame-son claims, is one way to begin a sociological study of nostalgia. Nostalgia, according to Fred Davis, is from the Greek nostos, to return home, and algia, a painful condition -thus it means "a painful yearning to return home."27 In its medical and military senses, nostalgia also refers to the psychological and mental problems of melancholia and homesickness of the soldiers who are on military duty far away from home.28 In a modern sense, nostalgia extends its meaning to any sort of positive feeling toward anything past, no matter how remote or historical. Moreover, nostalgia in contemporary culture also indi-cates a sense of the present and the future in terms of the "remembrance of things past."29 Almost in the same manner, Jameson claims that nostalgia films "can be read as dual symptoms: They show a collective unconscious in the process of trying to identify its own present at the same time that they illuminate the failure of this attempt."30 In other words, the historicist defi-ciency in nostalgia films is a way of reflecting the social consciousness of the mass toward their past and future. In this regard, Davis's and Jameson's explanations of the sociological aspect of nostalgia is helpful in explaining the social reception and the collective unconsciousness of Hong Kong nostal-gia cinema.
Because of the 1997 issue, most of the people of Hong Kong suffer from a sense of loss and temporal disorder. People are eager to search for identity, to rewrite the history, and to foresee the future. Such anxiety of time, that is, the yearning for the past and the uncertainty about the future, is a significant motif of the nostalgia cinema in Hong Kong. The feeling of nostalgia, as Davis emphasizes, must reside in the present.31 It is the discontent of the present circumstances and conditions that bring about the yearning for and the mourning of the past. In the processes of yearning and mourning, the question of identity emerges. As Davis writes,
[N]ostalgia is a distinctive way, though only one among several ways we have, of relating our past to our present and future, it follows that nostalgia (like memory, like reminiscence, like daydreaming) is deeply implicated in the sense of who we are, what we are about, and (though possibly with much less inner clarity) whither we go. In short, nostalgia is one of the mean -or, better, one of the more readily accessible psychological lenses -we employ in the never ending work of con-structing, maintaining, and reconstructing our identities.32
To paraphrase, nostalgia, in its positive sense, is a process of constructing, maintaining, and rediscovering identities. The search of "who we are, what we are about, and whither we go," is a way of rewriting or reinventing the history of the past, a revision of the present, and a speculation of the future. The essence of nostalgic experience, on the one hand, cultivates appreciative stances to former selves,33 and on the other, helps to manage the unpleasant present by celebrating the past and transcending the future. That is why Jameson defines nostalgia as "a perception of the present as history." Therefore, nostalgia tells more about the present than the past realities.
Nostalgia can be divided into two types: personal nostalgia and collective nostalgia. The two are interrelated. Davis explains that personal nostalgia maintains itself on the levels of personal memory and individual retrospection of the past, whereas collective nostalgia locates itself on the social level in which collective identities, memories, histories, and consciousness or uncon-sciousness are invoked.34 In terms of its social meanings, nostalgia is a collective search for identities; it marks epochs and rewrites the history. It creates a kind of sentiment in which the remembered past can be "filtered, selected, arranged, constructed, and reconstructed from collective experi-ence.35 In the case of Hong Kong nostalgia cinema, the reconstruction of the histories of the 1950s and the 1960s symbolizes a collective identity crisis and a widespread fear of social change after the 1997 handover. The 1950s and 1960s, in an allegorical way, are represented as the beginning of the history of Hong Kong and, simultaneously, as the golden age of the colonial time.
As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, the 1950s and 1960s used to be labeled as the beginning of the history of the modern city, whereas the 1970s are considered the mature stage of the development of the "local consciousness" of the people of Hong Kong. However, after the signing of the Joint Declaration, they were suddenly put into an uncertain situation in which social anxiety, identity crisis, and the sense of loss resulted. In the late 1980s, Hong Kong nostalgia cinema emerged to explicate the historical crisis of the colony. The reconstruction of the past of such movies as Lee Rock, To Be Number One, and He Ain't Heavy, He's my Father express the yearning for the golden age of the colonial time. It is a time that was governed by a policy of noninterference and self-determination. It was also a time character-ized by freedom of speech and economic prosperity. On the other hand, under the political pressure of the 1997 issue and the social impact of the June Fourth Event that happened in 1989 in the mainland, the future of the colony is always imagined or pictured in a catastrophic way. The collective experi-ences of uncertainty and anxiety of the future and the collective memories of the golden past on a social level, contextualized the background of the nostal-gia films of Hong Kong. As a perception of the present as history, in Jame-son's words, Hong Kong nostalgia films return to the past to escape the unpleasant present and the uncertain future. It is a past that had been overcome by the Hong Kong people. No matter how bitter and difficult it was, it was gone. As described by Davis, nostalgia is always tinged with a certain sadness or melancholy, that is, "a nice sort of sadness -bittersweet." The component of sadness serves only to heighten the quality of recaptured joy or content-ment.36 On the psychological level, moviegoers derive a certain kind of satis-faction when they come across, struggle, and finally overcome the difficulties of the past as it is projected on the flat screen. The nostalgic past that is stylized in the films shows the audience who they are, what they are about, and whither they go. The recovery of the past, as claimed by Kathryn Wood-ward, is part of the process of constructing identity.37 To rewrite or reinvent the history of the past in cinematic form, in this respect, is to reconstruct the collective identities and memories of the society. It is way to search for the lost origin and the time past in cinematic narratives.
In the earlier days of the colony, the temporality of the 1950s and the 1960s in Hong Kong nostalgia films serve as a point of departure from the grand narrative of the official history. In the early 1990s, rewriting the his-tory of Hong Kong has been a popular trend. Numerous history books, research documents, and government reports have been published. Scholars from the mainland are incorporating the history of Hong Kong, especially the 1997 handover, into the grand narrative of national unification. Hong Kong, under the depiction of these outsiders, is characterized as a place without history and culture, a city of moneymaking and immorality, and a colony saturated with criminal activities and social problems. Under the title of nationalism, the 1997 handover is labeled as the liberation of the colonial fate of the city. However, the national discourse on Hong Kong is so incomplete, naive, and simplified that it does not tell the whole story or illustrate the true picture of the colony. The Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed in 1984 without consulting the people of Hong Kong and it cannot be easily or simply dissimulated as a national act in which China's interference with Hong Kong is legitimatized. Hong Kong, on the other hand, under the 150 years of British colonization, which started from the end of the Opium War in 1842, has gone through a long, complicated, and difficult history. Nostalgia cinema, as a countermemory as well as a counterdiscourse of the official history, composes a different story about the colony. The modernization projects of the 1950s and 1960s are presented as an initial time of urbanism and the golden period of industrial development of the city from which the citizens benefit from economic prosperity and social welfare. As mentioned earlier, the foundation of the PRC in 1949 was followed by political purge and famine in China, and the subsequent flood of refugees to Hong Kong helped initiate the process of modernization. Under this political reading, the 1950s and
1960s are significant in these social memories. The struggle and success of Lu Lok in Lee Rock, on its metaphorical level, represents the story of Hong Kong. It is the story of how Hong Kong turned itself into a modern city through the difficult time of social disorder and official corruption. It is also a story narrated in terms of a biography of a social figure rather than the discourse of anticolonialism under the title of nationalism. In this regard, the nostalgia films, like Lee Rock and To Be Number One, are the antithesis to the official documentation of national unification between Hong Kong and China.
As the countermemory of the official history, the nostalgia cinema rewrites the history of Hong Kong in the form of popular culture. In other words, the popular media, that is, film production, captures the local history that has been suppressed in the national discourse of historical writing. The everyday life experience of local history is embodied in popular culture and mass media, rather than in the textbooks designed by the education department of the colonial government or the grand narrative of national history written by mainland Chinese scholars. When Patrick H. Hutton explains the interrelation between history and memory in his book, History as an Art of Memory, he argues that,
[H]istory is an art of memory because it mediates the encounter between two moments of memory: repetition and recollection. Repetition concerns the presence of the past. It is the moment of memory through which we bear forward images of the past that continue to shape our present understanding in unreflective ways . . . Recollection concerns our present efforts to evoke the past. It is the moment of memory with which we consciously reconstruct images of the past in the selective way that suits the needs of our present situation.38
Hutton means here that history is a product of human memory, which is articulated by the mental activities of repetition and recollection in written form. To paraphrase Hutton's idea, the nostalgia cinema is also an art of memory mediated by repetition and recollection. Nostalgia, by means of both its cinematic form as well as the social imagination of the audience, is an artistic creation or a psychological process of reconstructing the past in the present point of view through the dislocation of the time and the displacement of the space. In the social context of Hong Kong, the articulation of the history of the 1950s and 1960s in such nostalgia films as Lee Rock and To Be Number One is to reconstruct the past in an selective way that suits the needs of the present situation of Hong Kong. It serves as a form of resistance to the official documentation of the city by the two powers, British and China, under the social depression of the 1997 issue. The historical figures presented in the nostalgia films are not the political figures of the grand history, but instead the social members who are distinguished in their representation of the suc-cess of the city. The audience recognizes these social figures as a part of their memory and history. Historicity, in this context, refers to the cultural recog-nition and the social experience of everyday life shared by the common people.
Nostalgia cinema, as an art of memory, is one possible way to search for a personal history. On its social planes of film production and audience percep-tion, the nostalgia cinema of Hong Kong is not only the counterdiscourse of the official history but the personal account of the filmmakers' lives. The directors rewrite the history of Hong Kong by means of their personal mem-ories and stories. Most of the filmmakers of the nostalgia cinema were either born in or grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, the reconstruction of the 1950s and 1960s is also the recovery or the rediscovery of the directors' experience of personal growth. Wong Kar Wai, the director of Day of Being Wild, proclaims that he composed the romance among the four protagonists with reference to what he had experienced in his neighborhood during the 1960s. It is a story of a Teddy boy who was incapable of love. In its stylistic cinematography, Day of Being Wild highlights not only the nostalgic feeling of love of the 1960s but the social insecurity of the 1990s. It is the retrospec-tive exhibition of the past by the director from the present position. Peter Chan, the director of He Ain't Heavy, He's my Father, started to write the script when his father was in the hospital. What Chan tries to recover in his film is the personal memory of his father, as well as the moral values that had been treasured in the 1950s and were lost in the 1990s. In the ending credit, the director pays homage to the past history by saying that the movie is made to "contribute to those who had left behind treasure of wisdom and memo-ries." In this regard, the nostalgic form of presentation of the film is a mourning of and the yearning for days that will never come again.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
As a social and cultural discourse, Bryan S. Turner argues, in his "A Note on Nostalgia," that the nostalgic paradigm has four major dimensions. First, there is the sense of historical decline and loss, involving a departure from some golden age of "homefulness." Second, there is a sense of the absence or loss of personal wholeness and moral certainty. In this dimension, human history is perceived in terms of a collapse of values, which once provided the unity of human relations, knowledge and personal experience. The third aspect of the nostalgic paradigm is the sense of the loss of individual freedom and autonomy with the disappearance of genuine social relationships. The final aspect of the nostalgic paradigm is the idea of a loss of simplicity, personal authenticity, and emotional spontaneity.39 Turner's discourse, in his sociolog-ical approach, cultivates the social aspect and impact of nostalgia and, at the same time, contextualizes nostalgia in terms of its social relationship and psychology. In the case of Hong Kong, the nostalgic paradigm refers to the political issue of the 1997 handover. Not only does it create a sense of historical decline and loss of the golden past, it also provides a sense of cultural and identity crisis for the present and the future. The yearning for the past indicates a departure of time from the linear development of the history of the past. That means, in its political context, the 1997 issue that suddenly appeared in the mid-1980s serves as a temporal break for the people of Hong Kong to perceive their future. What the people yearn for in the past is not the hardship of their lives in the 1950s and 1960s but individual freedom and autonomy. In this respect, as a historical discourse in its cinematic represen-tation or the countermemory of the official celebration of the 1997 handover, the nostalgia cinema of Hong Kong pictures the social mentality and the historical imagination of the local people in the transitional period. It is a period of time saturated with the social expressions of insecurity, anxiety, and the yearning for the past that is labeled as "postcolonial nostalgia" by Rey Chow. The more prosperous the city becomes, the more uncertainties the people struggle with. The shared memories of the nostalgia films by the audience provide an alternative means of social expression. Borrowing Chow's statement, the nostalgia cinema does give a "voice" to the suppressed
subjectivity of the historical writing of Hong Kong.40 The sense of historicity of the nostalgia films, which is always easily misinterpreted as a representa-tion of historical depthlessness by the local film critics, in fact, emerged as a vocal presentation of the history of Hong Kong shared by the local people. The reconfiguration of the idols of 1950s and 1960s cinema and the recon-struction of the social setting and moral values of the historical past that carry out the nostalgic emotion in audience reception signifies the collective uncon-sciousness and the social memory of the people of Hong Kong. It is a nostalgic point to the introspection of the past, the anxiety of the present, and the uncertainty of the future of the city. It is also a nostalgia that awakens the sense of social belonging as well as the search for cultural identity.
NOTES
1.
See Rey Chow, "Listening Otherwise, Music Miniaturized: A Different Type of Question about Revolution," Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contem-porary Cultural Studies. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993.
2.
For details on the negotiation settlement of the question of Hong Kong between Britain and China, refer to the eight major items listed on the Joint Declaration. Besides the declaration of China's takeover of Hong Kong after June 30, 1997, the agreement also sets down the basic policies regarding Hong Kong's future. The policies concerning the laws, the judicial system, public services, the financial system, external relations, and issues related to culture, education, travel documen-tation, social security, freedom, and rights are all explained in the annex to the Joint Declaration. In April 1990, the Chinese government promulgated the Basic Law in which the arrangements are spelled out in detail. See Sino-British Joint Declaration on the Future of Hong Kong. In Hong Kong Report 1985. Hong Kong: Government Printing, 1985.
3.
Most of these immigrants came from the urban center of Shanghai and the rural area of Guangzhou. Those who came from Shanghai were mainly capitalists and professionals, and those who came from Guangzhou were skilled and unskilled laborers. The former provided Hong Kong with capital and technology, and the latter supplied a cheap labor force. It is an undeniable fact that the newcomers made a great contribution to Hong Kong's economy in the 1950s, yet they also created problems in housing, employment, social security, and social welfare.
4.
Serious riots occurred during the 1950s and 1960s because of racial and social conflicts. The Riot of 1967 was the most significant. It was influenced by the Cultural Revolution in China and, at the same time, was motivated by the leftists in Hong Kong. It turned into an anticolonial protest soon after the public focus shifted to the local problems, especially unemployment and inflation. The trade barriers of the 1950s were a result of the outbreak of the Korean War and the United Nations embargo on trade with China.
5.
L. C. Chau, "Economic Growth and Income Distribution in Hong Kong," Twenty-Five Years of Social and Economic Development in Hong Kong. Benjamin K. P. Leung and Teresa Y. C. Wong, eds. (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 1994), 494.
6.
In this chapter, "The Idea of History in Nostalgia Films," Leung Ping-kwan distin-guishes nostalgia films from historical films in terms of their cinematic style and documentation. However, Leung's clarification is incomplete, and it needs further explanation. See Leung Ping-kwan. "Huaijiu Dianying de Lishiyishshi" (The Idea of History in Nostalgic Film), in Xianggang Wenhua (Hong Kong Culture) (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Center, 1995).
7.
See Fredric Jameson, "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," in Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991, p. 19.
8.
In his "The Postmodern Turn of Hong Kong Cinema in 1992-1993," Li Cheuk-to labels the nostalgia film 92 Legendary La Rose Noire (1992) as the beginning of the postmodern turn of Hong Kong cinema. Followed by Jameson's postmodern theory, Li proclaims that Hong Kong nostalgia cinema presents a sense of historical depth-lessness in which no collective memory of the past can be found, for the historical past is erased on the flat screen (pp. 14-19). See Li Cheuk-to. 92-93 "Xianggang Dianying de Houxiandai Zhuanzhe" (The Postmodern Turn of Hong Kong Cinema in 1992 and 1993), in Guanniji (A Collection of Film Reviews), (Hong Kong: Subculture Publisher, 1993).
9.
According to Edward Said's "Traveling Theory," in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983) there are four stages common to the way any theory or idea travels. First, there is a point of origin in which the idea came into being or entered discourse. Second, there is a passage through the pressure of various contexts as the idea moves from an ear-lier point to another time and place, where it will come into a new prominence. Third, a set of conditions of acceptance or resistance, confronts the transplanted theory. Fourth, the full or partly accommodated idea is to some extent trans-formed by its new uses (pp. 226-7) 227). Here, what I am concerned with are the third and the final stages-what happens to a theory when it moves from one place to another place?
10.
See Fredric Jameson, "Nostalgia for the Present" in Postmodernism or, The Cul-tural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991, p. 19.
11.
See Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," in Postmodern Culture, Hal Foster, ed. London and Sydney: Pluto Press, second impression, 1987, p. 114. 111-125.
12.
See Jameson, "Cultural Logic," p. 119.
13.
See Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Utopia," in Utopia Post Utopia: Config-urations of Nature and Culture in Recent Sculpture and Photography, The Institute of Contemporary Art, ed. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1988, p. 166.
14.
See Jameson, "Utopia," p. 15.
15.
See Jameson, "Nostalgia," p. 283.
16.
Ibid., p. 286.
17.
See Yip Fu-Keung, "Liushiniandai Xianggang Yueyupian yu Shehuibianqian" (Cantonese Cinema and Social Change of the 1960s Hong Kong), in Cantonese Cinema Retrospective (1960-69), Shu Kei, ed. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 14-19. According to Yip's figures, 239 films were made during 1959-60, and more than 300 movies were produced during 1961-62 (p. 18). The film production of Hong Kong declined in the early 1970s because of the new distribution of population and the popularity of television programs.
18.
For a critical analysis on the historical development of Hong Kong cinema since the
1950s, see Lai Kit's "Cantonese Cinema in the 1960s: A New Perspective," in Cantonese Cinema Retrospective (1960-69), Shu Kei, ed. Hong Kong: Urban Coun-cil, 1982; and Poshek Fu's "The Turbulent Sixties: Modernity, Youth Culture, and Cantonese Film in Hong Kong," in Hong Kong Cinema Retrospective: Fifty Years of Electric Shadows, Law Kar, ed. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1997.
19.
See Linda Chiu-han Lai, Nostalgia and Nonsense: Two Instances of Commemora-tive Practices in Hong Kong Cinema in the Early 1980s. In Hong Kong Cinema Retrospective: Fifty Years of Electric Shadows, Law Kar, ed. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1997, p. 97.
20.
See Jameson, "Cultural Logic," p. 6.
21.
Ibid., p. 27.
22.
See Jameson, "Consumer Society," p. 119.
23.
See Jameson, "Utopia," p. 12.
24.
See Jameson, "Cultural Logic," p. 18.
25.
See Jameson, "Utopia," p. 12.
26.
See Jameson, "Cultural Logic," p. 284.
27.
See Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: The Free Press, 1979, p. 1.
28.
See Davis, Yearning, pp. 2-3.
29.
Ibid., pp. 6-8.
30.
See Jameson, "Nostalgia," pp. 196.
31.
Davis, Yearning, p. 9.
32.
Ibid., p. 31.
33.
Ibid., p. 36.
34.
For more detailed description of "personal nostalgia" and "collective nostalgia," refer to the two chapters, "Nostalgia and Society" and "Contemporary Nostalgia," in Fred Davis's Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia.
35.
Davis, Yearning, p. 116.
36.
Ibid., p. 14.
37.
See Kathryn Woodward, "Concept of Identity and Difference," in Identity and Difference, Kathryn Woodward, ed. London: Sage Publications, 1997, p. 11.
38.
See Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory. Hanover and London: Univer-sity Press of New England 1993, xx-xxi.
39.
See Bryan S. Turner, A Note on Nostalgia. Theory, Culture & Society, 4.1: 150-1.
40.
Rey Chow raises the question of "who speaks" in cultural studies in WritingDiaspora (pp. 145-6). Chow means, in her self-consciousness of the subject she discussed, that the answer to the rhetorical question, "who speaks?" should refer to those who have the power to speak. The "voice," either in its passive or active way relates to the issue of power. In my borrowing, here, I would like to change Chow's rhetorical question into a new way of historicizing the social value of the nostalgia cinema of Hong Kong.
FILMOGRAPHY
Days of Being Wild
Director: Wong Kar Wai Cast: Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau, Jacky Cheung, Andy Lau Hong Kong: In-Gear Film Production Co. Ltd., 1990.
He Ain't Heavy, He's my Father
Director: Peter Chan Cast: Tong Leung Leung Ka Fai, Tong Leung Chiu Wai, Carina Lau, Anita Yuen Hong Hong Kong: United Filmmakers Organization, 1993.
