JUMP CUT

A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA

In “Women on the Edges of Hong Kong Modernity:

The Films of Ann Hui,” Elaine Ho explores the
multiple and shifting deployments of the figure of
woman and also Hong Kong’s crisis of modernity
through a critical study of the trajectory of women
characters in Ann Hui’s work. In these films, Ho find
a new possibility for agency lying within Hong Kong’s
intense rupture of modernity that is remaking the
city’s identities. Ho does not propose a universal
figure of woman nor see Hui’s women characters as a
Director Ann Hui directed site of unambivalent resistance. Rather, Ho’s critical
the award-winning Song of analysis considers the shifting use of the figure of
the Exile, with a female woman in Hong Kong to consolidate both hegemonic
protagonist who comes to and counter-hegemonic discourses. A larger question
terms with career and that Gina Marchetti covers in her treatment of women
family ties to various in “Transnational Exchanges, Questions of Culture,
countries. and Global Cinema: Defining the Dynamics of
Changing Relationships” is how diaspora and
transnationalism affect women’s subjectivities.
Marchetti uses a critical analysis of To Liv(e) and
Crossings to illustrate ways that women experience
the personal dimension of political concerns. In the
films, the women characters undergo displacement,
exile and immigration differently, and the films show
the range of how these large political forces can shape
identity. Looking at the films in terms of
contemporary viewership, Marchetti illustrates how
displaced female figures experience and negotiate the
To Liv(e), by Evans Chan, personal dimension of 1997’s political concerns.
incoporates a polyglot
mixture of languages and In Part Three, “A Culture of Disappearance:
Nostalgia, Nonsense and Dislocation,” Rey Chow
dialects. Chan lives in New
centers on Stanley Kwan’s film Rouge to examine “a
York and Hong Kong and
cultural politics of self-nativizing that is as complex
makes Godardian-like low
and as deserving of attention as critiques of
budget features for a Hong colonialism and Orientalism themselves” (210). Chow
Kong audience. looks at nostalgia as a form of idealization that Hong
Kong popular culture directs towards its own past.
Chow names this “alternative way of conjuring a
‘community’ amid the ruthless fragmentations of
postcoloniality” (226) as “self nativizing.” It is a
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 strategy that tries to avoid celebrating Hong Kong’s
pluralism by exploring the conflicting aspects of
cultural identity. Also taking up nostalgia, in “Film
and Enigmatization: Nostalgia, Nonsense, and
Remembering,” Linda Lai sees nostalgia mingled with
a sense of local community and faith in modern
progress. Collective memories of history and everyday
experiences become intertwined with the history of
popular culture in a process Lai calls
“enigmatization.” “Enigmatization” in this sense
means reorganizing existing pop culture images to
select the local audience as a distinct, privileged
interpretative community. Understanding this
imagery distinguishes those within from those
“outside” by marking as special those viewers who
Rouge, by Stanley Kwan, share a similar pop culture history. Lai uses
uses nostalgia to idealize “enigmatization” as a theoretical trope to examine the
Hong Kong’s past. phenomenon of how Hong Kong cinema deals with
identity. He draws on two films as examples—C'est La
Vie, Mon Cherie and He Ain't Heavy, He’s My Father
—and also on the work of Clifton Ko and Stephen
Chiau. In preserving a textual domain where local
expressions, memories and contentions find
articulation, Hong Kong cinema takes up those
themes conjured up by enigmatization at a time when
regional identities are undergoing tremendous
reconfiguation. Also examining the theme of identity
and here using specific films as case studies in
“Transnationalization of the Local in Hong Kong
Cinema of the 1990s,” Kwai-Cheung Lo reassesses a
notion of localism which cultural producers and
intellectuals often want to attribute to local cultural
productions as they react against globalized film and
television, especially Hollywood film. Lo illustrates
Lan Yu, by Stanley Kwan, his argument through analysis of Back to Roots, First
offers a melodramatic look Option, He’s a Woman She’s a Man and Comrades,
at contemporary gay Almost a Love Story. Lo especially challenges critical
personal relations in Hong paradigms that can easily once again set forth
Kong. parameters to describe and thus reinscribe a stable
Hong Kong identity. He argues that different
temporalities and spatialities have often co-existed as
people and films articulate and constitute multiple
aspects of Hong Kong’s identity; he names what he
sees as a common phenomenon, “trans-subjectivity”
(265). Lo uses the notion of “trans-subjectivity” to
study the social and cultural conditions of 90s Hong
Kong cinema and to rethink the concept of “local”
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 identity within a new global context.

