Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media 1474440444, 9781474440448

Citation preview

V I C TO R FA N

EXTRATERRITORIALITY L O C AT I N G H O N G KO N G CINEMA AND MEDIA

Extraterritoriality

To Sabina

Extraterritoriality Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media

Victor Fan

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Victor Fan, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 4042 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4044 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4045 5 (epub) The right of Victor Fan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Parts of the following articles and book chapters have been revised and incorporated in this book, with their publishers’ permission:   ‘Cultural extraterritoriality: Intra-regional politics in contemporary Hong Kong Cinema,’ East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 1, no. 3 (September 2015), pp. 389–402.   ‘Poetics of parapraxis and reeducation: The Hong Kong Cantonese cinema in the 1950s’, in The Poetics of Chinese Cinema, (eds) Gary Bettison and James Udden (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 167–83.   ‘Extraterritorial cinema: Shanghai jazz and post-war Hong Kong Mandarin musicals’, The Soundtrack 6, nos. 1 and 2 (2014 [2015]), pp. 33–52. Figure 3.2, a production still from the 1990 performance of Zuni Icosahedron’s Deep Structure of Chinese (Hong Kong) Cultures, is reproduced here with the permission of director Danny Yung. The cover photo, a production still from Ziyou xing [A Family Tour, 2018], is reproduced here with the permission of director Ying Liang.

Contents

List of Figures vi Acknowledgements viii Notes on Transliteration xi On Extraterritoriality 1. What is Hong Kong Cinema? 2. Breaking the Wave 3. The Time it Takes for Time to End 4. Posthistoricity 5. The Age of Precarity The Body of Extraterritoriality

1 36 70 111 157 196 238

Notes Filmography and Videography Index

268 315 323

vi

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Figures

0.1–0.8 The ‘Night of Shanghai’ sequence in An AllConsuming Love 26–7 0.9 An All-Consuming Love: Zhijian throws a record of Xiangmei’s song into the sea 29 1.1 Verticalisation of the social dialectics in In the Face of Demolition 64 1.2 Development of in-group solidarity 65 2.1 The opening sequence of The Arch 79 2.2 The Arch: mirroring-drifting enables the spectator to be sexually stimulated 82 2.3 In The Arch, desolation is sensed through the process of mirroring-drifting 83 2.4 The final montage of The Arch 84 2.5 In ‘Miu Kam-fung’, one of Joe’s girlfriends waits for him 94 2.6 In ‘Miu Kam-fung’, Joe and his two lovers wait for their dinner under a pop art mural 95 2.7 Joe flips through a capitalist and communist magazine side-by-side 95 2.8 Joe and his friends swagger into a car dealer to test drive an Austin Princess 2220 96 2.9 In ‘The Boy from Vietnam’, Hing-nin performs cạo gaió on Man 103 2.10 In a night market, Chung spots a ghostly sex worker 106 2.11 Man’s penultimate dream sequence 107 3.1 Boat People: the affect of extraterritoriality 129 3.2 The central motif of Deep Structure of Chinese (Hong Kong) Cultures 146 3.3 The blindfolded young woman in May Fung, She Said Why Me 147 3.4–3.6 Ellen Pau’s Drained II 150 3.7 ‘Letter 1’ in Video Letters 1–3 152 3.8 The abstract spectre of Yam Kim-fai in Song of the Goddess 155

­

f igur e s vii 4.1

Timmy stares directly at the camera while Xiaobei reads his nominal identity   188 4.2 Xiaobei and Zhang Lei look up to Timmy 188 4.3 Timmy looks back at Xiaobei 188 4.4 Timmy and Zhang Lei occupy the same liminal position 191 4.5 A proto-military image of fishing boats leaving the harbour 192 4.6 The sight of Timmy being executed 194 5.1 Joshua Wong in Lessons in Dissent 216 5.2 Intercepting an attempt to investigate a water-balloon incident in Midnight in Mongkok 219 5.3 P recounts her experience of being sexually harassed in Do You Hear Women Sing? 220 5.4 Original footage of the protests framed as memories in Road Not Taken 224 5.5 Fung tries to reach Lam in Civic Square 225 5.6–5.7 Two sides of Admiralty and two modes of temporality in Yellowing 228 5.8 An intimate interview of Edward Leung in Lost in the Fumes 235 6.1 A bird’s-eye view of a worker labouring in a gigantic machine in We the Workers 260 6.2 In A Family Tour, the film momentarily decentres Xiaolin and Yang’s story   263

viii

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Acknowledgements

Revisiting memories – both lived and cinematic – from my childhood and teenage years, an era during which Hong Kong went through some of its most tumultuous trials and tribulations, was a painful experience. Furthermore, to analyse how it feels to be a Hong Konger and why it is so difficult to articulate those feelings required a level of self-honesty that was at times emotionally draining. I am therefore tremendously grateful for many people who walked me through this extraordinary journey. ‘Extraterritoriality’ as a concept was inspired by my many conversations with my friend and mentor Thomas LaMarre, with whom I had the privilege to work at McGill University from 2010 to 2012. Its intricacies and complexities have been enriched over the years under the generous guidance of Thomas Elsaesser, the unconditional support of Dudley Andrew and Haun Saussy, and the patience and encouragement from Chris Berry. Every word of this book, in truth, is indebted to the intellectual companionship of my friend George Crosthwait. I feel incredibly honoured that in the last eight years, many filmmakers, critics and scholars whose works I discuss in this book have put every confidence in my project. Some I have met in chance encounters, whose works and words have left indelible traces on these pages. Others have become friends and kindred spirits. Six of them deserve special mentions: Gary Bettinson, Guo-Juin Hong, Earl Jackson, Jr, Jason McGrath, Luke Robinson and Kristof Van Den Troost. Their friendship and untiring support have been crucial in every step in this project. In addition, I wish to thank Lo Wai-luk, Jessica Yeung, K. C. Lo, Eric Lau and his wife Mary-Ellen Porto, Shu Kei, Po Fung, Mary Wong, Ben Wong, Johnnie To and his brother To Kei-chi, Gordon Lam Ka-tung and Candy Tong, Yu Yat-yiu, Danny Yung, Ellen Pau, Matthias Woo, Vicky Leung, Hera Chan, David Chan, Kit Hung, Eva Man, Timmy Chen, Nora Lam, Chan Tze-woon, Wen Hai, Lee Wai-shing, Tammy Cheung, Daniel Cheuk, Cheung King-wai, Ying Liang, Wu Wenguang and Zhang Mengqi, Zhang Zhen and Ying Qian. These chance encounters and kinships have been made possible by  many friends, cohorts and work partners both in the film festival

­

a c kno wle dge me nt s ix circle and in academia. The most important people are James Mudge and Xie Jingjing at the Chinese Visual Festival (London) and the one and only Tony Rayns! Furthermore, I am extremely grateful to have the opportunities to work with all past and current members of the Chinese Visual Festival team (Sylvia Zhan, Swani Ip, Matthew Hurst, Ciu Cen and Andrew Heskins, who also runs easternKicks.com), David Somerset from the British Film Institute, Roger Garcia from the Hong Kong International Film Festival, Yuni Hadi and Weijie Lai from the Singapore International Film Festival, my buddy from the University of Southern California Aditya Assarat, and Hye-jung Jeon from the London East Asian Film Festival. It is also wonderful to be pampered by all the Nice Looking People of the Network of Asian Film Festival in Europe: Sonali Joshi from Day For Night (London), Kristina Aschenbrennerova from Art Film Fest (Košice), Nancy Fornoville from Camera Japan (Rotterdam and Amsterdam), Jakub Królikowski from Five Flavours Film Festival (Warsaw) and Joshua Smith from the Japanese Avant-garde and Experimental Film Festival (London). Of course, I also want to thank the stunning-looking Julian Ross from the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Davide Cazzaro from NANG and Sabrina Baracetti from the Far East Film Festival (Udine). In the past eight years, the idea of ‘extraterritoriality’ has been developed, tested and defended in conferences and publications. I treasure the memories of my joyful time at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) with Frederik Green, Wei Yang and Yanhong Zhu, with whom I edited a special issue of East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, where my discussion of Drug War was first published. I want to thank Robert Hyland for inviting me to give a keynote on extraterritoriality at the Bader International Study Centre, Queen’s University, in 2013. I will never forget my research seminar at the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong, on 2 September 2014, shortly before the Umbrella Movement. This talk was made possible by my friends Aaron Magnon-Park and Gina Marchetti. Another memorable event was the Eleventh ACSS Conference in Macau, on 14–16 July 2014, hosted by Bettinson and another great mentor Tan See-Kam. I also want to thank Bao Hongwei and Jeremy Taylor for inviting me to Nottingham to present my work on extraterritoriality on two occasions. I feel tremendously blessed to know all of you. After my seminar at HKU, Enoch Tam invited me to pen a written interview for his magazine Fleurs des lettres on extraterritoriality and Agamben. One of my former PhD students, Lu Zhiqi, introduced me to Li Yang from Dianying yishu [Film Art], where I published the first

x

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Chinese-language introduction to my concept regarding Hong KongMainland co-productions. I am extremely grateful for the invitations for me from Chan Hiu-man to contribute a piece on Shanghai jazz and its extraterritoriality in The Soundtrack, from Lisa Pitta and Tijana Mamula to write a chapter on dialect cinema and regional politics in New Reflections on Cinema and Linguistic Difference and from Bettinson and James Udden to work on a chapter about the classical Cantonese cinema in the 1950s in The Poetics of Chinese Cinema. These publications allowed me to conceptualise ‘extraterritoriality’ in different historical contexts and with different levels of depth. Some of these works are incorporated into the chapters in this book. The idea of this book was germinated during the time I taught at McGill University from August 2010 to December 2012. I want to thank my friends and colleagues in Montréal, especially Grace Fong, Robin Yates, Yuriko Furuhata, Marc Steinberg and Brian Bergstrom. This monograph would not have been completed without the generous support and love from my colleagues at King’s College London, especially Sarah Cooper, Rosalind Galt, Mark Shiel, Mark Betz, Belén Vidal, Tom Brown, Jinhee Choi and Michele Pierson. I am tremendously grateful to be the recipient of the QR funds from the Department of Film Studies and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities Conference Grants over a number of years, which enabled me to host workshops and conferences where this little idea of mine could be further honed and developed. I feel very loved and indulged by my circle of friends and my family. Here, I would especially like to thank Archie Wolfman and Simon Hewitt for their untiring trust, support and encouragement. Most importantly, none of these pages would have come into being without my parents, Samuel Fan and Jackie Mak, my partner John Christiansen and my best mate Peter Restrick. And then, of course, there is always Scotty and my former feline companions, Pupazzo (2000–14) and Sabina (2003–15).

­

no t e s o n tr a ns lite r a t i o n xi

Notes on Transliteration

On a day-to-day basis, Cantonese is the main spoken language (or some say, topolect) in Hong Kong. Yet, Putonghua (or Mandarin) is now the lingua franca among scholars, researchers and students who study Chineselanguage materials. In this book, all film and literature titles and special terms in Cantonese will first appear in pinyin, followed by a Jyutping (Cantonese) transliteration and an English translation within parentheses. Historically, however, Mainland China during the Republican period (1911–49) and Hong Kong have used different transliteration systems under specific circumstances. Instead of re-transliterating all these names and terms into pinyin and Jyutping, I feel strongly that we respect the ways that individuals or communities have chosen their names to appear in English. 1. Names of all Hong Kongers, companies and geographical locations will appear in their official English names only. The transliterations of these names often follow the Hong Kong government Romanisation method. Cantonese terms with no Mandarin equivalents will appear in Jyutping only. 2. Some political institutions, organisations and persons in Mainland China and, later, Taiwan, had historically designated their own English names. For example, the Kuomintang (KMT; Nationalist Party) is an official nomination in English, not simply a transliteration. In the 1930s, for instance, the Lianhua dianying gongsi had an actual English name: United Photoplay Service (UPS). In their first appearances, I will use their pinyin names, followed by their official names in parentheses: for example, Cai Chusheng (Tsai Chu-sang). In their subsequent appearances, I will use only their historical spellings. 3. From 1906 to 1949, place names in Mainland China were transliterated with the Postal Map Romanisation (PMR) system. Some of these PMR names were used in British documents into the 1980s. These names will appear first in their pinyin transliterations followed by their PMR ones: for example, Guangzhou (Canton). In the rest of the text,

xii

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y the  PMR versions will be used to refer to these places during the period 1906–49, whereas the pinyin versions will be used to refer to the same places after 1949.

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 1

On Extraterritoriality

This book is about a perturbation. What are Hong Kong cinema and media? Where do we locate them?1 This perturbation was wrestled with by filmmakers and critics as early as the 1930s. In 1937, on the brink of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), some cadres of the ruling Guomindang (Kuomintang, KMT or Nationalist Party) in Nanjing (Nanking) proposed to implement a ban on the fangyan dianying ( fongjin dinjing, topolect or regional-speech film), especially the Cantonese films produced in colonial Hong Kong.2 The rationale behind this ban betrayed Hong Kong’s peculiar juridical, socio-political and culturo-linguistic position in relation to the Republic of China (ROC) on the one hand, and the United Kingdom (UK) on the other. In the debate on this ban, the KMT cadres, together with the Shanghai studio executives who supported them, considered the Cantonese film made in Hong Kong a degenerate, vulgar and overly theatrical entertainment that failed to convey modern values both of the cinema and of society at large. It was therefore seen as a stumbling block to national unity, socio-political modernity and cultural and cinematic progress.3 In this sense, Hong Kong and its cinema were set aside as a socio-political and culturo-linguistic anomie outside the national terrain and cinema. Yet, KMT’s attempt to implement a ban on a cinema that had already been displaced outside its jurisdiction instantiated its zhuquan (sovereign authority) extraterritorially over a trading port and a cultural practice administered by Great Britain. As I shall demonstrate later, such a separation between sovereign authority and administrative right was set up by a system of treaties and conventions that designated Hong Kong as a mare liberum (free sea), over which Great Britain could exercise its zhiquan (administrative right) extraterritorially.4 In short, Hong Kong as a city, its film and media industries and the ordinary lives who lived in it were occupied by two mutually ­conflicting – but also mutually collaborating – sovereign authorities. They both sought to claim their political power over Hong Kong, curiously, by ostracising it to an extraterritorial position or even declaring its lives and cultures too unfit, degenerate and dispensable to be incorporated into their respective imperial or national bodies. Such a conundrum has since then been

2

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

renewed and reconfigured, decade after decade, as new socio-political crises emerged. These crises have repeatedly put into question the individuality, subjectivity and autonomy (agency) of Hong Kongers. In response, filmmakers, artists, critics and spectators have continuously striven to locate Hong Kong cinema and media – a site where they can negotiate their conflicting political affects and opinions associated with their extraterritorial positions. Individuality, subjectivity and autonomy are three terms to which I will continually return in this book. On a day-to-day basis, these three ideas are often used interchangeably and taken for granted as a starting point of any investigation in the humanities. For example, I have a body (biological individuality), a thinking mind (psychic individuality) and a position in a given society (social individuality). I therefore come to believe that I have a self (subjectivity), which instantiates a difference between the others and me. I can therefore exercise my right to act and make decisions on affairs that affect me and my relationships with the others (autonomy and agency).5 As Gilbert Simondon (1924–89) argues, in modern Euro-American politics, these underlying assumptions are considered inalienable.6 A citizen in a nation-state is supposed to be an individual who constitutes a part of a fully individuated political community. This individual participates in this community as a political subject and thus can exercise their right to make decisions on affairs that affect them as an individual and on their relationships with other individual members of the polis.7 In the discourse of national and transnational cinemas, film and media scholars too hold on to their belief in these seemingly inviolable presuppositions, either consciously or inadvertently. In China, the quest for dianying  minzuxing (cinema’s national characteristics), first proposed in the 1920s and 1930s by Shanghai filmmakers and critics, has been ­institutionalised since 1949 as a legitimate area of research in film and media studies and as a party-state policy.8 In Euro-American film studies, the concept of transnational cinema still presumes that fully individuated filmmakers, critics, spectators and political communities have their respective territories and boundaries, even though they have been interacting with one another intersubjectively. Such interactions actively rewrite their territorialities and put into question a cultural worker’s or spectator’s political autonomy and agency.9 Therefore, as Dudley Andrew argues, ­individuality, subjectivity and autonomy are still treated as the points de départ of a transnational investigation into the cinema, only that their boundaries and stabilities have been put into question by the cinematic experience.10 As Miriam Hansen proposes, cinema, historically

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 3 configured as a mass entertainment, can be regarded as a public sphere, where conflicting opinions and affects generated from these intersubjective interactions are exchanged, negotiated and rewritten.11 In Die deutsche Ideologie [The German Ideology, 1846], Karl Marx (1818– 83) and Friedrich Engels (1820–95) call individuality, subjectivity and autonomy (agency) collectively one’s sense-certainty.12 As a Hong Konger who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, I have never found that. I spent my childhood under the colonial administration of Murray MacLehose (1917–2000; in office 1971–82). During that time, I was educated to be a British subject in a predominantly ethnic-Chinese community called Hong Kong. Colonialism was performed by calling the Queen Her Majesty, seeing Great Britain, Western Europe and North America as the mecca of modernity and Enlightenment values, speaking and thinking in the English language as a sign of intellectual sophistication, and avoiding China – an alienating Communist neighbour – as a forbidden subject. All these underwent drastic transformations from 1979 to 1997, when the impending and fatal handover of the administrative right over Hong Kong from the UK to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on 30 June 1997 urged Hong Kongers to actively revise their relationships with China  – as a concept, sovereign authority, political power and cultural formation. Moreover, Chapter 61 of the British Nationality Act of 1981 formally ostracised British citizens who were born in Hong Kong by taking away our (me included) right of abode in the UK.13 As Chan Ka-lok and Chu Lap argue, Hong Kong became a wuzhu zhi cheng (mouzyu zi sing or city without a self).14 Until now, if someone asked me, ‘Victor, are you Chinese?’ I would feel compelled to deny it, ‘No, I am not Chinese.’ I do so because China has never been part of my process of becoming an individual and becoming a subject. But then, if someone asked me, ‘Victor, are you a Hong Konger?’ I would feel compelled to qualify it, ‘Yes, but as a Hong Konger, I am also Chinese.’ In the United States, I would use the paradigm of identity politics by saying that I am of Chinese descent and call it a day. In the UK, where being Chinese and being British are not mutually exclusive, this statement calls forth a difference – that, as a Hong Konger, I am constantly interpellated by both China and Great Britain as a Chinese subject, even though I have never been individuated and fully acknowledged as such. I therefore have no autonomy and agency whatsoever in determining who I am as a political being.15 Each time I am being asked who I am or where it is that I come from, I always need to go through the agony of putting a label bestowed upon me under erasure. Understood in the sense Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) puts it,

4

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

by effacing the label someone gives me and by foregrounding another one that the original seeks to efface, I make visible and tangible the difference that I constantly need to negotiate.16 Thomas Elsaesser, based on Derrida’s notion of erasure, argues that cinema is by definition toujours occupé (always occupied) by conflicting socio-political forces. No cinema is inherently national or transnational, local or regional; it is always doubly occupied.17 Hong Kong cinema and media are therefore always doubly or even multiply occupied by contesting socio-political forces, in-group loyalties, senses of belonging, linguistic formations and cultural values. But to say that is to risk suggesting that cinema and media are sites where preexisting territorialities, boundaries and identities are tested and rewritten. The point is: as a Hong Konger, my life is not characterised by any sense-certainty. Rather, I am constantly in a state/non-state of senseuncertainty: that my individuality, subjectivity and autonomy (agency) are always measured against pre-established territories as a difference. In this sense, I argue, Hong Kongers and Hong Kong cinema and media are always extraterritorial. My object of study is not how we can pin down our territoriality. Rather, I scrutinise how our extraterritoriality is constituted and how the cinema and media in turn constitute our socio-political extraterritoriality. Homi Bhabha has told us that deindividuated and depoliticised lives who have historically been colonised or are currently living under postcolonial conditions always occupy a difference.18 For example, what is meant by British-Chinese? This term, first and foremost, instantiates a nominal difference by means of an act of hyphenation. In addition, it refers to an assemblage of colonial and postcolonial discourses. Through these discourses, my socio-political, cultural, linguistic and economic positions are constantly measured against a set of pre-established relationships between the coloniser and the colonised. Bhabha calls this doublemarked-ness,  that is, the colonised other is not actually relegated to the margin.19 Rather, they are doubly marked by a difference between the centre and the margin. We can even extend this idea further by arguing that even a white working-class man from Leeds occupies, by default, a difference – between whiteness (neither the centre nor the margin; at once the centre and the margin) and the working class (lives relegated to the economic margin, although constituting the centre of a society’s production). As Giorgio Agamben argues, every human life is by default a difference, as each life is politicised as a member of a community. Each member subjects their life to the communal right to depoliticise them as nothing more than a bare or animal life. As a result, the community can manage, persecute or even execute this life without being answerable to

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 5 the law – as though both this life in question and the community at large were both extraterritorial.20 I shall return to these theoretical ruminations throughout the rest of this book. For the time being, I want to raise a question: Are all cinemas by default extraterritorial? My answer is: Yes, although as scholars and  researchers, our belief in treating individuality, subjectivity and autonomy (agency) as our starting point in most of our theoretical and historiographical investigations blinds us to our respective extraterritorial positions. Yet, the uniqueness of Hong Kong, its cinema and media lies not only in their juridical, but also in their legal and cultural extraterritorialities. Thus, Hong Kong cinema makes it easier for us to grasp what cinema does and can do as an apparatus that mediates our extraterritorialities. And by ‘apparatus’, I mean a set of institutions that participate in the establishment, stabilisation and corroboration of a political power: or, as Michel Foucault (1926–84) puts it, ‘a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge’.21 In the rest of this introduction, I first examine why the national/­ transnational debate on Hong Kong cinema falls short of helping us understand the core of the socio-political perturbation it seeks to locate. I then expound the term ‘extraterritoriality’ from both theoretical and historical angles. With these in mind, I study the Mandarin musical Chang xiangsi [An All-Consuming Love, He Zhaozhang, 1947] as an example of an extraterritorial cinematic and musical experience. Finally, I introduce the specific topics and case studies I discuss in each chapter of this book.

Hong Kong Cinema as a Theoretical Problem In film studies, defining Hong Kong cinema has always been a precarious problem. In Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi [History of the development of Chinese cinema, 1963], Cheng Jihua, Li Shaobai and Xing Zuwen consider films produced in Hong Kong before 1949, regardless of the topolects they speak, as part of Chinese national cinema.22 Such a historical view is hardly surprising, as Cheng, Li and Xing were given instructions in the 1950s by Jiang Qing (Madam Mao Zedong, 1914–91), Director of Film in the Central Propaganda Department, to compile a two-volume study of the history of Chinese cinema to consolidate the role of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in the film industry. Nevertheless, given the interdependent relationship between the Hong Kong and Shanghai film industries during the Republican period (1911–49), this historiographical position is not entirely a political fabrication. As I shall illustrate in chapter one, even Hong Kong film critics held such a historical view until 1966.23

6

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

In 1993, Stephen Crofts turned this position around by calling Hong Kong cinema a ‘national cinema’, one that ignored Hollywood as a globally dominant cultural industry and institution. Crofts’ claim is based on Andrew Higson’s call in 1989 to define a national cinema not simply in terms of its geopolitical boundaries, but also its economic (productive), stylistic (textual) and cultural (consumptive) specificities in relation to Hollywood and other dominant cinemas in the region. For Crofts, in ‘Hong Kong, the national cinema outsells Hollywood by a factor of four to one’ and it ‘exports through East Asia, dominating the Taiwan market, for instance, and to Chinatown throughout the Western world’.24 Crofts’ argument can be corroborated by the economic performance of Hong Kong cinema since 1968. Yet, by the same token, Hong Kong cinema was more transnational than national. For example, in 1967, the year of the Leftist Riots (also known as the Confrontation), Hong Kong imported HK$14.37 million’s worth of films from abroad (primarily Hollywood) and exported only HK$7.14 million’s worth. Yet, in 1968, the ratio was changed to $10.94 m to $9.16 m. Most of these exports travelled across the globe to Singapore (24.2 per cent), the United States (18.5 per cent), Indonesia (12.9 per cent), Thailand (12.5 per cent) and Taiwan (7.5 percent).25 That year, there were ninety-seven registered cinemas in Hong Kong, of which eighty-eight were active and only seventeen were devoted to showing Hollywood films exclusively.26 In addition to the fact that the moguls of the two major Mandarin film studios, Run Run Shaw (1907–2014) of Shaw Brothers and Loke Wan Tho (1915–64) of Cathay, were from Singapore, and that the industry continued to attract filmmakers and actors from Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan and Southeast Asia, Hong Kong cinema was more transnational than national.27 Defining Hong Kong cinema’s specificity can be even more treacherous from a stylistic perspective. For instance, David Bordwell argues that even though Hong Kong directors have inherited filmmaking techniques and aesthetics from Shanghai cinema in the 1930s and 1940s, their style is best understood as an intensified version of classical Hollywood. For Bordwell, Hong Kong filmmakers know classical Hollywood so well that they systematically violate it, thus achieving a mutation. They do so by systematising fast-paced editing with spatio-temporal discontinuity. As a result, the unity of a sequence is maintained not by a cause-and-effect chain in space, time and narrative, but by pure graphical energy and chaotic excitation.28 While this may be true for commercial Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s, we may not be able to say the same for the Hong Kong Cantonese films in the 1950s or experimental videos in the 1980s and 1990s, which do not follow any classical Hollywood principles of narration.

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 7

While agreeing with Bordwell that the Cantonese filmmakers in the 1950s, well-versed in the classical Hollywood system, consciously revised Hollywood’s narrational strategies, I point out elsewhere that their narrational devices owe a great deal to the aesthetics of the Yueju (Jyutkek or  Cantonese theatre). According to the rules of the Cantonese theatre, a narrative is constructed out of a set of building blocks called ben (bun or act). Each act features a set of actors who are known for their special acting or singing skills. A xi (hei, film or play) is then divided into roughly eighteen acts that alternate between comedic, tragic and dramatic scenes and action sequences. The result is not a cause-and-effect chain driven by a single hero’s objective, but a series of events (or even in some cases, spectacles) where an ensemble of characters would undergo changes driven by a larger socio-political force.29 Understanding Hong Kong cinema by teasing out its economic or stylistic specificities can become a pure taxonomic exercise, where Hong Kong cinema fits into none of the pre-existing categories, or into all of them – but not quite comfortably. Alternative ways to classify Hong Kong cinema are based on how it serves as a public sphere. For instance, scholars including Law Wing-sang, Pang Laikwan and Wang Haizhou use the terms shenfen (sanfan or identity) and rentong (jingtung or identification). For them, Hong Kong spectators, through negotiating a series of historical crises, deeply question how they identify themselves as political subjects and how they differentiate themselves from their Chinese o/Other.30 The problem with this approach is that Hong Kong cinema is still implicitly treated as an individuated cultural formation, which, as Law argues, has its benti (buntai or core body), which is constantly in a state of crisis.31 Yet, by arguing that there is a pre-existing self that can form an intersubjective relationship with the o/Other, or to think of the existence of a core body, is to regard the search for Hong Kong cinema as an ontological investigation. Meanwhile, based on Ronald Robertson’s idea of the ‘glocal’ and Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s notion of globalisation as hybridisation, Zhang Yingjin argues that Hong Kong cinema is best understood as a glocal industry and cultural practice. For him, Hong Kong cinema has always been constructed out of exogenous factors that converge at the city. There, a population of diasporic migrants, networks of strangers and cultural brokers constantly generate heterogeneous discourses through inter- and intra-cultural translations. As a result, even though Hong Kong cinema is one of the many industries that have made up Chinese national cinema, it is posited at the interstices between the global and the local.32 Zhang’s proposal could have been a possible way to depart from the ontological approach of understanding Hong Kong cinema. Yet, Zhang holds on to

8

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

the notion that Hong Kong subjectivity and identity are pre-constituted formations, and Hong Kong cinema has the power to problematise them. In so doing, Zhang still presumes that Hong Kong-ness – as part of Chineseness – is the ontological ground of Hong Kong cinema, albeit being highly unstable and contestable at any given historical moment. As Chris Berry argues, the ontological approach to a cinema – be that national, local, regional, global or glocal – often assumes that a film industry, cultural discourse or even political community has its own autonomy and agency. In other words, Hong Kong cinema is supposed to speak in its own terms and with its own consciousness. In his argument, Berry borrows Rey Chow’s understanding of the cinema as a mode of rewriting a political community’s subjectivity through two parallel processes: ­internalising external pressures (for example, in the case of China, internalising Orientalism) and externalising internal pressures (for example, by performing repressed desires and crises associated with the external ­pressures so as to appropriate them as their own and rewrite them).33 Based on Judith Butler’s understanding that what we call subjectivity is in fact externally inscribed onto a body (for example, a textual surface), and that the body actively performs – and reconfigures by performing – both the act of inscription and the forms and appearances it inscribes, Berry suggests that we see individual films as performances that actively inscribe a seemingly autonomous body onto the surface of a complex and contradictory process of subjectivisation. Such acts of inscription and performance always involve an ongoing rewriting of the interiority and exteriority of a cultural boundary.34 The cultural boundary and sense of ontological consistency of Hong Kong is, of course, constantly shaped and revised by its relationship with China. It is in this sense that Shih Shu-mei considers Hong Kong cinema as a Sinophone one in her revised version of the concept. For Shih, imperial China was as much a colonising as a colonised empire. Since the late Ming (1368–1644) dynasty, Chinese imperialism took the form of continental and settler colonialisms, that is, as waves of migrants left their homes from South China to settle down in Tibet, Mongolia, East Turkistan (Xinjiang), the Southeast Asian port cities or in urban Europe and North America. According to Shih, their sense of in-group loyalty and imaginary ontological coherence have come from their shared linguistic heritage and performance, which actively put pressure on other linguistic groups, discourses and practices in those cities or regions they have occupied. Under Euro-American colonisation, these groups developed their own social, cultural, linguistic and political consciousnesses, identities and subjectivities in association with China-proper as their home. Yet, by

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 9

the same token, they have also been put under the pressure of China and the Sinitic linguistic cultures.35 Therefore, Shih argues that Hong Kong cinema, with its linguistic multiplicity and cultural diversity, its strong association with the Mainland, and its position of being constantly under the various pressures of both the Mainland and the larger Sinitic linguistic sphere, is a prime example of Sinophone cinema. Berry’s and Shih’s understandings of Hong Kong cinema can be considered an ontogenetic approach. In this book, I do not intend to argue against them. Rather, I push their ideas further with my notion of extraterritoriality. In particular, I pay attention to two issues. First, in the process of becoming individuated, Hong Kong cinema negotiates, via the spectators’ sensoria, a set of perturbing social, cultural and political affects (immediate psychosomatic responses to external stimulations) generated from Hong Kong’s extraterritorial position. In this sense, Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality is the pre-condition under which China and the larger Sinitic culturo-linguistic sphere exert their pressures onto Hong Kong. It is via the spectators’ bodily stimulations and their psychosomatic impact that subjectivities are formed and inscribed onto the cinema’s textual surface. Second, extraterritoriality is not a historically stable condition. Rather, it has taken many forms since the 1930s, and these changes have also given rise to various stylistic strategies and understandings of what extraterritorial cinema is – and can be.

What is Extraterritoriality? The concept of extraterritoriality was developed out of a pluralistic juridical history between Europe and Asia. As Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) argues, this concept was summarised by the writing of Francisco de Vitoria (circa 1483–1546), even though Vitoria predated the age of colonialism. During the fifteenth century, the Catholic Church defined Africa and the Americas as mare liberum (free sea) that lay beyond the jurisdiction of the Pope. It meant that such sea did not belong to this world and therefore could be freely acquired as colonies. These colonies were regarded as private properties of those European subjects who discovered them, not as terrains upon which monarchs could exercise the law of the land. Moreover, as properties that lay outside Papal control, they were also free of the law of God. In other words, a life that lived in a colony could kill and be killed by another life without committing homicide, an act that was punishable neither by the law nor by God.36 Such a concept of colonies, however, became problematic when it was applied to Asia. Since the sixteenth century, the Orient was seen as an

10

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

empire, that is, a world order on its own. Nevertheless, in the eyes of European traders, missionaries and settlers, it exercised an unsystematic notion of law. An empire (including the Roman empire), unlike a nation-state (a concept that emerged in Europe toward the end of Vitoria’s lifetime), was a pluralistic system, which was maintained by internecine, inter-ethnic and inter-regional agreements that allowed the imperial authority to adjudicate on multiple and mutually contesting systems of law.37 A modern nation-state in Europe, as defined by Vitoria, regarded law as land-bound.38 For instance, a Venetian citizen who travelled to or lived in Rome had to observe the Papal law, whereas a Papal subject who broke the law in Rome would be considered free in Venice. In an empire, while some laws were land-bound, others were tied to the human subject. For instance, in the Ottoman empire (1299–1922 or 1923), Muslims, Jews and Christians would observe different laws within the same space.39 Therefore, when Europeans arrived and lived in the Ottoman, the Ming and the Qing (1644–1911) empires, they found themselves carrying their own laws outside their own lands. In other words, European laws were exercised in these empires extraterritorially. Modern European juridical scholars often found this concept confounding and pre-modern, even though this practice was actively exercised between the Christian and Jewish communities in Europe well into the twentieth century and was the primary root of the Shoah (1933 or 1941–5).40 It was also largely based on the Medieval – and a now revived – understanding of Islam as the foe of Christianity and its world order.41 Since the 1550s, Portuguese and, later, British and US merchants had accepted with different degrees of reluctance that they were legally bound by the codes of the Ming and Qing empires, which guaranteed these Euro-American subjects’ extraterritoriality. This was part of the reason why extraterritoriality was not regarded as an issue in the Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing; signed 29 August 1842). Nonetheless, on 3 July 1844, the Treaty of Wanghia (Wangxia), signed in Macau between the Qing empire and the United States, stipulated that US citizens were to enjoy extraterritorial privileges. The effect of this clause was to turn extraterritoriality from a right already provided for by the Qing code (comparable to a constitutional right) to a colonial privilege. This clause was then copied and provided for in all subsequent treaties between China and other European nation-states.42 In this light, from 1844 to 1895, the European and Chinese understandings of extraterritoriality were somewhat different.43 The Qing code was a mixture of fazhi (rule by the law of the land) and renzhi (judgement in accordance with the law of the political community to which a person belonged),

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 11

and hence subjects had the right to be judged in accordance with the laws of their respective communities, which overrode the law of the land where they actually resided. In a legal case involving a dispute between subjects of two different ethnicities, a huishen (mixed court) would be set up, presided by a Qing judge and accompanied by legal observers from the two respective communities. Therefore, the Zongli Yamen (Foreign Office) at first understood extraterritoriality as a huishen quan (right of being judged in a mixed court), not as a colonial privilege.44 In 1863, the Qing government even established the famous Shanghai Mixed Court, which dealt with legal processes between Chinese and Euro-American subjects. In the SinoJapanese Friendship and Trade Treaty (13 September 1871), the Japanese delegates called the huishen quan enjoyed by the Qing subjects in Japan chigaihōgen (pronounced zhiwai faquan in Mandarin), borrowed in 1895 by the Qing officials to redefine the extraterritorial clause in the Treaty of Shimonoseki as a colonial privilege.45 At first glance, extraterritoriality might not be related to Hong Kong, especially since the UK has always claimed that Hong Kong was fully ceded to the British Crown by the Qing empire as a colony.46 However, as I will illustrate in chapter one, the three juridical documents in ­question  – the  Treaty of Nanking, the Convention of Peking (Beijing; 24 December 1860) and the Convention for the Extension of Hongkong (9 June 1898) – were all formulated with legal languages specific to the two empires’ r­ espective understandings of extraterritoriality.47 In other words, Hong Kong has always been configured as an extraterritorial space, even though the terms of its extraterritorial status have been contested. This contributed to many disputes between the various Chinese authorities and their UK counterparts over two questions: (1) the zhuquan (sovereign authority), that is, the right to constitute the law of the land, over Hong Kong, which has always been in the hands of China; and (2) zhiquan (administrative right), that is, the right to exercise the law of the sea over the biological lives who resided in Hong Kong, which was ceded to the UK via these treaties.48 According to Kristof Van Den Troost, such a dispute surfaced as early as the 1900s when the power of the Qing court was in crisis.49 It was centre-staged in subsequent political crises in Hong Kong, including the 1967 Riots, the Sino-British negotiation over the future of Hong Kong (1978–84), the trade agreements between Hong Kong and Beijing after the handover in 1997 and the Umbrella Movement (2014). Each crisis triggered a transformative wave in Hong Kongers’ understanding of individuality, subjectivity and autonomy (agency). In response, new modes of cinematographic and media forms emerged so that filmmakers, artists and spectators could negotiate these values.

12

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Extraterritoriality is not only a juridical, political and legal matter. It can also be understood culturally and linguistically. Historically, the Lingnan region – south of the Nanling mountains and north of Vietnam, which covered the Guangdong (Kwangtung)-Hong Kong region and the eastern part of Guangxi (Kwangsi) today – has been a hub of settlers who left other areas of China and Southeast Asia to escape from wars and political turmoil. These settlers have maintained and developed a set of cultural and political sensibilities and linguistic systems that have often been considered different from, or at times belligerent toward, their northern counterparts. In fact, during the Republican period, this region was governed by a semi-autonomous administration headed by Hu Hanmin (1897–1936) until his death.50 Some intellectuals and politicians during that time conceived of the Chinese nation not as a unified and coherent formation organised and managed by a central political party; rather, it was imagined to be a multifocal assemblage of political communities, with their own local linguistic and cultural specificities.51 As I will explicate in chapter one, in the 1930s and 1940s, linguistic and cultural extraterritorialities were debated among intellectuals, politicians and filmmakers over the issues of fangyan ( fongjin or topolects, although more appropriately translated as regional-speech) cinemas and literatures. Also, it was from these debates that Hong Kong cinema as a public sphere extraterritorial to the larger national imagination of China was germinated. Such southern sensibilities, however, were in conflict with the nationbuilding policy promoted by both the KMT and the CPC. Between the 1930s and 1980s, a large number of workers, intellectuals, industrialists and businesspeople from Shanghai and other regions settled down in Hong Kong to escape from the Sino-Japanese conflicts (1931–45), the battles between the KMT and the CPC (1927–49) and the political upheaval within the PRC (1949–78). These people held mutually conflicting political opinions, social values and regional sensibilities, although they shared one thing in common: that their personal beliefs were not completely in accord with the official lines of both parties. For them, Hong Kong was a place where their extraterritorial positions could remain undeclared and undefined. Yet, to complicate matters, the progeny of these social groups, who grew up in Hong Kong between the 1950s and 1980s, were educated to identify China as their homeland on the one hand and maintained an affective distance from China on the other. This was especially true during the years from 1951 to 1978, when the Sino-British border was closed to regular visitors.52 In this light, not only was Hong Kong configured juridically and politically as an extraterritorial space, but also, people who lived in it instantiated a number of different extraterritorial positions.

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 13

Finally, I want to push further extraterritoriality from a historical aporia  grounded in Hong Kong’s juridical, political, legal, cultural and linguistic positions, to a theoretical concept both specific to Hong Kong and applicable to a global context. In my historical review, we can observe that a biological – or in Foucault’s term, biopolitical – life that occupies an e­ xtraterritorial position is perpetually torn between conflicting socio-political and culturo-linguistic forces.53 These forces claim their authorities over this life, ironically, by ostracising it outside their respective territories. Such a mode of existence is characterised by this life’s sense-uncertainty, as it constantly tries to individuate itself out of a perpetual process of deindividuation, subjectivise itself out of a continuous undertaking of desubjectivisation, and autonomise itself out of an active deprivation of its autonomy by the conflicting forces that tear it apart. If we take the extraterritorial position as a mode of existence, we can locate such a position as one being occupied by those biopolitical lives that have been at once occupied and ostracised by what Bhabha would call the unmarked dominant social group.54 These lives would include those of the working class, women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex+ (LGBTQI+). These groups have specific histories of sociopolitical struggles and cannot be conveniently reduced to one unified and coherent community. Yet, historically, in Hong Kong cinema, television and video art, their struggles for visibility have been interconnected. As I will demonstrate, between the late 1960s and mid-1970s, Hong Kong’s extraterritorial position was negotiated primarily via the working-class struggle for socio-political rights. Then, in the 1970s, it was increasingly associated with women within a predominantly male cultural industry. After that, LGBTQI+ bodies and voices became increasingly visible and audible within Hong Kong cinema and media’s larger struggle to make sense of the city’s extraterritorial status. As Agamben would argue, every biopolitical life is by default extraterritorial.55 In other words, as biological lives, we are all extraterritorial, only that we may not feel it. In this sense, not only cinemas and media made by and/or for marginalised communities are to be considered public spheres that negotiate the conflicting forces and affects that trap biopolitical lives at such a position, but also that cinema and media, by default, is an apparatus that negotiates these forces of extraterritoriality.

14

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Extraterritorial Cinema and Media? This is a treacherous question. A satisfactory answer must await several other book-length discussions. The reason is that in order to call a cinema or media an extraterritorial entity, we need to ask if the cinematographic image and the cinematic experience are ontologically or ontogenetically extraterritorial. For example, I need to ask whether the cinematographic image, whose existence is called forth by the spectator’s mind as an image consciousness based on a set of conditions captured by the camera at the time when the photographed being or object was existent, is by default extraterritorial.56 I plan to discuss this as part of my next monograph. At this juncture, I hesitate to coin the term extraterritorial cinema or media without understanding this term’s edges and limitations. Socio-politically speaking, cinema and other related media are by default an extraterritorial apparatus. Nonetheless, there is not a single mode of extraterritorial cinema or merely one aesthetic strategy developed for the purpose of negotiating the filmmakers’, artists’ and spectators’ extraterritorial positions. From a socio-political and culturo-linguistic perspective, an extra­ territorial cinema or media can be tentatively understood as: a cinema or media environment that actively negotiates a set of mutually conflicting socio-political forces and affects that catch a biopolitical life at an extraterritorial position – and, at times, offers potential solutions to render these forces inoperative. Such an understanding of extraterritorial cinema and media does not always necessitate a line of investigation that would lead us back to the question of cinema ontology or ontogenesis. It nonetheless begs for another question: Is there such a thing as an extraterritorial aesthetic? My answer is: There is not one extraterritorial aesthetic, but multiple ones. In the history of Hong Kong cinema and media, different social groups that occupied different modes of extraterritorial existence came up with their own poetics and narrational strategies to negotiate their respective biopolitical positions. No filmmakers or artists consciously produce an extraterritorial film, television programme or video. Rather, different filmmakers and artists, with various degrees of awareness of their own extraterritorial positions, use film, television and video as creative opportunities to speak. Likewise, no spectators consciously read a film or video as extraterritorial (unless they have read some of my previous articles or attended my lectures on this subject matter). But then, this is not simply a matter of one’s political unconscious, as Hong Kongers do not repress their psychological struggles over their deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised p ­ ositions, and await the cinema, television and video art to release and mediate

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 15

them. Rather, the traumatic pain, agony and discomfort of our day-to-day extraterritorial experiences are affective. When I spoke to filmmakers, scholars and audience members in Hong Kong who told me that they found the concept of extraterritoriality useful, they all agreed that such agonising je ne sais quoi has always been there. Like an itch that is seated in the deep structure of our skin, we actively seek opportunities in a public sphere like the cinema to scratch it – either by creative images that can mediate it or by reading a film text that can help us relieve such an agony. Historically, therefore, some filmmakers and artists have been more conscious of seeking narrational strategies or aesthetics that may stand apart, yet continue to form a relationship with, dominant modes of n ­ arration – be that classical Hollywood or mainstream Hong Kong studio films of a specific period. As I discuss in chapter one, in the 1950s, Cantonese filmmakers, who were aware of the classical Hollywood style of filmmaking, deliberately chose to tell a story in a way that would actively disrupt the classical Hollywood understanding of verisimilitude. In chapter two, I demonstrate that between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s, while some filmmakers adopted modernist approaches to make visible the cinema as an ideological apparatus, others followed and rewrote the classical Hollywood codes to put into question the authority to see and desire by the heterosexual male. This book traces these efforts to experiment with new aesthetics and narrational strategies in an attempt to grasp, make sense of and mediate the affective agony of being in an extraterritorial position. But as David James argues, these efforts do not need to be oppositional to the hegemonic mode of narration, for being oppositional requires a filmmaker or spectator to seek a relationship with the hegemony in the first place.57 Today, the Beijing government sees any effort of claiming Hong Kong cinema as an autonomous entity as oppositional. Thus, making a Hong Kong film (broadly defined) is automatically considered oppositional in the eyes of the national discourse. In Hong Kong, the use of the cinema as a public sphere to mediate contesting political ideas and affects associated with extraterritoriality can be traced back to the 1930s and 1940s. Let us study an example. From 1945 to 1949, a large number of Mandarin musicals were financed by Shanghai film studios and produced in Hong Kong, directed and performed by émigrés from the Shanghai industry during the Sino-Japanese War, and originally targeted an audience of Shanghai expatriates who used to watch Mandarin-speaking films during the 1930s.58 Despite the fact that they were made in Mandarin, these films were exceptionally popular among the Cantonese-speaking cinemagoers in Hong Kong partly because they were made with a higher budget and production value than their Cantonese

16

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

counterparts, and they represent the splendour of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan life or the extravagance of historical subject matters.59 Historically, the Cantonese film industry was nearly destroyed during the Pacific War (1941–5), and the immediate post-war Cantonese audience turned to Mandarin cinema for entertainment. From 1937 to 1942, Cantonese filmmakers, under the leadership of Sit Kok-sin (1904–56), Ma Si-tsang (1900–64), Lo Duen (1911–2000) and Shanghai-based Cai Chusheng (Tsai Chu-sang, 1906–68), promoted the Huanan guofang dianying (Waanaam gwokfong dinjing or South China national defence cinema), yet they could hardly compete with the Mandarin folk tale films, musicals and historical dramas in the box office.60 By 1938, Southeast Asian regions, including Singapore, Malaya, and Indonesia – the largest overseas markets of the Cantonese cinema – banned political films that could upset the Japanese military in fear of provoking an invasion.61 During the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong (1941–5), many Cantonese filmmakers went to the rural areas of Kwangtung and Kwangsi, where they directed or performed anti-Japanese plays; thus Cantonese film production came to a halt during those years.62 Immediately after the War, Mandarin cinema continued to dominate the Hong Kong industry and the Southeast Asian market, until Cantonese cinema flourished again at the beginning of the 1950s.63 The Mandarin musicals produced in Hong Kong between 1945 and 1949 were not entirely the same as their Hollywood counterparts from MGM and Warner Brothers. Rather, they were dramatic films with musical numbers that could be marketed independently on radio and as records. These films tend to use a mode of jazz once popular in Shanghai during the 1930s, which combines the rhythm and harmonic structure of American jazz, alongside melodies of Chinese and Japanese folk songs.64 This type of jazz could be seen as a product and mediator of Shanghai’s semicolonial modernity and its social, cultural and political plurality during the 1930s. It was then revised after the Sino-Japanese War for the purpose of renegotiating its spectators’ and filmmakers’ conflicting political loyalties and repressed memories. Understanding the intricate relationship between Shanghai jazz and the wartime memories of Shanghai and Hong Kong in the 1940s therefore requires a thorough rethinking of how this extraterritorial musical mode addresses the spectators’ ­extraterritorial consciousness. From 1945 to 1949, Mandarin cinema in Hong Kong and its fi ­ lmmakers went through an ideologically confusing and politically embarrassing period. Studio executives including Zhang Shichuan (1889–1953 or 1890–1954) and Zhou Jianyun (1893–1967) from the former Mingxing

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 17

dianying gongsi (Star Motion Picture Company) restructured their businesses based on those Sino-Japanese relations and financial infrastructure established from 1937 to 1942. In fact, during the Sino-Japanese War, many individual producers, directors, critics and actors worked for companies funded to different degrees by Japanese sources.65 For the Shanghai expatriates who watched the films produced by these filmmakers after the Sino-Japanese War, their conflicting political affiliations and identities between being Shanghainese (or, historically, Shanghailanders) and Hong Kongers, wilful colonised subjects and responsible patriots, and nationalists and socialists required a mode of mediation and reconfiguration that could both justify their political ambivalence during the War and address their inside–outside relationship with the larger national imagination. In such a politically ambiguous environment, Shanghai jazz, also known as shidai qu (music of the time) and nicknamed huangse yinyue (yellow or erotic music) – in itself a culturally and politically hybrid art and entertainment – was mobilised in the cinema as an instrument that negotiated these socio-political forces and affects.66 In his book Yellow Music [2001], Andrew Jones argues that Shanghai jazz was a site where the delicate, interrelated, yet antagonistic relationship between two modes of modernity was negotiated. In one register, Shanghai jazz could be considered a form of colonial modernity, that is, a modernity that was neither completely imported nor home grown, ahead of nor behind European modernity, but was specific to the semicolonial experience, cultural plurality and historical layered-ness of Shanghai in the 1930s. In this sense, Shanghai jazz did not systematically hybridise the boundaries and relationships between Western (colonial and modern) and Chinese (colonised and para-modern) music. Rather, it emerged out of a vernacular negotiation of those desires for and anxieties about the fluidity of these boundaries and definitions.67 Such a process of public negotiation, however, went against a more top–down attempt by the KMT and the Republican academia to construct a national culture, ironically, by grafting European aesthetics and high culture onto what intellectuals and ideologues would consider Chinese music, that is, a form of music that was a priori deemed, in the coloniser’s eyes, inferior and uncivilised.68 Shanghai jazz, in this sense, both addressed and exceeded the cultural and geopolitical territories that engendered it. Jones attributes the emergence of this mode of extraterritorial music to the works of composer Li Jinhui (1891–1967). At about the May Fourth period (circa 1919–23), Peking intellectuals believed that Chinese music was degenerate, as it seemed to lack the harmonic structure, equal temperament, formal unity and notational standard that characterised

18

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

European symphonic music. Academic music reform at the time therefore meant Europeanisation. For example, composer Liu Tianhua (1895– 1932) established the Guoyue gaijin she (Society for the Improvement of National Music) and employed nineteenth-century European harmonic and melodic paradigm in his compositions.69 Contrary to this trend, Li studied Chinese folk and theatrical music. In 1920, he established the Mingyue (Bright Moon) ensemble, which featured athletically fit, modern and healthy schoolgirls, including his daughter Li Minghui (1909–2003), who performed patriotic children operas onstage. These children operas consist of musical numbers that emphasise melody over harmony, simplicity over theoretical complexity. According to Li’s daughter Wang Renmei (1914–87), performed by young girls who wore athletic outfits that accentuated their youthful beauty and health, these patriotic children songs were quickly condemned by many people as degenerate and immoral.70 Nonetheless, according to Jones, despite such public outcry, the popularity of Li Jinhui’s children operas continued to grow. When the ideologues of the KMT proposed the Xin shenghuo yundong (New Life Movement) by the end of the 1920s – a social movement that tried to instil a national consciousness in the individual sentient bodies by suggesting a set of proto-Confucian values that aimed at regulating, educating and  managing biological lives – the sexually attractive, athletically fit,  but  morally reserved young woman was seen as the ideal of urban China’s xin nüxing (new women or femininity).71 In 1929, the Bright Moon troupe was stranded in Singapore because of their lack of funds. Li Jinhui began to write popular romantic songs that hybridised Chinese music, jazz and Japanese melodies and sold them to radio and record companies.72 In the 1930s, he became the most popular songwriter and film composer in Shanghai. His students included Wang Renmei, Nie Er (George Njal, 1912–35) and Zhou Xuan (Chow Hsüan, 1920–57).73 Despite or because of its popularity, Li Jinhui’s yellow music was decried equally by both the KMT and CPC musicians, including his own student Njal. Li Jinhui’s mode of Shanghai jazz neither deliberately Europeanised Chinese music, nor consciously Sinicised American jazz. As Jones argues, Chinese music, once performed with the bodies of knowledge, techniques and sonic preconceptions of European music, must be considered a culturally hybridised form produced under the colonial conditions of urban China. Likewise, American jazz, supposedly an African-American musical style, was still considered in the beginning of the twentieth century in Shanghai, New York, Paris and London as an exception from the norm

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 19

of European music.74 In other words, both Chinese music and jazz were understood in Shanghai as musical forms that stood outside European modernity; yet because of their being posited as the imaginary frontier of Western modernity, they both signified a mode of modernity far more avant-garde and modern(ist) than academic European music.75 Li’s yellow music therefore openly enjoys and celebrates the pleasure of colonial modernity in a space that is extraterritorial to both European and Chinese cultures, thus challenging the imaginary consistency of territory-bound cultural jurisdiction. The use of the term extraterritoriality is especially pertinent in our analysis here. It was because the Sino-Japanese War and its immediate aftermath was precisely the historical period during which extraterritoriality, as a shared experience between Shanghai and Hong Kong, emerged. As Fu Poshek points out, while the Chinese quarters of Shanghai were occupied by the Japanese military as early as 1937, the French Concession and the International Settlement in Shanghai remained in the hands of the Europeans and Americans until 1942, often called the gudao (solitary island).76 The film and cultural industries of Shanghai moved into these two areas, where they continued to produce and finance film productions, but would channel their funds to Hong Kong and conduct their principal photography and postproduction there. For some, the solitary island and the former British colony were the last extraterritorial havens where one could still make and see films that promoted Chinese patriotism (even though explicit anti-Japanese messages were banned in these areas in fear of Japanese retaliation). For others, these extraterritorial spaces were seen as ‘lands of lawlessness’ where politicians, bankers, gangsters, spies, intellectuals and cultural producers of conflicting political affiliations, or individuals who were ambivalent about their political loyalties, could find ways to work with one another, and renegotiate their socio-political and cultural boundaries. As Fu argues: [M]any writers chose to live a reclusive life as a means of harmonizing the conflicting demands between private and public morality. They saw in passivity a symbolic voice of protest, a way toward ‘dignified survival’ that saved one’s skin without sacrificing much of one’s ideals. The few who resisted slighted personal concerns and championed the notion of moral integrity in the heroic tradition of loyalism in order to mobilize a revolt against compromise. In their minds, though not always in their actions, collective interests transcended the private realm. At the same time, there were many literary collaborators seeking to assuage their moral guilt over betrayal. They emphasized the banality of human needs; they portrayed themselves as human ‘anachronisms’ who clung to an existence totally at odds with the present, representing their feeling of alienation in nostalgia.77

20

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

After the War, early postcolonial Shanghai and colonial Hong Kong continued to provide extraterritorial spaces for these filmmakers to foster new relationships and to rewrite and rethink why they remained politically ambivalent or multifarious during what other people would consider a national crisis.

Wartime Extraterritorial Film Industries Historically, after an industry-wide recession in 1935 and wartime destruction in 1937, including the bombing of the two major studios in Shanghai, Star and Lianhua dianying gongsi (United Photoplay Service or UPS), Shanghai cinema was rebuilt with unprecedented vibrancy in 1938.78 The most powerful studio executive of the time was Zhang Shankun (Chang San-kuen, 1905–57), a businessman who established the Xinhua dianying gongsi (Hsin Hwa Film Company) in 1934. As an investor, he was well connected with politicians from the KMT, the Japanese military and the de facto ‘governor’ of Shanghai – gang leader Du Yuesheng (1888–1951). As Fu explains, Chang’s business operated out of the international concessions of Shanghai under the protection of US extraterritoriality. He consolidated financial investments from Japanese businesspeople and ChineseAmerican merchants, as well as opium money from the two rival political parties, which were laundered through Du’s drug-trafficking network (including the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Company or HSBC). With this money, Chang carried out his productions in Hong Kong. Filmmakers who decided not to follow the KMT to Chongqing (Chungking) or the CPC to Yan’an (Yenan), including Bu Wancang (1903–74), Zhu Shilin (1899–1967), Ma-Xu Weibang (1905–61), Li Pingqian (1902–84), Tu Guangqi (1914–80), Fang Peilin (1908–48), Wang Yin (1911–88) and Yue Feng (1909–99), stayed in Shanghai.79 Under the Japanese-friendly political censorship in the concessions, these directors and actors turned to the historical epic, melodrama, musical film and gods and demons film to work through an assemblage of conflicting political affiliations and beliefs.80 The resulting cinema, produced for the expressed purpose of appealing to an audience with contesting and ambivalent socio-political beliefs, conveys layers of texts that transcend any single juridical and cultural jurisdiction. For example, in 1939, Chang produced Mulan congjun [Hua Mo-lan or Mulan Joins the Army, Bu Wancang], an adaptation of a popular folktale about a young woman, Hua Mulan (412–502), who joins the army in place of her ailing father and is sent to the frontier to fight against foreign invaders. In one register, the film can be read as an allegory of a young woman who fights against foreign (Japanese) invasion. In

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 21

another register, Chang worked closely with Japanese producer Kawakita Nagamasa (1903–81), who believed that the Shanghai film industry should be encouraged to make patriotic films to inculcate the spectators with the Japanese military’s notion of anti-(Euro-American)-colonialism. According to such a belief, Japan did not invade China; rather, it merely helped the Chinese people expel their European colonisers and stay on its path toward nationhood under the auspices of the Japanese Empire. In fact, when the film was shown in Chungking, an angry mob sabotaged the screening and burned the print in public.81 Chinese cinema was further extraterritorialised after the Japanese military invaded the international settlements. In 1942, the Nanking collaborative government (1940–5) and the Japanese military consolidated the Shanghai film industry into the Zhonghua dianying gongsi (United China Film Corporation), largely founded upon the infrastructure of Hsin Hwa. Most filmmakers and talents who remained in Shanghai worked for the company, including Chow Hsüan, Chen Yunshang (Nancy Chan, 1921–2016), Lü Yukun (1921–2004), Yan Jun (Yen Chun, 1917–80) and Shu Shi (1916–2015).82 The studio published a monthly magazine called Xin Yingtan [New film altar], which promoted theoretical discourses on the cinema and national film policy. The editor of the magazine was producer Tsuiji Hisaichi (1914–81), who invited Chinese filmmakers and critics to reconvene debates on the reconstruction of Chinese national cinema as an anti-capitalist, anti-feudal and anti-imperialist cultural ­discourse.83 Yet, Chinese nationalism and patriotism would be promoted in the cinema as an extraterritorial consciousness and Japanese militarist ideology would provide an extraterritorial space for the Chinese audience to renegotiate their relationships with it.84 Wartime and post-war extraterritorial cinemas can be distinguished from each other in terms of their visual and musical styles. Visually, Tsuiji disliked Soviet montage, a style adopted by many left-wing Chinese filmmakers from 1932 to 1937. In his own writing, Tsuiji maintains that film scholars should adopt a realist notion of cinema: An excellent work of cinema can fully blend and combine its themes, thoughts, performances, techniques, and all its other elements into a unified body. In this process of combination, [the cinematographic work] would have the effect of eliminating all those elements common between the cinema and other art forms, in order to uncover the purest and most specific essence in the cinematographic image. What we can discover, in the end, is something that we can call the ‘manifestation of the cinema-itself.’ Here, I do not hesitate to use the word ‘manifestation.’ It is because the cinema neither ‘illustrates’ nor ‘describes.’ Rather, it manifests in accordance with the methods and ideas of its author.85

22

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

He furthers: The cinema can completely visualise a character’s appearance and personality by means of a single shot, which, [in a novel,] would have required thousands of words to illustrate . . . But cinematographic manifestation is a rearrangement of reality in accordance with the author’s will. In other words, reality, which is in itself unintended and purposeless, can be given an intention and a purpose by means of cinematographic manifestation . . . Such a process of cinematographic perfection and reconstruction allows the spectators to approach reality again; it enables them to receive an image of ‘life-itself manifested’.86

One specific feature about wartime Chinese cinema is its penchant to employ long takes, deep staging and elaborately choreographed camera movements to maintain the spatio-temporal continuity of the filmic reality, and to preserve the presence of the performer and the unity of their performance. After the War, as a reaction against this aesthetic, filmmakers began to replace this paradigm with a mixture of long takes and montage more akin to the classical Hollywood style of narration. Meanwhile, the Shanghai pop music industry had been dominated by Japanese investments throughout the 1930s, with Pathé Orient, the largest gramophone company in Shanghai, being merged with the Nipponophone Company.87 As Michael Bourdaghs points out, during the War, Japanese composer Hattori Ryōichi (1907–93) introduced exotic Chinese shidai qu melodic features into Japanese jazz, with lyrics configuring the colonised other as a vehicle that negotiated the Japanese listeners’ own anxieties about militarism.88 A major characteristic of the music of this time is the extensive use of melodic and harmonic features imagined to be Chinese: parallel fifths and octaves, unresolved dissonance, and ascending or descending melodic sequences without proper returns. Such Sinicised Japanese jazz was ironically (re-)introduced to China, with songs such as ‘Shoshu no yoru’ [Night of Soochow], ‘Yelai xiang’ [Chinese violet] and ‘Heri jun zai lai?’ [When wilt thou return?], which employ romantic lyrics that may suggest both wilful submission to Japanese occupation and Chinese nationalism. For example, ‘When wilt thou return?’ was first sung by Chow Hsüan in the 1937 romantic comedy Sanxing banyue [Stars Moving Around the Moon, Fang Peilin], produced by the Yee Hwa Film Company. The song sheet published by Pathé Orient that year attributed the composition to Bei Lin and the arrangement to Yan Ru. In his study of its historical background, Nakazono Eisuke (1920–2002) argues that the song was originally composed by Liu Xue’an (1905–85) and the lyrics were written by screenwriter Huang Jiamo (1919–2004).89 Huang was one of  the

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 23

editors  of film magazine Xiandai dianying [Modern Screen]. He advocated a form of phenomenological film criticism called ruanxing dianying lilun (soft film theory), criticising the Marxist filmmakers and critics for turning their films into yishi lun (talks of consciousness) and geming kouhao (revolutionary slogans). Stars Moving Around the Moon, together with many romantic comedies, gods and demons films and historical epics produced from 1937 to 1942, was criticised for its indifference toward the national crisis, and was therefore accused of being collaborationist. In 1939, director Tsai Chu-sang appropriated this song as a patriotic one in his national defence film Gudao tiantang [Orphan Island Paradise, 1939], although, a year later, Japanese-Manchurian movie star Li Xianglan (Ri Koran, screen name of Yamaguchi Yoshiko, 1920–2014) sang a cover version of this song and popularised it among the Japanese audience both in China and Japan. “When wilt thou return?” is a tango. In the 1937 version, Chow Hsüan was only accompanied by an accordion, and the range of the song was limited to those pitches playable by the instrument (B -1 to D1). While the accordion accompaniment provided the harmony and rhythm idiomatic of the tango, the melody is composed in the Chinese pentatonic scale 1 2 3 5 6 (in B ). Yet in the melody, there are frequent octave drops between D1 and D0, a feature highly unusual in any indigenous Chinese composition, but was seen in the music of Hattori as an imagined characteristic of Chinese music. The octave drop, sung with a slight glissando, makes the voice sound more submissive, exotic and erotic, thus making the song and the voice a feminised and Orientalised object of fascination. The stylistic hybridity of the music, I argue, generated conflicting sensations in a listener’s sensorium: an enjoyment of cosmopolitan modernity (tango), a nostalgia for indigenous Chinese sound (pentatonic scale), an objectification of this Chinese sound as a Japanese colonial fetish (octave drop and feminisation of the voice) and, for a Japanese listener, a transference of this exotic Chinese nostalgia for its past to the Japanese longing for home and homecoming. Meanwhile, the lyrics, supposedly sung by a young dance hostess to her Chinese-American intellectual lover, are also politically ambiguous. Out of the context of the 1937 film, the second person pronoun jun (thou) can be interpreted as a KMT or Japanese soldier, or even the KMT or Japanese military government. In the lyrics, the young woman pours wine and offers food for jun, persuading him to put his worries aside, enjoy himself for the night, and go in peace with no hope that they will see each other again. In the final stanza, the hostess sings:

24

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Stop singing the variations on the theme of Yangguan. Hit our white-jade glasses with gusto. Let me keep offering thee words of comfort. Let me firmly pat thy chest.

In lines 1 and 2, the word Yangguan (a fortified mountain pass that guarded the western frontier during Han [206 bce–220 ce] and Tang [618–907] dynasties) and white-jade glasses frequently appeared in the songxing (farewell) genre of the Tang poetry. During the 1930s, the word guan (fortress) signified the Manchuria–China divide. Thus, the song invoked a picture of a KMT soldier going off to guanwai (Manchuria) to fight against the Japanese, or vice versa. And the eroticism in lines 3 and 4 had the effect of imprinting this sensation of sorrow and longing into the sentient body of the listener, who either imagined themself in the position of jun (who goes off to fight the war on either side) or of the hostess (who stays on the home front and submits herself to jun). It is in this sense that the song is both formally and politically extraterritorial.

An All-Consuming Love An All-Consuming Love was produced by Zhou Jianyun, featuring two wartime film stars, Shu Shi and Chow Hsüan. Zhou originally offered the directing position to Zhang Shichuan, but Zhang was summoned to Shanghai to be tried for treason. After that, He Zhaozhang was hired to finish the film.90 As film historian Po Fung argues, post-war Hong Kong Mandarin cinema directed by filmmakers who had once fostered relationships with Japanese investors during the War can often be read as their autobiographical allegories.91 In this film, intellectual Gao Zhijian (Shu Shi) is the best friend of Hou Xinming (Liang Fu) and his wife Li Xiangmei (Chow Hsüen). After the Japanese occupation of the concessions, Xinming went to the front and Zhijian stayed in Shanghai to teach. Xiangmei is a music student, but in order to earn a living, she works for a Chinese collaborationist in a nightclub. Zhijian finds her unpatriotic and he establishes a tutorial school where he secretly promotes patriotic messages. Eventually, Zhijian is arrested by the Japanese intelligence, and Xiangmei uses her connections to the collaborationist network to save Zhijian. Zhijian finally recognises the hardship Xiangmei needs to endure. They both think that Xinming has been killed. When they are about to confess their romantic feelings toward each other, victory is declared and Xinming, who lost his arms, also returns from the front. Xiangmei reunites with her maimed

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 25 husband and Zhijian leaves Shanghai to Hong Kong, with unspeakable regret and sexual frustration. Far from being apologetic, the film can be read as a letter to those who accused people like Zhang Shichuan, Zhou Jianyun, or even Shu Shi and Chow Hsüan, who stayed in Shanghai during the War and worked with the collaborationists in order to survive. Through the personal trajectory of Zhijian, the film offers an alternative version of historical memory – albeit retroactively and retrospectively constructed – that cultural producers in wartime Shanghai fought against the Japanese on their own terms. And they did so by relying on the complex, highly conflated and mutually dependent Chinese and Japanese intelligence networks. Likewise, Xiangmei’s collaborationism is implicitly excused by her insistence on singing the Li School of Shanghai jazz, romantic songs with highly patriotic and anti-capitalist lyrics. However, those spectators who lived through this wartime experience would know that these patriotic songs were permitted in the Shanghai nightclubs with their nationalistic messages framed within the anti-colonial agenda of the Japanese military. In other words, these songs had the effect of recalling, renewing, rehearsing and reconfiguring the film spectators’ wartime memories and their extraterritorial relationships with both the nation and the enemy. They did so by reintroducing and rewriting the sensorial memories associated with them. Yet, there existed a discrepancy between these spectators’ organic memory and understanding of wartime politics and the prosthetic memory that the film offered. The result, I argue, was not a direct replacement of the organic memory with the prosthetic one. Rather, both versions of the memory existed as two contesting aspects of the extraterritorial consciousness of those Shanghai expatriates in Hong Kong: these viewers’ genuine desire to collaborate with the Japanese authority in order to ensure their survival and capitalistic pleasure on the one hand, and their nationalistic conscience on the other. These contesting political affects are actively negotiated in the film’s musical numbers. A particular feature of all these numbers, composed by Chen Gexin (1914–61), deliberately eliminated all the Japanese exotic melodic and harmonic elements, and their style harks back to the 1930s Li School of Shanghai jazz. In addition, the numbers themselves are also shot in montage rather than découpage, thus recalling the mid- to late- 1930s editing style in Shanghai cinema. The most popular number in An All-Consuming Love is ‘Ye Shanghai’ [Night of Shanghai]. The music is in the A-B-A ternary form and it uses a pentatonic scale idiomatic of both Chinese music and jazz with half-tone variations and subdominant modulations. Melodically, the song begins

26

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Figures 0.1–0.8  The ‘Night of Shanghai’ sequence in An All-Consuming Love.

in the zhenggong wu diao (pentatonic mode in the key of G) with E as the tonic (1=G: 6. , 1, 2, 3, 5). After the first two phrases, Chen replaces a high 3 by a high 4 to signal a modulation to chezi liu diao (pentatonic mode in the key of C) with G as the tonic (1=C: 5. , 6. , 1, 2, 3). In the B section, the baseline stays within the chezi liu diao (1. , 3, 5, 6, 1, 6, 5, 6), while the melody alternates between 1 and the half step 7. to create an ambiguous modal variation between the two keys. Eventually, the song returns to its A section, but ends unexpectedly in 1=C. Chen further surprises the listeners by opening the song and starting each section with a tonally ambiguous diminished seventh chord and chromatic ornaments. In other words, this song provides a sensorial experience that stays both within and exceeds the spectators’ cultural boundaries and understandings, with constant surprises and variations that navigate along the liminal space between Chinese music and American jazz, modern and para-modern elements, as well as colonial and national sensibilities. In terms of political messages and visual elements, the A section praises the cosmopolitan nightlife in Shanghai, which ends with the idiom gewu shengping (peace and prosperity with song and dance), a phrase often used in nightlife magazines during the War to indicate how well the Japanese military had maintained the prosperity of Shanghai. In this section, the film photographs Xiangmei’s performance onstage from a frontal camera

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 27

angle: first, in an establishing long shot from a high angle (Figure 0.1) and then in a medium shot (Figure 0.2) that dollies back to a full-bodied long shot (Figure 0.3). This opening sequence therefore presents Xiangmei’s performance as a performance, thus making visible the self-reflexivity of this musical number and its socio-cultural intervention. In the A section refrain, the film stays on a medium-to-three-quarter shot of a group of dance hostesses accompanying their male clients on the dance floor (Figure 0.4). During this section, the lyrics convey the idea that, although these hostesses seem to enjoy themselves, they are there only because they need to put food onto their tables. After that, in the B section, the song critiques such nightlife and pleasure as superficial and wasteful performances put on by individuals who had no choice but to maintain Shanghai’s beautiful façade. This section therefore reinstates the film’s prosthetic memory, which those spectators who once fostered relationships with the collaborationist authorities did so involuntarily for their individual survival and the continuation of Shanghai’s cosmopolitanism. Here, the film first cuts to a close-up of four hands holding wine glasses (Figure 0.5). It then cuts to a medium shot of an older (albeit the lyrics call him ‘youthful’) man and a young hostess. As the hostess offers him a drink, he takes a sip and begins to cough (Figure 0.6), thus suggesting that both the women and men in

28

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

the nightclub simply put on excessive performances at the expense of their health. Then, the film cuts to the opening high-angle long shot of the nightclub (Figure 0.7), where Xiangmei sings about how everybody, after having sought their pleasure, would eventually go home with their ‘hearts following the spinning wheels of the motor cars’, thus suggesting the purposelessness of such capitalistic night life and the numbing effects of colonial modernity. Eventually, the film cuts to a medium close-up of Xiangmei (Figure 0.8), who urges the audience to start a new life. On the one hand, this ending re-educates the audience in the light of KMT’s New Life Movement. On the other hand, it encourages the spectators to forget their conflicting political affiliations and affects and to move on with their new post-war political existence. Both the ‘old life’ that this musical number and the film at large try to rewrite and erase were in fact both a product and a symptom of the filmmakers’ and spectators’ extraterritorial consciousness: their standing at the liminal space between the inside and outside of the larger national imagination and their celebration and discomfort of occupying an extraterritorial space. Yet, this film never reintegrates the Shanghai expatriates or returned expatriates into the national. Rather, the use of jazz in this film as a hybrid musical form directly re-instils the spectators’ extraterritorial consciousness into their sentient bodies. It does so through a combination of visual montage and a musical form that both excites the spectators’ sensoria and recalls their traumatic memories and senses of guilt, while suggesting new meanings and justifications to their politically ambivalent positions. Interestingly, by the end of the film, Xiangmei reunites with her maimed husband, who fights for a nation that does not seem to understand or appreciate the complexity of her desire and colonial experiences. The ending of the film features Zhijian throwing a record of Xiangmei’s song into the sea of Hong Kong, thus suggesting his ultimate refusal to rearticulate his colonial experience in national terms (Figure 0.9). In other words, the new life that Zhijian develops will still be framed within extraterritorial terms and can only be addressed and understood as such in Hong Kong as an extraterritorial space.

