The Iterability of Hong Kong Topographical Poetry

Abstract When a technocratic and developmentalist government decided to tear down two historic piers in Hong Kong in 2006-2007, among other reactions, it spurred the production of a new type of poetry inscribed in the urban space. Poems by Uncle Hung and Liu Wai-tong define an oppositional poetics, predicated on a new awareness and willingness to act. Often recited or […]

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The Urban Maze Crisis and Topography in Hong Kong Cinema

Situating the new millennial films vis-à-vis several critical turns in the representations of the city in Hong Kong cinema, this chapter aims to examine the cinematic city as an episteme that grounds our knowledge of political, cultural, and socio-economic dynamics of Hong Kong society within a complex global–national–local network. It is argued that the urban cinema provokes critical discourses on […]

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A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema: Introduction

Time haunts Hong Kong cinema in a peculiar way that sets it apart from other film cultures. Critics talk about it in terms of “time pieces” (Stephens 1996), “poets of time” (Rayns 1995), “translating time” (Lim 2001), “violence of time” (Law 2006), and “marking time” (Ma 2010). As Esther M.K. Cheung and Chu Yiu-wai (2004) remind us, Hong Kong film […]

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Between Demolition and Construction: Performing Drifting Identities in Jia Zhangke’s Films

Contemporary Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke demonstrates how auteurism performs an essential role in shaping an impressive grassroots poetics within a rapidly vanishing space. Hailed by some critics as “the cinematic poet” of postsocialist China, Jia has developed an expansive field of citation where the recurrent spaces of demolition and construction are notable tropes. Bound up with the transformations of local […]

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The Ordinary Fashion Show: Eileen Chang’s Profane Illumination and Mnemonic Art

Abstract: Eileen Chang’s fiction and essays show us an intricate relationship between the quotidian, gender and literary imagination. Similar to what Walter Benjamin calls “profane illumination,” her literary inspirations are drawn from the materialistic and anthropological dimensions in the mundane realm of everyday life. On the one hand, her feminine writings about clothing display Shanghai as a phantasmagoria in the […]

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寫給過渡城市的詩

時間,可以是客觀標準,像牆上的日曆,日後一日,不回頭以線性往前走。也可以是感性的、詩想的,一直迴環往復。舊時代走到盡頭,孕育新的紀元;新時代的帷幕已被掀起,但是舊世界的痕跡沒法抹去。梁秉鈞,筆名也斯,生於斯長於斯的香港作家,1992年出版中英對照詩集《形象香港》,英文書名City at the End of Time,集內詩作,含蓄暗示時代的過渡漫無邊際,各個時期無法逐一劃分清楚。[…]

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New Ends in a City of Transition

Calendar time advances in a linear, progressive manner, whereas poetic time moves in somewhat circular patterns. An ending spawns another beginning. An old epoch comes to an end but that old epoch has not ceased to exist. A new era has begun but the new is still struggling to forget the old. In naming his volume of poetry City at […]

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Leaving in Sorrow

Funded by government financial aids from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (ADC), Vincent Chui’s Leaving in Sorrow is an independent film which belongs to the tradition of realism in Hong Kong cinema. A digital video shot at a low cost, the film contributed to the revival and growth of independent film-making in the late 1990s and the new millenium; […]

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Do We Hear the City?: Voices of the Stranger in Hong Kong Cinema

Abstract: This chapter attempts to examine the ethical relationship between self and other by way of focusing on the theme of estrangement in the New Hong Kong Cinema. In his study of the voice-over in cinema, Michel Chion creates a category of “acousmatic voices” or in French the acousmêtre. The acousmêtre refers to the image-voice relation in which one does […]

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Between Times and Spaces: Interview with Evans Chan

Abstract: A Hong Kong Second Wave filmmaker, Evans Chan’s work is characterized by its transnational context and narrative technique. Migratory experiences, border crossings, and the quest for identity are recurrent themes in his films. One can say that Chan’s migratory experiences in his life naturally have stimulated his interest in these subject matters. In 1984, he furthered his studies in […]

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