ABBAS ANALYSIS OF HONG KONG

Abbas Analysis Of Hong Kong

Abbas Analysis Of Hong Kong

Introduction

In the 1990s, Hollywood saw an inflow of Hong Kong film stars such as Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-Fat, and Michelle Yeoh; filmmakers including John Woo, Tsui Hark, Stanley Tong, Ronnie Yu, and Kirk Wong; and martial arts choreographers including Yeun Woo-Ping and Corey Yeun. In the international art-house film scene, the reputation of Hong Kong filmmakers makes viewers familiar with names like Wong Kar-Wai, Stanley Kwan, Ann Hui and Fruit Chan. At the same time Hong Kong itself is undergoing an unprecedented process of decolonization and forming a perhaps more unified national identity. However, the very term “national identity” is contested since Hong Kong is being legally and culturally absorbed into the PRC while many of its people have strong lingering feelings that Hong Kong is and should continue to be a very separate society, distinct linguistically, culturally and—for many—politically from the mainland.

Discussion

Thus Hong Kong cinema becomes an interesting way to examine the disjunctures that Hong Kong represents culturally and politically, especially in light of the end of British colonial rule. Film in general is a crucial industry for revealing the mechanisms of contemporary transnational production and global circulation of commodities. The transnational film industry offers a speculative ground for global capital investment, and it reveals patterns of international commodification, including international capital's various contending factors or levels of functioning within national and local communities. In this light, film scholars ask these kinds of questions: Is Hong Kong cinema becoming more national or transnational? How do the film talents in this industry and the works that derive from it react to challenges of (post)colonialism and nationalism? In very diverse ways and to differing degrees, political concerns underpin and inform essays in At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World.

The cover image of this anthology “Asia the Invincible” comes from Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-Tung's Swordsman III—the East is Red; together with the volume's title, the image suggests an analogous embodiment of Hong Kong cinema as the “Hollywood of the East” that “registers the industry's pursuit of the global market, a pursuit that mirrors Hollywood's, whose 'authentic' productions consolidate its screen hegemony”(8). Thus Hong Kong cinema seems to be playing “Hollywood” in the age of global capitalism, only on a smaller scale. “Borderless” in the title represents the authors' attempt to suggest a theoretical paradigm that would eliminate any confining intellectual essentialism. The book's critical goal is to allow a more flexible cultural identity of Hong Kong to be articulated and imagined than could be done using a more traditional “national cinema” approach. Yau proposes a notion of “borderless” to express the flexibility of Hong Kong cinema in this era of global capitalism without imposing a critic's totalizing perspective on the area's diverse and alternative modernities. The book exposes globlism's imposition of power differentials. Complexly the articles suggest both a de-territorialization and a re-territorializing of borders that lie in “the shadow of capital,” of ...