Extraterritoriality in Hong Kong Cinema The following chapters are arranged in a chronological order, although they are not meant to provide a historically linear account of Hong Kong cinema and media’s extraterritoriality. Rather, they are best understood as five case studies that illustrate how different generations of filmmakers, television directors and writers, and video artists configured and negoti-

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 29

Figure 0.9  In An All-Consuming Love, Zhijian throws a record of Xiangmei’s song into the sea of Hong Kong.

ated the contesting socio-political forces and affects that constituted their extraterritorial sense-uncertainty. Collectively, these five case studies can also be seen as five different nodes on a journey. This journey was bookmarked by two mass movements in Hong Kong: the Leftist Riots in 1967 and the Umbrella Movement in 2014. These two movements were distinct in their political opinions. The Leftist Riots, as its name suggests, stemmed from the political left (Maoism), while the Umbrella Movement was initiated from a sociopolitical milieu in which the distinction between the political right and the political left had already collapsed. In 1967, the beginning of this book’s journey, filmmakers and artists tried to make sense of a je ne sais quoi about the invisibility of their bodies, the effacement of their voices, and the ­precarity and dispensability of their lives under Hong Kong’s extraterritorial position: one that was torn between two sovereign authorities that sought to claim their power over these lives via political violence. In the course of this journey, this je ne sais quoi became increasingly tangible, definable and irritable, as Hong Kongers found themselves perpetually deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised under the extraterritoriality of the city and their lives. Toward the end of this journey, global neoliberalism – or as Jason McGrath would call it, global post-socialism (a worldwide economic state in which socialism has been perceived as being already failed) – has systematically deprived middle- and ­working-class

30

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Hong Kongers of their means to subsist.92 Yet, it makes survival an ethical responsibility of these bare and dispensable lives.93 A young generation of  filmmakers and spectators find themselves in a position where the only  way to survive is to foster new inter-human relationships that are based on mutual-individuation, mutual-subjectivisation and mutualautonomisation. For them, film and video give their extraterritorial position, which has rendered their lives invisible and dispensable, a body that matters. In each chapter, I first explicate the socio-political, industrial and/or cultural histories of a key event that set in motion an intellectual debate on the definition of Hong Kong cinema or media, the debates between filmmakers and critics of the time, and how cinema and media were configured to negotiate the traumatic affects of the event. My discussion is based on materials I collected and studied over a number of years from the Hong Kong Film Archive (Hong Kong), the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) (New York, USA), the National Archives (Kew, UK), Videotage (Hong Kong) and the Chinese Visual Festival (CVF London, UK). I also had the opportunity to speak to filmmakers and artists through my work with CVF, the London East Asian Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival (London) and my visits to the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Far East Film Festival (Udine, Italy). My historical contextualisation then enables me to conduct close readings of individual films, television programmes and video art works and to unpack and push further extraterritoriality as a theoretical concept. In chapter one, I start my discussion with the Leftist Riots in 1967, a large-scale anti-colonial social movement that traumatised its supporters, critics and bystanders. In these protests and demonstrations, both the colonial authority and its revolutionary counterpart exercised acts of violence in order to instantiate their power, under which Hong Kongers were deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised. They were banished to a position that was juridically, socially and culturally outside these sovereign terrains proper, thus generating what I call an inchoate or spontaneous awareness of Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality. During the unrest, the colonial government feared not the actual fights and bloodshed on the street, but the affective power of the media as an instantiation of the absence of PRC’s sovereign authority over Hong Kong. Such a media-phobic discourse made Hong Kong film critics and intellectuals realise that cinema and film criticism were more than talks. Rather, they were speech-acts that gave Hong Kong’s extraterritorial position a body. Such a realisation inspired these critics to ruminate on the meaning of Chinese cinema and question the assumption that films produced in Hong

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 31

Kong were to be unproblematically called as such. In this debate, these writers pay special attention to the Cantonese cinema produced in Hong Kong in the 1950s as an artistic practice both integral to and outside – that is, extraterritorial to – Chinese cinema, thus suggesting that new filmmakers and critics should redefine and reconfigure a cinema specific to Hong Kong spectators. In this chapter, I analyse Weilou chunxiao [Ngailau ceonhiu or In the Face of Demolition, Lee Tit, 1953] to illustrate this spontaneous awareness of Hong Kong cinema’s extraterritoriality. In chapter two, I study how a renewed understanding of Hong Kong cinema inspired young filmmakers and television directors and screenwriters, especially women, to foster new ways in which they could speak with their spectators inter-individually, intersubjectively and inter-­ autonomously. They are interested in configuring a film language known by filmmaker and scholar Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75) as a free-indirect discourse, that is, a film image in which the director, spectators and characters appear to one another and speak together intersubjectively.94 From 1968 to 1978, these filmmakers, television directors and writers sought to make sense of their extraterritorial positions in politics, gender and, to a lesser extent, sexuality, a movement popularly known today as the ­modernist – or as Li Cheuk-to argues, the only true – phase of the Hong Kong New Wave.95 In this chapter, I examine three different experimentations in this movement. First, filmmaker Tang Shu-hsuen, in her feature debut Dong furen [The Arch, 1970], consciously unlearns the ­Euro-American cinematic paradigm by borrowing aesthetics and narrational strategies from the Six Dynasties (220 or 222–589). However, by the end of the film, she uses the technique of montage to deconstruct both cinematic languages and make tangible that the imaginary dichotomy between (Chinese) tradition and (Euro-American) modernity has always been constructed upon – and made visible by – extraterritorialising women as dispensable bodies outside heteronormativity. Meanwhile, in the ‘Miu Kam-fung’ episode of Qi nüxing [Cat neoising or Seven Women, 1976], director Patrick Tam and screenwriter Joyce Chan  appropriate the modernist paradigm of the films by Jean-Luc Godard. Such a transplantation is best understood not as an imitation, but a reconfiguration. In the programme, viewers are implicated in a scopophilic structure wherein the signifiers and signifieds in a consumerist society are dissociated from each other. As a result, consumption – including consumption of individual and collective traumas and China as a commodity packaged and marketed through the lens of Euro-American modernism – was completely detached from its ethical implications and moral consequences. Then, in ‘Laike’ [‘Loihaak’ or ‘The Boy from

32

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Vietnam’, 1978], director Ann Hui and screenwriters Shu Kei and Wong Chi reconfigure the classical Hollywood narrational paradigm to mediate the affects of failure among three men. These men foster alternative kinships out of their shared state of deindividuation, desubjectivisation and deautonomisation by Vietnam, the PRC and the United States. From 1978 to 1997, extraterritoriality was no longer a spontaneous awareness. Rather, it was felt, on a day-to-day basis, as a political crisis. This crisis was triggered by the Sino-British negotiation on the future of Hong Kong, as the New Territories, the region north of the Kowloon Peninsula leased by the Qing court to the UK under the Convention for the Extension of Hongkong (9 June 1898), was due in 1997.96 The negotiation became a six-year diplomatic deadlock. The PRC insisted that China had always had sovereign authority over Hong Kong as a whole, and that on 30 June 1997, the UK had the obligation to transfer its administrative right over the city to the PRC. Meanwhile, the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013; in office 1979–90) wilfullly ignored  advice from experienced diplomats and insisted that the UK extend its extraterritorial rights over Hong Kong by means of a unilateral Order in Council.97 The two governments signed the Joint Declaration in December 1984 to set aside Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) with its capitalist system kept intact. Nevertheless, the idea that the city was to be grafted onto a renewed extraterritorial position in a diplomatic process wherein its biopolitical lives had no right of participation sent a strong message to most Hong Kongers: their lives were dispensable. The date 30 June 1997 was therefore seen by many Hong Kongers as an expiration date. Meanwhile, the transitional period from 1984 to 1997 was regarded as the time it took for time to end, during which one must seize the day – carpe diem.98 In this light, the 1980s and 1990s were not only an extraterritorial crisis characterised by a totalising sense of deindividuation, desubjectivisation and deautonomisation, but also a wilful failure to acknowledge the advent and progression of this crisis. This crisis was then renewed on 4 June 1989 by the Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing, as Hong Kongers came to realise that the Beijing government under Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) was determined to liberalise the economy (albeit under the CPC’s supervision) while tightening the party-state’s control over its biopolitical lives’ socio-political freedom. In film studies, many critical works have been written on the impact of this socio-political perturbation on mainstream cinema. As Ackbar Abbas argues, Hong Kong’s cityscape, its urban architecture, spatial layout, cinema, media and cultural productions were configured as a transient,

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 33 volatile, yet perpetually self-generating environment of confusing and exciting actions and events. These events appeared and disappeared before one could grasp and feel them.99 In this chapter, I first push further this line of investigation by re-evaluating the industrial conditions, cultural practices and affective milieu of Hong Kong cinema, television, newspapers and magazines, and popular music. I then turn to video artists who were associated with two interconnected organisations: Zuni Icosahedron and Videotage. The earliest members of Videotage included Danny Yung, Kwan Pun-leung, Ellen Pau, Yau Ching and May Fung. They used to make films in ciné clubs during the 1970s and considered themselves part of the New Wave.100 During the 1980s, they continued to make experimental videos when feature filmmaking became increasingly commercialised. Meanwhile, they were also part of a global movement, in which artists around the world who found themselves at their respective extraterritorialised positions turned to video art to reclaim  their bodies, voices and subjectivities. These Hong Kong artists saw their extraterritorial position as a tripartite one: (1) as Hong Kongers (political extraterritoriality); (2) as women or lives who actively questioned their genders (gender extraterritoriality); and (3) as LGBTQI+ lives (sexual extraterritoriality). On 1 July 1997, time ended, only we did not feel it. In this sense, Hong Kong entered the era of posthistoricity: the perpetual performance of a juridical, socio-political and economic system in order to sustain the time it took for time to end as though nothing had happened. Such a performance has continued to banish Hong Kong to an extraterritorial position. Not only that those lives who inhabit the city are deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised, but also that their lives have become increasingly precarious and unlivable – or in the eyes of the political authority: dispensable. Before the establishment of the SAR, the business oligarchy that governed Hong Kong transferred their loyalty from the British colonial government to the Beijing government. Legislatively and administratively, the infrastructure of the juridico-political institutions from the colonial period remained intact, while, economically, Hong Kong was swiftly transformed into the world’s most deregulated economy that guaranteed the political power of the oligarchy and integrated its financial system into the larger national economy under PRC supervision.101 Chapters four and five address how cinema and media negotiate the conflicting political affects and opinions in two different, but overlapping, spheres: (1) commercially produced (or more popularly speaking, mainstream) cinema; and (2) independent documentaries.

34

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

In 2003, the Beijing government signed the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) with the SARs of Hong Kong and Macau. This arrangement allows Hong Kong–Mainland co-productions to acquire domestic status in the Mainland, thus enabling investors to maximise their capital from both regions in pre-production and release their films in both markets.102 For Hong Kong critics and scholars, these co-productions, which cater to two different cultural sensibilities and socio-political experiences on the one hand, and fulfil the censorship requirements of the PRC on the other, are regarded as symptoms of Hong Kong’s Mainlandisation.103 Meanwhile, Mainland scholars lament that these films fail to suture the ideological differences between the two communities.104 What is at stake in this debate on CEPA is authorship. In chapter four, I first analyse the socio-political conditions and affects in Hong Kong after 1997, which I shall call neoliberal extraterritoriality. Then, I explicate a complex process of industrial transformation under neoliberalism between the 1990s and the early 2000s, which eventually led to the signing of CEPA. I then expound how scholars from both Hong Kong and the Mainland evaluate the first ten years of the Hong Kong–Mainland co-productions made under this arrangement. It is within this context that I study ways in which Hong Kong filmmakers confront the crisis of  authorship under CEPA in three registers – industrial, creative and socio-political. I use Johnnie To as a case study and conduct a close analysis of Duzhan [Dukzin or Drug War, 2013], a film regarded by Hong Kong spectators as the first of its type, which uses the Mainland socio-political and aesthetic paradigm to address Hong Kongers’ extraterritorial sensibility and posthistorical conditions. A book about Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality cannot end without a discussion of the aftereffect of the Umbrella Movement in 2014 on the cinema and media. Civil disobedience is an act by which a desubjectivised life can potentially take control of their own desubjectivisation. Yet, as a new socio-political structure emerges, a new set of differences will inevitably appear and reengage this life in another biopolitical state of exception. In chapter five, I first discuss how Hong Kong’s posthistorical conditions under neoliberalism and global post-socialism posited its biopolitical lives, especially those of young people, in a precarious position. I also explicate how documentary filmmaking in Hong Kong since 2000 has configured a new public sphere where conflicting political opinions and affects on such precarity can be negotiated. After a brief summary of the Umbrella Movement, I conduct an analysis of a number of documentaries made during and after the Movement,

­

o n e xt r a t e r r ito r ial i t y 35

including Matthew Torne’s Weigoucheng [Meigaucing or Lessons in Dissent, 2014], Nora Lam’s Wangjiao heiye [Wonggok haakye or Midnight in Mongkok, 2014], Nate Chan’s Do You Hear the Women Sing? [2014], Lam and Samuel Wong’s Weijing zhi lu [Meiging zi lou or Road Not Taken, 2016], Chan Tze-woon’s Luanshi beiwang [Lyunsai beimong or Yellowing, 2016] and Lam’s Dihou tiangao [Deihau tingou or Lost in the Fumes, 2017]. In the age of precarity, documentarians and spectators no longer presume that what they see on the screen must be an access to the truth. Rather, at an age when film, video and media images are assumed to be mediated, manipulated and fabricated, these documentaries serve as texts that are constructed out of realities captured, re-narrated and remediated from multiple perspectives. Their truth claims must then be contested and defended in the larger public discourse. Such a public discourse in turn makes visible that a set of problematics is embedded in the interstices of the debate between the political establishments and the hard-line supporters of political reforms.

The Body of Extraterritoriality The study of extraterritoriality and how the cinema negotiates those conflicting forces and agonising affects that actively deindividuate, de­subjectivise and deautonomise a biopolitical life should not be an end in itself. The question is: What solution can we imagine? In the conclusion of this book, I discuss the works of Mainland directors Wen Hai (aka Huang Wenhai) and Ying Liang, who have been in exile in Hong Kong in recent years. These two directors actively use documentaries and fiction films to re-examine one idea: there must be a way precisely in the cinema where imaginary solutions can be proposed and rehearsed in which these forces and affects can be rendered inoperative. It does not mean that the biopolitical life in question can then be reindividuated, resubjectivised and reautonomised. Rather, territoriality and boundaries, which incarcerate human imagination of how we come to know ourselves and our ­relationships with others, can be tentatively suspended. In other words, there must be a way that humanity can be reinvented and restored in the face of socio-political and economic precarity. We can then let life be, releasing it from the cage of individuation/deindividuation, subjectivisation/­desubjectivisation,  and autonomisation/deautonomisation once and for all.

36

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

C HA PT E R 1

What is Hong Kong Cinema?

Extraterritoriality has never been a novel concept for Hong Kong filmmakers, critics and spectators. It was nonetheless not openly discussed or directly addressed by film critics and intellectuals until the mid-1960s. During 1966 and 1967, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial social movements – known at the time as the Confrontation or the Leftist Riots – broke out first in Macau and then in Hong Kong. Their immediate consequences, however, continued to ripple through the year 1968. From 1966 to 1978, these consequences transformed the terms by which film critics discussed the relationship between films produced in Hong Kong and the larger concept of Chinese cinema. In this discussion, these Hong Kong critics profoundly questioned the political agency of Hong Kong filmmakers and spectators. Eventually, such questioning inspired young directors to initiate a new mode of filmmaking: the Hong Kong New Wave. The core of this debate is: What is Hong Kong cinema? At first glance, this seems to be an ontological question, that is, an attempt to locate a zhuti xing (zyutai sing or core body), zhuguan xing (zyugwun sing or subjectivity) and shenfen rentong (sanfen jingtung or identity and identification) that demarcate Hong Kong as an individuated political community and cultural sphere from its Chinese other, that is, an object from which Hong Kong maintains a structure of differences. For scholar Law Wing-sang, in Hong Kong’s process of individuation, subjectivisation and autonomisation, China is not only posited as the other, but also the Lacanian Other, that is, the Law of the Father. Under the gaze of the Other, Hong Kongers were caught in a dilemma: on the one hand, they must obey such Law in order to enter political normativity and maintain their ontological consistency; on the other, such Law has always been built upon their death drive to overthrow and supplant the Father’s authority.1 Such an ontological approach, as discussed in the introduction, has been adopted by many scholars in film and cultural studies in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Europe and North America.2

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 37

On the contrary, those film critics who were engaged in the debate in the 1960s and 1970s saw Hong Kong cinema as pre-individuated and presubjectivised. They saw mutually contesting affects (bodily and psychic responses to external stimulations and excitations) that were in the process of being crystallised into a critical point of convergence, that is, an assemblage of diverse, mutually conflicting and non-normative socio-cultural practices and discourses that gradually assumed the form of a community.3 In other words, defining Hong Kong cinema was regarded by these critics not as a stable and unified state of being, but a perturbing ontogenetic process (of individuation) that was yet to achieve any metastability. Such perturbation, I argue, was generated by a spontaneous or inchoate awareness among the intellectuals at the time, that Hong Kong and its cinema occupied a juridical, political, social, cultural and linguistic position that had been doubly extraterritorialised by both the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United Kingdom (UK). This chapter is about the critical debate on what is meant by Hong Kong cinema after the Confrontation, and the historical context – both in the film industry and in politics – that shaped the contour and topos of this debate. In this discourse, the question, ‘What is Hong Kong cinema?’ was never raised or addressed directly. Very often, it was asked under the disguise of finding out what Chinese cinema was. Film critics from 1966 to 1978 worked through this problem by understanding how Hong Kong left-wing Cantonese filmmakers in the 1950s grappled with this question, and the anxieties such a question had generated, both narratively and stylistically. Through their retrospective investigation, these critics retroactively theorised how Hong Kong cinema gradually individuated itself from Chinese cinema out of its long history of being politically ostracised, linguistically marginalised and culturally despised by their Mainland counterparts. Equally important, their debate was inspired not only by the physical struggle on the streets during the Confrontation, but also by a larger media environment that initiated an awareness of the power of media as an instantiation of competing sovereign authorities. Both of these authorities tried to exercise their power over Hong Kong, yet actively abandoned the city outside of their respective juridico-political territories. The resulting fear and censorship of speech-acts – known in legal terms as seditions – that might either make visible or threaten Hong Kong’s extraterritorial position  made it extremely risky and fearful for these critics to name, acknowledge and articulate Hong Kong’s extraterritorial status, or to propose options of socio-cultural or political autonomy.

38

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

The 1967 Confrontation and Extraterritoriality From 1966 to 1978, Hong Kong film critics did not come up with a strong definition of Hong Kong cinema. Rather, their writings demonstrate that there was a rising awareness: that there had been a historical structure of differences between Chinese cinema and its Hong Kong counterpart. These critics began to question the continuous practice of using the term Zhongguo dianying (Zunggwok dinjing or Chinese cinema) as a reference to the politically distinct, culturally diverse and linguistically incongruent cinemas in the Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Borrowing from Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), I call such a form of perturbation a spontaneous extraterritorial awareness, that is, a set of inchoate affects – anxiety, disillusionment, frustration and anger – generated out of a realisation of Hong Kong’s double occupancy and double abandonment by both the PRC and the UK, and by the absence of any political agency in such a position.4 As Yiman Wang argues, Hong Kong and the larger Lingnan region – a vast area south of the Nanling mountain ridge, covering the modern provinces of Guangdong (Kwangtung) and Guangxi (Kwangsi) – has historically developed a ‘region-specific collective consciousness’.5 It was developed out of this region’s relatively late incorporation into imperial China (circa 112 bce, during the Han dynasty, 206 bce–220 ce), its geographical separation from the rest of the empire by the mountain ridge, its historical maritime connectivity with South and Southeast Asia, Taiwan and Japan, its diverse network of regional speech developed discretely from their northern counterparts, and its role as a harbour for political dissidents since the seventeenth century. From 1931 to 1937, the Lingnan region was even a semi-autonomous republic governed by warlord Hu Hanmin (1898–1936), while the city of  Hong Kong remained a British colony. Nevertheless, such a collective consciousness was primarily social, cultural and linguistic. The Confrontation between 1966 and 1968, however, brought such a consciousness to a political register. On the street level, the core c­ ontention of the Confrontation was unquestionably about colonial oppression. Administratively, however, it was about Hong Kong’s extraterritorial status, which had been denied by the British colonial government, and inconsistently exercised by the PRC since 1949. Such an extraterritorial status of Hong Kong also produced a political affect: that lives who resided  in Hong Kong also occupied an extraterritorial position. These lives were doubly claimed, managed and persecuted by two competing sovereignties, ironically, by ostracising them from the two respective juridico-political territories.

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 39

According to the records from Whitehall from 1966 to 1968, the order of the events was as follows. On 5 April 1966, a young man named So Sauchung (b. 1937) ‘staged a hunger strike’ to protest against a five-cent fare raise proposed by Star Ferry, which ran the major cross-harbour service between two key business districts: Central and Tsim Sha Tsui. His arrest instigated a series of protests during 5 and 6 April, resulting in 1,456 arrests, of which 905 were eventually charged with criminal offences.6 Then, in Macau, a series of anti-colonial disputes and demonstrations from September to December 1966 led to the Motim 1–2–3 (12–3 Incident).  On 3 December 1966, rioters raided the Leal Senado (seat of the  Portuguese colonial government) and burned portraits of Portuguese governors. After more than a month of confrontations between the pro-Communist protesters and the police, on 29 January 1967, Governador José Manuel de Sousa e Faro Nobre de Carvalho (1910–95; in office 1966–74) signed a statement declaring the PRC as Macau’s de facto sovereign authority, although the city remained under Portuguese administration.7 During this period, the Labour government in London under Prime Minister Harold Wilson (1916–95; in office 1964–70) proposed to introduce representative government, local councils and welfare state as steps to decolonise Hong Kong. From January to May, leftist presses in Hong Kong attacked the administration for creating ‘Two Chinas’, that is, gradually turning Hong Kong into a sovereignty.8 On 4 May, workers from the Resettlement Department (now Housing Department), escorted by the police, took down illegal structures outside the Kowloon Walled City, an area designated as an extraterritorial space that had remained under Chinese administration since the Convention for the Extension of Hongkong (9 June 1898). The leftist presses in Hong Kong, the Ta Kung Pao, Wen Wei Po and New Evening Post, considered this move a blatant violation of Chinese sovereignty not only over the Walled City, but over the whole of Hong Kong. Governor David Trench (1915–88; in office 1964–71) considered it an attempt by the Beijing government to coerce London to accept an extraterritorial settlement like the one signed by Lisbon for Macau.9 On 6 May 1967, picketing workers at the Hong Kong Artificial Flower Works clashed with the riot police, and many strikers were brutally beaten up and arrested.10 The left-wing presses, led by the local branch of the New China News Agency (NCNA) (which historically served as the representative office of the PRC in Hong Kong; known in the 1990s as the Xinhua News Agency), used the opportunity to denounce the British colonial government by calling the incident a ‘fascist atrocity’. Under

40

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

the name of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and the guidance of Mao Zedong (1893–1976), they called for city-wide strikes, protests and demonstrations.11 Although the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the CPC, released a statement in support of the workers as early as 15 May the Beijing government remained quiet.12 Nevertheless, as social unrest escalated, Trench received permission from the Executive Council to arrest and detain, up to twelve months, leading leftist leaders – especially union activists, journalists, filmmakers, actors and cultural workers – by executive orders.13 Between the end of May and early June, unions, under NCNA’s leadership, called for more city-wide strikes, which were brutally suppressed by the police. After that, individual activists began to plant bombs in major thoroughfares in the city. On 8 July, six protesters were shot dead and twenty were injured at the border area of Sha Tua Kok.14 Meanwhile, the Beijing government also became more explicit in its support for the workers and the Confrontation became a theatre of a year-long diplomatic warfare between Beijing and London. On 21 August, Red Guards in Beijing detonated a bomb at the UK Chargé d’affaires Office.15 Then, on 25 August, in Hong Kong, radio host Lam Bun (1926–67), who was critical of the leftists, was burned to death with his cousin as rioters (and, some say, government agents disguised as rioters) set his car on fire.16 Trench called the UK Ministry of Defence to devise an evacuation plan. Bombing, however, subsided by early September after the police raided union headquarters and pro-CPC schools, and the evacuation plan was called off by Whitehall in September.17 The Riots ended with an injunction issued in secret in December to the activists by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai (1898–76; in office 1949–76), as the moderate faction of the CPC regained control of the state from the Red Guards. The NCNA representatives in Hong Kong were recalled by the Beijing government and their replacements advocated de-escalation. Yet, the Beijing government denied exit visas to the UK representatives in Beijing in order to demand the release of all political detainees in  Hong  Kong.18 On 15 March 1968, two film stars from the left-wing Chang Cheng (Great Wall) Motion Picture Enterprise, Shih Hui (b. 1934) and Fu Ch’i (b. 1929), ‘kidnapped’ by the Special Branch (department of intelligence) of the Royal Hong Kong Police on 15 July 1967, were brought  to the Sino-British border for deportation. As Trench anticipated, the PRC border control denied entry to them because Chinese citizens could not be ‘deported’ from one region to another within the same nation-state. Despite protests from the Chinese Chargé d’affaires in London, this incident eventually justified the release of all political

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 41

­etainees within Hong Kong by August, thus softening the tension d between the PRC and the UK.19 In the course of the Confrontation, a major anxiety expressed by Trench and his fellow diplomats and politicians was Beijing’s claim of Hong  Kong’s extraterritoriality. On 18 March 1967, Trench reported to Foreign Secretary George Brown (1914–85; in office 1966–8) that the ‘two leading Hong Kong left-wing papers of 17th March devoted much attention to an alleged “plot to turn Hong Kong into a country” ’. These papers cited five instances in which Hong Kong was referred to as a ‘country’ by members of the Legislative Council and other government officials. For these newspapers, ‘the aim [of these claims] is to reject the right of China to claim her sovereignty over Hong Kong’.20 In another telegram he sent to Brown on the same day, Trench suggests that these newspapers responded to the recent public opinions ‘in the press about the desirability of developing representative institutions, introducing Elected Members into the Legislative Council and the creation of some form of “Hong Kong citizenship” ’. These proposals were made by James Johnson (1908–95), Judith Hart (1924–91) and John Rankin (1889–1973) in the House of Commons on 27 February.21 Trench’s opinion was accepted on 31 March 1967 by Bunny Carter, head of the China and Hong Kong Department of the Foreign Office, who was considered the de facto governor of Hong Kong at Whitehall.22 On 5 April 1967, Percy Cradock (1923–2010), who worked at the Chargé d’affaires Office in Beijing, recommended that the UK government not actively question Hong Kong’s constitutional status.23 What Trench and Cradock worried about, based on these newspapers’ opinions, was the ‘Macau’ scenario, that is, the acknowledgement of Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality. Historically, Hong Kong Island was ‘ceded to’ (geiyu, more accurately translated as bestowed upon) the British Crown according to Article III of the Treaty of Nanking (29 August 1842).24 What we call Kowloon Peninsula today was formally ceded to the UK according to Article VI of the Convention of Peking (24 December 1860). This territory was initially leased to Harry Smith Parkes (1828–85) on 28 February 1860. After cancelling this lease, the second paragraph of Article VI states: ‘the claims of any Chinese to property on the said portion of Cowloon [Kowloon] shall be duly investigated by a mixed Commission of British and Chinese Officers’.25 This clause is phrased in accordance with what was known in European international law as extraterritoriality and in the Qing (1644–1911) code as huishen quan: that a dispute between a European subject and a Qing one would be adjudicated on in accordance with their respective laws (see the introduction). According to the legal

42

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

debate among British merchants and missionaries during the first half of the nineteenth century, the Qing code was inadequate to protect their colonial interests; hence, the clause granted British subjects an exemption from the law of the land.26 Strictly speaking, under European international law, the law of the land was always considered absent in a colony, which justified the use of the common law (of the sea) there.27 Meanwhile, from the Qing perspective, it was simply a right enjoyed by their subjects. Yet, curiously, by granting the Qing court the right to adjudicate on property matters, the British colonial authority implicitly acknowledged Qing’s de facto sovereignty over the territory. In fact, the Qing court exercised both de jure and de facto power over the Walled City of Kowloon. In the Convention for the Extension of Hongkong (9 June 1898), the Qing government agreed to lease the rest of Kowloon (nowadays New Territories) to Great Britain for a period of ninety-nine years. This convention guaranteed not only the right of the Qing government to exercise its power over the Walled City, but also the right of the Kowloon residents, Qing military personnel and government representatives to use the Victoria Harbour, in order to protect the passage between the harbour and Xin’an (Hsin-an, nowadays Shenzhen). Moreover, disputes over property rights or criminal cases were to be jointly adjudicated on by commissioners from both governments, and the British government had no right to expel any resident from the extraterritorial region to a non-extraterritorial one within China.28 Therefore, in the eyes of the international law, the Qing court had both sovereign authority and political power over the New Territories, even though the UK had administrative right. Therefore, in 1967, what was at stake, from a diplomatic perspective, was PRC’s intention to claim and exercise its extraterritorial rights over Hong Kong.

Cantonese Cinema as an Extraterritorial Medium In film history, extraterritoriality was not an alien concept for most Hong Kong filmmakers. Since the 1930s, directors, producers and actors in Hong Kong have always recognised the de facto power of the leaders in the Chinese film industry and government institutions over Hong Kong. Hence, from 1966 to 1978, the Hong Kong film critics’ urge to individuate Hong Kong cinema from its Chinese counterpart was motivated by a sense that film productions in Hong Kong were always under the extraterritorial scrutiny of the Chinese Other, and to a certain degree, their subject matters were also about someone else’s affairs, framed within someone else’s socio-political sensibilities. In the 1930s, for example, executives from the two largest studios

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 43 in Shanghai, Luo Mingyou (Lo Ming-yau, 1902–67) from the United Photoplay Service (UPS) and Zhou Jianyun (1883–1970) from the Star Motion Picture Company, saw the blossoming Cantonese film industry in Hong Kong and San Francisco as a threat. It was because the Shanghai productions, which were silent until 1933–4 and Mandarin-speaking afterwards, were only marketed to Shanghai, Tianjin (Tientsin), Peking and the less urbanised north, where Mandarin could be understood. On the contrary, Cantonese films were released not only in the more urbanised and densely populated Lingnan region, but also to the diasporic communities in Southeast Asia, Europe and North America. According to Hong Kong Cantonese film magazines Lingxing [Ling Sing] and Yilin [Ngailam or Art Lane], from July 1936 to June 1937, Luo Gang (1901–77), director of the Zhongyang dianying jiancha weiyuanhui (Central Film Censorship Committee), issued a ban on all regional-speech cinemas. Despite the fact that the ban could not possibly be implemented in colonial Hong Kong and the United States, Cantonese producer Chiu Shu-sun (1904–87; Grandview Studio) and directors Chuk Ching-yin, Lee Fa, Ko Lei-hen (1890–1982) and Chan Kwan-chiu formed the Wanjiu Yuepian lianhe xiehui (Waangau Jyutpin lyunhap hipwui or United Association for Rescuing the Cantonese Cinema) and sent producer Runje Shaw (1896–1975, executive of the Hong Kong–Singapore Tianyi or Unique Studio) and Lee Fa to Shanghai and Nanking to negotiate for a three-year postponement.29 In so doing, these Cantonese filmmakers recognised the Republic of China (ROC) as the de facto sovereign authority over Hong Kong, thus implicitly confirming Cantonese cinema’s own extraterritorial status. The postponement was eventually granted by Luo Gang, although with considerable bureaucratic complications. Eventually, the incident was dropped altogether with the official declaration of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45).30 During the War, the ruling Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist Party) tried to take the initiative to reorganise the Hong Kong film industry. In 1937, for instance, the Zhongyang dianying shezhichang (Central Film Studio) from ROC’s wartime capital Chongqing (Chungking) sent filmmakers Tsai Chu-sang (1906–68), Shen Xiling (pseudonym of Shen Xuecheng, 1904–40) and Situ Huimin (1910–87) to reform Cantonese cinema. As reported by Ling Sing and Art Lane, Tsai, Shen and Situ promoted the Huanan guofang dianying (Waanaam gwokfong dinjing or South China national-defence cinema), which sought to turn Cantonese cinema into an instrument of propaganda.31 As reported by Cantonese magazines Youyou [Jaujau] and the Tianxing dianying yuekan [Tinsing dinjing jyuthon or Star Pictorial], as well as

44

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Shanghai magazines the Lianhua huabao [UPS Pictorial] and Diansheng zhoukan [Movietone], this effort was matched by another one made in 1935 by the Cantonese filmmakers themselves: the dianying qingjie yundong (dingjing cinggit wandung or film cleansing movement). The film cleansing movement aimed to: ‘(1) promulgate the national spirit; (2) raise the moral standard of the nationals; (3) inculcate the nationals with scientific knowledge; and (4) inspire the nationals with human sensibility and will’.32 In  September 1937, filmmakers Chuk Ching-yin, Chan Pei (1925–75), Lo Duen (1911–2000), Ma Si-tsang (1916–97), Sit Kok-sin (1904–56)  and Tang Xiaodan (1910–2012) produced a national defence film Zuihou guantou [Zeoihau gwaantau or At this Critical Juncture, Chan Pei, Chiu Shu-sun, Ko Lei-hen, Lee Chi-ching, Nam Hoi Sap Sam Long and So Yee, 1938].33 Curiously, during the Japanese occupation (25 December  1941–30 August 1945), the official studio United China Film Corporation adopted these policies to promote a new Cantonese cinema against Euro-American imperialism. However, most Cantonese filmmakers and actors left Hong Kong and joined itinerant theatre troupes in Chinese territories, and only one Cantonese film, Hong Kong kōryaku [Xianggang gonglue, Hoenggong gungloek, or Invasion of Hong Kong, Tanaka Shigeo, released 19 November 1942], went into production during that period.34 After the War, the sweeping success of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the Civil War (1945–9) between the KMT and the CPC inspired many socialists – although not necessarily pro-CPC – as well as filmmakers and actors to prepare for a communist takeover of the film industry and an end to Hong Kong cinema’s extraterritoriality. These film workers included Liu Qiong (1913–2002), Kung Chiu-hsia (1916–2004), Sun Jinglu (1923–89), Shu Shi (1916–2015), Wang Renmei (1914–87), Wang Yin (1911–88), Yen Chun (1917–80) and Bai Guang (1920–99) from the Mandarin industry, and Cheung Ying (1919–84) and Lo Duen from the Cantonese.35 In 1948, Lo made Cihen mianmian wu jueqi [Cihan minmin moujyutkei or Everlasting Regret] to encourage his spectators to return to their hometowns in the Mainland to fight for the revolutionary cause. In 1950, Tsai, screenwriters Yang Hansheng (1920–93) and Yu Ling (1907–97), and critic Zhou Gangming (1909–81) established the Nanguo Film Company and produced a big-budget Cantonese feature, Zhujiang lei [Zyugong leoi or Dawn Must Come, Wong Wai-yat].36 The film not only encouraged Mainlanders who fled to Hong Kong during the wars to return to their hometowns, but also Southeast Asian investors to put money into the Mainland industries. According to Lo’s own account, in

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 45

1949, Liao Chengzhi (1908–83), Head of the NCNA in Peking, offered Hong Kong left-wing journalist Liu Yat-yuen (1920–2002) a start-up fund to purchase two cinemas in Hong Kong. Liu established the Great Wall Motion Picture Enterprise in 1950 and Feng Huang Motion Picture in 1951 to produce Mandarin left-wing films. A year later, he set up the Sun Luen Film Company to produce Cantonese films. And their first feature was Baijia zai [Baaigaa zai or The Prodigal Son, Ng Wui, 1952].37 Nevertheless, Hong Kong cinema’s extraterritorial condition resumed shortly. On 27 June 1951, the Hong Kong government issued the Frontier Closed Area Order, which effectively closed the Sino-British Border between the Mainland and Hong Kong. In 1951, the staff of Great Wall instigated a strike. As a result, Shu Shi and nine left-wing filmmakers and actors were ‘kidnapped’ from their homes and expelled to the Mainland between 1 and 6 October.38 This coincided with the beginning of the fanyou yundong (anti-rightist movement) in the Mainland, under which many revolutionary filmmakers and artists from the 1930s and 1940s were labelled and persecuted as petit bourgeois counter-revolutionaries.39 For many left-wing cultural workers, the deportation of these filmmakers signalled PRC’s acceptance of the UK’s de jure power over Hong Kong and the beginning of their lives in exile. Many of these producers, directors and actors found themselves caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, they believed in socialism and wished to contribute their creative works to the revolutionary cause. On the other, as the anti-rightist movement escalated across the border, these Hong Kong-based filmmakers found themselves alienated by the very government that they once supported. They and their spectators began to develop a sense of political failure: the failure of being in an extraterritorial position that was doubly occupied and doubly ostracised by a new socialist nation-state that they once corroborated but to which they could no longer return, and by a colonial power against which they constantly resisted but under which they had to remain and survive. Throughout the 1950s, pro-CPC cultural workers continued to ‘infiltrate’ predominantly pre-KMT or politically neutral film studios in various capacities.40 This sense of failure is rehearsed by the contemporary dramas made by the most economically successful and culturally memorable left-wing studio, the Union Film Enterprise. Unlike Sun Luen, Union was not directly associated with the CPC. Rather, it was set up by a collective of Cantonese filmmakers and actors, including Ng Cho-fan (1911–93), Cheung Ying, Pak Yin (1920–87), Mary Wong Man-lei (1913–98), Lo Duen and Wu Pang (1909–2000).41 Although Union films belong to a variety of genres, the studio is best known for making petit urbanite

46

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

films, with plots developed around an ensemble of lower middle-class and working-class characters. In addition, their films show a deliberate effort to give narrative agency to marginalised women, including dance hostesses and home workers. These characters can be roughly grouped into: (1) émigrés from Mainland China who settled down in Hong Kong before or during the Sino-Japanese War, including drivers, day labourers and seamen, who were the most unionised groups in Hong Kong during the 1950s, as well as intellectuals and educators, dance hostesses and home workers; (2) new immigrants from the Mainland who settled down in Hong Kong after 1949, including factory workers and house helpers; and (3) entrepreneurs from Shanghai, including manufacturers, company managers, accountants and real-estate investors. The plots of many Union films are set in tenement buildings rented to a baauzou (rent contractor), who subdivides each floor with wooden panels and curtains into makeshift units and sublets them to individual tenants. This is a living arrangement easily recognisable by many lowermiddle-class and working-class viewers in Hong Kong during the 1950s; it also allows characters from all walks of life to interact with one another and condenses socio-political and economic conflicts in a densely populated and claustrophobic space. In addition, the rent contractor, an evil character who demands money from those who struggle for their living, is constantly under the pressure of the landlord, thus allowing the viewers to trace all the social ills to the landowner as the ultimate symbolic substitute of capitalism. That being said, none of these petit urbanite films can be considered anti-capitalist. Rather, these films merely suggest that through hard labour, communal loyalty and individual perseverance, these lower-class characters can overcome monetary issues and demonstrate their strength against the upper middle class. In these films, the Canton region is still fondly called or remembered as one’s hoenghaa (hometown) and the fact that one cannot cross the border to return to one’s hometown is effectively erased. By the same token, mobility between Hong Kong and one’s hometown is either actively denied (for example, nobody travels or expresses any intention to return to their hometowns), normalised (for example, some characters can somehow travel between Canton and Hong Kong as though border control did not exist) or retarded and delayed until a film’s denouement. These films allow the filmmakers and their spectators to reexperience the affects of their failed performance of returning home. Yet, by performing their collective sense of failure, the left-wing filmmakers and the left-leaning audience regained a sense of socio-political agency over their extraterritorial position in Hong Kong.42

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 47 In other words, Union films can be understood as an early mode of cinematic negotiation of the sense of failure brought forth by extraterritoriality. The Union Film Enterprise, which produced left-wing Cantonese films outside the jurisdictions of both the CPC and the KMT within colonial Hong Kong, was an extraterritorial film studio par excellence.

Fear of Sedition and its Extraterritorial Authority During the 1960s, however, the Hong Kong Cantonese film industry declined steadily. By 1972, there was no Cantonese production at all. Film historians attribute such decline to overproduction and market saturation between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, and the emergence of young spectators who were brought up entirely in Hong Kong and indifferent to the sense of failure addressed by these films.43 Meanwhile, left-wing film productions came to a halt during the Confrontation in 1967.44 On 5 March 1968, a report prepared by the Special Branch of the Royal Hong Kong Police offers a reason for their demise: Members of communist cultural organisations did not play a major role in confrontation although some employees of communist film companies and theatres were involved in early street demonstrations and isolated violence. Since confrontation began the three major local communist film companies have not produced any full length films and at present are experiencing difficulties in finding suitable scripts, which will be passed by the Hong Kong Government censors and yet, at the same time, will not run the risk of being condemned as revisionist or anti-Maoist by the authorities in China. The communist film world suffered a number of setbacks during confrontation; several of their major stars left the Colony and others have been detained by police. In order to effect economies and tighten control over the companies, a joint administration is being effected and this should in the near future produce greater working efficiency. The communists currently control four out of a total of 97 licensed theatres in the Colony (one other had its license revoked by Government in 1967). Regular stage performances, which are invariably well attended, are given at two of these theatres. Films currently being shown are re-runs of China produced films and as such do not attract capacity audiences. The communists also control a well equipped film studio which provides the necessary facilities for production and a film distribution company which disseminates local and China produced motion pictures throughout the world. At present, it seems likely that once the reorganisation within film circles has been completed, film production will be resumed but it will be a long time before they will regain their pre-confrontation influence.45

From 1966 to 1968, the CPC turned from the cinema to more direct and  immediate media: newspapers, big-character posters, handbills and loudspeakers. These media proved to be so effective that politicians and

48

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

diplomats of both the PRC and the UK considered their real struggle over Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality not in the actual violence on the streets, but in the confrontation brought forth by the media. In fact, these media generated among British diplomats and politicians (especially Trench) a fear of sedition, as though the sensorial stimulations they initiated – as opposed to their messages – were enough to instantiate PRC’s sovereign authority over the colony. In Trench’s opinions, the most important task the colonial government had to do was to control, manage and expel these seditious excitations, which cumulated with the attempted deportation of Great Wall stars Shih Hui and Fu Ch’i. The resulting fear and censorship of seditions fostered a media environment in which discussing Hong Kong’s extraterritorial position or suggesting any desire for autonomy would be considered risky or unimaginable. Trench’s anxiety about the enervative power of media began in May 1967. On 12 May, in response to the police brutality in a riot that took place in Sun Po Kong, an industrial district in Kowloon, the CPC-controlled Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po sent a ‘serious warning to Trench’. It states: Trench is the principal troublemaker behind the racialist oppression of our compatriots in Hong Kong and Kowloon and the series of fascist atrocities! Trench has carried out in Hong Kong the war policy of United States Imperialism and has been the spearhead of anti-China activities. All the criminal responsibility for the series of bloody suppressions must be laid at his door. We wish severely to put to Trench the question: what do you think you are doing in daring today at the door of our great motherland on territory which has been occupied by the Chinese people over the ages to engage in such frenzied anti-China activities to carry out racialist persecution and to suppress bloodily our compatriots?46

The graphic language of this editorial is idiomatic of that employed by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, by which words are fetishised as acts of violence in the absence of any actual extraterritorial right exercisable by the CPC and the PRC. Such speech-acts, however, were taken so seriously by Trench that on the same day he downplayed the actual violence on the street and foregrounded the editorial as a threat to force Whitehall to ‘acquiesce in a situation comparable with what has recently developed in Macao’, that is, extraterritoriality. He furthers, ‘Unless more effective control can be exercised over the way in which Hong Kong workers express their grievances, there are dangers of a collision which could destroy Hong Kong as an economic entity and also have serious international repercussions.’47 In other words, Trench demanded his executive power to exercise

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 49

censorship, which he did by drafting the Public Order Ordinance and submitting it to Whitehall on 17 May. The Ordinance eventually became law on 15 November 1967, which has since then banned any ‘seditions’ (including photographic images) that might offend either the British or Chinese government.48 On 15 May 1967, Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Luo Guibo (Lo Kuei-po, 1907–95) of the Beijing government delivered a lengthier statement, which was published in People’s Daily.49 Upon reading Trench’s telegram, British Chargé d’affaires Donald Hopson (1915–74) warned Trench not to take any action against CPC’s ‘mouthpieces’.50 Likewise, Bunny Carter urged Trench to restrain from giving any further press statements that might escalate the Confrontation.51 Nevertheless, on 16 and 17 May, Trench once again expressed his agitation in response to the left-wing newspapers’ personal attack on him:52 A new note of militancy has been discernible in several labour disputes involving left-wing unions that have occurred since the Macau incident . . . A common feature of these disputes has been the unusually noisy and truculent behaviour of left-wing elements (the chanting of quotations from the works of Mao Tse-tung [Zedong], singing of revolutionary songs and the brandishing of copies of ‘quotations from Chairman Mao’) and the prominence given to them in the Hong Kong left-wing press. Such press comment has in general characterised the actions of the Hong Kong authorities as suppression of ‘patriotic workers and compatriots’, has referred in open or veiled terms to the parallel of Macau, and has blamed ‘US/ Chiang [Kai-shek, 1887–1975; leader of the ROC between 1928 and 1975] elements’ for stirring up the troubles.53

In this note, Trench fully considers the media – including chanting of Mao quotations, singing and dissemination of copies of the Red Book – and the remediation of these media by the left-wing presses as acts of militancy. For Trench, they could potentially incite workers by the sheer volume of their noises stimulating the listeners’ sensoria, as opposed to the political messages they conveyed. In another note he wrote to Brown, Trench attributed CPC’s use of these media to the ‘Chinese disinterest in the concept of the “law” ’. In this light, the actual transmission of violent energies through media instantiated the presence of the absence of the law in Hong Kong, and such absence was in itself a juridical power that turned the city into an extraterritorial space – as it once did in Macau.54 On 18 May, Trench reported that a delegation from the unions staged a protest in front of Government House, demanding to see him. Once again, he drew Brown’s attention to these protesters’ use of media: ‘After a period of chanting and singing, during which posters were fixed on the sentry box and outer gate of Government House, the delegation and its

50

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

accompanying crowd eventually withdrew still singing.’55 On 19 May, Trench reported: As expected the pressure today has again been on Government House. Throughout the day, starting at about 1000 hours until 1700 hours, with short break at lunch time, groups from a wide range of Left-wing organisations including publishing circles, bankers, trade unions and particularly schools, have demonstrated outside Government House. They formed up in the area of the Bank of China, marched in orderly, well-disciplined form up Garden Road to Government House where they chanted, sang the Thoughts of Mao and acted in an arrogant and noisy manner. Posters were again plastered on the walls and gates of Government House, but today they were more violent in nature, some exhorting the public to ‘beat up the British and foreigners’. The demonstrators then marched off again, back to the Central District area, still in orderly well-disciplined form, chanting and singing the while: they dispersed in the area of the Bank of China.56

Notice that Trench’s initial description of the protest is ‘orderly, welldisciplined’. Yet, when he starts depicting their chanting, he regards these protesters to be ‘arrogant and noisy’. Once they put up posters, Trench accuses them of being ‘violent’. In this sense, Trench’s agitation was aggravated not by any physical acts of violence, but by the power of the media to stimulate the senses. In another telegram he dispatched to Brown on the following day, Trench acknowledges that he was disturbed by noises of these protesters chanting, ‘Kill Trench!’57 Trench’s worries reached a new height on 22 May. In his report to Brown, Trench complains that the Bank of China had installed loudspeakers to broadcast anti-European slogans, including repeated calls to ‘Kill Trench!’ He therefore considered the most important actions to be taken were to: (1) arrest and deport leaders that disseminate seditions through media; (2) neutralise the Bank of China building and other union headquarters, where loudspeakers were installed to broadcast seditions; (3) take action against the Wen Wei Po and other left-wing newspapers under the Public Order Ordinance against seditions; and (4) ‘bring commando ship Bulwark on a visit to Hong Kong’.58 Three of these demands targeted the media based on Trench’s obsession with and fear of seditions, as though controlling the leftist speech-acts could immediately restore law and order, placate the actual violence that took place on the street, and pre-empt Hong Kong from being recognised as an extraterritorial space. Not only were these demands repeated during the rest of the month, they were also carried out between July and November 1967. When Trench learned that the Bank of China was under Chinese administration, Trench neutralised the building by installing even louder ‘European speakers’ to broadcast Cantonese and British rock music to drown these

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 51

speech-acts. During the rest of 1967 and throughout 1968, Trench sent the police everyday around the city not only to handle bomb threats and actual violence, but also to tear down seditious posters, confiscate loudspeakers and Red Books, raid presses, schools and publication houses – sites regarded by him as where the actual Confrontation took place.59 The circulation of pro-CPC newspapers dropped by 31.9 per cent from 349,500 in April 1967 to 238,000 in March 1968.60 Today, the Public Order Ordinance is still considered good law, under which any discussion of the 1967 Confrontation can still be regarded as seditious. As I mentioned earlier, such fear of seditious media motivated Trench to pick two film stars to be expelled as a diplomatic experiment. At the beginning of 1968, the NCNA demanded the unconditional release of all political detainees while refusing to issue exit visas to British diplomats in Beijing. On 9 March 1968, Trench confirmed that he would like to ‘deport’ two film stars, Shih Hui and Fu Ch’i, as a goodwill gesture. For Trench, the Chinese border control would refuse. It was because they considered Hong Kong part of Chinese territory; hence, the two film stars, who committed no crime under Chinese law, had the right to choose to stay and live there. In so doing, these stars would remain in Hong Kong, although a signal would be sent to Beijing that the colonial government had the intention to release all detainees in due course.61 This happened as planned on 15 March 1968. In a telegram sent on 16 March, Trench reports: The two film stars left the bridge at Lowu yesterday at 3.05 p.m. having waited some 31 hours. They returned of their own free will and boarded a Kowloon train at Lowu accompanied by China Travel Service representatives. They were removed from the train at Sheung Shui and placed in custody. They did not resist arrest and seemed quite happy to be back. In fact the girl had even taken the opportunity while on the train to remove all the Mao badges which had been presented to her by the Chinese border guards.62

In this incident, Shih Hui and Fu Ch’i, and the left-wing Hong Kong cinema they were supposed to represent, were ostracised to a precarious position. On the one hand, they were physically and symbolically expelled from colonial Hong Kong out of the colonial government’s fear of sedition and their anxiety about China’s claim of their extraterritorial right over Hong Kong. On the other hand, they were refused admittance into the Mainland, precisely because as extraterritorial lives, they were supposed to be under Chinese jurisdiction outside of China-proper. In this sense, Shih and Fu were reduced to bare lives caught between two sovereign authorities that occupied them by ostracising them. Her act of removing

52

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

all the Mao badges can be understood as one that extricated herself from politics once and for all, thus rendering these political powers purposeless. After their release, Shih and Fu immigrated to Canada, and they donated all their badges to film historian and collector Paul Fonoroff.

What is Hong Kong Cantonese Cinema? For film critics from 1966 to 1978, cinema and the critical debate on it were not merely speeches, but also acts that instantiated the presence of the absence of a political agency that they dared not name: a Hong Konger’s political agency outside of their precarious extraterritorial position. The difficulty of naming and articulating such agency, especially in the media, was precisely the heightened awareness of the cinema and media as potential instantiations of Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality and as potential sites where Hong Kong’s political autonomy – albeit an inchoate one – could be constituted. Yet, the Public Order Ordinance and the colonial government’s fear of seditions also created a media environment in which any search for Hong Kong subjectivity and individuality would be considered politically risky. Thus, in the following discourse, the Hong Kong film critics never name the actual question that they have in mind: What is Hong Kong cinema? Rather, this soul-searching question is carefully concealed under the question, ‘What is Chinese cinema?’ On 6 October 1967, the most influential newspaper on film, literary and cultural criticism of the time, the Zhongguo xuesheng zhoubao [Zunggwok hoksaang zaubou or Chinese Student Weekly] published an article written by film critic Kam Ping-hing titled ‘Zhongguo xindianying de qiwang’ [‘Zunggwok sandinjing dik keimong’ or My expectations on the new Chinese cinema]. The significance of this article toward the debate on the emergence of Hong Kong cinema can be easily overlooked by film historians today. At first glance, under censorship, the article simply offers some reflections on problems facing Chinese cinema at the time. However, a more careful reading would reveal to us a perturbation over Hong Kong’s territorial belonging – both geopolitically and culturally – which Kam tries to nuance and negotiate. To begin with, this article was published strategically between 1 October, the National Day of the PRC, and 10 October, the National Day of the ROC, which signals its attempt to negotiate its position between these two competing sovereign authorities. Kam argues: We often blame Chinese cinema’s backwardness on our nationals’ close-mindedness and their penchant for resisting and impeding changes. Yet, this merely explains part

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 53 of the phenomenon, not the whole. The self-aware era of Chinese cinema has long begun, and a group of people have been working earnestly for it.63

This opening paragraph responds to the leftists’ accusation that cultural workers who refused to take a side during the Confrontation were attached to their colonial status quo. However, Kam indicates that a group of filmmakers were aware of the backwardness of Chinese cinema, and such backwardness stemmed from many commercial filmmakers’ unawareness of their own responsibility: that their professional works actively defined Chinese cinema. Therefore, in the first half of his article, Kam criticises zhuanye dianying (zyunjip dinjing or professional cinema) for capitalising on the star system and formulaic narrational devices to guarantee profits. He then argues that the core of the problem lies in the film industry being organised as an apprentice system, which taught young practitioners by means of erru muran ( jijyu mukjim or immersing themselves in what they heard and saw), which effectively buried their benxing (bunsing or self-nature). To recover such self-nature, these young filmmakers had to sacrifice their monetary reward for the art of cinema. Yet, what does Kam mean by self-nature? In one register, Kam refers to these new filmmakers’ creativity, which should stem from their own individuality, subjectivity and autonomy. Here, Kam makes a strategic taxonomic switch. The young filmmakers to whom he refers were new ‘Hong Kong’ directors who showed their films in a screening organised by  magazine Juchang [Theatre Quarterly]. From this point on, Kam refers to these artists as Xianggang xin dianying gongzuozhe (Hoenggong san dinjing gungzokze or new Hong Kong film workers). In other words, creative individuation, subjectivisation and autonomisation could only be enabled by political individuation, subjectivisation and autonomisation: by fully engaging oneself in understanding and rethinking Hong Kong’s extraterritorial relationship with China.64 Kam’s article instigated a decade-long discussion on what Hong Kong cinema is in the Chinese Student Weekly and its successor, film magazine Da texie [Daai dakse or Close-up]. Chinese Student Weekly was first published in 1952 as an intellectual newspaper that covered a wide range of cultural topics. In 1960, a new column titled ‘Dianying quan’ [‘Dingjing hyun’ or Cinema sphere] appeared. Since then, its contributors included Kam, Lam Nin-tung (1944–90), Law Kar, Cheung Wai-hung, Lam Lei, Shek Kei and other figures who would become instrumental in the Hong Kong New Wave, professional film criticism and academic film studies. Launched by a group of students who were born or brought up in Hong

54

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Kong, the newspaper claims itself to be ‘established by Chinese students; operated by Chinese students’. Decades later, Cheung Wai-hung argued: The name Chinese Student Weekly demonstrates a self-awareness that identity is a learning process. It encompasses an imagined response and continuation of the idealism of the May-Fourth period [circa 1919–21]. Yet, one can also see it as a selfnomination given by the artistic and literary workers of Hong Kong. At first glance, such a nomination seems to be self-assertive. Upon a closer look, however, it is a premature act of naming that is caught between [two socio-political] phases: a lack of clarity of one’s actual identity between the past and the future. It is a projection of an active yet submissive present as a will of being.65

In other words, Hong Kong self-awareness was to be located between two understandings of China and Chineseness: one from the past and another in the future. The one from the past was inherited from the MayFourth movement, a historical moment at which intellectuals tried to define and configure a mode of modernity out of a cross-cultural discourse among European, Japanese and Soviet modernities and modernisms, as well as philosophical, literary and cultural interventions that stemmed from Chinese classical learnings and late-Ming intellectual cultures.66 Yet, the promise of constructing such a specific mode of modernity has been, ever since the late nineteenth century, interfered, obscured and revised by the discourse of colonialism. It was therefore always posited as an unfulfilled goal or desire, one that was always yet-to-be-attained. In this sense, the intellectuals and critics who wrote for the Chinese Student Weekly saw themselves as a group who could rehearse such perpetual failure to achieve Chinese modernity (and modernism) from a public sphere that was extraterritorial to the Chinese cultural territory proper. Kam’s call for a re-understanding of film practices in Hong Kong had two precursors in the Chinese Student Weekly. On 23 September 1966, Shek Kei complained in his article ‘Gangchan zuopai dianying ji qi xiao zichan jieji xing’ [‘Gongcaan zopaai dinjing kap kei siu zicaan gaaikap sing’ or The petit bourgeois sensibility in the Hong Kong-produced leftwing film] that the Hong Kong-produced left-wing Mandarin films had no direct stylistic and ideological continuity with the left-wing cinema in 1930s Shanghai. For Shek, in Hong Kong: The petit bourgeoisie is the foundation of a capitalist society. Its members have certain intellectual cultivation. They have a stable foothold in the society, and they have a certain connoisseurship regarding the arts, that is, they understand what it means by having a ‘taste of life.’ Therefore, what a petit bourgeois film represents is the harmonious surface of the quotidian, and it pays attention to describing those minute details in human affections, feelings, and emotions. Since a petit bourgeois is

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 55 socially observant, their films often make harmless fun of those cosmopolitan characters in the capitalist society. Yet, since they are satisfied by their status quo, their films never confront any deep-structural traumas. Hence, no matter how hard they try, their works always seem to be realistic, but at the same time highly unrealistic; they often critique an imaginary ‘feudal power’ that has ceased to exist since the end of the May-Fourth era.67

In other words, the problems with the left-wing Mandarin cinema are: (1) its focus on the superficial problems of social injustice experienced primarily by the petit bourgeoisie (for example, office clerks, intellectuals, or workers who have already achieved a certain level of class consciousness); (2) its displacement of problems generated from socio-economic relationships to the level of human affections and sufferings, with such an emphasis on humanity also lending these films an illusion of social reality; (3) its failure to locate the deep-structural socio-political trauma; and (4) its displacement of all social problems to an imaginary ‘feudal power’, which might have been true in the 1920s and 1930s, but had since then become an empty signifier. As I have pointed out and will demonstrate later, this problem is also visible in the left-wing Cantonese film. The significance of Shek’s observation is that the left-wing cinema produced in Hong Kong displaces problems of social injustice that affected the Hong Kong petit bourgeoisie in the 1960s to an imagined feudal China in the past. In so doing, these films direct the audience’s attention not to the actual social problems, but to a generalised and universalised understanding of human suffering – all from an extraterritorial position. In response to Shek’s argument, Ku Yee argues in his article ‘Songhuajiang shang de kusheng’ [‘Cungfaagong soeng dik huksing’ or Crying in Along the Sungari River, 18 August 1967] that films produced in Hong Kong are stylistically disconnected from their Shanghai counter­ parts in the 1930s and 1940s precisely because the former lack any understanding of human affections and sensations. For Ku: The roaring waves of political struggle swept away the foundation of Chinese cinema. As a result, the special political environment interrupted our tradition. Our misfortune is that almost all the excellent early filmmakers had left-wing tendency. They were all deceived by the political myth of communism. Therefore, their talent had been unconsciously buried by themselves in the red earth of authoritarianism. It had no chance to be conveyed to the free world overseas.68

Despite the fact that Shek and Ku came from two opposite political perspectives, they both foregrounded a historical, stylistic and ideological discontinuity between Chinese cinema produced during the Republican

56

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

period (1911–49) and the films produced in Hong Kong afterwards – oftentimes by the same group of directors. The common underlying assumption between them is that film critics and makers had the responsibility to rethink the relationship between the cinemas of Hong Kong and the larger national cinema. This discussion of Hong Kong cinema in relationship to Chinese ­culturo-linguistic and socio-political territories was eventually brought to the fore by Lam Nin-tung in two articles. Lam was one of the first film critics of his generation who turned himself into an academic scholar. After his graduation from New Asia College (now part of the Chinese University of Hong Kong), Lam worked as a screenwriter for Cathay from 1968 to 1971, and then as a producer for the Yangtze Film (HK) Ltd during 1971 and 1972. After that, he studied for his Dottorato di ricerca at the Università di Bologna in Art History. With his degree, he then taught at the Hong Kong Baptist College (now Hong Kong Baptist University) and devoted his research to Chinese aesthetics in literature and cinema. Lam’s first article was published on 10 October 1969, titled ‘You guoqing xiangqi de Hanyu dianying, fangyan dianying’ [‘Jau gwokhing soenghei dik Honjyu dinjing, fongjin dingjing’ or From national day to Chinese-language cinema, dialect cinema]. In this article, Lam argues that the term ‘Chinese cinema’ ignores the ethnic and juridico-political diversity of China. Meanwhile, the term Zhongwen dianying (Zungman dinjing or Chinese-language cinema) reduces a complex assemblage of artistic, cultural and socio-political practices and discourses to a linguistic matter. It also overlooks the distinction between yuyan (  jyujin or speeches), which are multi-regional, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural, and wenzi (manzi or written language), which was standardised and unified through socio-political interventions, in the Chinese concept of yuwen (  jyuman or language). Finally, the term guoyu dianying ( gwokjyu dinjing or national-language cinema) suggests that only Mandarin films can be qualified as such, thus ostracising regional-speech cinemas like the Hong Kong Cantonese films.69 Then, in 1978, he expanded this article as ‘Wushi niandai yueyu pian yanjiu zhong de jige wenti’ [‘Ngsap nindoi jyutjyu pin jingau zung dik geigo mantai’ or Several questions on the study of Cantonese cinema in  the 1950s], published in Close-up. ‘Several questions’ was written as an  introduction for the ‘Retrospective of Cantonese Cinema of the 1950s’  in the second edition of the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF). In his article, Lam argues that Hong Kong Cantonese cinema is an art form developed out of Hong Kong’s unique linguistic, historical and socio-political conditions, although such conditions were

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 57

c­onfigurative elements and ingredients that have constituted Chinese cinema as a whole. If we borrow a term from Madhyamaka (Middle Way) Buddhism, Lam proposes that Hong Kong Cantonese and Chinese cinemas are buyi buyi (neither the same nor different): they are art forms and aesthetic traditions individuated out of separate conditions (not the same), yet they are constituted out of a pool of cultural elements that have always been historically interdependent and interconnected (not different). In other words, Hong Kong Cantonese cinema has always assumed an extraterritorial status. For Lam, in order to understand this intricate relationship between Hong Kong Cantonese cinema and its Chinese counterpart, one must actively question the interpellative power of the guoyu (national language) to summon film spectators to the nation as a juridical agent. Lam opens his article by reminding his readers that Putonghua (common language) is an official language historically constructed upon the native dialect of Beijing. Yet, Putonghua is not equivalent to the Beijing dialect or the Han-Chinese language as a whole.70 He then argues, ‘Even though Cantonese cinema does not share the long creative history of dialect literature, its d ­ evelopment – especially in the 1950s – is best understood as a part, or in fact, a direct descendant, of the Xin wenxue yundong [New literary movement].’ Based on the works of 1940s literary critic Ching-wen (pseudonym of Chung Ching-wen, 1903–2002), Lam argues that contrary to the literary historians in the second half of the twentieth century, who considered the New literary movement as an attempt to standardise the written language in accordance with Peking Mandarin, most writers during the 1920s and 1930s transliterated their respective regional speeches into written words. He then cites examples of Cantonese writers including Fu Kung-mong (1911–77), Auyeung San (1908–2004) and Chan Chan-wan (1914–2002) as literati who renewed the Ming-Qing Cantonese literary tradition in the twentieth century.71 In other words, understanding what Hong Kong Cantonese cinema is requires an active rewriting of the history of Chinese cinema from the ‘national cinema’ model proposed by Cheng Jihua, Li Shaobai and Xing Zuwen in the Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi [History of the development of Chinese cinema, 1961], one of the first attempts after the Sino-Japanese War by Mainland historians to provide a grand narrative for the history of Chinese cinema (see introduction). Lam argues that the Film cleansing movement and KMT’s attempt to ban Cantonese cinema in the 1930s generated a spontaneous awareness that a vernacular modern medium of the Cantonese masses had to be consolidated in order to address the sociopolitical conditions and economic hardship of the Cantonese working

58

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

class. These spectators experienced not only colonialism (as opposed to Shanghai’s semicolonialism) and feudalism, but also the pressure of a Nanking-centric and Mandarin-centric mode of nationalism. Based on the argument of Mao Dun (pseudonym of Shen Yanbing, 1896–1981), for the filmmakers in the 1950s, Cantonese cinema not only spoke, but also actively constituted the Huanan dazhong yu (Waanaam daaizung jyu or Cantonese language of the masses).72 In other words, the Cantonese language constituted by these films is not one standardised by the literary elite; rather, it is a faithful record of the speech – together with its vocabulary, slangs, syntactical structure and traces of their regional variations – specific to the diverse body of labourers who settled down in Hong Kong between the 1930s and 1950s. Lam cites examples including Jiajia huhu [Gaagaa wuwu or Mutual Understanding, Chin Chien, 1954], In the Face of Demolition, Shihao fengbo [Saphou fungbo or Typhoon Signal No. 10, Lo Duen, 1959] and Huoku youlan [Fowat yaulaan or Father Is Back, Lee Tit, 1961]. Lam argues that these films resist the stylistic and ideological influences from Hollywood, represent the vernacular culture of the working class, inherit their thematic concerns from left-wing Shanghai cinema in the 1930s and, at the time, appealed to a working-class audience domestically and overseas.73 However, defining Hong Kong Cantonese cinema is not simply a ­linguistic matter. Lam laments that early film criticism from 1948 to 1950 focused primarily on individual films, thus failing to offer judgement based on the historical context in which those films were made. These critical essays can be found in newspaper columns including ‘Wutai yu yinmu’ [‘Moutoi jyu nganmok’ or Stage and screen] in the Huashang bao [Waasoeng bou or The Chinese business journal], ‘Yingju zhoukan’ [‘Jingkek zauhon’ or Film and drama weekly] in the Wen Wei Po, ‘Yingju’  [‘Jingkek’ or Film and drama] in the Ta Kung Pao, and ‘Yingju zhendi’ [‘Jingkek zandei’ or Film and drama base] in the Xingqi bao [Singkei bou or The weekly]. In the Chinese Student Weekly, Lam argues, writers including himself were heavily influenced by Cahiers du cinéma and paid attention only to individual films’ mise en scène and directorial authorship.74 Auteurism, for Lam, falls short of providing a full picture of what Hong Kong Cantonese cinema is, as such a methodology does not take into account the cinema’s overall ‘ideological, aesthetic, creative, productive, and industrial developments’. In addition, formal analysis often persuades both the critics and their readers to regard Hong Kong Cantonese cinema as stylistically inferior, while overlooking other specificities that make these films appealing to their audience. Lam raises two examples:

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 59 We can use Xilu Xiang [Sailou Coeng; The Kid, Fung Fung, 1950] and Father is Back as two examples to show the inadequacy of the auteur theory in expounding the creative value of the Cantonese art of filmmaking. The characteristics of The Kid and Father is Back, like those of the Cantonese films produced in the 1950s, are the results of a collective – instead of individual – creative effort. The camerawork of The Kid is simplistic and poorly designed. [At first glance,] there is nothing special about it. Yet, for some reasons, we are deeply affected by the film in our viewing experience. The film has several special features as a piece of drama and artistic expression: its image is clear, its plot points are lucid, and its narrational flow is fluid. These features allow the spectators to sense intimacy. They also make those concrete and lifelike characters realistic and outstanding. The director of Father is Back Lee Tit can be considered the most stylistically consistent auteur in Cantonese cinema. He surpasses many of his peers in his design and management of transitional scenes, and his allegorical use of camerawork. Nevertheless, without the art of his cinematographer Dong Keyi [1906–73], Lee could never have produced those masterpieces that would successfully combine realism and romanticism together! Collaborative creation is an excellent tradition of Cantonese cinema. Father is Back exemplifies the reason behind such [artistic success]: the more talented artists are willing to participate in the creation of a Cantonese film, the more excellent the film will be. The failure of Leiyu [Leoijyu or Thunderstorm, Ng Wui, 1957] proves that a good original story [from a modern literary classic] cannot guarantee a film’s success.75

To further define the stylistic specificities of Hong Kong Cantonese cinema, Lam proposes his most influential observation, an idea he would later call jingyou ( gengjau, mirroring-drifting or mirroring-journeying). During his lifetime, Lam was highly influenced by Beijing-based art historian and aesthete Zong Baihua (1897–1986) and devoted a great deal of effort to studying the aesthetics of the Six dynasties (220 or 222–589).76 During this period, aesthetes considered painting, poetry and music as media that could draw the beholder into a jing (literally a milieu, but more properly understood, according to Yogācāra Buddhism, a senseperception or an image). Being posited in such a milieu, the beholder is free to you (drift or journey) in order to guan (observe) the interdependent relationship between the beholder (subject) and the milieu (object), and between the various objects (including the beholder themself ) within the milieu. Since the milieu is the sense-perception of the beholder, the art work is best understood as a mirror that reflects the xin (mind or consciousness) of the beholder.77 In ‘Several Questions’, Lam argues that the Hong Kong Cantonese filmmakers, based on the same principles, prefer the use of the long shot and the medium long shot for political purposes: First, many of these films use the long shot to show how objective matters and events are, in principle, dialectically in conflict with each other. By using the long shot and

60

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

the medium long shot, these films can make tangible the two poles of a dialectical relationship. In this sense, the long shot is especially effective in bringing out the conflicts and contestations between social relations that are backward and feudal on the one hand, and those that are ideologically progressive and democratic on the other . . . In addition, the long shot allows the audience to witness the process of the dialectical struggle. It also shows the transformation and mutual substitution between these two poles, and the process of passing from one dialectical phase to another. These films can therefore educate the audience and help move forward the actual dialectical process of our society. Moreover, the long shot and the medium long shot can make palpable the power of a collective and the communal spirit of mutual care and help. The use of the long shot and the medium long shot in Cantonese cinema in the 1950s is completely different from the way it is used in [classical] Hollywood cinema. Unlike its Hollywood counterpart, the long shot in the Cantonese film does not provide an overall [narrative and spatio-temporal] direction to the rest of a film segment. In other words, it does not function in a segment as an establish[ing] shot. Instead, it is used as a means to introduce the main idea of the entire film. Such a way of constructing the diegesis emphatically and expressively makes palpable the living reality of the masses, both on the collective and individual levels.78

‘Several Questions’ is one of the most substantial, systematic and engaging discussions on the problems of defining, classifying and studying Hong  Kong Cantonese cinema in the 1950s. It did not, however, emerge out of a political void. Rather, it is best understood as a result of a decade-long attempt by Hong Kong film critics to name, label, define and investigate Hong Kong cinema as a structure of differences from its Chinese counterpart. Such an effort, I argue, was motivated by a spontaneous awareness of Hong Kong’s extraterritorial position, which was initiated by an awareness of the power of the media to instantiate sovereign authorities that sought to exercise power over Hong Kong by ostracising its political lives from their respective juridical territories.