92 Legendary la Rose Noire
Director: Joe Chan Cast: Tong Leung Ka Fai, Fung Bo Bo, Wong Wen See Hong Kong: Hoventin Film Production Co. Ltd., 1992.
Lee Rock
Director: Lawrence Liu Cast: Andy Lau, Cheung Man Hong Kong: Win's Movie Production, 1991.
The National Opening Ceremony
Director: Li Qianguan and Xiao Guiyun Cast: Gu Yun, Sun Feihu, Wang Kai Changchun: Changchun Film Studio, 1989.
Once Upon a Time in China II
Director: Tsui Hark Cast: Jet Li, Rosamund Kwan Hong Kong: Film Workshop, 1992.
To Be Number One
Director: Poon Man Kit Cast: Ray Liu, Yip Tung Hong Kong: Johnny Mak Production Ltd., 1992.
FILMING DIASPORA AND IDENTITY: HONG KONG AND 1997
Sheldon H. Lu
NARRATIVES OF THE NATION-STATE
As a century and a half of British colonial rule ended in Hong Kong and the island returned to Chinese control on July 1, 1997, the media in the Chinese speaking world was all geared up to celebrate, relish, and comment on the event. There was no lack of visual, televisual, filmic, and artistic representa-tions of the history, past, and present of Hong Kong. Outside Hong Kong, the return to China was most conspicuously glorified in the motherland itself. In the realm of cultural production and consumption, the Hong Kong issue became the main theme in the summer of 1997. TV programming was monop-olized by the Hong Kong story, and a flood of soap operas were aired on TV channels across the nation or were under hurried production.1 The provinces and major cities were required to mark this historic occasion by producing and staging performances, concerts, TV programs, art exhibitions, and plays.2
In commemoration of the reversion of Hong Kong, two large-scale, Chi-nese-made films were advertised and screened in China around the handover day. They were the much publicized The Opium War (Yapian zhanzheng) by the veteran director Xie Jin, and The Red River Valley (Honghe gu), directed by Feng Xiaoning, starring Ning Jing. The lavish, expensive epic film The Opium War recounts the events causing the Opium War in the mid-nineteenth century and the subsequent ceding of Hong Kong to Britain by the Qing Empire. As expected, the hero of the film is Commissioner Lin Zexu, who was determined to stop the opium trade by seizing and destroying all the British opium in China.
The new production recalls to the mind an earlier film on the same subject, Commissioner Lin (Lin Zexu, directed by Zheng Junli and Cen Fan), made in 1959. In mainland textbooks and history books, the Opium War signals the beginning of modern Chinese history. In Lin Zexu, the peasant uprising in Sanyuanli at the end of the film inaugurates a series of Chinese resistance to imperialism and revolutionary struggle that ultimately culminate in the found-ing of the People's Republic in 1949.3 Indeed, a relief of the Monument of People's Heroes at the heart of the Tiananmen Square thus immortalizes this foundational event of the Opium War as the beginning of a century of the Chinese people's struggle for liberation. Facing the monument at the square is the Museum of Chinese History and Revolution, where a huge clock has been installed in the last several years to count down the days, hours, and seconds toward zero time in anticipation of the moment of the handover, namely, midnight, June 30, 1997, exactly ninety-nine years after the treaty that leased the New Territories to Britain was signed.4 This unilinear, teleolog-ical concept of modern Chinese history based on the sovereignty of the nation-state is thus most concretely embodied in the heart of Beijing's political space -Tiananmen Square.
The timing of the release of The Red River Valley was also carefully coordi-nated with the handover, for the film narrates the story of Chinese/Tibetan resistance to British imperialism in another part of China -Tibet.5 It depicts how the Tibetan people fought off the attempt of the British to occupy Tibet and tear it apart from China proper in the early twentieth century. The feature reaffirms the status of Tibet as a member of the large Chinese family of nationalities. (It is not without some irony that the famous lead actress of the film, Ning Jing, who portrays the proud daughter of a Tibetan chief, fell in love, off-screen, with the American actor Paul Kersey, who played the role of a young British officer in the film; they married, and she emigrated with him to the United States.) After watching The Red River Valley, the viewer or film historian cannot but be reminded of another PRC film classic, Serfs (Nongnu, 1963, directed by Li Jun), in which the Han nationality and its revolutionary government are positioned as the liberator of the Tibetan people from their repressive theocratic regime and backward customs.
It is interesting to contrast these mainland-produced epics with several highly publicized Hollywood productions on the subjects of China and Tibet in the year 1997. The release of two features - Seven Years in Tibet and Red Corner, starring Brad Pitt and Richard Gere, respectively, was orchestrated to coincide with the state visit of Chinese President Jiang Zemin to the United States. Martin Scorsese's Kundun, a biopic of the Dalai Lama, offers another take on the question of Tibet. Although these Chinese and Hollywood films could not be more diametrically opposed to each other in ideology and the representation of history, their point of departure is based on the same notions of fixed territoriality, sovereignty, and nationality.
The sense of the dawning of a new historical era was no less felt in Hong Kong during the handover period. The integration of Hong Kong with China demands a new perspective in the self-representation of Hong Kong in cultural production and reception. For instance, the joint production of the epic film The Soong Sisters (Songjia huangchao, directed by Cheung Yuen-ting) covers a time span of several decades and reflects on the political triangulation of the mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong as the three Soong sisters, originally from the same family, drift apart and settle, by historical vicissitudes, in the three different parts of China after 1949. (The eldest sister Soong Ailing (Michelle Yeoh) and her husband live in Hong Kong, the second sister Soong Qingling (Maggie Cheung), widow of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, stays in the mainland, and the youngest daughter Soong Meiling (Vivian Wu/Wu Junmei), wife of Chiang Kai-shek, moves to Taiwan.)
Needless to say, the question of national and cultural affiliation has been the most problematic and of the foremost importance in the minds of Hong Kong residents, for they have lived a life without a proper nationality, being neither Chinese nor British. Until the handover on July 1, 1997, most Hong Kong people have been denied British citizenship, yet they are ruled by the British. The mainland claimed them as its subjects and compatriots, but played no part in the daily administration of the city. Even worse, Hong Kong people had no say in the negotiation process between China and Britain about the future of Hong Kong that led to the Sino-British Joint Declaration. Was there some guarantee for the autonomy and self-governance of the Hong Kong people? Was there any real significance to official slogans such as "Hong Kong people govern Hong Kong" (Gangren zhi Gang), "no change in fifty years" (wushi nian bubian), and "one country two systems" (yiguo liang-zhi)l What is the wish of Hong Kong residents themselves?
While awaiting the return of Hong Kong to China, how did the average mainland Chinese citizen feel about Hong Kong? What does Hong Kong mean on a private, personal, subjective level? It is no coincidence that one of the most popular songs in China in the 1990s is Ai Jing's 1993 song "My 1997" {Wo de 1997). The lyrics and music of this pop song have captured the heart and feelings of the mainlanders in ways that official pronouncements could not. To the private "I, " 1997 means the following in the words of the songstress:
When will it be possible to go to Hong Kong
without a visa and a stamp
Let me go to this dazzling world
give me a stamp
1997 please come quickly! What does Yaohan look like?
1997 please come quickly! So I can go to Hong Kong
1997 please come quickly! So I can stand in Hung Horn Coliseum
1997 please come quickly! So I can go with him to see the midnight show
1997 please come quickly! So I can see how the clothes in Yaohan are
actually like
1997 please come quickly! So I can go to Hong Kong
1997 please come quickly! So I can stand in Hung Horn Coliseum
1997 please come quickly! So I can go with him to see the midnight show6 For Ai Jing, evidently, Hong Kong represents a "dazzling world" of depart-ment stores, beautiful clothes, night concerts, and fun; and 1997 will be the time for the mainlander to freely travel to Hong Kong "without a visa and a stamp" so that she or he can enjoy all the things that Hong Kong has to offer. The irony of history is that the border between Hong Kong and the mainland is still maintained and traffic between the two is as strictly controlled as ever even though Hong Kong is now part of China.
Beyond and beneath the sweeping, grand narratives of unity and sover-eignty, there are more engaging, noteworthy, localized, small stories of dias-pora and displacement. The teleological reading and representation of Chi-nese/Hong Kong history as a series of losses and recoveries eclipses the private drama of the formation and deformation of the identity and subjectiv-ity of individuals in their daily existence. What I wish to examine in this chapter is a fluid, deterritorialized, transnational, and mobile mechanism of national affiliation as opposed to the idea of a fixed, territorial, homogeneous, sovereign nation-state. This conception of flexiblefiliation bespeaks a process of decontextualization and recontextualization of citizenship, nationality, and residence.7
I would like to focus on two films about the private lives of ordinary Hong Kong citizens: Comrades, Almost a Love Story (Tian mimi) by Peter Chan (Chan Ho San) and Happy Together (Chunguang zhaxie) by Wong Kar-wai. Comrades, Almost a Love Story has won numerous awards. It took nine prizes at the 1997 Hong Kong Film Awards, including best film, best director, best actress (Maggie Cheung), best supporting actor (Eric Tsang), and best script. It was also named best picture, and Maggie Cheung the best actress for her role in the film, at the Golden Horse Award in Taiwan in December 1997. Happy Together won the award of best director for Wong Kar-wai at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.
COMRADES, ALMOST A LOVE STORY
Comrades begins with the male character Xiaojun's (Leon Lai Ming) arrival at the Hong Kong train station in 1986. As a native from Wuxi, Hong Kong is an entirely new, unfamiliar world to him. (The role of Xiaojun was por-trayed by none other than Leon Lai, a popular singer-actor, who himself originally comes from mainland China.) His aunt takes him to her boarding house and finds him a job as a food delivery boy in a Chinese restaurant. His dream is to save enough money to bring his fiancee Xiaoting to Hong Kong. One day, while eating at McDonald's, Xiaojun meets Li Qiao (Maggie Cheung), a waitress fluent in both Mandarin and Cantonese. Li Qiao originally comes from Canton (Guangzhou), but because of her Cantonese speaking ability, she at first pretends to be an indigenous Hong Kong resident. Newly arrived poor mainlanders are often regarded as second-class citizens in Hong Kong.
The friendship between the two lonely, dislocated mainlanders develops and deepens. While it is still Xiaojun's dream to bring his fiancee from Wuxi to Hong Kong one day, Li Qiao's ambition is to become a rich lady on top of the world. One common ground between the two is their shared enthusiasm for the songs of the Taiwanese singer Deng Lijun, who was perhaps the most popular singer in the mainland. While in Canton, Li Qiao was able to sell enough tapes of Deng's songs to make a small fortune. They now decide to do the same in Hong Kong, but their undertaking proves to be a disaster. For a Hong Kong resident to confess his or her love of Deng Lijun and buy her tapes is to reveal his or her lowly mainland origins.
In her dream to be rich, Li Qiao invests in the Hong Kong stock market, but in one stock crash, she loses all her savings. To pay all her debts, she becomes a masseuse in a massage parlor. As time passes, Li Qiao falls in love with her client Baoge (Brother Bao, by Eric Tsang), boss of a Hong Kong mafia family, and the two eventually get married.
In 1990, Xiaojun realizes his long-time dream: he brings his fiancee Xiaot-ing to Hong Kong. The marriage turns sour quickly, for time has proven that the love between Xiaojun and Li Qiao is stronger than anything else. Xiaojun leaves his wife just as Li Qiao is about to separate from her husband. Yet, as Baoge's safety is in danger, Li Qiao decides to stay with him, and they leave Hong Kong to escape the police.
In 1993, Xiaojun becomes a chef in a Chinese restaurant in New York City, where Baoge and Li Qiao now reside. However, the murder of Baoge in a New York street changes the lives of everyone once again. By 1995, Li Qiao has received her green card and works as a tour guide in New York City, often taking tourists to the Statue of Liberty. With the security of having an American green card, Li Qiao wishes to visit her home in Canton from which she has been away for so long. Among her tourists at the Statue of Liberty are wealthy ladies from the People's Republic of China, who eagerly urge Li Qiao to take them quickly to department stores to buy Gucci bags. They tell her that her homeland has changed tremendously, and that overseas Chinese now find it easier to make money in China and many of them have gone home.
On May 8, 1995, the news of the death of Deng Lijun was broadcast. Having not seen each other for many years, Li Qiao and Xiaojun both happen to stop at the window of a TV store in New York to watch the news of the life story of Deng Lijun being broadcast on TV. As they turn, they recognize each other and meet again. It has been ten years since their initial encounter. Deng Lijun's endearing, enchanting song "Sweet Love" (Tian mimi), also the original Chinese title of the film, is heard on the soundtrack. The last segment of the film is a flashback through time, jumping back to ten years ago. In a black-and-white sequence, Xiaojun and Li Qiao are on the same train from China to Hong Kong, unaware of each other's presence. They sit back-to-back with their heads almost touching, dozing off and dreaming until the train arrives at their destination -the Kowloon station.
As opposed to the grand discourse of national unity and Chinese sover-eignty surrounding the handover of Hong Kong, such a small melodrama seems to suggest a more ambivalent relationship of ethnic Chinese to their home country. Contrary to the solid anchoring of the self in the soil of some nation-state, the film depicts the state of perpetual diaspora and displacement. Although the two mainlanders, Xiaojun and Li Qiao, leave China for Hong Kong in pursuit of happiness, it soon becomes clear that Hong Kong does not make a comfortable home either. At the end of the film, they drift to New York, an entirely foreign land, to start new lives. Ironically, it is the security of a green card that would allow Chinese citizens to travel more freely to their home country. Yet, even in eternal diaspora, China looms large in their lives, perhaps not in the narrow sense of the modern sovereign nation-state, but in the realm of private, emotional attachment, as revealed, for instance, in their love for the songs of Deng Lijun. It is the popular, deterritorialized, pan-Chinese songs of a Taiwanese singer more than the national anthem that unite ethnic Chinese and Hong Kongers into some sense of communal bonding. As the TV broadcast states, there is a Chinese saying: "wherever there are Chinese people, you will hear the songs of Deng Lijun."
Earlier in the film, as Xiaojun rides happily through the streets of Hong Kong delivering food, the Chinese national anthem is played loud in full length. The episode indicates his previous, unproblematic identification with China. However, this all-too-easy cultural and national security is soon shat-tered as he has to renegotiate his identity.
For the Hong Kong director Peter Chan, making the film was necessarily a process of self-discovery. In an interview, Chan states that in the past it would have been impossible for him to make a story about the collision of values and cultures against the background of the nation-state, for Hong Kong was merely a city, not a state. Hong Kongers did not feel as though they belonged to any country. The question of belonging to a nation, with a national flag and a national anthem, became urgent with the approach of 1997. However, national affiliation did not solve the crisis of identity. A sense of rootlessness still defines the existential, emotional condition of the ordinary Hong Kong citizen. Hong Kong has served as the transit point for all Chinese bound for different parts of the world. In order to search for a home, the characters in the film have to come a long way to find it. Neither the mainland, nor Hong Kong, nor New York City is the ideal homeland. The immigrants feel Chinese in their hearts without the benefit of the Chinese citizenship. The story of the two immigrants in the film is thus the story of every Hong Konger.8
Indeed, the film is also indirectly an allegory of the relationship between Hong Kong and China. The love-hate relationship of Hong Kong to the mainland has been "almost a love story." The ostensible identification of the Hong Kong people with the fate of the mainland is all too touchingly evident in recent history. Hong Kong was a main supporter of the student democracy movement in spring 1989. One million Hong Kong residents took to the streets to show solidarity with the students in Tiananmen Square. It was also the people of Hong Kong who generously donated funds to relieve the flooded areas of southern China in 1991.
There are emphatic, temporal history markers in the film as the years 1986, 1987, 1993, and 1995 are directly projected on the screen. The ten-year span within the diegesis falls into a period of Chinese and Hong Kong history between the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984 and the handover in 1997. However, the filmic approximation of the real is neverthe-less narrated through the private world of ordinary Hong Kong residents, not by invocation of world-historical, public events as done by some other films on the subject of Hong Kong.
In the film itself, the nature of love is as strong and indestructible as it is fleeting and dislocated. Xiaojun's aunt lives in the memory of her elusive past love affair with William Holden, although it is not clear to the viewer if she actually had such a relationship with him. Holden portrays the hero in the 1955 film Love Is a Many-Splendor ed Thing and the 1960 film The World of Suzie Wong, both shot in Hong Kong. A white tenant in the house, portrayed by none other than the famed cinematographer Christopher Doyle, falls in love with another tenant, a prostitute from Thailand. He contracts AIDS from her, and they both have to move out. The differences between these orientalist interracial romances, between a Eurocentric, idealized past and the harsh present always endangered by life-threatening diseases such as AIDS, indicate how times have changed in world history. The marriages and partnerships in the film do not last long. Thus it is all the more remarkable to see that a possible union between the hero and heroine is rekindled at the end of the story.
HAPPY TOGETHER
If Comrades, Almost a Love Story was a local hit, Wong Kar-wai's HappyTogether was an international success that once again put Hong Kong on the map of world art cinema. As the winner of the Best Director at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, Happy Together has been much discussed in Hong Kong film circles.
The film narrates the South American adventures of two Hong Kong citizens. Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung) are two gay lovers who set out to visit the Iguazu Falls in South America.
The opening shot of the film zooms in on their travel documents, which state "British nationality." As we know, Hong Kong residents were granted the right to free travel to most countries by the British administration, yet most of them were not allowed to become permanent residents of Great Britain. The uncertainty of national identity for the Hong Kongers is foregrounded at the beginning of the film narrative.
Unable to carry out their planned trip, the two characters settle in the streets of Buenos Aires. Lai becomes a doorman in a tango bar, while Ho becomes entangled in affairs with Latin male lovers. Their difficult, intense relationship is on and off as they drift throughout Argentina. In the middle of the film, they break up and separate. Lai meets and befriends Xiao Zhang (Zhang Zhen), a young man from Taiwan, who is working in the same Chinese restaurant where he is now a dishwasher. Xiao Zhang is uninterested in women and remains single. (For instance, he declines a date proposed by a fellow Chinese female co-worker at the restaurant, and later in the film also declines the invitation of a Latin woman to dance in a bar.) After parting with Lai, he travels alone to the lighthouse at the most southern point of the continent.
The lack of assimilation of the Chinese to Argentine society is accentuated in the film. There is no real contact between the Chinese and the Argentines, who sometimes appear in the background. There is a scene where the Chinese youth play a soccer game by themselves in a dark night illuminated only by the light of the moon. There seems to be no effort on their part to mingle with and engage the local people in their life. The Chinese seem to be cultural misfits and sexual mismatches always on the move.
Toward the end of the film, Lai has saved enough money to leave Buenos Aires for Hong Kong. Before going home, he decides to stop in Taipei first. On Liaoning Street, he discovers the food stall of Xiao Zhang's parents, and sees his pictures taken at the lighthouse in South America.
Liaoning is not simply a street name, but refers to a province in Northeast China. A Taipei street is thus a mapping of the geopolitical imaginary of the Chinese nation as the Republic of China in Taiwan proclaims to be the only legitimate sovereign Chinese state. In such a manner, the street sign points to both the unity of the Chinese nation and its fragmentation. The evocation of such a fragmented collective further heightens the sense of displacement of ethnic Chinese across the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the various continents.
