In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Vivian P.Y. Lee about her article “The City in Flux: Toward an Urban Topology of Hong Kong Cinema,” from Telos 197 (Winter 2021). An excerpt of the article appears below. In their conversation they discuss Hong Kong’s urban space and its cinematic reinventions; the relationship between cinematic space and disappearance; the cinematic lineage of Patrick Lung and John Woo, and their different depictions of modern urban institutions and individual heroes; the use of nostalgia in film to reveal darker realities of the dystopian present; how post-Umbrella Movement films have created new forms of production and distribution; the present and future of Hong Kong cinema; and the ways in which filmmakers have turned the city of Hong Kong into a protagonist. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 197 are available for purchase in our online store.
The City in Flux: Toward an Urban Topology of Hong Kong Cinema
Vivian P. Y. Lee
Whether appearing as a dramatic setting or as a “protagonist” in itself, Hong Kong’s urban space has inspired the imagination of filmmakers of different generations and artistic orientations. If architecture is the primary denominator of a city’s spatial identity,[1] the cinema offers a repertoire of visual vocabularies through which this identity is articulated, contested, and transformed in time. “Space” here connotes both the diegetic configuration of setting and locale, and the non-diegetic realm of identity-making invoked by the cinematic medium. Space has also been used as a conceptual tool in critical discourse on the dynamics between the cinematic imagination and the urban space.[2] Its long tradition of martial arts films and costume dramas notwithstanding, Hong Kong cinema displays an inherently urban quality that speaks through its subject matter, fictional personae, and the spatial aesthetics that have become an imprint of “Hong Kong-made films.” While critical attention to the relationship between the cinema and urban space tends to favor popular action films from the 1980s and afterward, filmmakers’ self-conscious engagement with the urban space can be traced further back. The black-and-white films of the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, frequently insert location shots at the beginning to authenticate the predominantly studio setting. The most commonly used scenes are panoramic views of high-rise buildings, motorways, rail stations, and different types of modern transportation. Mostly appearing in the credit sequence, these shots display an inner logic that amounts to a self-narrative of the city that varies from a critical self-distancing from the capitalist city in left-wing films to a celebratory embrace of capitalist modernity in right-wing films.[3] The symbolic reinvention of the urban space as an experiential realm of identity-making, therefore, has been a leitmotif in Hong Kong films for a much longer time than it is commonly assumed.
This paper will examine more nuanced renditions of the “cinematic city” since the late 1960s, when the ex-colonial enclave was beginning to recover from the turmoil of the 1967 anti-British riots and embark on a new phase of modernization. Reference will be made to both popular genre films and noncommercial productions to shed light on inter-generic crossovers. While a comprehensive survey would require a lengthier study, the selection of films discussed here exhibit a distinctive pattern of intertextuality within and across film genres from which a set of visual and thematic coordinates can be deduced. Taking into account the allegorical and phantasmagoric qualities of the city rendered through the cinematic medium, it examines how the imagined cityscapes participate in the co-construction of an urban topology at critical junctures of the city’s historical, social, and political transformations. It argues that the cinematically crafted urban space is more than a “context” against which the city is narrated. Rather, it is very often a subject of narration, if not a narrating subject in itself.
The analysis will concentrate on three thematic clusters: namely, the city of progress and crisis, the city of nostalgia, and the city of protest. The first cluster is represented by the films of Patrick Lung dealing with disenfranchised urban youths in the late 1960s and the “hero films” of John Woo and Ringo Lam in the late 1980s. It traces how the narrative of progress under colonial modernity gave way to images of a crisis-stricken metropolitan wasteland. The second cluster examines the creation of the “cinematic city” in non-action genre films in which the nostalgic impulse triggered by a perceived crisis of disappearance (as oblivion, destruction, and death) is behind the vision of the city as dystopian fantasy, cardboard city, and “haunted house.” The third cluster consists of independent films made after the Umbrella Movement in 2014, a large-scale civil disobedience movement that resulted in a 79-day-long mass protest on several occupied sites in the busiest administrative and commercial districts in Hong Kong. The popularity of these films is evidenced not by box-office earnings but by the emergence of a new social space of participatory media production and consumption that invites further reflection on the dynamic relationship between cinema and the city, understood as both the subject of representation and a mobile community of participatory spectators. Organized roughly in a linear order, these three clusters reveal a more nuanced intertwinement that accommodates both synchronic and diachronic interpretations, rendering linear models untenable precisely because progress, crisis, nostalgia, and protest are overlapping chronotopes, if not heterotopias of simultaneity.[4]
Cinema and the Critique of Space
Since its invention more than a century ago, cinema has contributed to the spatial imagination of film audiences and researchers not limited to the discipline of film studies, while social theories of space have also shed light on the intricate connections between cinematic space as a critique and problematization of the social and political processes of “making space” as an everyday experience. In this latter respect, Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre is among the most frequently cited in discussions on space and space-making in contemporary culture. Lefebvre theorizes the social production of space in terms of a conceptual triad, namely, practice (urban reality, everyday routine), representations of space (space determined by planners and scientists, urban planners), and representational space (the symbolic or imaginative uses of space).[5] Lefebvre’s theory of space as social practice, noting in particular the potential of the imagination to transform and intervene in the spatial politics of everyday life, has been adapted as an analytical tool in the study of the cinematic production of space.[6] Also contributing to this body of critical scholarship on cinema and space is the work of Michel de Certeau,[7] Manuel Castells,[8] and Michel Foucault,[9] who in different ways have opened up cognitive pathways to rethink the corporeal, cognitive, affective, and imaginative properties of space, and how space, whether real or represented, can be “read” and interpreted. The multidimensionality of this critical literature points toward an intimacy between the physicality of space and its phantasmagoric potentiality in the production of spatial experience in the modern age.