In the Face of Demolition In ‘Several Questions’, Lam pays special attention to the film In the Face of Demolition, which I shall use to understand further what he means by a prototypical Hong Kong Cantonese film. In the Face of Demolition is based on a Cantonese-language novel written by Mong Wan (pseudonym of Cheung Man-bing, 1910–59), Renhai leihen [ Janhoi leoihan or Traces of tears in a human sea], serialised in the Hong Kong newspaper Tai Chung Pou in the 1930s. In fact, director Lee Tit adapted the novel as a film under the same title in 1940. The original novel is about young writer Chow Ping moving into a living unit in a tenement building in Lan Kwai Fong, a poor alley in Central (known today as the hippest bar district in

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 61

the city), and witnesses how his housemates struggle with their lives.79 The 1953 film merely borrows the novel’s settings, plot elements and character types, and migrates them to post-war Hong Kong. In the Face of Demolition centres on Law Ming (Cheung Ying), a young teacher who moves into an old building in Fai Fu Alley (literally, an alley where everybody gets rich quickly). Law Ming falls in love with one of his housemates, Pak Ying (Tsi Lo-lin, 1924–2015), a dance hostess, but he soon loses his job. Pak Ying introduces Law Ming to a man who claims to be a newspaper editor, yet he turns out to be an impostor. Angered by Pak Ying and frustrated by life, Law Ming asks his uncle, the landlord of his building, to give him a job as a rent collector. Nonetheless, once Law Ming assumes his position, his uncle presses him to collect all the rent within three days, because the building turns out to be due for demolition. Not being able to tell his housemates about this, Law Ming pressures his  housemates to pay their rent as though he were some greedy and abusive figure. In order to pay his rent, poor housemate Tam Yi Suk (Wong Cho-shan) sells his blood. When the doctor refuses to take more of his blood, Yi Suk takes up a job as a day labourer and breaks his back. On a stormy evening, Yi Suk passes away. While all the housemates are worrying about getting money for his funeral, the wife of Law Ming’s best housemate Leung Wai (Ng Cho-fan) suffers from obstructed labour and must go to the hospital. Law Ming goes to his uncle, demands he repair the building, quits his job and asks for his last month’s pay. He then runs to the hospital to give his salary to Wai. Not only that, since his blood type matches Mrs Leung’s, Law Ming donates his blood to save her. Eventually, Park Ying forgives Law and the film ends with the housemates promising that they will always help one another: ‘All for One; One for All!’ As 1950s film critic Kong Tong points out, the film is by no means driven by the want and obstacles of Law Ming alone. Law seems to lack any want in life besides having a passing fancy in the first half of the film to become a writer. His aimlessness in life is matched with his temperamental manner (as Ying points out, he is like a thermometer: ‘warm and passionate when everything goes well, and cold and mean when things go against his will’) and his penchant to ‘save face’, a negative stereotype of a middle-class intellectual. In this sense, Kong Tong argues that the romance between Law Ming and Pak Ying is a highly developed sub-plot that is put there by the screenwriter to satisfy the increasing demand from the audience for a Hollywood-styled narrative development.80 The syuzhet (plot) of In the Face of Demolition is highly unusual from the classical Hollywood perspective. Unlike a classical Hollywood film, in

62

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

which the opening sequence is about the disturbance of a status quo, In the Face of Demolition reverses this process by presenting a status quo that has already been disturbed. In fact, this opening sequence, lasting as long as fourteen minutes of screen time, condenses and rehearses the overall narrative by allowing the viewers to see how all the key characters gradually come together as a collective. In addition, as Lam argues, the organisation of the narrative’s devices, especially its camerawork and editing, is based on the principle of social dialectics with: (1) the extensive use of the long shot and the medium long shot to preserve the integrity of the dramatic space; and (2) the use of deep-focus composition to create dramatic tension between characters within a unified dramatic space.81 The opening sequence condenses a constellation of signs that can  be employed as a user manual for reading the rest of the film.82 The camera first tilts down from the sky to a plaque that reads ‘Fai Fu Alley’. It then continues to tilt down until it shows an arch opening onto the housing complex. The plaque ‘Fai Fu Alley’ condenses the problem that disturbs the status quo of the house: the principle of ‘everyone getting rich quickly’  under capitalism. Later in the film, Law Ming and Wai both describe Fai Fu Alley as a rotten house that leaks everywhere and say that someone may get killed if the landlord fails to repair it. The landlord ignores the problem, as the building is due for demolition. Yet, before he knocks it down, the building collapses in a typhoon and kills Manager Wong (Lo Duen), a small-time moneylender who used to be employed in a big trading company. The plaque Fai Fu Alley therefore sets up a metonym between the building and the capitalist society as a whole – or even more specifically, Hong Kong. Nonetheless, when the building finally collapses, it kills neither the working-class collective who manage to leave the house in time, nor the landlord who chooses to ignore the problem. Rather, it kills Manager Wong, an opportunist who is both a victim and an exploiter under the capitalist system. If we push this idea further, the Cantonese title Ngailou cheonhiu, literally, the dawn of spring in a condemned building, puts the emphasis on the possibility of retaining, renewing and overcoming the condemned socio-political positions, rather than taking an active agency to change it. A set of dialectical relationships is then established through camera­ work  and editing. When the camera continues to tilt down, a rickshaw comes into the frame from the right and enters the arch. The camera dollies slowly to the right, away from the arch; it then cuts to a medium long shot of the rickshaw stopping in front of a building. Law Ming gets off the rickshaw and instructs the driver to take his belongings up to his new place. As Law Ming knocks on the door of the flat, which is

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 63 located on the second floor, the film cuts to a long shot inside, and we see Manager Wong walking down the stairs from the third floor to open the door for him. As Law Ming enters, he steps on Wong’s toes, thus suggesting that the arrival of Law Ming will stir up a series of problems that are going to ‘step on Manager Wong’s toes’. From this point on, the film begins to convey the story by means of montage. The entire opening segment consists of 108 shots that first compartmentalise individual characters in their own individuated spaces, and then editing juxtaposes these discrete spaces against one another. For instance, when Law Ming walks up the stairs, the film alternates between medium shots and medium close-ups of Law Ming and Manager Wong. Law Ming is often shot from a high angle, and Wong is often seen from a low angle, thus foregrounding the sense of superiority that Manager Wong has over Law. Meanwhile, Wong is rarely seen together in the same shot as Law. The only exception is a low-angle shot of Wong flirting with his cousin Yuk Fong (Mui Yee, 1923–66) in the foreground as they stand at the bottom of the staircase, while Law stands in the background on the top of the staircase paying the rickshaw driver, which verticalises the dialectical relationship between Law Ming and Wong by juxtaposing them in the same shot (see Figure 1.1). Besides the dialectics between Law Ming and Manager Wong, this opening sequence also establishes a dialectic between Law Ming and Yuk Fong. As Law Ming gets to the top of the stairs, he accidentally kicks over the shrine of the mungwun (door-keeping god). When Yuk Fong finds out, she warns Law Ming that he is going to have a stomach ache that evening as a divine punishment. In this sense, Law Ming as an educated man is juxtaposed against Yuk Fong, a new immigrant from the hoenghaa (hometown), who is still bound by feudalistic superstitions. Eventually, Fong will be raped by her cousin-in-law and become his concubine: a victim of feudalism. Nonetheless, far from being a progressive educator, Law Ming is soon revealed to be an intruder. After Law Ming first meets Yuk Fong, he asks her to look for the rent contractor Sam Ku (Lee Yuet-ching, d. 1997). The film cuts to the kitchen, where Sam Ku is doing laundry. Up until this point, there is no establishing shot giving the viewers a sense of the overall topography of the building. Rather, the film relies on the spectator’s familiarity with the generic layout of a tenement building, either through their lived experience or through other films belonging to the same genre. After a brief introduction to Sam Ku’s husband Pat Sin (Ko Lo-chuen, 1909–88), who performs kung fu with his frighteningly loud voice (a comic relief), the film cuts to the room of Yi Suk, where Sam Ku asks him

64

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Figure 1.1  Verticalisation of the social dialectics in In the Face of Demolition.

and his family to move in order to vacate the space for Law Ming. Yi Suk is co-operative, although Sam Ku is impatient. In this sub-segment, the film alternates between a recurring three-quarter shot of the entire room with Yi Suk and his family, and medium shots to medium close-ups of Sam Ku, thus foregrounding the dialectical relationship between the rent contractor and the tenants by separating them into two spaces. When Yi Suk eventually moves out of the room, he meets Law Ming in a claustrophobic corridor. Here, in a long shot, Law apologises for making Yi Suk move. Yi Suk then blames the problem on money – an issue that will recur in Yi Suk’s personal trajectory. From this point on, the film frames characters who occupy contesting social positions in the same shot, and the dialectical relationships among them are conveyed through staging. Strategically, this technique allows the film to pack an increasing number of characters into the same frame as they begin to develop a sense of in-group loyalty. As this sub-segment continues, Yi Suk and his family, Sam Ku and Pat Sin gather together around the staircase as Yi Suk begs Sam Ku to rent them the space under the staircase, where they can set up a bed. This space, however, has been occupied by Manager Wong for Yuk Fong. Yuk Fong joins the group and agrees to offer that space to Yi Suk.

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 65 The wife of Manager Wong (Lai Cheuk-cheuk, 1905–90) then appears and scolds Yuk Fong for giving up her bed. Here, the film alternates between the group and Mrs. Wong, thus allowing the viewers to sense that an opposition has now developed between the moneylender’s wife and the rest of the tenants. As the argument escalates, Wai returns home from work and joins the rest of the group. Meanwhile, Pak Ying also appears and helps negotiate. The tenants convince Sam Ku to rent the space to Yi Suk, although Yi Suk reveals to Wai that he does not have a bed anymore. Eventually, Law Ming steps up, joins the group and offers his bed for Yi Suk and his family. The entire segment eventually ends with a long shot of the whole group celebrating their solidarity with the film’s slogan: Janjan waingo; Ngowai janjan (All for One; One for All) (see Figure 1.2). After this moment, Wai introduces Law Ming to all the housemates. However, a special emphasis is given to the relationship between Wai and Law Ming, and then between Law Ming and Pak Ying. Wai originally takes Law Ming as a bully. However, when Law Ming agrees to offer his bed to Yi Suk, Wai becomes deferential. In a series of shot/reverse

Figure 1.2  Development of in-group solidarity through gradually packing dialectically conflicting characters into a single long shot.

66

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

shots, Wai asks Law his name. Out of respect, Law asks Wai to introduce himself first. Wai tells Law Ming his name, and calls himself a taxi driver, thus foregrounding his social class as a unionised worker. Law Ming then introduces himself as a teacher, which inspires Wai’s admiration. Later, when Wai introduces Law Ming to Pak Ying, Wai tries to describe the character ‘Ying’ to Law Ming. However, while he remembers ‘Pak’ as in ‘white’, he cannot remember how to write ‘Ying’. When Law Ming steps in by saying, ‘Ying as in crystal,’ Wai utters, ‘Please shake hands, you intellectuals.’ The weighted introduction between Law Ming and Pak Ying is important not only because their romantic sub-plot will be the first plot-line to be developed, but also because they are the two educated ones that stand out from the rest of the tenants. In fact, as Wai later criticises repeatedly in the film, Law Ming and Pak Ying’s problem is their pride, that they want to ‘save face’. In some ways, the film is about how the solidarity and in-group loyalty of the tenants eventually re-educate Law, and to a lesser extent Pak Ying, to become co-operative members of the masses. To a certain degree, In the Face of Demolition is an ensemble piece interwoven by the trajectories (or sub-plots) of several key characters. Most spectators would come out of the film not necessarily remembering a set of ‘stories’. Rather, they would remember a set of characters  – or ­stereotypes – whom they may recognise among their fellow petit urbanites, and who make decisions with moral characters who they may remember, emulate or detest. Besides Law Ming, the film features Wai prominently as a down-to-earth taxi driver who always makes quick, effective and morally fair decisions in times of crisis and hardship. In the entire film, Wai does not have a goal, and he overcomes his difficulties with hard work.  For example, when he loses his job, he becomes a day labourer; when he needs money for his wife, he goes out and looks for it from his friends. He serves as a moral compass for the entire household. Yi Suk is almost kicked out of the house at the beginning because he fails to pay rent. Twice in the film, he declares that he will persevere in order to make money, pay his debts and bring up his children properly. In this sense, he does have an objective, but not in the form of a personal determination. Rather, he is driven to take action because of the social inequity that entraps him. None of the rest of the characters – Manager Wong and his wife who only care about money; Yuk Fong, the kind-hearted cousin-inlaw of Wong who is raped by Wong; and Sam Ku, who is typical of a rent contractor who qishan pa’e (heisin paa’ngok or bullies the kind and fears the bigger bullies) – has what classical Hollywood cinema would call an individual goal.

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 67

However, without any goal or objective, the film still works upon what Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) would call narrative retardation – the deferral and displacement of the key narrative goal.83 The narrative question is not how these key characters achieve or fail to achieve their individual objectives. Rather, one is drawn to follow the narrative steps in order to find out what it takes for these housemates to realise that they have a collective goal. If a Bildungsroman is about a girl or boy being educated through facts of life into a self-made bourgeois individual, In the Face of Demolition is about a group of individuals, who are already weathered by the hardship of life, re-educating themselves as a community who can persevere and grow under capitalism. In short, these individuals have already failed to perform, that is, to return home to join the revolution or to enact social reforms that can fundamentally change the society. However, by performing and rehearsing their individual failures, the spectators begin to develop a sense of affinity with these individuals and achieve a form of in-group loyalty with these marginalised classes.

Hong Kong Cantonese Cinema and its Spontaneous Extraterritorial Awareness What is at stake in In the Face of Demolition is, I argue, extraterritoriality as a spontaneous awareness. In a sense, this film performs the failure of the left-wing intellectuals to perform in a colonial space where they had no active socio-political agency. It also performs their collective failure to consider returning home, where they can reconstruct a national space. In other words, they were trapped in their extraterritorial position. In the Face of Demolition offers a narrative in which intellectuals are re-educated and reintegrated into the masses, thus offering the spectators a second chance to rehearse the possibility of having a political agency to activate social changes. The film lays out the dialectical relationships among workers, intellectuals and opportunists who are all victims of capitalism. These failed figures are dialectically juxtaposed in the film through camerawork and editing, yet the film never offers any imaginary resolution to their problems besides generating a sense of in-group loyalty and mutual dependency among them. Their problems are displaced into the abstract yet affectively appealing slogan, ‘All for One; One for All!’ In a sense, this memorable slogan is the emblem of the left-wing intellectuals’ collective failure. However, by performing such failure and rehearsing their collective trauma, the Hong Kong Cantonese cinema keeps alive a social ideal that was rapidly dwindling in post-war Hong Kong.

68

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Equally important is the fact that the critical debate on the definition of Hong Kong cinema was also driven by the same sense of spontaneous extraterritorial awareness: that Hong Kong cinema occupied a position that was interdependently related to Chinese cinema, yet it had been historically ostracised, linguistically marginalised and artistically looked down upon by the larger discourse, practice and imagination of Chinese national cinema. Such an awareness was generated by both the long history of Hong Kong Cantonese cinema’s precarious relationship with its Shanghai counterpart, its own extraterritorial position during the Cold War era, and the street fights during the Confrontation from 1966 to 1968. Yet, the perturbation of naming, articulating and acknowledging such an extraterritorial position or initiating a clean break from Chinese cinema once and for all, was largely informed by the awareness that cinema and media had been highly politicised as an instantiation of the presence of the absence of competing sovereign authorities. It was a power so fearful that any insinuations of Hong Kong’s extraterritorial status – or autonomy – would be considered seditious. Lam’s ambitious attempt to conceptualise Hong Kong Cantonese cinema, nevertheless, was met with some opposition. In ‘Yueyu pian: Ganxiang, qiwang’ [‘Jyutjyu pin: Gamsoeng, keimong’ or Cantonese cinema: Thoughts and expectations, 1978], Law Kar summarises a roundtable discussion in the HKIFF retrospective. Wong Kai-chi from the Chinese University of Hong Kong argues that the Hong Kong Cantonese film tries to address the ‘sufferings and afflictions of the urban masses of Hong Kong and the conflicts between various social and economic conditions of the time’. However, it does so not by ‘describing, engraving, reflecting, and critiquing these plights and contestations in depth’. Rather, it simply pleases the working-class audience by offering imaginary resolutions to their problems. Meanwhile, for Lee Ming-yuk from the Hong Kong Polytechnic (now Hong Kong Polytechnic University), the Hong Kong Cantonese film negotiates the conflicting affects and actual problems of those refugees who settled down in Hong Kong in the 1950s. These viewers were torn between feudalistic values from the past on the one hand, and harsh economic conditions and inharmonious human and social relationships during Hong Kong’s transition from a semi-urbanised community to a fully industrialised society on the other.84 Yet, Law agrees with Shek Kei’s argument that Cantonese cinema ‘was fundamentally a regional cinema. It was never inspired by real artists and creative leaders. It was never a self-conscious art. Rather, it was initiated out of a necessity sensed by a group of film professionals, as in many kinds of folk art.’85 For Law:

­

what is ho ng ko ng cine m a ? 69 As a folk art, Cantonese cinema can be understood as a collaborative creation that does not necessarily have any self-consciousness. Many folk arts emerged in relatively coarse and incomplete forms. However, since they emerged out of the common people and their daily life, they appealed to the general masses. However, after a process of historical transformations and artificial changes, these original forms became increasingly polished, personalised, and self-conscious. They became greater and more standalone works of art.86

For Law, Lam’s effort of deducing a classical Cantonese narrational system out of his notion of mirroring-drifting risks defining Hong Kong cinema ontologically. It does so by assuming that Hong Kong Cantonese filmmakers were fully aware of their socio-political agency, and that the films also assume their own individuality and subjectivity by embodying a well-defined consciousness. Law therefore argues that Hong Kong Cantonese cinema is always in the process of being individuated and subjectivised, and it does so when a group of filmmakers craft their films in accordance with the mutually contesting affects of their audiences under their specific socio-political conditions. In other words, Law proposes a more ontogenetic approach to understanding Hong Kong cinema. In the end, Law Kar hopes to see a new process of becoming in the form of a New Wave: Hong Kong cinema today is not completely detached from Cantonese cinema in the 1950s. In the past, the audience liked films that conveyed a sense of life and reality, but so do the audience today. In the past, the Union Film Enterprise emerged out of the Cantonese filmmakers’ frustration of the negative atmosphere of the film industry. Today, new experimentations have emerged because a new generation of filmmakers and television directors are dissatisfied by the formulaic entertainment and ossified production system, and some of them have succeeded. Recent works on television have in fact inherited the tradition of Cantonese cinema, as well as some of their cast and crew members. Not only that, they have developed their heritage further in order to stimulate and challenge local cinema. Their potential is unlimited. Personally, I am optimistic. I believe that Hong Kong filmmakers in the future will choose to inherit the excellent tradition of Cantonese cinema in the 1950s and the positive influences from foreign cinemas in order to promote and transform Hong Kong cinema, and bring it to a new apex.87

70

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

C HA PT E R 2

Breaking the Wave

Locating one’s individuality, subjectivity and autonomy under the pressure of two competing sovereign authorities and culturo-linguistic forces was not an easy task for any young Hong Kong filmmakers. It was even harder for women artists, cinematic spectators and televisual viewers to find their own voices. Filmmaker and critic Shu Kei, in a conversation with film scholar Timmy Chen and me, pointed out that women filmmakers played a crucial role in driving forward the New Wave as an experimental movement. Yet, with the exception of Ann Hui, most of these filmmakers did not survive the commercial filmmaking system in the 1980s. For Shu Kei, ‘the Hong Kong film industry has always been dominated by heterosexual men who have little patience with women. Ann Hui survived because she acted like a “man” and inspired her crew to respect her as one.’1 According to Judith Butler, gender difference is not a biological matter. One might argue that anatomical difference is biological. But even then, anatomical difference is still articulated in language, which is always ideologically coded. For Butler, gender is a set of social codes inscribed upon our bodies, which exercise a power to determine the ways we perform, define and understand our genders and sexualities. These codes actively write and rewrite our processes of individuation, subjectivisation and autonomisation. Moreover, the process of gendering territorialises social spaces and power relationships.2 If women have been socio-politically and historically gendered (codified) as others who must speak in the heteronormative language authorised by men, female authorship is always extraterritorial. On the one hand, a woman stands inside the heteronormative language and cannot be conceived otherwise. On the other hand, she speaks through such a language only as the other, as someone who is banished outside its definition of normativity. If we simply look at the number of women filmmakers involved in the New Wave, we might have the impression that the Hong Kong film and

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 71

television industries at the time were a haven of equal opportunity. These women included directors Tang Shu-hsuen, Josephine Siao, Rachel Zen and Ann Hui; television producers Cheung Man-yee and Selina Liang (Chow); film producer Hsia Moon (1933–2016); and screenwriters Joyce Chan, Ivy Ho, Lilian Li and critic Wong Ain-ling (d. 2018). However, having the opportunities to make films and television programmes or discuss them intellectually did not mean that these cultural workers were automatically enabled to speak as women. It was because the cinematic and televisual ‘languages’ (langages) have been historically configured to enable the spectator to sense and perceive as an idealised European male subject.3 Today, we accept that such languages are historically and sociopolitically conditioned and can therefore be changed. In the 1960s and 1970s, filmmakers and critics regarded them as overdetermining factors that made it nearly impossible for women to speak. In this chapter, I ask the question: Can women filmmakers, cinematic spectators and televisual viewers speak from their doubly – socio-politically and gendered – extraterritorialised position?4 I address this question by re-historicising the theoretical discourse and film practice of the first – or Li Cheuk-to might say, only – phase (1968–78) of the Hong Kong New Wave from the perspectives of women filmmakers and critics.5 As Mary Wong argues, this phase was characterised by the emergence of women filmmakers and critics, who either made independent films in ciné clubs or worked on television. In response to a growing audience of educated middle-class women who demanded their voices be represented, these women artists were attracted to Euro-American modernist approaches to the cinema and film criticism.6 Here, I discuss three different ways by which women speak through the cinema and television as authors, all aiming to establish what Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75) would call a free indirect discourse: a cinematic speech (parole) articulated intersubjectively among the artist, the actor/ character and the spectator/viewer, thus putting into question the classical Hollywood paradigm, which was considered authorised by men.7 For independent filmmaker Tang Shu-hsuen and her collaborators, world-renowned Indian cinematographer Subrata Mitra (1930–2001) and Taiwanese ­cinematographer Chi Ho Che, through unlearning EuroAmerican aesthetics and relearning medieval Chinese ones from the perspective of modern women, a cinema specific to the extraterritorial position of a Hong Kong female spectator can be fostered. For screenwriter Joyce Chan and her collaborator director Patrick Tam, a free indirect discourse can only be achieved when the addresser–message–addressee mode of communication in commercial television is actively challenged, and when the

72

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

horror of consumerist feminism, practised under Hong Kong’s extraterritorial conditions, is made sensible to the viewers. Finally, for director Ann Hui and screenwriters Shu Kei and Wong Chi, the classical Hollywood paradigm can be reconfigured to enable desubjectivised and abjectivised gay male characters to negotiate their traumas and desires in terms that are understandable by heterosexual and heteronormative viewers.

Cinematic Interlocution and Free Indirect Discourse Who can speak in the cinema? In European film theory between the 1950s and the 1970s, this question was part of the discourse on authorship. For example, industrially, who (for example, producers, directors, screen­ writers or cinematographers) authorises a film to be made and under whose names is a film crafted?8 Creatively, is the director not part of the larger socio-political, economic, cultural and industrial fabric, a text that is authored by multiple agencies?9 In reception, should we not consider the spectators as ‘writers’, who, based on their own readings, construct their individual narratives?10 To complicate matters, studio filmmaking in the 1950s and 1960s, in Hong Kong, Taiwan and elsewhere, employed to different degrees a narrational paradigm from Hollywood, which often structured a dramatic action as one being driven by an individual (often male) hero in order to fulfil their property right and romantic interest. In other words, studio films have been ideologically authorised by an American sense of male individuality and subjectivity.11 In Shanghai Marxist film theory from the 1930s and in European film theory from the 1960s and 1970s, a filmic text is often considered an interlocution, that is, a text spoken through a mediator who speaks for and from an ideological authority, which guarantees that capitalist values, liberal individualism and heterosexual male desire are promulgated.12 In the 1930s, writer and critic Lu Xun (pseudonym of Zhou Shuren, 1881–1936) argued that Hollywood films and commercial Shanghai films made with the same narrational paradigm put on display the material and sexual pleasures that the colonised male spectators in Shanghai were supposed to enjoy. These spectators, however, did not identify themselves with the virile male protagonists on screen. Rather, they enjoyed watching these cinematic heroes flaunting their pleasures in front of them, thus compelling them to masochistically revel in their own inability to access these pleasures because of their status of being colonised – that is, to enjoy their own impotence.13 In other words, cinematic interlocution implies that those who are ­represented on screen do not speak in their own voices. Rather, they speak

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 73

through someone who possesses socio-political power. Meanwhile, the interlocutor speaks in a way that would persuade the spectators to enjoy their position of being disempowered. For Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, educated artists and intellectuals occupy a position that further complicates this dynamic. Based on the writing of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), Spivak calls this group of cultural workers subalterns. On the one hand, they are from the disempowered group, and are therefore expected to represent them. On the other, in the eyes of the coloniser, these subalterns are supposed to re-present the colonised group. The subalterns are therefore seen as either speaking for or speaking from the group they are supposed to represent or re-present, but neither they nor the represented/represented can speak in their own right.14 For example, when an educated woman makes a film that represents women who occupy a disempowered position, this would bring to the fore two precarious questions: (1) Can this educated woman speak as an individuated subject? (2) Can the disempowered woman whom the director seeks to represent or re-present speak in the image? In sum, the subaltern position is one that is deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised, a position extraterritorial to both the coloniser and the colonised. Heterosexual male directors and scholars do not always find it necessary to ask these questions, as heterosexual men, even when they occupy a subaltern position, are often acculturated to perform their individuality, subjectivity and autonomy.15 Therefore, as Cheuk Pak Tong argues, under the influence of the European and Japanese new waves and European magazines and journals such as Cahiers du cinéma and Screen, the Hong Kong New Wave critics and filmmakers subscribed to the auteur theory, with the underlying assumption that the authorial position of the (heterosexual male) director was unquestionable.16 In the critical writings published in the Chinese Student Weekly, Close-up and Huoniao diba [Foniyu daibaat or Phoenix no. 8; a predecessor of Close-up], male directors including Alex Cheung, Allen Fong, Yim Ho, Johnny Mak, Tsui Hark and John Woo were considered u ­ n-­problematically as selfcontained auteurs.17 As Shu Kei and Tony Rayns argue in Close-up, many of these heterosexual male directors claimed to expose the problems that plague the disempowered social groups. Nevertheless, they demonstrated no understanding of the deep-structural obstacles that had barred these social groups from speaking in the cinema. They were also blind to their own reliance on narrational techniques that reduced the working class and women to spectacles for their heterosexual male bourgeois viewers.18 In ‘Lun dianying shang de xinchaopai’ [‘Leon dinjing soeng dik sanciu paai’ or On the cinematic new wave, Chinese Student Weekly, 1962], film

74

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

critic Yu Kwai argues that in ‘traditional cinema’ the narrative is configured as a riddle, a problem that requires the act of narrativisation itself to come up with an imaginary resolution.19 Then, in the cinematic experience, the film alternates between explicating the riddle to the spectators and listening to such explication with them. For example, a classical Hollywood film is often framed within the point of view of an implicit narrator/observer. This is done so by first starting a film – and every scene or sequence within the film – with an establishing shot that embodies the perspective of an omniscient narrator/observer. The film then gradually reduces the distance between the camera and the characters in order to engage the (idealised) spectator in the dramatic action. At the height of each sequence, the film uses a series of shots/reverse shots to cut between two characters in a conversation, so that the spectator would alternate their anchor of identification between the speaker and the listener.20 By the end of the 1960s, Christian Metz (1931–93) called such a process ‘secondary identification’, that is, an identification with a single male protagonist as someone who possesses his imaginary individuality, subjectivity and agency.21 Yet, implicit in this shot/reverse-shot structure is the spectator’s own position as an observer, who identifies, first and foremost, with the camera – or more properly speaking, the cinematographic apparatus. Metz calls this ‘primary identification’.22 In other words, the male heterosexual protagonist is given his individuality, subjectivity and agency (authorship) by the dispositif (ideological apparatus), substituted in the cinema by the camera. For Metz, secondary identification with the protagonist is enabled by primary identification with the cinematic apparatus. Nonetheless, such primary identification is effaced by narrational devices that conceal any third-party intervention.23 Metz’s understanding of ‘double identification’ allows us to understand what Yu means by the cinema’s alternation between explicating the narrative and listening to its own explication of the narrative. In Metz’s secondary identification, the cinema pretends to work with the spectator in order to resolve a riddle by their own agency (Yu’s explication with). Yet, in primary identification, narration is always a narcissistic process, in which the spectator identifies with the cinematographic apparatus telling a story to itself in order to confirm the spectator’s subjectivity under the dispositif (Yu’s explication to). Yu believes that the New Wave cinema should break this mode of narcissistic communication by addressing the spectator (the ‘every me in the audience’) directly and enabling the spectator to address the medium in return, thus problematising or abnegating the role of the dispositif as an interlocutor.24 Yu’s interest in eradicating the interlocutor was common among many

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 75

European filmmakers and critics of the time. For instance, Pasolini raises a similar idea in his article ‘Il cinema di poesia’ [‘Cinema of poetry’, 1965], widely read by many Hong Kong New Wave critics and filmmakers. Pasolini argues that as a semiotic unit, the cinematographic image is not a grammatically, syntactically and semantically composed structure. Rather, each imsegno (im-sign), taken directly from reality, functions like a gesture or a dream image. As a gesture, it is ‘brutally objective’, ‘strictly functional’ and ‘flatly informative’. It trespasses linguistic boundaries and cultural differences by indicating a thought by means of an image. As a dream image, it is strictly ‘subjective and lyrical’, as it makes manifest desires and traumas unconscious to the filmmaker and the spectator. As a result, for Pasolini, the ‘language of im-signs . . . is at the same time extremely subjective and extremely objective (an objectivity which, ultimately, is an insurmountable vocation of naturalism’).25 For Pasolini, classical cinema imposes a grammatical structure to the cinematographic im-signs by using narrational devices such as the shot/ reverse shot. In so doing, cinematic narration is conducted through an interlocutor.26 In his film practice, Pasolini disrupts such a syntactic structure by holding each shot within what appears to be a shot/reverse shot longer than is necessary. In so doing, within the duration of each shot, the spectator’s attention is drawn to the facial gestures of each character. These gestures both objectively communicate a thought that trespasses linguistic boundaries and express unconscious desires and affections that are not consciously controlled by the actors. Meanwhile, by ordering these semiotic units without imposing any preconceived grammatical structure, the filmmaker also speaks in a register of the unconscious – of dreams and memories. In so doing, these characters address the spectator directly, instead of speaking through an omniscient interlocutor. This is what Pasolini calls a free indirect discourse, a mode of address that many female filmmakers in the Hong Kong New Wave seek to achieve in their own works.27

Experimental Cinema: Phoenix Ciné Club and Tang Shu-Hsuen Experimentations on film forms and subject matters were seen in the Hong Kong Cantonese industry during the 1960s. In 1966, film critics Wong Ting and Law Kar identified director Patrick Lung Kong (1934–2014) as a ‘new wave’ cineaste. Lung was trained at Hong Kong’s largest film studio Shaw Brothers during the early 1960s. After that, he directed his first two films Boyin wangzi [Bojam wongzi or Prince of Broadcasters, 1966]

76

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

and Yingxiong bense [Jinghung bunsik or The Story of a Discharged Prisoner, 1967].28 Wong and Law compared Lung’s mise en scène with the narrational devices used by filmmakers of the British New Wave, such as Karel Reisz (1926–2002), Lindsay Anderson (1923–94) and Tony Richardson (1928–91). These devices include the use of high-contrast black-andwhite photography with onsite available light, location shooting and production sound, handheld camera, and young and charismatic method actor Patrick Tse Yin, whose image greatly resembled that of British actor Albert Finney (1936–2019) during that period. In 1969, he made Feinü zhengzhuan [Feineoi zingzyun or Teddy Girls], which Wong and Law regarded as one of Lung’s finest pieces of experimental filmmaking.29 Yet, filmic experimentation was not simply an industrial matter. As filmmakers May Fung and Sau Law point out respectively, in 1966, young film critics who wrote for the Chinese Student Weekly organised themselves into film societies: the Dayinghui (Daaijingwui or Great ciné club), the Film Guard Association, the Hong Kong Community College Students’ Union, the Puji dianyingshe (Poukap dinjingse or Common Film Society), the Qingyinghui (Cingjingwui or Youth Ciné Club), 8mm dianyinghui (8mm dinjingwui or 8mm Film Club) and the Xianggang dianyinghui (Hoenggong dinjingwui or Hong Kong Film Association). In 1975, experimental filmmakers Tang Shu-hsuen, Jimmy Choi, Lui Siu-hing, Leung Kat-chiu and Wong Ain-ling established the Phoenix Ciné Club. Besides watching and discussing films, Phoenix also had a production unit headed by Eric Lau, who would later pursue his study and filmmaking career in the United States.30 According to Fung, from 1966 to 1970, these young artists made forty to fifty experimental shorts, including Law Kar’s Quanxian [Cyunsin or Entirely] and Qishi [Hatsik or Beggar], Sek Kei’s Sijie [Seigit or Dead Knot] and Ho Fan’s (1937–2016) Xizuo zhi yi [Zaapzok zi jat or Assignment, Part One]. Moreover, other key figures of the New Wave including Kam Ping-hing, Patrick Tam, Allen Fong, Lam Nin-tung and John Woo made experimental shorts.31 In addition, Phoenix published a monthly magazine, Phoenix No. 8. Nonetheless, its contributors were not interested in establishing a coherent theoretical discourse. Rather, they tended to praise wenyi (literary and romantic) films for moving beyond pure entertainment and enabling their spectators to reflect upon life. For instance, in the first issue of Phoenix No. 8, Leung Kat-chiu reviews two productions by Hong Kong-based Taiwanese studio Grand Motion Pictures, Dongnuan [The Winter, Li Han-hsiang, 1969] and Poxiao shifen [At Dawn, Song Tsun-shou, 1968]. For Leung, in The Winter, Li ‘is no longer attached to the splendorous and illusive cinematic world of the

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 77 past’; instead, it offers a ‘representation and reflection of a group of petit urbanites living and struggling in poverty with blood and tears’. Leung praises Li for ‘deliberately honing his directorial skills without exposing any trace of his polishing work’, and the result is a new style ‘free of vulgarity and extraneous concerns’ and ‘delightfully realistic’.32 In his evaluation of John Woo’s Cantonese-opera film Dinühua [Daineoifaa or Princess Chang Ping, 1976], Leung argues that in a xiqu dianying (heikuk dinjing or opera film), the operatic form and performance should be carefully preserved without deliberate formal and temporal manipulation.33 Such a literary and theatrical take on film criticism was attacked by Tang Shu-hsuen. Tang was born in the Yunnan (Yünnan) province and raised in Hong Kong during the 1950s. During the 1960s, she studied film production at the University of Southern California and, in 1968, she made her first independent feature film. Dong furen [The Arch, 1970]. Shot on black-and-white 35mm film with non-synchronised sound and dubbed Mandarin dialogue, this low-budget production garnered four Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan and was selected as Hong Kong’s entry for the Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards in 1970. In a roundtable discussion on 22 June 1975, after a Phoenix screening of her second feature, Zaijian Zhongguo [China Behind, 1974; released in 1987], banned by the Hong Kong government for its representation of the Cultural Revolution in the Mainland, Tang lambasted Hong Kong film critics for their failure to nurture local filmmakers. For Tang, impressionistic film criticisms such as Leung’s demonstrated a limited understanding of cinematic art and film production. When studio executives read these reviews, these directors were often denied a second chance to work. In addition, Tang also argued that while filmmakers were responsible for experimenting with new forms, film critics had a responsibility to conceptualise them and suggest ways to reconfigure Chinese cinema from outside China: For me, every form of art must have a well-established and well-rounded system of criticism, which can guide this art form to develop along the right path. This is especially important when cinema and commerce have such an intimate relationship. I think that Hong Kong has many knowledgeable film critics. In their writings, they are able to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of a film, but this is not really film criticism [theory]. They merely demonstrate what they know. I am sure that a small number of people would appreciate these writings. Yet for the overall development of Chinese cinema, these essays are completely useless. This is a problem arising from our [cultural] atmosphere. In the developmental histories of the cinematic art, including those in France, the UK, and Italy, film critics have been able to identify and ostracise those lesser-good filmmakers, in order that those filmmakers with serious work and social ethics could emerge and be discovered. This is comparable

78

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

to a field of wild grass. If one does not eliminate the wild grass, plough the field, and water it, how can good seeds germinate and flourish?34

What Tang believes is that Hong Kong intellectuals should elevate their discussion from individual criticisms to theory. She added, ‘Hong Kong film critics should understand their position in Chinese cinema; they should have a sense of mission.’35

The Arch What The Arch demonstrates is precisely this mission. The film has two preoccupations: (1) How can a Chinese filmmaker who is doubly occupied by Chinese and Euro-American aesthetics and political forces, yet standing outside both territories, speak through the cinema? And (2) How can women (the director, the film’s protagonist and women spectators) address one another in the form of a free indirect discourse? The Arch is an adaptation of ‘Zhenjie fang’ [Arch of feminine virtue], a short story by Chinese-American writer Lin Yutang (1895–1976). The plot is about Madam Tung (Lisa Lu), widow of general and descendant of a highly respected literary family. Tung was recommended by the head of the village for an imperial paifang (arch) to praise her loyalty to her dead husband. She lives with her mother-in-law (Man Sau) and her ­daughter Wei-ling (Hilda Chow Hsuan), helped by family friend Old Chang (Li Ying). Tung runs a school and manages the accounts and other daily affairs of the family. At the beginning of the film, a troop of soldiers arrive to protect the village, and Captain Yang (Roy Chiao, 1927–99), under recommendation of the local Buddhist master, stays in the study of Tung’s mansion. Both Tung and Wei-ling develop feelings for Yang. Yet, as Tung reminds herself of the arch and the sexual virtue it represents, she gives up her romantic interest by permitting her daughter to marry him. At the end, her mother-in-law dies. Wei-ling moves to Yang’s village and Old Chang also leaves the house on the day that the arch is completed. While the village celebrates Tung’s celibacy, we see her being left alone in a deserted mansion to grow old. Tang was trained in Chinese ink wash painting. In The Arch, one can see the resemblance of the photographic image to the ink wash painting in its use of spatial orientation, temporal layout and graphical composition. For example, the film begins with a series of panoramic shots from the top of a mountain, commanding a majestic view of the mountain ridge through layers of clouds, mist and trees (see Figure 2.1). In each shot, the camera slowly pans from left to right to enable the landscape to reveal itself in

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 79

Figure 2.1  The opening sequence of The Arch, based on ink wash painting, invites the spectator to drift within it.

front of the spectator’s eyes. As one shot crossfades into another, this slow panning movement also continues from one shot to the other, thus turning the sequence into a horizontal scroll. Meanwhile, in the version Tang submitted to the Golden Horse Awards, the entire sequence is accompanied by a sparsely written melody played by the guqin (five-stringed zither), characterised by a contrast between its resonant lower-pitched open-string notes, its affective quarter-tone glissandos and its transparent harmonics.36 At first glance, this seems to be a simple case of flaunting Chineseness and a further development of those elements of Chinese aesthetics practised by Cantonese filmmakers in the 1950s. However, this observation would be complicated by Lam Nin-tung’s understanding of jingyou ( gengjau, mirroring-drifting or mirroring-journeying; see chapter one), and as I shall argue later, by the film’s authorship and its overall structure. Understood in terms of Lam’s theory, the foreground of the photographic image is entirely obscured by a backlit mountain stretched across from the left of frame to the right. Such obscurity draws the spectator’s attention to the middle-ground, which is partially blocked by the foreground, thus requiring the spectator to stretch their neck to peek through the blockage in order to catch a glimpse of the details. Yet, such a task is impossible to undertake. As a result, the spectator must you ( jau: drift or journey) in the middleground by entering the picture not by sight, but by their xinshi (mind and

80

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

consciousness). This is, however, different from a fantasy, as the spectator is not entirely imagining what lies in the middle-ground. Rather, the details of the middle-ground have been suggested by its forms, which enables the spectator to yihui (ideate), that is, mentally grasp its general idea.37 The result of this process of mind-drifting is similar to what Henri Bergson (1859–1941; later adopted by Gilles Deleuze, 1925–95) would call a sensory-motor schema, that is, an image concrete enough to see, yet still in the process of in-forming and not finished enough to touch.38 The spectator is to actively complete the entire form as they travel into the painting. Such ideation is further enhanced by the three levels of distance in the image: pingyuan (distance on the surface), shenyuan (distance in depth) and gaoyuan (distance in height).39 For example, the sky in the background entices the spectator to make concrete the larger world beyond this image, thus situating what the spectator sees within the general environment in which the narrative takes place. Such techniques of representation, during the Six Dynasties (220 or 222–589), was called xieyi (sketching ideation), as opposed to xieshi (describing reality).40 Ideation has two significant effects. First, the photographic image does not address the spectator through an interlocutor. Rather, by sketching an idea, the image invites the spectator’s mind to initiate a concrete picture. In Six-Dynasty aesthetics, based on Yogācāra Buddhism, this mode of address is called jing yuan yu xin (an image being initiated by the mind). Yet, such a mode of address is also not a one-way street (from the mind to the image), as the image also initiates a state of mind: xin yuan yu jing. As a result, the image functions as a mirror of the mind, and vice versa, thus turning the cinematic experience into an interactive one.41 Moreover, as Lam argues, based on the apparatus theory of the 1960s and 1970s, the photographic frame, modelled upon the easel painting from the Renaissance, carries with it the perspective of an idealised (European) omniscient observer.42 To complicate matters, the cinematographers of The Arch are acclaimed directors of photography Subrata Mitra and Chi Ho Che. The collaboration between Mitra, Che and Tang requires them to unlearn their Euro-American aesthetic and technological t­ raining, and then learn and invent a new narrational paradigm inspired by S ­ ix-Dynasty aes­ thetics. Hence, the use of Six-Dynasty aesthetics in a film like The Arch does not flaunt Chineseness. Rather, it makes visible and ­sensible the tension between European ideology and what it has historically ­marginalised. As a result, this tension signifies an extraterritorial position, an aesthetic sensibility doubly occupied by both European and Chinese understandings of aesthetic judgement. Yet, the authors – the filmmakers and the spectator – must relearn such aesthetics from a position outside both cultural terrains.

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 81

This tension is especially felt in a sequence in which Wei-ling flirtatiously invites Yang to take a walk with her on a mountain. This sequence is a montage of long shots and medium long shots of a forest, in which the spectator sees Wei-ling and Yang leisurely hiking up the mountain. In one register, these shots are all framed within the horizontal academic ratio  of 1.375:1, thus reminding the spectator of the technological confines of the Renaissance easel. In fact, the densely wooded landscape, lustrously illuminated from behind with human figures travelling through its foliage, invokes the aesthetics of the eighteenth-century European landscape  painting.43 Nonetheless, Tang and Che (who shot the exterior scenes) deliberately employ an alternation between high angle and low angle to emphasise the diagonal lines both from the left of frame to the right, and from the background to the foreground. Together with the overwhelming image of trees projecting majestically from the ground to the sky, and the movement of Wei-ling and Yang from the bottom of the frame to the upper third of the frame, Tang and Che set up a strong rhythm of verticality, thus invoking the composition of the vertical scrolls from the Six Dynasties. The horizontal framing and the vertical composition and action then form a tension. Accompanied by a lively piece of music performed on the pipa (a four-stringed lute), the montage invites the spectator to drift across the frame, yet with bodily movements that lift their gaze upward toward the sky. Eventually, Yang leaves the mountain to look for his horse and Wei-ling waits for him in the wood. After Yang has left, the film shows a long shot of Wei-ling wandering in the forest. Photographed from a low angle with a wide-angle lens that bends the trees on both sides of the frame into upward-stretching curves, the shot invites the spectator to look up and admire the grandeur of the trees. The film then crossfades into a low-angle long shot of the top of the trees with an elegant 180-degree pan, as beams of sunlight penetrate through the treetops. This shot crossfades into a straight-on medium shot of Wei-ling, who gently caresses a tree trunk, while her eyes stare up to the treetop and then down along the trunk with approbation (see Figure 2.2). The pipa music sparsely punctuates the image, thus drawing our attention to the pauses between fragments of sound. In this shot, the visual metaphor between the tree trunk and Yang’s physical masculinity is overtly drawn. Yet, the shot demands the spectator not only to read it as a metaphor, but also to sense what Wei-ling touches. In the image, the spectator’s sentient body is drawn to the tactile quality of the tree trunk: its coarse surface, weight and strength. The image therefore directly stimulates the sexual desire of a heterosexual female spectator by means of tactility and by the breathing of the pipa music.

82

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Figure 2.2  In The Arch, mirroring-drifting enables the spectator to be sexually stimulated by Yang’s physical masculinity through the image’s tactility.

Besides direct sensorial stimulation, female desire is sometimes made sensible by means of repression. For instance, when Tung prepares for a mid-autumn festival dinner in her kitchen, her hands accidentally touch Yang’s, which kindles her desire for him. After dinner, she withdraws into her room, while Yang, Tung’s mother-in-law and the Buddhist master play a drinking game in the garden. The film cuts to a long shot of the room, seen through a mosquito net, dimly lit by a light from the garden, with two calligraphy scrolls decorating the wall in the background. The soundtrack is composed of a tune played on the pipa and cricket chirps. The camera pans slowly to the right to reveal the windows. The spectator then hears the distant voices of the guests. The camera then tilts down to a medium shot of Tung lying in bed. Her eyes blink as she listens to the voices. She then turns her body toward the camera while it dollies in slightly to a medium close-up of her looking off camera (Figure 2.3). The importance of this shot is not the visible, but what remains invisible: Yang’s physical body that lies outside those windows, made sensible through his disembodied voice, which in turn makes palpable Tung’s desolation. Here, Tang and Mitra (who shot the interior scenes) borrow such narrational techniques from the thirteenth-century (late Song, 960–1279–early Yuan, 1271–1368) guiyuan shi (boudoir poetry), which, according to Grace Fong, relies on an alternation between reality and illusion, presence and absence

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 83

Figure 2.3  In The Arch, desolation is sensed through the process of mirroring-drifting.

in order to ‘mov[e] backwards and forwards between reminiscence and description, between past and present’.44 In the two previous examples, Tang, Che and Mitra refer to SixDynasty and Song–Yuan aesthetics to unlearn Euro-American aesthetics and the omniscient perspective built into the cinematic apparatus. Yet, these medieval Chinese strategies are mobilised to address the sexual desire of modern women (Tang and the female spectator) who are, under colonialism, doubly occupied and doubly marginalised by both EuroAmerican and Asian cultural formations. What the film makes manifest is therefore a colonial tension that posits these women at an extraterritorial position. And in order for them to speak, they must break away from both aesthetic forces. Toward the end of the film, Tung’s sexual frustration and the film’s stylistic tension are sensuously manifested and interrupted in a complex montage of image and music. In the beginning of this sequence, Tung overhears the sound of construction workers chiselling stone at night in order to finish the arch in time for the village’s celebration. In order to drown out that sound, in a medium shot, Tung sits down behind a loom to weave. The music drops from the soundtrack. In its stead, the spectator hears the metered and mechanical sound of the loom. The film then cuts to close-ups and extreme close-ups of its mechanical parts, while the threads form a network of crisscrossing diagonal lines that move upward

84

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

and downward. Here, the camera also zooms in slightly in each shot to intensify the mechanical movements. The pipa music resumes with a sense of urgency. The montage of these close-ups is then superimposed with the medium close-up of Tung sitting behind the loom. As more and more images are superimposed upon one another and with each image having its own movement within the image and camera movement, the camera that observes Tung dollies in to her medium close-up. At this point, brief flashbacks to key moments in the film, at which Tung shows her romantic interest toward Yang, form another layer of superimposition. These moments, together with the medium close-ups of Tung, appear, disappear and reappear sequentially, with an editing rhythm escalating together with the pipa music (see Figure 2.4). Eventually, close-ups of hands chiselling a stone also appear and become part of the sequence. As the pipa music becomes increasingly agitated, the montage is interrupted by repetitions of a medium shot of Tung turning her body away from the camera and rushing toward the door of her room. Finally, the film abruptly cuts to the exterior of the room as Tung opens the door. She then picks up a sabre and cuts the throat of a chicken she finds in the garden. The soundtrack brusquely cuts to silence. In this montage, Tang enables the spectator’s sensorium to be directly stimulated by an assemblage of audio-visual milieux that generate Tung’s state of mind, thus enabling the spectator, Tung and what Tung

Figure 2.4  The final montage of The Arch brings Tung’s frustration, the spectator’s desolation and the film’s stylistic tension to a breaking point.

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 85 e­ mbodies – the filmmakers – to speak with one another through a complex counterpoint of im-signs. Moreover, Tang, Che and Mitra do so by abandoning any references to ink wash painting. Rather, they employ a technique associated with Soviet and French cinemas during the 1920s and 1930s. At this juncture, the elegant, subdued and carefully controlled aesthetics that Tang, Che and Mitra learned from ink wash painting are entirely undone by the montage. Thus, the overall tension between Renaissance and Six-Dynasty aesthetics comes to a breaking point. It is easy to read that such a stylistic contrast signifies a break from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’. However, this overall stylistic contrast signifies the fact that Tang, Che, Mitra and the spectator are all doubly occupied and doubly marginalised by both ‘Asian tradition’ and ‘Euro-American modernity’. Here, tradition and modernity should not be understood as pre-constituted notions. Rather, the difference between tradition and modernity arises as a tension that enables the political community to ostracise women and repress their desires. Posited at an extraterritorial position, Tang, Che and Mitra persuade the spectator to recognise that tradition and modernity are occupational forces whose structural difference is founded upon the female body and female desire as an extraterritorial position.

Extraterritorial Feminism: Television as a Consumerist Medium Tang Shu-hsuen was one of the few experimental filmmakers who managed to make independent features from 1967 to 1978. Most of the other New Wave artists began their careers on television, an industry that became increasingly popular after the decline of Cantonese cinema from 1967 to 1972. By the mid-1970s, it replaced cinema as the most influential mass medium, and as Jürgen Habermas would call it, public sphere. Habermas defines the ‘public sphere’ as a space where mutually conflicting socio-political affects and opinions are exchanged and negotiated, so that the relationship between a political authority and the lives it governs can be mediated.45 As Law Kar and Frank Bren argue, with the absence of any democratic channel for Hong Kongers to participate in politics, television served as a mediator between the colonial government and its mass audience after the 1967 Riots.46 The lubricant for this process of mediation is, I argue, consumerism. Television and consumerism were popularised after the 1967 Confrontation. From 1971 to 1982, Governor Murray MacLehose (1917–2000), a Labour Party diplomat, under the guidelines set by the

86

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Foreign Office in 1971, established a welfare state in Hong Kong and introduced democratically elected district boards (local councils), thus nurturing a sense of political agency among Hong Kongers.47 Yet, in so doing, the deep-structural resentment against colonial capitalism that manifested during the 1967 Confrontation remained unaddressed. As Law and Bren argue, young Hong Kongers distrusted both the British and Chinese authorities, as they exercised their political powers during the Confrontation through their respective modes of juridical violence.48 Meanwhile, as Hong Kong continued to prosper as an international financial hub, the educated middle-classes’ power to consume Euro-American commodities and cultural values gradually turned into a symbolic substitute for their lack of any juridical authority and socio-political agency over their own lives and affairs. Parallel to this trend, as Mary Wong points out, young artists between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s borrowed and reconfigured Euro-American modernist styles as their mode of expression. Their act of borrowing was not motivated by a blind admiration for Euro-American culture, but by an urge to protest against the established social, political, sexual and aesthetic values from the 1950s and the rising tendency of Hong Kongers to displace their lack of socio-political interest to consumerism.49 Wong cites an analysis by Leung Ping-kwan in his discussion of the novel Di de men [Dei dik mun or Gate of earth, Kwan Nam, 1961]: It seems that the author [Kwan Nam] borrows Western styles to rebel against the materialist and profit-oriented values common in the Hong Kong society at the time. Often, an author borrows [techniques] from foreign literature in order to rebel against the social norms established in the past. He finds himself in conflict with the literary views of the [local writers from] the previous generation. Meanwhile, he does not sense the same antagonism against foreign literature. These literary values then become his model [of creation], which directs and guides his act of rebellion.50

In other words, the new generation’s cultural affinity with Euro-American capitalism, liberalism, aesthetics and cultural sensibilities is best understood as an attempt to borrow the signifiers of these Western values, detach them from their signifieds, and rewrite them in accordance with Hong Kong’s extraterritorial position. Television was instrumental in cultivating such cultural sensibilities. Compared to its Euro-American counterparts, the Hong Kong television industry had a relatively late start. According to media historians Chu Hark, Stephanie Chung, Zhang Zhendong and Li Chunwu, paid cable television services – in both Cantonese and English – were first offered in Hong Kong in 1955 by British company Rediffusion (RTV). In the 1960s,

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 87

RTV attracted producers, directors and actors from both the Cantonese and Mandarin film industries, including executive Chung Kai-man from the second – largest Mandarin film studio in Hong Kong, Motion Picture and General Investment (MP & GI).51 During the 1950s and 1960s, television was not only watched at home, but also in public places such as loengcaa pou (herbal tea shops), Shanghaistyled barber shops and caacaanteng (tea restaurants). According to Shu Kei, a newspaper advertisement (4 April 1960) for Hong Kong’s largest amusement park at the time, Lai Chi Kwok Amusement Park (Lai Yuen), showed RTV programmes in one of its cinemas from 5:00 pm to 7:30 pm.52 These public spaces provided a venue for television viewers to discuss socio-political issues they saw on the daily news and cultivated an illusionary agency among these viewers over their own affairs. Moreover, RTV variety programmes featured young, attractive and fashionable actors who performed Anglo-American rock songs, introduced new trends from the UK and the United States, and advertised luxurious commodities such as refrigerators, air conditioners and electric kitchenware. The most outstanding of these actors were a group of four women known as Sei cingam (Four Princesses): Wong Chor-wing, So Kit-yin, Lisa Wang and Huen Siu-ha. They embodied a mode of consumerist feminism: that their power to consume signified their financial independence from men and their ownership of female sexuality. I call this mode of new femininity ‘extraterritorial feminism.’ In the Euro-American context, this mode of feminism is called by scholars today ‘postfeminism’.53 Under postfeminism, as long as a woman takes ownership of her gender performance and sexuality, she is automatically considered as having an agency over her body. Nonetheless, the heteronormative codes that constitute such performance and sexuality remain largely unquestioned, as the woman merely purchases the symbolic authorship over a pre-packaged mode of performance and sexuality already sanctioned by the heteronormative dispositif.54 To complicate matters, in a colonial context, a colonised woman’s ability to author her body, gender and sexuality by consuming Euro-American commodities simply enables her to become her coloniser through a set of symbolic articulations adopted from her coloniser’s language. In other words, she emulates her coloniser from an extraterritorial position, precisely by buying the excessive commodities and images sold to her by the coloniser. Like the Shanghai male film spectator discussed by Lu Xun in the 1930s, the colonised woman is persuaded to enjoy her status of being colonised! The promulgation of extraterritorial feminism was accelerated in the 1970s by the introduction of broadcast television services in 1967. That

88

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

year, Television Broadcast (TVB), owned by Shaw Brothers, was licensed by the government to offer terrestrial television in both Cantonese and English. With the decline of the Cantonese film industry, TVB triggered a wave of migration of film talents to its Cantonese channel TVB Jade. Shaw Brothers operated TVB as a classical Hollywood studio. As reported by critics Mong Tung and Wong Tak-ming from Close-up, the studio offered training courses to cultivate acting talents, thus serving as a factory that mass produced young actors who embodied extraterritorial feminism.55 According to a government report published in 1985, with the advent of broadcast television, cable television became unprofitable. In December 1972, the government licensed two more studios to offer broadcast services, including RTV itself and a third studio called Commercial Television (CTV) (closed down in 1978).56 In 1970, Radio Hong Kong, a government-owned radio station, established a film unit and, in 1976, it was renamed Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK). RTHK did not operate its own channels; rather, its programmes were shown during designated hours on the three commercial televisions. According to a survey conducted by Joseph Wong from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1978), in 1957 only 3 per cent of households in Hong Kong owned television sets. This figure rose to 89 per cent in 1975 and 90 per cent in 1976.57 With more households owning television sets, television viewing became a private activity, one that signified a viewer’s monetary power to own the equipment, the medium of communication, the information transmitted and the image of consumerist pleasures. During the early to mid-1970s, most lower-middle-class and working-class viewers lived in cramped, government-subsidised housing, while many women still lived in families modelled upon a syncretic mode of neo-Confucianism and Protestantism, configured and promoted during the first half of the twentieth century in urban China by Euro-American missionaries. For them, such capitalist pleasures, the sense of individuality and sexual freedom enjoyed by the fashionable women on screen were unattainable or even unimaginable in real life.58 Yet, owning and consuming the medium became a symbolic substitute for their inability to revel in such pleasures and liberty. On the production front, the increasing demand for television triggered a corresponding demand for creative talents. According to producer Lau Tin-chi, with the popularity of the Cantonese-language channels, RTV, TVB and CTV could no longer rely on buying series from the United States. With a population of only approximately 4.46 million, competition among these three studios was cut-throat. As a result, producers began to localise their programming to attract more Cantonese-speaking viewers.59 As Eric Lau points out, television studios in about 1975–8 hired young

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 89

screenwriters, directors and producers to create short series with seven to fifteen episodes, each lasting anywhere from twenty to forty-five minutes. These episodes were shot inexpensively on 16mm reversal stock, which can be processed, flipped inside out and used as a positive.60 Using the filmic medium to create convinced many filmmakers that their works were cinematic shorts made for television, an extension of their film club experiments. This notion that television was simply another platform for artistic experiment was quickly challenged by media critics of the time. Chui Yeung, for example, argues that since the 1930s, television in Europe and the United States had been used as an instrument of communication, rather than a means of artistic expression. For him: For over twenty years [after its popularisation], whether being used as a means of communication or promoting products, television conveyed information from the addresser to the addressee in a unidirectional manner. As linguist Roman Jakobson [1896–1982] argues, the formula ‘addresser–message–addressee’ is commonly adopted as a mode of communication in a capitalist society when a message is being conveyed to the masses. Not only do television, cinema, radio, poster, and drama all adopt the same mode of communication, media theory propounded within the [capitalist] system, such as Marshall McLuhan’s [1911–80], is often constructed upon such an underlying assumption. In communication, unidirectionality is in fact a sign of un-democracy; it cannot possibly be a good thing. It has one shortcoming: the addressee remains passive. The only action they take is to receive information. They do not have any opportunity to communicate. In fact, they are often compelled [by the system] to receive information. If one wishes to change this habitual formula, the medium must be reconfigured in a way that the addressee can become conscious of the contents of the message.61

Meanwhile, Shu Kei argues that television is not only a means of communication, but also a political weapon. For him, under colonialism and capitalism, Hong Kong television was configured as an instrument of education that inculcated its viewers with middle-class values. He argues that most Hong Kong television screenwriters and directors claimed that they explored ‘human nature’, without realising that what they called ‘human nature’ always had ‘social relevancy’, that is, the dispositif.62 Shu Kei is apt to point out that by the mid-1970s, television had become a powerful tool for the colonial authority to constitute a critical mass, a group of viewers who genuinely believed that they had the agency and authority over their own socio-political conditions, simply because they had the power to consume in the way their colonisers had always done.

90

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Renegotiating Extraterritorial Feminism: ‘Miu Kam-Fung’ How could women filmmakers borrow signifiers from consumerism and rewrite them to make visible and sensible the dispositif at work? From 1975 to 1978, a number of television programmes written, directed and produced by young talents emerged. They included TVB series Qunxing pu [Kwansing pou or Superstars, 1975], C.I.D. [1976], Beidouxing [Bakdousing or The Bigger Dipper, 1976], Qi nüxing [Cat neoising or Seven Women, 1976], Nianqing ren [Nincing jan or Young Generation, 1977] and Xiao renwu [Siu janmat or Ordinary People, 1977]; RTV series Da zhangfu [Daai zoengfu or Big Men, 1977]; CTV’s Jindao qingxia [Gamdou cinghap or Golden Blade, 1978]; and RTHK’s Shizi shanxia [Sizi saanhaa or Below the Lion Rock, 1972–80, 1984–8, 1990, 1992–4, 2006, 2014–17].63 These programmes do not have a unified style or thematic concern. Some of them take a more modernist approach. For example, director Patrick Tam, in the series Seven Women (written by screenwriter Joyce Chan), employs self-reflexive devices to draw the viewers’ attention to the medium and to the horror of consumerism. Meanwhile, other programmes emulate ‘kitchen sink realism’ as seen in the British New Wave. The most widely discussed one of this type is Below the Lion Rock, which features women directors including Cheung Man-yee, Ann Hui and Rachel Zen. According to producer Cheung Man-yee, working with an extremely low budget, these artists privilege the use of handheld camera, naturalistic acting, child and amateur actors, location shooting and onsite available lighting to represent the lives of working-class characters, new immigrants from Mainland China, underage sex workers, children with divorced parents and Vietnamese boatpeople.64 In this section and the next, I analyse a key episode from Seven Women – ‘Miu Kam-fung’ [written by Joyce Chan and directed by Patrick Tam]  –  and Ann Hui’s ‘Laike’ [‘Loihaak’ or ‘The Boy from Vietnam’, 1978; written by Shu Kei and Wong Chi] from Below the Lion Rock to illustrate how these two teams of filmmakers construct their modes of free indirect discourse. Joyce Chan began writing short essays for newspaper and magazine columns in the early 1970s. Her works represent teenagers from middle-class families or young professionals, who consume material pleasures, Anglo-American rock music and modernist art, and indulge themselves in non-normative sexual relationships. Chan joined TVB as a screenwriter in 1975. In 1976, she began writing for Haowai [Houngoi or City  Magazine], a lifestyle magazine edited by Chan Koon-chung. Printed on glossy A3  paper, the publication featured cutting-edge and

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 91

c­ osmopolitan ­writings, photography and other art works by young intellectuals.65 Meanwhile, Patrick Tam is a veteran writer of the Chinese Student Weekly. He joined TVB as a screenwriter and director in 1967. After Seven Women, Tam went to San Francisco to study film production. He then returned to Hong Kong to direct feature films Mingjian [Minggim or The Sword, 1980], Aisha [Ngoisaat or Love Massacre, 1981], and Liehuo qingchun [Litfo cingceon or Nomad, 1982]. While he has continued to direct feature films up to the present, he also became an award-winning editor for acclaimed directors including Wong Kar-wai and Johnnie To. In Seven Women, Tam pays tribute to the films of Jean-Luc Godard and makes stylistic references to his works. These include the use of one-scene-one-takes, interruptions of a narrative’s cause-and-effect chain, direct addresses to the audience, musical cues that are at odds with the affective tonality or thematic concerns of a scene, lack of narrative closure and modernist production design. Tam’s formal experimentation, together with the explicit representation of women’s sexualities, became the centre of attention of his contemporary critics including Cheung Kam-mun, Shu Kei, Jimmy Ngai and Law Kar.66 Based on Leung Ping-kwan’s argument I have mentioned earlier, Mary Wong proposes that Tam’s stylistic borrowing demonstrates a childlike contempt for the establishments. In the 1970s, Tam and his contemporaries regarded growing up as an acknowledgement of defeat. Therefore, the episodes Tam and Chan jointly create can be seen as Bildungsromans, novels in which children would go through trials and tribulations that would gradually educate them to become adults. Yet, in their Bildungsromans, teenage girls and young women, with little to no memory of the past, refuse to grow up by internalising or enjoying those conflicts that are meant to change and educate them.67 In ‘Miu Kam-fung’, actor Miu Kam-fung plays herself: a thirty-yearold television actor. This episode consists of direct citations from Godard’s Le Mépris [Contempt, 1965], Pierrot le fou [1965], Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle [Two or Three Things I Know about Her, 1967], La Chinoise [1967] and Week-end [1967]. These citations are best understood as signifiers detached from the signifieds in their original texts and contexts. Meanwhile, in the episode, Miu (the character) and her husband Joe live a high consumerist life, in which they freely enjoy Euro-American commodities, images and sexualities as performances devoid of their affective and emotional values and consequences. As the disavowed affections and emotions begin to ripple subtly on the surface of Miu and Joe’s utopic life, those contesting social, marital and sexual values that perturb Miu are made sensible to the viewers. Eventually, as Wong argues, she internalises

92

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

these conflicts and learns to live with them. Yet, for me, Miu does not refuse to grow up. Rather, within the framework of consumerism and extraterritorial feminism, Miu fails to grow up. As a result, the episode performs not only Miu’s failure to come face-to-face with her perturbation, but also the viewers’ own failure to locate, identify and rewrite it. From the beginning, the episode suggests that everything visible in a consumerist society, including the televisual image itself, is performative. In the opening sequence, a handheld camera follows Miu on the street, on the sets and in different stores and supermarkets, where she performs as an actor, a housewife and a mother with a strong sense of individuality and agency. In her voice-over, Miu tells the viewers that they are watching a documentary of her life. But almost immediately, she says that this documentary is a fictional fabrication that faithfully documents her actual life, in which she performs her various roles as in a fiction film. This sequence not only blurs the boundary between documentary and fiction, but also between performances on film and performances in life, which both seem to be inconsequential for her. In one of the shots, the viewers see Miu playing a woman who died in a car accident, a reference to Contempt. In ‘Miu Kam-fung’, the camera shows the left side of the front of a 1961 silver Jaguar E-Type convertible. It then dollies along the side of the car and tilts down onto the seat next to the driver to reveal Miu’s blood-covered face. Her blue cowgirl outfit is juxtaposed sharply against the red car seat. This shot prefigures a narrative point toward the end of the episode, at which Joe’s extramarital lover, Mary Ann, will die in a car accident. Yet, disturbingly, being staged and photographed as though it were a spread in a fashion magazine, the shot turns the image into a signifier without a signified, a performance devoid of any emotional values. This opening sequence ends with a black-and-white still photograph of Miu’s close-up, with a hand-drawn line that splits her face in the middle. On the left of screen, her face is labelled ‘housewife’; on the right of screen, her face is labelled ‘actor’. At first glance, this seems to be a very commonplace understanding of how a young woman like Miu is constantly torn between being a ‘modern’ professional and a ‘traditional’ house-worker. Framed within a sequence that turns every image into a signifier without a signified, both of these roles are best understood as superficial performances. In this sense, what appear to be Miu’s individuality and agency are merely performances devoid of any subjectivity. In the first thirty minutes of the episode, Miu and Joe seem to live in a utopia of capitalist pleasures and sexual freedom. After the opening sequence, the episode shows a close-up of a glossy magazine in English,

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 93 which features award-winning advertisements from around the world. These advertisements, having been printed as art objects, become signifiers without signifieds. In the soundtrack, the viewers hear the dramatic opening of the first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s (1770–1827) Symphony No. 5, which will then be associated with Joe as a leitmotif (a musical theme associated with a character). Nevertheless, once being used as a piece of canned music accompanying the pages of a magazine, it is taken out of its historical context – as a tribute to the revolutionary ideals of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Suddenly, both the music and the image are interrupted by a cut to a silent close-up of Miu shampooing her hair. In a voice-over, Miu reiterates the shampoo’s advertisement: ‘the additional protein makes my hair “feel alive” ’! After that, the episode cuts to a long shot of her lounge with minimalist furniture. Miu sits on a sofa with her Boots vanity hood hairdryer and speaks to her friend on a Northern Electric white telephone. As the camera slowly zooms in to her close-up, she tells her friend that if her husband has an extramarital affair, she would prefer not to interfere. After all, she has no plan to give up her marriage. At this point, the viewers may begin to sense that Miu and Joe are in an unconventionally open marriage. The problem is: Is it a form of liberation or is it another consumerist appropriation of Euro-American liberalism, another signifier without a signified? Immediately after this scene, the episode cuts to a sequence in which Joe drives his red Ford Pinto with Mary Ann. They then pick up their mutual friend. Accompanied by a funk soundtrack popularised by 1970s Blaxploitation thrillers, Joe and Mary Ann drive through the new engineering marvel: Cross-Harbour Tunnel. They then stop by the front of a health club with giant posters of young women exercising and having their hair removed (see Figure 2.5), where she waits for them in her yellow outfit. This image collapses the surface and depth and conflates the consumer with the consumed – and again, the signifier and the signified. After that, Joe, Mary Ann and their mutual friend wait for their dinner  in a restaurant, under a pop art mural that features a group of young women surfing on a wave of Coca-Cola poured out of a gigantic bottle (see Figure 2.6). While the two women discuss their hairstyles, Joe flips through two magazines simultaneously (see Figure 2.7). On the left of frame, Joe’s hand flips through a fashion magazine, and on the right of frame, his other hand flips through a Mainland Chinese magazine discussing anti-Soviet-revisionism. Despite their ideological difference, both magazines put what they advertise in glossy photographic images (signifiers without signifieds). Then, in a long shot, Joe reads out an article

94

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Figure 2.5  In ‘Miu Kam-fung’, one of Joe’s girlfriends waits for him in front of a fitness centre’s advertisement, which collapses the difference between the signifier and the signified.

about abortion. Yet, it is unclear to the viewers whether he recites from the fashion magazine, which would make abortion a ‘hot topic’ for EuroAmerican liberals, or from the communist one, which would make the discussion a matter of state policy. Disturbingly, once being read aloud by Joe, the passage becomes a pure performance as trivial as those women surfing on a wave of Coca-Cola. As we shall see, the separation between the signifier and the signified will have real affective and emotional impacts on Miu and Joe. Yet, in the first half of the episode, these affective responses are disavowed by them. For example, Joe loves to recite news of traumatic accidents or political events from the newspaper at dinner, as though they were merely commodities of consumption, rituals that give him neither pleasure nor displeasure. Likewise, in one sequence, Joe and his friends swagger into a car dealer to test drive an immaculate silver Austin Princess 2220. In several dolly shots, the camera shows three brand-new Triumph Stags from a low angle, accompanied by Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. Then it follows Joe and his friends down a hallway decorated with colourful posters of Toyota automobiles, accompanied by the song ‘Drive My Car’

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 95

Figure 2.6  In ‘Miu Kam-fung’, Joe and his two lovers wait for their dinner under a pop art mural.