If Liaoning Street is an index of geopolitical dislocation, the other signifi-cant reference to history is February 20, 1997, when Lai hears the news of the death of Deng Xiaopeng on TV, the architect of the return of Hong Kong to China. It is also Deng Xiaoping who attempts to lay the groundwork for the eventual unification of Taiwan and China under the Hong Kong model by proposing the concept of "one country, two systems." (The offhand, oblique reference to history and the avoidance of direct representation of public, historical events in such a private melodrama is a noticeable contrast to those epic productions, say, in the fashion of Xie Jin's The Opium War and Feng Xiaoning's The Red River Valley.) However displaced and scattered on the edge of the world, the migrant Hong Konger is nonetheless linked to China in real or imagined space and time (Liaoning Street, date of the death of Deng, etc).9
The soundtrack and musical motifs have been significant structural ele-ments in Wong's films. Happy Together overtly alludes to a tradition of Western music and art film. The Chinese name of the film, Chunguang zhaxie, which may be loosely translated as The Light of Spring, is the Chinese title given to Antonioni's Blow Up when it was screened in Hong Kong. Antoni-oni's film was based on the script of an Argentine writer, Julio Cortazar. Wong also jokingly stated that he decided to shoot the film in Boca, Argen-tina, with the hope of meeting Madonna who was making Evita there. Latin tango music is heard throughout the film. The opening track "Tango Apa-siondo" and the end track "Milonga for 3 " are both by the Argentine musician Astor Pantaleon Piazzolla. Other tunes include "Cucurrucucu Pal-oma" by Caetano Veloso. Some live recordings were made at local pubs Bar Sur and Three Amigos during the shooting. Frank Zappa's "Chunga's Re-venge" and "I Have Been in You" are also played, although they are rearranged versions by Danny Chung.10
The film concludes with the soundtrack of "Happy Together," a 1967 song by the Turtles, performed by a Hong Kong band, hence the English title of the film. As the ill-fated, tumultuous love affair between Ho and Lai "ends" many times, Lai often finds courage in Ho's catch-phrase "Let's have a new beginning." It is such a cavalier attitude toward the future that has inspired Lai to start new relationships. As Wong Kar-wai confesses, his films are about communication among human beings.11
Happy Together exhibits some of the same stylistic characteristics in terms of camera work, music, and narrative as his earlier films, especially Chung-king Express. The soundtrack, which ranges from Latin American music to Frank Zappa, creates atmosphere and connects the plot. Part of the film is shot in black and white and part in radiant color. The fast speed of the camera in the shots of the skyline and the busy intersections of the city and in the final sequence renders a sense of exhilaration and wonder typical of Wong's and Doyle's best work. More significantly, these visual, structural discontinuities and editing differences within the same narrative reveal a more pervasive, existential reality, namely, the fragmented, atomized nature of urban life in Hong Kong or in diasporic conditions. The challenge for the solitary Hong Kong/Chinese globetrotters is not to be lost in temporal discontinuity and spatial dislocation but to connect and reconnect themselves with some sense of homeland and discover a destination, however transitory it may turn out to be. The film does not end on a pessimistic, apocalyptic note of impending doom in view of Hong Kong's return to China but with the possibility of a new beginning. At least it is safe to say that the ending is more ambiguous than negative.
FROM NATIONALITY TO FLEXIBLE CITIZENSHIP: FAREWELL CHINA OR FULL MOON IN NEW YORK
It is noteworthy that weddings or erotic relationships is the favorite trope of many Hong Kong films of the handover period. Hong Kong filmmakers and citizens alike are probing the exact nature of the partnership between Hong Kong and China. The Manual of a Complete Marriage (Wanquan jiehun shouce, director Ruan Shisheng) is the felicitous title of another Hong Kong film, which describes a tenuous, precarious marriage. The couple's hesitant, uncertain feeling about the future is similar to the general mood of many Hong Kong residents.12
If epic films such as The Soong Sisters and The Opium War provide officially sanctioned grand narratives about modern China as a historical and sovereign subject, the other Hong Kong films that I briefly discussed seem to offer alternative narratives of ethnicity, identity, and nationhood. These pri-vate melodramas tell postmodern tales of Chinese in diasporic conditions without the comfort of national affiliation. Features such as Comrades and Happy Together partake of a tradition of Hong Kong films about Chinese in diaspora and displacement. The most notable earlier films in this vein include Song of the Exile (Ketu qiuhen, 1990, directed by Ann Hui), Farewell China (Ai zai biexiang de jijie, 1990, directed by Clara Law), Full Moon in New York (Ren zai Niuyue, 1990, directed by Stanley Kwan). Song of the Exile tells the story of a mother and a daughter whose sense of belonging is torn between China, Hong Kong, and Japan. Farewell China depicts a mainland Chinese couple who come to America in search of a new homeland but meet a tragic end in New York City. Full Moon is the story of three Chinese girls from the mainland (played by the mainland/Mongolian actress Siqin Gaowa), Taiwan (Sylvia Chang), and Hong Kong (Maggie Cheung). As New York City becomes their new home, these three Chinese immigrants are still bereft of both a homeland and a private home. They each live and enact a personal drama of loss and displacement. The final sequence is a scene of their being "happy together": the three girls drink, laugh, and toast each other on a rooftop under a beautiful full moon in New York. Although culturally attached to some sense of Chineseness, the daughters of the mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are together yet separate, at home yet homeless. None has entered a fulfilling relationship with her lover or husband, her new country, or her region of origin.
The story in Farewell China begins in the Shawan Village, Panyu (Punyui) County, Guangdong Province, in 1988. Hong (Maggie Cheung) and Zhao Nansheng (Tony Leung Ka-fai) live with their baby son Shanshan and parents in the village. It it Hong's dream to immigrate to America. The couple travels to the American Consulate in Shanghai for an interview to obtain a visa. Hong has been denied a visa four times by the American Consulate in Guangzhou (Canton). According to Hong, she was previously denied because they thought she was "too pretty" and would not return to China. She tried to convince the consul that since she has given birth to a child and has a family, she would certainly return to China. The consul poses this question to her: Did you give birth to a child in order to obtain a visa to America?
Hong is determined to earn a green card at all costs so that she can bring her whole family to America, the land of freedom and opportunity. For the future of their child Shanshan, they are willing to endure any hardship. But as time passes and months go by, Nansheng does not receive any letters from his wife. In May 1989, he enters the United States illegally and goes to New York City to look for his wife. With little money and speaking broken English, he is reduced to a vagabond wandering the streets of Bronx, Harlem, and Brooklyn. Jane, or "Jing" as mispronounced by him, a Chinese American teenager, who ran away from home in Detroit at age fifteen, becomes his friend. She is a prostitute, and Nansheng, an impoverished illegal alien, be-comes her pimp toward the end of the film. Out of despair and frustration, he calls his parents in China, telling them that he cannot bear the misery any longer and wishes to return home. The answer from his parents is simple: Please do not come back to China for the sake of the family and Shanshan. At one point, a Taiwanese American couple who own a Chinese restaurant in Harlem admonishes Nansheng telling him that although he is an illegal alien in the United States, he should be ' 'happier than one billion people'' in China. In America, there is no limit on how many children one can have. He should wait for the time of the next amnesty for illegal aliens.
In a month-long period of searching, wandering, disillusion, degradation, and humiliation, Nansheng learns that life in America has been most difficult for Hong and that she has had many jobs. To obtain a green card, she even married a Chinese laundryman. The marriage is mutually understood as a relationship of convenience without feelings of love. Yet she runs away from the marriage after a while.
One day when he is delivering food for a Chinese restaurant, Nansheng finally meets Hong in an apartment building. This happy reunion turns into a moment of profound sadness. Together they discover what has happened in the other's life after separation and realize that their American dream has turned sour. The reunion scene, their dialogue, and her tears are set against the soundtrack of the Chinese song "My Motherland" (Wo de zuguo), which Nansheng hums now and then through the film. "My Motherland" is the theme song of the PRC film classic Shanggan Ridge (Shanggan ling). Made in the 1950s, it is a film about the heroism of Chinese soldiers in the Korean War who fought against the American invasion of Korea. The song has long been regarded as one of the most beautiful patriotic songs in mainland China. The jarring, climactic juxtaposition between the unspeakable sufferings of Chinese nationals in the United States and the idealistic celebration of the motherland deconstructs and dispels any sense of sacredness and innocence associated with the Chinese socialist nation-state. Ironically, it is none other than the United States, China's arch-enemy in the song, that Chinese nationals have escape to to start a new life, and it is the Chinese state that has caused indescribable, horrible catastrophes in the lives of its nationals both inside and outside China.
When Nansheng wakes up the next morning, he discovers that his wife has become a schizophrenic, psychotic, mentally ill person. He realizes that she never mailed many of the letters that she had written to him. Moreover, she does not remember many things about their past together. Worse, she denies her Chineseness and despises her "chink" husband in a desperate attempt to assimilate to American mainstream culture. In her job, she swindles money from elderly Chinese men and women living in New York City (by being the middleman who "helps" them send money back to their relatives in China). In a fateful confrontation, Hong stabs Nansheng to death in front of a white replica of the Statue of Liberty in a park. The sequence ends with a close-up of Nansheng's red notebook which has fallen to the ground. The front cover of the notebook is graced with Mao's calligraphy of his own famous saying "serve the people" (wei renminfuwu).
The miniature Statue of Liberty is reminiscent of both the original one in New York City as well as the Statue of the Goddess of Democracy erected by Chinese students in Tiananmen Square in May 1989. Chinese immigrants and students have set up similar statues all over the world in the aftermath of the Tiananmen square incident of June 4, 1989. Indeed, Nansheng's stay in New York coincides with the time span of the 1989 student democracy movement in Beijing. The concluding shots are of the small Statue of Liberty in the park, the American flag, and the Chinese countryside: a man ploughing the yellow earth, a road, a village. The final image is, poignantly, that of a child -the symbol of China's future, who could very well be Shanshan. Evidently, the fate of China's children in this film must be read against the historical back-ground of China in 1989. The film is an overt criticism of the Chinese motherland itself, which has deprived its citizens of a home. The ideological premise of films such as this one is that the bad policies and malpractices of the nation-state are pitted against its innocent, powerless citizens and are indeed the cause of their misfortunes.
If Farewell China is heavily inflected by the politics of the Tiananmen incident, Hong Kong films made on the eve of the handover in 1997 need not be so. After a hiatus of eight years, China and Hong Kong seem to both have a facelift. The memory of Tiananmen has become dim in the minds of both Chinese and non-Chinese all over the world, although never completely for-gotten, to be sure. In the 1990s, China has become a major player in transna-tional capitalism and is an important part of the global economy. Business interests often receive a higher priority in the calculations of leaders of nation-states. Hong Kong itself has been by far the biggest foreign investor in the China market, and the inflow of its capital fuels the economic growth of the mainland.
I would argue that a new type of intellectual discourse and popular cultural production has emerged in Hong Kong and China in response to the transna-tional social and economic formations in the post-Cold War period.13 This shift may be described as change from the discourse, ideology, and geopolitics of the nation-state to a more flexible notion of citizenship among the Chinese. The idea of a single national identity and loyalty to a nation-state is losing credibility among the people of Hong Kong and China for practical and political reasons. As a homo economicus in the age of transnational capitalism, mobile investment, flexible accumulation, and global postmodernity,14 the Chinese in diaspora renegotiates a flexible set of spatial, geographic, eco-nomic, and cultural considerations in the identity formation process. As Aihwa Ong points out, "Such flexibility of options, whether financial, spatial, social, or legal, constantly destabilizes and even attenuates what it means to be Chinese. The shifting narratives rework global displacements and liminality into a self-inscribed alterity to the western insistence on a single national identity."15 To me, this seems to be the difference between a film such as Farewell China, made in 1990, at the end of an era, and a film such as Comrades, made in the mid-1990s, although both are about the Chinese diaspora. In Farewell China, even though the characters may suffer because of the nation-state, it is still the latter that provides the emotional basis for a sense of identity and selfhood. In the postmodern, diasporic condition, the nation-state may no longer be the primary arena of activities for ethnic Chi-nese scattered around the globe.
However, all this does not imply that "Chineseness" does not matter today to ethnic Chinese across the world in cultural productions by and about Hong Kong. On the contrary, the question of what it means to be a Chinese or Hong Konger is the subject of all the filmsI have discussed. The answer to this question has to be sought in a more subtle manner. Interestingly enough, it is the pop songs of Deng Lijun, not the nation-state of the PRC, nor the Special Administrative Region (SAR) of Hong Kong, nor the United States of Amer-ica, that become almost a defining characteristic of being "Chinese" for the generation of Chinese-turned-Hong Konger turned-New Yorker such as Li Qiao and Xiaojun in Comrades. (Here lies the essential difference, it seems to me, between the function of the song ' 'My Motherland'' in Farewell China and the effect of Deng's songs in Comrades.) A transnational, flexible, dias-poric citizenship is without the blessing of a secure national affiliation, but it can be ultimately turned into a source of agency and creative transformation in the post-Cold War new world order.
According to Jiirgen Habermas, there is a double coding of citizenship in the modern nation-state. On the one hand, the state endows its citizens with civil liberties and political rights as a mode of legitimation; on the other, the nation speaks to the hearts and minds of the people and gives rise to a collective consciousness through invoking the notion of a common ancestry, language, and history.16 However, the model of the nation-state can no longer fully account for the kind of pan-Chinese attachment as seen in the films. In the words of Arjun Appadurai,
[T]he world in which we live is formed of forms of consociation, identification, interaction, and aspiration that regularly cross national boundaries. Refugees, global laborers, scientists, technicians, soldiers, entrepreneurs, and many other social categories of persons constitute large blocks of meaningful association that do not depend on the isomorphism of citizenship with cultural identity, of work with kinship, of territory with soil, or of residence with national identification.17
It is such a new form of interaction, identification, and attachment that binds refugees and immigrants of Chinese and Hong Kong origin into a sense of community, albeit deterritorialized and supranational.
On another related level, the ultimate question posed by these Hong Kong films is one as difficult to answer at this historic juncture as it is provocative. Will Hong Kong and China after 1997 be happy together and remain close comrades, and evolve a lasting partnership as sweet as almost a love story?18
NOTES
These TV serials include The Story of Hong Kong (Xianggang de gushi, director Wang Jin), The Date of a Century (Shiji yuehui, director Wang Fengkui), Get Wedded on the Return Day (Hunli dingzai huigui ri, director Cao Zheng), and Once in a Thousand Years (Qiannian deng yihui, director Wang Dapeng). Massive official art exhibitions to celebrate Hong Kong's return were organized in Beijing. "The Great Exhibition of Chinese Art" (Zhongguo yishu dazhan), under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Culture, took place at the Museum of Chinese History, and "The Joint Exhibition of Women Artists of Beijing and Hong Kong" took place at the National Art Gallery. At the same time, against the background of these grandiose state-sponsored projects, much smaller art exhibitions were organ-ized in the cramped spaces of Hong Kong's tiny art galleries. Hanart T Z Gallery hosted "Hong Kong 1997 -It Must Be Shangri-la" with paintings by Han Xin and an installation titled "Hong Kong Monument: the Historic Clash" by Gu Wenda (July 1-19, 1997). Schoeni Art Gallery was the site of the exhibition "8 + 8 -1", which included selected paintings of fifteen contemporary artists. These art shows and artworks are satires and caricatures of either the politics of the Hong Kong handover itself or more generally the social and cultural life of China.
A widely publicized new play in Beijing is Oh Homecoming (Guilai xi) by the Shanghai People's Theater. It is the story of a patriotic Chinese/Hong Kong capital-ist and his determination to keep his own company alive as an example of the Chinese people's own industry. Over his entire career from the times of Dr. Sun Yat-sen through the Sino-Japanese War to the 1980s he has faced pressure and competition from foreign companies. Historical figures such as Li Hongzhang, who represented the Qing government to cede Hong Kong to Britain, appeared in the play. A climactic moment was the staging of the meeting between Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher in Beijing in 1982 when Deng declared his intention to take Hong Kong back to Chinese rule.
3.
The Opium War and the life story of Lin Zexu have been used for various political, antiimperialist, and even imperialist causes in different contexts and historical per-iods. Poshek Fu brings to our attention the case of the Sino-Japanese coproduction Eternity (Wanshi liufang, 1943) in Shanghai during the Occupation. Although im-perial Japan may want to make an anti-Western, antiimperialistic statement to glorify its war efforts against the United States and Britain, the film itself must nevertheless go through a series of mediations in the hands of the directors and film artists and be interpreted differently by the Chinese audience. For a discussion of such cultural politics, see Poshek Fu, "The Ambiguity of Entertainment: Chinese Cinema in Japanese-Occupied Shanghai, 1941-1945," Cinema Journal 37.1 (Fall 1997): 66-84.
4.
See Wu Hung, "The Hong Kong Clock-Public Time-Telling and Political Time/ Space," Public Culture 9.3 (Spring 1997): 329-354. This entire issue of Public Culture is worth reading. It is a special issue subtitled Hong Kong 1997: The Place and the Formula, and is edited by Ackbar Abbas and Wu Hung.
5.
For a series of short reports on the film, the director, and the cast, see "Honghe gu xilie baodao" (Red River Valley), Zhongguo yinmu (China Screen) 112 (February 1997): 14-23.
6.
Quoted in Nimrod Bernoviz, China's New Voices: Politics, Ethnicity, and Genderin Popular Music Culture on the Mainland, 1978-1997, (Ph.D. dissertation, Univer-sity of Pittsburgh, 1997), 331-32.
7.
For a discussion of the notion of deterritorialized citizenship in the Chinese diaspora, see Aihwa Ong, "On the Edge of Empires: Flexible Citizenship among Chinese in Diaspora," Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 1.3 (Winter 1993): 745-78.
8.
Feng Ruozhi, "Fangwen Chen Kexin (Chan Ho San)" (An Interview with Peter Chan), Zhongguo yinmu (China Screen) 111 (July 1997) 18-19. See also the entire special section on Comrades, Almost a Love Story, in Zhongguo yinmu (July 1997): 12-19.
9.
For a discussion of time in Wong Kar-wai's films, see Chuck Stephens, "Time Pieces: Wong Kar-wai and the Persistence of Memory," Film Comment 32.1 Janu-ary-February, 1996): 12-18. On the question of spatial, temporal discontinuity in Wong, see Curtis K. Tsui, "Subjective Culture and History: The Ethnographic Cinema of Wong Kar-wai," Asian Cinema 12 (Winter 1995): 93-124.
10.
This information is from "Womanizing Wide Boys," HMV Music Guide (July 1997): 14.
11.
See Peng Yiping, "Chunguang zhaxie: 97 qian rang women kuaile zai yiqi," (Chunguang zhaxie: Let's Be Happy Together Before 1997: An Interview with Wong Kar-wai), City Entertainment (Dianying shuangzhou kan) (Hong Kong): 473 (29 May-11 June, 1997): 41-48. See also the special sections on Happy Together
in City Entertainment 472 (15-28 May, 1997): 32-46, and City Entertainment 474 (12-25 June, 1997): 68-73. See also Chris Doyle, "To the End of the World," Sight and Sound 7.5 (May 1997): 14-17; Charlotte O'Sullivan, "Happy Together/ Chunguang Zhaxie" (movie review), Sight and Sound 8.5 (May 1998): 49.
12.
See Ji Jun, "Lun huigui qi dianying de huigui yishi" (On return consciousness in the films of the return period), City Entertainment 476 (10-23 July, 1997): 32-3. For a discussion of the state of Hong Kong film industry during the handover period, see Berenice Reynaud, "High Noon in Hong Kong," Film Comment 33 A (July/August 1997): 20-23.
13.
For the question of transnationalism in Chinese cinemas, see Sheldon H. Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (Honolulu: Univer-sity of Hawaii Press, 1997).
14.
On flexible accumulation and postmodernity, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
15.
See Ong, "On the Edge of Empires," 772. See also Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini, eds., Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Trans-nationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997). For a series of reflections on the meaning of Chinese, see Tu Wei-ming, ed., The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994).
16.
Jiirgen Habermas, "The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sover-eignty and Citizenship," Ciaran Cronin, trans., Public Culture 10.2 (Winter 1998): 397-416.
17.
Arjun Appadurai, "Full Attachment," Public Culture 10.2 (Winter 1998): 449.
18.
Brief, useful information about the films and directors under discussion in this chapter can be found in Fredric Dannen and Barry Long, Hong Kong Babylon: An Insider's Guide to the Hollywood of the East (New York: Hyperion, 1997). More comprehensive discussions can be found in Stephen Teo, Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: British Film Institute, 1997).
BUYING AMERICAN, CONSUMING HONG KONG: CULTURAL COMMERCE, FANTASIES OF IDENTITY, AND THE CINEMA
Gina Marchetti
There is a shot in Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express (1994) that frames one of the principals (played by Brigitte Lin/Lin Qing-xia, herself a major trans-national Chinese star and pop icon), dressed in a blonde wig, raincoat, and sunglasses, standing in front of a shop window.1 Toys, small electrical goods, and a variety of colorfully packaged gadgets envelop her. Despite her outland-ish attire (i.e., blonde tresses framing an Asian face, dark glasses and raincoat when it is neither particularly sunny nor raining), the character blends in perfectly with the backdrop. Disguised as a Marilyn Monroe look-alike, this drug dealer blends in by standing out. She embodies many of the ironies and contradictions revolving around Hong Kong's image as the melting pot of Asia, dealt with in the film. She becomes another aspect of the spectacle of global consumerism that forms the visual foundation for the film's vertiginous bricolage of American pop culture, British colonialism, and Asian commerce. In the background of the same shot, Faye (Faye Wong), the female protagonist of the film's second section, purchases an oversized Garfield stuffed toy. This brings the spectacle of display and the consumption of commodities together in a single image. Running parallel to the film's two love stories is a more general, all-encompassing story of markets, consumers, commodities, pack-aging, display, promotion, and exchange. The romantic entanglements are juxtaposed with fantasies that revolve more around the marketplace than the heart.