Marc Siegel in “The Intimate Spaces of Wong Kar-

Wai” analyzes Hong Kong cinema’s politics of
representation from a gendered context; his essay
deals with the interconnections of global, gay/queer
and sexualized identities in the context of the film
Happy Together, which garnered Wong Kar-Wai the
Lan Yu depicts details of Cannes 1997 Best Director Award. In light of Guy
the “translocal gay ghetto” Hocquenghem’s invocation of the importance of the
in Hong Kong. One critic ghetto to the urban gay male traveler, Siegel argues
compared it to the TV that Happy Together’s narrative assumes the
series Queer as Folk. existence of practices of non-familial sexualities
across national boundaries; the film, which depicts its
Chinese gay couple on a trip in Argentina, refuses the
more affirmative rhetoric found in scripts based on a
nationalist politics of intimacy. Using the notion of
the “translocal gay ghetto,” Siegel argues that what is
portrayed in Happy Together is a queer world in
which intimacies between its travelers, journeying in
Argentina on the eve of Hong Kong’s political
transition to China in 1997, bear no necessary relation
to the logic of family and the hetero-normative
narration of nation. Siegel explores the invocation of
Happy Together uses homosexuality in Wong Kar-Wai’s movie as
Argentina as a background. transforming concepts of citizenship so as to lead
viewers to think about new ways to conceptualize
nationality and culture. The essay leads to a
reconsideration of concepts of public and private,
noting that the film takes up these themes and
presents the geographical displacement of the couple
in Happy Together not only to imagine diaspora in
conventional terms related to ethnic dispersion but to
imagine it queerly, that is, to challenge the
normativity of the social and political forces
contingent on people’s lives.