Figure 2.7  Joe flips through a capitalist and a communist magazine side-by-side, both advertising their ideologies with signifiers that are detached from their signifieds.

96

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Figure 2.8  Consumption becomes a pure ritual as Joe and his friends swagger into a car dealer to test drive a silver Austin Princess 2220.

[The Beatles, Rubber Soul, 1965] (see Figure 2.8). While the image and the sound emphasise the trendiness and sophistication of Joe’s rite of consumption, he shows neither excitement nor disappointment. Miu’s and Joe’s stone faces become disturbing when it comes to sexuality. One evening, Joe listens to the Internationale, the anthem of the Communist International (1919–43), on a radio. Miu then asks Joe, ‘What a pleasant song! What is it?’ Without answering her, Joe climbs on top of Miu to have sex with her. She then switches off the light. In a dimly lit close-up, she shows neither pleasure nor displeasure. In this sense, sex is also reduced to a ritual, a signifier without a signified, and the Internationale is detached from its revolutionary meaning and appropriated as a stimulant for foreplay. Later in the episode, Miu tells Joe what she learned from Mary Ann: that contraceptive patches are now available from Mainland China. Therefore, devices designed to facilitate China’s state-controlled birth policy are turned into capitalist commodities that guarantee the un-interruption of the couple’s sexual ritual. In the episode, the three references to Communist China are particularly complex. They are not direct appropriations of Chinese socialist elements. Rather, they are all citations from La Chinoise. Therefore, the episode sug-

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 97 gests that these Hong Kong consumerists relate to Chinese communism extraterritorially: as signifiers without signifieds already appropriated by European modernism. These references can be seen as the filmmakers’ protest against the previous generation’s attachment to the larger national imagination of China. For Chan and Tam, China is simply another commodity that is ‘put on display’ by a French filmmaker. Yet, such reduction of Communist China as a signifier without a signified generates a perturbation in the viewing process, as many viewers well knew that for billions of Chinese people across the border, anti-revisionism persecution, singing the Internationale as a ritual, and forced abortion were their lived reality. These references performed the viewers’ failure to connect these signifiers to their signifieds within their socio-political contexts. They also performed the viewers’ failure to come face-to-face with the political reality of China after 1967 by seeking refuge in a British colony and its consumerism. Half way through the episode, however, the long repressed signifieds return slowly to the narrative and disturb Miu and Joe. The couple attend a party and they leave their young child with an educated working-class babysitter, Kei. When Miu puts on her makeup, Joe discusses his annoyance over his car accident, in which he was at fault. Instead of blaming himself, Joe complains about the driver’s rowdiness and he worries that the shop will not be able to fix the car properly. In the party, while Joe merrily dances with other women and discusses his sexual conquests, Miu withdraws to a corner to call an electrician to repair their washing machine. As the electrician claims that he does not have time to visit Miu, she becomes agitated. For the viewers, these conversations expose the labour that goes into the machines that have long been fetishised as pure commodities. At this point, the Northern Electric telephones in the shots are no longer white; they are now red. After Joe and Miu return from the party, Joe offers to drive Kei home. In the car, Kei tells Joe that she and her friends repaired a road, after having called the Highway Department multiple times. She then suggests that the government should give her a tax refund and Joe remains indifferent to her ideas. When they arrive in front of her building, Joe offers to see her to the door, which she politely declines. The episode then cuts to a long shot of a petrol station, in which Joe pulls up his car, walks by a gigantic Mobil neon sign and uses a red telephone next to three shelves of identical cans of Mobil petroleum. Joe first calls Miu to tell her how lovely she is. He then calls Mary Ann to tell her that he will stay with her that evening. This is the first time the viewers witness Joe lying to Miu about his extramarital affairs, even though they had suspected it all along. In this

98

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

sense, the viewers begin to feel implicated by Joe’s lie, as they sense that they have been disavowing Joe’s unfaithfulness since the beginning of the episode and enjoying it as a consumerist pleasure. The next day, while Miu prepares for lunch, she receives a phone call from Joe. Joe lies to Miu that he spent the night in his office. In a medium close-up, the viewers see Miu doubting Joe’s truthfulness. Yet, she plays along and urges him to come home for dinner. She then tells Joe unsympathetically that Kei was robbed and raped at home that evening, and it was fortunate that Kei did not see her to her door. At this point, both Joe’s mendacity and Miu’s callousness become disturbing. Then, the episode shows Miu and Mary Ann in a sauna. In a single take, Mary Ann tells Miu that Joe spent the night with her and that she wishes Joe would never return to Miu. Miu calmly puts some lotion on her arms and chest and then excuses herself from the sauna. Her deliberateness indicates that she is not entirely insensitive to Mary Ann’s confession, which somehow confirms what she has suspected Joe’s relationship with May Ann to be all along. Nonetheless, in her calmness, Miu pretends that her relationship with Joe has always been a performance, a signifier without a signified. That evening, at dinner, Joe receives a phone call, which informs him that Mary Ann died in a car accident after she left the sauna. After the phone call, Joe tells Miu the news. Uncharacteristically, Miu pauses her eating, but refrains from saying anything. Joe then praises Miu for her excellent cooking. For the first time, a signifier the viewers saw in the opening sequence (the shot of a dead woman in a Jaguar) aligns with a signified (Mary Ann, who died in a car accident) and generates an affective impact on Miu. In ‘Miu Kam-fung’, all signifiers are detached from the signifieds. In this sense, every shot is an im-sign (in the brutally objective sense of it), a semiotic unit that compels the viewers to observe the severance between the signifiers and the signifieds, and, eventually, sense the brutality of Joe’s and Miu’s disavowal of their affections and emotions. The viewers are therefore asked to see anew the consumerist world they live in and reflect upon how extraterritorial consumption of Euro-American commodities  – including these citations and re-performances of Godard’s images – e­ ffectively turns indifference, inhumanity and, in fact, the colonial pleasure of consuming those Chinese people across the border into a form of ritual that generates neither pleasure nor displeasure. In this sense, Miu’s pause is the only reaction shot – or in Deleuze’s term, ‘affectionimage’ – in the entire episode, a moment of pure affect that crystallises the horror of Miu, Joe and the viewers’ indifference toward traumas that they all manage to objectify.68 It is an instant at which the horrific reality

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 99 of consumerism itself – without any symbolic articulation – stares back at the viewers: or in Lacanian terms, the pre-symbolic ‘Real’ that is disorganised, unlivable and untenable.69

From Utopia to Horror: ‘The Boy from Vietnam’ Ann Hui, Shu Kei and Wong Chi are not modernists. Rather, they use the classical Hollywood paradigm to invite their viewers to live with characters who are reduced to a socio-politically deindividuated, desubjectivised and  deautonomised position. Giorgio Agamben calls such a position a bare life or homo sacer, a life identified by the rest of the community as an outsider, which can be kept alive, persecuted, ostracised or even killed without breaking the communal law.70 Julia Kristeva calls such a life abject. The abject is part of me (the subject) that I eject. Facing the abject, I feel disgusted and am eager to objectify it. Yet, it has once been part of me and it has once formed – and still does – a relationship with me.71 In biological terms, bodily fluids such as vomit, phlegm, excrement, blood and semen can be regarded by a subject as abject. In political terms, refugees, illegal immigrants, queers or even women are often perceived and treated by the larger community as such. Yet, becoming abject is not the end of all hopes. Instead, the abject figures in Hui’s works come to terms with their own extraterritorial positions and form alternative kinships with one another, thus suggesting that a new sense of agency can be generated from their state of deindividuation and desubjectivisation.72 ‘The Boy from Vietnam’, together with feature films Hu Yue de gushi [Wu Jyut dik gwusi or The Story of Woo Viet, 1981] and Touben nuhai [Tauban nouhoi or Boat People, 1982], are now known as Hui’s Vietnam trilogy.73 Hui’s trilogy was inspired by the influx of Vietnamese refugees (later renamed boatpeople) into Hong Kong from 1978 to 1989. After the Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, ethnic Chinese, especially middle-class families in the South, were increasingly targeted in the new government’s economic and political reforms. By 1978, many of them were sent to the New Economic Zones, remote areas where they were forced to clear landmines in order to cultivate the land. In May 1978, a large number of ethnic Chinese began to leave Vietnam by boat. Some of them reached Hong Kong directly or via Mainland China. Those who had relatives or were picked up at sea by vessels registered in Hong Kong could apply for permanent residency. Otherwise, they would stay in refugee camps for resettlement in Europe or North America. On 11 June 1979, there were 51,400 Vietnamese refugees waiting for resettlement, and only 3,400 were successfully resettled.74

100

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

In an interview (1983) she gave to Li Cheuk-to for the Dianying shuangzhoukan [Dinjing soengzauhon, Film Biweekly, later renamed City Entertainment Biweekly], the successor of Close-up, Hui confesses that she was a humanist who admired Roman Polanski. For her: He [Polanski] can use very traditional and classic means of expression to film classic subject matters, yet he has his own variations. His style is standard, yet very inventive . . . He is cinematically correct and elegant.75

Likewise, in his analysis of Boat People, Li also considers Hui a humanistic realist: Human beings suffer because of the pressure from the environment: this is the main theme of Ann Hui’s body of works . . . In ‘The Boy from Vietnam,’ Vietnamese settlers in Hong Kong sell themselves by becoming labourers and male sex workers . . . However, in spite of all these sufferings, Hui’s characters never feel hopeless. They always hold on to their human dignity and beliefs.76

Film scholars today may find it odd to call Ann Hui’s works ‘realistic’. Yet, in 1977, critic Law Wai-ming argued, ‘An ideal social-issue film should put the “human” at its centre, whereas the “issue” should be secondary. As long as [the director] is willing to explore [the human] internally and projects what they find externally, the social problem as a whole can be illuminated by the predicament of a single person.’77 For  Evans  Chan, Ann Hui, who grew up in Japan and went to film school in London, is always interested in the question of ‘rootlessness’, that is, someone who is either ostracised by a community or who has no choice but to leave that community and then settles down in a new community to which they have no sense of belonging.78 In this sense, the three young men in ‘The Boy from Vietnam’, Man (the boy), his cousin Hing-nin and Hing-nin’s friend Chung, all find themselves in such an abject and extraterritorial position, both politically and sexually. ‘The Boy from Vietnam’ begins with a dream sequence. Over the episode’s title, the viewers hear a Vietnamese-speaking male voice urging people to return to their houses, as the Republican soldiers are entering the village. The episode then cuts to a medium close-up of a young boy playing with a nón lá (conical leaf hat). As he looks up, it cuts to a close-up of a pair of running feet rushing into a house, followed by another close-up of a few mud-covered feet marching toward the camera. Then, in a long shot of a street, a troop of exhausted soldiers march from a distance toward the boy, who sits on the left of frame a few feet away from the camera. Then, in a medium close-up, the boy looks confusedly up at the soldiers.

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 101 After they are gone, in a long shot, the child gets up and runs away from the camera. As he approaches a house at the far end of the street, the episode cuts to a medium long shot of him walking up to its door. Then, in a close-up, the child’s hand hits the steel door, but nobody responds. The camera then suddenly cuts to an extreme close-up of a teenager’s (Man) face in a lying position. This first dream sequence is a vision of a clueless child who cannot make sense of what is happening. It is made up entirely of im-signs, that is, semiotic units of memories and dreams, which are pre-linguistic and pre-rational. Hence, the purpose of this sequence is not to tell a story that can be rationally deciphered, but to initiate an affect: one of confusion and abandonment. On one level, the boy in the dream is projected by Man (the dreamer) as a helpless child who is abandoned by the war and by himself (as the dreamer). On another level, Man also actively seeks a relationship with this abandoned child/self. Thus, the boy occupies precisely the abject position – he is posited by Man as the other, yet he is the traumatic core that constitutes Man’s ontological consistency. As the episode continues, Man turns out to be lying in the hold of a cargo ship with other refugees. Before they disembark, the trafficker (known in Hong Kong as setau or snakehead) asks each passenger to surrender one-half of their photograph. In the following scene, the snakehead will take the half-photograph of Man to his mother, who has been keeping the other half with her. Once the two sides of the photograph match each other, Man’s safety is considered confirmed and his mother would pay the snakehead for the rest of his passage. In the cargo hold, however, Man refuses to surrender his half-picture: the last material trace of his past, which, once surrendered, would return to the hands of his mother. Therefore, surrendering this half-picture can be understood as a return to the womb: a form of self-inflicted deindividuation, desubjectivisation and deautonomisation. It also marks his formal entry into abjecthood as a deterritorialised life. That evening, this affect of becoming abject is once again being conveyed in a dream. In this dream, Man and the viewers (re-) experience the sensation of being abandoned when his brother Chiu, who was supposed to travel with him on a fishing boat, jumped back into the sea in order to return to his wife he had left behind on the beach. Man is then left on the boat, drifting on the open sea. These dreams may be taken as memories. However, in psychoanalysis, memories are always revised for the purpose of addressing an individual’s traumatic experiences in the present, a process known by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) as Nachträglichkeit and by Jean Laplanche (1924–2012) as après coup (afterwardness). For Freud and Laplanche, a traumatic event is

102

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

always immediately disavowed by an individual who experiences it. Later, this individual would reconstruct their memory in order to symbolically articulate not the traumatic origin, which has already been erased and is therefore un-locatable, but to make sense of the traumatic experience in the present.79 In other words, by revising his memories of being abandoned, Man tries to come to terms with his current state of abjection, that is, his physical and psychic extraterritoriality. For Hui, Shu Kei and Wong, however, abjection is not the end of all hopes. Rather, when an extraterritorialised life condemned by one community tries to enter another one, only to find itself being condemned again, it can relate to other homines sacri via their shared state of abjection and form alternative kinships. The first of such kinships is developed between Man and Hing-nin. In his first entrance, Hing-nin can be identified by the viewers easily as a gay man. He has a fashionable Afro haircut and he wears a flamboyant blackand-white striped shirt unbuttoned to his chest and a necklace with a cross pendant. Hing-nin takes care of Man when he first settles down in Hong Kong. In their first evening living together, Hing-nin performs cạo gió on Man’s back. In a long shot of Hing-nin’s lounge (see Figure 2.9), Man, bare chested, sits merrily in front of Hing-nin, who wears an exuberant silk robe. The episode then cuts briefly to a close-up of the back of Man’s left shoulder, from Hing-nin’s point-of-view. Hing-nin uses a coin to gently scrape the skin of Man, so that toxic substances can be induced from Man’s pores. After that, back in a long shot, Hing-nin tenderly teaches Man to speak Cantonese. The scene generates in the viewers an affect of intimacy: mutual understanding, acceptance and care. Attentive viewers may even notice that on top of the television on the left of frame, there is a photograph of Hing-nin and another man embracing each other. If we read this detail semiologically, Man’s half-picture, already surrendered and abandoned, is now symbolically transferred to this picture and completed as an image of an alternative kinship. In the episode, Man is supposed to be at the age of eighteen, although Hui casts a teenager who looks younger than Man’s age. In the viewers’ eyes, Man and his intimacy with Yau-hing can be read as both pre-sexual and sexual. By pre-sexual, I do not mean in the Freudian sense of being pre-genital, that is, oral or anal. Rather, I simply refer to a stage of sexual development in which the individual has yet to associate intimacy necessarily with sexuality. On the one hand, one can say that Hui, Shu Kei and Wong make a compromise by disavowing Man and Hing-nin’s sexuality. On the other hand, by enticing the viewers to navigate between the pre-sexual and the sexual, Hui, Shu Kei and Wong question how the

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 103

Figure 2.9  In ‘The Boy from Vietnam’, Hing-nin performs cạo gió on Man, which conveys an affect of same-sex intimacy.

boundaries between kinship and sexual relationship are supposed to be defined and territorialised. For the observant viewers, however, sexuality are always present in the household. One evening, Hing-nin receives a phone call and quickly consents to meet the caller. Given Hing-nin’s flamboyant appearance, the viewers would be able to guess that he may be a sex worker. When Hing-nin leaves the flat, the episode cuts to a long shot of his dining room. As he opens the door on his way out, the light from the corridor outside illuminates the room for a second. The viewers can see a long cowboy boot leaning against a chair in the frame’s foreground, a direct reference to Midnight Cowboy [ John Schlesinger, 1965], a film about a young Texan man Joe Buck ( Jon Voight) who struggles to survive in New York by being a sex worker who serves clients of both genders. In the following scene, when Hing-nin returns home from work, he proposes to bring Man to the United States, where they can be free. Man reacts violently because his sister was killed by a GI. That night, Man has one of the most peculiar dreams in the entire episode. In this dream, a group of undertakers carry the blood-stained body of Man’s sister down

104

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

a staircase in a narrow alley and put it into a coffin. Then, the camera cuts to a series of close-ups of the mourners, including Man, who look at the body stoically. One middle-age man imbibes a mouthful of wine and then spurts it out over the corpse several times, supposedly to purify the body. Seen in a close-up with details of his saliva drooling out of his mouth, this purifying ritual generates disgust – yet, it uncannily invokes the image of ejaculation. How shall we interpret this dream? This sequence is triggered by Hingnin’s suggestion of leaving Hong Kong and immigrating to the United States. In one register, this means that Hing-nin plans to uproot Man from Hong Kong, a place to which he has just begun to develop a sense of belonging by acquiring its language (Cantonese). In another register, Hing-nin’s proposal implies an opportunity for them to foster a new life as kinsmen (what we may now call a ‘gay couple’) in a land where same-sex intimacy is more accepted. This dream intricately connects Man’s fear of abjection (his sister’s corpse, the stoic undertakers and the disgusting ritual or purification) to his desire (orgasm and ejaculation). In this sense, the perturbation generated by the prospect of uprooting and resettlement is delicately mixed with the potential joy and pleasure such resettlement promises. Yet, such pleasure is also the source of another anxiety: one about a form of kinship that is yet to be named and understood. Hing-nin’s proposal will eventually be thwarted. Toward the end of the episode, Hing-nin visits Hong Kong Immigration. At the reception, he tells an officer that he wishes to change his place of birth from China to Vietnam. When he arrived in Hong Kong, he lied to Immigration that he was a Chinese citizen, so that his permanent residency application could be processed more quickly. Unfortunately, the US Consulate has just informed him that he cannot immigrate to the United States without any proof of his refugee status. In response, the officer threatens to sue Hingnin for perjury, which makes him realise that he has been caught between places – Vietnam, China, Hong Kong and the United States. All these communities exercise their respective authorities over him as a bare life by ostracising, managing or even persecuting him. His political extraterritoriality disables him from moving to the United States, a place where he and Man may have an opportunity to foster, define and territorialise their kinship. The second kinship is developed between Man and Chung. Chung meets Man outside his hotel’s lift, as Chung is putting up posters there to solicit Vietnamese writers for an art magazine he edits. Chung was trained as a painter. Yet, he now works in a studio to fabricate mass-produced oil paintings for tourists. In contrast to Hing-nin’s flamboyant appearance,

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 105 Chung has a reserved demeanour, with a ruggedly handsome face that always holds back his emotions. One day at lunch, Man runs into Chung in a restaurant. Chung invites Man to visit his studio. On the day of Man’s visit, Chung takes Man to a canteen for coffee. In a long take in which the camera slowly dollies across the canteen to a medium close-up of the two men, Chung divulges his story to Man. It turns out that Chung was a soldier from the PRC, who was sent to Vietnam during the 1960s. After the War, he stayed in Vietnam, but was soon persecuted by the new government. He then fled to Macau via Mainland China. From Macau, he made two attempts to swim to Hong Kong. After being caught during his first attempt, he tried again and settled down in the city illegally. At this moment, the camera zooms in to Chung’s extreme close-up, thus allowing the viewers to sense the intimacy that Man must have felt at this point. After a long pause, Chung tells Man that he finds his position ironic. He was first sent to the front by the PRC in the name of helping Vietnam. He then found himself being persecuted by the very government he helped to establish. After that, he returned to China as a Vietnamese refugee and settled down in Hong Kong as an illegal immigrant. This close-up therefore invites the viewers to develop a kinship with or even desire for an abject life that embodies extraterritoriality. After coffee, Man and Chung walk arm-in-arm in a night market. Yet, such a utopic moment is short-lived. Later that evening, Chung spots a female sex worker between two empty stalls. Chung walks past her and then he looks back. In a long shot that slowly dollies away from the woman, Chung and the viewers see her. This young woman is lit with a dim blue light from the front and dressed in a red blouse. She stares at Chung attentively and longingly (see Figure 2.10). Being abandoned between empty stalls in the middle of the night, she appears to be a spectre that has nothing to do but to wait: to occupy the time it takes for her abjection to end. After Chung and Man say goodbye to each other in front of a restaurant, Chung sees two police officers pressing a pedestrian against a wall to ask him for his identity card. As Chung is an illegal immigrant, he does not carry one. Quietly, Chung returns to the empty stalls and approaches the sex worker. The long tracking shot of the sex worker seen from Chung’s point-ofview is a highly precarious moment. In one register, the camera movement embodies an exchange of looks between two homines sacri – the sex worker and Chung – who have reached a momentary mutual ­understanding. Therefore, Chung’s return to the sex worker can be understood as a longing for kinship between two bare lives that have been extraterritorialised and stripped of their humanity and legal statuses. Yet, what is going

106

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Figure 2.10  In a night market, Chung spots a ghostly sex worker, who stares at him longingly.

to happen is a sexual transaction, an act that enables Chung to perform heterosexual masculinity by precisely abjecting a woman. This sequence makes sensible that at an extraterritorial position, gender asymmetry is still in operation. In fact, in this case, the abjected (Chung) disavows his state of abjection by abjecting another extraterritorialised life. In this light, we are all abject, only that we abject one another in order to disavow our own abjection and perform our subjectivity. In a way, ‘The Boy from Vietnam’ can be understood as a Bildungsroman. In this light, Man needs to learn what the viewers have already learned from Chung in his encounter with this sex worker. This is done within two moments of symbolic transference and reversal: (1) the symbolic transference of Chung’s encounter with the sex worker to Man’s dreamt vision of the same woman; and (2) the symbolic transference of Man’s earlier dream about a man spurting out wine to purify a dead body to Chung’s memory of a dead body spurting out brain matters to profane his face. The first transference is triggered by Man’s accidental discovery that Hing-nin is a sex worker when he delivers a painting to a hotel. That evening, at a pier, Man tells Chung that Hing-nin’s profession is

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 107 s­omething  that is too disgusting to name, and he wishes to live with Chung instead. By the end of their conversation, the episode cuts to another dream sequence of Man’s. In this dream, Man is a private guarding a colonial-style building with an old soldier. This old soldier is eating a dish of rice with spring onions, whereas Man is eating a dish of rice with chicken, thus suggesting that the old soldier might have given Man his ration of meat, that he might be a father-figure for Man. In the dream, the old soldier tells Man that the Northerners are about to march into Saigon  and they are going to see peace again. But then, the old soldier asks Man, who was born during the War, if he knows what peace means. While the old soldier rambles on, Man looks around. The camera emulates his point-of-view by turning from the old soldier to the wall behind them, on which his shadow is projected. It then continues to rotate 180 degrees to a long shot of a woman (the sex worker in the red dress), now wearing an immaculate white dress, calmly walking onto her balcony and watering her plant. Like her previous appearance, this woman is lit with a ghostly blue light, with a white light from the interior of the flat highlighting her side. The camera then zooms in gently to her medium close-up (see Figure 2.11). It then cuts to a medium shot of Man staring at her.

Figure 2.11  In Man’s penultimate dream sequence, he sees the sex worker, seemingly unharmed by war, leisurely watering a plant on her balcony.

108

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

The lighting on the sex worker in white recalls the viewers’ memory of the lighting of her in red (transference and reversal). This time, we do not know her profession and she does not return Man’s gaze. In other words, she seems to be posited by the camera as Man’s object. Her peaceful and nonchalant demeanour and her clean and elegant appearance, framed under the gaze of a teenage soldier, assumes an ethereal quality. She embodies the affect of peace, a form of normativity that is completely unharmed by the War. In other words, she embodies an idealised subjecthood prior to her being violated by the War and extraterritorialisation. Yet, this woman never looks back at Man. Thus, this supposedly homely, warm and soothing vision is not Man’s object at all, as it forms no relationship whatsoever with Man as a subject. In psychoanalytical terms, she is the phallic mother (the perfect embodiment of pre-war and pre-extraterritorial peace and unity), an ideal to which he is supposed to return. Yet, she seems to form no relationship whatsoever with Man. In this sense, the trauma Man needs to address is his inability to enter subjectivity – as a political subject with a sense of communal belonging and as a sexual subject that can assume an agency over his desire. This perturbation is articulated in the second symbolic transference and reversal. One evening, Chung and Man have hotpot on a seaside pavement. Chung confesses to Man that he cannot return to China because of a traumatic experience. One evening during the War, his unit was under attack. He and the other soldiers all lay down on the ground to play dead. A few US soldiers walked around the ground to make sure that they were all dead. Suddenly, his friend next to him was shot on the arm by a stray bullet. He could not help screaming. A GI then shot his friend in the head and the brain matter spurted onto Chung’s face. Chung describes his sensation as a moment of profanation by spurts of warm and slimy fluids that still seemed to be alive when they hit his face. Such a graphic description invokes the sensation of one’s face being hit by spurts of semen (a transference of the purifying ritual earlier, and a reversal from purification to profanation). Chung then concludes: ‘That’s why I can’t go back. I can’t go back to it.’ In this light, Chung’s inability to confront his own desire for same-sex intimacy (his present trauma) is intricately connected to his own sense of being profaned by abject matters (his past trauma). Or in a way, his past trauma is revised and recounted so as to explain his fear of being profaned ever again by other abject matters (semen and same-sex desire) and of his status of abjection. ‘The Boy’ has a double ending. By the end of the episode, in a voiceover, Man tells the viewers that Hing-nin was found dead in a hotel room after he was strangled by a male customer. Meanwhile, Immigration

­

b r e a king t he wa v e 109 found out Chung’s illegal status and sent him back to Macau. The narrative proper ends with Man standing at the front gate of the Hong Kong Macau Ferry Terminal, from where he watches Chung being escorted across the border – albeit with a dignified smile. After that, the episode ends with Man’s final fantasy, in which he and the old soldier are bombed to pieces in a trench. This absurd fantasy manifests Man’s desire to put the past behind him, a completion of an act he was asked to perform at the beginning of the episode: to surrender the last trace of his memory in order to embrace his deindividuation, desubjectivisation and deautonomisation as is.

Extraterritorial Sensibility In this chapter, I discussed three different means by which women artists, actors/characters, spectators and viewers speak through the cinema and television as authors. For Tang Shu-hsuen, women can speak intersubjectively by rewriting the heteronormative language that shapes and constitutes commercial cinema. They do so by bringing to the fore the tension between Euro-American aesthetics, which they unlearn and reconfigure, and medieval Chinese aesthetics, which they initially appropriate and eventually violate. In so doing, they constitute a new cinematic language that enables the artists, characters and spectators to converse in a free indirect discourse, one that privileges not only the visible, but also what remains invisible and can therefore only be sensed and touched. Meanwhile, Joyce Chan and Patrick Tam challenge the addresser– message–addressee mode of communication that characterises mass tele­ vision by self-reflexive narrational devices. Moreover, with these devices, they make sensible the horror of extraterritorial consumerism. By misrecognising the power of consumption as individuation, subjectivisation and agency (authority), extraterritorial feminism compels women – and men as well – to turn the horror and cruelty of consumption and consumerist culture into a ritual that generates neither pleasure nor displeasure. In ‘Miu Kam Fung’, consumerism severs the relationship between the signifiers and the signifieds, devoid of any affective and emotional impact. Yet, when those affections and emotions long disavowed by Miu and her husband Joe gradually resurface, the viewers come face-to-face with the horror of colonial capitalism and the extraterritorial femininity it constitutes. In comparison, the work of Ann Hui, Shu Kei and Wong Chi may not sound as modernist and revolutionary. Yet, ‘The Boy from Vietnam’ can be understood as a Bildungsroman, one in which a pre-sexual/sexual

110

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

utopia of same-sex kinship is gradually dismantled by the terror of heteronormativity. For Man, Hing-nin and Chung, such terror is further displaced to and revised through the horror of war and political violence. Hui, Shu Kei and Wong structure the entire episode in the classical Hollywood paradigm. Nonetheless, by framing the episode as a vision of a protagonist who occupies an ambiguous position between pre-sexuality and sexuality, and a group of characters who are deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised by war and heteronormativity, the viewers are asked to rehearse and experience their process of being abjected, and of performing subjectivity by abjecting others. In so doing, the episode carries the viewers from a position where acceptance, acknowledgement and security are gradually established out of the ashes of war, to a point where these young men are once again haunted by political violence and homophobia. By the end, the televisual image, composed by a series of im-signs, engages the viewers as a free indirect discourse. But then, we may still want to ask, is Shu Kei apt to point out that these cinematic and televisual works, which seek to make those cultural workers and spectators who occupy an extraterritorial position speak, ultimately a petit bourgeois preoccupation? We may want to remember that these works from the early Hong Kong New Wave are best understood not as proletarian or revolutionary acts. Rather, they are artistic creations conceived by and made for the subalterns. This is precisely the ­position that most Hong Kongers found themselves occupying. They did not ­consider themselves as being socio-politically oppressed all the time, as they enjoyed a certain level of imaginary agency and autonomy from their extraterritorial position. In fact, they took such imaginary agency and autonomy as their individuality, subjectivity and authorship. Yet, being at the subaltern position, they also have a certain awareness of their colonised status and of their double banishment by those political authorities that claimed to occupy them. We may condemn these works as petit bourgeois preoccupations that are still seated in the colonial and capitalist dispositif, but that is precisely the point: there is no escape from that dispositif unless the entire generation is turned into ashes – or unless they could find ways to speak from gaps and interstices that somehow allow them to breathe – to leak out a subtle cry, in hopes that their voices can be heard and treated seriously.

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 111

C H A PT E R 3

The Time it Takes for Time to End

From 1979 to 1997, extraterritoriality was no longer a spontaneous awareness. As a juridico-political position, it was made tangible by the contestation between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United Kingdom (UK) over the sovereignty of Hong Kong after the lease of the New Territories were to expire in 1997. Then, in 1989, Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality was again brought to the fore by the Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing.1 As a socio-political affect, it was felt, on a dayto-day basis, by ordinary people who had no choice but to live under the pressure of a high degree of political uncertainty about the city’s ­extraterritorial status, informed and mediated by a complex, permeating but also volatile media environment. Through media, one seeks to make sense of a socio-political and cultural milieu that defies any sense of rationality and coherence. This chapter is about how extraterritoriality was elevated from the level of spontaneous awareness to a fully formed political consciousness. I argue that the socio-political unpredictability, irresolution and disquietude during this period created a milieu in which individuation, subjectivisation and autonomisation were impossible, an environment constituted not by a process of becoming, but by a perpetual failure of becoming: a present with no future.2 In other words, time ended, only that we could not feel it.3 In post-Lacanian terms, a position in which the process of individuation and subjectivisation is constantly interrupted, frustrated or even preempted is by definition unlivable. Yet, it is also a (non-)state from which a new symbolic order – a new mode of existence – can be imagined.4 As we shall see, Hong Kongers defied the unlivability of their desubjectivised and deindividuated (non-)state by dwelling in what Giorgio Agamben would call καιρός (kairos): the time it takes for time to end.5 In the following pages, I first share with you my personal memory of how it felt to live in Hong Kong in the 1980s. The reason for commencing my discussion with a personal note is: this chapter is not only about what

112

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

happened or how things happened, but how I felt and how my affect, as a Hong Konger, was negotiated through media. I then offer a historical account of the Sino-British negotiation of the future of Hong Kong from 1979 to 1984 and explicate how it is best understood as a critical moment at which the traumatic affect associated with Hong Kong’s extraterritorial  position was intensified. After that, I analyse how such a traumatic experience was actively negotiated by a kaleidoscopic media environment  – newspapers and magazines, television, radio and mainstream cinema  – from both industrial and cultural perspectives. Eventually, I depart from most scholars’ tendency to focus on Hong Kong’s successful mainstream film and television industries by examining how artists responded to these relationships in an emerging medium of the time: video art. I do so by scrutinising the works of artists from an organisation called Videotage, originally founded as part of the Phoenix Ciné Club in 1985.6 I am drawn to video art during this period not only because it further developed the experimental ethos of the women (and in the 1980s, lesbian and gay) filmmakers discussed in the previous chapter, but also because these artists actively explored their deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised (non-)state as an intersection of three modes of extraterritoriality: as Hong Kongers, as women, and as lesbians and gay men.

A Present that Has No Future Political consciousness and affects are not the same thing, yet they are intricately connected. In Yogācāra Buddhism, for instance, vijñapati (consciousness) is not a formation, but a name given to two functions made possible by an assemblage of cause-and-effect chains: the ability to differentiate (for example, between the self and the other, subject and object, individual and collective) and the ability, based on the result of sensory differentiation, to enable all phenomena to manifest themselves – including the sentient body and the milieu in which it dwells. Meanwhile, vedanās are affects that arise and are extinguished, from one temporal point-instant to another, when our sensory-perceptual organs come into contact with the sense data in the surrounding milieu. One can say that affects are generated because of the two key functions that consciousness is able to perform. But then, one can also say that affects put into operation those functions that in turn give form to consciousness.7 Therefore, in order to conceptualise what extraterritorial consciousness is, we need to start from the affects generated from being in an extraterritorial position. To do this, I would like to offer you an account of my personal memory,

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 113 including elements that are not politically correct, and I invite you to let your sentient body respond to my narration. I was twelve in 1984. My parents wanted a divorce earlier that year (something fashionable to do about that era), but they decided not to by that summer. After a painful two-year negotiation, in April, the PRC and the  UK governments finally agreed upon a plan on the future of Hong Kong, as the lease of the New Territories was to expire on 30 June 1997. Eventually, the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed on 19 December 1984, which promised to turn Hong Kong into a nebulously  defined political entity in 1997: Special Administrative Region (SAR). The first Legislative Council (LegCo) election was to take place in 1985. Our political future remained uncertain. Everything in life seemed to have an expiration date: 30 June 1997. Everybody in Hong Kong had friends and relatives who were about to immigrate to Canada or Australia. Likewise, we met friends who had recently left the PRC in search of a better life in the capitalist enclave. Our right of abode in the UK was taken away by an act of Parliament in Westminster in 1981 out of the Conservatives’ fear that the prospect of a handover of the sovereignty over Hong Kong to the PRC would inevitably trigger an exodus to Great Britain. We were told that the jobs of the British working class were at stake; but immigrating to the UK, for most Hong Kongers, was an extremely unattractive prospect. Our gross domestic product (GDP) was higher than our British counterparts’ and we had cooler models of Walkman, videogames and personal computers than theirs – fresh from Japan and the United States. The Hong Kong currency, recently backed by the US dollar, became a guarantee of our economic prosperity. Meanwhile, China was our closest neighbour. It was supposed to be our ancestral and cultural root; yet it was considered a ‘communist country’  about which we knew close to nothing. At school, Mainland immigrants were often laughed at for their ‘funny accent’ when they spoke Cantonese and their lack of communication skills in English. Yet, they were secretly admired for their endurance, hard work, mathematics and sports. My grandmother, who married my grandfather after the war, received letters from my grandfather’s legitimate wife in his hometown in China, asking for a refrigerator, a television and some Hong Kong currency. She also wished to have a reunion with my grandfather in Guangzhou after having lost communication with him since 1949. Of course, my grandmother said no. She did not want to see them; she did not want to travel to China.

114

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Meanwhile, my parents would take me to see at least two new movies per week, mostly comedic films with exciting – albeit formulaic – action sequences. When we went home, we would watch the newest television melodramas, historical epics and martial arts extravaganzas. We did not care too much about Star Wars [George Lucas, 1977–present] as Hollywood was nothing but background noise. We enjoyed our own pop music sung by Danny Chan (1958–93), Alan Tam (1950–), Leslie Cheung (1956–2003) and Anita Mui (1963–2003), while keeping an eye on David Bowie (1947–2016), Madonna, Pet Shop Boys and Cyndi Lauper. By the end of the decade, Commercial Radio II (now FM 90.3) even declared itself free of any Anglo-American music. We were proud of our local creativity. When we travelled to the Mainland, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, we watched our own films and television programmes and listened to our own music. Yet, we looked up to everything Japanese: their pop songs, matinee idols, pink pornos, anime and manga – and for the adults: cars and hi-fi systems. Meanwhile, if we wanted a dose of ‘high culture’, we flipped through the pages of City Magazine, where we could find a review of the new installation of Bill Viola in New York, a new performance choreographed by Pina Bausch (1940–2009) in Munich, a debate on the films of Wim Wenders and Derek Jarman (1942–94) at the Berlinale, a report from someone who participated in an Act Up demonstration in Manhattan, and, of course, the date and venue of the next screening of video arts at Videotage and the new performance of Zuni Icosahedron (an organisation founded by artist Danny Yung, devoted to experimental theatre and art). But then, we were never certain what was going to happen tomorrow. Everything was bound to disappear, but not yet. Toward the end of the decade, we learned from Dead Poets Society [Peter Weir, 1989] that this was called carpe diem (seize the day). In that same year, we saw on television live footage of the Tiananmen crackdown, accompanied by mobile-phone reports by Hong Kong journalists who were running for their lives. This was after approximately 1.5 million people in Hong Kong went out to the street to support the protesters and hunger strikers in Beijing by the end of May. China was no longer a foreign country to us. Rather, we realised that we had always been subsumed under it, yet we remained extraterritorial to it. Yet, such extraterritoriality was bound to end or to be fundamentally reconfigured, precisely in 1997, an anxiety that compelled us to learn to enjoy a present that had no future. It was not a culture of becoming, but of the failure of becoming: extraterritoriality was the time it took for time to end. *

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 115

As my brief narration illustrates, affects are never an assemblage of unified, consistent and rational sensorial responses. They are intimately generated by a sentient body at a crossroads of intensely conflicting energies. In return, these contesting bodily and psychic responses define a life’s physical and mental boundaries: they inform this life where its body begins and ends in relation to the surrounding environment, they shape its sense of individuality and subjectivity, and they provide portals and bridges for inter-subjectival connections.8 Affects often defy verbal descriptions and, hence, it is extraordinarily difficult for scholars to depict them and communicate them to their readers. To complicate matters, a verbal description of an affect is inevitably done retrospectively, thus involving a retroactive reconstruction of that affect in the analyst’s imagination.9 As Alison Landsberg argues, one can only come close to reliving it through the mediation of a film, a book or a piece of art, which can provide sensorial clues for the body to reactivate part of the affect without asking the spectator or beholder to revisit the traumatic experience in its totality.10 As illustrated by Thomas Elsaesser, Landsberg and Vivian Sobchack, all this has been well recognised in the studies of key traumatic moments in Euro-American history: the Shoah, the Vietnam War, the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1917–63) and September 11th.11 Critical analyses of these events and their media representations can at most draw empathy between the readers and those who lived through these traumatic events. Yet, this issue has never been raised by any studies of Hong Kong in the 1980s mostly because the complex affective structure of this era has never been acknowledged as traumatic. Hence, we read about this period often with the aid of verbal reductions, which prescribe the structure of feeling experienced by Hong Kongers as anxiety, anger, frustration, uncertainty, helplessness, hopelessness and distrust. But affects often lie in the interstices between these clinically defined affections (embodiments of affects) and emotions. To complicate matters, affects are not directly generated by an event that we may commonly identify as their ‘origin’ (in this case, the crisis regarding the future of Hong Kong). Rather, they have always been in the substratum of a polis’ collective psyche, and a socio-political trauma is best understood as a critical moment that allows these affects to manifest themselves in an intensified form.

The Unanswered Question 1997 What is now popularly known as the ‘1997’ problem was raised by Governor Murray MacLehose (1917–2000; in office 1971–82) during his visit to Beijing from March to April 1979. On 29 March, he was received

116

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

by Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping (1904–97), by then the de facto leader of the Communist Party of China (CPC). At this meeting, MacLehose requested Deng to reassure investors that an arrangement would be made regarding the sovereign authority and administrative power over Hong Kong after the lease of the New Territories to Great Britain was to expire in 1997 (see chapter one). In response, Deng stated: After the sovereignty over Hong Kong is returned to China after 1997, Hong Kong will still be able to operate under capitalism. Historically, we have always insisted that the sovereign authority over Hong Kong belongs to the People’s Republic of China. Yet, Hong Kong has had a special status. Hong Kong being a part of China is not a debatable question.12

In his report to Whitehall, MacLehose claims that Deng told him to ‘ask the investors in Hong Kong to put their hearts at ease’.13 But on what terms? Reading the documents released by Whitehall to the National Archives, one must say that CPC’s position had been very clear from the beginning: in 1997, the PRC was to assume zhuquan (sovereign authority) and zhiquan (right to govern) over Hong Kong. To a certain degree, this was well understood and deemed legitimate by MacLehose and British Ambassador at the time, Percy Cradock (1923–2010; in office 1978–83).14 Yet, Foreign Secretary Peter Carrington (1919–2018; in office 1979–82) advised Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013; in office 1979–90) to adopt a hard-line policy: The proposed solution to the land lease problem is that the Hong Kong Government should grant leases without a fixed term and alter existing leases to the same effect. At the same time, any legal obstacle on the British side to the Governor continuing to administer the New Territories after 1997 would be removed by an Order in Council. The Order would not have to be laid before Parliament. These moves would make it possible for British administration to continue beyond 1997 if the Chinese so wish. But they do not contradict the Chinese position on Hong Kong. Nor do they call for any response from the Chinese or any action by them. Nevertheless, we need to know that the Chinese are not going to give a public rebuff before going ahead.15

Carrington therefore proposed that the Conservative government, by means of an executive order, should formalise Hong Kong’s extraterritorial status: a Chinese territory under British administration. This would underline the British position in the entire process of Sino-British negotiation until, as Nancy Bernkopf Tucker claims, April 1984.16 Such a proposal was based on two assumptions. First, juridically, as the Home Office’s Deputy Legal Advisor A. R. Rushford claimed, the annexation

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 117

of the New Territories was first legitimated by an Order in Council in 1898, before it was ratified by the Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong on 9 June 1898. It would therefore, according to Rushford’s understanding of the international law, only require another Order in Council to extend this lease in perpetuity, while fully recognising China’s sovereign authority over the land.17 In other words, Carrington held on to the nineteenth-century notion of a Eurocentric world order, according to which, maintenance of such an order in the mare liberum (free sea, that is, any European ‘properties’ outside Europe) only required a European nation-state to act unilaterally. This view was corroborated in a discussion by Richard D. Clift, Head of Hong Kong and General Department (in office 1979–84), who alerted the Prime Minister to the long-term implications of the extraterritorial settlement on the rest of the Commonwealth. In a letter to Thatcher, he cites diplomat Timothy Daunt: If the Chinese are prepared . . . to have talks on Hong Kong, it is likely that one major concession they would ask for would involve British acknowledgement of their sovereignty over the Territory. There are obvious political difficulties. There could be implications for other Dependent Territories, in particular the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar. But this should be containable – a lease-back in return for acknowledgement of Argentine sovereignty has in fact already been canvassed for the Falklands. So far as Hong Kong is concerned, there is no question of avoiding some sort of change in 1997. A concession on sovereignty would therefore be a price worth paying for the removal of uncertainty and the maintenance of a form of British administration for as long as possible beyond 1997.18

Along this line of discussion, politicians at Whitehall and diplomats overseas did not entirely give up the idea of maintaining both sovereign authority and administrative right over Hong Kong until Thatcher met Deng in Beijing in September 1982, a visit that triggered a historically unprecedented plummeting of the value of the Hong Kong dollar. For instance, in preparation for her visit, Thatcher held a meeting at 10 Downing Street with Edward Youde (1924–86), former Ambassador to China (in office 1974–8) and Governor of Hong Kong (in office 1982–6), Cradock and Alan E. Donald, Assistant Under-Secretary of State (Asia and Pacific; in office 1980–4). Thatcher and her advisors would have preferred a continuation of both sovereign authority and administrative right over Hong Kong. However, in fear of an exodus of Hong Kongers to the UK, which was already pre-empted by taking away their right of abode in Great Britain by Chapter 61 of the British Nationality Act 1981, they agreed that the Prime Minister should focus on keeping a British administration in Hong Kong after 1997.19

118

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

MacLehose regarded the Nationality Act in 1981 a fatal blow to the confidence of Hong Kongers in the UK. It practically undid his attempt to build a sense of belonging among Hong Kongers to the Commonwealth through social reforms in the 1970s. In response to MacLehose’s concerns, Donald replied that taking away Hong Kongers’ right of abode in the UK was crucial in putting pressure on the Chinese government. It would do so by indicating that the PRC was responsible for the future of approximately five million people (including ‘white’ and South Asian residents). He wrote, ‘Confidence in Hong Kong cannot from a practical point of view be based on promises or half promises that any major group of its inhabitants will automatically become British if there is a Chinese takeover.’ In other words, Donald firmly believed that colonised subjects were not British in the first place, despite the fact that they were considered as such legally prior to 1981.20 This point was reiterated on Hong Kong radio and television during the parliamentary debate on the Nationality Act, which triggered a resentment against British colonialism during this crisis. On the one hand, during this entire process of negotiation, the Conservative government in the UK was supposed to speak for the people in Hong Kong, especially the educated elite and the businesspeople. On the other hand, the Nationality Act clarified pre-emptively that Hong Kong had never been regarded as a British territory in the first place. Thus, Hong Kongers felt strongly that they were occupied by a colonial power that imposed a juridical affiliation with Hong Kong simply as a financial source, with all intention to ostracise its depoliticised lives outside Great Britain and the Commonwealth. Carrington’s second assumption was that the UK had no vested interest in Hong Kong as a financial hub. Rather, the PRC, which desperately needed foreign currencies after the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), should do everything they could to ensure the city’s stability and prosperity – precisely by agreeing to a continuation of British administration or even sovereignty. Scottish taipan (business leaders of Indo-European descent in Hong Kong) John Keswick even claimed on 27 October 1981 that the PRC was so short of cash that it would be willing to lease Hong Kong to the UK as a deposit for at least a hundred years.21 This form of speculative bravado, uncorroborated by any data and in defiance of specialist opinions, interestingly dominated the Conservatives’ rhetoric. For instance, the idea of allowing the UK to continue governing Hong Kong after 1997 was conveyed by Cradock to the Beijing government as early as 2 September 1979, which Deng called ‘inappropriate and unnecessary’.22 In a telegram dated 24 September 1979, Cradock complains that Deng’s reply was

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 119 ‘­disappointing’ and the thought of proposing ‘continuing administrative powers might well stick in the Chinese gullets’. He continues: The Chinese appear to be unwilling to understand the need for British legislative measures (as opposed to general Chinese statements) in order to reassure investors. They appear to wish to keep their options open and to avoid a situation in which the British are seen to be taking the lead on the future of the colony and China acquiesces. They seem particularly nervous about the effect of this abroad. Here they may be thinking of their image in non-aligned countries, but they will also have in mind the effect on their relations with Taiwan.23

Cradock’s observation that leaders of the CPC were nervous was further corroborated by an effective silence on the issue by Premier Hua Guofeng (1921–2008; in office 1978–81) during his visit to 10 Downing Street on 1 November 1979.24 Retrospectively, we now know that Hua’s quietude came from his dicey position within the party and the state leadership and an uncertainty about how well China’s economic reforms were going to fare. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, with the arrest of the Gang of Four on 6 October, Hua and Deng were engaged in a power struggle. The former sought to restore a 1950s-style planned economy and partystate institution, whereas the latter proposed a gaige kaifang (reform and open) policy by introducing elements of market economy into China’s socialist system. From 18 December to 22 December 1978, the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CPC adopted Deng’s proposal and Deng became the party’s de facto leader.25 By the time Hua visited 10 Downing Street, the CPC faced many uncertainties. Earlier that year, the PRC reinstated its diplomatic relationship with the United States with the implicit goal of resolving the ‘Taiwan issue’.26 According to a set of written notes by MacLehose, Deng first communicated his intention to turn Taiwan into a form of special economic zone to the US Congressional delegation in July 1978. Then, in January 1979, he told another US delegation that as a special economic zone, Taiwan could even retain its own military forces.27 In April 1979, Deng and Liao Chengzhi (1908–83), Head of the Hong Kong and Macau Office, indicated that the future of Hong Kong could be settled in the same manner.28 By that time, Taiwan had just completed its Ten Major Construction Projects and became one of the rising economies in East and Southeast Asia. In July 1979, the Central Committee of the CPC established four special economic zones in the Guangdong and Fujian provinces, where a higher degree of market economy was exercised.29 Yet, the success of these zones was not confirmed until Premier Zhao Ziyang (1919–2005;

120

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

in office 1980–7) visited them from 15 August to 18 August 1981 on his way to Singapore. According to Hong Kong political commentator Hu Ju-ren, in October 1981, Ye Jianying (1897–1986), Chair of the Standing Committee of the People’s Congress (in office 1978–83), declared the ‘nine-point proposal of unifying Taiwan’ in this manner. A year later, the principle of resolving the ‘1997 problem’ by turning Hong Kong into a special administrative region was proposed at the Twelfth Congress of the CPC in September 1982.30 The Sino-British negotiation, which took place after Thatcher’s visit to Beijing in September 1982 and ended with the signing of the Joint Declaration in December 1984, was largely stalemated by two sides that held on to proposals with no common ground. Even before her visit, the lack of any prospect of resolving the 1997 issue had worried business leaders. For example, Hong Kong’s oldest liberal political party, the Reform Club (1949–95), produced a lengthy report in 1981 for Whitehall’s consideration.31 Industrialist Pao Yue-kong (1918–91) wrote to Thatcher on 13 August 1982, alerting her that sovereignty was no laughing matter and that the best way to guarantee business investments in Hong Kong and the UK was to accept China’s proposal to set Hong Kong as a ‘zone of exception’.32 On 8 September 1982, five unofficial (non-­governmentofficial) members of the Executive and Legislative Councils of Hong Kong, accompanied by Governor Youde, had lunch with Thatcher to convey Hong Kongers’ anxiety to Whitehall.33 Later, business tycoon Lawrence Kadoorie (1899–1993) wrote to Thatcher on 31 December 1982, urging her to abrogate the unequal treaties signed between the Qing empire (1644–1911) and the UK during the nineteenth century and to give up seeking continual sovereign authority over Hong Kong.34 By the end of 1982, Hong Kong politicians, journalists and public figures began to complain that the opinions of Hong Kongers were not taken into account during the negotiation. On 21 January 1983, Youde wrote impatiently that the general public in Hong Kong should remain uninformed, since the settlement for the future of Hong Kong should be a  diplomatic, rather than a democratic, matter.35 On 22 June 1983, unofficial members of the Executive Council met Deng, who told them dismissively that in his eyes they did not represent the people of Hong Kong and therefore their opinions did not matter.36 During the entire negotiation process, Hong Kongers felt: (1) deindividuated, that is, being forced to become dependent on two contesting higher authorities that both sought to exercise power over them, yet abandon them at a position outside their juridico-political terrains; (2) desubjectivised, that is, being stripped of their colonial subjectivity

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 121

e­stablished under MacLehose’s administration, political subjectivity under Thatcher’s pre-emptive stripping of their citizenship, national subjectivity under Deng’s dismissive comment that Hong Kongers had no place in a discussion of their own future; and (3) deautonomised, that is, being compelled to consign their own political future to two competing political powers whose sole concerns were their own rights over Hong Kong as a mare liberum, while the biological lives that lived there were entirely dispensable. During 1983 and 1984, Hong Kongers uninterruptedly watched, on television, Chinese and British diplomats discussing their future without their presence or their interests in mind. With the standoff between the two sides, their meeting each evening would be summed up by the same comment: ‘Today’s discussion was beneficial and constructive.’ Living in Hong Kong from 1979 to 1984 was like being trapped in a nightmare, where time had already ended – only that we continued to live as though the clock were still ticking to indicate the time it took for time to end. It was a perpetual present that had no future. Even the Joint Declaration did not seem to guarantee the future of individual Hong Kongers, but to guarantee the continual existence of the mare liberum as an extraterritorial time and an extraterritorial space.

Publication, Television and Popular Music In spite of – or perhaps, because of – Hong Kong’s disturbing socio-­ political uncertainty and extraterritorial position, mass media throve. In the 1980s and 1990s, the mass media played a crucial role in articulating and negotiating the traumatic affects associated with this tumultuous period. However, such articulation and negotiation did not result in alleviating Hong Kongers’ anxieties and sense-uncertainty. Rather, they contributed to and became part and parcel of their overall problems. If we observe the media environment of Hong Kong during the 1980s and 1990s as a textual surface, that is, a skin or membrane on which sensorial stimulations took place, we can consider the colonial city as a site of what Ackbar Abbas would call ‘affective intensities with no name’, where ‘we find . . . emotions that do not belong to anybody or to any situation’.37 For him, such a site was created by a ‘strange dialectic between autonomy and dependency that we see in Hong Kong’s relation both to Britain and China’ through a process of mutual misrecognition.38 As a budding teenager living in Hong Kong during that period, the port city was indeed a hub of sensory overload, with information, excitations and shocking sensations that seemed impossible to grasp instantaneously. I could only

122

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

make sense of these sense data retrospectively and retroactively in the process of their disappearing.39 My contention is that sensorial arousal always leaves a trace that quietly but actively rewrites my consciousness. Almost forty years later (from 1980), none of these traces have disappeared, even though they were, as Elsaesser would argue, ‘etched on our retinas, too painful to recall, too disturbing not to remember’.40 During 1979 and 1980, the population of Hong Kong was about five million. For such a medium-sized population, however, there were thirtyfive newspapers and even more magazines in circulation.41 Newspapers not only offered daily news from Hong Kong, China and abroad, but also featured fukan ( fuhon or daily supplements), which published social commentaries, literary criticisms, film reviews, poems, cartoons, leisure essays  and erotica. As Xu Xiaoqun argues, the daily supplements – a publishing tradition of Chinese-language newspapers that began as early as the 1890s – offered their readers two to a few pages of sensorial excitations each day, which both fostered and served as a reflective surface of their sense of cosmopolitanism and in-group loyalty.42 In 1977, Da texie [Daai dakse or Close-up] reported that there were eleven magazines devoted to television.43 During the 1980s, the success of the oldest cinema and society magazine Mingbao zhoukan [Mingbou zauhon or Ming Pao Weekly, established 1968] inspired a proliferation of many similar ones. Printed on low-quality yet colourful A3 paper, these magazines featured the most up-to-date gossip from the television, film and music industries, as well as semi-nude pictures of starlets who openly defied social mores in order to catch their audience’s attention. These magazines have since then been fondly called baatgwaa zaapzi (gossip magazines). As film historian Zhai Haoran argues, some of these articles were responsible for making or breaking the career of a star, a director or a producer.44 The proliferation of these entertainment magazines was made possible by the unprecedentedly vibrant television, popular music and film industries. On 21 August 1978, Commercial Television (CTV) went bankrupt with a debt of HK$70,000,000 (approximately US$14,000,000). Selina Chow, CTV’s executive producer, who moved there from Television Broadcast (TVB) in 1977, attributed this disaster to CTV’s conservative management.45 TVB, a studio owned by Shaw Brothers, became the largest television powerhouse in the city. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Run Run Shaw (1902–2014) operated the television company in the style of a Hollywood studio, with a well-established star system, a training programme for actors, and an apprenticeship system for screenwriters, directors and producers.46

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 123

According to producer Lau Tin-chi, the demise of CTV, however, signalled to the studio executives that the mass entertainment market of Hong Kong was too small to support experimental filmmaking. Under Lau, TVB focused on producing melodramas and martial arts extravaganzas of sixty episodes (reduced to fifteen to twenty episodes in 1980), with one new episode per evening.47 According to television historians Zhang Zhendong and Li Chunwu, TVB’s business consistently soared during the 1980s. For instance, TVB became a public limited company in 1984 with a net profit of HK$204,000,000 (US$26,153,846). Its net profit rose to US$52,307,692 in 1987.48 Meanwhile, according to Lau, the remaining television studio, Rediffusion (RTV), suffered a loss of approximately US$10,000,000–12,000,000 in 1980. On 9 July 1979, RTV released martial arts series Tiancan bian [Tincaam bin or Reincarnated], which, for the first time, attracted a higher revenue from advertisements than TVB’s Chu Liuxiang [Cho Lauhoeng or Chor Lau Heung], an adaptation of a martial arts novel of renowned avant-garde writer Gu Long (pseudonym of Xiong Yaohua, 1938–85), produced by Shanghai veteran director Wang Tianlin (1927–2010) and starring matinee idol Adam Cheng. Then, in RTV, New Wave producer Johnny Mak and director Tsui Hark made a more concise and experimental adaptation of the novel, titled Xiadao fengliu [Hapdou funglau or It Takes a Thief  ], thus showcasing RTV as a supporter of art cinema.49 In September 1980, RTV launched an offensive called Qianfan bingju [Cinfaan binggeoi or Raising a thousand sails together] and released one of the most memorable series during the 1980s, Dadi enqing [Daaidei jancing or Fatherland]. Fatherland is a historical epic that centres on a family from a village along the Pearl River in southern Guangdong (Kwangtung) during the late-Qing (1644–1911) and early Republican (1911–49) period. The epic traces different family members to San Francisco (via slavery) and Nanking (via university education). RTV also enlisted actors and directors from the Union Film Enterprise to appear in the programme. Thus, the programme appealed to Hong Kong audiences’ extraterritorial sensibilities via these diasporic experiences and to their collective cinematic memory via the use of Union Film talents. It garnered a 60 per cent rating over Johnnie To’s directorial debut (with Wong Kar-wai as Assistant Director) Lunliu zhuan [Leonlau zyun or Five Easy Pieces].50 However, as Stephanie Chung argues, RTV did not have the capital to fight a long-term battle with TVB. The company was sold twice during the 1980s, first to David Syme & Co. from Australia in April 1981 and then to Chiu Te Ken (1924–2015) in July 1982, who renamed the studio Asia Television (ATV). His austerity policy eventually balanced ATV’s

124

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

budget, although at the expense of the quality of its programmes.51 Such a competition, however, compelled both studios to produce not only a wide variety of dramas and comedies, but also biweekly spectacles including beauty pageants, singing contests, awards and fundraisers. TVB-trained creative workers would become household names in Hong Kong cinema, including directors Ringo Lam, Johnnie To and Wong Kar-wai, and actors Stephen Chow, Chow Yun-fat, Gordan Lam, Andy Lau and Tony Leung.52 Nonetheless, as Johnnie To and Gordon Lam both admitted in my conversations with them, TVB in the 1980s and 1990s was an incredible training ground for directors and actors. Yet, what it eroded were individuality, subjectivity and autonomy. As To stated, ‘I established Milkyway Image in 1996 because in order for me to say something as an individual and to assert who I was as a filmmaker, I needed to become an author.’53 For Lam, ‘The high volume of productions at TVB encouraged  actors to employ ossified techniques from the Jyutkek (Cantonese theatre), common in acting in Cantonese cinema between the 1930s and 1950s, without any chance to individuate themselves as actors, delve into the depth of their characters’ subjectivities, and authorise their works as their own signatures.’54 In addition, TVB dominated the pop music market through its record label Capital Artists, with contracted singers including Leslie Cheung (1956–2003), Leon Lai (1966–), Anita Mui (1963–2003) and Roman Tam (1945–2002). It has hosted the TVB International Chinese New Talent Singing Championship since 1983 to cultivate new stars. Hong Kongers have been proud of their pop music since the 1970s. In the 1950s and 1960s, siudiu (small tunes) taken directly from the Jyutkek or written in its style, which often featured in live performances or Cantonese films, were still tremendously popular. Yet, as Shek Kei argues, even these popular tunes carry traces of European concepts of tonality and ABA form (instead of using modality and dialogical progression inherited from the Kunqu opera).55 Meanwhile, as Jean Ma points out, Mandarin songs from musicals, modelled upon the Shanghai shidai qu (songs of the time; see introduction) and infused with elements from Anglo-American rock music, became increasingly popular among the young generation.56 After The Beatles visited Hong Kong in 1964, English pop bands became popular among elite English-school students, including Teddy Robin and the Playboys and The Lotus in the 1960s and The Wynners in the 1970s. As composer, lyricist and music producer James Wong (1941–2004) argues in his PhD thesis (regarded as one of the most authoritative studies of Hong Kong popular music to date), these earlier forms of popular

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 125

music instantiated Hong Kong’s indebtedness to the Guangdong region, Shanghai and the UK respectively. However, by the early 1970s, Hong Kongers began to acquire ‘a kind of local commoner spirit originated from  the vernacular’.57 He cites the theme song for TV series Tixiao yinyuan [Taisiu janjyun or The Fatal Irony, 1974], written by composer Joseph Koo. Koo was born in Canton in 1933 and wrote Mandarin songs for Shaw Brothers, usually with elaborate classical orchestration for the big band. ‘The Fatal Irony’ is composed in what Wong would call the AABA form. The A section is entirely written in the standard Chinese pentatonic scale, without any half-step ornamentations typical in Cantonese music (for accommodating up to seven tones in the Cantonese language). Mordents (three-note twists) are added by the performer, Hong Kongborn Eurasian jazz singer Sandra Lang, to imitate a Cantonese siudiu, although in a way that is more commonly heard in jazz. The B section, meanwhile, is composed as a jazz section with full orchestral accompaniment. The entire song lasts thirty-two bars. The song sounds like a piece of Chinese music composed by someone who was classically trained in European music, yet he is informed enough about Chinese music that it lacks the Orientalist touch of a shidai qu.58 Wong aptly points out that Koo did not invent this form of extraterritorial pop song. It was organically developed over a decade and was evident in another pop song during that decade, Tieta lingyun [Tittaap lingwan or A tower that rides on clouds, 1972], which is an American-styled folksong composed with the Chinese pentatonic scale. In the 1980s, while this form of pentatonic music continued to evolve (with electronic instrumentation), straightforward American-style R&B and dance also became tremendously popular. Many of these songs were cover versions of Japanese pop songs fitted with Cantonese lyrics that convey local sensibility, which, as Koichi Iwabuchi argues, are localised and remembered not as foreign adaptations, but as local productions.59 Capital Artists and other major labels in Hong Kong, together with TVB, cultivated idols in the 1980s including Danny Chan, Leslie Cheung, Alan Tam and Anita Mui and, in the 1990s, Jacky Cheung, Leon Lai, Andy Lau and Aaron Kwok. One can say that the idols in the 1980s modelled their images and performance styles from Japanese and Anglo-American artists. Yet, they often localised these styles. Danny Chan’s glam-rock fashion was mixed with his intellectual elegance. Leslie Cheung sang music that recalled the styles of David Bowie (1947–2016), Saijō Hideki (1955–2018) and American rock music. The popularity of his cover version of ‘Monica’  (1984) surpassed that of Kikkawa Kōji’s original both in Hong Kong and in East and Southeast Asia. Alan Tam sang a mixture

126

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

of highly vernacular and local disco music and English pop, while Anita Mui designed her image with the goal of exceeding the extravagance of Madonna. Popular music, actively produced, promoted and driven by television, became one of the most powerful public spheres where mutually contesting cultural elements and sensibilities as understood by their Hong Kong audience were mediated. In this process, individuation, subjectivisation and autonomy – through authoring and authorising these syncretic styles in accordance with their own perceptions – could be performed. In other words, TVB turned the entertainment industry into a kaleidoscopic machine. From 1979 to 1989, many residents in Guangdong and the eastern part of Guangxi installed antennas to receive Hong Kong television programmes, with fairly limited official intervention. Roman Tam, who was born in Guangzhou, performed in his birthplace in 1984  and 1985 respectively, thus turning him into the second most popular singer in the PRC market, only after Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng (1953–95). TVB series from Hong Kong were initially syndicated in Taiwan,  Southeast Asia  and a growing number of Chinese-language television channels in Europe and North America. Later, video stores in ethnic-Chinese communities would ship VHS tapes of these programmes and new records (and, later, CDs) – sometimes illegally and other times commissioned by TVB or ATV – via overnight courier services.60 But this entertainment industry was not merely a culture of disappearance. No one can deny that by performing individuality, subjectivity and autonomy via popular entertainment, Hong Kongers’ extraterritorial awareness was formally written and consolidated as a political consciousness.