As July 1997 comes and goes, and debate surrounding Hong Kong's political status intensifies, the film industry's place as an arena for the forma-tion of identity and forum for speculation about Hong Kong's future also comes into question. In this light, Chungking Express can be looked at as a cinematic entry into this discourse of speculation. Although ostensibly a stylish love story, the parallel romantic plot lines of the film obscure but do not conceal other issues beyond the surface of plot and character. Hidden in shop displays, model airplanes, Mamas and the Papas tapes, and canned goods, the film tells another story about economics and the politics of identity.
Commodities create and re-create individual identities, not only operating along the axis of sexuality, but moving from the uncertainties of gender and romantic roles to the instabilities of international commerce, American cul-tural penetration, and the national, ethnic, and linguistic hybridity that is Hong Kong.
Chungking Express can be read as a commentary on contemporary Hong Kong, as a meditation on its current state and speculation on its future metamorphosis. This commentary can be teased out of the film's mise-en-scene through a close look at the choice, use, and organization of the corn-modified objects in the film. These objects create a spectacle that reveals as it pretends to hide, and this creates a landscape that comments on the transna-tional nature of Hong Kong's economy and the personal identity of this film's characters.
Many films produced in Hong Kong look at the way in which personal and public identities are shaped through an encounter with American popular culture and, specifically, through the consumption of "American" commodi-ties that are often made in China. This chapter examines this theme as it runs through films made in Hong Kong, like Chungking Express and Comrades: Almost A Love Story, and films about Hong Kong, like The Opium War.
ALLEGORY
Several critics have already discussed Chungking Express as an allegory of Hong Kong's return to China on July 1, 1997.2 Indeed, critics have routinely read many of Hong Kong's more popular current films as allegories of 1997.3 Because Hong Kong filmmakers have traditionally worked within the bound-aries created by the colony's censors, it is not surprising to find sensitive political issues, particularly those involving Hong Kong's relationship with China, dealt with obliquely within the mass media.
In the case of Chungking Express, although no direct mention is made of the handover, the film's mood, themes, and overall sensibility point to feelings that have commonly been associated with 1997. Some of these include:
�E
Obsessive interest in time and dates. The first segment of the film revolves around May 1, 1994 as a turning point, that is, an expiration date for the drug trafficker as well as the cop whose birthday falls on that date, marking a month since his girlfriend left him on April Fool's Day. Clocks, expira-tion dates on cans, elements of the dialogue, and voiceover monologues ("In 24 hours I will fall in love with this woman," "In 24 hours this woman will fall in love with someone else," etc.), even songs like "What a Difference a Day Makes" remind the viewer of the passing of time and the absolute demarcation of time by dates like July 1, 1997.
�E
Sense of loss and abandonment. Chungking Express deals with two stories
of jilted lovers. Cop 223, Ho Chi-wu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a regular at the Midnight Express carryout, has been abandoned by his girlfriend. Lovelorn, he engages in rituals, like buying dated cans of pineapple, his ex-girlfriend's favorite fruit, to deal with his loss. One night, in a bar, he meets an unnamed woman (Brigitte Lin) and decides to fall in love with her. He has promised himself that he would fall in love with the next woman he sees, and he does not know that she is a drug trafficker. Earlier, in a plot to smuggle drugs out of Hong Kong, she is duped by a group of South Asian couriers. She has been warned to right the situation or face her own "expiration date." After spending a platonic night with Ho in a hotel, she kills her narcotics boss and escapes.
In the second part of the film, the narrative shifts to deal with the story of Cop 663 (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), who is also a victim of a broken heart. Like Cop 223, he carries out a series of rituals to cope with his loss. For example, he carries on a conversation with various objects in his apartment, including a dishrag that he thinks is crying. A regular at the Midnight Express carryout, Cop 663 becomes acquainted with Faye (Faye Wong), a relative of the owner who works there. When his former girlfriend leaves a key to his apartment at the carryout, Faye secretly begins to visit the apartment, cleaning up, rearranging the place, changing labels on the canned food in the cup-boards, etc. Eventually, Cop 663 catches Faye in the act, and he decides to make a date with her. She breaks the date, becomes a stewardess, and returns a year later to see Cop 663 settling in as the new owner of the Midnight Express.
These parallel plots may serve as an allegory for Hong Kong's return to China. Under the veneer of popular optimism about the future, there is also a sense that Hong Kong has been abandoned and, worse, that, like the jilted lover, it has no power or say in this decision.
�E Uncertainty of identity, shifting sense of identity. The characters found in Chungking Express do not present themselves as the traditionally unified creations of classical Hollywood. Rather, these sometimes nameless, some-times faceless, creations are closer to Brecht's or Godard's characters. The pop stars and movie stars, who portray these characters, bring their own baggage of recognition to their roles. Therefore, these characters have a theatrical aspect that keeps them at an imaginative distance. Looking di-rectly at the camera, addressing the viewer through voiceovers, they have a self-consciousness associated with the European New Wave.
Also, the characters seem to comment on the roles they play by constantly shifting among occupations and recognizable types. Cop 223 is a representa-tive of the royal police and the British Crown and a lovelorn, ineffectual dupe who befriends a drug dealer. The cop and the criminal become intimate.
Authority dissolves with the state; legality becomes a nonissue. Cop 663 acts as a bastion of the state and aspires to own a carryout joint. Faye escapes from her menial work for her cousin in the carryout only to be cast in the similar role of stewardess; she has essentially the same job with different clothes.
The film seems to ask if anyone ever can be certain of his or her identity in the shifting political and cultural climate of Hong Kong. Hong Kong hybridity can be disorienting. The heavily accented Cantonese of Ho, ex-plained away as a Taiwan education, comes up against the accented English of a Mandarin-speaking woman in blonde wig and outlandish Western dress. The 1960's quality of Faye, her short hair and slight figure conjuring up both Jean Seberg and Twiggy, the Mamas and the Papas, and the British Invasion, plays against the official stiffness of Cop 663's police uniform and Faye's own transformation into a flight hostess.
As Abbas has eloquently pointed out, Hong Kong's shift from refugee way station to a self-consciously unique place with its own local interests, lan-guage, and culture has happened over the last few years.4 He notes a shift since the signing of the Joint Declaration. This shift stepped up during the events in Tiananmen Square, May-June 1989. Hong Kong residents have been searching for an identity that goes beyond that of exile (from the Qing court, the Japanese, the KMT, or the Communists) or marginal colonial subject to one of local Hong Konger. The characters in Chungking Express seem to be part of Hong Kong and elsewhere as well. The use of language in the film makes this clear. Cantonese vies with English, Mandarin, and Japa-nese in accents coming from Taiwan, India, the mainland, America, and beyond. The search for an authentic Hong Kong identity becomes pointless within this hybridity.
�E
Escape from Hong Kong. The feeling of wanting to be elsewhere and of living as if one were elsewhere is palatable in Chungking Express. Most of the principals have their boarding passes in hand, ready for a flight out of there. All are looking for a change. The fact of 1997 has made staying or leaving the main topic of conversation.
�E
Economic uncertainty. The prospect of the turnover has occasioned eco-nomic uncertainty that can be felt in the film. Will the drug deal (or any deal) go through to completion? Will a job as cop (or any government job) be there after July 1? Will the carryout (or any business) continue as usual?
�E
Self-reflexivity. Chungking Express turns back on itself as an object, re-flecting on its creation and the place of "intellectual property" under the new regime. One country -two systems; one film-two segments. Will this film (or any film) be the same after July 1997?
�E
Life as a literal "blur." The cinematography and editing -optical printing, freeze frames, jump cuts, hand-held camera, and other techniques -create
a vertiginous feeling of spatial/temporal disorientation. Time and space take on new qualities as Hong Kong passes into a new type of existence.
�E Metropolitan Hong Kong. Chungking Express plays up the transnational/ transcultural associations that point to a cosmopolitan, urban culture in keeping with a perception of Mainland China as monolithic, isolated, "primitive," and out of the swing of the global economy.5 ChungkingExpress's vision of Hong Kong as a hybrid, postcolonial metropolis at the pulse of postmodern world culture allows the film to be read as a tacit entry into the list of works that have tried to eke out an identity for Hong Kong separate from the Mainland and Taiwan.
While others have examined all of these elements in some detail, it may be worth taking another look at some of these issues from a slightly different perspective. In this study, Chungking Express and the world of politics, culture, identity, time, and space conjured up in the film are examined in relation to Hong Kong as a transnational entrepot.6 Its narrative will be examined with an eye to Hong Kong's defining role as a place for production, exchange, and consumption of commodities. From this point of view, Chung-king Express tells its story of love, loss, and memory through the romance of goods.
THE COMMODITY
As Marx has pointed out, commodities operate like fetishes. They appear to be concrete, absolute, knowable, tangible, limited, but appearances can be deceptive. The commodity actually hides its history. The thing does not reveal the labor that went into its production, the relations of production that organ-ized that labor, the ownership of the means of its production, and how and for whom its value is defined. Rather, the commodity mystifies in its obviousness and banality. The social critic, however, can see that it acts as a fetish, standing in for something else that is not there, magically appearing out of nowhere to drift in a "free" marketplace that mysteriously determines its value. Standardized, mass-produced, homogenized, circulating globally, the commodity erases its past and presents only a cheerful present moment to its consumer.
In the postmodern turn, the commodity can be stripped of its substance and become an image of itself, which, in turn, becomes a commodity. ChungkingExpress freely plays with this mercurial relationship between goods and im-ages. It features commodities that circulate in the material economy and commodities as images that circulate in a cultural economy. In this regard, the film owes a genuine debt to Pop Art. Like Warhol, Wong Kar-wai takes a close look at mass produced, popular commodities, such as cans of pineapple, sardines, stuffed toys, soda pop, beer, model planes, wigs, sunglasses, CDs, portable stereos, textiles and clothing, home furnishings and domestic goods, soap, toothbrushes, dish towels, and the list goes on. Although all have a place within the drama (i.e., characters talk to and about the commodities, use the commodities, buy and sell the commodities), these goods take on meaning beyond the narrative. Isolated in close-up or overpowering the characters in long shots, these commodities function as objects of specular contemplation. They take on a significance of their own.
Examining Dole pineapple cans or a giant stuffed Garfield doll in a diegetic universe brimming with manufactured goods, Chungking Express addresses the nature of our contemplation of the manufactured object. Like Pop Art, Chungking Express poses several questions: Why am I looking at this can of pineapple or sardines? Why am I fascinated by this glittering CD? Is there an aesthetic pleasure involved in looking at something as banal as a beer bottle? Is the poetry in the everyday or in the artistry of the creator of the image? Which creator? The one who designed the Coca-Cola logo or the one who represents it for us on the screen? Does the image critique or celebrate the manufactured commodity? Is the surface of things superficial or a profound contemplation of the (post)modern world?
As Jameson might ask, do these images function as pastiche or parody?7 Does the viewer laugh at or empathize with a character who confronts a convenience store clerk with his cold-hearted disregard for the feelings of his expired cans or with a character who tries to console a crying dish rag? Does the contemplation of the commodity demystify it or simply add to its fasci-nation and fetishization? Does Pop Art comment on commodities or simply accept them as natural, like the landscapes and portraits of an earlier epoch?
As in Warhol's oeuvre, all of these questions remain unanswered in Chung-king Express. Beyond these questions, however, there is another aspect to the play of commodities/images common to both the film and Pop Art that needs to be addressed. This involves the flattening of the political dimension of the image as well as its global circulation. Beyond soup cans, Warhol reproduced images of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, John F. Kennedy, and Mao Zedong. Media personalities and political figures circulate as commodified images, bought and sold through newspapers and magazines as well as through Warhol's prints and paintings. Moving beyond national borders, ide-ological allegiances, historical moments, detached from movie fantasies as well as political realities, these images take on a resonance for some and exist as only an emptiness and evacuation of meaning for others.
Not since Jurassic Park has a film spent so much time contemplating commodities (in Jurassic Park, the commodities are dinosaurs in all their various manifestations from stuffed dolls to manufactured attractions that bite back). The global surface of the manufacture and display of the commodity (dinosaurs in the Third World created by a multinational cast of characters) takes on a particularly American quality when consumed (by two American kids in the film and by a global audience seeing a Hollywood production).
The same relationship between American style and transnational manufac-ture holds true in Chungking Express. Garfield, Coca Cola, Dole pineapple, the Mamas and the Papas, flannel shirts, Caesar salads, hot dogs, blonde ''Monroe" wigs, model Boeing airplanes, and other similar objects in Chung-king Express may be made in China, but from a clearly American mold. American labels mark the commodities as global and the environment (as well as the people in it) they form as modern and cosmopolitan.
In Chungking Express, Hong Kong serves as an image for contemplation, a stylish, cinematic commodity for consumption. The film makes its surface visible; canted angles, step-printing, slow motion, jump cuts, handheld camera movements, startling ranges of under/overexposure, play with light and filters foreground the technique involved in making the film. It is an object with a surface like the tin of sardines it depicts. It circulates in global markets, perhaps "speaking" in unexpected ways like the crying dish rag.
THE OPIUM WAR
To have a better understanding of the presentation of commodities in Chung-king Express, it may be useful to look at the film in relation to Xie Jin's The Opium War (1997). Specifically, one scene in that film brings commodities to the fore in a spectacular display: The depiction of Lin Zexu's destruction of the opium. Made to commemorate the July 1 handover of Hong Kong to the administration of the People's Republic, the film depicts the events surround-ing Hong Kong's transfer from Qing to British jurisdiction during the first Opium War. Much maligned even before its completion as anti-British/pro-Communist/Chinese chauvinist propaganda,8 The Opium War, the most ex-pensive mainland Chinese film ever produced, should not be so simply dis-missed. If nothing else, it reminds the world that Hong Kong's roots as a major port of trade are grounded in a drug deal gone sour. Antidrug czar Lin Zexu runs afoul of drug traffickers, corrupt petty customs officials, high-placed addicts, a corrupt Qing court, a vacillating emperor, power-hungry British military officials, and an English monarch devoted to free trade over the public good. Hong Kong arose out of a war over processed goods. The exchange of opium as a commodity stands in for the imperialist underpinnings of capitalism.9
Beyond the pomp and circumstance of the imperial destruction of the opium (the incident that directly led to the start of the firstOpium War) and the heroic Lin Zexu's apparent triumph over the foreign drug trade, there is a sensual delight in the destruction of the opium. The film pays careful attention to the details of the process: the cutting of the black, tar balls of opium with broadswords, the glistening of the light on the sweat-drenched bodies of the workers involved in the process, the texture of the water changed by the white smoke of the lime as it is poured into the quadrant of the river used for the event. The camera cranes up to give a sense of scale to the destruction and moves in to show closer details of the entire process. Shots of officials, European merchants, and townspeople looking on as the event takes place underscore the spectacle. Firecrackers burst; drums and gongs sound. Lin Zexu looks proudly on as the detritus is flushed from the river into the bay.
The scene is reminiscent of the helicopter napalm attack on the Vietnamese hamlet in Apocalypse Now; that is, it is a sensual moment of destruction that visually and viscerally overwhelms. However, the delight in the destruction of the opium brings with it no moral ambivalence. Rather, Xie is free to critique capitalism as vociferously as he pleases because the commodity in question is opium.10 In Hollywood film, drug trafficking is normally presented as an extreme form of capitalism, excessive and unrelated to more mundane forms of bourgeois relations. However, in Xie's The Opium War, the drug traffic becomes emblematic of capitalist and imperialist relations.
A noted master of the "woman's film" during the post-1949 reconstitution of the Shanghai film studios under the new regime, Xie still bears traces of a socialist suspicion of commodities and the hidden oppression of free trade. However, moving away from early accounts of the Opium War produced in the PRC, Xie fails to people his film with peasants and members of the working classes. Rather than show the ravages of the drug trade on the commoner, his version deals with the powerful, the wealthy, and the nobility. Even the victims of opium addiction are courtiers and fallen nobles. Thus, his critique of capitalism is oblique and highly ironic.
Xie places the British rationalization for the Opium War in the mouth of Queen Victoria. A prim, youthful figure in bonnet and fiddling with a whip, she is better informed than her ministers seem to realize. Her remarks, throughout her brief appearance in the film, are intercut with close-ups of the astonished expressions of her aging, male ministers. Opening a royal railway line and holding office in her royal car, Victoria approves a stamp of her profile for distribution throughout the empire (where the sun never sets). When asked for her approval to use military force to handle affairs in China, she delivers the following speech:
If I were in Lin Zexu's position, I would also burn all the opium. But now, it's not the opium issue, nor the issue of the lives and properties of a few merchants. It's not even a matter of the dignity of our British flag and royalty. If all the nations followed China's example and rejected free trade, the British Empire would no longer exist within a year. This is the reason for us to use force. We must teach them a lesson on free trade. Gentlemen, Britain has the responsibility to open up this last, largest territory in the East. I hope you won't tell me one day that this has been done by other countries. The fact is whoever gets hold of China will have the entire East, the nineteenth century.
The camera dollies in during the speech, so that it finally rests on Victoria's face in close-up, half in shadow (profiled like her stamp) from the light coming in through the window next to her. She emphasizes "free trade" like a curse throughout the monologue.
Hong Kong emerges later in the film as a makeshift wooden sign announc-ing it as British territory. It is a ripple in the film and in the film's telling of the tale of the first Opium War; little more than a dot on a map and a few planks marking a nondescript piece of ground. Hong Kong itself is property to be exchanged. It becomes the funnel for opium between British India and China. The making of the film itself seems to be another episode in the saga of the Opium War, with Hong Kong still serving as booty to be lost or won, a token of China's lost national integrity.
Queen Victoria's rationalizing of the opium trade through reference to the free market has a curious resonance with the media discussion surrounding the changeover, including fantasies at the edge of the political discourses involving July 1, 1997, like Chungking Express. A scene in the first segment of Chungking Express stands out in a way similar to The Opium War's spectacle of the opium's destruction. The unnamed woman in the blonde wig (Brigitte Lin) organizes a group of South Asians in a drug smuggling opera-tion. A montage sequence shows the details of the packaging, concealing, and transportation of the heroin. The spectacle of opium represents the hidden historical identity of Hong Kong as a place for the exchange of commodities. In this case, because the commodity is heroin, what is normally hidden by the surface of commodities comes dramatically to the surface, so that there is at least a partial appreciation of the human labor involved in the transportation and exchange of goods. Hong Kong, the quintessential entreport, is depicted as a place where commodities are processed, repackaged, transported, and redistributed. Raw materials and the initial stages of manufacture lie else-where. Hong Kong is in the middle as the merchant and go-between.
The drug trafficker in blonde wig, raincoat, sunglasses, and pumps is regal as she holds court in the Chungking Mansions flophouse. Seated next to a refrigerator, open for cooling, she fans the chilled air toward her face. Like Queen Victoria in The Opium War, a side light gives her an imperious profile. She speaks in English to people off-screen, "Are you sure you want to do it?" "Yes, yes" comes from off-screen. Passports are handed to her, and the drug running montage begins. Synthesized music on the soundtrack holds the shots that follow together. Drugs are sewn into clothes and shoes. Money (US$100 bills) is counted out. Shoes are made; scissors cut through seams; sewing machines whirl. Men in traditional Indian skirts on bunks count money happily. Shots show various shops with shoemakers, tailors, and seamstresses putting drug-filled plastic bags in heels of shoes, clothing, a toy stuffed bear. The woman in the blonde wig counts money; she then fills condoms with white powder. South Asian men go into the bathroom with the condoms and come out waddling.
Preparations continue around the bunks of the cramped room: scissors rip open new hiding places, a box marked "VCR" provides another place to hide the drugs; a woman pretends to be pregnant with wadded cloth under her sari; another man comes out of the bathroom, waddling. A shot of the airline flight board at the airport follows; the last of the drugs are wrapped up; jump cuts juxtapose various shots of luggage being closed. At the airport, the blonde smuggler leads the South Asians (men, women, and children) in a line behind her, pushing carts laden with boxes and luggage. One man carries an infant. The others follow behind toting baggage. Except for the blonde leading the group, the picture represents a cliched presentation of South Asians on the way back from a stint working abroad, laden with consumer goods, particu-larly electrical appliances, and an overall air of prosperity.
There is a sound of a baby crying with the music on the soundtrack. The trafficker goes to the ticket counter. The film cuts away to a stewardess (the girlfriend who jilts Cop #663 in the following section) waiting for a taxi. South Asian drum music comes up on the soundtrack; the trafficker turns around; her charges have vanished. Back at her supplier's bar, she is given a can of sardines with a May 1 expiration date to indicate the amount of time she has to clean up the mess.
