In recounting the last fifteen years of the independent film movement in Hong Kong, it is impossible not to mention Tammy Cheung’s name. Even though she does not make narrative films, she has nevertheless made inroads with documentary films. She focuses on social and human problems as her subject matter and uses direct cinema as her approach. Without the use […]
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Abstract: This chapter explores how various moments of disjointed time in Hong Kong history are associated with the expression of a sense of ghostliness, alienation and homelessness. It discusses the possibility of writing a meta-history of Hong Kong over the past thirty years or so through a hermeneutical reading of the cinematic depictions of space. It focuses on how an […]
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Abstract: With persistent efforts on constructing personal and collective memories arising from the unprecedented transformations in post-socialist China, Jia Zhangke has produced an ensemble of realist films with an impressive personal and authentic appeal. This paper examines how his films are characterised by a variety of accents, images of authenticity, a quotidian ambience, and a new sense of materiality within […]
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James Clifford’s essay ‘Diasporas’ (1994), which discusses the need to move from the ‘ideal type’ of ‘diaspora’ to non-Jewish kinds of migratory experiences, casts significant implications on the study of Chinese diasporas. We can follow this stance to assert that ‘diaspora’ as an analytical category must be referred to in the plural form and with a lowercase ‘d’. In many […]
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Hong Kong author Xi Xi began writing in the 1960s. A prolific writer, she has produced poetry and prose ranging from short stories, novels, screenplays, and translations, to literary, film and art criticism and covering a wide variety of settings and themes. Included in her work are aspects of modern city life, identity, gender, illness, re-interpretations of historical and classical […]
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「為了證實自己的存在，古老的記憶比未來的瞭望更明晰、親切。」──張愛玲〈自己的文章〉《流言》 「我在你自戀的鏡像中看見自己，欣喜若狂。」──佚名 鬼魅、雙城、對話 人總有一死，文本卻生生不息，新的文本在連綿不絕的文化承傳、革新和交流中再生逝去的人與事。我們不得不承認，許多時候，歷史傳統對當下上下求索的眾生來說，有若揮之不去的鬼魅，創作者必須竭力驅魔，「破舊立新」，解開心結。改編小說為電影的人，也常常把舊的文本輪迴再生，在創新和忠於原著的衝突中，尋求出路。若說原著小說有時像鬼魅般纏繞改編者，也沒有誇大其辭。但曾幾何時，在鬼影幢幢的新文本內，我們看見「過去」與「現在」彷彿一對好友知己，在斷裂的歷史脈絡中促膝談心。
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Hong Kong literary critic Wong Wai-leung claims that Hong Kong literature integrated with modern Chinese literature during World War II, when Hong Kong became the stopover for refugee writers from the mainland. It is true that for a few decades Hong Kong literature was mainly produced by writers either passing through or residing temporarily in Hong Kong. However, this mainland-based […]
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Wayne Wang’s Chinese Box (1997) is a film about trauma, amnesia andfantasy. Just as trauma is a symptom of history and fantasy is asymptom of amnesia, this paper is an attempt to engage in asymptomatic reading of the film. As a coded, ciphered form, a symptom calls for interpretation since “there is no symptom without an addressee,” as Slavoj Zizek […]
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In Hong Kong film history, the emergence of a corpus of film productions loosely called “horror films” in the 1980s has invited film critic to adopt an allegorical approach to the reading of Hong Kong films. What figures centrally in this film discourse is the trope of Hong Kong as a haunted house. In the introduction to the programme notes […]
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Abstract: This paper examines the formation of modernity in three colonialist epics of Hong Kong and the recent historical and fictional works that aim to rewrite the history of the ‘local’. Adopting a challenge-response structure, the paper argues that the colonialist epics construct a monolithic discourse of modernity-as-progress via the amnesia of conflicts, tensions, and processes of domination and negotiation […]
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