Mainstream Cinema Am I conflating extraterritorial consciousness with localism? In the 1980s and 1990s, it was one and the same. The reason was that local sensibility at that time was extraterritoriality. By the same token, being occupied by conflicting socio-political, linguistic and cultural forces by being ostracised to a position extraterritorial to these forces compelled Hong Kongers to seek opportunities to individuate, subjectivise and autonomise themselves in the local. Nonetheless, in chapter five, I will discuss how localism, as a form of populism today, assumes a proto-nationalistic quality. In other words, the moment that extraterritorial awareness was consolidated as a political consciousness was also one at which this process of becoming was split into two directions. On one level, there was an audience (or in capitalist terms, market), who had a hunger for constant

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 127

reassurances that the local was a state of being that was tangible and permanent. This was in fact the driving force behind a kaleidoscopic entertainment industry, including the film industry, to which I will turn shortly. I shall call it the popular-culture environment, which will eventually lead to a populist understanding of extraterritoriality in the 2010s. On another level, there was a group of artists who complained that this process of mass mediation was symptomatic of the audience’s wilful forfeiting of the opportunity to think. Thus, they constantly engaged themselves in a whirlpool of audio-visual excitations that gave them the impression of being individuated, subjectivised and autonomised, an argument close to Theodor Adorno’s (1903–69) understanding of popular music.61 In this light, video art, more so than mainstream cinema, would enable their spectators to come face-to-face with their affects. I shall call this the intellectual environment. Both of these environments were problematic. In this chapter, I privilege video art not because I agree with the intellectuals. It is simply because the popular-culture environment has remained the dominant topic in the academic discussion of Hong Kong’s cultural production. Thus, we cannot gainsay that Hong Kong video art has been under-discussed. However, as Leung Ping-kwan argues, these two cultural productions were intricately related to each other and I shall demonstrate that by first visiting mainstream cinema and its discursive topos before I conduct my close analysis of the video art works.62 The tension between these two strands of cultural productions in the moving image can be traced back to the 1970s. In 1974, director Michael Hui made Guima shuangxing [Gwaimaa soengsing or Games Gamblers Play]. According to Alfred Ng, President of Angie International Ltd, the Canadian distributor of Hong Kong films in the 1980s, the film garnered US$1,250,327 at the box office, which exceeded the performance of the Bruce Lee films.63 As film critic of the time Law Tat-chun argues, Games Gamblers Play and its sequel Tiancai yu baichi [Tincoi jyu baakci or The Last Message, 1975] pay very little attention to the mise en scène. Rather, Hui takes pride in making jokes that not only employ vulgar language, but also in making tangible the ‘worldview’ of the Hong Kong working class. For instance, in The Last Message, Tim (Michael Hui) says, ‘God spent six days to create human beings, but they are all idiots. Meanwhile, I spend seven days to do laundry, yet every piece of clothing is sparklingly clean.’ Despite his jocularity, Tim is incapable of smiling until he becomes mentally ill.64 David Bordwell argues that besides smart jokes, Hui also employs slapstick that had long been absent from Hollywood cinema since the silent era.65

128

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Both of Hui’s films were produced by Golden Harvest, a company established by former mogul of Shaw Brothers, Raymond Chow, in 1970. Unlike Shaw Brothers, which was run as a Hollywood-style studio, Golden  Harvest operated on the ‘package-deal’ system. For example, a  filmmaker would initiate an independent project and raise money to shoot a few key scenes. They would then pitch the project to Chow. If Chow was willing to buy out this project, he would then raise the remainder of the production cost to bring the project to fruition and distribute it to its chain of cinemas (called the jyunsin or cinema circuit) in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe and North America.66 On the one hand, the package-deal system made possible the success of Hui and Jackie Chan in Golden Harvest. On the other, it also cultivated an industrial environment in which New Wave filmmakers were able to materialise their ideas on the big screen. For instance, Teddy Robin’s company, Pearl City, bought out Alex Cheung’s Dianzhi bingbing [Dimzi bingbing or Cops and Robbers, 1979] and Ann Hui’s Hu Yue de gushi [Wu Jyut dik gwusi or The Story of Woo Viet, 1981]. Meanwhile, Ann Hui’s Touben nuhai [Tauban nouhoi or Boat People, 1982] was produced by left-wing screen actor Hsian Moon (1933–2016), who used her connection with the Great Wall Movie Enterprise to set up her own company, Bluebird Movie Enterprise. In 1984, Bluebird produced another New Wave classic, Sishui liunian [Ciseoi launin or Homecoming, Yim Ho].67 On the level of popular culture, Michael Hui’s comedies engage the spectators’ extraterritorial sensibilities through verbal and corporeal stimulations. On the level of intellectual intervention, the New Wave films engage the audience in a dramatic milieu, an image consciousness where the spectators are invited to act, react and contemplate upon their extraterritorial position. In the early 1980s, film critics in Hong Kong were not keen on reading the New Wave films as political allegories. For instance, after the release of Boat People, Evans Chan, Kam Ping-hing and Li Cheuk-to conducted a debate in the Dianying shuangzhoukan [Dinjing soengzauhon, Film Biweekly, later renamed City Entertainment Biweekly], the successor of Close-up, in which they all resisted allegorical readings. For Chan, these films ‘can be considered a self-exile of imagination. They offer an image of double occupancy, which allows the audience to see how the mind of Hong Kong operates.’68 In other words, these films may roughly contain allegorical elements that can be read as metaphors of Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality. Yet, they are better understood as cinematic experiences in which the spectators are posited in an affective environment, where they become aware of how a doubly occupied mind or body operates.

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 129 For instance, in Boat People, Officer Nguyen (Shi Mengqi) is a FrenchVietnamese who studied in Paris and returned to Vietnam to fight the revolution. He once confessed to Akutagawa Shiomi (George Lam), a Japanese journalist who visits post-revolutionary Vietnam with a genuine belief that the Vietnamese have built an ideal society freed from colonialism. One evening, Nguyen invites Akutagawa to an underground New Orleans-style bar run by Madam (Cora Miao), the only place in town that serves steak and French wine. In a high-angle long shot, Nguyen orders steak and whisky for him and Akutagawa, while Madam, in her cheongsam with her arms crossed, waits patiently at their table. After having taken their order, Madam walks to the bar in the background to pour them drinks. Nguyen then asks Akutagawa to guess how old she is. The film then cuts to a straight-on medium close-up of Akutagawa from Nguyen’s right shoulder. Akutagawa says, ‘Thirty.’ His reply motivates a cut to the reverse shot, in which he says, ‘Forty.’ Then, the film cuts to a medium close-up of Madam from an angle that is inaccessible to either of the two men (see Figure 3.1). Shot in the widescreen format, Madam is on frame left picking out a record and putting it onto a turntable that occupies frame right. On the soundtrack, we hear Nguyen introducing her complex personal history, while she remains utterly silent and indifferent. ‘She is Chinese. Her mother was a society woman [sex worker]. When the Japanese took Saigon, she lived with a general. When she was fourteen . . .’ The film then cuts back to

Figure 3.1  In Boat People, the affect of extraterritoriality is initiated and made tangible by Nguyen’s comment on Madam’s body.

130

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

the medium close-up of Nguyen, in which he continues the introduction. ‘She was living with a French general. When the French pulled out, she moved on to the Americans.’ At this point, the film cuts to a reaction shot of Akutagawa. Nguyen then says offscreen, ‘But you would never imagine.’ This comment motivates a cut to a close-up of Madam’s hand wiping a glass sensually, while her chest, accentuated by her cheongsam, is featured on frame right. It then cuts to an even closer medium close-up of Madam with her head lowered as she pours the drinks. Meanwhile, Nguyen claims that her body still looks like that of a fourteen-year-old girl, as though those occupiers had never left a trace on her. It is tempting to read this scene allegorically, as Madam can be understood as an embodiment of a postcolonial body that has been used, molested and fetishised as an eternal object, which survives and insists within a postcolonial subject’s (Nguyen) imagination as the soul of the land unpolluted by colonialism. Yet, a strict allegorical reading does not make sense. On the one hand, Madam is not ethnically Vietnamese to begin with and Hong Kong did not experience colonialism in the same way as Vietnam. However, what the scene rehearses is the affect of being extraterritorial. Madam is a blank slate that has been violated and objectified by highly conflicting colonial forces, yet she remains unscathed by these acts of violation. In fact, she stands apart from her new forces of occupation – a communist officer and a capitalist journalist – and listens to their comments calmly and extraterritorially, as though she were not able to understand a word they say. The scene crystallises how one feels to be a Hong Konger caught between two occupying forces. However, the intellectual strand of Hong Kong mainstream cinema, often called the ‘commercial phase’ of the New Wave, was short-lived.69 In 1980, the Louey family from the Kowloon Motor Bus Company (1933) acquired enough cinemas to form a new circuit called Golden Princess. In June, Golden Princess purchased 73 per cent of the shares of production company Cinema City, run by young producers Karl Mak, Dean Shek and Raymond Wong.70 Cinema City and its satellite companies produced some of the most memorable comedies and action films that are fondly remembered as part of the ‘golden age’ of Hong Kong cinema, including the works of Tsui Hark, Teddy Robin, John Woo and Eric Tsang.71 According to the correspondence between Golden Princess and Gordon’s Film International, a New York-based film distributor, Cinema City became a serious competitor against Golden Harvest by June 1982, with the release of Zuijia paidang [Zeoigaai paakdong or Aces Go Places, Eric Tsang, 1982], which yielded HK$8,000,000 (US$1,024,614).72 The boxoffice receipts of Cinema City films grew steadily in Hong Kong up until

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 131

1988. For example, Daoma dan [Doumaa daan or Peking Opera Blues, Tsui Hark, 1986] garnered US$2,251,200, Qiannü youhun [Sinneoi jauwan or A Chinese Ghost Story, Tony Ching, 1987] earned $2,414,323 and Longhu fengyun [Lungfu fungwan or City on Fire, Ringo Lam, 1987] made $2,528,654. In 1988, Ji tong ya jiang [Gai tung ngaap gong or Chicken and Duck Talk, Clifton Ko] made $3,766,509, while Baxing baoxi [Baatsing bouhei or Eighth Happiness, Johnnie To] earned $4,755,228.73 Ko joined Cinema City in 1982 and became a creative director soon after that. In a conversation we had in Coventry on 2 November 2014, Ko was proud to admit that Cinema City productions were formulaic. Before the 1980s, a Hong Kong cinema ran six regular screenings per day: 12:30 pm, 2:30 pm, 5:30 pm, 7:30 pm, 9:30 pm and midnight. Each new production would run in Hong Kong for only four to twenty-one days. According to the agreements drafted between Gordon’s Film and Golden Princess, which are modelled upon the Hong Kong protocol: ‘If a film’s box-office receipts were lower than $2,564,102.56, or HK$20,000,000, Sun Sing [the cinema] would receive 60 per cent of the net profit; if a film yielded receipts above this figure, Sun Sing [the cinema] would take half of the net profit instead.’74 According to Barry Koh, manager of the Sun Sing Theatre in New York, net profit refers to the total amount of box-office receipts minus the film’s rental fees and performance rights, shipping, insurance, the overhead cost of the cinema, salaries and taxes. In most cases, the cinemas would need to bear a loss and recuperate its expenses through advertising and confections sales.75 Ko confirmed that the case was the same in Hong Kong. Therefore, a 4:00 pm matinee was added by the cinemas in the 1980s to accommodate more spectators. In order to facilitate this, Cinema City stipulated that each film would run exactly at ninety minutes. Ko said, ‘We would run every print on a frame meter to ensure that the running time was uniform.’ These ninety minutes would be divided into segments. Each segment would be assigned a mode: comedy, drama, action, romance and so on. The structure of a Cinema City film therefore harks back to the Jyutkek, in which a play would be divided into bun (acts), each featuring a specific talent in the troupe. For instance, a gangster film may start with a five-minute action sequence, followed by a three-minute romantic relief and a two-minute drama. Then, another action sequence would ensue and so forth.76 Studying Hong Kong mainstream cinema of this type is important. First, if we follow Bordwell’s argument, like Hollywood, Hong Kong cinema during the 1980s and 1990s could be considered an art of entertainment modified and intensified from the classical Hollywood paradigm.77

132

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

In this sense, Hong Kong mainstream cinema can be understood as one developed in an extraterritorial relationship to Hollywood. Of course, by the 1990s, with Jackie Chan, Tsui Hark and John Woo’s ventures to Hollywood, it transformed Hollywood’s narrational style from without.78 Moreover, Chan Ka-lok and Chu Lap, who follow Bordwell’s analytical method closely, argue that Hong Kong’s censorship system had long inspired filmmakers to develop narrational strategies that could serve as political allegories. For instance, montage is often used to juxtapose dialectically opposite forces, which could be read by spectators as a staging of confrontations between Hong Kong and its Mainland Other, especially after the Tiananmen crackdown. For them, Hong Kong filmmakers employ Hollywood’s deadline narration (that is, setting up a deadline for the protagonist to accomplish a task in the beginning of the film so that the spectators are ‘hooked’ to follow how it will be met) to allegorise 1 July 1997 as its political deadline. Moreover, parallel editing is often used to juxtapose two escaping, migrating or moving characters to create a sense of uncertainty in location and identity. Finally, for them, in action films, the spectators are invited to split their identification between a lawbreaker who serves as the film’s moral compass, and a law enforcement officer, whose sense of morality is questionable.79 For example, in John Woo’s Yingxiong bense [ Jinghung bunsik or A Better Tomorrow, 1986], the famous sequence in which Mark (Chow Yun-fat) marches into a Japanese-style restaurant in Taiwan to gun down the entire Taiwanese gang is a montage that juxtaposes dialectically opposite forces, which initiates a strong passion to support Mark as the self, versus the Mandarin-speaking others whom he guns down. The film is structured with two deadlines: (1) the time it takes for Ho (Ti Lung) to be released from prison, which will end his career as a gang leader and jeopardise his relationship with his brother Kit (Leslie Cheung); in this case, Kit resents Ho for jeopardising his career in the force; and (2) the time it takes for Ho to join forces with Mark again to avenge Shing (Waise Lee), who took over Ho’s gang while he was in prison, and the reconciliation between Ho and Kit. These deadlines are not only ‘hooks’ for the audience to follow the dramatic action, but they also carry a fatalistic and tragic tenor, that the cinematic experience can be sensed and perceived as the time it takes for time to end Ho’s life. In the final faceoff between Ho and Shing, parallel cutting is used between Ho, Mark and Kit, who are constantly moving from one location to another without any sense of spatial continuity. Thus, editing generates a sense-uncertainty for the spectators and a crisis of identification. Finally, the film is hinged upon a split of identification between Ho, who serves as the film’s moral compass,

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 133

and Kit, a policeman whose hatred against his brother is understandable but contestable. While studying these films is crucial to our understanding of Hong Kong cinema and popular culture’s extraterritoriality, it has been widely done by many scholars. Moreover, by 1986, every Cinema City and Golden  Harvest film would end with an obligatory fight scene and the formula quickly became nonsensical. I vividly remember that by that year, spectators would begin to shout expletives or even leave the cinema halfway through a screening. As experimental theatre director, video artist and film critic Edward Lam argued in September 1989 in a seminar at theatre company Zuni Icosahedron, mainstream cinema became a medium that taught the spectators not to think.80 Yet, not giving the spectators any room to think was both the strength and weakness of these films. It is precisely because these films are so kaleidoscopic and so formulaic that they directly stimulate the spectators on a corporeal level. As I will demonstrate in the second half of this chapter, video art does not encourage its spectators to think either! Ko argues that this changed when director Mabel Cheung, a film student from New York University, directed Qiutian de tonghua [Cautin dik tungwaa or The Autumn’s Tale, 1987]. The film was distributed by rising film company D&B, run by Hong Kong billionaire Dickson Poon. The film was shot on location in New York City and is based on a screenplay written in accordance with the Hollywood narrational paradigm. Ko fondly remembers that in the middle of the film, after a romantic dinner between Samuel Pang (Chow Yun-fat) and Jennifer Lee (Cherie Chung), the film cuts to an extreme high-angle close-up of Sam smoking a cigarette, accompanied by a piece of sparsely written jazz music played on the piano. As the smoke rises to the camera lens, the film cuts to a close-up of a bare lightbulb against a green wall. We then contemplate the image of the smoke filling the screen. For Ko, the film signalled to him that his audience was ready to take time to think.81 D&B, which entered the Hong Kong film industry in 1986 and became the third-largest production company, specialised in Hollywood-style dramatic films distributed by a new circuit called Newport.82 The business of Cinema City began to decline and Golden Harvest resumed its dominant position in film production and distribution.83 For Johnnie To, after 1989, directors including himself, Fruit Chan, Stephen Chow, Wong Kar-wai and Shu Kei, who set up their own independent film companies, marked the transition from industrial filmmaking to auteur cinema.84 Yet, it also marked the financial decline of the Hong Kong film industry.

134

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Videotage Examining mainstream cinema as a symptom of the political conditions of a particular historical moment is often a retrospective and retroactive process. Meanwhile, video art in the 1980s and 1990s was initiated by artists who believed that there was an urgency to engage their viewers in a political dialogue via the body. As Edward Lam argued in 1989: Many people complain that my theatrical and video works are difficult to understand. But why do these people want to understand my work? Would you go to a museum to look at a Picasso and then declare to the world: ‘Now, I understand it!’? Mainstream cinema and theatre have trained us to expect a film or a staged performance as a story or a message to be read. An experimental work captures an affect. You only need to enter a piece of art and feel it!85

This is not to say that all video artists think alike, that the viewers are supposed to be a bundle of nerves that interact with the art work as a mechanical or electronic sensorium. Danny Yung, whose creative process emphasises form and structure, often tells me, ‘Edward is too angry.’ For Yung, the viewers love to narrativise even an abstract formal construction. Hence, instead of re-training them, an artist can satisfy them and challenge their expectations by questioning the correlation between their sense-perception and meaning.86 Video art in Hong Kong during the 1980s and 1990s was grounded in a critical point of convergence between politics and the body. Yung is a trained Chinese-American architect who studied at Columbia University in the late 1960s. In the apex of the mass demonstrations in 1968, he  moved  to Hong Kong and was determined to employ architectural concepts in art. In 1982, he established an art collective called Zuni Icosahedron. The name ‘Zuni’ refers to: (1) a shade of green that the company has used in its logo since its inception; and (2) a virus that has twenty surfaces (icosahedron) and can be spread quickly and profusely. In the Chinese language, the name is Jinnian (Zeonnim): progressive awarenesses. Between 1982 and the 2000s, Zuni sat at the margins of the Hong Kong art scene, attracting young and visionary artists (at a certain point, including myself) to create their own theatrical works, installations, videos and dance works either within or outside the organisation.87 After the 2000s, Zuni began to receive more support from the Hong Kong government and other international networks. As a result, Yung has been able to work with professional performers and artists. In June 1985, the Phoenix Ciné Club hosted a special screening called Videotage in its Alternative Film and Video Festival (at the Hong Kong

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 135

Arts Centre), showcasing the works of Neo Lo, David Sam, Jim Shum and Wong Chi-fai. In April 1987, May Fung, Ellen Pau and Wong Chi-fai hosted a Super 8 Workshop at Goethe Institut Hong Kong. Then, in June, Phoenix hosted another Videotage screening. A month later, Yung curated a programme with works of Johnny Au, Pia Ho, Pau and Pun Tak-shu at the Japan 87 Video Television Festival, Spiral. In subsequent years, Videotage initiated collaborations with artists, galleries and museums in Taiwan, Japan, Germany, the UK, and the United States. By April 1988, Videotage was formally hosted by Zuni, a relationship that lasted until the 2000s. Pau started to write critical essays in the Hong Kong Economic Journal and City Magazine to raise public awareness of their works. In these critical essays, Pau positions their works as a critical space against commercial television and mainstream cinema.88 Three of the founding members, Fung, Pau and Yau Ching, openly identified themselves as lesbians, while many male members of the group were openly gay. Informed by Anglo-American critical theories, Fung, Pau and Yau seek to use video art to examine how the highly volatile and perturbing political environment inscribed not only traces of deindividuation, desubjectivisation and deautonomisation onto their bodies, but also how these political inscriptions depoliticised their bodies by ostracising them as others.89 In their works, political, gender and sexual extraterritorialities are converged, scrutinised and reconfigured. In autumn 1989, Zuni Icosahedron hosted a four-hour retrospective of Videotage works and it was my first encounter with these pieces. In a scorching and crowded room and sitting on folded chairs, we watched these videos under large banners that members of Zuni used in the city-wide demonstrations in June in support of the Tiananmen Square protesters and hunger strikers. In our discussion, we debated how we could rethink the connection between the human body (gendered and sexualised) and politics. Especially, we had witnessed through the media how the bodies of the Tiananmen protesters were violated and killed by a political authority without breaking the law and how the Beijing government at the time denied its responsibility by pointing out: just because you watched it on television doesn’t mean that it was real. In June 1993, in commemoration of the Tiananmen crackdown, Pau curated a video installation at the Hong Kong campus of Democracy University, a college set up by the hunger strikers at Tiananmen Square in 1989 for those students who were not able to attend classes.90 For Pau, the connection between politics and the body was not immediate to most video artists. In a speech she gave to the International Art Critics Association on 14 December 1996, Pau argued that in the

136

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

1960s and 1970s, independent filmmaking lay mostly in the hands of the  middle-class to upper-middle-class intellectual elite. For her, the popular format during those two decades, super-8 (and to a lesser extent, video-8), were not considered affordable by most people. By the late 1970s, independent filmmakers and critics were mostly returning PhD or MFA students from abroad, including critics and screenwriters Kam Ping-hing, Lam Nin-tung and Law Kar, and directors Ann Hui and Tsui Hark. Because of their elite positions, these critics and filmmakers were capable of maintaining a connection between independent filmmaking and the industry at large. Meanwhile, video artists in the 1980s and 1990s were not interested in establishing this relationship. For instance, May Fung and Cheng Chi-hung were proud to be independent video artists. Wong Chi-fai and Comyn Mo considered themselves as visual artists and Danny Yung was interested in the connection between visual art and architecture.91 Today, Pau would find the dichotomy between the popular-culture argument and the intellectual argument outdated. In the 1980s, however, this dichotomy was first set up not by the artists themselves, but by the government: Local productions in the eighties focused their concerns mainly on the definition of video art: the ontology of the medium, the new language that were [sic] different from TV and film. Works by Linda Kwong, Johnny Au, Eugene Ho were in this stream. At that time, some TV melodrama [sic] were still using 16mm as production. The only arts funding organisation, Council for the Performing Arts openly rejected funding for video art. They reasoned: 1. Video had nothing to do with ­performance[;] 2. Video production is a commercial activity that could generate revenue.92

In order to fight for funding and recognition, these artists sought to define video art as a separate art form and discourse from both independent and mainstream cinemas. Also, as a result of this struggle – which is still ongoing – both Pau and Yung have been very adamant about engaging artists in public-policy discussions. For Pau, Hong Kong video art became politicised in 1989, with the establishment of an initiative called Video Power. The initiative was put into motion when young video artists travelled to Beijing during May and June to document and support the protesters and hunger strikers on Tiananmen Square. The two founders, Cheng Chi-hung and Mak Chi-hang, worked in collaboration with non-government organisations (NGOs) in Hong Kong, Mainland China and overseas. Yet, this initiative, according to Yank Wong, also made the artists aware that there was an incommensurable difference between Hong Kong and China.93 The first Chief Executive of the

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 137 Hong Kong SAR Tung Chi-hwa (in office 1997–2005) even blamed video artists for politicising Hong Kong by making tangible a local consciousness that stood apart from China. To a certain extent, the fear that video art would encourage localism and separatism had underlined the government’s policy by denying video artists the opportunity to showcase their works on commercial television.94 This attitude changed after the 2000s as Danny Yung began to collaborate with Mainland video and performance artists in projects directly funded by PRC institutions and as Matthias Woo’s video art series Donggong xigong [Dunggung saigung or East Wing West Wing] was programmed by ATV, and then, later, on social media. Pau’s account of Hong Kong’s video art history may give us an impression that video artists passively reacted to government policy. Yau Ching, who was teaching at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1997, explained that she did not see videomaking as a social responsibility. Nonetheless, the socio-political conditions under which the artist grew up and made their videos constituted these works’ aesthetics and consciousnesses. In an article she wrote in a mixture of Cantonese and standardised Chinese, ‘Wo nege wo’ [‘Ngo nigo Ngo’ or Me, this me, 1997], Yau recorded her thoughts on her extraterritorial position, a document of her affect that is worthwhile quoting substantially here: I don’t know what’s up with you. I was born in Hong Kong. Naturally, I’ve never studied Hong Kong history (what’s that?). The only historical fact I know of, which is about Hong Kong, is the Opium War. From then on, Hong Kong became a British ‘dependent territory’. The only identity of Hong Kong was its being a colony. But let’s not investigate into what a colony was. The Qing court was rotten anyway. I studied Chinese history only up to the year 1949. I learned about the rest through my parents’ oral accounts and from those relatives and friends who fled to Hong Kong as refugees. When we grew up, we began to have titbits of exchanges with the Mainland. We started to understand a China that was more real and intimate than any Chinas that people in many other countries might have learned through media and textbooks. On the one hand, we have no history. On the other hand, we are eager to keep a distance from the oppressive and dominating history of China. We embody the freedom and independence of thoughts in order to fight against the idea that art must serve the people. I don’t know what’s up with you. Meanwhile, we grew up in the embrace of the omnipresent Euro-American culture. We adore all imports from imperialist Europe and North America as the supreme state and the coolest mode of being. We worship the West because we live in the Orient. However, we worship the West not simply because we live in the Orient. By worshipping the West, we express a difference between the Mainland and us. We express the independence of our consciousness by swallowing and skinning the artistic trends from Europe and North America. We  deny our selves in the process of colonisation; yet we constitute ourselves by embracing our colonisers’ culture . . .

138

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

I don’t know what you think. But me, this me, I emphasise that the cultural quality of Hong Kong is very different from the Central Plain culture in the Mainland. I like to call myself Hong Konger. My works are made up of the paradigm of European video art, which has nothing to do with Chinese painting. I read more English books than Chinese books. I work in the United States today. Ten years ago, I did not believe that art should have any relationship with politics. Ten years ago, I did not believe that art should have any objective. I, this I – like it or not, right or wrong – am closely related to 150 years of colonial rule under Great Britain. You may say, ‘What the fuck? You attribute every fucking thing to colonialism.’ I say, colonialism is colonialism, but we are talking about a Hong Kong mode of colonialism. We do not care about our consequences, and that’s why we colonise ourselves to the end, so that we can fight against an even more overt form of violence. We can only accept one mode of modernism. But in order to survive, we must give up any hopes for selfdetermination; we must pretend that we have nothing to do with the postmodern. We live in a society, but we have no ability to intervene in it . . . When I was fourteen, I had never read from any books in which a woman would say that she loves another woman. If the video I make is given to another fourteenyear-old, she might not think about committing suicide that easily. I came from Hong Kong. I live in the United States. I make videos so that I can spread those voices grown from the soil of Hong Kong.95

In this passage, there are two very powerful statements. First, Yau openly declares that British colonialism and the postcolonial domination of Euro-American culture in Hong Kong and elsewhere set the stage for Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality. Yet, we cannot undermine the fact that a fully deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised life can potentially turn its lack of agency into a form of agency, as in: I exercise my agency to strip my life from all modes of agency and the concept of agency itself, once and for all. For Yau, if a Hong Konger is always being colonised, the only way to fight colonisation is to become so thoroughly colonised that the purpose of colonisation is rendered inoperative. The remainder of a life that has nothing left but traces and inscriptions of colonisation is now a new agent, ready to fight against even stronger modes of political violence – as there is nothing left for this life and no consequences to be afraid of. Second, for Yau, the purpose of making videos that crystallise the convergence of the socio-political and the corporeal (gender and sexuality) is simple: so that other bare lives who occupy similar extraterritorial positions can live. It is important to note that Videotage emerged not only as a local movement, but also as a trans-extraterritorial one, that is, it has always been intricately connected with other deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised lives around the world. Grace Ng, for example, argues that the works of Videotage must be understood in the context of the larger Asian diasporic artistic movements, exemplified by the works of

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 139 Paul Wong on Chinese-Canadian men with acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), Nguyen Tan Hoang’s works on Asian-American internalised racism, Gregg Araki’s works on youth and sexuality, and Shu Lea Cheang’s works on global colonialism and desire. She argues: American artist Nguyen Tan Hoang’s Seven Steps to Sticky Heaven investigates into the idea of sticky rice, a term referring to those Asian gay men who prefer dating other gay men of Asian descent. The author performs in his own video. By using food as a metaphor, he communicates the prejudice exercised by Asians upon other Asians. Yet, at the same time, he also challenges the desexualisation of Asians within the framework of Eurocentrism. Hoang also points out that gay culture is not a matter between white gay men. Asians have their own tongzhi (tungzi or comrade) culture. They have their own sexual imagination and desire. Thus, the video is a process by which a gay man of Asian descent locates his own sexual identity.96

The intersection between politics, gender and sexuality, in the case of Videotage, must therefore be understood within the context of the larger Asian diasporic effort to use video as a medium to locate and define their own extraterritorial positions. In 1986, for instance, Canadian video artist Richard Fung made Orientations, in which he interviewed fourteen young lesbians and gay men who lived in the Toronto area. In the interviews, these young people discuss their experiences of being doubly marked as the Other by their race and sexuality, in a city that still considered itself as predominantly white and in a lesbian and gay community that was still blind to its own racial prejudices (including Asian-Canadians’ own internalised racism). In 2016, some of these interviewed subjects reappeared in his new work Re:Orientations, while almost half of the original cast had died of AIDS. When I showed Re:Orientations at Ryerson University in March 2018, as part of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference, I introduced the film by saying, ‘Canada, like any other nation-states, has many pages of dark history, and this film represents one of them.’ To my presentation, Richard himself replied, ‘I think Victor was being too kind. Canada is founded entirely upon its dark history.’ What video artists shied away from naming in the 1980s and 1990s, and that we now have the philosophical frameworks to do so, is political violence. And Yau Ching was apt to point out in 1997 that what video artists fought against, through their works, was political violence and the lacerations left upon the depoliticised lives’ bodies – which constituted these lives themselves. This also means that in the video art works in the 1980s and 1990s, there was no boundary between the private and public, sexual politics and social politics. For Marina Grzinic, who wrote on Slovenian and former Yugoslavian video arts:

140

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

The eighties witnessed the over sexualisation of the video medium that was not only a process of art-political reflexivity of the repressed sexuality in Socialism and Communism, but the process of distancing-disassociating the video medium from its sisters: From film and the TV medium. This process was carried out with the externalization of sexuality perceived, learned and adopted from the underground film tradition conceived by Fassbinder, Rosa von Praunheim, Warhol, etc. . . . The externalization of sexuality took the form of overtly staged pornography and gender confusion (gender-bending) of gay, lesbian and transvestite sexual attitudes . . . that the sexual stereotypes and civil rights prototypes were not only consumed in and by the underground, but immediately performed and staged in the private rooms and bedrooms in front of a VHS camera. In these works the masquerade of reappropriation ensured not only the simple question of the formation of identity of the artists or of the underground community but the process of negotiation with multiple realities in the direction to produce continually ambiguous and unbalanced situations and identities.97

In other words, the 1980s and 1990s was an opportune time for extraterritorial lives around the world to use the video as a medium to locate, rethink and reconfigure their positions. And Hong Kong video artists were part and parcel of this trans-extraterritorial movement. In these works, body politics is social politics.

The Works of Videotage In 1984, Danny Yung and Jim Shum made Videotable. Visually, this tenminute video consists of close-ups of a rotating table with a world map on top of it. At first, we see the entire world map turning clockwise. The video then cuts to a smaller portion of the world map – China – which turns counter-clockwise, followed by close-ups of the North Pole and the southern tip of Africa turning counter-clockwise. After that, the video cuts to a close-up of the white surface of an office clock, which turns counter-clockwise. The video then proceeds with alternating close-ups of the cartographical representations of different parts of the world and of the clock, turning counter-clockwise. Nevertheless, after a while, Yung and Shum begin to insert flash frames of a pair of open hands. After that, they insert a close-up of a black bird with a red beak hopping clumsily across the frame while the camera itself is turning counter-clockwise. A montage is then built upon different combinations of these elements: the map, the clock, the open hands and the bird. The speed of editing gradually accelerates until these images become merely flash frames. Finally, we see the image of the clock stopping at an upside-down position, followed by a more stable close-up of the map, a close-up of the hands and another close-up of the clock, before the video fades to black.

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 141 The visual image of Videotable therefore recalls the principles of montage proposed by Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948).98 It can be understood as an architectural construction built upon four elements with four different types of rotations/movements: 1. A close-up of the world map, which is an inanimate object that is animated mechanically by a rotating table and a rotating camera. Yet, what the map represents is a globe that rotates perpetually and a geography (land and human) that is constantly in a process of becoming; 2. A close-up of a clock, whose hands constantly rotate; yet, the actual surface of the clock and sometimes the camera or both, rotate in a direction counter to the flow of time; 3. A close-up of a pair of hands opening, which is rotated by the camera movement itself; they are organic components of a human body, yet they are inanimate unless they are animated by the body or by the camera; 4. A close-up of a black bird, which is always moving without any orientation on a rotating world (map) and is seen from the eye of a moving camera.

Intellectually, this ten-minute montage juxtaposes different modes of movements and their combinations, thus enabling the viewers to perceive and dissect the different machinic components that constitute ­movements – which in turn constitute the world in its process of becoming. However, as Gilles Deleuze argues, the point of Eisensteinian montage is not solely to generate intellectual understanding.99 Rather, each shot of the video is comparable to a harmonic that is not immediately graspable by the human sensorium. The series of shots is best understood not linearly as a temporal progression. Instead, they are apprehended by the human senses vertically as layers of harmonics that stimulate the cerebral cortex. Eventually, the video as a whole is perceived as one single musical tone: a pure affect. Then, what is this affect? Before we address this question, we need to turn to the video’s soundtrack. Over the series of shots, we hear a man’s voice, which keeps asking where the zhongxin (zungsam or centre) is. But then, the term zungsam is also homonymous to another term that means loyalty. Here is the transcription of the voice-over from the first two minutes of the video: Is it turning right or left now? Turning right is better or turning left is better? Do we have to change the colour?

142

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

What colour should we change to? Is this the centre of the Art? (the Art Centre) Is the deadline, finishing line change [sic]? Where are you going to? Is this a health(y) centre? Where are we going to? Not turning left and not turning right . . . Is there a way we can turn? (Is there only one centre?) Is this your centre? Is there a meaning with turning left and turning right, am I right? Not turning to the left, not turning to the right. Is there no way we can turn? What is the deadline [in Cantonese, the word carries the same sound as ‘faith’]? What is the colour of this? Is this the only colour? Yes . . . n . . . o Yes Yes or No N . . . o . . . Ye . . . s Are you faithful to art? Final? Yes. Is this a new centre of the world? Yes. Is this a new world centre? No. Where do you come from? Take me, give me. Is there only one centre? Are you ‘faithful’ to health? Yes . . . no . . . Are you faithful to art? Are you a health centre? Are you an art centre? Where do you come from? Do we have to change the colour? What colour? Is there only one centre? The centre of the art, the art centre . . .

The voice therefore constantly asks the viewers to question where their centre lies. Is it within the body as a site where the ability to sense and perceive arises? Or is it the image, from which the ability to sense and perceive is confirmed? The constant rotation of the image then perpetually disorients the viewers’ sense of centrality and decentres the orientation of the image and the objects represented. Moreover, the voice distracts the viewers by introducing elements of free association, including the health(y) centre and the Art Centre. These free associations, however, are not merely comic reliefs. Rather, they trigger the viewers’ temporary curiosity to mull over the meanings of these socio-political institutions by calling them, identifying and understanding them as centres of their

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 143 biological (or biopolitical) well-being and creative forces. Then, by pointing out to the viewers that, in Cantonese, the terms centre and loyalty are homonymous, the video inspires the viewers to extend this process of decentring and re-centring from the corporeal and social to the political. As the corporeal centricity of my sense-perception is being questioned, I also begin to question my political centre: Where am I? Am I a Hong Konger? What is my relationship with China? What is my relationship with the world – via Hong Kong or via China, or via Hong Kong through China? In Videotable, extraterritoriality is therefore condensed and crystallised as an affect of corporeal-socio-political (biopolitical) disorientation. After ten minutes of viewing, when the screen cuts to black, the rotation, as a movement, can still be perceived by the viewers as an after-image, as though disorientation, both in the physical and intellectual senses, were materialised as a whirlpool of darkness/nothingness that perpetually churns with our bodies. Yung’s creative energy has been spent primarily on the theatre and installation. However, his footprints are seen in many other video artists’ works. For example, Kwan Pun-leung’s Project No. 9046 [1990] is an eight-minute piece based on Yung’s theatre work, Deep Structure of Chinese (Hong Kong) Culture, performed at the Studio Theatre, Hong Kong Cultural Centre from 6 April to 15 April 1990. Even before 1990, Yung’s works were known for exploring concepts and elements from the Kunqu opera and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). For instance, historically, the Kunqu opera only employs yi zhuo er yi (one table two chairs) to indicate different settings in a drama.100 Throughout his career, Yung has used primarily tables and chairs, sometimes on a bare stage with black floors and black curtains, and, other times, surrounded or punctuated by mirrors or projected words. From the Cultural Revolution, Yung would take bodily gestures and poses from dances such as the zhongzi wu (dances in the shape of the character zhong or centre), accompanied by worn-out cassette recordings of revolutionary songs. These elements, however, are not always featured as spectacles within the stage performance (which is in itself a spectacle). Rather, they are integrated with poses, gestures and movements that are associated with the spectators’ day-to-day lives in Hong Kong. Thus, these Chinese cultural elements from the distant or recent pasts function like the return of the repressed – that is, they are repressed cultural memories that are not always associated with Hong Kong’s cultural position, yet they resurface momentarily as part and parcel of the spectators’ day-to-day cultural performance. After the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, Yung did not respond

144

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

­immediately. Deep Structure of Chinese (Hong Kong) Culture did not address the crackdown. Nonetheless, it was provocative for the Hong Kong spectators to suggest that it was about time to examine the deepstructural relationship between Chinese and Hong Kong culture(s) as a mutually bracketing mode of co-dependency. In the opening night, Yung introduced a nude male dancer into the performance. Even though  the spectators could only see his back and his appearance was very brief, the Urban Council, which sponsored the performance, proposed to ban the show. Eventually, on 7 July 1989, a compromise was reached, and the subsequent performances were restricted to an audience more than eighteen years of age.101 Yung has never been willing to offer a comment on this incident to me directly. However, most of his creative team members and fans found this strategically clever. Even though the show did nothing to comment on the Tiananmen crackdown, it triggered a crackdown from the government funding body. It therefore displaced the site of state violence from Tiananmen Square to the theatrical space and to the nude male body as a biopolitical life. It also expanded the scope of political commentary, via government intervention, from the politics as understood by a largescale event like the Tiananmen crackdown to the supposedly private and depoliticised site of gay male desire. The number ‘9046’ in Project No. 9046 stands for ‘1990 April 6’. The video begins with a title card: The first piece with numbers, and numbers are very important in Hong Kong. The number 2 in Cantonese sounds like the word ‘easy’; 3 sounds like the words ‘lively and energetic’; while 8 is the most important one as it sounds like the words ‘growth and wealth.’ Car number plates in Hong Kong with numbers like 88 can sell for half million dollars. People believe that things with good numbers will bring good fortune. In Hong Kong, the Tiananmen Sq. massacre on 4th June 1989 is called the ‘six four incident.’ ‘9064’ refers to the year after the political movement and carries a political subtext in this documentary of Zuni Icosahedron going to England. The song ‘China is a big garden,’ sung in Mandarin, is no longer a neutral children’s song: here it brings sadness and arouses complex emotions.

Director Kwan Pun-leung was one of the performers (and collaborative creators) of Deep Structure of Chinese (Hong Kong) Cultures. After the title card, the screen shows a close-up of an opening eye, which is then cut to a close-up of a television screen with the same eye opening. The image of the eye is not merely a direct reference to the Tiananmen crackdown as an eye-opening experience. Also, it serves as a reminder that most Hong Kongers’ memories of this crackdown are mediated through the eye of television. This idea is then carried forward to the next few shots. Over the sound of a train, we see black-and-white photographs of the protest

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 145 and hunger strike on Tiananmen Square, followed by a black-and-white televised (and pixelated) image of the Square, with the camera panning slowly from left to right. These photographs and video images were shot by Kwan in the Square, yet they are deliberately processed and manipulated as though they were newspaper and televisual images. They therefore remind the viewers that their traumatic memory is constructed out of a double mediation: (1) a mediation through the eyes of a photographer who was there; (2) a mediation through the televisual eye, which etches someone else’s memory onto the viewers’ retinas as though they had been there with the eyewitness. Televisual memory is therefore an appropriation. But then, for what purpose? The video then shows very out-of-focus footage of Danny Yung and  Edward Lam at the airport, ready to depart for London. On the soundtrack, Kwan plays Tat Ming Pair’s rendition of ‘Dengzhuo ni huilai’ [Waiting for your return]. The song was originally released immediately after the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) by Hong Kong-based Shanghai expatriate actor and singer Bai Guang (1921–99). It was composed by Yan  Zhexi (1909–93). Bai Guang made her name during and after the War  as a ‘decadent demon’ (sex worker) with a deep baritone voice. ‘Waiting for your return’ is written in the style of 1920s blues, which, by the 1940s, was already considered nostalgic. The original rendition of the song invokes the image of an aged sex worker sitting alone in a nightclub with her absinthe, waiting for her young lover to return from the front – which she knows will never happen. The song therefore draws the listeners’ attention to the act of waiting and to her frustration of f­ rustration – that is, the idea that frustration itself is rendered inoperative. Tat Ming Pair, a British-style alternative pop band, turns the song into a flat and emotionally indifferent tune (frustration of frustration), accompanied by airport announcements of flights first departing to many Hong Kongers’ destinations of migration (San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto and New York) and then arriving from Chinese cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Guangzhou). The effect of listening to this rendition of the song over the footage of Yung and Lam departing is an immense pain of premature separation: that relatives and good friends are all leaving. The hope that, someday, we will reunite in the Hong Kong we used to know is nothing but a frustration of frustration. This footage is then followed by Kwan’s footage of the Tiananmen Square students in front of a bonfire. On the soundtrack, Kwan plays the song ‘China is a big garden’. The song was written during the early 1970s as an English-language revolutionary song for promoting China’s image in the Anglophone world:

146

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

The sun shines brightly Everybody’s happy and gay Wah ha ha Wah ha ha Everybody’s happy and gay

In the voice-over, we hear Yung saying how he is fascinated with the song, as children are taught to sing a big lie. We then see a bonfire on a street of Beijing after Tiananmen Square was cleared. The image then fades to footage from the performance of Deep Structure. The motif of the performance consists of one or multiple lines of four performers, who stand rigidly with their backs against the audience. Meanwhile, one single performer would be on their knees as though they were begging the other performers for attention (see Figure 3.2). Or this lone performer would be engaged in some acts of hard labour while another solo performer would wipe their sweat off the floor or a table. This sense of hopelessness – and the sense of being hopeless that such hopelessness is an end in itself – sums up the affect of being a Hong Konger caught between two political authorities that were utterly indifferent, yet constantly eager to assert their power over them. What Project No. 9046 does is to trace the deep-structure of Hong Kongers’ appropriation of the mediated memory of the Tiananmen crackdown as theirs – all for the purpose of mediating and negotiating their sense of frustration of frustration. As I mentioned in my previous chapter, women – and in our case

Figure 3.2  Lines of four performers being indifferent to a lone performer as the central motif of Deep Structure of Chinese (Hong Kong) Cultures. Courtsey of Danny Yung.

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 147 here,  lesbians – are further deindividuated, desubjectivised and de­autonomised as the Other by their gender and sexuality. May Fung’s She Said Why Me [December 1989] is a 7' 47" piece, in which a blindfolded young woman wanders in the city, tracing the interrelationship between its past and present. The video begins with an ID photo of Fung as a student, which fades into a medium close-up black-and-white photo of a grandmother figure, and then back. Immediately, this opening image suggests the idea of seeing the city anew as a site where the life of a woman is constituted – from being a receiver of knowledge and history (student) to an embodiment of knowledge and history (grandmother). The video then cuts to the front gate of the Tin Hau Temple in Causeway Bay. In front of the gate, a blindfolded young woman, wearing a white blouse and a blue skirt, walks from one side of the frame to the other (Figure 3.3). Tin Hau literally means the Empress of Heaven. In coastal South China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, it is a title attributed to historical figure Lin Mazu (circa the tenth century). She was a priestess when she was alive. Then, after her death, sailors reported that she  rescued their drowning cohorts and protected their fleet.102 Tin Hau is therefore regarded by many coastal communities as a divine figure who looks after the safety of their

Figure 3.3  The blindfolded young woman in May Fung’s, She Said Why Me.

148

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

men at sea. The particular Tin Hau Temple in Causeway Bay was built in the seventeenth century by the local Tai family, at a site that used to overlook the harbour.103 Tin Hau can therefore be understood as a matriarch mythologised by local communities to cohere their sense of in-group loyalty and provide a sense of faith and confidence among men. In other words, men are supposed to be parts of the workforce, who make history in the embrace of a dead, mystical and all-encompassing mother.104 While a dead female divinity is revered as an omniscient and omnipresent figure of protection, a living woman is disabled from seeing, touching and acting at the very doorstep of her divined predecessor/ancestor. Meanwhile, the viewers are put in a position behind the cauldron, where incense is offered to Tin Hau – and by extension, a generation of new women who are destined to be blindfolded, fetishised and embalmed as objects of worship. The video then proceeds in the form of parallel cutting between a series of historical images and the various images of the blindfolded young woman walking on the streets around Central. The historical footage consists of images of Star Ferry, of women on the street nursing and holding multiple babies, of a major thoroughfare in Central Hong Kong, of an educated woman in cheongsam braving a crowd of men outside a pier, of a young woman hauling a basket of goods to sell, of a young girl and two women sitting on a staircase, and of three girls talking to one another in front of a passing tram. Meanwhile, the young woman in the present is seen walking along the walls of various historical sites, including the War Memorial in Central. Then, we see her walking on steep slopes and trying not to grope around. In other words, this young woman and those historical women in the past have been blindfolded by a social environment that has always expected women to be passive bystanders of history-making and history-writing. Yet, in their state of blindfoldedness, they train themselves not to grope around and to brave the crowd of men around them. Eventually, the historical footage begins to show women on construction sites and a fashionable young woman raising her arms on a blocked street, presumably in a protest in 1967. We also see women smoking with young men on a street in a fashionable corner of Queen’s Road and a woman holding a banner and running through a street of 1967 protesters. Here, May Fung rewinds this footage over and over again, thus suggesting that the director herself is amazed by a woman engaged in political action. The video then cuts to a medium close-up of the young woman’s back as she walks down Queen’s Road. She turns around and stares into the camera. She then walks forward. Finally, the video ends with a double

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 149 image of the historical Tin Hau Temple at the top of the frame and the contemporary one at the bottom. While Fung focuses on women’s issues, Ellen Pau’s works before 1989 are more concerned with the ontology of the videographic image. In Drained II [1988], Pau employs the language of serial art to make tangible the mediatedness and imperfection of the video image. The video begins with a high-angle long shot of a stage with two black wings (curtains) at the back, thus leaving a doorlike opening. A woman walks from the left to the right between these two curtains. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the frame, we see the head and upper back of a woman with long hair dancing (Figure 3.4). The video image, shot on Betamax, is deliberately pixelated and distorted by repeated copying during the editing process. This shot is repeated three times. After that, the shot is repeated with different start and stop points within the shot, thus creating a linear serial rhythm. After that, the frame is divided into sixteen modules. Each module is this original shot (Figure 3.5). However, these sixteen modules start and end at different points. As they repeat themselves, we also see the woman at the back entering and exiting the ‘door’ between the two wings at different instants, thus forming different series of ‘melodies’ across the frame. The image recalls the early Muybridge photographs. But instead of dissecting movements, these modules dissect time, as each module can be seen as a repeated unit of time, while the sixteen modules as a whole suggest different combinations by which these units of time can relate to one another. Then, the video cuts back to a single module. However, this time, Pau plays with different coloration, stencilling, pixelation and other special effects. She sometimes even reverses the top of the frame and the bottom, thus turning what is supposed to be a unified space into a series of two different modules (Figure 3.6). Yet, to say that this is simply a formal exercise is to undermine the piece’s gender and sexual politics. The entire video is accompanied by Tat Ming Pair’s ‘Aisha’ [‘Ngoisaat’ or Love murder, 1987], a song they wrote for Yung’s 1987 theatre piece Romance of the Rock (arguably the very work that made Yung and Zuni famous). The song is made up of a layer of mechanical sound, punctuated by occasional hits on an electronic drum whose sound is delayed, thus invoking a slow-motion image of a body falling into a pool of water with upward splashes. Then, there is a layer of sexual moaning between two men or two women. Eventually, Anthony Wong, with his ethereal voice, sings: My affections and will are all confused; The road is chilling yet I can feel a gust of warm wind.

150

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Figures 3.4–3.6  Ellen Pau’s Drained II.

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 151 Raining; I divulge my endless love.

The conflict between affections and will, chills and warmth resonate with a similar conflict between the measured and rational woman in the background and the almost hysterical one in the foreground. The video therefore makes tangible the process by which a woman needs to navigate between extreme poles of affections, emotions and behaviours, and the serial structure of the image enables the viewers to see how these poles are combined and how these extremities in fact flow into one another serially. But, more importantly, the sound of two human beings of the same gender moaning in sex suggests that the video is specifically scrutinising how lesbians are framed by society between these extreme polarities. The video, which reshuffles the interrelationships between these poles, offers a schizophrenic intervention into the way that heteronormativity perverts and disables same-sex desires. In 1990, Pau makes a video with Wong Chi-fai and Yau Ching called Here’s Looking at You Kid. It is a five-minute video collage of television commercials, popular music and news(reel) footage from the 1950s to the 1970s. The soundtrack is also a montage of dialogues from Cantonese films, radio programmes and Cantopop. This complex collage demonstrates how Hong Kong’s collective memory is largely based on mediated images. The video therefore serves as both a celebration of Hong Kong’s local popular culture and a critique of its superficiality. Yet, it also illustrates how consciousness, which we always believe to be something deep-structural, consists of nothing but a series of traces scratched onto the surface of a social or individual body. In Diversion (1990), Pau intercuts between: (1) excerpts from a 1970s Hong Kong government newsreel Jinri Xianggang [Gamjat Hoenggong or Hong Kong today], which shows film stars and celebrities swimming and diving into a pool in a five-star hotel; (2) a low-angle long shot of the middle of a stairwell and various long shots of a woman running along a staircase; and (3) views of Hong Kong from overlapping shots of open windows and the Star Ferry. The Cantonese title of the video is called Loengtau ng dou ngon [Unable to reach either shore]. Through acts of diving, running and navigating, the camera engages the viewers into a sweeping sensation of constantly drifting – or at times, drowning – in undefinable spaces. In other words, the viewers are constantly posited in an extraterritorial – both in the sense of not reaching any shore and in the sense of not resting on any ground – position. Yau Ching studied in the United States during the 1990s and her work is informed by Euro-American theories. For example, Video Letters 1–3

152

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

[1994] is a twelve-minute piece that consists of three interventions. In her programme notes, Yau writes, the video piece is an ‘attempt to write to people I miss when I am constantly on the road . . . [as] an exploration of the relationship between desire and diaspora’. In ‘Letter 1’, we see an extreme close-up of Yau’s face in a horizontal position as she points the camera lens toward herself (Figure 3.7). Yau explains in her programme note, ‘Can I edit desire? What is the limit of our vulnerability? What if I see myself? Would the attempt of reconciling with the self help me escape language?’ In other words, Yau tries to re-enact the Lacanian mirror stage with her own camera. However, instead of entering the heteronormative language, this attempt is to see whether the video medium can enable her to escape from this language by being exposed to the camera as a woman who desires another woman. In other words, this video exercise allows Yau to enter into a relationship with herself as abject. Her self is at once objectified as a video image, yet it constantly seeks a relationship with her as the cameraperson/viewer and re-fosters a new intersubjectivity. In a way, the abject is considered abject not because it is ontologically constituted as such. It is because the heteronormative language configures its relationship with the subject as a thing that is objectionable.

Figure 3.7  ‘Letter 1’ in Video Letters 1–3.

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 153 If ‘Letter 1’ is an exercise in which Yau ostracises her self as abject, ‘Letter 2 (or, call me an essentialist!)’ posits this self as an object among other objects. The video is initially composed of a series of shots in the style of René Magritte’s (1898–1967) La trahison des images (often translated as ‘This is not a pipe’). For example, the beginning of this letter, we see a medium shot of a man (also framed horizontally) imitating the pendulum of a clock with an offscreen voice ticking like one. A subtitle says, ‘I am not you.’ This is followed by an extreme close-up of a clock’s surface, with a subtitle that says, ‘You are not a clock.’ Then, we see an extreme close-up of Yau’s mouth as she puts pieces of snack into it. The subtitle says, ‘History can be ideal.’ The video then cuts to a close-up of a book that teaches how filmmakers apply for a grant. The subtitle says, ‘Or a fantasy.’ The image is suddenly interrupted by distortions created by a tape being fast-forwarded. When it settles down, we see an extreme close-up of an alarm clock on top of a book about the British empire. The subtitle says, ‘Before the British Empire retreated from its colonies.’ After another interruption by video distortions, we see a shot of a pig head formed by a pair of glasses being put on top of a bed sheet. The subtitle says, ‘Depends on who reads it.’ The video then cuts to a close-up of a pair of hands picking out Twinings teabags. After that, we see a close-up of a pillow, which is labelled ‘evil’. The camera then pans right to another bed with another pillow, which is labelled ‘good’. Eventually, the film shows an editing system, with the subtitle saying, ‘until they cause one another’. This sequence is not a systematic denial of the relationship between the signifiers and the signifieds. Rather, it testifies to the arbitrariness of how we assign meanings or values to the images as signs. Throughout this sequence, we hear the pop song ‘Huanghou dadao dong’ [‘Wonghau daaidou dung’ or Queen’s Road East] composed by Taiwanese songwriter  Lo Da-yu. The song uses the name Queen’s Road East, a major thoroughfare in Hong Kong that bears its colonial history, to fantasise how streets, currencies and other objects would be renamed after the 1997 handover, and how new values and meanings would be attached to these same objects. In her programme note, Yau writes, ‘How are our beings defined and confined by history? To what extent does where I come from determine who I am, and what I desire?’ In other words, renaming and reassigning values to places and inanimate objects around us are part and parcel of a process of Hong Kongers’ inevitable need to rewrite our sense-uncertainty (if not subjectivities), including what we call ourselves and what we desire. ‘Letter 3’ was shot entirely in the United States. It is composed of

154

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

frozen frames of Yau Ching’s extreme close-ups and shots of the rural landscape in Michigan. These images are intercut or superimposed with the following titles: Everyone is better off remaining still. It’s dark anyway. How do you know if I’m not something you don’t like? There can be no civilisation without repression. There is no essential lack, nothing to envy; we invent our reasons for being. I always arrive at my desires too late. But it takes all of me – with all my pasts to reach you. Desires are, therefore, memories only intelligible to the present . . . contradictions. Perhaps this is only of me. Even so, what is important is what it goes towards. And how . . .

In other words, ‘Letter 3’ concludes Yau’s journey with her reconciliation with her desire and with the constitution of her subjectivity not by a lack, but by turning her abject position and her political extraterritoriality into an agency to be – with love and care for and between two women. In 1989, the death of Cantonese theatre star Yam Kim-fai (1913–89) inspired many cultural historians to re-evaluate the role of lesbian and gay performers in popular culture. Yam began her career as a siusang (baritone) in 1935. In 1946, she met zingjan faadaan (prima donna) Bak Shuet-sin and they fell in love with each other. In the Lingxing ribao [Ling sing jatbou or Ling sing daily], a Canton–Hong Kong entertainment newspaper established in 1931, a reporter wrote in 1949: Yam Kim-fai and Bak Shuet-sin finished their theatrical run the day before yesterday. They were too lazy to go home. They wore the same redwood-styled clothes, sun shades, shoes with thin soles and strolled around Central hand-in-hand. When they got tired, they went to Gator Marsh and enjoyed cold drinks. They then returned to the Ko Shing Theatre around seven o’clock for their evening show. What a pair of illusionary phoenixes! What a comfortable life!105

As Lo Wai-luk argues, Yam’s male impersonation on stage (and often offstage as well) offered her female fans a forum to channel their same-sex affection. It also permitted their silent acknowledgement of her same-sex affection with Bak.106 The poem that Bak composed for Yam in the latter’s funeral was: Jyuho suk hai; baak jim kei san (How shall I redeem you from death, alas; I shall surrender my life a hundred times). To commemorate Yam’s death, Bak organised a charity screening of their last film together, Li Houzhu [Lei Hauzyu or Tragedy of the Poet King, Lee Sun-fung, 1964], a mega-budget musical that employed modernist mise en scène to convey a Cantonese theatre of a Wagnerian dimension.

­

th e t ime it t a ke s f o r t ime t o e n d 155 The death of Yam Kim-fai inspired intellectuals in Hong Kong to rewrite and rethink lesbian and gay representation in popular culture. In response, both Pau and Yau made video works about her. Pau’s Song of the Goddess [1992] is composed of a long take of a slowed-down, and therefore stroboscopic, image, tinted with the colour gold, of a platform of New York City’s 34th Street station from a window of a departing subway train. On this window, the ghost of the theatrical stars, taken from a romantic scene from Tragedy, emerges. Yet, the filmic image is not immediately identifiable by the viewers. Rather, it is filmed from the reflection of a distorted mirror, thus turning the stars’ operatic choreography into an ethereal and sensual abstract pattern (Figure 3.8). Like Pau’s earlier works, the video uses form as a starting point, and it then initiates an affective milieu in which the viewers come to experience the affection and mourning of a video artist who rethinks and rewrites these stars’ history from an extraterritorial position. Meanwhile, Yau Ching’s Suet-sin’s Sisters [1999] uses a clip from a film in which Yam teaches Bak how to behave like a man as a starting point to launch a documentary on lesbian activism in Hong Kong.

Figure 3.8  The abstract spectre of Yam Kim-fai in Song of the Goddess.

156

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

How Shall I Redeem You from Death, Alas; I Shall Surrender My Life a Hundred Times As a Hong Konger who was a budding teenager in the 1980s, a retrospective recounting of the popular culture, cinema and video art of this period is in itself a traumatic experience. On one level, popular culture of Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s was kaleidoscopic, a media environment that was so colourful, enervative, yet volatile that nobody could make sense out of it. It could indeed be understood as what Abbas calls a ‘culture of disappearance’. On another level, the political trauma that this kaleidoscopic culture sought to negotiate was so confusing, painful and unbearable that it would be unfair and unrealistic to call it a culture of disappearance. As I wrote this chapter, I could attest to the fact that all my memories have been well and alive, only that the affects associated with them were too painful to relive. Popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s certainly taught me not to think, but to focus on what I saw, I sensed, I perceived – and my bodily responses to them. But video art did not teach me how to think either. Rather, it taught me how to process my affects in a more self-reflexive and reflective manner. I have no doubt that popular culture could exist without video art. Yet, video artists responded to and continuously worked with the extraterritorial consciousness actively shaped and written by popular culture. The creative impetus behind both is the time it took for time to end, that is, the realisation that the handover of 1997 was an expiration date of a mode of consciousness and a mode of existence – in Hong Kong as an extraterritorial space. As the subsequent chapters will demonstrate, Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality did not stop in 1997. However, it would take a very different path and assume a very different meaning. For the bare lives who lived through this period, something did die in us on 1 July 1997, even though a new life arose on the same day. To this life, which had indeed disappeared, I shall say: ‘How shall I redeem you from death, alas; I shall surrender my life a hundred times.’

­

p o s t his t o r icity 157

C H A PT E R 4

Posthistoricity

What is posthistoricity? In what sense can Hong Kong cinema after 1997 be regarded as posthistorical? The term posthistory, in European philosophy, is derived from Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’ [‘Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan point of view’, 1784].1 In his essay, Kant argues that history is driven by the universal human  will to move toward a cosmopolitan and civic society. Such a ­teleologically linear understanding of human history, however, has encountered a number of problems in twentieth-century Europe and postcolonial societies around the world. For example, in the 1920s and 1930s, the mechanisation of social life and politicisation of biological life inspired philosophers to question the centrality of the human – as opposed to the technical machine and the socio-political apparatus – in the evolution of history.2 Then, during the 1930s and the 1940s, National Socialism fundamentally put into question this Kantian notion of historicity. It was because on the one hand, Nazism, according to which human beings who belonged to the same community were to care for one another in the time it took to reach a common destiny, was supposed to be the height of the cosmopolitics produced by European democracy.3 On the other hand, it instigated the Shoah (1933 or 1941–45), which proved that the absolute power produced and exercised by such a democracy was based on the ostracisation and dehumanisation of the other. It also marked the end of humanity and civilisation. After the Second World War (1939–45), the return to parliamentary democracy under capitalism in Western Europe and socialism in Eastern Europe was increasingly considered a pure performance of a system that had already failed, all for the purpose of reliving the time that it took for time to end. But in this context, time had already ended, only that we were not able to feel it.4 Posthistoricity becomes even more problematic in a colonial or

158

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

­ ostcolonial setting, as acts of colonisation actively interrupt local history. p These acts at once ostracise the communal sense of collective temporality outside European history (thus rendering it ahistorical ) and obsessively measure it against the European perception of universal human progress (thus rendering the local community non-human). Nonetheless, posthistoricity is not always negative and unproductive. On the one hand, as Alexandre Kojève (1902–68) argues, by perpetually performing the failure of a civic society, humanity and social changes are performed for the purpose of maintaining the façade of civility and socio-economic stability.5 On the other hand, as Judith Butler argues, performativity also serves as an invocation. It calls lives together into an assembly, as acts of performance inscribe new traces of memory, collective knowledge and mutual understanding, thus enabling new modes of civic existence to emerge.6 It is in this light that I call Hong Kong mainstream and independent cinemas after 1997 posthistorical. In the introduction of this book and the previous chapters, I illustrated that during the colonial era, Hong Kong was designated as an extraterritorial space that was doubly occupied by two contesting sovereign authorities: China and the United Kingdom (UK). These authorities exercised their political powers over Hong Kong, ironically, by ostracising its biopolitical lives from these sovereignties’ respective juridical territories. In this sense, Hong Kong cinema and media have been historically configured as an extraterritorial industry, creative environment and public sphere, where conflicting affects associated with Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality can be negotiated. If 1 July 1997 was regarded by filmmakers, video artists and their spectators as an expiration date on which a mode of biopolitical existence – that is, a mode of juridico-political history – ended, cultural productions that came after this deadline have both repeated and performed the maintenance of a civic society after such history. Yet, in so doing, they also invoked a new sense of community and collective temporality. This chapter, and the next, study two modes of performance and invocation. In this one, I examine Hong Kong–Mainland co-productions made under the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA), first signed on 29 June 2003. CEPA facilitated the collaboration between Mainland Chinese investors and Hong Kong filmmakers to produce films that are supposed to cater to audiences in both regions.7 The intention and implications of CEPA are still debated among filmmakers, critics and scholars today.8 CEPA allows Hong Kong film companies to solicit capital from their Mainland counterparts so that their films can be distributed as domestic Chinese productions.9 Hong Kong directors and producers including Gordon Lam, Chapman To and Johnnie To have seen CEPA

­

p o s t his t o r icity 159 as a potential corrosive force of Hong Kong’s authorial signature. At the same time, most of them agree that industrially, creatively and sociopolitically, there is always a way to maintain the individuality, subjectivity and autonomy of Hong Kong’s authorship.10 This renewed effort to individuate, subjectivise and autonomise Hong Kong’s socio-political voice and position in these co-productions, I argue, requires an active rewriting and re-understanding of extraterritoriality in the aftermath of the 1997 handover as a form of posthistoricity: (1) as a continual performance of a civic society that had already failed under global neoliberalism; (2) as an invocation of a new assembly of biopolitical lives that are eager to form a new civic society. In the next chapter, I shall push my argument further with the study of independent films and the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers and spectators during and after the Umbrella Movement in 2014, who are interested in redefining Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality as a form of territoriality in its own right. This chapter is not going to be an extensive discussion of a large number of CEPA films. Instead, I first explicate the socio-political conditions and affects in Hong Kong after 1997, which I shall call neoliberal extraterritoriality. Then, I expound how CEPA emerged out of a complex process of industrial transformation of Hong Kong cinema under neoliberalism between the 1990s and the early 2000s and how scholars evaluate the first ten years of Hong Kong–Mainland co-productions after CEPA. With such a background in mind, I scrutinise how Hong Kong filmmakers confront the crisis of authorship under CEPA in three registers – ­industrial, creative and socio-political – with close attention to Johnnie To as a case study. Finally, I conduct a close reading of To’s Duzhan [Dukzin or Drug War, 2013], a film regarded by Mainland spectators and scholars as a dime a dozen. Nevertheless, for Hong Kong spectators, it is the first film produced under CEPA that manages to sit comfortably within the Mainland socio-political and aesthetic paradigm; yet, it speaks honestly to our extraterritorial sensibility and posthistorical conditions.

Neoliberal Extraterritoriality Discussing and analysing Hong Kong’s juridico-political structure after  1997 has been a precarious matter. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the Sino-British Joint Declaration (signed on 19 December 1984), which guaranteed the designation of Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), was a pragmatic agreement reached for the purpose of promising inves-

160

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

tors the port city’s economic continuity. It also pledged to maintain the colonial judicial system and mode of governance for a period of fifty years so that the capitalistic infrastructure could remain intact.11 It did nothing to address, let alone resolve, the deep-structural problem that divided the two sovereign authorities in the first place: Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality. To a certain degree, by setting aside Hong Kong as an economic, juridico-political and social zone of exception and by maintaining a physical border that continues to mark the structure of differences between the two regions, Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality has been preserved in order that international trade can be conducted freely, that is, with minimum sovereign intervention. Precisely because of this, market deregulation and free trade can remain unchecked by any government intervention. It was in this sense that Hong Kong was once again extraterritorialised not under colonialism, but neoliberalism. The debate on CEPA, as I shall demonstrate, crystallises the contesting affects generated from this neoliberal extraterritoriality. Juridico-politically, what exactly was ‘handed over’ from the UK to  the  PRC at midnight on 1 July 1997 has been highly debated. The term being used in the media at the time was zhuquan yijiao (handover of sovereignty). The underlying assumption of this term is that the sovereign authority over Hong Kong before 1 July 1997 stemmed from the British Crown, which was then transferred to the people of China afterwards. On 1 May 2018, Hong Kong’s most authoritative Englishlanguage newspaper, South China Morning Post, reported vindictively that the term ‘handover of sovereignty’ was considered inappropriate by the SAR government of Hong Kong in preparation of the celebration of the twenty-first anniversary of the handover.12 From the perspective of most Hong Kongers, including myself, who had been using this term since the 1990s and understood what happened when we watched the television broadcast of the handover ceremony as a transfer of sovereignty, the SAR government’s sudden decision to cease using this term was undoubtedly a shock. Nevertheless, if we follow the historical debate on Hong Kong’s political extraterritoriality between the two governments since chapter one, the PRC has always considered Hong Kong as an extraterritorial community under Chinese sovereignty. The UK merely exercised its administrative right ‘bestowed upon’ by the Qing government.13 As Lydia Liu argues, this problem can be traced back to the nineteenth century, during which the concept of sovereignty, formulated by Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) during the sixteenth century, was understood as a communal right to travel to and wage war against another European polis

­

p o s t his t o r icity 161

(that is, nation-state) in what was then considered the mare liberum (free sea), including the coastal areas of existing empires. This concept was not understood in the same terms by the Qing court in the 1840s. Instead, according to the Qing code, coastal trading ports could be set aside where foreign subjects could trade freely and exercise their own laws within their communities. By the late 1850s, when the European international law was widely studied by the imperial scholars, China (now defined as a nation-state) and its sovereign authority over these extraterritorial areas was then debated.14 As I pointed out in the previous chapters, Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality was precisely the point of contention between the PRC and the UK during the 1967 Leftist Riots and their negotiation from 1978 to 1984. In the Sino-British Joint Declaration, this point of contestation is carefully preserved – yet muted – in its language: 1. The Government of the People’s Republic of China declares that to recover the Hong Kong area (including Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories, hereinafter referred to as Hong Kong) is the common aspiration of the entire Chinese people, and that it has decided to resume the exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong with effect from 1 July 1997. 2. The Government of the United Kingdom declares that it will restore Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China with effect from 1 July 1997. 3.  The Government of the People’s Republic of China declares that the basic  ­policies  of the People’s Republic of China regarding Hong Kong are as follows: (1)  Upholding national unity and territorial integrity and taking account of the history of Hong Kong and its realities, the People’s Republic of China has decided to establish, in accordance with the provisions of Article 31 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, a Hong Kong Special Administrative Region upon resuming the exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong.15

Notice that in the passage cited, the words being used are: ‘recover [shouhui] the Hong Kong area,’ ‘restore [jiaohuan] Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China’ and ‘resuming the exercise of sovereignty [huifu xingshi zhuquan] over Hong Kong’ so that ‘national unity and territorial integrity’ of the PRC can be upheld.16 The terms shouhui (return) and jiaohuan (restore) refer to a reclamation of a piece of land that has always been rightfully under Chinese authority. Meanwhile, huifu xingshi zhuquan (resuming the exercise of sovereignty) indicates that the sovereignty (juridical authority) over Hong Kong has always belonged to China, only that it was not instantiated during the colonial era as a political power.