However, as the sequence ends, it remains unclear as to whose mess she must clean up. She is left to fight her own opium war between her Caucasian supplier and the South Asian runners. As a go-between, she finds herself expendable. Her supplier/bartender/boyfriend has already found a replacement for her; he elevates the newcomer to this position by crowning her with a blonde wig and a kiss. Hidden behind wig, raincoat, and sunglasses, the trafficker's identity evaporates, freeing her, at the end of the film, to escape. She kills all the principals in the drug transaction, but she is doomed to a self-less, anonymous existence defined only through commodities and her relation to them. When she throws off her wig after killing the supplier, she frees herself from one set of relations (i.e., associated with colonialism, American-ization, Western patriarchy), but her image remains a literal blur captured by a freeze frame; her identity remains a mystery.
Speaking Mandarin and English, clothed like Marilyn Monroe, drifting between the Anglo-American world of the bartender/drug supplier and the (post)colonial world of the South Asian runners, this nameless character appears to be a mainlander who has drifted to Hong Kong and fallen in with the seedier side of the colony. However, she could be the opposite: a Taiwan-ese gangster looking for greener pastures in Hong Kong. It is impossible to tell. Commodities define her in their movements between places; her identity drifts with them between drug trafficker and survivor, blonde wig and black hair, raincoats when it is sunny and sunglasses on overcast days. When the goods are gone, nothing clear (or authentic) remains.
THE POETRY OF GOODS
A Chinese saying seems to be creeping, with increased frequency, into the discourse of Hong Kong movies. Roughly translated, it goes as follows: "When they travel, goods become more precious and human life cheaper."11 Although women have traditionally circulated in patriarchal culture, and spe-cifically Hollywood cinema, as tokens of exchange between men, ChungkingExpress goes beyond the objectification and commodification of its female protagonists. The film draws in all the characters within the spectacle of the manufactured environment. People function as commodified images for exchange. However, revealing the fetishization of goods on another plane, the film also elevates the commodity to the status of character, attributing thoughts and feelings to goods, allowing them to "speak" through close-ups. Commodities begin to reveal the secrets that the mystification of the fetish tries to keep hidden.
Ho's relationship to canned pineapple can be taken as one case in point in the film. Separated on April 1, Ho decides to buy a can of pineapple, his girlfriend's favorite fruit, every day with an expiration date of May 1. If his girlfriend, named May, does not return before May 1, Cop 223 will call the relationship "expired." When the convenience store no longer carries cans with an expiration date of May 1, Ho confronts the store clerk. The clerk feels it is unethical to sell cans that expire the next day. After confronting the clerk with his insensitivity for refusing to take the cans' feelings into consideration, Ho is given a box of expired cans and dismissed from the store. Outside, a bum refuses to take the cans because they have expired. All of this takes place in a busy composition with a neon sign saying "Okay" and huge pictures of ice cream cones framing the store's entrance.
In his voiceover commentary, Ho queries, "Is there anything that doesn't have an expiration date?" Back in his apartment, Ho eats pineapple and watches his goldfish (ironically, a sign of fertility, according to Chinese lore). In voiceover, he notes that he is eating his thirtieth can of pineapple and laments, "To May, I'm just another can of pineapple." Eventually, he tries to get his dog to help him eat the pineapple. He notes he is lucky that "May isn't into durian." The camera pans from the gold fish to a pile of empty pineapple cans.
Ho ventures into a bar and vomits up the pineapple in the urinal. To "protect" himself, he asks the woman in the wig whom he has decided to woo on impulse if she likes pineapple. He tries the question in several languages until Mandarin provokes a response. Again, in voiceover, pineapple comes up as a summation of his ultimate inability to know someone -"pineapple one day, something else the next." Canned goods, then, become a shorthand or code for human relationships. Although a critical edge to this may be expected, none is delivered. Commodities retain their mystery as the segment ends on an optimistic note. When Ho receives a happy birthday greeting from a woman via his beeper, he remarks in voiceover, "If memories can be canned I hope this one never expires. If an expiration date must be set, I hope it's 10,000 years."
SPACE AND MARKETPLACE
The title of Chungking Express conjures up a locale and implies quick move-ment. Not only does the title bring together the Chungking Mansions, where the South Asian drug runners live, with the space of the Midnight Express, where both Cop 223 and Cop 663 habitually stop, but other associations as well. Chungking was the last stop on the train, so to speak, for the KMT fleeing the rape of their capitol, Nanjing, by the Japanese during the Pacific War. It conjures up images of last resort, of a last place of exile before a further scattering in 1949 to Taiwan, Hong Kong, or elsewhere after the civil war. The title may also be read allegorically as Hong Kong speeding back to Chungking on the mainland.
However, Chungking here does not refer to the city, but to a high-rise block in the tourist district of Tsimshatsui. Known for cheap accommodations (small hotels/backpacker dorms/flophouses) often owned by South Asians and frequented by a cosmopolitan blend of guest workers and very-low-budget tourists, the Chungking Mansions provide a seedy environment for the scenes of drug trafficking. It is the urban jungle or wild forest referred to in the Chinese title of the film (Chung Hing Sam Lam, or Chungking Forest).
The English title conjures up still other associations, however. Express brings up other relationships, closer to Hollywood than fast food, of The Orient Express and Shanghai Express, of trains as conduits for Orientalist cinematic fantasies about the Westerner abroad. The fast food "express" operates as a more banal appropriation of the word for the serving up of "made in Hong Kong" American-and-British-style fast food (hot dogs, pizza, salads, and fish and chips) for the local crowd.
The title brings together mainland China and Hollywood in one breath, the Chungking Mansions and the local/global aspects of the fast-food joint in one thought. The title serves as an entry into the physical space of the film,a space in which commodities are displayed as spectacle and circulate as objects of exchange.
Much has been written recently on the presentation of urban space within postmodern film culture. For example, in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Fredric Jameson examines the traditional, national, multinational, and transnational organizations of the urban space of Taipei in Edward Yang's Terrorizer.
A foreigner and an outsider may be permitted to wonder whether this way of looking at urban experience does not have something to do with the * 'representa-tion of totality" of a small island which is also a non-national nation state. The enclosed spaces in their range and variety thereby figure or embody the uneven-ness or inequality of the world system: from the most traditional kind of space all the way to the national space of the hospital, the multinational space of the publisher's office (the media, surely of a global range, now housed in a great glass high-rise) and what I am tempted to call the equally transnational anonymity of the hotel corridor with its identical bedrooms.12
Drawing on Jameson, Curtis Tsui notes the following about ChungkingExpress in his insightful article on Wong Kar-wai's oeuvre:
And these spaces also illustrate the inequality created by the global system that is present in the Crown Colony today, as the film goes from the "(multi)national" space of the ethnically diverse Chungking House, to the "transnational" space of the airport, to the 'personal/local' space of Cop 663's flat. With these spatial relations then (and with his heavy use of jump cuts, which further atomize the characters' lives temporally and spatially), Wong has created a film that com-pletely visualizes the nature of Hong Kong (or practically any global city such as New York, Los Angeles, or Tokyo).13
Expanding on Tsui's observations, it may be useful to look at these spaces in Chungking Express in a bit more detail and in relation to how commodities in the film operate in relationship to various spaces. As the Surrealists have shown us, objects take on a different significance in different contexts. Sun-glasses are just utilitarian objects to prevent sun glare until they are worn at night or with a raincoat. Cop 223 then hypothesizes that they signify blind-ness, pretentiousness, or a broken heart; he does not see the "caution" that the wearer ascribes to them, preparing her to deal with sunshine at a moment's notice.
As Jameson observes in his analysis of Terrorizer, there is a range of spaces that need to be examined in the postmodern metropolis. To embellish on his and Tsui's observations a bit, these spaces often exist as palimpsests -one on top of the other. The most traditional, most local space can be the most global (e.g., a widely circulated picture postcard representation of a city). Also, in this case, there is a powerful dynamic played out spatially between the precolonial, colonial, neocolonial and postcolonial spaces in the film.
At its base, Hong Kong appears as the open hawker's market, filled with small stalls run by aging Chinese merchants, handmade wicker baskets of produce carried on the shoulder, tailors and seamstresses working with older machines, a single bare bulb for illumination. This is the Hong Kong of the waves of immigrant mainlanders who came to the Crown Colony seeking their fortune or looking for political exile. It is the Hong Kong of cheap labor, handcraftmanship, and small merchants and shopkeepers in the Chinese mold.
The colonial legacy asserts itself further in the presence of the South Asian population both in the Chungking Mansions and as workers at the Midnight Express. They represent another side of cheap labor, another facet of the international operation of empire. They provide another take on the dynamics of trade among the colonies, through a vague reference to the history of the Opium War and the centrality of India in the British imperial system.14
As a legacy of colonialism, these Chinese and Indian workers, small busi-nessmen and merchants continue to form the backbone of an important sector of the Hong Kong economy. The spaces that they occupy, from sweatshops to flophouses, appear traditional (i.e., ethnically marked by the sounds of Cantonese opera and Indian chanting) and, therefore, precolonial. However, these spaces really feed into the workings of the global economy from the textiles and toys found in the film's shop windows to the informal sector of heroin trafficking.
Where national or clearly marked colonial, modern space might be ex-pected, there is a vacuum. Police officers circulate in the city without police stations or jails. The closest one may get to public space in Chungking Express is be the jogging track where Cop 223, alone and isolated, runs to drain his lovelorn tears from his system by sweating them out. The solid blocks of low-income high-rise housing move from the national to the private, that is, to Cop 663's apartment in the trendy Mid-Levels, situated by the shots of the escalator sidewalk outside his window. This part of the project of modernity is missing from Hong Kong's history. It has never been a nation or an independent state, with a uniquely defined precolonial past. Perhaps this is what makes the city postmodern: It easily bypasses the national and has always, already been part of the global in terms of economic relationships and cultural formations.
The multinational spaces in the film seem to be related to those interna-tional enterprises associated with the postwar turn to American domination of many sectors of the international economy. With headquarters in the United States, these multinational corporations formed the bedrock of many contem-porary transportation and telecommunications concerns. These neocolonial economic relations still have their power. In this case, the airlines (both Faye and Cop 663's former girlfriend wear the United Airlines uniform) define spatial relations as centripetal forces drawing characters away from one an-other and from Hong Kong as well as defining intimate relations in terms of take-offs, landings, smooth skies, and seductions measured in thousands of feet above the ground. Airports and airplanes have a uniformity worldwide, a global anonymity that would seem to run counter to domesticity, intimacy, and private life. However, here, in the form of uniforms and toy model airplanes, this neocolonial, multinational presence finds its way into the bed-room. Bare backs become landing fields after sex and the model plane cele-brates Faye's excitement during her surreptitious forays into Cop 663's apart-ment.
Other spaces have a transnational dimension, moving away from a neoco-lonial domination of the periphery by the center to a more active play among emerging economies, the Third World, and a postcolonial reorganization of the cultural sphere. Spaces take on a global uniformity, rooted in the local economy but appealing to an international flow of tourists, business people, and a mobile, local middle class, either educated abroad or well traveled. The hotel room in which Cop 223 wolfs down salads as the blonde drug trafficker sleeps nearby could be anywhere. Only the framed spaces of the television playing old Cantonese movies and the cityscape outside the high-rise picture window mark the location as specific to Hong Kong. Otherwise, the imper-sonal room could be anywhere on earth.
The bars, the convenience stores, and the electronics/toy shop function in a similar fashion. Contrasted to the traditional/colonial spaces of the hawkers stalls, where Faye buys produce and Cop 663 eats local fare, and the sweat-shops and flophouses frequented by the drug trafficker and her ilk, these spaces embody a different type of economic relationship. The local is poured into molds that can no longer be located in the East or West, Third or First Worlds, periphery or center. For example, the Garfield toy and the boom boxes in the shop display are probably manufactured in China, designed by American or Japanese firms, bought and sold in entrepots like Hong Kong, and finally used by a cosmopolitan consumer (either a local or tourist shop-per). In this vein, it seems fitting that the film should end with a shot of the portable stereo at the deli. The transnationals -whether JVC, Sony, or Moto-rola -have the last word.
In the convenience store, the display of commodities offers a similar vision of homogeneity; that is, sardines, pineapple, and beer are all poured into the same cans and packages worldwide. The California Bar (frequented by Cop 663 and Faye) and the other bars (operated by the white drug lord, Cop 223 's haunt where he encounters the blonde) express a similar sort of transnational organization of culture. CDs, beer bottles, ash trays, whiskey, cocktail and shot glasses, colored lights, and mirrored bars all seem to be the same every-where. (Only Faye's cousin moves on to the more regional KTV entertainment establishment when he sells the Midnight Express.)
Finally, the Midnight Express itself, which glues together the two sections of the film, also works as a cultural glue that brings together the various economies and personal/productive relationships that appear throughout the film. The Midnight Express brings the local and global together in the arena of commerce. It serves Coca-Cola, coffee, salad, pizza, fish and chips, hot dogs, and other deli items to an international clientele of local police and English-speaking tourists. Behind the scenes, the filmgives us a look at what goes into the production of these international food favorites. South Asian assistants, Chinese cooks, servers, and the proprietor drag food in from the local market, cook it up in a culturally hybridized kitchen, and serve it up in the paper and foil containers of delicatessens everywhere. In a culture tradi-tionally suspicious of cold, raw food, Cop 223's and Cop 663's girlfriends' penchants for salads appear to be quite cosmopolitan. In this case, on the peripheries of the transnational exchange of goods, local production creates exotic commodities, (e.g., the pizza, with its horrific -to the traditional Chinese palate -gobs of cheese, and the salad).15 Cheese, raw lettuce, and Coca-Cola meet at Hong Kong's Midnight Express and become part of the local cultural environment.
The Midnight Express also serves as a fitting backdrop for Cop 223's numerous telephone conversations. (Cops seem to hang out at delis and convenience stores everywhere.) It serves as an ironic meeting place for the alienated, disaffected characters that people the narrative. The viewer hears only one side of the conversation. The telephone underscores the hybridity of the Hong Kong environment by concentrating on language and (mis)communication. The polyglot Cop 223, for example, switches from Can-tonese to Mandarin to English to Japanese in search of a language to pick up women. The blonde drug trafficker uses English with the South Asians and Mandarin with the cop. However, most of the time, characters do not con-verse. Voiceover monologues replace conversation. American English blots out thought: "California Dreamin' " blares at the Midnight Express to help Faye (and later former Cop 663) "not think."
The faceless, voiceless beeper message to "live 10,000 years" as a birth-day greeting for Cop 223 offers a rather removed glimmer of hope for that character's happiness. Mechanical mediation and the machinations of Faye also interfere with Cop 663's communication with his ex-girlfriend (e.g., messages on voice recording machines get erased "accidentally").
Commodities -culturally mediated, tainted, fetishistic certainly, but con-crete -remain the most certain conduit for the communication of personal feelings and desires. To get to know the blonde drug trafficker (whom he never knows), Cop 223 asks if she likes pineapple (in several languages). Cop 663 recognizes and expresses his feelings for Faye by returning the compact disk of the Mamas and Papas tunes he had mistaken earlier as a gift from his ex-girlfriend.
The last type of space depicted in Chungking Express is domestic space. The female characters have a tangential relationship to this space, whereas the male characters are firmly entrenched within the domestic. For example, the blonde drug trafficker is shown only briefly in anything resembling a private space, and it appears to be a very impersonal hotel room. Cop 663 's apartment frequently hosts his stewardess girlfriend and her personal effects as well as Faye's additions. These women have no room of their own so to speak. The women drift and the men stay put in this film.
However, even if the women are cast adrift, they still manage to shop. The montage of the blonde drug trafficker shopping for all the containers and special clothing and trick luggage for the runners parallels the montage scenes featuring Faye reorganizing Cop 663 's apartment with the commodities she has purchased. Faye expresses her passion through commodities: goldfish, new sheets, old sardine labels on new cans of fish, new compact disks, new soap, toothbrush and cup, new dish rags, sleeping pills (to help the lovelorn cop get some sleep); a giant Garfield replaces a white stuffed bear. Faye transforms Cop 663 's domestic realm, but only subtly and without upsetting the transcultural panoply of commodities that define his personal space. Cops 223 and 663, like most of Hong Kong's residents, do not need to leave home to see the world. They can stay home, put their feet up, and have the world tumble in on them. The toy airplanes in Cop 663 's apartment operate both as sex toys and symbols of the interconnections between the Hong Kong locality and the global system.
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN': ARE GLOBAL DREAMS MADE IN AMERICA?
In Chungking Express, the most intimate spaces bear the marks of a global environment. However, although Made in Hong Kong commodities bearing an American or transnational label would be expected to be found in any urban center, these same commodities take on different meanings as they appear in different locations. In Woman and Chinese Modernity, Rey Chow points out a very important aspect of the relationship between identity and commodities in Asia:
Unlike what Oriental things still are to many Europeans and Americans, "Western things" to a Chinese person are never merely dispensable embellishments; their presence has for the past century represented the necessity of fundamental adap-tation and acceptance. It is the permanence of imprints left by the contact with the West that should be remembered even in an ethnic culture's obsession with "itself."16
Chungking Express's director Wong Kar-wai talks about being influenced by what he calls "Seventh Fleet Culture" during the years between the Korean War and Vietnam when American presence in Asia was waxing. He "bought the music, the cigarettes, the lifestyle; seeing big foreigners in the streets made a strong impression. . . ."17
Chungking Express is filled with this sort of culture. The blonde wig, sunglasses, high heels, and raincoat of Monroe and Hollywood in the late 1950s/early 1960s and the "California Dream' " of the swinging late 1960s both refer to a specifically American "look." The airline uniforms have a timeless American aspect to them -sensible pumps, dark skirt, tailored blouse and tie, pinned-up hair.
Like Godard's Breathless, Chungking Express relies on Hollywood as a backdrop. It pastiches Hollywood genres like the policier, the gangster film, and the romantic comedy. It plays with a Hollywood/Hong Kong sense of stars and stardom, for example, Lin Qing-xia as Monroe; Faye Wong as Jean Seberg; Tony Leung somewhere between Cary Grant and a John Woo hero. It self-reflexively recognizes itself as a commodity for exchange within the international art film market.
The song "California Dreamin' " promises an escape to the warmth and safety of Los Angeles -particularly for many Hong Kong filmmakers with Hollywood aspirations. Several questions come to mind. In Hong Kong, whose mind, as 1997 comes and goes, is not elsewhere? If the PRC, England, and Taiwan are part of that elsewhere, is America the "big elsewhere"? Is the hybridity of Hong Kong just a new take on American cultural imperial-ism? Or, has America been made in China, too? Does the global dimension of culture put the discussion on a different plane? Has California and Hong Kong's California bar dissolved into one another and become interchange-able? Is the dream for California or has the California of the dream never existed? Faye, for example, remarks when she returns to Hong Kong that California is "nothing much."
Commodities seem to be the key to this ambivalence. America is a global dream and a Hollywood illusion, but it is also the structuring principle for identity. The carryout selling Coca-Cola and hot dogs is as marked by Amer-ica as the stewardess in her uniform and sensible pumps. American goods move beyond the market to construct the individual.
GENDER AND COMMODITIES RECONSIDERED
Abbas talks about Chungking Express as a "comedy of the fetish, a displaced detail. A fetish is a substitute, a surrogate, a neurotic symptom, but it can also be regarded as a defense against neurosis, in that it is a less harmful kind of neurosis."18 Taking a cue from Abbas and moving from Marx to Freud on the nature of the fetish, it may be worth looking at the commodities that populate Chungking Express as different sorts of fetishes. Going back to Freud, the fetish exists as a phallic object used symbolically to belie the mother's lack of a penis, and, thus, to disavow the possibility of the male's own castration.
Both Cop 223 and 663 encounter women who threaten their egos. Each one deals with loss, abandonment, and rejection by women. Pain (the pain of symbolic castration) turns into fetishistic encounters with commodified objects (e.g., canned pineapples, black coffee, soap, dishrags, stuffed toys). All of this comes back to another aspect of postmodernity evident in Chungking Express', that is, a crisis in the authority of the patriarchy and in traditional notions of masculinity. All the women in the filmfly off (in the cases of the drug trafficker, the stewardess, and Faye, quite literally in airplanes) and leave the men to fend for themselves. Officially (on the police force) or economically (as small businessmen), the men are grounded, while the women move freely in the new service (airline hostess) and informal (drug trafficking) parts of the global economy.