Space in Hong Kong cinema has also been a subject of interest to critics and researchers. Michelle Huang has examined how the cinematic representation of the city in films such as Little Cheung (dir. Fruit Chan, 1999) problematizes and challenges the institutionalized “compressed space” of Hong Kong as a global city by unraveling the contradictions and tensions that define the everyday experience of the local people.[10] Stephen Teo coins the term “Kowloon noir” to distinguish the aestheticized urban setting in Johnnie To’s action cinema.[11] To’s films exhibit a sharp awareness of noir conventions and their non-Western variants (most notably in Akira Kurosawa’s films), and how the qualities of noir can be transplanted into contemporary Hong Kong to capture the mystique of the city’s urban space. As Teo observes, it is stillness rather than speed that distinguishes To’s action city on screen.[12] Huang’s compressed space of globalism and Teo’s nocturnal space of noir draw attention to how the film text activates an imagination of spatial identity that speaks to the existential condition of the city caught between action and stillness.
The critical discourse on Hong Kong’s urban space and its cinematic reinventions foregrounds the intertwinement of the lived and imagined realms of spatial experience with an emphasis on the production of space as a social practice subject to both institutional forces and idiosyncratic appropriations by the city’s inhabitants. This observation is directly relevant to a widespread sentiment of the fin de siècle in the critical reception of Hong Kong films as allegories of the city’s predetermined political future. In film criticism, the fin de siècle is coterminous with a “crisis consciousness” that pervaded Hong Kong films during the political transition to Chinese rule (1984–1997).[13] This perception of crisis has somehow conditioned the way in which the idea of “disappearance” is invoked. I have elsewhere discussed how “disappearance” according to Ackbar Abbas is much more nuanced and complex than the fin de siècle scenario it seems to immediately evoke, and how it is still relevant to our understanding of Hong Kong’s skewed cultural space today.[14] For the purposes of this essay, “disappearance” is understood not as the equivalent of annihilation, extinction, or the absence of appearance. Rather, “disappearance” refers to, first, the overproduction of meaning that empties out meaning itself and, second, cultural forms that offer innovative ways to survive and intervene in a space of “disappearance.” A “politics of disappearance,” as elaborated by Abbas, therefore takes the condition of the fin de siècle as its subject of inquiry to tease out the dilemmas, contradictions, and potential for asserting a new “Hong Kong subjectivity” in the face of political change, rather than being a symptom of the fin de siècle and the nostalgic impulse that it triggered in the run-up to 1997, in which spatial imagination in film takes on allegorical meanings.
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1. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univ. Press, 1997), p. 64.
2. Abbas, Hong Kong; Huang Tsung-yi Michelle, Walking between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univ. Press, 2004); Stephen Teo, Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univ. Press, 2007).
3. For a discussion on this aspect of Hong Kong cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, see Vivian P. Y. Lee, The Other Side of Glamour: The Left-wing Studio Network in Hong Kong Cinema in the Cold War Era and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2020).
4. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 20–27.
5. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
6. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds., Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Huang Tsung-yi Michelle, Walking between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univ. Press, 2004); Zhang Yingjin, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 2009).
7. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984).
8. Manuel Castells and Ida Susser, The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002).
9. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.”
10. Huang, Walking between Slums and Skyscrapers.
11. Teo, Director in Action, pp. 11–12.
12. Ibid., pp. 111–12.
13. Esther M. K. Cheung and Chu Yiu-wai, eds., Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema (Hong Kong: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004); Tony Williams, “Space, Place, and Spectacle: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo,” Cinema Journal 36, no. 2 (1997): 67–84.
14. Vivian P. Y. Lee, “Relocalising Hong Kong Cinema,” Wasafiri 32, no. 3 (2017): 64–70.