162

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Yet, the resumption of instantiating the PRC’s sovereign authority over Hong Kong (juridical inclusion) and the setting aside of the city as a judicial, political and economic zone of exception (juridical exclusion) are two mutually conflicting objectives. On 1 January 1983, editor-in-chief of Baixing banyuekan [Pai Shing Semi-monthly] Hu Ju-ren pointed out that by making Hong Kong a zone of exception, the extraterritorial status of Hong Kong would simply remain unresolved: In the event of China’s recovery of HK [Hong Kong], its legal system will naturally be subordinate to the constitution of China. Article 31 of the revised constitution of the PRC provides for the establishment of special administrative regions, and Article 62 provides that the National People’s Congress exercise the power to decide on the establishment of special administrative regions under their rules and regulations. That is where the crux of the problem is. For a nation, all its laws follow its constitution and there cannot be any contradictions between the two. The revised constitution of the PRC so provides also in Article 5: ‘The state upholds the uniformity and dignity of the socialist legal system. No laws, decrees or statutes shall contradict the constitution.’ According to ‘authoritative persons’ like Xi Zhongxun [1913–2002] and Liao Chengzhi [1908–83], all systems in HK will remain unchanged after 1997. In other words, statutes of a capitalistic system will be practiced. Will this offend the uniformity and dignity of the socialist legal system? Secondly, laws to be applied in special administrative zones will be local laws and regulations and cannot be over and above or contradict stipulations of the constitution. In this context, the laws pertaining to the proposal of HK under the administration of HK people will be contradicting to the constitution.17

In his article, Hu cited more passages from PRC’s constitution to indicate that the concept of the SAR would inevitably invite constitutional disputes. Most notably, according to Article 1 of the constitution: The People’s Republic of China is a socialist state of the people’s democratic ­dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and ­peasants. The socialist system is the basic system of the People’s Republic of China.  Disrupting the socialist system by any individual and in any form is prohibited.18

Since 1982, the ‘socialist system’ has meant Zhongguo tese shehui zhuyi (socialism with Chinese characteristics), a notion proposed by Deng Xiaoping (1904–97). In the 1980s, what Hu feared was that the capitalist system in Hong Kong would be in conflict with the PRC’s socialist one. However, retrospectively, we can now see that the actual conflict is something quite unanticipated by most people in the 1980s. Today, socialism with Chinese characteristics means a high degree

­

p o s t his t o r icity 163

of liberalised market economy controlled by a complex network of corporations owned either directly by the party-state or by trusted party members, which are in turn supervised by the CPC.19 In other words, the socio-political autonomy of the Hong Kong SAR can be instantiated if and only if it will not challenge the economic benefits of this national economic system and its party-state supervision – what Jason McGrath would call global post-socialism.20 In the eye of the international law, what the Joint Declaration guarantees is the continuation of Hong Kong’s status as part of the free sea, that is, a port where trade can be freely conducted without any direct sovereign intervention.21 Socio-politically, Hong Kong remained an extraterritorial space, a zone of exception where two parallel systems of law – the national constitution or lex terrae, that is, law of the land, and the local law or maritime law – must be constantly negotiated in order to guarantee the proper operation of post-socialist neoliberalism both in China and in the region. How to maintain Hong Kong as a zone of exception where neoliberalism can be exercised freely has been the central point of contention among different political factions. The most controversial and politically impactful debate is on the way the Hong Kong Legislative Council (LegCo) and Executive Council (ExCo) should be run. According to the Letters Patent and Royal Instructions to the Governor of Hong Kong (1931; revised 1969), LegCo members had always been appointed directly by the governor.22 In 1979, when it became clear that Deng Xiaoping would not permit the British government to extend its lease of the New Territories, Murray MacLehose (1917–2000; in office 1971–82) proposed to introduce a representative system to district-level governments. He did so by setting up popularly elected district boards modelled upon the Local Government Act of 1972 in the UK.23 Then, shortly before the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the colonial government published the Green Paper: The Further Development of Representative Government in Hong Kong in July. It proposed a new LegCo that would consist of twelve members elected by electoral colleges and twelve by functional constituencies (guilds and professional organisations), a plan realised in the 1985 election.24 This plan, however, was challenged repeatedly by Pro-democracy activists, who demanded direct election of all LegCo seats. In 1995, Governor Chris Patten (in office 1992–7; former Chairman of the Conservative Party, 1990–2) permitted twenty members to be directly elected, while others were indirectly elected by functional constituencies and the district boards.25 The Beijing government regarded Patten’s plan as one designed to give  power to the Pro-democracy camp, which was also known to

164

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

be ­antagonistic towards the Beijing administration after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. In response, the PRC set up the Provisional Legislative Council (PLC) in 1996, which consisted of members elected by a constituent committee appointed by Beijing.26 The PLC was eventually replaced in an election in 1998, under a system modelled upon the Patten plan, with the exception that LegCo members were returned by a proportional representation system. Also, the functional constituencies were restructured so that some registered voters ended up losing their votes in this category.27 Although the Democratic Party won the majority in this election, according to a report on Hong Kong’s democratisation filed by Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa (1997–2005), the system would later on facilitate pro-Beijing political parties to form effective alliances among themselves, which had since 2004 dominated Hong Kong politics.28 The continued existence of seats returned by functional constituencies, which consisted of trade and business associations that used to be loyal to the colonial authority before 1997 and became subservient to Beijing thereafter, has remained a point of contention for the Pro-democracy politicians. For Law Wing-sang, Hong Kong’s social, political, cultural and economic structure during the 1980s and 1990s was a site of collaboration between elites who stayed loyal to the British colonial administration and those who served the increasingly prominent Chinese government. These elites formed financial, political and cultural networks of communities of Hong Kongers across the globe, thus transforming Hong Kong ‘identity’ and ‘subjectivity’ from a geopolitically bound formation to an inter- and intra-regional one. For Law: In cultural terms, collaborative colonialism also refers to an ideological and affective formation characterized by the dominance of a colonialist culture which is, however, maintained both by the imperialistic foreigners and the native collaborators. Amidst the rise of anti-colonial nationalistic discourses, which always try to set up a Manichean binary framework to affirm an anti-colonial subjecthood, collaborative relations are precarious and always vulnerable to criticisms and attacks. As a corollary, within the formation of collaborative colonialism, the colonized natives always fail to achieve for themselves politically effective collective identity in resistance to the dominating colonial power because they are socially divided by mutual mistrust and suspicion. Also, the double identity of a collaborator further entails a split subjectivity, which is always torn apart by endless interrogations (or self-interrogations) of loyalty, as the flipside of collaboration is betrayal to one’s own brothers or intimate relatives.29

As Lo Kwai Cheung and Pang Laikwan argue, because of such a transition, decolonisation in Hong Kong was not marked by a transfer of

­

p o s t his t o r icity 165

economic and political privileges from a coloniser to the colonised. Rather, it was marked by a maintenance of the same system of powers and privileges shared and negotiated between the two groups of elites. As a result, despite the fact that Hong Kong maintains a structure of differences from its Mainland counterpart, the ‘new hegemony of neo-liberal capitalist economies – in the city that extends market rationality to every sphere of life, intensifies pauperization, and depoliticizes administrative and social powers’. Such hegemony compelled multinational corporations to follow the ‘so-called “Beijing Consensus” or the Chinese model of coordinated development’.30 Meanwhile, the colonial governor was replaced in 1997 by the chief executive, who was elected by an electoral college of 800 people (increased to 2,000 in 2010).31 Pro-democracy politicians and supporters have accused the elections of being heixiang zuoye (haaksoeng zokjip or black box operations), that is, lacking in transparency.32 In addition, the chief executives have been incredibly unpopular. Tung Chee-hwa was considered conscientious but too subservient to the Beijing government.33 Meanwhile, Donald Tsang (in office 2005–12) was regarded as a government servant whose sole interest was to benefit the top corporations and businesspeople. He was remembered as an opportunist and speculator during the financial crisis from 1997 to 1999 and was found guilty of corruption on 17 February 2017.34 Leung Chun-ying (C. Y. Leung; in office 2012–17), a 1967 activist and academic, was criticised for being a Maoist-turned-neoliberalist who employed high-handed strategies during the Umbrella Movement.35 Finally, Carrie Lam (in office since 1 July 2017) is considered by many people as merely a lackey of the Beijing government. The sense of deindividuation, desubjectivisation and deautonomisation that Hong Kongers have faced since 1997 is not entirely different from that experienced by the middle and working classes in Europe and North America: that the city’s political power has rested in the hands of a network of businesspeople whose sole interest is to guarantee Hong Kong as a trading port free of any governmental intervention. This has been done, like everywhere else, at the expense of skyrocketing housing prices and privatisation and erosion of healthcare and education. Middle-class and working-class Hong Kongers have felt perpetually ignored and silenced by a small number of people who possess the majority of wealth and properties in the city and region. What complicates matters is that many of these financial and business elites have strong ties with the Mainland through their investments in the PRC, thus convincing Pro-democracy politicians and s­upporters that China has actively taken advantage of the ‘one-country-two-­systems’

166

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

policy to syphon Hong Kong capital into the Mainland. This problem still awaits economists to verify or dispute. However, through these economic ties, the Hong Kong economy has unquestionably been integrated into the larger post-socialist neoliberal one under party-state supervision. Deindividuation, desubjectivisation and deautonomisation under Hong  Kong’s neoliberal extraterritoriality have therefore developed a sense of alienation among Hong Kongers vis-à-vis the Mainland. For example, during the financial crisis from 1997 to 1999, the Beijing government insisted that the Hong Kong government was responsible for its own financial survival, as stipulated by the principle of Hong Kongers administering Hong Kong. Nevertheless, Beijing’s non-intervention was seen by some Hong Kongers as a sign that the city’s financial collapse would help Shanghai to replace Hong Kong as the leading financial market in the region.36 This sense of alienation has also been crystallised in the debate on Article 23 of the Hong Kong Basic Law, which requires the SAR to ‘enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People’s Government’. Nonetheless, due to popular protests, Article 23 has not been legislated.37 Meanwhile, the annual June-Fourth Vigil at Victoria Park in commemoration of the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 and the annual mass protest on the Inception Day of the HKSAR on 1 July have been considered as key political acts that demarcate the imagined boundary between democratic Hong Kong and authoritarian China.38 Furthermore, from 1999 to 2016, the executive and judicial branches of the Hong Kong government asked the People’s Congress of the PRC to interpret the Hong Kong Basic Law. Such acts were considered by Pro-democracy, and, later, Pro-independence, politicians as unnecessary interventions.39 In 2011, the SAR government introduced moral and national education to primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong, which triggered a mass protest led by secondary-school student activist group Scholarism, presided over by fifteen-year-old leader Joshua Wong.40 All these developments paved the way to the Umbrella Movement in 2014, which I shall discuss in the following chapter. For many Hong Kongers, however, the SAR government has continued to perform the role and functions of the colonial government, a system that, under post-socialist neoliberalism, had already failed. Yet, as a mode of posthistoricity, it perpetually performs its failure as a series of repetitive rehearsals of the time it took for time to end. For many people who still carry our memories from the colonial period, history ended on 1 July 1997, only that we are not willing to feel it.

­

p o s t his t o r icity 167

Hong Kong–Mainland Co-productions Hong Kong–Mainland co-productions under CEPA are best understood in the same neoliberal extraterritorial terms. Hong Kong productions have been categorised by the PRC as foreign films since July 1950, under the ‘Guowai yingpian shuru zhanxing banfa’ (Temporary methods of importing films from outside the country). At the time, the New China News Agency (NCNA) recommended Hong Kong filmmakers to ‘Yao jingti zuo; yao fangzhi you’ (Alert themselves against the left; prevent themselves from leaning toward the right), thus promulgating a moderate mode of socialism under the colony’s capitalist infrastructure (see chapter one). However, precisely because of this middle-of-the-road policy, the PRC exercised censorship in the Mainland against not only Hong Kongproduced pro-Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist) films, but also left-wing Mandarin and Cantonese ones.41 This policy was revised in 1981, with the new ‘Jinkou dianying guanli banfa’ (Methods of management over film importation). According to Article 7: ‘With the exception of Hong Kong’s Great Wall, Phoenix, Feng Huang and Sun Luen, which, in case of co-productions, may contact the related regions and government units via the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office of the State Council, all other co-production businesses involving foreign countries, between us and the Hong Kong and Macau regions, and between us and the province of Taiwan, are to be managed by the China Film Co-Production Corporation (CFCC).’42 In 1981, for instance, left-wing producer Liu Yat-yuen (1920–2002) determined to depoliticise the image of left-wing cinema by hiring director Chang Hsinyen to make martial arts film Shaolinsi [The Shaolin Temple, 1982], which was also Jet Li’s acting debut.43 In 1982, producer Hsia Moon (1933–2016), who used to act for Great Wall Movie Enterprise, used her connections to arrange Ann Hui’s Touben nuhai [Tauban nouhoi or Boat People, 1982] to be shot on Hainan Island (see chapter three). In May 1982, director Li Han-hsiang (1926–96), who had been working for pro-KMT studio Shaw Brothers, received permission to shoot his Qing-dynasty historical epics Huoshao Yuanmingyuan [The Burning of the Imperial Palace, 1983] and Chuilian tingzheng [Reign Behind a Curtain, 1983] on location in the Forbidden City.44 These co-productions were made as Hong Kong films facilitated by Mainland talents and resources. In the 1990s, Hong Kong–Mainland co-productions became part of a complex intra-regional and transnational production and distribution network. From 1992 to 1996, the box-office performance of Hong Kong productions reached an all-time low. According to Chan C ­ hing-wai,

168

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

in  1995, Hong Kong mainstream films garnered US$107,551,395. In 1996, the figure dropped by 29.95 per cent to $75,704,133.45 Some industry professionals, whose names cannot be disclosed here, argue that the Hong Kong film industry in the 1990s was destroyed by the triads: clan-based business conglomerates that have been historically associated with organised crime. Given that many triad members who were active in the industry are still powerful today, it is nearly impossible for film historians to accurately chronicle and evaluate this claim.46 According to my research, there is no evidence that the triads had singlehandedly shattered the film industry. However, producers who had triad backgrounds might have introduced business models – with all good intention – that were not sustainable unless co-productions could be introduced to offset local investors’ risks. To a certain degree, the triads did not destroy the film industry; they transformed it. For instance, as early as 1982, producer Alan Tang (1946–2011) changed the rules of distribution with his film Xiexi tangrenjie [Hyutsai tongjangaai or New York Chinatown, Stanley Siu, 1982]. We can catch a glimpse of this change from the way he handled his North American distribution, which I have discussed elsewhere: On 6 April 1982, [Hong Kong-based Taiwan distributor] Century represented the Wing Scope Company, a production firm headed by producer Alan Tang (known later for his work with Wong Kar-wai) in signing a contract with Sun Sing [New York distributor]. According to this agreement, before production Wing Scope licensed the distribution and performing rights of . . . New York Chinatown . . . in the US and Canada for a sum of [US]$40,000, with Sun Sing’s ‘usual’ deposit of $5,000. Wing Scope agreed to furnish Sun Sing with one new print and one used print of the film (in Cantonese), two used trailers, 150 posters, twenty sets of colour stills, thirty sets of the synopsis in English and Chinese, one script in English and Chinese, and one comprehensive certificate of origin. The peculiar point was that Wing Scope demanded the rest of the payment upon the arrival of the film crew at New York for principal photography, not at the time of the film’s release. Such an arrangement required Sun Sing to gamble on the market value of the film, and in order to maximize anticipated receipts Sun Sing was responsible for promoting it aggressively in North America – which it did with a front-page report in a newspaper chronicling the cast’s promotional trip to Atlantic City. Wing Scope and Sun Sing agreed to share the revenue equally, after deducting the ‘share of theatrical exhibitors, governmental tax, the license fee, promotional’ and other expenses. Finally, Sun Sing was responsible for paying the licensing fee and performing rights again upon any re-exploitation, and to return the film prints to Wing Scope at Sun Sing’s cost. This particular gamble was a failure. Sun Sing’s advertising campaign was initially a success, and the hype persuaded the heads of several triads, whose lives and glory the film is supposed to portray, to assist the production. Nevertheless, the film represented these triads and key figures with their real names, a strategic disaster that led to the boycott of the film in the Chinatowns around North America. Sun Sing

­

p o s t his t o r icity 169 eventually distributed the film to seventeen theatres and restaurants (that served dinners with movies on weekends) in major cities in the US, which generated a gross of $58,093.89. After paying $40,000 to Century, Sun Sing could only afford to pay Wing Scope $18,093.89, leaving the theatre with a debt of $16,906.11.47

According to the correspondence between Wing Scope and Sun Sing, despite the disastrous impact on the cinema, this system of distribution was immediately adopted by other cinema circuits and production companies both in Hong Kong and overseas.48 Tang’s strategy, according to Justin Wyatt, emerged in Hollywood in the 1980s as the ‘package-deal’ system. What Tang did effectively was to put his own name, his triad connections, his stars (again, himself, Hong Kong television star Melvin Wong and US kickboxing champion Don Wilson) into a package pre-sold to a distributor. Not only were all the advertising fees and publicity work paid for and furnished by the US distributor, the film’s prospect of being shown in North America also attracted a higher volume of capital from the investors. Yet, such a system put pressure on the distributors and investors, who had to gamble on the success of the film in the market.49 It certainly did not work for a small company like Sun Sing. However, it would work if these distributors and investors could offset their potential losses by their businesses in other sectors (for example, triads) or if they were multimedia and multinational conglomerates (for example, a Hollywood, or, later, a Mainland Chinese media corporation). Sometimes, a loss in an investment in the film industry can help cut the taxes incurred by a profitable investment elsewhere (that is, money laundering). When such a system functions properly, it not only enables production companies to produce bigger-budget blockbusters, but also independent filmmakers to direct financially high-risk arthouse films. An example in the 1990s was Wong Kar-wai’s Afei zhengzhuan [Afei zingzyun or Days of Being Wild, 1990], produced by none other than Alan Tang. If Tang’s package-deal system inevitably led to the need to seek coproduction opportunities with the Mainland, other triad-led producers advocated a more localised cinema. A rising production company run by another clan began to catch the industry’s attention in 1987: Win’s Movie Production. On 25 June that year, Win’s released Wong Jing’s Jingzhuang zhuinüzai [Zingzong zeoineoizai or The Romancing Star], which garnered US$2,784,695 at the box office.50 Win’s owners were triad members Charles Heung and Jimmy Heung (1950–2014). The success of The Romancing Star, a comedy that parodies Cinema City films, marked the decline of Golden Princess’ dominance over the Hong Kong film market. The film’s vernacular – and borderline vulgar – sensibility also

170

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

posed a serious competition to the more artistic approach of newcomer D&B (see chapter three).51 Cinema City dissolved by the end of 1989 and Golden Princess distributed only one film per year from 1993 to 1995.52 Meanwhile, Win’s gambling films became the most popular releases between the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Zhizun wushang [Zizyun mousoeng or Casino Raiders, Wong Jing and Jimmy Heung, 1989; US$2,986,197.31] and Du shen [Dou san or God of Gamblers, Wong Jing, 1989; $4,751,113.59]. The company also produced films that feature Stephen Chow, including Luding ji [Lukding gei or Royal Tramp, Wong Jing, 1992; $5,238,824.49] and Taoxue weilong 2 [Touhok wailing 2 or Fight Back to School 2, Gordon Chan, 1992; $2,165,340].53 The vulgar language and vernacular subject matter of these films and Chow’s mouleitou (nonsensical) humour appealed to a Hong Kong audience who were unable to cope with the illogical sociopolitical environment over which they could exercise no agency. In this sense, Wing’s productions offered the spectators a cultural and sensorial anarchy that helped them mediate and negotiate their affects of failure. Stephanie Chung argues that the package-deal system was further ­expedited by two developments: the VHS market and the emergence of intra-regional fundraisers in Taiwan. From 1981 to 1988, three major video rental companies, Fotomax, KPS Video Express and Golden Cinema City (specialising in Golden Princess productions), dominated the market. Yet, by 1988, VHS rentals were so oversaturated that these companies began to offer membership-free services, thus making these businesses unsustainable. From 1988 to 1997, the remaining company, KPS, found itself fighting against US company Blockbuster on the one hand and video piracy both in Hong Kong and in Mainland China on the other.54 Then, in the same year (1988), Taiwan fundraisers elevated the stake of the package-deal system by buying out project proposals, that is, general packages of movie stars and synopses, with a sum of HK$2,000,000 (US$256,410). The final project might only garner about $256,410 at the Hong Kong box office. However, the company could then sell the rights to Southeast Asian, North American or even Mainland Chinese markets for anywhere from $25,641 to $2,564 per country. Including VHS rentals, these seemingly small sales could potentially double the sum of their investments.55 These Taiwan companies included KMT’s Central Pictures Corporations, Chiu Fu-sheng’s Century, Tsai Sung-lin’s Scholar Film and Wang Ying-hsiang’s (1938–2016) Long Shong, Dragon Crown and Te Pao.56 These Taiwan fundraisers were instrumental in making the works of fifth-generation directors in the Mainland possible. For instance,

­

p o s t his t o r icity 171 Century  fundraised for Zhang Yimou’s Dahong denglong gaogaogua [Raise the Red Lantern, 1991] with a pre-packaged deal sold to Miramax, thus persuading the CFCC to greenlight the project despite its problem with the party-state censorship. Meanwhile, Tomson International Distribution pre-sold Chen Kaige’s Bawang bieji [Farewell My Concubine, 1993] to Miramax. As I discussed elsewhere, these deals were facilitated by Miramax and other major independent companies in the United States, which actively sought runaway productions in emerging economies during the early 1990s.57 CEPA was therefore made possible by an intra-regional and interregional – or some might say, global – synergy. On 27 December 1995, in preparation for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), the State Council of the PRC issued the ‘Memorandum of the meeting about the questions related to the studies of television’. It announced the implementation of the ‘9550 Project’, which set out to produce fifty jingpin chuangzuo (quality creations) from 1995 to 2000. The 9550 Project was a long-term plan to liberalise the Chinese film and media market by terminating the state-run studio system established since the 1950s. It did so by converting the thirty state-controlled film studios into private media corporations. Instead of being financed directly by State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT), these media corporations were required to generate their own income via ‘commercials, multinational investments, and sales’. In return, they would ‘contribute three per cent of their gross profits to SAPPRFT’.58 SAPPRFT would  then use such profits to provide direct funding for fifty quality creations, that is, zhuxuanlü (main melody – or some say, propaganda) films that would eulogise the san hao (three goods) promoted by the CPC: Gongchan dang hao (the CPC is good), shehui zhuyi hao (socialism is good) and gaige kaifang hao (the reform and open policy is good).59 The concept of the main melody film emerged during the Seventeen Years Period (1949–66), a concept based on the film theory of screenwriter and playwright Xia Yan (1900–95), who served as the Deputy Minister of Culture from 1954 to 1965.60 The term zhuxuanlü is a translation of the term leitmotif, a musical device used by Richard Wagner (1813–83). For Wagner, Italian opera is usually constructed out of arias that bear no motivic or thematic relationships with one another. In response, he composed each of his operas based on a set of leitmotifs, that is, motivic or thematic materials that are associated with different characters, affects or plot elements. As these leitmotifs repeat themselves in variations and in different modulations (key changes), they generate structures of  affects  associated with these respective themes. For policymakers,

172

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

a successful propaganda film should carry visual leitmotifs that could train the sensoria of the masses to associate specific affective responses to the socio-political elements represented by these themes.61 During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), for example, theories were developed to discuss how camerawork, editing, framing, lighting and performance would allow these leitmotifs to tuchu (stand out), so that the dialectical relationships between the individual and the collective, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and the party and the masses could be thematically and emotively emphasised.62 The complaint among some film scholars and policymakers is that the main melody film is a form of direct state intervention into the liberalised film industry, which does not appeal to the international market. Policymaker and scholar Zhao Shi, who supports the continuance of such state intervention, argues that the main melody films in the 1950s and 1960s were the most financially lucrative, popularly supported and ­internationally acclaimed films the PRC had ever produced.63 In response to the accusation that in a market economy the state should not interfere  in private filmmaking, scholar Lü Yidu argues that the CPC should not impose any ideological position upon individual productions, as it did in the past. However, under the principles of shehui zhuyi hexie  shehui  (a  socialist harmonious society), a national policy adopted by the Sixteenth Central Committee of the CPC on 19 September 2004, a main melody film should promote the formation of a public consensus by  generating affects that would allow the spectators to gongming (resonate) their sensoria with one another by means of patriotism and nationalism.64 SAPPRFT often cites Yingxiong [Hero, Zhang Yimou, 2002] as an example of a successful main melody film. The film uses the popular genre of wuxia, the modern technology of computer-generated image (CGI), and internationally acclaimed movie stars from Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong to create a cinematic spectacle. It then garnered unprecedented box-office success and international accolades. More importantly, for SAPPRFT, the film uses the notion of tianxia (all that under heaven) as a universalising concept. The idea was generated from philosophies during the Warring States period (circa 475–221 bce), which propounded that the world order was to be conceived as a delicate social, political and cosmic balance of power adjudicated by an internecine relationship based on benevolence and harmony. Since 1995, this concept has been promoted by contemporary Chinese scholars as a world order alternative to the Euro-American mode of postcolonial global structure. Last but not least, Hero put together financial resources from Hong Kong and Mainland

­

p o s t his t o r icity 173 China, and with its pre-sale to Miramax for North American distribution. It quickly became the model for a basis for further intra-regional and inter-regional collaboration between Hong Kong, the Mainland and the United States.65 From the perspective of these CPC policymakers, CEPA could solicit Hong Kong producers and filmmakers to refresh the main melody film with the aesthetics, global sensibility and professional expertise of Hong  Kong filmmakers. The most recent example of this is Honghai xingdong [Operation Red Sea, Dante Lam, 2018], a film about a Chinese Naval Special Forces unit, Jiaolong, rescuing Chinese citizens from various war zones in the Middle East. Meanwhile, for the Hong Kong producers, this was the only way by which Hong Kong cinema could remain sustainable within an intra-regional and inter-regional neoliberal economy. CEPA was signed on 29 June 2003. According to Annex Four of the arrangement (signed 23 September 2003): 1. Chinese language motion pictures produced in Hong Kong may be imported for distribution in the Mainland on a quota-free basis, after vetting and approval by the relevant Mainland authority. 2.  Chinese language motion pictures produced in Hong Kong refer to those motion pictures made by production companies which are set up or established in accordance with the relevant laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and which own more than 75% of the copyright of the motion pictures concerned. Hong Kong residents should comprise more than 50% of the total principal personnel in the motion pictures concerned. 3. Motion pictures jointly produced by Hong Kong and the Mainland are treated as Mainland motion pictures for the purpose of distribution in the Mainland. Translated versions of the motion pictures in languages of other Chinese ethnic groups and Chinese dialects, which are based on the Putonghua version, are allowed to be distributed in the Mainland. 4. For motion pictures jointly produced by Hong Kong and the Mainland, there is no restriction on the percentage of principal creative personnel from Hong Kong, but at least one-third of the leading artists must be from the Mainland; there is no restriction on where the story takes place, but the plots or the leading characters must be related to the Mainland.66

According to my conversation with independent filmmaker Ben Wong, Hong Kong producers and investors were initially lukewarm toward CEPA, as filmmakers were at the time weary of the Mainland’s censorship requirements. They also worried that their box-office shares would not be duly returned to them. The second point was an especially delicate one, as SAPPRFT has a policy of highlighting the success of

174

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Mainland productions (especially the main melody films) by lowering the official box-office figures of the CEPA productions published to the public. As a result, investors were for a period of time unclear whether they would be paid according to the deflated figures on the report or the actual figures according to the book. This anxiety was eventually pacified as Hong Kong producers were able to retrieve their full revenues from SAPPRFT.67 Meanwhile, Hong Kong producers wished to distribute the Cantonese versions of their films beyond Hong Kong, in the Guangdong ­province, and they also wished to lower the Hong Kong shareholding ­requirements  from 75 to 50 per cent. These conditions were granted on  18 October  2005 by Annex Two, ‘Supplements and amendments II to the Mainland’s ­specific commitments on liberalization of trade in services  for Hong Kong’ (also known as CEPA III).68 In 2006, the year after the signing of  CEPA  III, there were fifty-one commercially released features produced in Hong Kong. Twenty-nine (56.86 per cent) of them were granted domestic status.69 In this sense, big-budget Hong Kong films financed by Mainland companies are best understood as ­extraterritorial ­productions that submit themselves to Mainland legal regulation or a Mainland ­production that enjoys certain extraterritorial privileges. I will discuss its further industrial implications in the following section. CEPA generated a highly contested discourse among Hong Kong and Mainland scholars. In the next section, I will also discuss this question from the filmmakers’ perspective. For scholars from both Hong Kong and the Mainland, CEPA productions challenge the stylistic integrities and cultural specificities of both industries. Many Hong Kong scholars are worried about what they call Mainlandisation and the most outspoken person was Mirana Szeto. For Szeto and Chen Yun-chung, Mainlandisation is not simply an abstract concern about the loss of Hong Kong’s cultural specificity and identity in co-productions. Rather, the negative impact of CEPA on Hong Kong cinema can be measured in terms of labour and narrative structure. Szeto and Chen point out that since the 1990s, the Hong Kong film industry, not unlike its Hollywood counterpart, has adopted the ‘flexible independent system’. This means that individual producers and filmmakers would form small companies to raise funds for their own productions. They would then hire top talents for their above-the-line labour (for example, director, director of photography, editors and actors) and flexible non-contracted and non-unionised labour for the below-the-line posts. In most cross-border co-productions, Szeto and Chen argue, these below-the-line positions are filled with

­

p o s t his t o r icity 175 Mainland labourers, who are willing to work at lower salary points than those of their Hong Kong counterparts.70 Stylistically, for Szeto and Chen, Hong Kong Cantonese cinema in the 1980s was characterised by a combination of both slapstick and screwball comedies. While slapstick comedy and action (for example, martial arts) are considered translatable to other cultures, screwball comedies are considered local and untranslatable. Most CEPA productions put their emphasis on slapstick comedies or actions, which are regarded as marketable both within China and overseas. As a result, the spectators begin to see increasingly higher-budget blockbusters in these genres. Meanwhile, verbal comedies and other subjects are marginalised as low-budget independent productions. For Szeto, Mainlandisation is part and parcel of what Toby Miller would call ‘global Hollywood’, a gradual homogenisation of film genres by investing most of the industry’s capital into those subject matters that are considered ‘universal’ or ‘global’, which ends up silencing local interests and sensibilities.71 Meanwhile, for Mainland scholars, CEPA was initially designed as a step toward national integration. Yet, CPC policymakers soon realised that the spectators in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing – the three major film markets – carried different qinggan (affects).72 Many film scholars trace the problem to Hong Kong cinema’s post-1997 complex.73 A complex, in psychoanalytical terms, is a trauma that an individual continually revisits, rehearses and reconfigures. Nevertheless, the traumatic site so identified by an individual may not be the actual traumatic incident itself. Rather, the individual attaches the pains and sufferings they experience now to this traumatic site in the past in order to make sense of their own ontological consistency.74 For Mainland scholar Wang Haizhou, on the surface, Hong Kongers’ post-1997 complex is similar to their pre-1997 one, that Hong Kongers come to realise that Hong Kong is not a ‘self-determined “independent speaking subject”.’ Rather, the very idea that it constantly requires an interlocutor (the British government in the past and the Beijing government after 1997) has created anxiety about the city’s own limitation – or even one might say, mortality.75 Wang cites Hong Kong film critic Long Tin: Pressure: it seems like there is never enough time. As a result, one must try one’s best to do everything in a hurry. It seems like there is never enough space, so we must use our space wisely. Time is limited and space is disappearing. What used to belong to us has now changed hands – this is an awareness of those people who live in a city in danger, whose danger is aggravated by their sense of mortality. Hence, symbolically, this sense of mortality is transferred to an intense sense of action, and a form of rhythm that is extraordinarily fast.76

176

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Meanwhile, Szeto also echoes this idea: The SAR New Wave is a cinema of anxiety, a clinical and forensic science of the real. It tries to catch the objet petit a of Hong Kong culture, which the Hong Kong subject is unaware of. It examines the skeletons in the closet and presents their contexts and histories in ethnographic, archaeological, and genealogic detail. It makes earnest effort to see what is there. It consciously takes stock of what is to be salvaged, understood, and transformed. It reckons with cultural landscapes and ways of life literally disappearing unawares, and conserves this culture and way of life for Hong Kong before an undifferentiated vision of Chinese developmentalism, neoliberal city makeovers, and cross-border infrastructural integration with China delete them from our cultural-political consciousness.77

Nonetheless, Yang Yuanying argues that the problem does not lie in the Hong Kongers’ sense of mortality alone. For her, the CPC and individual production companies, during the first ten years after the signing of CEPA, have encouraged projects that can help achieve what she would call yishi fenghe (ideological suture). What she means is that a commercially successful film should reconnect the two mutually incoherent ideological formations together, by suturing the subjectival inconsistencies not between the Hong Kong and Mainland audiences alone, but within the political subjectivities of the Hong Kong spectators and the Mainland spectators respectively.78 Yang argues that post-socialist Mainland Chinese subjectivity and postcolonial Hong Kong subjectivity are both characterised by their respective modes of schizophrenia. The former is split into a continuous belief in and resistance against classical socialism on the one hand and state-directed capitalism on the other. The latter is split into a growing acceptance of and resistance against Hong Kong’s position in the larger national imagination.79 Yang uses the negative reception of the 2009 Hong Kong–Mainland coproduction Shiyue weicheng [Sapjyut waising or Bodyguards and Assassins, Peter Chan, 2009] in Mainland China as an example. The film is about a number of unknown working-class Hong Kong martial artists sacrificing their lives in order to protect revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen (1866– 1925) from being assassinated by killers sent by the Qing government. Yang observes that while the Hong Kong critics praised the film for its successful negotiation between its local Hong Kong sensibility and its role in the larger national history, the Mainland viewers found the film incapable of addressing their ideological split: As viewing subjects, these young [Mainland] spectators [of Bodyguards and Assassins] were in a state of schizophrenia. On the one hand, in the film’s attempt to educate [the Mainland viewers about classical socialist beliefs], its vacuous ideology was

­

p o s t his t o r icity 177 seen as overtly didactic . . . The rhetoric of the film fails to communicate a message without preaching it. As a result, these young viewers find [the film] untrustworthy or even disgusting. In other words, [the film’s] classical socialist rhetoric and the [Mainland] spectators’ ‘real’ sensations or daily experience [under state-directed capitalism] constitute a severed or contradictory condition. Such a schizophrenic subjectival condition is precisely the very subjectival position constructed at the cusp between the 1970s and the 1980s; it is a form of inconsistency within the subjectivity of post-socialist China.80

Yang cites Toumingzhuang [Tuamingzong or The Warlords, Peter Chan, 2007] as a failed attempt to satisfy the ideal of ideological suture. As she points out, The Warlords was exceptionally well received in Hong Kong. The film represents a story about the rise and fall of three sworn brothers as warlords who help the Qing government to fight against the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64). After their success, these brothers hope to retain their regional influences despite the Qing court’s efforts to limit their power. In so doing, the film promotes a multifocal and pluralistic form of government alternative to the centralised system of the PRC.81 Likewise, John Woo’s Chibi [Cekbik or Red Cliff, 2008–9] is structured around the preservation of the Three Kingdoms (220–280) as divided yet mutually dependent political entities. Before the final battle, the character Zhu Geliang (Kaneshiro Takeshi) whispers to himself: tianxia san fen, zhi zai tianyi (I entrust my hope to maintain our tripartite political divide to the will of heaven). His wish can be read as a metaphor of the tripartite relationship between the Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong director and audience’s desire to maintain such a status quo with minimum Mainland intervention. In other words, these works are more interested in healing the subjectival conflict sensed and perceived by the Hong Kong viewers than in renegotiating the subjectival inconsistencies of their Mainland counterparts. What is at stake in these films that are believed to have failed to suture the ideological divide between the Mainland and Hong Kong and within their respective schizophrenic subjectivities is their insistence on the idea of making palpable a sense of extraterritorial affect. By engaging the spectators in scenarios where heroes and warriors – often played by topbilling stars – fight for regional autonomy or alternative modes of political governance, these films validate the idea of national integrity and unity as an underlying political assumption. Yet, they also suggest that c­ entralised governance may not be the best option for those who enjoy the political and economic privileges of their extraterritorial status.

178

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Crisis of Posthistorical Authorship: Johnnie To What is at stake with CEPA is authorship. As Johnnie To told me in our conversation on 30 November 2016 (see chapter three), ‘I established Milkyway Image in 1996 because in order for me to say something as an individual and to assert who I was as a filmmaker, I needed to become an author.’82 The advent of CEPA challenged these directors’ hard-won authorship from the 1990s. Authorship in Hong Kong–Mainland co-productions under CEPA needs to be understood in three registers: industrial, creative and sociopolitical. First, the focus of the discourse around CEPA, rightfully so, falls  on the potential absorption of the Hong Kong mainstream film industry by the larger Chinese film industry. We can call this a crisis of industrial authorship. In the 2018 report of the performance of the Hong Kong  film industry compiled by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), in 2017, fifty-four out of eighty-nine films (or 60.6 per cent) produced in Hong Kong in 2016 were granted co-production permits. The industry consisted of 2,692 establishments, employing 16,486 individuals, including both Hong Kong permanent residents and temporary workers. In 2016, sixty-two ‘locally produced’ films were released, whereas in 2017, the number dropped to fifty-three.83 These figures are often pessimistically compared to those from the early 1990s, when the industry produced close to 400 films per year.84 However, in the United States, in 2016, only ninety-three films produced by the six major Hollywood studios (Warner Bros., Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony Pictures and Universal) were released in cinemas, even though 736 US-produced films were released that year.85 As Ruby Cheung points out, the HKDTC figures exclude independent films and theatrical releases that are deemed politically sensitive (see chapter five).86 Hence, these frequently cited data are not enough for us to understand where the crisis of industrial authorship lies. There are two ways to look at the Hong Kong film industry: (1) as a business that generates income; (2) as a cultural brand. As an income-generating apparatus, these figures seem to suggest that the industry has been sound and healthy. In fact, the proportion of coproductions over the total number of film outputs from Hong Kong only rose slightly from 56.86 per per cent in 2006 to 60.67 per cent in 2016. The HKDTC boasts that in 2017, the industry exported HK$658 million’s (US$83,833,937.60) worth of audio-visual-production-related services primarily to Mainland China.87 According to Ben Wong and Gordon Lam, these services are: (1) screenplay development; (2) pro-

­

p o s t his t o r icity 179

duction management; and (3) postproduction. For Wong and Lam, in pre-production, famous Mainland Chinese writers, including legitimate members of the Chinese Writers Association and intellectual wanghong (social media stars), are always sought after by production companies to offer project ideas. These writers are sometimes paid millions of US dollars upfront for one-page synopses. Nevertheless, these highly talented authors are not always familiar with Hollywood-style screenwriting. Hence, experienced writers from Hong Kong would be paid to help develop these screenplays, especially when these authors have multiple deadlines to meet. Then, in production, many Mainland line producers and assistant directors were either trained during the studio era (older generation) or were brought up at a time when resources seemed unlimited to them (newer generation). Hong Kong production managers, who are more used to working within limited budgets and tight schedules, are often hired by Mainland companies to keep the production costs in check. Finally, Hong Kong postproduction companies not only offer creative talents and technicians, but also a space comparatively safe from censorship and immediate corporate pressure.88 Looking at this pessimistically, the Hong Kong film industry has been transformed into a service-oriented one, which provides creative and technical resources for Mainland productions – or what Toby Miller and colleagues would call ‘runaway productions’.89 Optimistically, as Johnnie To argues, this does not mean that the Hong Kong film industry has been absorbed into the larger Chinese one. Rather, it means that Hong Kong cinema is instantiated as a creative force that is indispensable for the continuous development of Chinese cinemas.90 At the Far East Film Festival 18 at Udine, To was asked by a Mainland journalist what he thought about Chinese cinema. He responded: Lan (rotten)! The rottener a film is, the more money the producer gets. But this does not mean that Chinese cinema is doomed to failure. It simply means that, like Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s, the market must come to a point of saturation, at which the audience will eventually be able to voice their demand for quality and creativity. When I was a boy, China was good at making two things. I mean they were really high-quality things: men’s briefs and face towels (with the ‘Wish you a good morning’ inscription on each). Chinese filmmakers and producers should study carefully how to make men’s briefs and face towels. The manufacturers back in those days put their hearts into these products. They were what people needed and they were durable. In fact, the users developed an affective affiliation to them. Our mission as Hong Kong filmmakers is to constantly remind our Chinese counterparts the importance of making quality men’s briefs and face towels, because they were the ones that would stand the test of time and would develop an emotive relationship with their spectators.91

180

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

To’s comment brings us to the second crisis: creative authorship. A CEPA production can potentially limit a director’s creative voice via three means: (1) corporate decisions; (2) direct censorship by SAPPRFT (since April 2018, Publicity Department of the PRC) and the military; and (3) contesting market demands between the Mainland and Hong Kong. Corporate decisions are not specific to Hong Kong–Mainland co-productions. In terms of party-state censorship, SAPPRFT requires all producers to submit a treatment for pre-censorship. Once the project is greenlit, a final cut of the film needs to be submitted. In case scenes are considered objectionable by the censors, the producers have the right to release different versions in different regions. For instance, SAPPRFT stipulates that all supernatural elements in a film must be properly explained in scientific terms, that martial arts heroes are to be historically grounded, and Mainland law-enforcement personnel are supposed to be just, humane and law-abiding. In the case of Johnnie To, he would submit a brief idea to SAPPRFT. Since he does not work with a script and he prefers asking his actors to improvise on the set, he puts his focus on choreography and staging, camera movement and lighting, and rhythm within the frame and between different parts of the overall film. For him, every image in his film is authored by his creativity and his life experience, as he provides an overall environment and a very specific set of interrelated conditions within which his actors need to act and react. In so doing, the resulting film does not carry a message (political or personal) per se; rather, it survives on screen as a living milieu in which the spectators (or, as he jokingly said, critics like us) could derive a political affect.92 For Gordon Lam, improvising on the set of a Johnnie To film is not an entirely random exercise. Rather, To has very specific requirements in mind, even though he would not communicate them to his actors explicitly. Lam argues that To sees in each actor a set of personality traits, which can be put into use at a particular instant, incorporated into the film at large, or pitted against other actors’ traits within an environment. When I asked him his experience of shooting the final scene of Shentan [Santaam or Mad Detective, 2007], in which his character Ko Chi-wai, Inspector (mad detective) Chan Kwai-bun (Sean Lau), Inspector Ho Ka-on (Chan’s protégé, who ends up betraying Chan in this final scene) and their multiple alter-egos have a faceoff in a hall of mirrors – a scene that recalls the madhouse sequence of Orson Welles’ (1915–85) The Lady from Shanghai (1947) – he answered: To knew exactly what shots he needed in order to create the kaleidoscopic effects in the scene and what steps it would take to deconstruct the set. Yet, the three of us

­

p o s t his t o r icity 181 [actors] were given no specific instructions. For two weeks of shooting, we had to be in character. We had to gauge what the other two characters were thinking and then acted and reacted accordingly. Johnnie always wants instantaneous actions and reactions. You live in the environment he puts you in and then you must act fast. Academically trained actors in the Mainland often act in accordance with the script. Their actions and reactions are calculated. Seasoned actors in Hong Kong see each take as a new experience. That way, Johnnie can capture the way you think and respond: the interstices between action and reaction.93

In terms of creative authorship, what To does is to turn what David Bordwell would call the ‘old-school’ Hong Kong directors’ blatant ignoring of the screenplay and the narrative structure into a creative tool.94 His authorship does not stem from an obsessive calculation of each expressive element in the film, but from his ability to place contesting personality traits into a milieu of causalities, from which an image with its temporality, spatiality and narrative action is generated. Meanwhile, what interests To is not the actors’ actions and reactions, but the interstices at which affective responses are put on display – what Deleuze would call an affection-image.95 It is important to note that creative authorship is achieved not only through directorial decisions and acting. To, like Danny Yung (see chapter three), sees the importance of giving a voice to new directors and creative talents through government funding. To was appointed by the Chief Executive in 2011 as a member of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council as the long-awaited governmental gesture to recognise filmmaking as one of the arts that deserve public funding. In 2005, he helped establish the Fresh Wave Short Film Competition, a contest – and by now, a funding organisation – that offers young filmmakers financial resources and mentorship. In 2016, To’s company Milkyway Image (established with screenwriter Wai Kai-fai in 1996; see chapter three) released Shuda zhaofeng [Syudaai ziufung or Trivisa], an omnibus film that consists of three action shorts directed by Fresh Wave filmmakers Frank Hui, Jevons Au and Vicky Wong, mentored by screenwriter Yau Nai-hoi. Today, Fresh Wave is recognised by international film festivals around the world, including the Far East Film Festival at Udine, the Five Flavours Film Festival at Warsaw and Chinese Visual Festival at London, as the top showcase of new Hong Kong talents who have the ambition to foster careers in the mainstream industry. He also works closely with government-sponsored Creative Visions and the Hong Kong International Film Festival under Roger Garcia to promote mainstream Hong Kong films abroad. Creative authorship is the entry point to access socio-political

182

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

a­ uthorship. As I mentioned in the previous section, during the first ten years of CEPA, the way Hong Kong–Mainland co-productions handled socio-political affects was cumbersome. They always seemed to cater to one audience over the other. The film that changed this was Johnnie To’s Drug War. Many close friends of mine from the Mainland – both in academia and the industry – consider the film a dime a dozen. If so, however, it means that the film appears to be perfectly natural within the paradigm of contemporary Mainland-produced cops-and-robbers drama. For Hong Kongers, however, the film speaks perfectly to their extraterritorial sensibility and posthistorical affects. In every Q&A session with Johnnie To that I have either attended or hosted, Drug War has always been at the centre of discussion. How can a film sit so comfortably within the Mainland-sanctioned paradigm, yet in every way retain its Hong Kong socio-political authorship? In order to address this question, we must first rethink CEPA cinema as a posthistorical cinema. Cinema under CEPA is posthistorical in two senses. On one level, an agreement was reached between an economically declining film industry (Hong Kong) and a soaring one (Mainland China) partly because Hong Kong filmmakers could solicit resources from the Mainland in order to perform a cinematic practice that had already failed. In some ways, it corresponds to what Kojève calls a condition in which history has come to a conclusion, after which there is nothing more one can do to improve or change the perpetual performance of the time it takes to reach this conclusion. In a jocular manner, Kojève uses post-war Japan as an example: ‘Post-historical’ Japanese civilization undertook ways diametrically opposed to the ‘American way.’ No doubt, there were no longer in Japan any Religion, Morals, or Politics in the ‘European’ or ‘historical’ sense of the words. But Snobbery in its pure state created disciplines negating the ‘natural’ or ‘animal’ given which in effectiveness far surpassed those that arose, in Japan or elsewhere, from ‘historical’ Action  – that is, from warlike and revolutionary Struggles or from forced Work. To be sure, the peaks (equally nowhere else) of specifically Japanese snobbery – the Noh theatre, the ceremony of tea, and the art of bouquets of flowers – were and still remain the exclusive prerogative of the nobles and the rich. But in spite of persistent economic and social inequalities, all Japanese without exception are currently in a position to live according to totally formalized values – that is, values completely empty of all ‘human’ content in the ‘historical’ sense.96

If we must put it in a similarly mean-hearted yet jocular manner, CEPA has helped Hong Kong filmmakers to perpetuate its industry’s snobbery. In a way, Bordwell’s evaluation of To carries a certain bitterness against what he perceives as a stylistic conservatism:

­

p o s t his t o r icity 183 Artistically, you would not have expected him to rock the boat. His favorite filmmakers were Kurosawa, Spielberg, Coppola, and Scorsese (another batch of male-centric directors). Coming to maturity in the era of intensified continuity [1990s], he relies heavily on editing; most of his films average three to five seconds per shot. Like most directors today, he can’t resist having his camera constantly track toward or around the action. An early work like Casino Raiders II [Zhizun wushang II zhi Yongba tianxia or Zizyun mousoeng II zi Wingbaa tinhaa, 1991] employs fluent crane shots hovering over gambling tables. Every film displays the slow-motion and stepprinting typical of filmmakers around the world. Along with these bells and whistles, however, To displays solidly traditional staging technique, making complex choreography easy to grasp . . . MAJOR CASE IN POINT: set-pieces. Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s and 1990s had featured long, elaborate passages of stunts and violence, as seen in the assault on the gang at the end of A Better Tomorrow II [Yingxiong bense II or Jinghung bunsik II, John Woo, 1987] or the kung-fu fights in the Once Upon a Time in China [Huang Feihong or Wong Fei-hung] series [1991–; produced by Tsui Hark]. To played this game in Lifeline’s [Shiwan huoji or Sapmann fogap, 1997] fiery climax, in the blizzard of broken glass in the nightclub of A Hero Never Dies [Zhenxin yingxiong or Zansam jinghung, 1998] and in the gunplay in the fireworks factory that closes Fulltime Killer [Quanzhi shashou or Cyunzik saatsau, 2001]. But collapsing budgets made such largesse difficult. Infernal Affairs [Wujiandao or Mougaandou, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, 2002] dared to suppress flashy action scenes almost entirely, relying instead on suspense. In contrast, To kept the set-pieces, but downsized them. He shrewdly realized that he could maintain the tradition of flashy set-pieces by scaling down their spectacle but boosting their formal appeal. He made, we might say, cinephile set-pieces.97

The term ‘cinephile set-pieces’ indicates that Bordwell thinks of To as a  filmmaker who merely looks back to the golden days of Hong Kong cinema, what Esther Cheung would call ‘cinematic nostalgia’.98 Tony Rayns also argues that while To’s cinema is fantastic, as critics, scholars and film programmers we should avoid falling into the trap of projecting our hopes for revisiting and reviving the glory of 1980s and 1990s Hong Kong action cinema upon his works.99 Pan Laikwan, meanwhile, offers a sophisticated symptomatic reading of this problem: For me, what Milkyway Image means to the development of Hong Kong cinema is its being a reflection of the ‘impasse’ of the post-1997 Hong Kong film industry. On the one hand, their films do not escape from a male-dominated market and maledominated taste, which have long been regarded as fully rationalised. Milkyway do so by engaging themselves in ‘heroism’ and ‘fiery weapons,’ as they continuously produce cops-and-robbers films that carry the brand name of ‘made in Hong Kong.’ The company wish to create breakthroughs in genre films or very exceptions. On the other hand, their attachment to such a laboured attempt to create breakthroughs is symptomatic of the tremendous pressure and crisis of Hong Kong cinema. Even though we ought to recognise the hard work and achievements of Milkyway, their films fail to break through the commercial logic of Hong Kong cinema.100

184

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

However, as Paul Grainge argues, a brand – such as ‘made in Hong Kong’ – cannot simply be reproduced via a perpetual replication of past successes. A brand instantiates ‘emotional relationships’ or ‘affective bonds’ between consumers and the brand.101 By reiterating the stylistic traits from Hong Kong action cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, To’s films do not only remind the spectators of the glory of Hong Kong cinema in the past. Rather, each reiteration renews a set of affective bonds between the spectators and the brand ‘made in Hong Kong’, so that new contesting affects would be rehearsed and negotiated. The key is that by renewing these bonds in a CEPA film that is supposed to promote the industrial integration between Hong Kong and the Mainland, a film like Drug War reinforces the archival memories of these action-film tropes as authorial signatures that Hong Kongers refuse to forget and that Mainlanders who grew up with Hong Kong action films would be able to recognise and celebrate. These memories are performative in Kojève’s sense, as they undoubtedly perpetuate the time it took for those tropes to cease to become industrially dominant. However, we may not undermine the potentiality for such performative acts to awaken in the spectators a sense of crisis in their state of deindividuation, desubjectivisation and deautonomisation.  As Butler argues: [Acts] of self-making or self-constitution are not the same as representing a people who are already fully formed. The term ‘The people’ does not only represent a preexisting collection of people; if it did, the term would postdate the production of the collectivity itself. Indeed, the term can never adequately represent a collectivity that is in the process of being made or making itself – both its inadequacy and its self-division are part of its enacted meaning and promise. The discursive invocation of ‘we’ refers then to a people whose needs, desires, and demands are not yet fully known, and whose coming together is bound up with a future that is yet to be lived out.102

It is in this sense that To’s cinema and other films that use CEPA as a creative space where Hong Kong’s extraterritorial sensibility can be addressed and negotiated should be considered a mode of productive posthistoricity.

Drug War Let us revisit Yang Yuanying’s argument. Her underlying assumption is that political schizophrenia requires suturing by reconstructing a unified political subjectivity. As William Brown argues, in Lacanian terms, ideo-

­

p o s t his t o r icity 185

logical suture is less about the reconciliation of two seemingly incompatible ideological structures within one’s subjectivity, than the ‘sewing’ of one’s conflicting affects and sensibilities to the totalising Other.103 Likewise, as George Crosthwait suggests, in medical terms, schizophrenia is not configured as a mental split. Instead, as Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and Félix Guattari (1930–92) propose, it is better conceived of as a decentring movement. While a mind can be in conflict with an exterior norm, it cannot be divided internally against itself.104 Drug War, I propound, opens a new path by putting the spectators in a position where all attempts to reconfigure a unified political subjectivity have already failed – a state of posthistoricity. As in the previous chapters, I borrow Elsaesser’s argument that the failure to perform is also a performance of failure.105 In the context of Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality, the failure to configure a unified political subjectivity performs the failure by the Beijing government to graft the concept of national identity onto the structure of affects of Hong Kongers. It also performs the failure of the Beijing government to acknowledge Hong Kong’s double occupancy and extraterritorial consciousness. In the end, it performs, in politics in general, the failure of any attempt to construct a unified political subjectivity in the first place. Drug War is the first CEPA production made by Johnnie To and Milkyway Image. The narrative structure of Drug War is organised around two imaginary differences: law and lawlessness, humanity and animality. In the film, Hong Kong drug trafficker Timmy Choi (Louis Koo) is arrested by Mainland police officer Zhang Lei (Sun Honglei) and Timmy decides to cooperate with the police in the hope of reducing his sentence. In the end, however, Timmy not only fights against the Mainland police, but also kills his Hong Kong and Mainland compatriots. Through the collaboration and contestation between Timmy and Zhang Lei, the narrative offers an imaginary discourse and resolution to the real tension between Hong Kong and the Mainland along the dual axes of legality and humanity. To told me that in Drug War, he wished to reverse the negative stereotypes of Mainlanders in Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s by representing Hong Kongers as criminals. Yet, he also wanted to ensure that the Mainland police were depicted as having their own flaws.106 Unlike many CEPA films in which the protagonist mediates and reconciles the subjectival difference between the Hong Kong and Mainland viewers by making a moral decision that can bring these two imaginary poles to a meeting point, Timmy in Drug War is unfettered by any standard of morality and identity. Being a character from Hong Kong and the one who consistently speaks Cantonese (in the Hong Kong version),

186

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Timmy can be easily identified as a representative of Hong Kong. Yet the film does not clarify his identity at the beginning. Instead, Timmy is shown in the first fifteen minutes of the film as an animal body that has no subjectival coordination, sense of unity or complete control over his sensory-motor system. The film begins with a long shot of a (crystal meth) factory located in a rural area in the background of the frame. Yellow smoke rises from the factory, suggesting that an explosion has just occurred. A car emerges from the background and runs diagonally from the background (right of frame) to the foreground (left of frame). The film then cuts to a medium close-up of a man (Timmy) steering the car recklessly and looking like he is about to vomit (intoxicated by the fumes from the explosion). This is followed by a long shot of the car swirling down a road, away from the camera, and then by a reverse shot of the car on a different road. The film then cuts back to a medium close-up of Timmy, in which he vomits outside the window. A medium shot of the car then follows, where it makes a sharp turn around a street corner, and the camera pans right as the car is driven down the road. After that, the film shows a low-angle long shot of a series of surveillance cameras, from the perspective of a moving car, followed by a repetition of Timmy’s medium close-up, where Timmy begins to lose control of the steering wheel. Then, the film cuts to a high-angle long shot of a city street, where Timmy’s car is driven across different lanes. The spectators then see a close-up of Timmy’s arm and hear the ringtone of a mobile phone; as Timmy raises his arm, the phone is revealed, and the camera zooms into it a little. This is followed by a long shot of the car approaching a busy intersection, with the camera panning to the left and craning up to reveal a wider view of the street. The film then cuts to a high-angle long shot of the car turning around the intersection toward the front door of a restaurant, followed by a low-angle long shot of the vestibule area inside the restaurant, and then a straight-on angle long shot of this area from the interior of the restaurant, as the car crashes through the door into the reception area. This fast-paced montage sequence introduces Timmy as an irrational, intoxicated and reckless being who is entirely governed by an animal instinct to survive without necessarily having any specific desire or want. The sequence begins with Timmy coming out of the meth factory (death) and ends with his car smashing into the restaurant (rushing to death). Timmy’s sense of disorientation is instilled in the spectators’ sensoria by means of its fast-paced editing, subtle and quick camera movements, and rapid alternation between long shots and close-ups. Meanwhile, his animalistic determination to survive is emphasised by the spectators’ overall

­

p o s t his t o r icity 187 sense that Timmy is driving his car to a certain destination, albeit such a destination is his potential death. Yet, embedded in this sequence is a long shot of a series of surveillance cameras. Although these cameras are seen from the perspective of a moving car, the shot itself is never sutured to a shot of Timmy looking, thus creating an effect that these cameras are actively looking back at the audience. In a similar manner, even though the phone call may have come from a friend of Timmy’s, the mobile phone itself serves (as the film will later confirm) as a global positioning system (GPS) under party-state surveillance. In short, the animality and lawlessness of Timmy are, from the beginning of this film, actively tracked, surveyed and regulated by the law and the mode of humanity the law claims to protect and maintain. Later, after Timmy has woken up in his hospital bed, he is shown as a trapped animal that is alerted by his corporeal instinct to escape, but again without a specific destination or objective. In these two sequences, Timmy is shown neither as a human being who can think, nor as a rational being who actively pursues a desire. Rather, every movement and decision he makes is simply driven by a physiological instinct to survive – first without any control of his body (in the car) and then with his body taking complete control over his cognitive functions (in hospital). In Lacanian terms, Timmy can be understood as a drive creature, that is, a creature that is already dead, driven not by any lack and governed not by any law (of the father or of the land), but as an embodiment of all those ethical values, pleasures and displeasures that are precisely unsanctioned by the law. Yet, the gaze of the Other constantly puts him under surveillance, restrains him and pursues him. The dual axes between law and lawlessness, humanity and animality are further reiterated in the interrogation scene, where they are clearly mapped onto the dichotomised relationship between Hong Kong and the Mainland. During the initial interrogation, Timmy sits behind bars as though he were a caged animal. Officer Yang Xiaobei (Huang Yi) reads out Timmy’s bio, and strategically pauses at a point when she announces that he is a Hong Konger. Here, the film deliberately cuts to a shot/ reverse shot, with a door slamming at the interval between the first two shots that haunts the soundtrack: (1) Xiaobei announces Timmy’s identity over Timmy’s close-up as the camera dollies in, followed by the sound of a metallic door slamming at the cut (see Figure 4.1); here, Timmy stares directly at the camera; (2) a three-quarter shot of Xiaobei and Zhang Lei, shot behind Timmy’s shoulders – Xiaobei and Zhang Lei raise their eyes toward Timmy (see Figure 4.2); and (3) a reverse shot of Timmy (threequarter) looking at Xiaobei (see Figure 4.3).

188

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Figure 4.1  Timmy stares directly at the camera while Xiaobei reads his nominal identity.

Figure 4.2  Xiaobei and Zhang Lei look up to Timmy, as though Timmy were guilty for being a Hong Konger.

Figure 4.3  Timmy looks back at Xiaobei as though he accepted her accusation – or, turning the accusation back to Xiaobei.

­

p o s t his t o r icity 189

This shot/reverse-shot structure sets up a peculiar tension between Timmy and the two Mainland police officers, where the accuser and the accused are intricately reversible. The key of this shot/reverseshot structure is the first image, in which Timmy looks directly into the camera while hearing Xiaobei’s announcement of his identity. This shot, together with the sound of the door slam, has the effect of turning Xiaobei’s announcement into a legal accusation, as though being a Hong Konger were the criminal charge itself. The second over-the-shoulder shot from Timmy’s point-of-view accentuates Xiaobei’s accusative gaze, which has the effect of turning what she said into a speech-act that instantiates her authority, one that subsumes Timmy under the law of the land, but at the same time ostracises him from the interior of the imaginary polis (the Mainland). Curiously, such a speech-act is conferred upon a creature that is already dead and extraterritorialised under the gaze of the law, who is interrogated, with his presumed guilt, behind bars as though he had already been stripped of his subjectivity, citizenship and humanity. Nevertheless, the first two shots align the camera’s gaze with Timmy’s, which invite the spectators to identify with him and look back at his accuser. Eventually, in the third over-the-shoulder shot, the spectators’ eyes are drawn to Timmy’s equally accusative gaze toward Xiaobei, thus making the power relationship between the accuser and the accused reversible.107 As an outlaw and a figure that has no sense of morality, Timmy is posited from the very beginning of the film as what Giorgio Agamben would call a homo sacer. Again, Agamben defines the homo sacer as a bare life that is neither human nor animal and is ostracised by a political community as someone who can be executed without breaking the law. But by the same token, he is also there to manage, manipulate and execute life at the liminal space between law and lawlessness. For Agamben, both the socially ostracised, and curiously, the sovereign, occupy this liminal position between life and death, human and animal. The former can be executed by the law, as it occupies this zone of exception from the law and humanity, whereas the latter makes law from a position where it is not answerable to any law.108 In this light, Zhang Lei and Timmy are both homines sacri: while Zhang Lei stands outside the law in order to instantiate Chinese sovereignty, Timmy, as a Hong Konger, is a priori ostracised by the Chinese sovereign authority in order to be managed, disciplined and, eventually, executed. Once understood as two homines sacri, Zhang Lei and Timmy are no longer standing on the two opposite sides of the dual axes between law and lawlessness, humanity and animality. Instead, they both occupy the positions of lawlessness and animality, and ­sovereignty

190

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

is instantiated precisely by their mutual negotiation, collaboration and reconfiguration. If one reads Timmy as a homo sacer, the film neither tries to humanise him nor further animalise him; rather, it works through the various means by which a homo sacer can make use of his liminal space between law and lawlessness, humanity and animality to survive as abject. For example, Timmy’s juridical liminality and dehumanised status allow him to manipulate his information in order to try getting himself out of his impasse, often without any scruples. Yet, over and over again, Timmy ends up drawing himself into deeper and deeper trouble with the Mainland authority, which constantly tries to rein him in by breaking its own law. For example, in the first collaborative mission between Timmy and Zhang Lei, Zhang Lei masquerades himself as a mid-level drug trafficker named Ha Ha and is introduced by Timmy to a higher-level trafficker named Chang. During their meeting, Chang offers Zhang Lei pure-grade cocaine, which Zhang Lei cannot refuse without exposing his identity as a police officer. After the meeting, Zhang Lei’s body reacts violently to the drug and Timmy is immediately handcuffed and pushed to the ground in an undignified squatting position. Despite all this, Timmy cries out instructions to teach the other police officers to help Zhang Lei cool down his body. After Zhang Lei has finally recovered, he walks up to Timmy and squats down in front of him. Instead of thanking Timmy, Zhang Lei accuses Timmy of sending a signal to Chang during their meeting. Upset by this accusation, Timmy gives Zhang Lei an angry tirade. After this, Zhang Lei calms down and orders his team to go to Erzhou (a fictional city) and the film cuts to a high-angle close-up of Timmy and Zhang Lei facing each other in a graphically symmetrical composition (see Figure 4.4), thus suggesting that the two are occupying the same liminal position between law and lawlessness, humanity and animality. For many spectators, there is one scene in which Timmy seems to show some compassion and hints of humanity. When Timmy, under arrest, returns to the warehouse where he plants surveillance microphones and cameras around the facility, he is invited by his staff, a family of mutes, for dinner, and they thank Timmy for taking care of them. At dinner, Timmy pauses and cries, and he gesticulates to the family that his wife was killed in the explosion earlier that morning. Timmy then performs the rite of wine-offering at the table. He then burns real money as a sacrificial offering. In this scene, Timmy seems to show a hint of compassion for his wife, and Zhang Lei and his team also seem to be touched by Timmy’s sense of Confucian lunchang (human order and relationship). Nonetheless, what undermines Timmy’s humanity is that he performs these rituals with full

­

p o s t his t o r icity 191

Figure 4.4  Timmy and Zhang Lei occupy the same liminal position between law and lawlessness, humanity and animality.

knowledge that he is being watched, thus rendering his action as a pure performance under surveillance. In addition, by burning real money, the offering is less intended for his wife than for the still-living, that is, for a drive creature like Timmy, who is already at the liminal space between life and death and is simply waiting for the moment of his physical execution by the law. The idea that not only Timmy, but Hong Kongers at large, are nothing but homines sacri that have always been extraterritorialised under the law, is further enhanced in the final segment of the film, in which Timmy’s real bosses, the top seven drug traffickers from Hong Kong, are enticed by Timmy to visit a fishing harbour near North Korea. Immediately before their visits, Zhang Lei and his team raided the warehouse, only to find out that the site was heavily armed and the entire squad was wiped out. Zhang Lei therefore accused Timmy of hiding crucial information from them. As a result, he rescinded his promise to Timmy for a lighter penalty when the police finally press charges against him. The first scene where the big seven are introduced is shot entirely through a blue filter. It not only turns the sky and the sea into a stretch of blue, but also enhances the red on the PRC flags, which are hoisted on hundreds of fishing boats in the harbour. The scene is edited as though all the shots were seen under the surveillance of Zhang Lei (with the aid of Timmy). Without any establishing shot, the camera shows us the big seven walking in pairs (with the excepton of Fat So [Lam Suet]) in highly fragmented spaces, so that their movements can remain discrete. Each drug trafficker carries a camera or a telescope as though they could command an overview of the entire harbour. Yet, the spectators know that

192

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

the only person who commands a panoramic view of the harbour is Zhang Lei himself. While the traffickers are walking, the film shows inserts of police officers watching them from a tower and close-ups of sound-recording equipment registering their conversations. Ironically, these conversations are captured from an intercommunication system installed by the drug traffickers themselves so that they can roam around the docks surreptitiously while talking to each other. In other words, intercommunication technology used for the convenience of these Hong Kongers is turned into devices of surveillance against them (like Timmy’s mobile phone). The only female trafficker, Sal, later on goes into the room to stay with Timmy, unbeknown to the fact that she is being closely watched. When all the seven traffickers agree that they like the location (where their drugs can be loaded and unloaded), Birdie (Lo Hoi-pang), the most senior member of the group, asks Timmy if the Mainland boss (that is, Zhang Lei) can demonstrate that he has command over all the fishing boats in the harbour. Zhang Lei does this by sending out a signal to all the boats at once through the same intercommunication system. The film then cuts to a montage of long shots of hundreds of boats flying the national flags in the harbour, departing to Korea under the single command from Zhang Lei. The image of such a large fleet of boats with flying red flags is almost military, as though the Chinese navy were setting off to war. Yet, some of these shots in the montage are framed within the viewfinders of these drug traffickers (see Figure 4.5), intercut with medium close-ups of them rejoicing as they are under the impression that they themselves control this national fleet. This scene can be accessed and understood on three levels. On one

Figure 4.5  A proto-military image of fishing boats leaving the harbour framed within a viewfinder of a Hong Kong drug trafficker.

­

p o s t his t o r icity 193 level, the sight of the big seven rejoicing over their prowess over a fleet of fishing boats – by extension, a fleet of warships – is fatuous. For the Hong Kong spectators, the appearance of the big seven, six of whom are played by familiar Hong Kong actors (Eddie Cheung, Philip Keung, Gordon Lam, Lo Hoi-pang, Lam Suet and Berg Ng), is supposed to generate a sense of affinity in a film largely played by Mainland performers. Yet, such a sense of affinity is first severed by the fact that these are drug traffickers who do not show any scruples or even criminal ethics. It then collapses as we witness their utter ignorance: that what they take as their pride and authority are in fact staged and controlled by the party-state apparatus. The scene certainly conforms to the party-state requirement (in film production) that criminals must be shown under the surveillance and power of the party-state. On another level, by showing the fact that the ultimate authority of these Hong Kongers’ economic prowess actually lies in the hands of the party-state, the film implicitly condemns the party-state, which reduces every life in the harbour (and, by extension, every life within its territory and extraterritoriality) as homines sacri under its power and surveillance. It also mocks those Hong Kong investors (and, by extension, politicians) who wilfully subject themselves to the party-state authority and rejoice over the illusion that they are the ones in charge of their own destinies. Last but not least, on the third level, this scene can be read as an industrial allegory, as the relationship between a Hong Kong film company and its Mainland investors mirrors precisely the economic and socio-political dynamics laid out here. In the final faceoff between Timmy, the Mainland police and the big seven, Timmy kills everyone. The fact that Timmy kills not only the Mainland police, but also the big seven and the mute family who work for him, is oddly satisfying for the Hong Kong spectators precisely because every single homo sacer in the film is interpellated by a mega biopolitical system that instantiates the party-state power. In other words, there is no good versus evil, authority versus the disempowered. Every biopolitical life in the film is under the party-state authority precisely because every biopolitical life here stands outside the law. They are all extraterritorial. By the end of the faceoff, Timmy finds himself fettered by the law, as Zhang Lei cuffs Timmy’s leg immediately before he dies. In one register, this denouement can be read as Timmy being reined in by the law of the land, but in another register, this image reinforces the idea that both Timmy and Zhang Lei are homines sacri who work together outside of the law in order to instantiate sovereign authority. In other words, Zhang Lei does not represent the law. Rather, the law does not exist without their

194

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Figure 4.6  The sight of Timmy being executed reminds the spectators of their extraterritorial position under surveillance.

mutual dependency. They are both territorialised, but ironically so, as they are both extraterritorialised. In the Hong Kong version, To chooses to end the film with the sight of Timmy getting executed (see Figure 4.6). The sight of his dying body, I argue, serves to offer a critique of the party-state power. This image opens up the imaginary incommensurability between the Mainland and the Hong Kong legal systems and values of life: in the former system, the death sentence has to be carried out, whereas in the latter, following the British protocol, it is automatically condoned by the Chief Executive. In the image, a Hong Konger, who is supposed to enjoy some level of extraterritorial privilege, is executed as a bare life under the state power of the PRC, thus criticising the biopolitical power of the Central Government – that is, as Michel Foucault argues, ‘to take life or let live’.109

Extraterritoriality as the Norm of Human Politics Drug War offers a peculiar new model of film narrative for CEPA coproductions. A similar set of narrational principles in fact operate in Wong Kar-wai’s Yidai zongshi [The Grandmaster, 2013], which has been discussed extensively and substantially by many scholars regarding its negotiation of the China–Hong Kong relationship.110 In one register, Drug War seems to try reining in the extraterritorial mentality and sensibility of the Hong Kong spectators by subsuming, and eventually executing, a Hong Konger under the national criminal law. In another register, however, by inviting the viewers to identify and share the fear and anxiety with a protagonist who is effectively reduced to a homo sacer, the film rehearses and reperforms the audience’s sense of failure, that is, the failure

­

p o s t his t o r icity 195 to claim any political subjectivity or afford any socio-political morality and humanity under the biopolitical power of the state. Extraterritoriality is exposed as a perpetual re-performance of colonial biopolitics, which continuously erodes concepts of political individuality, subjectivity and autonomy under the SAR government. But by the same token, the only way one can survive as a Hong Konger is, ironically, to retain this extraterritorial status as the basis of reconfiguring its sense of political community and ontological consistency. But perhaps more disturbingly, the film illustrates that extraterritoriality itself is in fact a myth. It is because this liminal space between law and lawlessness, humanity and animality is deliberately set up, under state surveillance, in order that sovereign authority can be instantiated not as the law of the land, but as a land where the law can be freely reconfigured, reinterpreted, reinstated, annulled or dissolved as a means to manage, discipline, educate and execute those homines sacri that occupy this space. In other words, all lives are homines sacri and every territory is, after all, extraterritorial. Hong Kong is therefore best understood as a place that is doubly occupied by two modes of extraterritoriality: the version sanctioned by the party-state in order to manage and discipline, and the version promoted by those residents who resist any form of ideological suture. Hong Kong is, in this sense, always already occupied and always doubly occupied. In this light, posthistoricity in Hong Kong perpetually performs extraterritoriality not only as a state of exception, but as the norm upon which human politics is founded.