More flexible, the women circulate more freely. As Gayle Rubin has pointed out in her work on women as objects of exchange, under patriarchy, men allow women to circulate according to male rules. The patriarchy defines the extent and nature of exchange among groups; that is, to whom a woman can be married implies a relationship between families, clans, communities, nations, and races. As postmodernity sees a weakening of all of these old relationships, women, traditionally more likely to circulate among various groups in patriarchal communities in which men stayed put, now, riding on the advances of feminism, can venture even further from hearth and home.19
In Chungking Express, this leaves the men to hang out the laundry, mop up the floor, and wring out the dishtowel. Within the Western imagination, however, the association of Asian men with domesticity is not a recent development. Rey Chow, in her analysis of Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, talks about the China of the Orientalist imagination as a "feminized space."20 Masculinity becomes problematic as it enters this space. However, as Shohat and Stam have shown in Unthinking Eurocentricism, filmmakers outside of the West create strategies for combating these Orientalist presuppositions promulgated by Hollywood's cinematic hegemony.21 Here, the fetish and the domesticated male do not point to a world hopelessly out of balance, but to a place of hopeful potential. Abbas sees the film as fundamentally comic, and Tsui reads it as a hopeful allegory of the handover. However, the film can also be seen as a description of a postmodern/postcolonial/transnational cul-ture in the making in which gender roles are radically redefined.
If nothing else, commodities and consumers are slippery characters -mys-tifying material relations of production, subject to the whims of fashion, creatures of the marketplace, capricious with disposable income. Cop 663's stewardess girlfriend learns a lesson from the world of consumption. She was satisfied with eating the salads her boyfriend brought her until the owner of the Midnight Express talked him into giving her a choice. Manipulating the consumer, he devilishly persuades Cop 663 to buy both the salad and the fish and chips to give the poor woman a choice. Rather than being grateful and satisfied with these food choices, the stewardess decides to try the same market strategy in her personal life and switches from man to man. The proprietor tells the cop that she will come back for more of her old favorites when she tires of the novelty of the new goods. However, Cop 663 does not have the same faith in the dynamics of the market. He leaves her letter unopened and lives with the illusion that she may be hiding in the wardrobe of his apartment. He even thinks she has come back to rearrange his apartment (when, in fact, Faye has rearranged the stewardess out of the cop's life by erasing her message from the phone answering machine).
Cop 223 complains that May treats him like "a can of pineapple." In Chungking Express, the men see themselves as the commodities. Women are the consumers. Like Yang's meditations on contemporary Taipei (That Day on the Beach, Taipei Story, Terrorizer), Chungking Express shows women as key players in new relationships of exchange. Women are more malleable, better at bouncing back, more proactive than the men, who are more emo-tional, nostalgic, trying to hang onto the past, wanting to stay put. Do these postmodern, supposedly "post-feminist" characters really inherit the world economy? Or, are they themselves commodified images packaged to sell the new look of old relations of production, exchange, and consumption?
A FINAL LOOK AT CULTURAL GOODS: COMRADES, ALMOST A LOVE STORY
Chungking Express is in no way exceptional in its interest in American commodities, consumerism, and the shaping of Hong Kong identity. Rather, it serves as one example within a body of works that take up these themes and marry them to the issue of the 1997 changeover and emigration. Within a range of films dealing with border crossings between Hong Kong and the mainland, Hong Kong and America, and among various countries in Europe and Asia as traversed by Hong Kong emigres, Peter Chan's Comrades, Almost A Love Story (1996) stands out for several reasons. It swept the Hong Kong International Film Festival awards and has made money at a time when the Hong Kong film industry is experiencing a serious slump. The film also manages to bring together two key preoccupations of recent Hong Kong film: mainland Chinese coming to Hong Kong and emigration from Hong Kong to America. The characters that alight in Hong Kong seem to be more enamored of the American Dream than of any Hong Kong reality.
Like Chungking Express, Comrades offers a picture of Hong Kong formed from American commodities. McDonald's restaurants, Mickey Mouse, and English classes where students learn to say, "jump, you son of a bitch, jump," from American Westerns, provide the backdrop for the film's narrative action. As these American icons float transnationally, they come into contact with commodities that have a distinctive and sentimental Chinese aspect. Bottles of bean curd milk and the commodified music of the transnational Chinese pop star Teresa Teng circulate within the film, too. In fact, Teresa Teng's song, "Tian Mi Mi" (Sweetness) provides the film with its Chinese title, linking it with Teng's Mandarin love songs, and a pull away from the vacuous cheerfulness of Mickey Mouse. Teng represents a bittersweet sense of fate in Comrades. Her music sets apart the mainlanders in the film, since Teng is presented as being appreciated almost exclusively by Chinese from the main-land. Born in the mainland, Teng established her career in Taiwan and within the overseas Chinese communities of Southeast Asia. After the Cultural Rev-olution, Teng's music swept through the PRC and achieved a great deal of popularity.
When Li Xiao-jun (Leon Lai) and Li Chiao (Maggie Cheung), the com-rades of the title, are drawn together, it is through their common appreciation of Teresa Teng. At the end of the film,they meet in front of a shop window in New York City, pulled together by a television report on Teng's death. Teng, as a dead pop icon on a collection of flickering screens, stands in for the characters' lives and emotions, their "almost" love story.
Whistling Teng's music had brought them together earlier along with the debacle of Li Chiao's poor judgment in buying Teng's music for resale in Hong Kong. Hoping to make a profit on the fact that Hong Kong is filled with mainlanders, she opens a booth to sell Teng's music during the New Year holidays. She falls into debt when she fails to bank on the fact that, like herself, the mainlanders (referred to as "Uncle Chinas" in the film) try not to be spotted by indulging openly in the purchase of goods shunned by the cosmopolitan Hong Kong population. Teng makes the Uncle Chinas stand out in a crowd. In addition, the sense of fate embodied in Teng's songs and by her premature death permeates the film, pushing its protagonists from the mainland to Hong Kong and on to New York.
However, commodified, the sentiment of Teng's music flattens. Like Chungking Express, Comrades is difficult to pin down in its own sentiments. On the one hand, it offers a fantasy to the Hong Kong audience of the Mainland, represented by the naive Xiao-jun and the ambitious, but unlucky Li Chiao, as simply sojourners on their way somewhere else. However, it also offers a point of identification for the Hong Kong viewer who may, indeed, be on the way somewhere else, too, either by staying put and becoming part of the PRC or by emigrating. The promise of prosperity in Hong Kong and New York is undercut by the harsh conditions for immigrants in both places. In Comrades, this is represented by a roller-coaster ride of the characters' economic ups and downs in Hong Kong and by the even bleaker picture of a New York associated with violent death and sudden loss. While the charac-ters' fortunes and the future of Hong Kong can be dismissed as questions of "fate," any sense of nostalgia, sentimentality, or fatalism empties of its affect as Comrade's images empty out into flickering television images, muted further by the reflections of a shop window.
This postmodern draining of the image findsa parallel much earlier in the film with the introduction of Xiao-jun's aunt, Rosie (played by veteran Hol-lywood actress Irene Tsu). A former Hong Kong Wanchai bar girl, Rosie now helps to run a bordello; however, she remains obsessed with William Holden, whom she may or may not have met during the filming of either The World of Suzie Wong or Love Is a Many Splendored-Thing. Hollywood's image of Hong Kong surfaces again to stand in for the Hong Kong version of the American Dream.
Rosie has a shrine to William Holden on her bedroom wall. In addition to newspaper clippings and photos of Holden in various poses (in various states of dress and undress), the shrine includes a framed portrait of the actor. When the camera frames Xiao-jun and Rosie in a mirror hanging on the same wall, Holden's image is juxtaposed with their reflection and with a crucifix and a picture of Jesus Christ in the extreme background. Surrounded by Western icons of salvation, the images point forward and back to a mainland/Hong Kong/American future in the figure of Xiao-jun and a mainland/Hong Kong/ American past in Rosie.
Holden is revered. Rosie lends Xiao-jun one of "William's" suits for a job interview, telling him to dry clean it later because William will be back. A close-up shows the monogram "William H" on the collar of a shirt. Xiao-jun seems flattered when Rosie mentions he looks like William, and the camera lingers on Xiao-Jun's reflection superimposed over Holden's image after Rosie has been called away and leaves the shot. In the next scene, one of Rosie's acquaintances informs Xiao-Jun that William is a drunk Rosie picked up, undercutting the magic of Holden's image that had captured Xiao-jun's imagination in the previous scene.
However, later in Comrades, Rosie reappears to discuss her relationship with William further. Rosie tells Xiao-jun the story of meeting William Holden while he was in Hong Kong shooting Love Is a Many-SplendoredThing. Showing souvenirs of their relationship in the form of knickknacks from the swanky Peninsula Hotel, a Hong Kong colonial landmark, the plau-sibility of her story increases. Later, Rosie's memories seem to be justified by a snapshot Xiao-jun finds of the two together. However, the truth or self-delusion behind Rosie's relationship with Holden remains unimportant. Rather, it is through William Holden that Comrades looks at Hollywood's imagination of Hong Kong as the home of the exotic Suzie Wong as well as Hong Kong's view of Hollywood/America as a savior in the form of William Holden who is placed on a visual par with Jesus Christ.
Rosie's memories/delusions are presented in an ambivalent way -gro-tesque, satiric, nostalgic, bittersweet, ironic, sentimental, genuine, and false. Comrades accesses these feelings through the commodified image of Holden; that is, through the relationship between the American image/commodity and the Chinese/Hong Kong/Hollywood character/actress. However, Holden the American savior and Teng the heart of (displaced) China both fade in signifi-cance in the transnational cultural marketplace where meaning can so easily be drained through commodification.
The film's reflection on Holden in Hong Kong brings this discussion of consumerism, commodities, Hong Kong, and America full circle. Xiao-jun melts into the image of William Holden as completely as Faye and the blonde drug-trafficker blend in with the panoply of commodities in the shop window in Chungking Express. Global products with American labels define the cul-tural landscape of both films.
Film itself is a special kind of commodity for Hong Kong. Both Comrades and Chungking Express are self-conscious of their status as images and as commodities.22 They both seem to be about Hong Kong and 1997, while saying nothing directly about the handover. Both display commodities circu-lating around the globe, bouncing between Hong Kong and the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Hong Kong and the PRC and Hong Kong and the United Kingdom/British Empire/Commonwealth. Surface and the display of the marketplace play their roles, but more fundamental issues of identity and self-determination also come into play. Like most postmodern texts, Chung-king Express and Comrades remain elusive and equivocal, and, perhaps, ultimately, ambivalent.
NOTES
1.
Portions of this chapter were presented at the Asian Cinema Studies Society Fifth Biennial Conference, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, August 1997. My special thanks to Suzie Young, who enabled my participation in the conference, and to Yeh Yueh-yu of Hong Kong Baptist University and Evans Chan for reading an earlier draft of this essay.
2.
See for instance, Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappear-ance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Curtis K. Tsui, "Subjec-tive Culture and History: The Ethnographic Cinema of Wong Kar-Wai," Asian Cinema 8. 1 (Spring 1996): 83-108; Yeh Yueh-yu, "Cause Without a Rebel: Musical Discourse in the Films of Wong Kar-Wai," 1996 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival Catalogue (Taipei: Golden Horse Film Festival, 1996), 150-55.
3.
See Abbas; also Esther Yau, "Border Crossing: Mainland China's Presence in Hong Kong Cinema," in Nick Browne, et al., eds., New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Iden-tities, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
4.
The film's director, Wong Kar-wai, is himself a mainlander born in Shanghai, moving to Hong Kong as a child with older siblings who had stayed behind, unable to leave during the Cultural Revolution.
5.
For more on the transnational dimension of contemporary film, see Hamid Naficy, "Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panics: Independent Transnational Film Genre," in Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
6.
For a discussion of Hong Kong as an entrepot, see William H. Overholt, The Rise of China: How Economic Reform is Creating a New Superpower (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993).
7.
For the concepts of pastiche and parody in this context, see Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-modern Culture, Hal Foster, ed. (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983).
8.
See Patrick E. Tyler, "In China, Letting a Hundred Films Wither," The New York Times, 1 December 1996.
9.
Although the Opium War is taught to all who receive a Chinese education, one is often struck by the ignorance of those outside of China as to the roots of the international drug trade and its relationship to imperialism. I still encounter the occasional student who admits that he or she thought the British fought the Opium War to keep opium from coming into Britain from China, rather than the other way around.
At least since the fall of the Qing Dynasty, Lin Zexu has been used as a model hero, fighting imperialism as well as official corruption in China. Numerous films have been made about his career, most praising his efforts against the corruption and stupidity of the Qing court. As in Xie Jin's account, most of these historical depictions favor Qing villains over foreign devils as the true culprits in China's humiliation during the nineteenth century. For an account of Xie's film in relation to earlier renderings of the Opium War, see Li Cheuk-To, "Yapin Zhanzheng (The Opium War)," Cinemaya 38 (Fall 1997): 30-1. For the use of the Opium War as resistance to Japanese imperialism during World War II, see Poshek Fu, "The Ambiguity of Entertainment: Chinese Cinema in Japanese-Occupied Shanghai, 1941 to 1945," Cinema Journal 37. 1 (Fall 1997): 66-84.
10.
I have pointed out elsewhere that one of the few fantasies available to those outside the bourgeoisie to enjoy the vilification and destruction of capitalists and their goods is in fantasies about drugs and the drug trade. See Gina Marchetti, "Action-Adventure as Ideology" in Cultural Politics in Contemporary America, Ian Angus and Sut Jhally, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1989).
11.
In Once Upon a Time in China and America (1997), for instance, this saying cropped up in a speech given by Wong Fei-hung that put a gathering of Chinatown gamblers fast to sleep.
12.
Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 154.
13.
Tsui, "Subjective Culture and History," 115.
14.
It has been noted that the British colonial administration encouraged all kinds of migrations of labor, from its own administrators coming from the United Kingdom to boatloads of Indian convicts and Chinese coolies (from the Chinese ku-li, mean-ing "bitter labor"). Governing the motley, polyglot assortment in the colonies helped to solidify British power by keeping races, religions, and ethnic groups at odds, meeting only on the common ground established under British authority, law, and the English language.
15.
Cheese is a running joke in the film, The Soong Sisters (1997), a kind of epic of China's modernization via its confrontation with the West.
16.
Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 27.
17.
Tony Rayns, "Poet of Time," Sight and Sound 5, no. 9 (September 1995): 13-14.
18. Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, 57.
19. Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Toward an Anthropology of Women, Rayna R. Reiter, ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).
20.
Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 11.
21.
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994).
22.
It may be worth noting that Comrades includes several references to the work of Wong Kar-wai in addition to the stylistic debt it clearly owes to Wong's work. To cite only one example, the English teacher in Comrades is played by Wong's longtime collaborator, Christopher Doyle.
HONG KONG ELECTRIC SHADOWS: A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF STUDIES IN ENGLISH
H. C. Li
This bibliography includes selected publications in English on Hong Kong cinema, conveniently grouped under the following four headings: books, booklets/film programs, articles/book chapters, and theses/dissertations. While journalistic publications, in particular articles, interviews and film reviews in daily newspapers, fan and trade magazines, and most film journals (e.g., Cinemaya, Film Comment, and Sight and Sound) are not listed, book length general studies, the usual academic papers, the collectible film festival cata-logs, and M.A. theses and Ph.D. dissertations have been selected for inclusion, with brief annotations added to some entries.
For more than two decades, the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) has been publishing the best series of annual catalogs on Hong Kong cinema. Every year, from 1978 to 1999, the HKIFF has produced one or two (two in 1982, 1983, 1985-88, 1990, 1997, 1998, and 1999) retrospective catalogs devoted exclusively to Hong Kong cinema in addition to issuing its main catalogs (me) where, from 1991 to 1996, articles on recent Hong Kong films were also published. With a wealth of historical data, dozens of inter-views, many informative and insightful essays, hundreds of biographies, countless film synopses, and decades of filmographies, not to mention page after page of rare stills, these bilingual (Chinese and English) catalogs are indispensable to serious film researchers. To present a sampling of their rich contents, the more substantial articles from all the catalogs of the 1990s, i.e. from 1990 to 1999, are included in this bibliography. These catalogs are abbreviated as HKIFF 15th: 1991, HKIFF 15th: 1991 me, HKIFF 21st: 1997a, and HKIFF 21st: 1997b, and so on. Likewise, the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival catalog is cited as TGHFF followed by the year (e.g. TGHFF 1994). Although the contents of the Hong Kong Film Archive catalogs are not analyzed here, their richness and importance should not be overlooked by film scholars. A more comprehensive bibliography on Hong Kong cinema is em-bodied in my other bibliography, "Chinese Electric Shadows III: And the Ship Sails On" {Modern Chinese Literature 10.1-2 (1998): 207-68), which includes more than 900 entries. Readers should also consult the quarterly Hong Kong Film Archive Newsletter (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 1997-) and the annual Hong Kong Films (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Kowloon and New Territories Motion Pictures Industry Association, 1991-), which are both bilingual publications in Chinese and English.
BOOKS
Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Chapter 2, "The New Hong Kong Cinema and the Deja Disparu" (pp. 16-47) originally appears in Discourse 16:3 (1994): 65-77, and chapter 3 (pp. 48-62) is on Wong Kar-wai.
Baker, Rick, and Toby Russell, eds. The Essential Guide to Hong Kong Movies. London: Eastern Heroes Publications, 1995.
Berry, Chris, ed. Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 2nd expanded edition. London: British Film Institute, 1991. Articles on Hong Kong cinema by Chiao Hsiung-ping and Jenny Kwok Wah Lau.
Block, Alex Ben. The Legend of Bruce Lee. New York: Dell, 1974.
Browne, Nick, et al., eds. New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Articles on Hong Kong cinema by Li Cheuk-to, Esther Yau, and Leo Ou-fan Lee, with chronology by Esther Yau and Li Cheuk-to (224-29).
Chan, Jackie, with Jeff Yang. I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action. London: Pan, 1997;
U.S. edition, New York: Ballantine, 1998.
Chunovic, Louis. Bruce Lee: The Tao of the Dragon Warrior. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1996; U.K. edition, The Unseen Bruce Lee, London: Titan Books, 1996. Published in cooperation with the Bruce Lee estate.
Dannen, Fredric, and Barry Long. Hong Kong Babylon: An Insider's Guide to the Hollywood of the East. London: Faber, 1997; U.S. edition, New York: Miramax, 1997.
Eberhard, Wolfram. The Chinese Silver Screen: Hong Kong and Taiwanese Motion Pictures in the 1960s. Taipei: Orient Cultural Service, 1972. More than 300 synop-ses with an interpretive essay.
Fonoroff, Paul. At the Hong Kong Movies: 600 Reviews from 1988 till the Handover. Hong Kong: Film Biweekly, 1998. Silver Light: A Pictorial History of Hong Kong Cinema 1925-1970. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1997. Gaul, Lou. The Fist that Shook the World: The Cinema of Bruce Lee. Baltimore, Md.:
Midnight Marquee, 1997.
Gentry, Clyde. Jackie Chan: Inside the Dragon. Dallas, Tex.: Taylor, 1997.
Glaessner, Verina. Kung Fu: Cinema of Vengeance. London: Lorrimer, 1974.
Hammond, Stefan, and Mike Wilkins. Sex and Zen & A Bullet in the Head: The Essential Guide to Hong Kong's Mind-Bending Films. New York: Fireside, 1996. Hill, John, and Pamela Church Gibson. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hong Kong cinema, pp. 550-56.
Hong Kong Film Archive. Hong Kong Filmography. Volume 1, 1913-1941, and Volume 2, 1942-1949, and Volume 3, 1950-1952. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 1997-. Successive volumes under preparation.
International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. 3rd ed. Volumes 1-4. Chicago: St.
James Press, 1997. Each volume has different editors; v.l Films, v.2 Directors, v.3 Actors and Actresses, v.4 Writers and Production Artists. Entries on Hong Kong directors include King Hu and John Woo. Entries on actors include Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee. Entries on films include Rouge (Stanley Kwan) and Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-Wai).
Jarvie, I. C. Window on Hong Kong: A Sociological Study of the Hong Kong Film Industry and Its Audience. Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1977.
Lalanne, Jean-Marc, et al. Wong Kar Wai. Paris: Dis Voir, 1997. Lee, Bruce. Letters of the Dragon: Correspondence, 1958-1973, John Little, ed. (Boston: Tuttle, 1998). The Bruce Lee Library, v.5. Words of the Dragon: Interviews, 1958-1973. John Little, ed., Boston: Tuttle, 1997. The Bruce Lee Library, v. 1. Lent, John A. The Asian Film Industry. London: Christopher Helm, 1990. Chapter 4 is on Hong Kong cinema (92-121). Leyda, Jay. Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972. Chapter 11 is on Hong Kong (270-81). Lo, Che-ying, comp. A Selective Collection of Hong Kong Movie Posters, 1950's-1990's. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1992. Chinese and English. Logan, Bey. Hong Kong Action Cinema. London: Titan Books, 1994; U.S. edition, Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1995.
Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng, ed. Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997. Articles on Hong Kong cinema by Jon Kowallis, Anne T. Ciecko, and Steve Fore.
Meyers, Richard, et al. Marital Arts Movies: From Bruce Lee to the Ninjas. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1985.
