On Spectral Mutations: The Ghostly City in The Secret, Rouge and Little Cheung

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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Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong

This tragic coming-of-age story follows three disillusioned local youths struggling to navigate Hong Kong public housing projects and late adolescence amid violent crime, gang pressure, and broken homes. Their personal friendships and family lives intersect with a mysterious fourth protagonist, a girl whose suicide haunts the other three throughout the film as they move toward their own premature ends. This […]

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The City that Haunts: The Uncanny in Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong

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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