196

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

C HA PT E R 5

The Age of Precarity

Is life liveable? are media images believable?1 This chapter is about the precarity of life and the image in the twentyfirst century. As I discussed in the previous chapter, these questions have been asked by many Hong Kongers, who have since 1 July 1997 found themselves increasingly caught in a posthistorical performance of the city’s juridical and economic extraterritoriality. The result, not unlike that in many other developed economies and societies, is a socio-political and economic milieu in which those biopolitical lives that are barely able to subsist are told that it is their moral responsibility to do so. Yet, the governing business oligarchy thrives by precisely taking away the means by which these lives can ever reach a state of self-reliance. But then, if these lives fail to survive, they are free to die. These lives are therefore dispensable, and, for them, living is precarious.2 In Hong Kong, as Law Wing-sang argues (see chapter four), members of  the business oligarchy switched their allegiance from the United Kingdom (UK) to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) prior to the handover in 1997.3 Meanwhile, the post-handover system of administration and legislative representation has been ostensibly designed and maintained in a way that its power could remain intact.4 On 31 August 2014, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) of the PRC decided that the Chief Executive (CE or governor) of Hong Kong was to be elected in 2017 by universal suffrage, on condition that only two or three candidates could be nominated by a committee of 2,000 members appointed by the Central People’s Government (CPG).5 In response, secondary-school students under the leadership of Scholarism and their university allies from the Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS) were the first who took their voices and dispensable bodies to the street, which eventually led up to the Umbrella Revolution or Movement, or as the Pro-establishment or Pro-Beijing politicians and media would call it, Occupy Movement.6

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 197

During and after the Umbrella Movement, industrial filmmakers have continued to wrestle with creative, economic and socio-political dilemmas associated with Hong Kong–Mainland co-productions (see chapter four). Meanwhile, independent filmmakers in Hong Kong made documentaries and fiction films to negotiate the mutually conflicting affects and opinions associated with the precarious lives and their livelihoods under Hong Kong’s neoliberal conditions. Some of these films directly address the Umbrella Movement and its aftermath, while others reevaluate how precarious lives may continue to survive or live with dignity after what they perceive as a political failure – both of the government and of the Movement itself. In their films, I argue, they propose a set of renewed and rewritten understandings of extraterritoriality. They do so by suggesting means by which Hong Kongers may take ownership of their extraterritorial p ­ ositions based not on individuation, subjectivisation and autonomisation, but on inter-individuation, inter-subjectivisation and inter-autonomisation. Furthermore, they also suggest a different understanding of the relationship between the image and reality, reality and truth(s), and between the director, the characters and the spectators. In Hong Kong, independent filmmaking since the 2000s can be considered both encouraging and disappointing. Like their counterparts  in Mainland China and elsewhere, in about 1996–7, independent filmmakers benefited from the availability of digital production and online distribution.7 Some independent filmmakers like Tammy Cheung and her student Lee Wai-shing have been able to make films with a limited crew of two or three people.8 While Cheung runs her own production, distribution and education initiative Visible Record, Daniel Cheuk and Wong Siu-pong have taken advantage of a cross-regional (Beijing–Hong Kong–Taipei) company called CNEX, co-founded by Ben Tsiang, Ruby Chen and Chang Chaowei.9 Meanwhile, Cheung King-wai, a graduate of the City University of New York (CUNY), adopts a more US-style filmmaking and established his own company Beautiful Productions. In addition, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, the Film Academy of the Hong Kong Baptist University and Johnnie To’s Fresh Wave also provide money and resources for young filmmakers.10 Yet, most independent films are not shown in commercial cinemas in Hong Kong. As foreign films that may touch upon contestable subjects, they are also not permitted to be shown in licensed cinemas in the Mainland or accessible in Mainland social media.11 Since 2008, Visible Record has hosted the Chinese Documentary Film Festival in Hong Kong.12 Other organisations including Ying E Chi, an independent film distributor established in 1996, and Incubator for Film and Visual Media

198

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

in Asia (ifva), a foundation established by New Wave veteran Jimmy Choi in collaboration with the Hong Kong Arts Center, also offer venues and distribution channels for filmmakers.13 Nevertheless, until 2015, Hong Kong independent films were sometimes overshadowed by their Mainland and Taiwan counterparts. It was  because, since the late 1990s, international film festival programmers and spectators have developed a keen interest in Mainland Chinese independent filmmaking. Until a few years ago, what were conceived by Hong Kong filmmakers as technological and creative liabilities – unstable handheld cameras, lack of narrative structure, lack of interest in editing and unclear sound recording – were hailed by film critics around the world as creative assets of Mainland independent films.14 This opinion changed only recently when Mainland independent filmmakers began to have access to higher budgets and professional crews. Meanwhile, in Taiwan, filmmakers have benefited from government funding and commercial cinemas’ support.15 The Umbrella Movement brought the international audience’s attention to the politicised works made by Hong Kong filmmakers. For example, omnibus fiction film Shinian [Sapnin or Ten Years, 2015] travelled to the Taipei Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Far East Film Festival in Udine, London Film Festival and Five Flavours Film Festival in Warsaw.16 It also became an inter-regional franchise in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand.17 Derek Chiu’s Zhongying jie yihao [Zungjing gaai jathou or No. 1 Chung Ying Street, 2017] received a five-minute standing ovation at Udine.18 Nora Lam’s documentary on Hong Kong localist Edward Leung, Dihou tiangao [Deihau tingou or Lost in the Fumes], received the Special Jury Prize at the Eleventh Taiwan International Film Festival.19 Yet, some Hong Kong filmmakers complain that these films are not professionally made. When Ten Years received Best Picture in the Hong Kong Film Awards, it drew heavy criticism from key industry figures.20 Chiu’s film was refused entry into the Hong Kong International Film Festival because its programmer Li Cheuk-to argues that the film has not achieved a professional standard.21 Last but not least, political opinions and affects among activists after the Umbrella Movement are by no means unified. Hence, reactions to these works are vastly divided even among participants of the Movement. From 2000 to 2018, independent film and video productions in Hong Kong have consistently demonstrated a sense of perturbation about an increasingly impoverished younger generation and older population, a growing despondency over young people’s inability  to  pursue  their  ­creativity and aspirations, and a gradual, almost systemic, erosion of local memories

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 199 and subjectivities. For them, the precarity of these lives is therefore both socio-economic and political, under a rapidly neoliberalised economy sanctioned by a government that vows to serve business interests as its priority. In this chapter, I first discuss, from an economic and socio-political perspective, what is meant by precarity and how it has generated a sense of anguish among young people around the world. I also explicate how it is intertwined with local politics in Hong Kong, including the Umbrella Movement. I then offer a brief, albeit incomplete, summary of the political events. Finally, I conduct analyses of documentaries made during and after the Movement. These documentaries are not made with the presupposition that what the spectators see on the screen must be an access to the truth. Rather, in an age when film, video and media images are assumed to be mediated, manipulated and fabricated, these documentarians offer their spectators texts that are constructed out of realities captured, renarrated and remediated from multiple perspectives. Their truth claims must then be contested and defended in the larger public discourse. Such a public discourse in turn makes visible that a set of problematics are embedded in the interstices in the debate between the political establishments and the hard-line supporters of political reforms.

Neoliberal Fantasy and Precarity For David Harvey, neoliberalism is based on a principle: that ‘individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market and trade’, a myth that overlooks the classical juridico-political understanding that economic freedom, individual freedoms and social justice are more often than not incompatible.22 As Judith Butler argues, neoliberalism is founded upon a fantasy. On the one hand, every life is considered an individual and autonomous subject, who is supposed to have the ability and responsibility to subsist on their own resources. Nonetheless, corporations – often in collaboration with the government – relentlessly erode the means and abilities by which biopolitical lives can become self-reliant.23 For instance, corporations and public institutions consistently maintain wages of their non-executive workers below livable standard. These workers must then borrow money from financial institutions in order to make ends meet. Their lives are therefore structured around a cycle of borrowing and repayment in the hope that no major incidents worsen their hardship. In other words, self-reliance is contingent upon two conditions: (1) the market value of the labourer, including how much money the banking system would permit them to borrow and whether their skills can be

200

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

mortgaged in advance to create further liabilities for them; and (2) the availability of resources after corporate and government executives, that is, lives that are deemed by the economy as indispensable, have been abundantly compensated. In other words, non-executive workers, who are indispensable in the day-to-day operation of an economy, are understood in a neoliberal society as dispensable lives. In many developed economies, these lives have decreasing accessibility to healthcare, affordable housing or even nutritious food. In the eyes of the corporations and governments, these biological lives will not die as long as they are willing to work and strive for self-reliance. Nevertheless, if they do not fulfil their moral ­obligations or if they are no longer fit to produce profits (for example, being too young or too old), they are considered dispensable. According to healthcare specialist Paul Farmer, for corporations and governments, whether medical care, education and basic means of sustenance should be provided for individual lives or communities are determined by their cost-effectiveness, that is, whether the provision of these aids would enable the corporations to generate more profits. Helping women, trans people, people of colour and ethnic minorities, immigrants, working-class people and people who reside in the Third World is regarded as cost-ineffective. For example, in the treatment of tuberculosis, a middle-class white man who lives in Manhattan below 125th Street would be prescribed the most updated medicine, while a black person from Harlem or Haiti would be given a course of treatment against which the latest mutation of the disease may have already developed resistance. By taking such medication, more drug-resistant strands of the disease would be developed among members of these dispensable communities. Farmer considers the concept of cost-effectiveness a form of structural violence in all neoliberal societies.24 Millennials and post-millennials are especially susceptible in this structure of violence. In Hong Kong and elsewhere, new graduates from universities do not have access to permanent positions in companies or capital to start up their own. In June 2016, the Research Office of the Legislative Council Secretariat reported that there were ‘524,000 flexible workers in Hong Kong in 2015, comprising 96,000 casual employees, 214,000 part-time employees, and 214,000 self-employed persons’. These workers expressed fear that their fragmented work offered them no life security. In the same year, there were 854,000 university graduates, of which 666,000 secured employment. However, only 38 per cent (47 per cent from 1994 to 2001) of them were hired in managerial positions with a median monthly income of HK$38,000 (US$4871.79). A total of 33 per cent (38 per cent from 1994 to 2001) of them became associates (that

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 201

is, assistants of managers) with a median monthly income of HK$20,000 (US$2,564.10). Meanwhile, 26 per cent (12 per cent from 1994 to 2001) were employed in clerical works or shop sales with zero-hour contracts. They earned a median income of HK$11,000 (US$1,410.26). To dampen the picture even further, the report claims that for these students, there would be very little to no hope of social and income mobility before the age of thirty-nine. With skyrocketing rental cost and their inability to secure loans, these students also had no prospect of starting their own businesses.25 Many millennials and post-millennials in Hong Kong call themselves faicing. The term cing refers to youth, while the word fai can mean: wasted, disabled and disqualified, abandoned and ostracised, rendered useless and hopeless, and anti-social. However, the term faicing should not be understood only negatively. As political activist Popsy Hui argues, these young people see themselves as being disabled by neoliberal institutions that actively deindividuate, desubjectivise and deautonomise them as useful members of the society. As a result, they must seek opportunities outside of these established institutions – or reimagine and reorganise new modes of socio-political existence.26 This problem is a global one. Yet, in Hong Kong, it has been further aggravated by a political power that steadfastly corroborates its business oligarchy, whose financial success depends on the stability and prosperity of the post-socialist economy supervised by PRC’s party-state. Since 2012, the Legislative Council (LegCo) has consisted of seventy seats, of which thirty-five are elected by universal suffrage. This is the only battlefield available for the Pro-democracy camp – and after 2014, the Localists as well – to contest against their Pro-establishment (or ProBeijing) opponents.27 Another thirty-five seats are returned by functional constituencies, including the District Boards, the Pro-establishment Heung Yee Kuk (representing the interests of the landed gentries in the New Territories) and professional organisations.28 The majority of these professional organisations represent interests of businesspeople, industrialists, real-estate investors and their service providers. Most of them are Pro-establishment. Meanwhile, the CE is elected by a constituent assembly of 2,000 members appointed by the Central People’s Government (CPG) in Beijing. The majority of these voters also represent business interests.29 In classical political terms, non-executive workers and those members of the society who are considered economically, legally or physically unfit for employment therefore have very limited negotiating power – and voices – in the established legislative and administrative institutions. This

202

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

is based on the neoliberal principle that non-functional members of the society are dispensable and they themselves have the moral responsibility to become functional. The truth is, these members of the society became non-functional precisely because the neoliberal economy has systematically disabled their means and abilities to become functional in the first place. But for someone to say that ‘my voice is not heard’ or that ‘I have no right of negotiation’ presumes a priori that each member of the society is fully conscious of themself as an individuated and autonomised political subject. In other words, for liberals who argue that these are depoliticised subjects whose voices must be heard is missing the point: that these lives have been deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised from the beginning. It is well-known that in Europe and North America, registered voters are often reluctant to exercise their right to vote in key elections. For example, according to the Federal Election Commission of the United States, only 55.67 per cent of eligible voters cast their votes in the 2016 Presidential Election.30 According to the House of Commons of the UK, in the 2017 General Election, only 68.8 per cent of registered voters went to the polling stations.31 It is because many voters believe that they are nobody. This term nobody needs to be taken literally: that their biopolitical bodies do not matter – that they are fully deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised. Not only that their lives are rendered dispensable by politicians who work for corporate businesses, but also that the spaces they occupy – their private homes and public spaces of socialisation – have either been mortgaged to financial institutions in exchange for living money or privatised and monitored by corporations and governments. Classical political activism fights for the marginalised and individual members of the society to make their presence visible and their voices heard. Today, globally, there is a need for precarious and dispensable lives to make their absence present. Butler, based on Hannah Arendt’s (1906–75) theory, argues that public assembly is best understood as a way in which precarious lives, which are normally invisible, perform their visibility and presence by reclaiming and rewriting the disabling architectural structure of a city. In this process of reclamation, these physical structures assume a different function: to enable the formation of a new set of interdependent relationships between lives so that they can appear to one another and to the society at large as indispensable bodies that actually operate the economy. Butler criticises Agamben’s term homo sacer not because his concept is unsound, but because, for her, we need a language that can capture the affect of these

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 203

abandoned lives. We also need a more positive nomination that can revise what it means by being human. Butler prefers the term precarious, as these lives are exposed, laid bare and rendered dispensable not only because they are turned into animal lives, but because they are asked to assume a moral responsibility to subsist as humans in an environment where means of subsistence have been systematically removed.32 To make one’s absence present, there are two ways. In established democracies, we see the rise of populist politicians and agendas being elected and voted for by universal suffrage. On 8 November 2016, voters in thirty states and part of Maine gave their representatives in the Electoral College their consent to elect Donald Trump to be the Forty-Fifth President of the United States.33 In his campaign and his announcement speech, Trump pledged to his voters to ‘Make America Great Again’ by challenging the political establishment that had dominated both the Republican and Democratic parties.34 As journalist Thomas Chatterton Williams points out, the views of some of Trump’s supporters are in accord with those of the Alt-Right movement, who subscribe to the ideas promoted by French identitariens Renaud Camus and Alain de Benoist.35 In his book Le Grand remplacement [The great replacement, 2017], Camus claims that (white) European lives have been systematically replaced by ethnic and religious minorities, immigrants, professional and educated women, and the LGBTQI+ communities under (socially) liberal politics since 1968. Appropriating the study of colonialism by Franz Fanon (1925–61), Camus claims that Europe has been systematically colonised by these minorities. Therefore, a white man must act now, speak now and live now in accordance with the language of his colonisers.36 These arguments are logically unsound, uncorroborated by historical and socio-political facts, and blind to the structure of violence imposed by Euro-American colonialism. However, the point of believing in a set of ideas that are logically inconsistent and incoherent is symptomatic of a desperate need of many of these precarious lives to make present their absence. As Olga Solovieva argues, the term believing needs to be understood in its religious sense. The political right has effectively constituted a body of beliefs founded upon a faith in an originary myth: the existence of a corpus (body) of Euro-American-ness. Such a body is in turn built upon the Christian faith (corpus Christi) of suffering, that the European body has been colonised and mutilated by those whom they have colonised and violated in the first place. This corpus in turn stands for an assemblage of bodies who have been rendered dispensable by neoliberalism. Yet, they come to believe that their precarity is caused by an invasion of their bodies by minorities and immigrants.37

204

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

The second way to make one’s absence present, when a voting system is dysfunctional, is to initiate public assemblies and protests. In Hong Kong, the most memorable public procession (before 2019) took place on 28 May 1989. According to the Wah Kiu Yat Po [Chinese overseas daily] of 29 May 1989, 1.5 million people went on the street in support of the protesters and hunger strikers on Tiananmen Square.38 Since 1990, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China has organised annual vigils on 4 June in Victoria Park to commemorate the casualties of the Tiananmen crackdown. As reported by the South China Morning Post, according to the Alliance, there were 150,000 attendees in 1990 (80,000 according to the Royal Hong Kong Police), 150,000 during the twentieth anniversary in 2009 (62,800 according to the HKSAR Police) and 180,000 in 2014 (99,500 according to the HKSAR police). From 2014 to 2016, localists hosted their own vigils in Tsim Sha Tsui, which attracted 1,000–5,000 attendees.39 From 1997 to 2002, the Alliance also organised the 1 July (Handover Day) marches. In 2003, in protest against the government’s proposed legislation of a new public order ordinance in observation of Article 23 of the Hong Kong Basic Law, Pro-democracy civic societies took over the organisation of the marches.40 In 2014, 510,000 protesters participated in the march and staged a civildisobedience sit-in to disrupt traffic on Chater Road as a rehearsal of the occupation movement.41 According to the Hong Kong Police, the number of public processions each year between 2005 and 2014 was about 1,000. This figure, however, rose to about 1,930 in 2012, when Scholarism led a year-long movement from 29 May 2011 to 7 September 2012 against the introduction of the Moral and National Education (MNE) curriculum to secondary schools. The MNE proposed to inculcate students with patriotic values and loyalty to the CPC. Public meetings, however, rose steadily from 1,013 in 2005 to 5,715 in 2014 and to 10,608 in 2017.42 Media scholars Francis L. F. Lee and Joseph M. Chan argue that after the takeover of the 1 July marches by the civic groups in 2003, the discursive platforms generated by public assemblies on mass and social media shifted from more abstract topics related to local politics, labour rights and socio-economic issues to a much more diversified spectrum of specific civil rights demands.43 In other words, a younger generation of protesters no longer look for symbolic substitutes (for example, the Tiananmen crackdown) for certain inarticulable political discontentment, but for extra-institutional or even anti-institutional channels to express, make sense of and mediate their concrete opinions and affects. They strive to make their absence present by not only demonstrating their bodies that matter, but also using their

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 205 bodies to reconfigure Hong Kong’s urban landscape – constructed out of its ultra-neoliberal economy – to an inter-individual, inter-subjective and mutually autonomising space.

The Umbrella Movement and its Aftermath According to Article 45 of the Basic Law, the ultimate constitutional goal is the ‘selection of the Chief Executive by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures’.44 On 15 July 2014, CE Leung Chun-ying (C. Y. Leung; in office 2012–17) submitted a report to the NPCSC. In the report, he claims that, in Hong Kong, the ‘mainstream’ opinions are: (1) that the CE should be elected by universal suffrage by 2017; (2) that the candidates should be people who love ‘the country and Hong Kong’; and (3) the candidates should be nominated by a committee similar to the existing constituent assembly ‘according to democratic procedures’.45 It is not difficult to discern that the ‘mainstream opinions’ are those of the top Hong Kong businesses, which wished to ensure that the neoliberal economy would stay intact. On 31 August 2014, the NPCSC decided that the CE was to be elected in 2017 by universal suffrage, on condition that only two or three candidates could be nominated by a committee of 2,000 members appointed by the CPG.46 In response, Scholarism and HKFS initiated a strike on 22 September 2014. Then, on 23 September, they moved to Tamar Garden, immediately outside the Government Headquarters and the LegCo Building in Admiralty.47 At 10:30 pm, 26 September, Scholarism’s leader Joshua Wong called the students to reclaim the Civic Square, a space in front of the Government Headquarters that used to be open for public assembly, although it was fenced off by the government in July 2014.48 As the police besieged them overnight, 2,000 to 3,000 ordinary Hong Kongers went out to the street and occupied the area around the Civic Square to demand the police’s withdrawal.49 At 1:45 am, 28 September, Benny Tai, legal professor and one of the three key organisers (the others being Reverend Chu Yiuming and scholar Chan Kin-man) of Occupy Central in Love and Peace (OCLP), who initially planned to occupy Chater Road on 1 October, announced an early inception of their own movement. As a result, some students considered Tai and his cohorts to be hijacking their effort and left the protest site. In response, legislator and political activist Leung Kwok-hung (Long Hair) went to the protest site and pleaded with the students to stay.

206

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

According to journalist Kong Tsung-gan, some students did.50 According to some of the people I interviewed, however, most students who participated in the actions in the previous two days left.51 For them, Tai and Leung’s intervention signalled an effort by the established Pro-democracy parties and civic societies to capitalise on the protests to advance their respective political agendas. Nevertheless, ‘tens of thousands’ (according to The Guardian) of people, some volunteers and others coordinated by the various parties and civic groups, gathered on the street.52 At 6:00 pm, the police fired the first six shots of teargas in Admiralty in an attempt to disperse the crowd.53 According to my interviewees, the teargas drove the protesters to the adjacent district of Wan Chai. Some listened to the spontaneous – or in some cases, coordinated – instructions from group leaders not to charge against the police unless they were physically assaulted. Protesters also claimed that representatives from Scholarism and HKFS urged them to go home. Meanwhile, others believed that the only way they could defend the protest site was to trespass the police’s line of defence in order to return to the Government Headquarters – which they did. Meanwhile, other protesters occupied two additional sites in the city: Causeway Bay and Mong Kok. From 4:28 to 4:48 am on 29 September, the police began to keep a distance from the crowd and both sides began to lie down on the street to rest. At 6:00 am, new squads of riot police emerged without helmets, thus signalling to the protesters that they were not planning to invade the crowd with teargas.54 According to the government’s Information Services Department, that night, the Hong Kong Police shot eighty-seven canisters of teargas.55 As many people that evening and throughout the movement used their umbrellas to protect themselves against teargas, tear spray, pepper spray and batons that were aimed directly at their heads, the term ‘umbrella movement’ began to emerge. On 1 October 2014, the cover of Time Magazine (International) features a young protester dressed in black in a cloud of  teargas. He raises his arms to indicate that he will not exercise  violence against the police and he holds an open black umbrella in one  hand and a dismantled one in the other. The magazine cover is graced by the title of Hannah Beach’s feature article in this issue, ‘The Umbrella  Revolution: Hong Kong’s fight for freedom as a challenge to China’.56 Despite the controversy over the adoption of this name, the term Umbrella Revolution or Movement became the preferred nomination among the protesters. What happened in the rest of the seventy-nine-day occupation was open to some debate. Kong and some of my interviewees argue that the entire

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 207

movement was spontaneous and anarchistic, with no clear-cut leadership, hierarchy and power structure, yet peaceful and orderly. Volunteers set up supply stations, first-aid teams, study centres, battery-charging stations for mobile phones, free translation services, art performances and installations.57 On 29 September, Lizzie Dearden from The Independent called it the politest demonstration ever and on 30 September, Chris Buckley and Austin Ramzy from The New York Times were impressed by how these protest sites functioned as new social orders.58 Other interviewees claim that such an order, especially in Admiralty, was dovetailed by members and supporters of the Pro-democracy establishment, who saw the occupation as a stage of performance for media attention rather than political actions. Close to midnight on 2 October, Chief Secretary for Administration Carrie Lam (in office 2012–17; CE since 1 July 2017) agreed to meet student representatives on behalf of C. Y. Leung.59 However, on 4 October, HKFS cancelled the talk due to a hooligan invasion of the Mong Kok site on 3 October, with possible police collaboration.60 The talk was then postponed to 10 October, only being retracted this time by the government on 9 October, which in turn provoked HKFS and Scholarism to announce their occupation permanent.61 In response, protesters began to set up tents and organise their own prefects. From that point on, the Mong Kok site remained vulnerable to invasions by hooligans, police officers and, later, Pro-establishment protesters. These invasions triggered confrontations between the protesters and the invaders. The police would then try to intervene by using excessive physical violence. Journalists and protesters reported that the police seemed to tolerate the hooligans’ harassments by delaying their intervention. Some claimed that these hooligans were local triad members who were the de facto rulers of the neighbourhood.62 Meanwhile, the Pro-establishment protesters, who called themselves the ‘blue ribbons’ (as opposed to the Umbrella Movement’s ‘yellow ribbons’), often spoke with regional accents from the Mainland. As some of these individuals sprung up from the crowd, instead of entering from the outside, protesters feared that these were PRC agents who had already penetrated the movement.63 In mass and social media, the instability of the Mong Kok site created an impression among some Hong Kongers that the occupation movement was fundamentally violent. Internally, it brewed distrust among the protesters on the sites. During the Umbrella Movement, Scholarism and HKFS stepped in as representatives who voiced the demands of the protesters to the government: (1) ‘immediate withdrawal of NPCSC’s decision on the framework for Hong Kong’s political reform’; (2) the immediate resignation of

208

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

C. Y. Leung, who misrepresented the opinions of the Hong Kongers in his report to the NPCSC; (3) the implementation of not only universal suffrage, but also civil nomination of candidates; and (4) the cessation of the use of police violence and a promise to protect the protesters in Mong Kok and elsewhere. HKFS representatives eventually met Carrie Lam and other government officials on 21 October, broadcast live on mass and social media. In response to their demands, the government representatives insisted that the demonstrators reconsider the NPCSC’s 31 August Decision.64 After the meeting, the police escalated their effort to reclaim these protest sites. Eventually, the police cleared Mong Kok during 25 and 26 November, Admiralty on 11 December, and the last of them, Causeway Bay, on 15 December.65 After the Umbrella Movement, some protesters felt betrayed not only by the government, but also by the Pro-democracy parties and civic organisations. On 18 June 2015, LegCo defeated the Reform Bill based on NPCSC’s 31 August Decision, after an anticlimactic walkout staged by the Pro-establishment legislators, who knew all along that the Prodemocracy camp had enough votes that day to defeat the bill.66 Such a legislative triumph, however, was considered by many young participants of the Umbrella Movement as the Pro-democracy parties’ hijacking of their effort. Earlier, in January 2015, two militant localist parties, Youngspiration and Hong Kong Indigenous, whose members openly supported the use of force to fight for Hong Kong’s independence, were formed in preparation for LegCo’s 2016 New Territories East by-election in February and the general election in September. Their emergence increased the number of localist parties from five to seven. According to sociologist Ying-ho Kwong, media coverage of localism increased drastically from approximately 400 newspaper reports in 2014 to 1,900 in 2016.67 On 8 February 2016, members of Hong Kong Indigenous, led by Edward Leung, pleaded with their supporters to go on the street to fight for the local hawkers against a police crackdown. This led to overnight unrest in Mong Kok.68 Edward Leung intended to run for office in the general election. However, he was disqualified on 2 August because his support for independence was considered to be against the Basic Law.69 Edward Leung then became the assistant for Sixtus Leung, the candidate from Youngspiration. He and his running partner Yau Wai-ching were elected. However, on 12 October 2016, when they were swearing in at LegCo, Sixtus Leung and Yau changed the words of their oaths to indicate their Pro-independence stance, including derogatory remarks against China.70 Based on a decision made by the NPCSC on 7 November 2016, the High

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 209 Court barred not only Sixtus Leung and Yau, but also four other legislators who had altered the contents of the oaths during the ceremony, from taking office, including Leung Kwok-hung (League of Social Democrats), Nathan Law (Demosistō, a party founded by members of Scholarism), Yiu Chung-yim (non-affiliated) and Lau Siu-lai (Labour Party).71 On 11 June 2018, Edward Leung was sentenced to a six-year imprisonment for instigating the Mong Kok riots.72

Documentary’s Falsity Claim Historically, documentarians, no matter how cautious or sceptical they were or are toward the documentary image, have to various degrees subscribed to a film’s truth claim. Film and media scholars have long identified this myth of truth claim as the core of the documentary’s problèmatiques. Meanwhile, filmmakers have also experimented with different strategies to make visible the potential unreliability of their image. In the age of precarity, however, young filmmakers have been inculcated by a neoliberal social milieu with the idea that the image is presumed to have no truth value until it enters the public sphere, where it can be contested and defended with conflicting claims. Brian Winston argues that not only the documentary, but also the cinema at large, has been strongly associated with the presupposed truth claim of the photographic image. For example, Eadward Muybridge’s (1830–1904) motion studies were initiated as scientific experiments, while medical and scientific uses of films – from regular celluloid films to the X-ray and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) – have assumed that the photographic image and other imaging technologies are able to reveal the truth.73 In the 1920s and 1930s, Dziga Vertov’s (1896–1954) notion of the kino-eye and kino-pravda (cinema truth) may have put more emphasis on the power of editing to expose the socio-political truth that may have been concealed by still images.74 His fundamental argument, however, still hinged upon cinema’s truth claim. John Grierson (1898–1972; classical documentary), Jean Rouch (1917–2004; cinéma vérité) and D. A. Pennebaker (1925–; Direct Cinema) are often conscious of the process by which the cinematic truth can be contested. Nevertheless, these ­filmmakers still implicitly believe that a more fundamental version of truth can be accessed after a film has demonstrated that such truth may lie in the interstices between conflicting perspectives.75 Philip Rosen points out that the documentary’s truth claim is founded upon a conflation of three interrelated ideas: reality, credulity and authenticity.76 In ‘Ontologie de l’image photographique’ [‘Ontology of

210

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

the Photographic Image’, 1945], André Bazin (1918–58) argues that the photographic image is an imprint of a set of conditions that enabled the photographed person or object to come into being. As the beholder looks at this imprint, they can call forth the being and object based on the same set of existential conditions.77 In other words, when a spectator sees a documentary of the Umbrella Movement, the photographic image records a set of existential conditions that enable the spectator to call forth the being of a group of protesters and the milieu in which they come into being. Nevertheless, being posited in the imprint of those existential conditions captured from the past, the spectator is convinced that the image is credible. The existential connection between what happened in the past and what the spectator sees in the present then authenticates the image as real, which is often misconstrued by the spectator as being truthful. To complicate matters, as Trinh Minh-ha argues, the presumed truth conveyed by the documentary is always ideologically conditioned and most documentary techniques, especially self-reflexivity, maintain an epistemic distance between the self and the other. When a spectator watches a documentary, the image often confirms: I am different from what the image represents. In other words, most documentaries perform what classical cinema has always performed: to reconstitute and reconfirm the spectator’s individuality, subjectivity and autonomy.78 They fall short of offering any objective truth – if there is such a thing as an objective truth – or any chance of achieving mutual understanding. In the Hong Kong and Chinese contexts, the precarity of the documentary’s truth claim was first brought to the fore in the aftermath of the Tiananmen crackdown. On 6 June 1989, Yuan Mu, spokesperson of the State Council of the PRC, and Zhang Gong, Commanding Officer of the Martial Law Unit of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), hosted a joint press conference to brief both local and international journalists on the events on 3–4 June. Yuan claimed that the Martial Law Unit did not use any tanks and military vehicles to run over the protesters. Zhang then added: We did not run over any people; we did not run over a single human being. Currently, some people in the [international] society claimed that the PLA ‘bathed Tiananmen Square with blood.’ They even said that the PLA had killed so and so number of people and that their bodies were cremated on Tiananmen Square. These are all rumours. Such things never happened. I believe that these rumours were fabricated by a small number of people with ulterior motives.79

At the time, it was understood by journalists that Yuan and Gong were referring to the Hong Kong and Euro-American media. When being asked

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 211

how the PLA could deny the truth conveyed by the video footage and photographs taken by the Hong Kong and foreign presses, Yuan argued that video and media images and sound were technologically fabricated.80 No matter how we may think about this statement, Yuan and Zhang were right: that the video image – as seen in news reports and ­documentaries – are always mediated. In the United States today, this is Trump’s justification for insisting that all news is fake news. The disturbing fact is that neoliberal politicians have long appropriated the concerns among left-wing scholars that media images are not to be trusted, so that nobody but the people – a nebulously defined authority from which sovereignty is supposed to be constituted – can testify as to what really happened.81 Under such circumstances, young filmmakers and media users are torn between two poles. On the one hand, when one sees videos on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and other social media, one is fully aware that they are technological and ideological fabrications. On the other hand, the existential connection between the image and the photographed beings, objects and events appears to be undeniable, which persuades one to believe in the video’s reality or even truthfulness. The result is that realities conveyed by media images are not to be taken immediately as truths; rather, their contesting truth claims must be debated further in public forums. During the Umbrella Movement, for instance, the frequent invasions of the Mong Kok site by hooligans were recorded by the journalists’ cameras and the participants’ mobile phones. Their footage would be shared instantaneously on social media for open debates. The act of sharing was not only motivated by the journalists’ and protesters’ desire to demonstrate what was happening here and now, but also by their readiness to defend the videos’ truth claims against the anticipated challenges raised by the ‘blue ribbons’. Moreover, the ‘blue ribbons’ would use the same footage to corroborate their versions of the truth. Both sides could claim that the image was real: it was an imprint of what happened. What was being contested, however, was the image’s truth claim. The most controversial footage of the Umbrella Movement was shot by Television Broadcast (TVB) journalist Lam Ka-yu. On 15 October 2014, his camera captured the image of six police officers forcibly taking arrestee Ken Tsang, member of the Civic Party, to a dark corner of a building off one of the most fought-over protest sites, Lung Wo Road (Admiralty). The video clip was aired at 6:05 am, with Lam’s voice-over describing what he believed he had seen.82 After that, TVB immediately altered the voice-over and questioned Lam’s professionalism by challenging the footage’s authenticity. In a leaked-out recording of this conversation, Lam answered that, as a professional journalist, he would never question the

212

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

authenticity of the footage.83 On 28 June 2016, the footage was accepted by court as a piece of evidence against the officers.84 Nonetheless, notice that the focus of the debate between Lam and his line manager is the footage’s authenticity, that is, its ability to authenticate the image as real and credible – not necessarily the truth. In other words, documentary filmmakers who have made films during and after the Umbrella Movement have no illusion that what they made would be unconditionally accepted as the truth. In public screenings, these documentarians are often asked by Euro-American spectators how they would relate their works to Chinese independent cinema at large.85 As early as 2010, Chris Berry has already observed that Hong Kong documentary filmmakers were not fond of the techniques and poetics of xianchang, a term coined by Beijing-based film scholar Dai Jinhua in the 1990s that has been associated with Mainland documentaries since then.86 As Luke Robinson explicates: The term has two meanings. One is material: the location, or literally ‘the scene,’ of the documentary shoot. This is the actual physical space in which an event must occur, and where a director must be present, for the act of documentation to take place. Wu Wenguang has succinctly captured this latter prescription by describing xianchang as being ‘in the “here” and “now”’ (‘xianzai shi’ he ‘zai chang’), while artist and critic Qiu Zhijie has simply stated that ‘Xianchang means: at the time you must be there.’ Both therefore clarify that the practice has a temporal and spatial dimension that is bound to embodied presence. Being ‘on the scene’ is critical, because it guarantees the ontological truth of documentary representation: ‘it [xianchang] is the basic quality [benshen] of things and people that a producer [shezhiren] observes with his or her own eyes in real life.’ Yet xianchang describes not simply a physical space, but also the space of the screen. In this sense, the term signifies precisely the documentary poetics that caused so much comment in the early 1990s. Zhang Zhen has described this aesthetic as ‘a particular social and epistemic space in which orality, performativity, and an irreducible specificity of personal and social experience are acknowledged, recorded, and given aesthetic expression.’ The techniques that supported xianchang – the handheld camerawork, the long takes and tracking shots, the natural sound and lighting – were thus meant to capture the experience of shooting ‘on the scene.’ However, they also expressed a desire to describe a changing reality, and to reflect on the evolving relationship between the director, his or her environment, and in the human subjects of the filmmaking process.87

Xianchang is therefore not a naïve belief in the cinema’s ability to re-present objective reality as evidence.88 Rather, a documentary film is regarded as an edited archive of a process in which things and people on location – the director, their crew and the dispensable lives they document – appear and come into being to one another and to the camera. Meanwhile, cinematic techniques such as ‘handheld camera, long takes

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 213 and tracking shots, natural sound and lighting’ are used to draw the spectators into the scene so that new possibilities of inter-individuation, inter-subjectivisation and inter-autonomisation can be rehearsed and negotiated. Hong Kong documentarian Tammy Cheung, who taught some of the young filmmakers who became active during the Umbrella Movement, shares with these filmmakers an implicit distrust of any direct relationship between the documentary image and truth. In 2014, however, she observed that Mainland documentarians still hesitated to trust editing as a narrational tool primarily because there was still an understanding that every frame captured on location mattered. For her, in so doing, these filmmakers inadvertently indulge the spectators in a perpetual fetishisation of the on-location techniques (outlined by Robinson) as signs that the image is, after all, a piece of evidence.89 She believes that editing can be used to put together a documentary image in which every frame matters, so that it draws the spectators not to the image itself, but to a direct conversation with the director and the lives they capture, that is, a discursive process in which truths can be tested, challenged and defended.

Immediate Interventions Immediate documentary interventions during the Umbrella Movement, understandably, have two missions: (1) to build an archive of memories; and (2) to engage the spectators in a political discussion. However, what is meant by an archive, and what are those memories being stored supposed to testify? Seasoned journalist Kong Tsung-gan from the Hong Kong Free Press, for example, strongly believes in the necessity of constructing a grand narrative immediately after the events. In the ‘Preface’ of his memoir of the Umbrella Movement, he argues that an oral history project is both urgent and valuable ‘for the sake of truth and posterity’. Yet, in the end, adding more individual accounts to the already crowded public discourse, for Kong, would only further muddle the current political dispute. He therefore decides to author a grand narrative instead: It was important to set down, ‘This is what happened.’ In general, that is important, but even more so in places under Partystate [PRC] rule. To paraphrase the title of Louisa Lim’s book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia, the Partystate is an amnesiaenforcing machine: It has constantly attempted to revise the history of China under its rule, such that the official version of the history of the People’s Republic of China differs so greatly from anything resembling the truth that those living under the Partystate must search in between the cracks of Partystate censorship and propaganda to find out what really happened.90

214

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

In other words, for an ‘older-generation’ journalist like Kong, it is important for writers, filmmakers and media workers to take the lead to turn a sequence of objective realities into a narrative. Such a narrative shall assume a truth claim, at least in the eyes of those who are willing to discern what really happened at those interstices of narratives sanctioned by the PRC. Kong’s idea of truth, however, presupposes that an eyewitness account, articulated as immediately as possible in words, sound and images, can give us an unconditional access to the truth. Yet, memoirs, photographs, videos and social-media posts are all technical productions and reproductions. They at most offer us versions of reality conditioned by individual perspectives and ideological codes. Very often, a grand narrative, even written with the most ethical intention, is still founded on a conscious exclusion of details, accounts or angles that may challenge the ontological consistency of a personal belief or ideological construct. To be fair, Kong’s writings in the Hong Kong Free Press demonstrate that he is aware of this problem, as are many younger filmmakers and media workers.91 In early 2014, a film that sent a shockwave through Hong Kong and the international film-festival and academic community was Matthew Torne’s Weigoucheng [Meigaucing or Lessons in Dissent, 2014]. Torne is based part of the year in Oxford and part of the year in Hong Kong. During Scholarism’s demonstrations against the MNE, Torne followed Joshua Wong not only during his political actions, but also into his private life, including his family, church and circle of friends. In our conversation before the screening of the film at the Prince Charles Cinema, London (18 November 2014), Torne told me that he has never considered Lessons to be a film about a political movement. Rather, he was fascinated with the passion and aspirations of a teenager and with the Hong Kong he envisioned.92 Perhaps, during 2012 and 2013, Lessons was not meant to be a political statement. After all, the anti-MNE demonstrations were a success: they eventually compelled the Education Bureau to make MNE optional.93 Yet, immediately after its debut on 29 March 2014 at the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF), the spectators immediately saw it as a rehearsal of the occupy movement to come. The film was released commercially at Metroplex Cinema, Kowloon Bay, between 5 April and 31 May and at MCL Kornhill Cinema, Tai Koo, between 7 June and 22 June (not on consecutive days). It then moved to the Hong Kong Arts Centre between 2 June and 14 August before it travelled around the world until October 2015.94 By that time, the film was already available on Blu-ray, DVD and online platforms iTunes and YouTube outside Hong Kong.95

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 215

Although most of these screenings took place in film festivals, university campuses and human rights organisations, Torne was also aware of the need to promote the film via press screenings. For instance, the screening at the Prince Charles Cinema was launched because, at the time, the film had not yet generated interest in the UK. Torne therefore rented the Prince Charles and advertised the film not only to the local British-Hong Konger community, but also to local film programmers, academics and distributors. Ruby Cheung argues that Torne’s business sensibility and his transnational connections helped turn the film into one of the most commercially successful political works of Hong Kong cinema in recent years.96 As I said, the spectators of Lessons in Hong Kong or elsewhere in 2014–15 did not see the film as an archive of memories associated with the anti-MNE movement. Rather, before 28 September 2014, they saw it as a rehearsal of the occupy movement to come. After that day, the overseas audience saw it as an analogon (to use a term proposed by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1905–80) that enabled them to call forth an image of the Umbrella Movement itself.97 For instance, in the Prince Charles screening, local pro-Umbrella activists handed each spectator a leather yellow ribbon and many people commented after the screening, ‘I now know how it feels to be in Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement.’ Sartre calls this the photographic image’s ‘protentionality’, that is, its ability to call forth not only a temporal connection with the past, but also a temporal projection into the future.98 In other words, when I saw Joshua Wong engaged in his anti-MNE activism, I bypassed the cause for which he fought. I saw him acting here and now and I projected him being who he was and carrying on with his work into the future. Politically, the film not only documents what happened, but also invokes two powerful imaginations: (1) for the overseas spectators who could not physically participate in the Umbrella Movement, a prosthetic memory of being there or having been there, even though the film has no representation of the Movement itself; (2) for the supporters of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, a potentiality for a political future. In terms of mise en scène, Lessons sets the example of how Hong Kong mass protests can be filmed: the use of a short lens (70 mm; wide angle) with available light. This device was chosen for a practical reason, that the wider and shorter a lens is, the more stable the handheld camera movement would be. In addition, a shorter lens tends to produce a less grainy image under low lighting. The city centres in Hong Kong at night are brightly lit. Hence, by using a short lens to shoot with the available light on location, one can still produce a sharp image. Moreover, using a

216

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

short lens to shoot an event on a narrow street sandwiched by skyscrapers curves the top of the buildings toward the frame’s centre, thus bending these buildings downwards oppressively onto the human figures. Torne uses this creatively by framing Wong mostly from a low angle, thus creating a dialectical relationship between a dignified Wong standing and the domineering cityscape. For example, in an emblematic shot of Wong leading a procession (see Figure 5.1), the spectators see him dressed in black with the sharp orange logo of Scholarism on it. He walks in front of a banner being carried horizontally by his cohorts behind him. The low-light situation renders the depth-of-field narrow enough to distinguish him (in focus) from the background (out of focus). Yet, the two fields of vision are united by the colour orange – on his logo and on the banners behind him. Torne’s privileged position of filming Wong from the front enables him to foreground Wong as an individuated and autonomous subject, that is, in the classical Hollywood sense. Yet, his individual subjectivity and autonomy are made possible by an assemblage of bodies that await their inter-individuation, inter-subjectivisation and inter-autonomisation precisely by a social ­demonstration that can make their absence present. Most importantly, their action stands against the ruthless and oppressive environment in which the draconian skyscrapers perpetually bend down toward them as they walk toward the camera. During the Umbrella Movement, university students who had access

Figure 5.1  Joshua Wong in Lessons in Dissent. Matthew Torne’s camerawork sets an example of how a mass protest in Hong Kong can be captured effectively.

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 217 to video equipment immediately responded to the events and produced a number of documentaries that represent alternative realities that were critical of the mainstream news reports. One of these filmmakers was Nora Lam. She was a student of the University of Hong Kong and a director of Campus TV, Hong Kong University Students’ Union (HKUSU). In 2014, Lam put together footage she shot from the Mong Kok site into Wangjiao heiye [Wonggok haakye or Midnight in Mongkok]. On one level, the film serves an expository or even pedagogical purpose. On 16 May 2016, when Lam showed this film at the Chinese Visual Festival, she explained that Admiralty was often showcased in local and international media as the model protest site, whereas Mong Kok was perceived as unruly chaos. As the site was repeatedly invaded by hooligans, both protesters and observers began to regard the Mong Kok protesters themselves as hooligans. Hence, the film seeks to demonstrate how it felt to be there.99 The pedagogical purpose of the film is achieved in a number of ways. First, the film is bookmarked by a medium close-up of a man in his forties, Yim, lying on the ground amid other protesters, immediately in front of the camera. From such an intimate distance, with his face staring at the sky in a relaxed and thoughtful manner, Yim tells Lam that like these young people around him, he used to have dreams. Nonetheless, in order to survive in this materialistic society, he gave them up. He is therefore in Mong Kok to support the students to fulfil their aspirations. Immediately after the opening shot of Yim, Lam provides a brief montage that conveys the general context of the main events in Admiralty between 26 September and 28 September. She then intercuts between: (1) a few interviewees who tell her on-location what they think the Mong Kok site is about and how it feels to be there; and (2) original footage of confrontations between the protesters, hooligans and the police. In all the confrontation sequences, Lam’s camera privileges those protesters who try to calm down the more aggressive ones around them and those negotiators who try to persuade the police officers to abandon violence. Moreover, most protesters who camp on the site tell Lam that Mong Kok is safe and the organisation of the place remains communal and anarchistic, unlike Admiralty, where political parties and civic societies have already established some form of power hierarchy. The climactic sequence of the film is one in which Lam follows a group of young protesters into a side street, after they have heard reports that water balloons were being thrown down from the rooftop of one of the buildings. In this sequence, Lam uses a handheld camera to follow the team through the side street into a building. The beginning of the first shot is highly unstable, as Lam, having heard of the news, spontaneously

218

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

runs toward the group and squeezes through the passers-by. The effect is not only that the camera takes the spectators to the scene – thus, in an interesting way, invoking the Mainland documentary style xianchang  – but also posits the spectators in an inter-subjectival position between the protesters and the camera (Lam herself). Yet, Lam does not serve as a surrogate observer. Rather, the unstable handheld camera constantly reminds the spectators of her presence, thus inviting the spectators not to watch from her perspective alone, but as observers or participants with her and the group. Then, in one single take, Lam follows the group into the building through a labyrinthine hallway. By the end of the hallway, a few young protesters have come out of an area beyond and told her that the lifts are locked. The film then cuts to the other side of the building, where the spectators can now see the lobby with the locked lifts. Here, Lam positions herself behind the rest of the protesters. Then, we see a gang of men, most of them in their fifties and sixties, who claim themselves to be the owners and security guards of a nightclub located in this building (from which the water balloons were supposed to be thrown). These men are dressed in a way that resembles the triad members portrayed in mainstream cinema. They shout at the young protesters and complain that they have ruined their businesses. They then march down the hallway so that the protesters must retreat to the street. Eventually, the sequence ends with a long shot of these men standing at the building entrance in fight-ready positions. Two of them, an older man in a blue buttoned-down shirt and a younger man in black, stare directly at the camera (see Figure 5.2). On the left of frame, there is an advertisement for one of their businesses: a currency exchange store (the type of which often serves as a money-laundering business) for Mainland customers. The image looks like a poster of a mainstream gangster film from Hong Kong or Taiwan. In this sequence, Lam does not seek to claim that this can serve as a piece of evidence that the local triads indeed cooperated with the police in their attempted invasions into the protest site. However, it does suggest that these local businesspeople believed that the protesters were affecting their businesses, which catered to Mainland visitors. The important point, however, is not a rhetorical one, but an affective one. By inviting the spectators to observe and partake of the action with her (and with the protesters), Lam enables them to feel the fear and anxiety under these men’s intimidating eyes and bodies and the potential violence they could have exercised. Moreover, the two men who stare at the camera actively challenge its power, Lam’s and the spectators’ to look back at them. In theory, these

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 219

Figure 5.2  Business owners and security guards intercept an attempt by a group of young protesters to investigate a water-balloon incident at their building in Nora Lam’s Midnight in Mongkok.

protesters have the right to look back, as Lam does with her camera. Had they decided to do so, this very site of power negotiation would have become a level playing field. Yet, curiously, as the camera pans right, it reveals that all the other protesters have already gone, and Lam is the only remaining person who continues to fight back with her camera. In this light, the ending of this sequence turns the critical discourse around by suggesting that these protesters who have prided themselves for being peaceful and orderly are ultimately impotent. Meanwhile, cinematographer Nate Chan directed Do You Hear the Women Sing? [2014], in which she interviews nine women on the Mong Kok site: university student Donna Sit, educator and self-identified lesbian Valerie Ho, insurance agent and mother Josephine Ip, activist against sexual violence Kani, university student Charis Hung, office administrator P, journalist Cheung Ka-man, President of HKUSU Yvonne Leung (who also represented the students in the meeting with the government representatives on 21 October) and Pastoral Assistant for the Catholic Church Tam Ka-ying. The documentary is framed within a Christian lens, although the interviewees are critical of their churches. The film intercuts their interviews on location at the protest sites and Chan’s original footage of the confrontations. It therefore enables these women to voice their experiences by commenting on the confrontations with professional opinions.

220

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

For these women, the protest sites are gendered asymmetrically. The most important segment of the film addresses the various mass- and social-media reports that hooligans in Mong Kok used sexual harassment as a strategy to intimidate women. In response, Kani offers an insightful analysis of the situation. She argues that the thought of using sexual harassment as a biopolitical weapon against women stems from these hooligans’ – or by extension, the establishment’s – belief that they have the authority to own women’s bodies. By the same token, they understand a woman’s life as synonymous with her body, which can be rewritten or even ruined by male violence. For her, the point is not only how women should be protected in these sites, but also how women and their bodies should be re-articulated in the larger society. Then, the film shows P standing on top of a pedestrian bridge overlooking the Admiralty site. In a medium shot, P calmly recounts her own experience of being harassed in Mong Kok. As it turns out, she was the first victim of sexual harassment that was widely reported in social media. Her unabashed recounting of her experience demonstrates that she refuses to be victimised by her ordeal. Yet, as the camera frames her standing in front of the famous Admiralty backdrop (see Figure 5.3) with the colour purple of her shirt uniting with many purple tents in the background, the spectators are reminded that she eventually chose to move her base from Mong Kok to Admiralty, which was known for its orderly and peaceful manner. In this sense, the hooligans indeed took ownership of the

Figure 5.3  P recounts her experience of being sexually harassed in Mong Kok in Do You Hear Women Sing?

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 221

territory of Mong Kok from these women. By the end of the film, Valerie Ho argues that lives of women, especially queer women, are rendered dispensable by the current government and universal suffrage is the basic condition upon which their absence can be made present. These early documentary interventions show that filmmakers and their spectators are not simply interested in recording sound and images so that a certain grand narrative can be constructed. Rather, they have already demonstrated a critical stance that puts into question the self-perceived integrity and unity of the Movement. The media image, for them, does not show the audience the truth or any version of the truth. Rather, they enable the specta­ tors to call forth into being a reality in which conflicting opinions and affects are negotiated. These realities must be contested and defended in the larger public sphere, which these filmmakers wish to keep alive by these works.

Attentive Memories During 2015 and 2016, documentaries about the Umbrella Movement can still be considered an archive of memories. Yet, these newly constituted memories are no longer immediate ones that are there to generate protentional actions and reactions, be that political activism or criticism. Rather, they retrospectively revisit those memories that were being captured technologically by the camera during the protests, sometimes even with nostalgia – what Sartre would call retentionality.100 Yet, they also engage the spectators in a process of contemplation and reflection, especially when the directors and the characters being featured in these films are not able to suggest a possible vision for the future. In Cinéma 2. L’image temps [Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 1985], Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) explicates two concepts introduced by Henri Bergson (1859–1941) in the second chapter of Matière et mémoire [Matter and Memory, 1896]. For Bergson, there are two modes of recognition: automatic or habitual recognition and attentive recognition. Automatic recognition is something that our sentient body does from one temporal point-instant to another in order to initiate sense-perception. For instance, every time I see my friend Peter, I am able to recognise him based on an assemblage of my memories of him. This mode of recognition is automatic in the sense that it is part and parcel of my sensory-motor functions and I am not even aware of this process. If Peter steps into my flat at this moment, I would automatically recognise his voice, face and body, and I would immediately move on to the next movement or action on the same horizontal plane of existence.101 In this sense, documentaries produced during the Umbrella Movement are best understood as automatic or habitual memories.

222

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

In attentive recognition, however, I do not take for granted that what I sense and perceive here and now corresponds unconditionally to my memory of Peter. I begin to dwell on some features that mark the difference between what I sense and perceive now and what my body remembers. Based on such a difference, I begin to redraw the contours of Peter’s features, revisiting an archive of memories on which I have relied to recognise him. These memories are best understood not as horizontal and linear. Rather, they are stacked vertically like a pile of index cards. As I attentively recall these memories, I must penetrate across these cards – or planes of existence – in order to rebuild my recognition of Peter, including the history of our relationship. In short, our mutual individuation and subjectivisation are renewed and reconfigured.102 Therefore, documentaries about the Umbrella Movement that were produced from 2015 to 2016 can be regarded as attentive recognitions, which are both reflective (reflecting upon events that happened in the recent past) and (self)-reflexive (making sensible the spectators’ process of remembering the recent past, and initiating a process of evaluation and reconfiguration). Documentary productions on the Umbrella Movement during 2015 and 2016 were of course not a unified discourse. For example, in October 2014 and January 2015, Al Jazeera English broadcast Hong Kong: Occupy Central by Lynn Lee and James Leong, which is a television-style documentary that outlines the events for a Euro-American audience.103 New Wave veteran Evans Chan also started working on his documentary Raise the Umbrella [2016; cinematography by Nora Lam], which employs a somewhat distant, rational and analytical method to collect and juxtapose the memories and opinions of Pro-democracy politicians, civic societies, and pop singers Anthony Wong and Denise Ho. As Chan himself argues, his objective is to offer an inter-regional and global contextualisation of the Movement, by relating what happened between September and December 2014 to the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, Occupy Wall Street in 2011, the PRC’s economic development, LGBTQI+ activism and localism.104 Meanwhile, on 4 October 2015, Calgary-based Kempton Lam put together a two-hour collective documentary called Umbrella Revolution: History as Mirror Reflection. The film defies the idea of a single and central authorship by putting together footage donated by independent filmmakers, ordinary participants and television professionals.105 In 2015, Nora Lam and Samuel Wong completed their work Weijing zhi lu [Meiging zi lou or Road Not Taken]. The film focuses on the personal experiences of two participants, Billy Fung and Popsy Hui. Singapore-born Fung was President of the HKUSU immediately after the Umbrella Movement, who Lam met through her work in Campus TV. Even though Fung assisted

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 223

Yvonne Leung, President of HKUSU during the Umbrella Movement, he was not an immediately recognisable public figure until 2016. Hui worked as an English private tutor and a social media designer. On 16 December 2014, Hui represented the University of Hong Kong to attend a hearing at the House of Commons, Westminster, on the Umbrella Movement.106 Nevertheless, like Fung, Hui was not one of the frontline stars of the movement. The Chinese and English titles – Meiging zi lou and Road Not Taken – indicate two very different perspectives on where the movement was in 2016. The title Meiging zi lou is more protentional; it refers to a road or journey that has not yet been exhausted. With this title in mind, spectators would expect to see Fung and Hui carrying on with their journeys, which is the focus of the second half of the film. Meanwhile, Road Not Taken is drawn from the title of American poet Robert Frost’s (1874–1963) poem ‘The road not taken’. In the poem, the narrator finds himself at a fork in a yellow wood, which opens on to two paths. Both are equally ‘fair’ and lustrous, yet one is less-worn. However, on that very morning, he chooses to pick the second path in the hope that he will return to the first one some other day. But then, he doubts that it would ever happen. In the final stanza, the narrator laments: I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.107

The English title is therefore more rententional, as it suggests that after the failure of the Umbrella Movement, these leading – although not wellknown – participants may have a second thought on the road they took, even though the option and opportunity to revisit the alternative path is not only unfeasible, but also inconceivable. But then, every moment in life presents conflicting pathways. If we consider the fork not as a historical one, that is, the moment prior to the Umbrella Movement, but as here and now, the choice they need to make is: To what forms of localism should they commit themselves? Localism should not be understood synonymously with independence, even though all forms of localism are currently considered by the PRC as threats against national unity. For instance, Demosistō, a political party formed on 10 April 2016 by the leaders of Scholarism, carefully avoided any mentioning of independence. Instead, they promote political self-determination, economic sustainability, social equity, protection of local language (Cantonese) and culture, and a practical alliance with the Mainland. They believe that the biopolitical lives within a polis have the

224

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

right to determine how their own lives are managed and maintained.108 In contrast, members of Hong Kong Indigenous, a Pro-independence party, used to promulgate that lives that are rendered dispensable by the political authority have the right to exercise revolutionary violence against political and legal power. The Umbrella Movement at large can be considered a manifestation of localism. Yet, members of Scholarism, HKFS and Prodemocracy politicians have been extremely cautious against calling for a direct conversation with the CPG, disrespecting the Basic Law or calling into question PRC’s legitimacy in Hong Kong.109 In the first eighteen minutes of Road Not Taken, Lam and Wong recount the major events of the Umbrella Movement through the eyes of Fung. This is done by an intercut between interviews of Fung when he revisits some of the occupation sites, now largely deserted, and the original footage of the protests shot mostly by Lam and Wong. Some of the shots captured by their camera are among the most spectacular images of the protests, including a high-angle long shot of a crowd in Admiralty at night, with a single protester standing alone in a cleared space directly hit by teargas (see Figure 5.4). However, the effect of intercutting these images with Fung’s narration is that they are now framed as memories. In other words, these shots are not supposed to call forth the existence of a milieu as though the spectators were reliving it. Rather, the spectators are encouraged to compare these memories with other competing memories they saw either organically or in other media. Moreover, since the actual movement is already over, the spectators are not asked to act or react to

Figure 5.4  Original footage of the protests framed as memories in Road Not Taken.

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 225 these images. Rather, they are asked to dwell in them attentively, with Fung’s re-evaluation in mind, so that a new understanding of the relationships between these protesters, and between them and the political power, can be reassessed and reconsidered. Fung’s recounting of his memories reveals a narrative that is filled with anxiety, uncertainty and a lack of self-agency. For example, when he revisits the outside of the now re-gated Civic Square, Fung remembers that he received a text message from Lam that she had already entered the square. He then tried to follow suit. The film then cuts to the footage of Lam entering the square as a journalist, an identity that is supposed to protect her from being sectioned off by the police. The highly unstable handheld camera gives the spectators a sense that there is no direction among the protesters. In such chaos, a police officer asks Lam to enter the sectioned-off area. As the camera swings around, it captures Fung. Standing in front of a police officer who blocks the newcomers, he stretches his arm out desperately in hope of reaching Lam (Figure 5.5). Instead of representing this critical moment of recapturing the Civic Square as an act of self-determination, the footage conveys a sense of desolation, hopelessness and aimlessness. In another sequence, Lam and Wong follow a group of young protesters to a street parallel to the occupation site in Admiralty in the middle of the night ( Johnston Road). Shot with a hidden camera and microphone, the spectators see the lower bodies of these protesters gathering together to discuss how they should set up a temporary road block. They do so in order to direct the police’s attention away from their fellow protesters

Figure 5.5  Fung tries to reach Lam in Civic Square.

226

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

who are trying to occupy the critical site Lung Wo Road. The spectators then see them, in almost comical fast motion, setting up a poorly designed road block with barricades, tyres and traffic cones. After they have left, the camera stays on the location and observes a taxi approaching the road block. The driver then gets out of the car and removes the barriers in a matter of a few minutes. During the whole process, no police officers are in sight. This sequence and the Civic Square one carry very different tones. However, they both convey a sense of hopelessness, helplessness, impotence and childishness even, thus indicating that these protesters were far from apprehending, let alone understanding, the core of their political problem, the objective of their fight, and the price they were supposed to pay in order to achieve their goal. As in Midnight in Mongkok, the director and camera operator, ironically, were the only ones left in the scene. This is not to say that Road Not Taken is cynical. Rather, it resists simply celebrating its participants as heroes and glorifying them as the hope for the future. The segment on Hui focuses less on her memory than on her current work as an English tutor and as a social-media worker. The film intercuts between interviews of her at home, revisiting the Mong Kok site to recount her traumatic experiences, and working with her students. In her interviews, Hui becomes increasingly intolerant of the older generations, whom she accuses of having no understanding of her generation’s lack of hope and aspirations under Hong Kong’s neoliberal conditions. At one point, she even wishes all older people to die as soon as possible. After that, the film shows Fung participating in the 1 July march in 2015, where he confesses that he no longer trusts these political parties and civic societies who hijacked the Umbrella Movement. In other words, the spectators are asked to endure a painful process of the mental disintegration of these two leaders, who become increasingly distrustful, cynical and despondent in front of the camera. The film therefore leads the participants and the spectators to question not only their actions, but also their belief that we could have done better. In the London screening, some members of the audience who did not understand the context of their disillusionment, simply told Lam that they found this new generation of political leaders borderline self-centred.110 Yet, such cynicism is symptomatic of a larger sense that the survivors of the Umbrella Movement simply do not see any agency within the existing socio-political and economic structure. Retrospectively, they must come face-to-face with the fact that they have indeed underestimated how deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised Hong Kongers really are. It is in this light that the film chooses to end with an interview of Fung sitting in front of the LegCo building, who solemnly confesses to the

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 227

camera his belief that every human being has the right to overthrow the state – as long as they do not put such thoughts into action. But then, this statement is both daring and self-contradictory. What does it really mean when one has the right to do something as long as they do not do it? Such scepticism can also be seen and felt in Chan Tze-woon’s Luanshi beiwang [Lyunsai beimong or Yellowing, 2016]. In 2017, the film received the Shinsuke Ogawa Award at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. According to Chan, the film was shot on a HK$3,000 (US$384.62) high-definition (HD) camera with a budget of HK$50,000 (US$6,410.26).111 The Chinese title of the film Lyunsai beimong literally means a ‘memorandum at a tumultuous age’. The term beimong not only refers to an actual memorandum, but also to the act of preparing for forgetting. Its indication is therefore protentional: that the film is supposed to be a note written in preparation of the future, in which the aspirations of the Umbrella protesters will be inevitably forgotten. Even more so than Road Not Taken, Yellowing is framed explicitly as an attentive memory. The film begins with a long shot of an intersection in Admiralty that leads up to Lung Wo Road. On the right side of the frame, the spectators can see the skyscrapers of Admiralty in the background. On the left side of the frame, there is a stretch of open sky (over the harbour). Suddenly, fireworks explode on the left side of the frame, whose colourful and spectacular lights are reflected on the mirrored surfaces of the buildings (Figure 5.6). Over the explosive sound of the fireworks, the film cuts to an extreme close-up of a severely bent and damaged ‘Stop’ sign, with a worn-out sticker that says, ‘Umbrella Revolution’. After that, the film cuts to a close-up of a wall with other stickers from the protests on the LegCo building, overlooking Tamar Garden. It then fades to a black-and-white image of an occupied street during the evening of 28 September 2014 (Figure 5.7). These opening shots, which invoke a sense of nostalgia (in fact, the phrase ‘remembrance of things past’ came to my mind when I first watched it), serve as an introduction of a montage. In this montage, the image alternates between shots of different parts of Admiralty being brightly and colourfully lit by the fireworks and shots of the same spots during the occupation, either in black-and-white or in monotone. In the soundtrack, the noise of the firework explosions is blended seamlessly with the noises of the teargas explosions and of the crowd. This opening sequence can be read as a user manual for the rest of the film. The opening shot of the clear and normalised Lung Wo Road, the explosive fireworks and the rhythm of the montage all convey a sense of transience. The alternation between the different locations in Admiralty bathed in the light of the celebratory fireworks and the same

228

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Figures 5.6–5.7  Two sides of Admiralty and two modes of temporality in Yellowing.

places being crowded by protesters turn memories into a stack of index cards. The spectators are therefore invited to flip back and forth between two planes of existence: peace and turmoil, order and disorder, neoliberalism and anarchy, present and past. Yet, the seamlessly blended noises in the soundtrack suggest that the boundaries between these planes of existence are porous and what appears to be peace and hope in the present (fireworks) is a form of loss and despair in the eyes of the protesters today. And what appears to be disorder and turmoil (the occupation) is a form of hope and aspiration for a different future.

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 229 The film then cuts to a montage of super-8 and hi-8 footage of home movies and videos, supposedly the director’s. In the voice-over, Chan contextualises the Umbrella Movement not by explicating its grand narrative, but through his personal story. He explains that he was brought up in a social environment in which the older generation had already accepted slavishly that Hong Kong was to be transitioned from a British colony to an SAR under the PRC. Then, he explains that those people who were not willing to acknowledge such a political reality chose to immigrate to North  America. But then, his parents, like many other people in Hong Kong, decided not to leave. In primary and secondary schools, he learned about ‘one country, two systems’ and, at university, he studied the Basic Law and PRC’s promise for democratisation. Yet, after nearly twenty years, Hong Kong simply became a neoliberal society where lives have been rendered unlivable and dispensable, and democracy is still nowhere in sight. This montage performs two functions in the narrative. First, it suggests that the Umbrella Movement and those participants who lived it came into being not out of a horizontal plane of existence, in which one event led to another in a linear manner. Rather, each of these mutually dependent living beings and each moment of their lives are a summation of an assemblage of intricately interrelated memories, where the personal and the collective intersect. Yet, each moment of existence, each instant of inter-individuation, inter-subjectivisation and inter-autonomisation, each decision and each action is fundamentally transient. Like Marcel Proust’s (1871–1922) À la recherche du temps perdu [Remembrance of Things Past, 1913–27], every moment is best understood in terms of the imparfait (imperfect tense), that something which happened and disappeared at a point-instant in the past persists as a memory that gives form to our new sense-perceptions. The narrative proper is indeed framed by Chan’s voice-over as a flashback, as though these images and sound taken from his lived reality, once transformed into the video medium, had already taken a fictional dimension. The story begins with a chance encounter, in the early morning of 28 September 2014, when the director stood at the front of a crowd directly facing the riot police. In a medium-to-medium close-up, which posits the police officers on the left of frame and the protesters on the right of frame, the camera first observes a young woman Rachel pleading with the police not to side with the government, that as Hong Kongers, the protesters are fighting for the police’s future, too. Then, the spectators hear a tearful voice of a young man (later revealed to be Lucky Egg) offscreen, who  asks the police to act conscientiously. After a while, the spectators

230

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

hear the police announcement that they are ready to clear the street. Yet, by the end of the shot, the director reveals to the spectators on an intertitle that the police did not arrest anyone. Then, in the following sequence, the film shows these young people smiling, relaxing and eventually sitting down. They then introduce themselves to one another. In a voice-over, Chan reveals that these are going to be the characters in his film. The idea of basing a documentary on a chance encounter, in a normal circumstance, is supposed to foreground the film’s contingency and ­spontaneity – and, by extension, sense of reality, credulity and authenticity. Yet, as an attentive memory, such a chance encounter appears to the spectators as surreal, incredible and unable to be authenticated. This is not to say that the documentary falsifies itself. Rather, for Chan, such an epochal, traumatic and life-changing event, from the way it exploded to the way it disappeared (like the fireworks), from the macro-political perspective and from the point-of-view of those lives who participated in it, was like this chance encounter: spontaneous, seemingly unreal and utterly incredible, yet it left an indelible mark that will continue to shape these lives and the way they understand the milieu they live in. The rest of this flashback is narrated chronologically. However, the film does not initiate each sequence with a key event. Rather, it introduces each segment by positioning the camera among these young characters as they are at work: volunteering in Mong Kok at first, forming into a think tank to discuss the newest developments of the larger political situation, negotiating their loyalties as different political parties and civic societies appear to take over the decision-making process, evaluating the pros and cons of democracy among themselves, maintaining a study centre originally built by a sixth-former, teaching English to primary-school children, dating, and participating in demonstrations and occupations. In other words, these young biopolitical lives, each carrying the summation of a complex assemblage of intersecting socio-political and personal memories, partake in a process of becoming a new socio-political milieu. This two-hour flashback ends with the police clearance of the Admiralty site, as the spectators see these young people packing their belongings during the time the police gave them to leave without being arrested. During the flashback, Rachel is seen in a close-up in front of her ad-hoc teaching station. She then reads an open letter written by her law professor at the University of Hong Kong, Albert Chen, published in a programme at Radio Television Hong Kong called Xianggang jiashu [Hoenggong gaasyu or Hong Kong Letter] on 25 October 2014. In this letter, Chen explicates that the Umbrella Movement arose out of a deeper crisis fundamental to ‘one country, two systems’. He pleads with the students

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 231 to consider the PRC’s national security and territorial integrity and to try to work within Hong Kong’s constitutional structure to treasure the available freedom they can still enjoy. They should let rationality and restraint conquer idealism and radicalism.112 In the final segment of Yellowing, the spectators first see a sequence of shots of the protest sites being cleared in slow motion, accompanied by a haunting piece of music composed of echoes and resonations of an electric guitar. We then see a series of shots of the city resuming its normal operation in silence. After that, Rachel reads her letter to Chen in a voice-over while the film shows a montage of shots taken during the occupy movement and shots of different parts of the city. The roads are now reoccupied by its regular traffic and public spaces are now guarded by reinforced police officers. The film then cuts to the home movies of Chan from the 1990s. Gradually, the sequence evolves into a montage of different images over a lyrical piece of guitar music: shots of the cityscape, images of the exhausted protesters collapsing on the ground, footage of the 2012 CE election, footage of large-scale public entertainment performances on Tamar Garden, images of public processions and assemblies, shots of a man in a market putting fish from one container into another, including a close-up of the fish being cramped into an unlivable space, images of highways, and shots of the tranquil and quiet evenings on the protest sites. The letter reads: Professor, I am not as erudite as you are, so I can only write to you with my passionate or rather naïve child’s heart. The night when the students stormed the Civic Square, I happened to be standing at the frontline near CITIC Plaza. We had no resources at that time. We simply tore up a few plastic bags to cover our eyes, noses, and mouths. There was nothing that separated the police from us. I don’t know why. But we held hands and defended our bodies with faith that could not be shaken. Then, we got tired and sat on the ground. We started chatting while having snacks given by other citizens. What I witnessed at all the occupied zones were increasingly tired yet determined faces. What I saw was a rebirth of the Lion Rock Spirit. Professor, I have never seen a Hong Kong like this. Isn’t this the old Hong Kong that the older generations have remembered so fondly? Isn’t it the old Hong Kong with strong communal spirit and close bond? You said the policy framework has been decided by the Central Government. Therefore, the people of Hong Kong can only accept this political reality, this ‘universal suffrage’ under the ‘one country, two systems’ designed by the CPG. You said that the older generations accepted the fate of being a colony under the British and that acceptance made Hong Kong great today. Hence, Hong Kongers today should accept quietly the decisions made by the Communist Party, focus on the economy and stability, and remain silent on their atrocities. Must a bird who was born inside a cage remain in that cage for good? Is it so

232

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

­ nreasonable for a caged bird to want to fly? You mentioned the policy framework u designed based on national security, stability, and prevention of foreign conspiracy. However, I want to ask why the CPC is so afraid? As the old saying goes, guilty conscience needs no accuser. Perhaps a totalitarian regime guarded by tanks and bullets is bound to worry about being overthrown by their people. Professor, I am sorry. To find a way of living in such a distorted political reality to be satisfied with the freedom ‘granted’ is merely surviving without dignity. I simply can’t agree with this way of life. Also, don’t you see that there are many other reasons behind the massive occupy movement that we are witnessing today? We live in the street in pain and rain because many of our restaurants, stationery stores, and bakeries are gradually disappearing and they are replaced by chain stores, jewellery shops, and large shopping malls. What you see and hear on the street are no longer Cantonese and traditional Chinese. We can’t afford a flat with our sweat and toil. There is no more upward mobility in the social class structure. We are reverting back to the age of feudalism. This is a society driven by self-interest, when the definition of right and wrong is turned upside down. The government is not working for us and many people are struggling to make ends meet. This is why we have to participate in the movement. Do you want to accept our fate quietly and witness the disappearing of our familiar Hong Kong? There is no legal justification for the CPG to define and restrict our universal suffrage. Also, is there really broad representation in the current ‘nominating committee’? Professor, the senior officials who treat the words of the NPC as the golden rule are the ones who are ruining our rule of law. A political institution that exercises its power to interpret the rule of law is a blatant disrespect to our rule of law. It is because the future is ours, we want to protect it against the odds. We don’t want to see a Hong Kong that we can no longer recognise in the future. Chances are gained not granted. We are young; we should fight on.113

The end of the film is a brief interview of Lucky Egg. In a single long shot taken early in the morning, he sits on the ground among other protesters. Chan then asks him if he thinks that, in twenty years, he would become like those forty-year-old people today. Lucky Egg answers honestly that he does not know what is going to happen in two decades. However, that is the reason why this film is important. In this sense, Yellowing can be seen as a letter written to oneself and then purloined – possibly for ten to twenty years – for the purpose of reminding one of a transient moment at which an assemblage of lives are inter-individuated, inter-subjectivised and inter-autonomised.114 Neither Chan nor the characters in the film are cynical of what they did, but they are sceptical of any belief or hope that their mutual appearance at this specific space and time would indeed leave an indelible mark in the future. But then, in this light, this memorandum is written not for the purpose of being read in the future, but for the purpose of reminding themselves that there is no political future until they turn

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 233 these memories into a momentum. But is it possible? Has this been happening?