Mintz, Marilyn D. The Martial Arts Film. South Brunswick: Barnes, 1978.
Palmer, Bill, Karen Palmer, and Ric Meyers. The Encyclopedia of Martial Arts Movies. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1995. Rovin, Jeff, and Kathy Tracy. The Essential Jackie Chan Sourcebook. New York: Pocket Books, 1997. Server, Lee. Asian Pop Cinema: Bombay to Tokyo. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999. Hong Kong cinema, pp. 12-41. Tarn, Kwok-kan, and Wimal Dissanayake. New Chinese Cinema. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1998. Chapter on Stanley Kwan (72-90).
Teo, Stephen. Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions. London: British Film Institute, 1997. The U.K. edition has no illustrations, but its Finnish edition (Helsinki: Like Publications, 1996), based on an earlier draft, is well illustrated.
Thomas, Bruce. Bruce Lee: Fighting Spirit, a Biography. Berkeley: Frog, 1994.
Tobias, Mel. Memoirs of an Asian Moviegoer. Hong Kong: South China Morning Post, 1982. Revised edition of the author's Flashbacks: Hong Kong Cinema After Bruce Lee. Hong Kong: Gulliver, 1979.
Weisser, Thomas. Asian Cult Cinema. New York: Boulevard Books, 1997. Almost exclusively on Hong Kong cinema. Witterstaetter, Renee. Dying for Action: The Life and Films of Jackie Chan. New York: Warner Books, 1997; U.K. edition, London: Ebury Press, 1998. Wong, Tak-wai, ed. Evans Chan's To Liv(e): Screenplay and Essays. Hong Kong: Department of Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong, 1996. Wood, Miles. Cine East: Hong Kong Cinema Through the Looking Glass. Guildford: FAB, 1998.
Zhang, Yingjin, and Zhiwei Xiao. Encyclopedia of Chinese Film. London: Routledge, 1998. Historical essay on "Hong Kong cinema" by Paul Fonoroff (31-46) and other entries on Hong Kong films and filmmakers.
BOOKLETS/FILM PROGRAMS
Hong Kong Film Archive. Archive Treasures: Chan Po-chu, the Princess of Movie Fans. Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council, 1999. 40p. Chinese and English. Chinese notes on 10 films, with complete filmography of Chan Po-chu's 250 films in Chinese and English. Archive Treasures: Rare Prints Found Overseas. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Ar-chive, 1997. 35p. Chinese and English. Film program of eight films made between 1952 and 1959. The Early Days of Hong Kong Cinema: An Exhibition (1896-1950). Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 1995. 60p. Chinese and English. 50 Years of Stardom: A Tribute to Hung Sin-nui. Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council, 1998. 36p. Chinese and English. 50 Years of the Hong Kong Film Production and Distribution Industries: An Exhibition(1947-1997). Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 1997. 106p. Chinese and English. Hong Kong Film Archive Treasures: An Exhibition. Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council, 1998. 96p. Chinese and English. Lam Kar-sing: Star of the Cantonese Opera and Silver Screen. Hong Kong: Provi-sional Urban Council, 1998. 36p. Chinese and English. The Making of Martial Arts Films - As Told by Filmmakers and Stars. Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council, 1999. 96p. Chinese and English. Superstars of Cantonese Movies of the Sixties: Exhibition 25.3.96-9.4.96. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1996. 96p. Chinese and English. Wong Fei Hung: The Invincible Master. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 1996. 36p. Chinese and English. Five short English articles and a complete list of ninety-nine Huang Feihong films.
Hong Kong International Film Festival. [Main Catalog]. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1977-. Chinese and English. Excellent programs on Chinese and Hong Kong films. (2nd: 1978). Cantonese Cinema Retrospective (1950-1959). Hong Kong: Urban Coun-cil, 1978. 188p. Chinese and English. Ed. Lin Nien-tung and Paul Yeung. Notes on seventeen films (88-101). (3rd: 1979). Hong Kong Cinema Survey 1946-1968. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1979. 173p. Chinese and English. Ed. Lin Nien-tung; English editors: Tony Rayns and Roger Garcia. Notes on twenty-three films (165-69). (4th: 1980). A Study of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Film. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1980. 242p. Chinese and English. Ed. Lau Shing-hon; English editor: Tony Rayns. Notes on twenty-eight films (191-218). (5th: 1981). A Study of the Hong Kong Swordplay Film (1945-1980). Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1981. 288p. Chinese and English. Ed. Lau Shing-hon; English editor: Leong Mo-ling. Notes on thirty films (255-87). Revised edition, 1996. (6th: 1982). Cantonese Cinema Retrospective (1960-1969). Hong Kong: Urban Coun-cil, 1982. 190p. Chinese and English., ed. Shu Kei; English editor: Leong Mo-ling. Notes on twenty-four films (143-89). Revised edition, 1996. (6th: 1982). The Hong Kong Contemporary Cinema. Hong Kong: Urban Council,
1982. 55p. Chinese and English. Ed. Jerry Liu. Notes on seven films (23-29), alternative cinema (pp. 41-43), and television documentaries (pp. 49-51).
(7th: 1983). A Comparative Study of Post-War Mandarin and Cantonese Cinema: TheFilms of Zhu Shilin, Qin Man and Other Directors. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1983. 224p. Chinese and English. Ed. Shu Kei; English editors: Roger Garcia, Jerry Liu, and Ian Findlay-Brown. Notes on forty-three films (210-21).
(7th: 1983). Hong Kong Cinema '82. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1983. 32p. Chinese and English. Ed. Jerry Liu. Notes on fourteen films (26-30).
(8th: 1984). A Study of Hong Kong Cinema in the Seventies. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1984. 183p. Chinese and English. Ed. Li Cheuk-to; English editors: Mi-chael Lam and Leong Mo-ling. Notes on forty-one films (145-61).
(9th: 1985). Hong Kong Cinema '84 & A Tribute to Li Pingqian. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1985. 57p. Chinese and English. Ed. Leong Mo-ling. Notes on sixteen short films and five feature films (15-25).
(9th: 1985). The Traditions of Hong Kong Comedies. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1985. 184p. Chinese and English. Ed. Li Cheuk-to; English editor: Cynthia Lam. Notes on thirty-four films (123-39).
(10th: 1986). Cantonese Melodrama 1950-1969. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1986. 160p. Chinese and English. Ed. Li Cheuk-to; English editor: Wong Ain-ling. Notes on eighteen films (106-14). Also includes "A Tribute to Li Chenfeng" with notes on seven of Li's films (115-18). Revised edition, 1997.
(10th: 1986). Ten Years of Hong Kong Cinema 1976-85. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1986. 55p. Chinese and English. Ed. Li Cheuk-to; English editor: Wong Ain-ling and Tony Rayns. Notes on fifteenfilms (25-53).
(11th: 1987). Cantonese Opera Film Retrospective. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1987. 191p. Chinese and English. Ed. Li Cheuk-to; English editor: Stephen Teo. Notes on twenty-six films (117-29). Revised edition, 1996.
(11th: 1987). New Hong Kong Films '86/'87. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1987. 36p. Chinese and English. Ed. Leong Mo-ling. Notes on seven films.
(12th: 1988). Changes in Hong Kong Society Through Cinema. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1988. 143p. Chinese and English. Ed. Li Cheuk-to; English editor: Stephen Teo. Notes on ten short films and twenty-nine feature films (114-28). Revised edition, 1998.
(12th: 1988). New Hong Kong Films '87/'88. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1988. 25p. Chinese and English. Ed. Leong Mo-ling. Notes on seven films.
(13th: 1989). Phantoms of the Hong Kong Cinema. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1989. [148p.] Chinese and English. Ed. Li Cheuk-to; English editor: Stephen Teo. Notes on twenty-eight films (86-99).
(14th: 1990). The China Factor in Hong Kong Cinema. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1990. 148p. Chinese and English. Ed. Li Cheuk-to; English editor: Stephen Teo. Notes on twenty-eight films (135^8). Rev. ed. 1997.
(14th: 1990). New Hong Kong Films 89/90. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1990. 47p. Chinese and English. Ed. Leong Mo-ling. Notes on twelve films (24-47).
(15th: 1991). Hong Kong Cinema in the Eighties. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1991. 163p. Chinese and English. Ed. Law Kar; English editor Stephen Teo. Biographical notes on seventy-six filmmakers. Rev. ed. 1999. 192p. With updated biographical notes and a new filmography of the 1980s.
(16th: 1992). Overseas Chinese Figures in Cinema. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1992. 127p. Chinese and English. Ed. Law Kar; English editor: Stephen Teo. Notes on twenty-four films (95-118).
(17th: 1993). Mandarin Films and Popular Songs: 40's-60's. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1993. 152p. Chinese and English. Ed. Law Kar; English editor: Sam Ho. Notes on thirty films (93-122).
(18th: 1994). Cinema of Two Cities: Hong Kong-Shanghai. Hong Kong: Urban Coun-cil, 1994. 155p. Chinese and English. Ed. Law Kar; English editor: Cindy Chan. Notes on forty-one films (113-54).
(19th: 1995). Early Images of Hong Kong and China. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1995. 170p. Chinese and English. Ed. Law Kar; English editor: Stephen Teo. Notes on thirty short films and twenty-four films (142-69).
(20th: 1996). Anniversary of the Hong Kong International Film Festival 1977-1996. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1996. 85p. Chinese and English. Ed. Emily Lo.
(20th: 1996). The Restless Breed: Cantonese Stars of the Sixties. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1996. 180p. Chinese and English. Ed. Law Kar; English editor: Stephen Teo. Notes on forty-two films (137-79).
(21st: 1997). Fifty Years of Electric Shadows: Hong Kong Cinema Retrospectives. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1997. 204p. Chinese and English. Ed. Law Kar; English editor: Stephen Teo. Notes on forty-six films (180-203).
(21st: 1997). Hong Kong Panorama 96-97. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1997. 52p. Chinese and English. Ed. Jacob Wong. Interviews with nine filmmakers. Includes independent film and video programs (47-51).
(22nd: 1998). Hong Kong Panorama 97-98. Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council, 1998. 84p. Chinese and English. Ed. Jacob Wong. Interviews with fourteen filmmak-ers. Includes independent film and video programs (79-82).
(22nd: 1998). Transcending the Times: King Hu and Eileen Chang. Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council, 1998. 190p. Chinese and English. Ed. Law Kar; English editor: Stephen Teo. Notes on twenty-four films (177-89).
(23rd: 1999). Hong Kong New Wave - Twenty Years After. Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council, 1999. 196p. Chinese and English. Ed. Law Kar; English editor, Stephen Teo. Notes on seventy-nine films, television series, and short films (157-94).
(23rd: 1999). Hong Kong Panorama 98-99. Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council, 1999. Chinese and English. Ed. Jacob Wong. Interviews with Johnnie To (61-65) and ten other filmmakers.
Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival 1994. A Perspective of Chinese Cinemas of the 90's. Taipei: Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival Executive Committee, 1994. 148p. Chi-nese and English. Ed. Adam Hsieh. Articles on Hong Kong cinema by Ng Ho, Law Kar, and Cheuk Pak-Tong. 1996. Festival Catalogue Anthology. Taipei: Taipei Golden Horse Festival Executive Committee, 1996. 163p. Chinese and English. Chief editors: Cara Cheng and Hsien-Cheng Liu. Articles on Hong Kong cinema by Liang Binjun (Leung Ping-kwan), Yang Ming-yu, Luo Feng, and Foo Tee-Tuan.
ARTICLES/BOOK CHAPTERS
Bordwell, David. "Aesthetics in Action: Kung Fu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressiv-ity." HKIFF 21st: 1997a, 81-89. "Richness through Imperfection: King Hu and the Glimpse." HKIFF 22nd: 1998b, 32-39. Chan, Bryan. "The Man Pushes On: The Burden of Pain and Mistakes in Johnnie To's Cinema." HKIFF 23rd: 1999b, 73-75.
Chan, Cindy, and Law Kar. "Cantonese Movies of the Sixties: An Oral History by Chan Wan." HKIFF20th: 1996b, 114-21. "Chan, Jackie." Current Biography Yearbook 1997. New York: Wilson, 1997. 103-6.
Chan, Johannes. "Film Censorship Ordinance 1988."Hong Kong Law Journal 18.3 (1988): 457-62. Cheng Yu. "Uninvited Guests." HKIFF 14th: 1990a 98-101. Cheuk, Pak-tong. "The Changing Image of Chinese Public Security Officer in Hong
Kong Cinema in the Nineties." TGHFF 1994 135-39. "The Characteristics of Sixties Youth Movies." HKIFF 20th: 1996b 73-79. "A Pioneer in Film Languages: On King Hu's Style of Editing." HKIFF 22nd: 1998b
57-61. "A Study of the Da Zhonghua (Great China) Film Company." HKIFF 19th: 1995 98-104. "Television in the 70s: Its State of Being." HKIFF 23rd: 1999a 28-31.
Cheung, William. "A Look at the Merits and Demerits of Patrick Tarn's Innovation in Cinematic Language: An Analysis of Imagery in Seven Women, Episode 2 and Love Massacre." HKIFF 23rd: 1999a, 91-93.
Chiao, Hsiung-Ping Peggy. "Bruce Lee: His Influence on the Evolution of the Kung Fu Genre." Journal of Popular Film and Television 9.1 (1981): 30-42. "The Distinct Taiwanese and Hong Kong Cinemas." Berry 155-65. Chong, Woei Lien. "Chinese Film at the 1998 International Film Festival Rotterdam." China Information 12.4 (1998): 96-110. Hong Kong cinema 105-9. Chow, Rey. "A Souvenir of Love."Modern Chinese Literature 7.2 (1993): 59-78. Stanley Kwan's Rouge. Chua, Siew Keng. "The Politics of 'Home': Song of the Exile." Jump Cut 42 (1998): 90-93. Ciecko, Anne T. "Transnational Action: John Woo, Hong Kong, Hollywood." Lu, 221�X 38. Coward, Rosalind, and John Ellis. "Hong Kong-China 1981." Screen 22.4 (1981): 91 -100. Croizier, Ralph C. "Beyond East and West: The American Western and Rise of the Chinese Swordplay Movie." Journal of Popular Film 1 (1972): 229-43.
Dannen, Fredric. "Hong Kong Babylon." New Yorker 1 Aug. 1995: 30-38.
Elley, Derek. "John Woo." Variety International Film Guide 1999. Ed. Peter Cowie. London: Faber, 1998. 44-51. "King Hu." International Film Guide 1978. Ed. Peter Cowie. London: Tantivy Press, 1977. 24-30. Eng, David L. "Love at Last Site: Waiting for Oedipus in Stanley Kwan's Rouge."Camera Obscura 32 (1993-94): 75-101. Fonoroff, Paul. "A Brief History of Hong Kong Cinema." Renditions 29-30 (1988): 293-308. Foo, Tee-Tuan. "From the View Point of Authorship to Evaluate Lee Chi-Ngai's Films." TGHFF 1996, 161-63. Fore, Steve. ' 'Golden Harvest Films and the Hong Kong Movie Industry in the Realm of Globalization." Velvet Light Trap 34 (1994): 40-58. "Home, Migration, Identity: Hong Kong Film Workers Join the Chinese Diaspora."
HKIFF 21st: 1997a, 130-35. "Jackie Chan and the Cultural Dynamics of Global Entertainment." Lu, 239-64. "Tales of Recombinant Femininity: The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus, the Chin P'ing Mei, and the Politics of Melodrama in Hong Kong." Journal of Film and Video 45.4 (1993): 57-70.
Fu, Poshek. "Patriotism or Profit: Hong Kong Cinema During the Second World War." HKIFF 19th: 1995, 73-9.
"Telling a Woman's Story: Eileen Chang and the Invention of Woman's Film." HKIFF 22nd: 1998b, 131-34. "The Turbulent Sixties: Modernity, Youth Culture and Cantonese Film in Hong Kong." HKIFF 21st: 1997a, 40-46. Gallagher, Mark. "Masculinity in Translation: Jackie Chan's Transcultural Star Text." Velvet Light Trap 39 (1997): 23-41. Graper, D. J. "The Kung Fu Movie Genre: A Functionalist Perspective." Culture and Communication. Ed. S. Thomas. Norwood: Ablex, 1987. 153-58.
Ho, Sam. "Licensed to Kick Men: The James Bond Films." HKIFF 20th: 1996b 40-46. "A Magical Witch's Brew: A Chinese Ghost Story." HKIFF 21st: 1997a, 56-59. "The Songstress, The Farmer's Daughter, The Mambo Girl and The Songstress
Again." HKIFF 17th: 1993, 59-68. "The Withering Away of the Family." HKIFF 15th: 199lmc, 125-29. Hong Kong Film Archive. "Chronology of Cinema Events in Hong Kong: 1896-1950." HKIFF 19th: 1995, 131-39. Hu, Ke. "The Influence of Hong Kong Cinema on Mainland China (1980-1996)." HKIFF 21st: 1997a, 171-78. "Hu, 'King' (Hu Chin-ch'uan)."Wor/d Film Directors, Volume II1945-1985. Ed. John Wakeman. New York: Wilson, 1988. 438-42.
"Interviews with 15 Film and Television Makers." HKIFF 23rd: 1999a 123-55. The interviewers are Cheuk Pak-tong, Cheung Chi-sing, and Donna Chu, and the inter-viewees are Alex Cheung, Clifford Choi, Selina Chow, Allen Fong, Ann Hui, Kam Kwok-leong, Lau Shing-hon, Johnny Mak, Stephen Shin, Terry Tong, Tsui Hark, Wong Chi, Yim Ho, Dennis Yu, and Peter Yung.
Jarvie, I. C. "The Social and Cultural Significance of the Demise of the Cantonese Movie." Journal of Asian Affairs 4.2 (1979): 40-51. Kaminsky, Stuart M. "Kung Fu Film as Ghetto Myth." Journal of Popular Film 3 (1974): 129-38. Keyser, Anne Sytske. "PRC and Hong Kong Films at the 1997 International Rotterdam Film Festival." China Information 11.4 (1997): 117-25. "King Hu's Last Interview." HKIFF 22nd: 1998b, 74-78. With Japanese critics Hirok-azu Yamada and Koyo Udagawa in 1996.
Kowallis, Jon. "The Diaspora in Postmodern Taiwan and Hong Kong Film: Framing Stan Lai's The Peach Blossom Land with Allen Fong's Ah Ying." Lu, 169-86. Ku, Lisbeth, and Law Kar. "Tragedy of a Floating Life: A Chronology of Eileen Chang's
Life." HKIFF 22nd: 1998b, 167-76.
Lai, Linda Chiu-han. ' 'Nostalgia and Nonsense: Two Instances of Commemorative Prac-tices in Hong Kong Cinema in the Early 1990s." HKIFF 21st: 1997a, 95-99. Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah. "Besides Fists and Blood: Hong Kong Comedy and the Master
of the Eighties."Cinema Journal 37.2 (1998): 18-34. "A Cultural Interpretation of the Popular Cinema of China and Hong Kong." Berry 166-74. First published in Wide Angle 11.3 (1989): 42-49. Law, Kar. "The Changing Identity of Hong Kong Cinema in the Late Transitional Period." TGHFF 1994, 89-94. "The Cinematic Destiny of Eileen Chang." HKIFF 22nd: 1998b, 141-46.
"Hero on Fire: A Comparative Study of John Woo's 'Hero' Series and Ringo Lam's 'On Fire' Series." HKIFF 21st: 1997a, 67-73. "Hong Kong New Wave: Modernization Amid Global/Local Counter Cultures."
HKIFF 23rd: 1999a, 44-50. "Hongkong Film Market and Trends in the '80s." HKIFF 15th: 1991, 70-77. "A Kaleidoscope of Character Actors." HKIFF 20th: 1996b, 103-06. "King Hu Biographical Notes." HKIFF 22nd: 1998b, 121-25. "The Shadow of Tradition and the Left-Right Struggle: Some Observations on the
Yonghua and Asia Film Companies." HKIFF 14th: 1990a, 15-20. "Stars in a Landscape: A Glance at Cantonese Movies of the Sixties." HKIFF 20th: 1996, 53-59. Law, Wai-ming. "Hong Kong's Cinematic Beginnings 1896-1908." HKIFF 19th: 1995, 23-26. Lee, Leo Ou-fan. "Two Films from Hong Kong: Parody and Allegory." Browne et al., 202-15. Lee, Paul S. N. "The Absorption and Indigenization of Foreign Media Cultures: Hong Kong as a Cultural Meeting Point of East and West." HKIFF 15th: 1991, 78-84. Lee, Yi-chong. "Artist Provocateur -On Tsui Hark's Artistic Character." HKIFF 23rd: 1999a, 77-82. Leung, Grace L. K., and Joseph M. Chan. "The Hong Kong Cinema and Its Overseas Market: A Historical Review, 1950-1995." HKIFF 21st: 1997a, 143-51. Leung, Noong-kong. "The Long Goodbye to the China Factor: Hongkong as Object of Gaze in China Behind and Homecoming." HKIFF 14th: 1990a, 71-76. Leung, P. K. "Eileen Chang and Hong Kong Urban Cinema." HKIFF 22nd: 1998b, 151-53. Leung, Ping-kwan. "From Cities in Hong Kong Cinema to Hong Kong Films on Cities." HKIFF 21st: 1997a, 29-33.