To conclude with a discussion of the book’s overview,

in her introduction to At Full Speed: Hong Kong
Happy Together deals with Cinema in the Borderless World, Esther Yau critically
a gay couple’s emotional examines Hong Kong cinema in the age of
distance. The film treats the globalization. She takes into consideration the notion
theme of displacement in of “speed” that Paul Virilio calls “the instantaneity of
many ways. ubiquity”(4). Virilio objects to the eradication of
distance, which diminishes freedom and subjectivity
as it leads to the dis-appearance of reality. Yau
evaluates “speed” in regard to production relations,
now ever more flexible and subject to the kind of
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 “space-time” compression that Marxist critics
associate with global capitalism. Yau applies this
concept of time-space compression to Hong Kong
cinema and adds the concept of borders/
“borderless,” notions commonly used to analyze
disasporic cultures. Here she uses the term
“borderless” to legitimize analyses of an evolving
Hong Kong cinema that do not use the conventional
critical constructs of national cinema. Her
introduction makes readers aware of how recent
political and economic developments have reshaped
Clara Law’s award-winning
and challenged the old intellectual paradigms of
The Goddess of 1967
“national cinema” which previously dominated
shows dislocation through a cinema studies.
transnational couple’s
roadtrip into the Australian While we acknowledge the strength of global
outback. capitalism, we should also recognize the
transformation and not decline of “borders,” regions,
and nation-states. In The Borderless World: Power
and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy, Kenichi
Ohmae celebrates the coming of a “borderless world”
with an attitude that is not only affirmative but in
some ways utopian about the disintegration of
borders in a global economy.[2] In contrast, in “A
Borderless World? From Colonialism to
Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-
State,” Masao Miyoshi suggests that colonialism
becomes more dynamic in a global economy by
functioning through transnational corporations.
Miyoshi argues that nation-states will gradually give
way to transnational corporations in a “borderless
world.”[3] As a critical term, “borderless” occupies a
contradictory position. Pheng Cheah summarizes the
sides of the contradiction:
With consumerism shaping
their identities, Law’s duo The postcolonial nation must be seen as a
share a passion for a specter of global capital (double genitive—
classic Citroen, the both objective and subjective genitive); it
“goddess.” always runs the risk of being an
epiphenomenon or reflection of global
capital to the extent that it is originally
infected by prosthesis of the bourgeois
state qua terminal of capital. But it is also
a specter that haunts global capital, for it
is the undecidable neuralgic point within
the global capitalist system that refuses to
be exorcised.[4]
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 In this “borderless” world, what is not so visible but
still dominant among the sparkles of dis-appearance
is capital. Capital is spreading and flowing so fast in
the instantaneous moments of time/space that it is
beyond perception. Transnational capitalism may be
borderless, but exactly because of its borderlessness,
it produces other kinds of borders that mask new
geopolitical formations and inequalities between and
across regions, nations and localities. Of particular
importance to understanding Hong Kong cinema,
major centers of capital accumulations in East Asia
have grown just as non-European capitalist societies
are making their own contributions to this narrative
about filmmaking. Ironically, the larger flow and
dispersal of capital across Asia also means that the
dominant culture industries, such the Hollywood
industry writ large, have ever more influence over the
In 1997 Clara Law made a production and distribution of entertainment within
scathing attack on China’s the circuits of global capital, including local film
takeover of Hong Kong. production in Asia.
She emigrated to Australia,
the location for her previous At Full Speed is a provocative, stimulating volume.
film about a family’s move Positioned at the crossroads of an altered global
there from Hong Kong, terrain, this anthology analyzes the evolving issues of
Floating Life. the social and cultural context of 90s Hong Kong
cinema, reconsiders the concept of “local” identity in
a new global framework, and examines the dynamics
between the intercultural movement of images.
Images travel so far and so fast that the extent of
their diffusion makes the history of their production
ungraspable. Cinema marks a phase in the
development of capitalism and gives evidence of
capital’s utter modification of social, material and
perceptual conditions. Essays in the anthology
negotiate the local and the global as they look at how
local constituencies, which traditionally have secured
identity and belonging, now are manipulated by and
Chungking Express, like must react to a new global network created by the
many of Wong Kar-Wai’s transnational production and global circulation of
films, finds new ways to films.
depict the relation between
Notes
public and private spaces.
1. Lowe, Lisa and David Lloyd, eds. The Politics of
Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Durham NC: Duke
University Press, 1997.

2. Ohmae, Kenichi. The Borderless World: Power

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 and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy. London:
Harper Collins, 1990.

3. Miyoshi, Masao. “A Borderless World? From

Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of
the Nation-State.” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993), 726-751.

4. Cheah, Pheng. “Spectral Nationality: The Living On

[sur-vie] of the Postcolonial Nation in Neocolonial
Fallen Angels by Wong Kar- Globalization.” boundary 2, 26:3 (1999), 251.
Wai is all about the rapid
spread of capital as seen in
To beginning Print version JC 45 Jump Cut home
the instantaneous moments
of time and space.

Comrades: Almost a Love

Story by Peter Chan Ho-
San deals with physical
migration and migrations of
the heart. Locations include
both Hong Kong and New
York.

In Comrades: Almost a
Love Story one young
woman works in
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 McDonalds. Another, an
older aunt, fantasizes that
the William Holden of Love
Is a Many Splendored
Thing will come to her.
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