"Hong Kong Cinema in the 1990's: A Re-examination of the Mass Media." TGHFF 1996, 128-31. This article appears under the author's name in pinyin form: Liang Bingjun.
"Urban Culture: Space, Identity and the Politics of Representation." The Metropolis: Visual Research into Contemporary Hong Kong, 1990-1996. Hong Kong: Photo Pictorial Publishers and Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1996. 36-41.
Li, Cheuk-to. "In Transition: Industry and Identity." HKIFF 23rd: 1999b, 13-15. "The Melodrama Strikes Back: Hong Kong Cinema 93-94." HKIFF 18th: 1994mc, 96-100. "The 1997 Mentality in 1997 Films." HKIFF 22nd: 1998a, 17-19. "The Polarization of Art and the Marketplace." HKIFF 19th: 1995mc, 27-32. "Popular Cinema in Hong Kong." The Oxford History of World Cinema. Ed. Geoffrey
Nowell-Smith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. 704-11. "The Postmodern Turn in Hong Kong Cinema 1992-93." HKIFF 17th: 1993mc, 92-98. "The Return of the Father: Hong Kong New Wave and Its Chinese Context in the 1980s." Browne et al.: 160-79. "The Rise of the Big Timer." HKIFF 16th: 1992mc, 108-12. Liang, Hai-chiang. "Hong Kong Cinema's 'Taiwan Factor'." HKIFF 21st: 1997a, 158-63. Liu, Hsien-Cheng. "Interacting Cinema Development between Taiwan and Hong Kong: The Past and the Future." TGHFF 1994, 53-58.
Lo, Kwai-Cheung. "Once Upon A Time: Technology Comes to Presence in China." Modern Chinese Literature 7.2 (1993): 79-96.
Lo, Wai Luk. "A Child without a Mother, An Adult without a Motherland: A Study of Ann Hui's Films." HKIFF 23rd: 1999a, 65-71.
Lo, Yu-lai. "Some Notes About Film Censorship in Hong Kong." HKIFF 21st: 1997mc, 60-63.
Luo, Feng. "Memory, Female, and History: On the Female Sensibilities in Stanley Kwan's Films." TGHFF, 146-49.
Ma Guoguang. "A Touch of Zen: Blood Draining into Poetry." HKIFF 22nd: 1998b, 65-67.
Ng, Ho. "The Cinema of Turbulence: The Emotional State of Shanghai Film Talents Working in Hong Kong in the Period 1946-50." HKIFF 18th: 1994, 30-34. "The Confessions of a Film Anarchist." HKIFF 23rd: 1999a, 55-59. "Exile, A Story of Love and Hate." HKIFF 14th: 1990a, 31-41. "The Facial Index: Movie Spies Play Havoc in Hong Kong." HKIFF 19th: 1995, 85-91. "Imbecility of History in Hong Kong Cinema." TGHFF 1994, 79-84. "King Hu and the Aesthetics of Space." HKIFF 22nd: 1998b, 44-47.
O'Brien, Geoffrey. "Blazing Passions." New York Review of Books 24 Sept. 1992: 38-
43. Mainly on Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s and films by Zhang Yimou. Ooi, Vicki. "Jacobean Drama and the Martial Arts Films of King Hu: A Study in Power and Corruption." Australian Journal of Screen Theory 1 (1980): 103-23.
Pang, Kenneth Ka-fat. "Chivalric Stories in Hong Kong Media." Continuity and Change in Communication Systems: An Asian Perspectives. Ed. Georgette Wang and Wimal Dissanayake. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1984. 215-27. Hong Kong kung fu films.
Pillsbury, Sarah. "King Hu in America." HKIFF 22nd: 1998b, 109-12. Rayns, Tony. " 'Cultural Abnormalities': A Distant Perspective on Hong Kong cinema in the '80s." HKIFF 15th: 1991, 62-67. "Missing Links: Chinese Cinema in Shanghai and Hong Kong from the 1930s to the 1940s." HKIFF 19th: 1995, 105-11. "The Redirected Embrace: The Communist Reinvention of Chinese Cinema and Its Echoes in Hongkong." HKIFF 14th: 1990a, 49-57. "The Well Dries Up." Index on Censorship 26.1 (1997): 89-94. Hong Kong and Chinese movies. Reid, Craig D. "Fighting Without Fighting: Film Action Fight Choreography." Film Quarterly 47.2 (1993-94): 30-35. Superiority of Chinese action filmmakers.
"Interview with Tsui Hark." Film Quarterly 48.3 (1995): 34-41.
"Remembering King Hu." HKIFF 22nd: 1998b, 79-108. Friends, associates, scholars, and critics pay tribute to the late master.
Robinson, Lewis. "Family: A Study in Genre Adaptation." Australian Journal of Chi-nese Affairs 12 (1984): 35-57. Two film versions, one in Cantonese and one in Mandarin, of Ba Jin's famous novel.
Rodriguez, Hector. "Hong Kong Popular Culture As an Interpretive Arena: The Huang Feihong Film Series." Screen 38 (1997): 1-24. "Questions of Chinese Aesthetics: Film Form and Narrative Space in the Cinema of King Hu." Cinema Journal 38.1 (1998): 73-97.
Ryan, Barbara. "Blood, Brothers, and Hong Kong Ganster Movies: Pop Culture Com-mentary on 'One China'." Asian Popular Culture. Ed. John A. Lent. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995. 61-76.
Sala, Ilaria Maria. "Censorship and the Market: How to Live with Them Both." China Perspectives July/Aug. 1997: 82-86. Sandell, Jillian. "Reinventing Masculinity: The Spectacle of Male Intimacy in the Films of John Woo." Film Quarterly 49A (1996): 23-34. Sek, Kei. "Achievement and Crisis: Hong Kong Cinema in the '80s." HKIFF 15th:
1991,52-61. "Hong Kong Cinema from June 4 to 1997." HKIFF 21st: 1997a, 120-25. "The War Between the Cantonese and Mandarin Cinemas in the Sixties or How the
Beautiful Women Lost to the Action Men." HKIFF 20th: 1996b, 30-33. Stanbrook, Alan. "Under Western Eyes: An Occidental View of Hongkong Cinema." HKIFF 15th: 1991, 45-50. Stockbridge, Sally. "Sexual Violence and Hong Kong Films: Regulation and Cultural Difference." Media Information Australia 74 (1994): 86-92. Stringer, Julian. "Centre Stage: Reconstructing the Bio Pic." Cineaction 42 (1997): 28-39. "Problems with the Treatment of Hong Kong Cinema as Camp." Asian Cinema 8.2 (1996): 44-65. " 'Your Tender Smiles Give Me Strength': Paradigms of Musculinity in John Woo's A Better Tomorrow and The Killer." Screen 38 (1997): 25-41. Tan, Chunfa. "The Influx of Shanghai Filmmakers into Hong Kong and Hong Kong Cinema." HKIFF 18th: 1994, 74-82. Tan, See Kam. "Ban(g)! Ban(g)! Dangerous Encounter -1st Kind: Writing with Cen-sorship." Asian Cinema 8.1 (1996): 83-108. "Hong Kong Cinema: Double Marginalization and Cultural Resistance." Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 22 (1994): 53-71. Teo, Stephen. "The Decade with Two Faces: Cantonese Cinema and the Paranoid Sixties." HKIFF 20th: 1996b, 18-25. "Hong Kong's Electric Shadow Show: From Survival to Discovery." HKIFF 21st:
1997a, 18-24. "Hong Kong's New Wave in Retrospect." HKIFF 23rd: 1999a, 17-23. "Oh, Karaoke!-Mandarin Pop and Musicals." HKIFF 17th: 1993, 32-36. "Only the Valiant: King Hu and His Cinema Opera." HKIFF 22nd: 1998b, 19-24. "The Shanghai Hangover: The Early Years of Mandarin Cinema in Hong Kong."
HKIFF 18th: 1994, 17-24. "Sinking into Creative Depths: Hong Kong Cinema in 1997." HKIFF 22nd: 1998a,
11-13. "The Squint-eyed Gaze." HKIFF 14th: 1990a, 86-94. "Tracing the Electric Shadow: A Brief History of the Early Hong Kong Cinema."
HKIFF 19th: 1995, 45-52. "The True Way of the Dragon: The Films of Bruce Lee." HKIFF 16th: 1992, 70-80.
"Three Critics Sum Up the Hong Kong New Wave." HKIFF 23rd: 1999a, 118-22. Interview with Li Cheuk-to by Lisbeth Ku, and interviews with Sek Kei and Law Wai-ming by Ng Sek-hing.
"Three Recollections of Eileen Chang." HKIFF 22nd: 1998b 160-66. By directors Wang Tianlin and Ann Hui, and former child star Peter S. Y. Dunn. Tsui, Curtis K. "Subjective Culture and History: The Ethnographic Cinema of Wong Kar-wai." Asian Cinema 7.2 (1995): 93-124. "Views on New Hong Kong Films." HKIFF 14th: 1990b, 9-23. A discussion partici-
pated by the following filmmakers and critics: Gordon Chan, Cheung Chi-shing, Kam Kwok-leung, Lai Kit, Lam Chiu-wing, Li Cheuk-to, and Sek Kei.
Weakland, John H. "An Analysis of Seven Cantonese Films." The Study of Culture at a Distance. Ed. Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. 292-95.
"Real and Reel Life in Hong Kong-Film Studies of Cultural Adaptation?" Journal of Asian and African Studies 6 (1971): 238-43. Williams, Tony. "Border-Crossing Melodrama: Song of the Exile." Jump Cut 42 (1998): 94-100. "From Hong Kong to Hollywood: John Woo and His Discontents." Cineaction 42 (1997): 40-46. "Space, Place, and Spectacle: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo." Cinema Journal 36.2 (1997): 67-84.
Wolcott, James. "Blood Test." New Yorker 23 Aug. 1993: 62-68. John Woo.
Wong, Mary. "Patrick Tarn's Exploration: Sculpting the 'New Women' Twenty Years Ago." HKIFF23rd: 1999a, 100-5. Yang, Ming-yu. "Kongfu Action Films of Tsui Hark: Construction and Deconstruction of the Heroes' Bodies." TGHFF 1996, 136-39. Yau, Esther. "Border Crossing: Mainland China's Presence in Hong Kong Cinema." Browne et al. 180-201. Yau, Esther Ching-mei. "Ecology and Late Colonial Hong Kong Cinema: Imaginations in Time." HKIFF 21st: 1997a, 107-13. Yu, Mo-wan. "The Patriotic Tradition in Hong Kong Cinema: A Preliminary Study of Pre-War Patriotic Films." HKIFF 19th: 1995, 60-68.
THESES/DISSERTATIONS
Lau, Kwok Wah. ' 'A Cultural Interpretation of the Popular Cinema of China and Hong Kong, 1981-1985." Ph.D. Dissertation, Northwestern University, 1989. 327p. Tan, See Kam. "Dangerous Encounters: New Hong Kong Cinema and
(Post)coloniality." Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Melbourne, 1997. 299p.
Yang, Mingyu. "China: Once Upon a Time/Hong Kong: 1997. A Critical Study of Contemporary Hong Kong Martial Arts Films." Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 1995. 204p.
Yu, Gwo-Chauo. "China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan: The Convergence and Interaction of Chinese Film." M.A. Thesis, University of North Texas, 1993. 115p.
INDEX
Abbas, Ackbar, 140, 146, 188, 306
Aces Go Places, 165
Ah Kam, 177
Ah Ying, 158, 241
Alias Smith and Jones, 24
All the King��s Men, 113
All the Wrong Clues (For the Right Solu-
tion), 106
Apocalypse Now, 296
Arch, The, 90
Anger, 121
As Tears Go By, 160
Ashes o f Time, 160
Au, Tony, 158
Autumn Tale, An, 160
Awful Truth, The, 27
Back to the Future, 262
Bad Day at Black Rock, 27
Bai Ying, 123, 124
Bak Yin, 210, 214, 216
Beach ofthe WarGods, 139
Better Tomorrow, A, 138, 142, 143, 144,
145, 160, 161, 162, 164
Better Tomorrow II, A, 148, 152
Better Tomorrow III, A, 162
BigBoss, Thesee Fistso fFury Big Brawl, The, 43, 138
Billy Jack, 30, 39
Black Belt Jones, 27, 36
Black Cat, 141
Black Karate, 36
Black Kung-Fu, 36
Black Rose, The, 80, 244, 260
Blaxploitation, 24, 25, 26, 36, 37
Blood Brothers, 139, 142
Boat People, The, 4, 102, 158, 159, 177,
178, 179, 182, 183-185, 187, 188,
191, 192, 242
Born Losers, The, 30
Boy from Vietnam, 106, 177
Breaker, Breaker, 36
Breaking Waves, 52
Breathless, 306
Bridge, The, 106
Brodsky, Benjamin, 45-47
Broken Arrow, 138
Broken Blossoms, 59
Bronson, Charles, 29, 141
Brother, 52
Bu Wancang, 79
Buck and the Preacher, 26
Buddha��s Palm, 91
Bullet in the Head, A, 147, 148, 150, 161
Burning ofthe RedLotus Monastery, 31
Butterfly Murders, The, 99, 102, 105, 159
Cagney, James, 27
Cai Chusheng, 206, 209, 210, 211
Calamity o fMoney, 49
Carradine, David, 24, 37
Cathay Film Company, 79, 142
Center Stage, 160, 164, 257
C��est la vie, Mon Cherie, 246-247
Chan, Fruit, 249, 250
Chan, Jackie, 2, 19, 36, 37, 99, 100, 101,
105, 114, 135, 138, 139, 141, 151,152, 159, 160, 161, 162
Chan, Joe, 257, 260C
Chan, Peter, 257, 268, 276, 278, 308
Chan, Nancy, 53, 54, 58
Chan Po-chu, 77, 81, 82, 244, 260
Chang Che, 32, 79, 91, 98, 100, 101, 117,120, 124, 127, 142, 161
Chang, Eileen (Zhang Ai-ling), 185, 190,191
Cheng Peipei, 100, 151
Cheuk Pak-tong, 101, 102
Cheung, Alex, 102, 105, 159
Cheung, Leslie, 145, 279
Cheung, Mabel, 160, 249
Cheung, Maggie, 275, 276, 282, 283, 309
Chiang, David, 27, 139, 142
Chiao, Roy, 131, 132, 188, 189, 248
Chicken and Duck Talk, 166
China, 56
China Behind, 90, 103, 163
China Film Company, 47, 51, 56
China Sun Film Company, 47, 48, 49
Chinese Boxer, The, 97
Chinese Connection, The, 22, 23, 24, 26,33, 34, 98, 137
Ching Siu-tung, 135, 139
Chiu Shu-sun, Joe, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55,57, 58, 65
Chiu Shutai, 216-7
Choi, Clifford, 101
Chor Yuen, 77, 78, 80, 81, 91, 95, 98, 99,103, 163, 240, 260
Chow, Raymond, 33, 79
Chow, Rey, 2, 252, 268-269, 305, 307
Chow Yun-fat, 94, 143, 145, 148, 182
Chuang Tsi Tests His Wife, 46
Chuen Kou Film Company, 53, 57, 61, 68
Chu Kong, 143, 148
Chungking Express, 160, 244-246,
281,
289-295, 297-308, 309, 311
Chun Siu-lei, 65-6
Cinema City, 99
Citizen Kane, 182
Clans o f Intrigue, 99
Cleopatra Jones, 36
Clouse, Robert, 36
Come Drink with Me, 32, 113,115, 127,128, 130, 131, 132, 151
Comrades, Almost a Love Story, 276-279,282, 285, 290, 308-311
Contract, The, 165, 166
Cops and Robbers, 102, 105, 107
Crimson Kimono, The, 28
Critical Juncture, The, 214
CTV, 102, 236
Dadi (Good Earth) Film Company, 210,213
Daguan Film Company, 203, 214, 216,217
Daihon Film Company, 49
Dangerous Encounters -First Kind, 102,239
Days o fBeing Wild, 160, 257, 267
Deadly China Doll, 34
Deafand Mute Heroine, 100
Deep Thrust -TheHand o fDeath, 20, 22,23
Dirty Ho, 98
Dirty Tiger, Crazy Frog, 99
Disciples o fShaolin, 98
Dobson, Tamara, 25, 36
Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, 37
Dragon Inn (a.k.a. Dragon Gate Inn), 80,115, 117, 120, 122, 127, 130, 131
Dr. No, 20
Drunken Master, 99, 101
Duelofthe Iron Fist, 23
Easy Rider, 30
Eighteen Springs, 111, 178, 187, 190-192
Enjoy Yourself Tonight, 95
Enter the Dragon, 24, 26, 27, 34, 35, 95,137, 139
Enter the Fat Dragon, 99
Executioners o f Shaolin, 98
Face/Off, 138
Farewell China, 104, 282-285
Fate o f Lee Khan, The, 99, 113, 115, 122,123, 127, 128, 129, 131, 134
Father and Son, 102, 106, 158, 159-160,219, 239-240
Fearless Fighters, 23
Fei Mu, 210
Feng Huang Film Company, 50
Fisto fFury see The Chinese Connection Fists ofFury, 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 33, 34,98, 137
FistfulofDollars, A, 29
Fists o fthe Double K, 34
Five Fingers o fDeath, 2, 20, 21, 22, 23,26, 21, 98, 139
Fok Yin, 53
Fong, Allen, 77, 87, 101, 106, 158, 219,237, 239, 241
Fong, Mona 96, 151
Fong Sai Yuk, 138
Fong Sai Yuk 2, 138
Force of One, A, 37
48 hours, 52
Forward, 214
Four Moods, 127; see also Anger French Connection, The, 26
French New Wave, 105, 144, 178, 180
Full Moon in New York, 282
Fuller, Sam, 28
Fu-sheng, Alexander, 37
Game ofDeath, 34, 36, 37, 137
Games Gamblers Play, 96, 165, 166
Girls Are Flowers, 81
Godard, Jean-Luc, 142, 306
Golden Swallow, 151
Golden Harvest Film Company, 26, 33,92, 96, 97, 101, 104, 151
Goldfinger, 29
Good Guys Wear Black, 37
Grandview Film Company, 50, 53, 66, 68
establishment: 51-52
war years: 54-57
Grant, Cary, 27, 141, 306
Great Devotion, The, 81
Great Wall Film Company, 56, 57
Green-Eyed Demoness, 91
Green Hornet, The (TV series), 29, 33
Gunshot at Midnight, 51
Hammero fGod, The, 23
Hammer Studios, 26, 96
Hand o fDeath, The, 143
Han Yingjie, 120, 123, 132
Happy Together, 279-282
Hard Boiled, 142, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152
Hard Target, 138, 142, 143, 149
Haunted Pot, The, 45
Hawks, Howard, 131
He A in��t Heavy, He��s My Father, 244,257, 260, 261, 262, 265
Heroes Shed No Tears, 143
Heroine White Rose, 116-117
Hiroshima 28, 103
Ho, Lily, 100
Holden, William, 279, 310, 311
Homecoming, 158
Homeland, 210
Hong Kong Film Company, 49
Hong Kong International Film Festival, 5,103
Hong Kong 1941, 104
Hong Kong Television Broadcast Ltd (HK-TVB), 94, 102, 236, 240
Hotel, 94, 236
Hou Hsiao-hsien, 108
House is Not a Home, A, 94
House o f 72 Tenants, 95, 96, 100, 163,243
Hu, King, 3, 32, 80, 90, 91, 97, 98, 99,101, 113-135, 138, 151
Hui, Ann, 4, 77, 87, 101, 102, 104, 105,106, 158, 159, 176-192, 219, 240-241, 242, 247-249, 282
Hui Brothers Show, The, 95, 96
Hui, Michael, 87, 91, 95, 96, 98, 101,107, 159, 165-173
Hui, Samuel, 95
Hung, Samo (aka Sammo), 99, 101, 105,125, 135, 139, 151, 152, 165
Hymn to Mother, A, 229-231
Idiot Pays His Respects, An, 50
Illegal Immigrant, 160, 161
In Defence o fSouth China, 214
In Like Flint, 29
Iron Bone and Orchid Heart, 50
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