The End of Extraterritoriality The logical conclusion of this chapter is bleak: that in Hong Kong, extraterritoriality in the way I have been discussing in this book, is bound to end. But as I shall discuss in this book’s conclusion, as a juridical principle, extraterritoriality has neither a beginning nor an end. Social individuation, subjectivisation and autonomisation are always based on a double mechanism: I am being individuated, subjectivised and autonomised as an exception from a community of individual and autonomised subjects. I am therefore always extraterritorialised. Yet, by defining my individuality, subjectivity and autonomy as a state of exception, I implicitly maintain a relationship with the polis and its territoriality. In this sense, I inadvertently recognise a certain authority that is initiated in the form of juridicopolitical violence upon me by this community. Yet, this authority does not come from nowhere, as Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) would argue, but from precisely the fact that what we take as individuation, subjectivisation and autonomisation are effectively inter-individuation, inter-subjectivisation and inter-autonomisation.115 The end of extraterritoriality is generally understood by many people in polarised terms. On the one hand, it seems that CPG’s solution will be the complete reterritorialisation of Hong Kong before the Sino-British Joint Declaration expires on 30 June 2046. Journalists and social-media workers are quick to point out: (1) the CPG has been pro-active in depriving localist politicians of further opportunities to stand in election or to take public offices; (2) in March 2017, Premier Li Keqiang (in office since 2013) proposed the formulation of a new region called Dawan qu (Greater Bay area), which unified Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Zhongshan, Dongguan, Zhaoqing, Huizhou and Jiangmen into a single economic union; and (3) the CPG has so far refused to discuss how Hong Kong is going to be administered by 1 July 2046, which led to speculation that Hong Kong will be fully incorporated as a direct-controlled municipality like Shanghai.116 Second, localists have been eager to territorialise Hong Kong as a citystate. This idea was first proposed by anthropologist Horace Chin in his book Xianggang chengbang lun [Hoenggong singbong leon or On Hong Kong being a city-state, 2011]. In response to his work, HKUSU published an edited anthology of nine essays called Xianggang minzu lun [Hoenggong manzuk leon or On Hong Kong as a nation-state, 2014]. Chin’s book

234

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

has influenced a lot of young localists today. However, as a scholastic monograph, it does what many nationalist scholars do around the world: to justify nationalism by appropriating left-wing critique of nationalism as a primer on how to constitute a nation. Chin’s thesis is based on Benedict Anderson’s understanding of the nation as an imagined community and Earnest Renan’s (1823–92) highly critical essay on nineteenth-century nationalism, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’  [‘What is a nation?’, 1882]. The former argues that what we consider a nation is an arbitrarily defined community based on an imagination that we all share a set of socio-political, economic and linguistic values. Such an imagination is a fabrication made possible by modern communication technology and media.117 Meanwhile, Renan warns his readers that the constitution of the nation-state is based on collective forgetfulness, that is, convenient forgetting of inter-individual and intersubjective differences, historical errors and the arbitrariness of their communal values.118 Yet, like many nationalist writers, by turning these ideas around, one may argue that any group of biopolitical lives who share imagined sociopolitical, economic and linguistic affinities with one another and where their actual differences can be conveniently effaced in this imaginative process can justify themselves as a nation-state.119 At first glance, there is nothing wrong with this argument, because it is tautological: the definition of a nation-state is X; hence, any assemblage of lives that can be characterised as X can be defined as a nation. But, then, which nation-state is not founded upon this tautological reasoning in the first place? In other words, the CPG and the localists operate upon the exact same juridico-political principles. It is therefore logical that the two geopolitical views consider each other as mutually exclusive, based on the implicit understanding of homo homini lupus (a man is a wolf to another man). In his book, Chin tries to soften his tone by suggesting that Greater China at large can be transformed into a powerful federation of city-states: the PRC, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Chin claims that his idea comes from his study of Greco-Roman politics.120 But then, in so doing, he also conveniently overlooks the fact that the Greco-Roman formulation of economic and military alliances between city-states was the foundation of the empire. Following his proposal, therefore, Greater China is precisely what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri would fear: a neoliberal alliance of political communities on a global scale constituted for their mutual military and economic benefits.121 What is at stake is that this debate between the Pro-establishment supporters and their localist counterparts on what type of reterritorialisation

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 235 Hong Kong needs is a convenient transference of a more troubling form of extraterritoriality: neoliberalism. It is because global neoliberalism has rendered the majority of biological lives precarious and dispensable, that they invest their hopes in the abstract nineteenth-century notion of nationalism. They believe that by reclaiming an imagined sense of territoriality, the actual problem of living will fall into place. What nationalism repeats and proliferates is the continual affirmation of the self as a state of exception, thus putting every biopolitical life’s extraterritoriality under erasure. This mode of localism can be easily appropriated by any charismatic politician as a form of populism. In 2018, Nora Lam’s Lost in the Fumes became the talk of the town after the film won the Special Jury Prize at the Eleventh Taiwan International Film Festival. Lost in the Fumes is about militant localist Edward Leung’s one-and-a-half-year participation in politics, before he returned to Hong Kong from Boston for his fateful trial. The film offers a highly personal and touching account of Leung struggling with depression. In the film, Leung confesses repeatedly that he knows very little about the theoretical foundation of localism. However, his cohorts offered him encouragement and support. He was then deeply convinced that he could devote his life to a purpose: to fight state violence with revolutionary violence. One of the most striking features of the film is an interview conducted at dusk by the sea (see Figure 5.8). In a medium close-up against the orange setting sun and light-blue sea, Leung, dressed in a red-and-blue plaid shirt, divulges to the camera (by extension, Lam and the spectators) his deep-seated depression, anxiety and lack of understanding of politics.

Figure 5.8  An intimate interview of Edward Leung in Lost in the Fumes.

236

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

At one point, he eats a bowl of noodles with fish balls. It recalls the origin of the Mong Kok riots, in which he took a leadership position: a movement triggered by the eviction of fish-ball hawkers from the street. In his completely relaxed state, he tells us that he has no agency over his being heroicised within a matter of a year into the poster-boy of localism. The Chinese title of Lost in the Fumes has nothing to do with violence. Rather, the phrase Deihau tingou is an idiom, which refers to a young and naïve person who fails to understand how complicated reality is. The narrative proper of the film is structured around Leung’s political actions in the February by-election and his subsequent work as the assistant to Sixtus Leung’s campaign in the September general election in 2016. In these sequences of political actions, the spectators are shown a group of fun-loving youngsters who genuinely believe that running for election, in itself, is a political act of intervention. For them, it is uplifting and engaging. But curiously, when the film shows how Sixtus Leung prepares for his speeches, he appears to hold very abstract and empty political beliefs. In theory, Sixtus Leung is supposed to be running on behalf of Edward Leung. Thus, Sixtus is supposed to say what Edward asks him to say. But then, neither Sixtus nor Edward manages to come up with any concrete socio-political agendas other than reiterating their belief that self-determination would be the first step to solving Hong Kong’s deeper socio-economic problems. These campaign sequences are therefore very painful to watch, as the spectators are indeed shown a group of young people who have yet to grasp the complexity of politics and what their mission really is. It also generates among the spectators a concern that the political aspirations of the two parties, Hong Kong Indigenous and Youngspiration, are built on thin ice. Toward the end, the film shows an assistant of Sixtus in a mass demonstration in front of the Liaison Office of the CPG in Hong Kong at night, demanding the NPCSC not to offer any further interpretations of the Basic Law, which would inevitably lead to the disqualification of the localist legislators-elect. The camera observes the assistant from the crowd as he sits on top of an electric meter box so that he is supposed to be able to issue commands to his supporters. Yet, surrounded by a crowd of supporters who are desperately looking up at him for leadership, this young man simply asks them to give up. His supporters therefore shout expletives at him, telling him that this form of impotent leadership was precisely what made the Umbrella Movement fail. Many viewers went to see this film after Edward Leung was sentenced to six years of imprisonment. The film therefore curiously serves as an open text. Some spectators find themselves sympathetic to Edward Leung

­

t he age o f pr e c a r ity 237 because they see him as ‘just a kid’, that he does not deserve such a severe punishment for his leadership in the Mong Kok riots. Those who are more cynical see him as a pawn being instrumentalised by the localists as a naïve martyr, who will eventually mature as a political leader after his six years of imprisonment. There are even more sceptical reactions to his naïveté. However, what the film does is to draw the spectators’ connection to Edward Leung and his cohorts via humanistic sympathy. On the one hand, Nora Lam does want her spectators to develop a mutual understanding with Edward because we are all humans. On the other hand, as a film made by a politically alert director, it also raises a question: Is localist politics built upon a sheet of thin ice: humanism? * * * Documentaries about the Umbrella Movement and other politicised films put Hong Kong independent cinema back into the spotlight of international film festivals and the local filmmaking and cinephile community. What these films attest to is not simply the precarity of life under neoliberalism, but also the precarity of the media image. At first glance, many of these films appear to be well-made documentaries with fairly conventional narrational strategies, shot and released at the right historical moments. However, if we contextualise them within the crisis of global neoliberalism and the crisis of the image, they subtly call for an active renewal and rewriting of extraterritoriality not only as a geopolitical status in Hong Kong, but also as a juridico-political principle. What they emphasise is that the problems suffered by the young generation are created precisely by the failure of individuation, subjectivisation and autonomisation of the older generation and that they are compelled to perform and repeat such a failure. What they hope for is a new mode of political existence based on inter-individuation, inter-subjectivisation and inter-autonomisation. Perhaps humanism is indeed the answer. But what they propose is not a 1950s understanding of humanism, but a fundamental revision of what it means by being human.

238

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

The Body of Extraterritoriality

What is hong kong cinema? Where will it go from here? I often tell my friends from Mainland China, the UK, North America or even Taiwan, ‘To be able to say to yourself and to other people with certainty, honesty, and pride where you came from, to what political community you belong, and what mother tongue you speak is a political privilege.’ The assertation ‘I am’ – including ‘I came from’, ‘I belong to’ and ‘I speak’ – testifies to the speaker’s ontological consistency: their individuality, subjectivity and autonomy. Being born into and perpetually put in an interstitial position that is at once occupied by mutually conflicting sovereign authorities, political powers, culturo-linguistic formations and socio-economic systems, and ostracised as outsiders of the territories of these occupational forces, Hong Kongers have always found themselves extraterritorial. As a trading port, colony or Special Administrative Region (SAR), Hong Kong has always been configured as a zone of exception, a floating island on the mare liberum (free sea).1 There is no geopolitical position in the existing juridico-political language to define what it is, what it has been and what it will become. I am nobody. In the eyes of these mutually conflicting political authorities and in this neoliberal economy, my body does not matter. In this book’s conclusion, let us revisit what extraterritoriality means and the historical journey of different generations of filmmakers and spectators who tried to work through this problem by creating, theorising, defining and defending Hong Kong cinema, television and media. These artists and viewers do so in order that a public sphere can be constituted, where their bodies and voices can be kept alive, and where their mutually conflicting affects toward their socio-political traumas can be negotiated. Locating and nurturing this public sphere also required filmmakers and cultural workers to experiment with new forms, poetics and narrational strategies, both in mainstream cinemas and television and in independent films, experimental videos and documentaries. A conclusion to a book, however, should be both retrospective and proactive. By the end of the previous chapter, I suggested that humanism is perhaps the answer to our political impasse. However, the mode of

­

the b o dy o f e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y 239 humanism that was widely promulgated by politicians and artists during and immediately after the Second World War (1939–45) had already failed. As I shall expound later, it turned out to be the beginning of the problematics that have produced the precarious milieu in which we live. I therefore propose that we revisit what it means by being human while living with other human beings, by not reterritorialising any place or anybody, but by giving extraterritoriality a presence, a body. I argue that in Hong Kong, Mainland filmmakers who were exiled from their homeland use their films to explore and negotiate the means by which one can reclaim humanity.

Extraterritoriality as a Topos On many occasions, I was asked by my friends and cohorts: Why is it necessary to come up with yet another new term to rethink Hong Kong cinema and media? In cinema and media studies, there has been no topos on which extraterritoriality, as a locutionary position, can be properly discussed. In other words, there has been no word to describe how I feel to be in this position. Extraterritoriality is neither national nor transnational, local nor global, regional nor inter-/intra-regional. This position is always being occupied by these territorial frameworks and juridical claims, precisely, by forgetting and glossing over those interstices that have yet acquired any ­terrestrial domains. You can say that it is glocal. But then, what the term ‘glocal’ indicates is that Hong Kong cinema and media are neither A nor B, at once A and B. As Buddhist logician Nāgārjuna (150–250 bce) argues, this paradox suggests that the ultimate reality of this position – which is in fact not a position – is: neither ‘neither A nor B’ nor ‘at once A and B’.2 Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) calls it the différance.3 Meanwhile, Giorgio Agamben calls it the remainder: what remains after the divides between the self and the other, humanity and animality, biological life and political life, individual and the polis, have been exhausted and rendered purposeless.4 As Lam Nin-tung argued in 1978, the three terms used by scholars to discuss Hong Kong cinema were Zhongguo dianying (Chinese [national] cinema), Guoyu dianying (national-language cinema) and Zhongwen dianying (Chinese-language cinemas). The first term fails to capture the complexity of the historical trajectories, geopolitical conflicts and cultural contestations that have contributed to the formation of Chinese sovereignties, statehoods and other modes of polis. The term ‘national-language cinema’ has been formulated since 1930, which excludes Cantonese and

240

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

other regional-speech (topolect) cinemas. The term ‘Chinese-language cinemas’ has been considered by many scholars as more acceptable. Yet, by calling Hong Kong cinema a type of Chinese-language cinema, we subsume a language spoken by Hong Kongers under the Chinese language, which was already regarded as problematic in the 1930s and 1940s.5 It is even more so today when many young Hong Kongers actively ­question their relationship with China. This is, once again, not simply a taxonomic matter. Rather, these nominations have shaped film policies, industrial organisations, poetics and criticisms since the 1930s. Ever since the Cantonese sound film emerged during that decade, Shanghai filmmakers and critics have attacked it as being vulgar, theatrical, pre-modern, degenerate, and coarsely and excessively made. In response, Cantonese filmmakers in Canton, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and San Francisco instigated the Cantonese film cleansing movement in an attempt to defend their own works as an integral part of the national discourse. In 1937, Shanghai film executives even convinced the Nanking government to implement a ban against region-speech cinemas. This situation was turned around during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), as the Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist Party) tried to mobilise audiences in the Canton-Hong Kong region to support the war cause by turning Cantonese cinema into an instrument of propaganda. In the 1950s, Cantonese filmmakers – including talents who migrated from Shanghai – fostered a specific poetics for the purpose of appealing to the Hong Kong spectators’ socio-political affects and experiences.6 These early historical experiences testify that locating Hong Kong cinema and media is best understood not as an ontological task, but an ontogenetic one. In other words, by asking what Hong Kong cinema is, we shall not assume that Hong Kong cinema and media share some fundamental existential basis. Instead, different modes of Hong Kong cinemas and media take shape out of assemblages of socio-political, cultural and linguistic conditions. For Shih Shu-mei, Hong Kong has been posited – both geopolitically and conceptually – at the periphery of the Chinese border, yet it is both part of and under the pressure of the Sinitic linguistic cultural sphere and political authority. The term Sinophone henceforth locates a site of tension: a zone of exception where a cultural, linguistic and socio-political force is instantiated both as a power of occupation and as a medium of communal cohesion. Such a force constitutes, and is constituted by, an ongoing process of excepting this zone from China’s territorial boundary.7 This is extraterritoriality. Extraterritoriality was a legal concept initiated in the fifteenth century, as European settlers in the colonies brought with them their own laws

­

the b o dy o f e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y 241

and exercised them in the free sea extraterritorial to their land of origin. During the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods, European settlers’ demand for extraterritorial right was initially considered by the imperial courts as being in accord with their codes. According to these codes, subjects from two ethnic or political communities have the right to be huishen (jointly judged) in accordance with their individual laws. The Qing court did not formally recognise the Euro-American demands as a form of colonial privilege until the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895. In the treaties and conventions signed between the Qing court and the government of Great Britain, the juridical status of Hong Kong had remained a matter of contestation. According to the British understanding, Hong Kong island and the southern part of the Kowloon Peninsula, with the exception of Kowloon City, were ceded to Great Britain as a Crown colony. However, according to the understanding of the Qing court, and, later, its political successors, Hong Kong has always been under Chinese sovereign authority, only that the administrative right over the region was geiyu (bestowed) on the British government. In other words, Hong Kong was regarded as an extraterritorial zone of exception. Therefore, Hong Kong’s socio-political extraterritoriality has been the locus of contention between the PRC and the UK during the colonial period, generating crises and perturbations during and after the 1967 Riots and the Sino-British negotiation of Hong Kong’s future from 1978 to 1984. After 1997, Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality has been preserved, maintained, eroded and challenged in the form of the SAR. Yet, underlining these changes has been one principle: the perpetuation of Hong Kong as a geopolitical and economic zone of exception. It is important to remember that extraterritoriality is neither land-bound nor geographically tied to a section of the free sea. Rather, it is a position that occupies, and is occupied by, biopolitical lives who find themselves caught in this juridico-political interstice. During most of the twentieth century, Hong Kong’s extraterritorial status made the city into a site where people with contesting political affiliations, social beliefs, cultural values, linguistic practices and regional loyalties would convene. Cinema, television and other media have also served as a public sphere where these conflicting ideas and bonds have been negotiated and reconfigured. During the Sino-Japanese War, for instance, some filmmakers, stars and cultural workers chose not to follow the KMT to Chungking or the CPC to Yenan. Instead, they worked in a film industry that took advantage of the extraterritorial status of Hong Kong and of the international settlements in Shanghai to survive. After the Sino-Japanese and Pacific (­ 1941–5)

242

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

wars, Mandarin musicals like An All-Consuming Love were made for the purpose of revisiting, rehearsing and rewriting these people’s memories of the occupation and their political failure: We could not have helped it; but we could have done it better. Hong Kong served as an extraterritorial site where their lives could be rebooted out of the ruins and ashes of conflicting loyalties and betrayals. Likewise, classical Cantonese cinema in the 1950s also served as a public sphere where left-wing intellectuals could negotiate their sense of failure: their failure to return to the Mainland to contribute to the revolutionary cause because they were no longer accepted there, and their failure to instigate any changes under Hong Kong’s colonialism and capitalism.

The Journey In this book, we have gone on a journey, in which generations of filmmakers and spectators in Hong Kong, who have had different degrees of trouble defining who they are – that is, of being individuated, subjectivised and autonomised – have sought to give extraterritoriality a body. My discussion is bookmarked by two mass movements in Hong Kong: the Leftist Riots in 1967 and the Umbrella Movement in 2014. These two movements were tremendously different in their political opinions. While the Leftist Riots stemmed from the political left, the Umbrella Movement was generated from an environment in which the difference between the political right and the political left has already collapsed. These two historical events nonetheless represented how two generations, under their respective extraterritorial conditions, tried to make the absence of their bodies present to the juridico-political authorities that rendered their lives precarious. In 1967, unionised workers, students, left-wing intellectuals and cultural workers initially saw the CPC as a leader in their fight against colonial capitalism. By the end of the Riots, not only they, but also many passive observers, had witnessed how the colonial government and the  ­revolutionary force used the same means – biopolitical ­violence  –  to ­instantiate their respective authorities over Hong Kong. In the Confrontations, what the colonial government feared, curiously, was not the actual fights and bloodshed on the street, but the affective power of media as an instantiation of the absence of the PRC’s sovereign authority over Hong Kong. Therefore, intellectuals and film critics became aware of the power of the cinema and film criticism as speech-acts that could give Hong Kong’s extraterritorial status a presence and a body. From 1967 to 1978, in the Chinese Student Weekly and its successor Close-up, they debated as to what Chinese cinema

­

the b o dy o f e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y 243

is and how classical Cantonese cinema has served as a forum in which Hong Kong cinema can be located. This intellectual discussion inspired young filmmakers, especially women, to experiment with ways in which they could speak with their spectators inter-individually, inter-subjectively and inter-autonomously. They wished to foster a film language known by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75) as a free-indirect discourse, that is, a film image in which the director, spectators and characters speak together inter-subjectively.8 In other words, they want to constitute an authorship that is specific to Hong Kong women. One of these filmmakers, Tang Shu-hsuen, in her debut feature The Arch, unlearns the Euro-American cinematic paradigm by appropriating aesthetic values from the Six Dynasties (220 or 222–589). She then dismantles both poetics by means of a montage that directly incites her female spectators to deconstruct the dichotomy between tradition and modernity. For her, such a dichotomy has always been built upon the ostracisation of women’s bodies to an extraterritorial position in gender and sexuality, so that the ontological consistency of heteronormativity can be maintained. Meanwhile, writer Joyce Chan and director Patrick Tam use ­modernist strategies to critique extraterritorial feminism in the ‘Miu Kam-fung’ episode of Seven Women. By extraterritorial feminism, I refer to a belief in the 1970s that cosmopolitan women who had the monetary power to consume Euro-American images and lifestyles were considered to be individuated, subjectivised and autonomised. In truth, they merely consumed the image of the colonising Other and enjoyed the pleasure of being colonised. In ‘Miu Kam-fung’, Chan and Tam transplant narrational devices from the works of Jean-Luc Godard. In the programme, television viewers are implicated in a scopophilic structure in which signifiers and signifieds in a highly consumerist society are dissociated from one another. Thus, consumption is detached from ethics and unethical consumption is  celebrated as fashionable and desirable. Through the act of stylistic transplantation, China becomes one of the many consumable signifiers filtered through the European lens, a sign that has no socio-political and ethical values. Finally, director Ann Hui and screenwriters Shu Kei and Wong Chi, in ‘The Boy from Vietnam’, use the homo-social relationships between three young men who were extraterritorialised by Vietnam, the PRC and the United States to mediate the conflictual affects of these deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised lives. Until this point, extraterritoriality had remained an inchoate awareness. From 1978 to 1997, it became a fully formed political consciousness. The Sino-British negotiation from 1978 to 1984 on the future of Hong

244

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Kong was a six-year diplomatic stalemate between the PRC and the UK. On the one hand, the Beijing government held on to their belief that the PRC had always had sovereign authority over Hong Kong. On the other hand, the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher blatantly disregarded expert opinions and the reality of postcolonial politics. They blindly believed that the only way to guarantee Hong Kong’s economic freedom was to perpetuate the city’s juridical extraterritoriality under British colonialism. In this stalemate, extraterritoriality was temporalised as the time it took for time to end. Without any settlement in sight, 1 July 1997 was projected as an expiration date, on which Hong Kong’s extraterritorial position as understood by this generation would come to an end. Time had ended, only that we did not feel it. As a result, the living principle of the time was carpe diem (seize the day). As Ackbar Abbas argues, Hong Kong’s cityscape, its urban architecture, spatial layout, cinema, media and cultural productions were a transient, volatile yet perpetually self-generating environment of confusing and exciting actions and events. These events appeared and disappeared before one could grasp and feel them.9 Industrially, Hong Kong newspapers and magazines, television, popular music, radio and cinema were configured by the studios as a kaleidoscopic machine, where their consumers could channel their anxieties, uncertainties and existential crises about their already-collapsed individuality, subjectivity and autonomy. During this period, theatre and video artists from Zuni Icosahedron and Videotage complained that mainstream cinema and media, by offering their audience and consumers massive sensual assaults, trained Hong Kongers not to confront their socio-political realities. Emerging from both local and global artistic movements of using video as a creative and interactive medium to rethink what it means by living and surviving at the interstices of a society, video art of this era can be considered an inter- and intra-extraterritorial movement. Women, lesbians and gay men, and stateless communities employed this medium to give their extraterritorialities visible bodies. Theatre and video works of Danny Yung (and his cohort Kwan Pun-leung), for instance, are best understood as experiences in which the viewers’ sensorial, perceptual, socio-political and sexual orientations are put into question, and that the biopolitical power of a government or institution is crystallised, instantiated, exemplified and troubled. Meanwhile, May Fung, Ellen Pau and Yau Ching use video art to give the extraterritorial position of women, especially lesbians, a tangible body. Their works put into question what constitutes a woman’s body, what performances inscribe her body, how her body performs and inscribes the spatiality and temporality of the city, and how she responds to and takes

­

the b o dy o f e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y 245 control of the sensorial assaults of popular culture. More importantly, these women directors use their experiments to rewrite video’s medium specificity, not only as a bundle of signals that give form to an image, but as a technicity that shapes how women define and deconstruct the boundary between the self and the other. They do so by negotiating the mutually conflicting aesthetic languages available to them at Hong Kong’s extraterritorial position. If 1 July 1997 was designated as the expiration date of extraterritoriality, post-1997 Hong Kong is best understood as a form of posthistoricity. The establishment of the Hong Kong SAR as an extraterritorial zone under, yet curiously ostracised by, the PRC’s sovereign authority, was the continual performance of the time it took for time to end. As Mainland China became a neoliberal post-socialist economy under party-state supervision, Hong Kong became the world’s most deregulated market, a trading port renewed and reinvigorated in order to facilitate free trade. The SAR’s legislative and administrative systems have also been maintained carefully by an oligarchy of business and corporate interests, which had transferred their loyalty from the UK to the PRC during the 1990s. In mainstream cinema, the industrial reorganisation that led up to the signing of the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) had generated a crisis of authorship on three levels: industrial, creative and socio-political. Industrially, who has the power to own and authorise a co-production? Who are the creative talents and technicians in the co-production process? Has Hong Kong cinema been transformed by Mainland censorship and market demands or have such constraints and conditions initiated new aesthetics or new ways of deploying classical Hong Kong aesthetics? How do these films, under the watch of both the Mainland censors and spectators, still serve to negotiate the conflicting socio-political affects and opinions of Hong Kongers? In my discussion, I used Johnnie To and his film Drug War as a case study to examine how he navigates through the co-production system by opening new industrial opportunities and creative devices to make Hong Kong’s extraterritorial position visible and sensible. Meanwhile, posthistorical life, for most people, is unlivable and precarious. Globally, the twenty-first century has been an age of precarity. Non-executive workers have been denied access to basic sustenance and financial means to survive, while the system is set up in such a way that these biopolitical lives are supposed to be morally responsible for their own subsistence. Being forgotten or even discarded as dispensable lives, these labourers have become nobody. They have no representation in the legislative and administrative infrastructure and their absented bodies

246

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

do not matter in the eyes of the political oligarchy. In Euro-American democracies, we see the rise of populism. In Hong Kong, where a voting system has been dysfunctional, these biopolitical lives engage themselves in public assemblies, where they can give their extraterritorial position a body. On 31 August 2014, the PRC Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC) decided to allow Hong Kongers to elect their Chief Executive (CE) by universal suffrage. Nonetheless, it also stipulated that candidates were to be chosen by a nomination assembly that would represent primarily business interests. This decision triggered the most massive social movement in Hong Kong history: The Umbrella Revolution or Movement (28 September–15 December 2014). This seventy-nine-day occupation of three major sites in the urban centre, Admiralty, Mong Kok and Causeway Bay, nurtured a new generation of politically active young people, who are persuaded that their hope is to fight for some degree of self-determination for Hong Kongers. With the Umbrella Movement, we see the emergence of politicised films, videos and media – especially documentaries. Young documentarians do not conveniently assume that the documentary image has any truth claims. Even though film and media images are still considered as being intricately related to reality, and that their authenticity may still be trusted, no one can safely say that they offer any access to the truth. Truths must be tested, contested, defended and challenged in a larger public discourse. Before and during the Umbrella Movement, documentarians including Matthew Torne, Nora Lam and Nate Chan demonstrated their awareness of a critical distance between the spectators, the director and the characters. They are not interested in (re)producing testimonies from an authoritative subjectival position. Instead, they capture and remediate an experiential process in which the affective power of the political events and the conflicting realities encapsulated by their films would enable an assembly of dispensable and precarious lives to initiate a process of inter-individuation, inter-subjectivisation and inter-autonomisation. After the Umbrella Movement, documentaries function as attentive memories that solicit contemplation, rethinking, re-remembering and reconfiguration of traumatic events. Through these memories, Nora Lam’s Road Not Taken and Chan Tze-woon’s Yellowing both enable their spectators to live with the characters. In these images, the spectators witness and sense their gradual loss of faith in the political establishment and in the Movement’s leadership. However, as these characters become more exhausted, cynical and hopeless, the spectators are encouraged to

­

the b o dy o f e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y 247 rehearse their own sense of failure by revisiting how one could have done it better and how one may reboot one’s understanding of the relationship between lives. For some young spectators, localism, or even militant localism, presents one possible solution. But as Nora Lam’s Lost in the Fumes suggests, young localist politicians have yet to understand the complexity of political powers and the democratic process. They appear to the audience as a group of naïve, albeit passionate, youngsters who are bound to fail. Yet, out of their naïveté and fatality, there lies one renewed connection between the film and the spectators: humanity.

Humanism as a Problematic For scholars in film and media studies and in the humanities, humanism has been considered for decades as a problematic. Humanism was the dominant framework in many cinemas around the world in the 1950s – including Hollywood, Japanese, Korean, Taiwan, Indian and Hong Kong. In these cinemas, filmmakers and spectators strove to reconstruct their  war  memories and made sense of the social inequity and injustice after the wars. The idea that we are all humans, conveyed as an affect in fiction films, has the power to move the spectators emotionally and persuade them to forget about their economic, socio-political, gender and sexual differences. In so doing, empathy can be achieved. However, these films consciously or inadvertently convince the spectators that the power asymmetry in the society or in world politics is ultimately irrelevant. As humans, these spectators all share a fundamental existential value – being human – which has been collectively violated by an unnamable, unconquerable and sinister force beyond the reach of ordinary lives.10 In the studies of Japanese cinema, for instance, New Wave filmmaker Ōshima Nagisa (1932–2013) argued between the late 1950s and early 1970s that humanist cinema in the 1950s convinced the spectators that there was a mystical political apparatus, under which all ordinary lives were subjugated. For him, what put citizens under surveillance, executed racial minorities as though they were animals, and stifled creativity through censorship and sexual oppression was every member of the polis.11 Meanwhile, film historian Hirano Kyōko points out that humanism was officially ‘introduced’ into Japanese studios in 1950 by the US Occupation (1945–52) under General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964). From 1945 to 1949, the Occupation initially encouraged Japanese directors and screenwriters to adopt socialist ideas. However, when the Korean War (1950–3) broke out on 25 June 1950, they began to encourage producers to propagate humanism in order to instil a sense of victimhood into the

248

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

spectators. According to many studio films in the 1950s, ordinary lives, regardless of their classes, nationalities and political affiliations, were collectively duped by an unspeakable force detrimental to their fundamental human values.12 A similar problem was located in PRC cinema immediately after the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). For example, director Xie Jin (1923–2008) started his career making revolutionary films in the Tianma Film Studio in Shanghai. He survived the persecutions and industrial re-organisations during the Anti-right movement from 1957 to 1959 and the Cultural Revolution a decade later. After his rehabilitation in 1980, Xie directed Tianyunshan chuanqi [Legend of Tianyuan Mountain, 1980] and Muma ren [The Herdsman, 1982]. The Herdsman is about Chinese-American Xu Jingyou, who travels to the Uyghur community of Chile to look for his son Linjun, in the hope of bringing him to the United States. However, Linjun refuses. In the film, Linjun recounts his traumatic experiences of being persecuted during the Anti-right movement and then being exiled to Chile during the Cultural Revolution. In spite of these experiences, Linjun finds solace and power in nature and in the local community. In 1983, Hong Kong filmmaker Evans Chan found the mode of humanism in The Herdsman ideologically disturbing: Xie Jin is a flamboyant director. Nevertheless, in his mind, there lies an ideal common to all those politically oppressed artists since the beginning of time: acceptance of fate. From such a perspective, Xie’s cinema is extremely ‘unprogressive’. He was born into a society that believed itself to be practising the most progressive form of political modernity. Then, how can a human being change a society that constantly progresses? His hope is humble. In The Herdsman, a man is rehabilitated after a lifetime of suffering. He eventually finds his true love and he regards the constantly changing and brutal political system as the Almighty and Loving God. It is important to note that The Herdsman is set in the bucolic countryside. I sense that the power that saves the Valley of Chile comes from an authority above the nation and its people, one in which Xu Linjun finds a form of love prior to its corruption by the political power and the masses.13

In 1990, Mainland film scholar Wang Hui argued that h ­ umanism in Xie Jin’s post-revolutionary films was symptomatic of a ­political impasse. After the Cultural Revolution, the CPC continued to hold political power in the name of Mao Zedong’s thought. Thus, o­ rdinary lives could not ­possibly blame the Party or the Chairman for their traumatic experiences. Political responsibilities were then placed onto those who violated ­humanity: the Gang of Four and their followers. Wang argued that in these post-­revolutionary films, political traumas were symbolically transferred to an ethical level. Meanwhile, the nation, ambiguously defined

­

the b o dy o f e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y 249

and u ­ ncorrupted by history, stood in as a higher authority that offered the spectators their imaginary consistency.14 As Jason McGrath argues, since the 1980s, Mainland scholars in the humanities have actively debated a society’s zhongji jiazhi (ultimate values), zhongji guanhuai (ultimate concerns) or hexin jiazhi (core values), which are often termed renwen jingshen (spirit of humanity). In the 1980s, the neoliberals, led by writer Wang Shuo, advocated the idea that as individuals made free choices in the market, they would produce the maximum degree of socio-political freedom. From 1980 to 1989, there was a genuine belief among these neoliberal intellectuals that economic reforms would inevitably lead to political democratisation. This proved to be untrue with the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. Then, in 1992, Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour signalled the CPC’s determination that economic reforms would be carried on with even tighter party-state supervision. In response, scholars in the humanities began to question the ethical values of neoliberalism by attempting to locate a set of core human values.15 The idea that there must be a set of ontological values unbound by freemarket principles is attractive. In the face of neoliberalism, it is tempting to argue that our task of rebooting the notion of being human is precisely to locate these values. However, in the age of global post-socialism, this return to the Romantic ideal of humanity solicits a number of problems. First, in the PRC, Europe and the United States, values that are supposed to be outside the terrain of the free market are often understood as socialist. In Europe and the United States, there are many people who benefit from neoliberalism and others who have been rendered precarious by it, although they cannot imagine any alternatives. They believe that human values are fundamentally opposed to the principles of the free market. Thus, individual freedoms and Euro-American values are also threatened. In the PRC, the belief in a set of core values means that the rapid erosion of human life brought about by neoliberalism must be ­regulated – or officially, ‘harmonised’ – by a combination of baseline socialism and Confucianism. In domestic politics, it was according to this belief that the policy shehui zhuyi hexie shehui (socialist harmonious society) was proposed on 19 September 2004 by the Sixteenth Central Committee of the CPC. It was summarised as ‘democratic rule of law, fairness and justice, honesty and fraternity, energy and liveliness, stability and order, and the harmonious coexistence between human and nature’.16 These precepts were then further extended to cover PRC’s foreign policy under the notion of tianxia (all-under-heaven). For political scholar Zhao Tingyang, the concept of tianxia, originated from the Zhou dynasty (circa 1046–256 bce),

250

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

e­ nvisions a world order based on internecine (in today’s world, international and inter-regional) negotiations, so that a consensus can be reached. For him, a consensus must be based on a sovereign’s ability to harmonise mutually contesting opinions not by a democratic process, but by a careful adjudication on these conflicting affects and opinions.17 Yan Xuetong even argues that military intervention is justified to keep human avarice and excessive violence under control.18 In his argument, Yan refers to chapter twenty-three of the Xunzi (attributed to the eponymous Confucian philosopher, third century bce), ‘Xing’e’ [‘Human nature is bad’]: People’s nature is bad. Their goodness is a matter of deliberate effort. Now people’s nature is such that they are born with a fondness for profit in them. If they follow along with this, then struggle and contention will arise, and yielding and deference will perish therein. They are born with feelings of hate and dislike in them. If they follow along with these, then cruelty and villainy will arise, and loyalty and trustworthiness will perish therein. They are born with desires of the eyes and ears, a fondness for beautiful sights and sounds. If they follow along with these, then lasciviousness and chaos will arise, and ritual and yi, proper form and order, will perish therein. Thus, if people follow along with their inborn dispositions and obey their nature, they are sure to come to struggle and contention, turn to disrupting social divisions and order, and end up becoming violent. So, it is necessary to await the transforming influence of teachers and models and the guidance of ritual and yi, and only then will they come to yielding and deference, turn to proper form and order, and end up becoming controlled. Looking at it in this way, it is clear that people’s nature is bad, and their goodness is a matter of deliberate effort.19

Yan’s reference to Xunzi is strategic. In popular imagination, Confucianism believes that human nature is good. This passage, however, enables Yan to ‘harmonise’ his argument with a fundamental European principle of humanity: homo homini lupus (a man is a wolf to another man). In other words, if human nature is a fundamentally egotistical, mercenary and violent drive to survive at the expense of others, ordinary lives would require a wise leader to regulate their desire. The way to do this is to bind these ordinary lives into rituals, that is, performances, of yi: mutual respect of each other’s position and interdependent relationships in a social hierarchy. As Agamben argues, humanism is fundamentally at odds with the EuroAmerican juridico-political understanding of the law, which is founded upon: (1) the dehumanisation and ostracisation of bare lives, who can be managed, persecuted and executed as animals; and (2) the dehumanisation and ostracisation of the sovereign, who is answerable to no law; but by the same token, it has the authority to make law and instantiate such

­

the b o dy o f e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y 251

authority by exercising violence against its subjects outside the law. In a democracy, every life is part of the sovereignty. Each life therefore has the right to make law because it stands outside the law. However, each life is subject to the law that manages, persecutes and executes it as a bare life.20 Redefining what being human means, in post-war and contemporary politics, carries an ethical significance. Both Arendt and Agamben regard Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) understanding of Dasein (being-there; being-in-the-word; and being-with) as a milestone in this line of thinking.21 Ironically, Heidegger himself participated in the reinterpretation of his concept to justify National Socialism, a view that has been verified by the publication of his Schwarze Hefte [Black Notebooks, 1933–45] in 2014.22 The concept of Dasein can sound very convoluted for nonspecialists in philosophy. I therefore borrow an idea from Japanese philosopher Tomonobu Imamichi (1922–2012), who compares Heidegger’s idea of Dasein with the concept of the ālaya-consciousness (storehouse consciousness) in Yogācāra Buddhism.23 I use this approach not because I agree that the two concepts are identical. It is because such a comparison will make the definition more accessible. On a day-to-day basis, when I say, ‘I am’, I mean that I am a conscious being. I have the abilities to sense, perceive and recognise (that is, I can see, hear, smell, taste, touch and think). I also use these abilities to sense, perceive and recognise my body and all the sentient beings and inanimate objects around me (myself and the world). What I call myself is therefore a compulsion to sum up two interrelated and inseparable aspects of my being: my ability to sense, perceive and recognise, and my sense-perception and recognition.24 Then, what puts into motion these two interdependent aspects of my being in time? For Heidegger, this more fundamental being is called Dasein, the here and now (being-there) that sets into motion the interdependent relationship between my sensory-perceptual ability and my sense-perception. Not only that, because there would be no divides between the self and the other, time and timelessness, potentiality and actualisation unless such an interdependent relationship is set in motion, Dasein is pre-individuated, pre-subjectivised and pre-autonomised. In other words, being-there is also being-in-the-world and being-with (other beings).25 Yogācāra Buddhists believe that the compulsion to sum up an assemblage of sense-perceptions and call it myself is illusionary. Such a compulsion is in turn set into motion by a storehouse of memories. These memories are records of past experiences not only during my lifetime, but also transgenerational (for example, deoxyribonucleic acid [DNA]), transmigrational (that is, in prior instantiations of life and death) and transcendental (that is, unbound by

252

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

temporality). These memories name and give forms to the divides between the self and the other, sentient beings and inanimate objects, and human and animal.26 Dasein can be understood as being-of-being. Meanwhile, the storehouse consciousness is not a being, but an assemblage of bījas (seeds or potentialities) that give forms to all beings. Yet, Dasein or the storehouse consciousness are normally concealed by the instant-to-instant operation of my being. For Heidegger, what distinguishes human beings from animals is that in a state of idleness, human beings are capable of reaching profound boredom: a sudden disconcealment of their being-there, being-in-the-world and being-with. For animals, idleness would remain open toward Dasein; yet Dasein would remain concealed from being.27 Tomonobu argues that this idea comes from Chan (Zen) Buddhism’s notion of sudden awareness or disconcealment, that a human being, through a process of intent contemplation and observation, can reach a state at which the relationship between the storehouse consciousness and the day-to-day operation of being can be disconcealed.28 What is at stake is that neither Dasein nor the storehouse consciousness is an additional ontological layer. Dasein or the storehouse consciousness is normally concealed by the operation of our sense-perception. Yet, it is manifested on a daily basis as my sensory-perceptual ability and as my sense-perception. In other words, Dasein is not the same as my being (or the storehouse consciousness is not the same as my consciousness), but it is also not different from my being (the storehouse consciousness is not different from my consciousness). But then, if what I call myself and the world I am in are generated from the interdependent relationship between my sensory-perceptual ability and my sense-perception, they are forms and appearances with no existential value. I only appear to myself as a human being in accordance with a set of memories that enables me to give form to myself as such. As Arendt argues, we appear to each other as human beings and the space of our appearance is the polis.29 Similarly, Butler argues that being human is nothing more or less than a performance of humanity. Nonetheless, through performance, my body is given form through an assemblage of socio-political inscriptions.30 In other words, there are no fundamental values of being human. However, as humans (for Heidegger) or as sentient beings (in Buddhism), we all have an awareness of our being-in-the-world and being-with. This awareness enables us to realise that there is no self unless there are others. Hence, the only way I can subsist is to care for other beings with whom I share this world. If a political authority governs by rendering all lives dis-

­

the b o dy o f e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y 253

pensable, its authority is drawn precisely from the fact that all dispensable lives are indispensable, even though their indispensability is concealed on the day-to-day social operation. What is at stake is that dispensable lives who are aware of their indispensability must perform their invisibility in order to give their extraterritorialised status a body. How to live with and care for other beings as humans? In the fifteenth chapter of the Lunyu [Analects, written during the Warring States period, 475–221 bce and edited until the Han dynasty, 206 bce–220 ce], Confucius (551–479 bce) was asked by his student Duanmu Ci (aka Zigong; 520–446 bce) for practical advice on this question. Confucius replies, Ji suo bu yu, wu shi yu ren [Do not bestow on another human being what I do not wish to receive].31 This advice seems to be simplistic. However, as Duanmu asks more questions, he begins to realise that politics is based precisely on the infliction of what I do not wish to happen to myself upon others. Therefore, if we wish to put this advice into full practice, we must all let go of the idea of being human: not to become animals that kill one another, but to come to terms with the fact that it does not matter to me whether I appear to you as a human being, and vice versa. We can therefore fully come to terms with our mutual dependency, that is, our being-with and our being-in-the-world. This is what Deleuze and Guattari call becoming animal, that is, becoming pure sentient beings and what Agamben calls positive or productive de-subjectivisation.32

Being-in-exile Ever since the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, a number of artists, intellectuals and cultural workers from Mainland China have been forced by the police and party-state representatives to leave their homes. While some of them settled down in Taiwan, Japan, Europe and North America, others went to Hong Kong. In 2016 and 2017, I had the good fortune to meet two of these filmmakers ‘in exile’: Wen Hai (aka Huang Wenhai) and Ying Liang. Through Wen Hai, I also had a chance to meet scholar Zeng Jinyan. Their works can be understood as another public sphere that seeks to negotiate a different type of extraterritoriality in Hong Kong. These filmmakers are culturo-political exiles, who work outside the Mainland Chinese border. Yet, they are still located at a juridical interstice over which the Mainland authorities can exert their power. Wen Hai was advised by the police to leave Beijing and seek refuge in Hong Kong upon his return from the Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica della Biennale di Venezia in 2008. That year, the festival showed his documentary Wo’men [We, 2008], featuring world-known

254

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

­ issident Li Rui (1917–2019). Wen Hai worked as a journalist in Beijing d and when he met Li, he was curious about how this outspoken revolutionary pioneer and his cohorts managed to remain critical without any party-state intervention. Li joined the CPC in 1937. In 1958, he became Secretary of Mao Zedong (1893–1976) in the Ministry of Water Resources. Yet, soon after he took office, he was named a rightist at the Lushan Conference (July–August 1959) because of his affiliation with General Peng Dehuai (1898–1974). During the Cultural Revolution, he was incarcerated – or some say, ‘protected’ – behind the walls of the PRC’s number-one maximum-security facility, Qincheng Prison. After his release, he took advantage of his revered status and remained critical of the CPC. In We, Wen Hai’s camera offers spectators an unprecedented access to this legendary figure and his cohorts in the comfort of his home. In the film, the spectators have a chance to hear Li’s experience as a revolutionary and his criticism against Mao and the CPC for betraying their own revolutionary thoughts. Li provides philosophical and political insights into how the CPC functioned, details of the political struggles between factions of the Party regarding Deng’s gaige kaifang (open and reform) policy, and his irritable remarks on the Party’s current leadership. Li is allowed to see journalists (Wen Hai included), although he advises his wife (who also serves as his secretary) to arrange Euro-American, Hong Kong and Mainland journalists jointly into his daily meetings, so that the CPC would not suspect him of collaborating with waiguo shili (foreign powers). For the spectators both inside and outside the PRC, such an intimate ingress into the lives of a group of famous dissidents and the opportunity to see them speaking to the camera candidly about their political opinions is an awe-inspiring experience. However, Wen Hai’s camera maintains a journalistic distance. He rarely uses the close-up or even the medium shot. Rather, he prefers staying apart from Li and his group as an observer. With such a cautious distance, the spectators’ fascination with Li speaking his mind on an armchair soon wears out. Li considers himself a politician whose career was already over by the end of the 1980s. This gives him free rein to criticise whoever he wants. After a while, the spectators begin to sense that he is precisely that: a dispensable life who measures the success and failure of the CPC by a set of abstract revolutionary ideals. Li and his cohorts may be dissidents who are constantly under police surveillance. Nonetheless, they all live comfortably, and their conversations betray their lack of understanding of the actual conditions of the working class today. Wen Hai was fairly private regarding the circumstances under which he was asked to leave Beijing. Ying Liang, however, posted the details on

­

the b o dy o f e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y 255 his Facebook page. Ying had to leave Shanghai in 2012. The year before, he was commissioned by the Jeonju Film Festival, Korea, to make a film titled Wo haiyou hua yao shuo [When Night Falls]. It is based on a true story of a young man, Yang Jia, who was arrested in 2008 for attacking the police and causing the death of six officers. When Night Falls focuses on Yang’s mother. After hearing about her son’s arrest, she was sectioned for severe mental distress. When she returns home, she is asked by the district attorney to collect further evidence in hopes of proving Yang’s innocence. However, after exhausting herself for two days, she finds out that her son has already been executed the morning before. According to Ying’s Facebook statement, he completed the principal photography of When Night Falls on 20 February 2012. Then, on 7 April he received a phone call from his parents, who informed him that they were visited by the police. The officers urged his parents to advise Ying to withdraw or re-edit the film. A week later, on 14 April, he sent his film to Jeonju. Two days later, the parents of Ying’s wife Peng Shan reported that they were visited by their local police in Zigong, Sichuan. These police officers claimed that Ying’s film represents a distorted and negative image of the PRC’s judicial system, even though they had no access to the film. Ying and Peng’s parents told these officers that they did not know anything about Ying’s work. The officers then asked Peng’s parents to bring them to see Ying in Hong Kong. The harassment lasted a few days. Eventually, two men who claimed to be staff members of a fictional ‘Shanghai Representative Office’ visited Ying in Hong Kong on 20 April. They claimed that the film had severely damaged the feelings and rights of Yang’s mother and asked Ying to withdraw or re-edit the film.33 Ying’s lawyer advised him that these claims had no legal ground. Since the court had never made Yang’s trial public, there was no evidence that the film’s representation was inaccurate. Moreover, if Yang’s mother was disturbed by the film, which she had not seen, she should be the one filing a civil lawsuit. Despite these men’s continual harassment, the Jeonju Film Festival screened the film on 28 April to an audience of 1,100. After the screening, programmer Ji-Hoon Jo told Ying that a self-proclaimed ‘representative of a Chinese production company’ was interested in buying the rights of the film in order to prevent it from being shown. A few days later, on 5 May, Ying’s parents received two emails from unknown authorities threatening that Ying would face arrest should he return to Zigong. Ying, at the time teaching at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, decided to stay there and the harassment stopped.34 Wen Hai considers both of them as fangzhu (being‑in‑exile).  The term  fangzhu is a composite one. It is made up of the  words  fang  (to

256

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

release oneself from) and zhu (being banished). The term therefore combines the active and passive, agent and patient. Going into exile, for these directors, means that they release themselves from their ties with the PRC as a polis. It also indicates that they are banished from this community – albeit to an in-between space. Hong Kong is still under the PRC’s sovereign authority, even though the city is outside the jurisdiction of its civil and criminal laws. The potentiality of the PRC to instantiate such an authority by means of police intervention always looms large in the city. Between October and December 2015, five staff members of the Causeway Bay Bookstore, which retailed books that were banned in the Mainland, disappeared. Between February and June 2016, the Guangdong provincial police claimed that these booksellers volunteered to turn themselves in for having broken PRC laws. Yet, both mass and social media speculated that the Mainland authorities arrested these people in Hong Kong extraterritorially.35 Edward Said (1935–2003) argues that the act of exile is never meant to be a clean severance. For him, exile is part of a process of consolidating a nation-state’s unity and consistency: Nationalism is an assertion of belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage. It affirms the home created by a community of language, culture, and customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile, fights to prevent its ravages. Indeed, the interplay between nationalism and exile is like Hegel’s dialectic of servant and master, opposites informing and constituting each other. All nationalisms in their early stage develop from a condition of estrangement . . . Triumphant, achieved nationalism then justifies, retrospectively as well as prospectively, a history selectively strung together in a narrative form: thus all nationalisms have their founding fathers, their basic, quasi-religious texts, their rhetoric of belonging, their historical and geographical landmarks, their official enemies and heroes. This collective ethos forms what Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, calls the habitus, the coherent amalgam of practices linking habit with inhabitance. In time, successful nationalisms consign truth exclusively to themselves and relegate falsehood and inferiority to outsiders.36

In the case of banishment, an exile is thrown away by a speech-act, an authoritative voice that perpetually ostracises a bare life from its law, ironically, in the name of the law. Thus, a banishment effectively ties the exiled life to the law from which it is excluded. In the case of a self-release from the law, the exiled life actively lets go of its tie to the law. But then, it does not foreclose the possibility of the political community’s reclamation of that tie by exercising their power extraterritorially. Nonetheless, a self-release from a political community may allow the exiled life to fully individuate, subjectivise and autonomise itself as a life unbound by the said law, thus creating a more active and critical distance between the exile and the community from which it is released.

­

the b o dy o f e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y 257 As Zeng Jinyan argues, the idea of self-banishment and self-severance from the law is crucial in understanding Wen Hai and Ying Liang’s extraterritorial status: Art is ultimately useless. It cannot resolve any actual problems. Elitist art needs to maintain a distance from reality. But now, it intricately and actively enters – and is compelled to enter – the terrain of power. Individual artists are therefore in competition with each other for cultural capital. They try to increase their own values by constructing different forms and appearances. In my opinion, however, the most outstanding artists are born in the margin. They hold different opinions from the hegemony and they are always in exile. They even exile themselves in their homeland. They turn this piece of land into a terrain of adventure without boundaries and borders, where they conduct experiments on their own selves and on the world. They test the public and the empowered in the art circle. They challenge their tolerance on criticism. They problematise ‘harmony’ and they are determined to deconstruct and destroy the established order, even at the price of sacrificing their own selves and their families.37

In 2016, Wen Hai published a collection of interviews of Mainland Chinese directors in exile titled Fangzhu de ningshi [Gaze of exiles, 2016]. For him, some filmmakers are not physically in exile, although their works are. In a presentation he gave on 4 May 2017 at Chinese Visual Festival, London, Wen Hai argues that the Arab Spring (2010–12) alerted the PRC government to the potential power of independent filmmaking and social media. In 2011, Ai Weiwei was detained for eighty-one days, while ‘Hu Jia, Ai Xiaoming, Wang Yunlong, Wang Libo, and Jia Zhitan, were invited for “tea” or summoned before the internal security bureau’. Meanwhile, domestic independent film festivals including YunFest, the Beijing Independent Film Festival at Songzhuang and the China Independent Film Festival at Nanjing were either ‘forcibly disbanded’ or driven ‘underground’. In response, independent films that are critical of the government have been screened outside the country, including Zhao Liang’s Beixi moshou [Behemoth, 2015], Wang Jiuliang’s Suliao wangguo [Plastic China, 2016], Ma Li’s Chou [Inmates, 2017], Guo Xizhi’s Gongchang qingnian [Factory Youth], Ai Xiaoming’s Jiabiangou jishi [Jiabiangou Elegy, 2017], Rong Guangrong’s Haizi bujupa siwang dan haipa mogui [Children are not Afraid of Death, Children are Afraid of Ghosts, 2017], Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow [2017], Xu Xin’s Changjiang [A Yangtze Landscape, 2017] and Wen Hai’s Xiongnian zhi pan [We the Workers, 2017].38 In his conversation with filmmaker Han Guang, who directed a film titled Wangming [Outside the Great Wall, 2014], Wen Hai comments:

258

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

After 1989, many Chinese intellectuals went into exile either by force or of their own volition. They established a new tradition of exile literature. Their representative figures include Gao Xinjian, Ma Jian, Yang Lian, Bei Dao, Bei Ling, Ha Jin, Meng Lang [1961–2018], and more recently, Liao Yiwu in Germany. They continued to work in the Western literary circle. Bei Dao and Bei Ling published their own magazines and anthologies Jintian [Today!] and Qingxiang [Tendency] respectively, which became the main media for publishing exile literary works. Moreover, Gao Xinjian received a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000 and Liao Yiwu was awarded the Peace Prize in Germany in 2012. These were important literary prizes in the West. The achievements of these authors in exile have enriched and broadened Chinese literature; they also established an important offshoot that has remained independent from the official literature of the Mainland. But unfortunately, China has yet to establish a system of exile cinema. Meanwhile, Iran, which is also a totalitarian state, has an exile cinema, which is widely recognised by film festivals around the world. As far as I can remember, your work Exile and Li Ying’s 2H (aka General in Exile, 1998), who also worked in Japan at the time, can be considered the pioneers of Chinese exile documentary cinema.39

Wen Hai therefore envisions a Chinese independent cinema in exile, which functions as a minor cinema.40 Such a cinema positions itself in an extraterritorial space either because the filmmakers themselves are in exile or because the films are (or both). By releasing themselves from the Mainland political community, these films and their makers can constitute a gaze that is individuated, subjectivised and autonomised outside the polis, yet it is always aware of its juridico-political tie with the power that banishes it and from which they abscond themselves.

Outcries and Silence A major concern in both Wen Hai’s and Ying’s works is: How to reclaim humanity? In 2017, Wen Hai premiered his 174-minute documentary We the Workers at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). The film is about migrant workers from different rural regions in Guangzhou. The Constitution of the PRC is one of the few in the world that vows to protect labour rights. Its law guarantees these workers minimum wages, health and accident insurance, rights of assembly and unionisation, compensation for overtime work, accommodation and transport to their homes. Most factories in Guangzhou have multi-million businesses with Hong Kong, Taiwan and Euro-American contractors. Yet, not only are these workers denied all of these rights, the police also actively i­ntervened by exercising excessive violence to disband strikes and arrest them. Wen  Hai argues that We the Workers is the answer to We. It testifies Li Rui’s claim that the CPC have ‘forgotten’ their socialist principles. Yet, it also seeks to dem-

­

the b o dy o f e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y 259

onstrate that workers’ rights are not an intellectual topic discussed among old party cadres, but a living condition for which the workers themselves must learn to fight. The main body of We the Workers uses xianchang strategies – long takes,  handheld camera, location lighting, location sound with some off-mic recordings, and the use of wide-angle lenses. It documents how these uneducated migrant workers, most of them women, gradually come to an awareness that they are suffering from an extreme form of social injustice. They then organise themselves into a union, hire a lawyer and instigate an industrial action. As the riot police go to the factories to carry out the injunctions against the strikes, the camera witnesses how the officers use excessive violence against the workers. This on-the-scene footage is then intercut with equally on-the-scene interviews at these workers’ dormitories, who recount and evaluate their experiences. Meanwhile, the lawyer offers these workers legal advice and eventually wins their case in court. Toward the end of the film, however, their victory is muted by an intertitle explaining that the lawyer and the union leaders were arrested shortly after the film’s production. We the Workers lays out the trajectory in which these workers come to an awareness of their precarity. In an early sequence, Wen Hai holds the camera in the middle of a crowd from a low angle, rotating between a few workers who initially complain about their working conditions. One of these workers argues that minimum wages and insurances are supposed to be guaranteed by the law. Hence, they must trust the law and let the government take care of their rights. Soon, the union leader intervenes by pointing out that these rights will not be materialised until they fight for them through industrial action. Posited between these two characters, the camera captures this conversation in one single take. The result is that these two dialectical positions are laid in the open: the complicity of the worker and the socialist theory proposed by the union leader. Spectators are therefore asked to come up with a third position or a synthesis. On the one hand, the worker needs to be educated. On the other hand, the union leader needs to be aware that pure theory cannot be preached in a street discussion. Toward the end of the film, most workers, after having realised to what extent their rights have been deprived and the fact that the police support the factory owners, all comment in their respective interviews: ‘In their eyes, we are dispensable. But we need to make the factory owners understand that we are indispensable for their businesses.’ We the Workers is not simply a didactic discourse. It also seeks to put the spectators into an affective milieu in which they learn to live with and care for these workers as their cohorts. The beginning of the film is a

260

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Figure 6.1  A bird’s-eye view of a worker labouring in a gigantic machine in We the Workers.

b­ eautiful and powerful montage shot at dawn. Wen Hai uses an HD camera mounted on a drone, so that he can capture larger-than-life architectural and mechanical structures in which these workers labour (see Figure 6.1). Some of these shots are captured from a bird’s-eye view, showing these graphically symmetrical, cold and indifferent structures incarcerating these workers as merely mechanical components. In addition, this montage is accompanied by an overbearing soundtrack of mechanical noises, which gives the spectators a sensorial shock. This soundtrack also makes them long for relief by seeing signs of inter-individual and inter-subjective gatherings between humans. Then, by the end of the film, Wen Hai uses a camera mounted on a trolley. The trolley then departs from a group of individual workers to roam between rows of machines. As it continues to track around the factory, it reveals cluster after cluster of noisy machines. It then cuts to faster and faster tracking shots of various machines, containers and workstations, where individual workers are gradually merged into a gargantuan mechanical milieu. As the montage progresses, the camerawork becomes increasingly disorienting, with handheld images shot with faster film speed (lower frame rates) and the industrial noises become increasingly overwhelming. The film then finally ends with a long tracking shot moving forward on an aisle in a gigantic factory, before it dramatically cuts to black. We the Workers may have nothing to do with Hong Kong in its subject matter. However, it was shown in multiple campuses and private screenings with vibrant discussions from supporters of the Umbrella Movement. By engaging the Hong Kong spectators in the process of discovering,

­

the b o dy o f e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y 261 realising and fighting against a neoliberal system that renders their lives precarious and dispensable, these local political activists are posited into an inter-extraterritorial position: an intersection of interstices where lives that are rendered dispensable have demonstrated that they are somebody that matters. Screened in Hong Kong, the film breaks down the divides between the Mainland and Hong Kong, the self and the other, by suggesting that the struggle against precarity is an extraterritorial position that trespasses regional and national boundaries. Ying Liang’s Ziyou xing [A Family Tour, 2018] is a fictional representation of the impact of police harassment over When Night Falls on him and his mother. In January 2018, a short version of the film Mama de kougong [I Have Nothing to Say, 2018] was shown at IFFR and A Family Tour was premiered on 2 August 2018 at the 72nd Locarno Film Festival. A Family Tour is developed out of a tension between Yang Shu (Gong Zhe), a woman filmmaker who went in exile in Hong Kong during the production of her film When Night Falls (which is in fact Ying Liang’s own film), and her mother Chen Xiaolin (Nai An), who was being visited by the police at her home in Sichuan and is now suffering from advanced stomach cancer. As an impetuous young artist, Yang commits herself to speaking out whenever she encounters any situations of socio-political injustice. Meanwhile, Xiaolin comes from a family of revolutionary pioneers, who went through waves of persecutions and rehabilitations through the PRC’s ­tumultuous history. She therefore faces the police harassment brought about by Yang’s filmmaking with a form of quiet resilience that is perceived by her daughter as passive and conformist. In the film, after five years of separation, Yang’s husband arranges a trip to Kaohsiung for Yang and her mother. Yang, being now a Hong Kong resident, can obtain a travel permit to Taiwan for Mainlanders called ziyou xing or free visit, meaning that she can go to Kaohsiung as a free individual. Meanwhile, Xiaolin, being a Mainland resident, must join a tour under the supervision of a tour guide who monitors each member closely for the CPC. Ying Liang begins his film, interestingly, with a sequence set in Hong Kong. It starts with an extreme close-up of Yang’s husband, a professional charcoal drawer and a film festival curator of Chinese independent films, followed by a close-up of his weathered hand. It then shows two print-outs of the information pages of two passports: his own British passport and Yang’s PRC passport. After that, the film cuts to a long shot of the Admiralty section of Connaught Road, a major thoroughfare that was one of the headquarters of the Umbrella Movement. In the background of this shot, spectators can see the building of the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, where Ying Liang taught. On top of

262

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

the building, they can also see a PRC national flag. The extraterritoriality statuses of two types of Hong Kongers – a former colonised life and a life in exile – and the extraterritorial status of Hong Kong being a free city occupied by the PRC, are laid out as the backdrop of the entire narrative. Yet, postcolonial Hong Kong is no longer considered a safe  space. Since the city is juridically part of the PRC, if Yang’s mother simply flies to Hong Kong to reunite with her daughter, they will all be ­followed  by PRC ­representatives. It is possible, however, to organise such a reunion in Kaohsiung, even though it is also an extraterritorial space that is not entirely free from the PRC’s surveillance. For example, the film features many shots of Yang, her husband and Xiaolin overlooking the harbour, where cargo ships from the Mainland pass by in close proximity. When Xiaolin first arrives at her hotel, the tour guide separates her from her daughter by forcibly taking Xiaolin to her room while kicking Yang and her husband out of the lift. Later that evening, Yang visits Xiaolin. In the intimate yet claustrophobic setting of a hotel room, Xiaolin asks Yang about her work, which she has never seen. But instead of engaging herself in a quiet conversation, Yang accuses Xiaolin of hiding her health conditions from her and blames her for the extent that the party-state has continually harassed her. Xiaolin explains that their Skype conversations were under surveillance. Then, the tour guide visits Xiaolin and asks her and her family to keep a low profile in front of the rest of the tour members. Here, Ying Liang uses deep-staging in long shots to contrast Xiaolin, who is quick to offer the guide a present in order to placate her, and Yang, who stands behind her anxiously to speak out against the guide. A Family Tour is edited with a patient pace, thus inviting Ying Liang and his spectators, who are mostly young people like him, to adjust themselves to Xiaolin’s rhythm and point-of-view. Yet, the film does so without suggesting that her quiet resilience is the only solution available to the younger generation. The film features two gift exchanges – an audio recording of Xiaolin being interrogated by the police and an opportunity for Xiaolin to take a selfie with her three-year-old grandson Yueyue (Tham Xinyue) – which establish empathy and mutual understanding between Yang and her mother. By the end of the scene in the hotel room, Xiaolin hands Yang a portable audio recorder, which contains a recording of the police visit to her home. When Yang listens to the recording on the balcony of her hotel suite, she is visibly agitated. The next day, in a taxi, Yang tells her husband (in front of an irritating cab driver who complains that her film is boring) that Xiaolin passive-aggressively wants her to listen to this recording in order to know how much she has suffered. Her decision, as seen in the following scene, is to apologise to her mother. Yet, Xiaolin seems to be indifferent to Yang’s apologies.

­

the b o dy o f e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y 263 What preoccupies Xiaolin, meanwhile, is to grasp an opportunity to take a picture of Yueyue. Being constantly restless and speaking only Cantonese, Yueyue is fascinated with everything around him except for Xiaolin. Scene after scene, the spectators see Xiaolin collecting all her wits to entice Yueyue to hold him in her arms and take a picture with her. At one point, on a boardwalk overlooking the harbour, Yueyue runs away from Xiaolin again. Xiaolin comments that Yueyue has only known her as a Skype image and will forever remember her as such. On the boardwalk, the whole family do get a chance to take a picture. Here, Ying Liang deliberately uses a long shot that shows two families running around and busying themselves with picture-taking and laughter. He also uses a microphone that captures the sound of the overall milieu instead of allowing the spectators to listen to Yang’s family (see Figure 6.2). Hence, the film momentarily decentres Yang and Xiaolin’s story and enables us to contextualise their situation within the larger neoliberal bliss of other xiaokang (small middle-class) families. The picture of a China constituted by millions of these content families is founded upon the deindividuation, desubjectivisation and deautonomisation of people like Xiaolin and Yang, who actually exert no impact on the rest of China’s ordinary lives. In a way, this film is about the disintegration of Yang’s family under party-state surveillance. Under the watch of the tour guide, Yang and Xiaolin can only steal fleeting moments to talk to each other, thus making it even harder for them to achieve any mutual understanding. At these precious moments, Yang gets to know that the government plans to

Figure 6.2  In A Family Tour, the film momentarily decentres Xiaolin and Yang’s story by illustrating how the idealised harmonious society is built upon by the ostracisation of their lives.

264

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

exhume and cremate the remains of her father, under the excuse that the cemetery where he was buried will be redeveloped. She also learns that Xiaolin is being forcibly moved to a new flat, again under the excuse of urban redevelopment. Yang knows well that it is a form of party-state persecution. And, at one point, she tells her husband that she would rather go home and face the law in order to take care of her mother. Her husband, meanwhile, reminds her that she is already a Hong Konger and her home is in Hong Kong, and that her being able to continue with her creative work is because of a network of friends whose effort must not be wasted. In one register, the CPC, which vows to build a harmonious society based on family values, actively founds such a society by disintegrating families. In another register, both Yang and the spectators come to realise that while Xiaolin is bound by party-state surveillance (her being extraterritorialised), Yang is bound by her responsibilities to her friends and the larger intellectual community in Hong Kong and Taiwan (her being tied to extraterritorial affiliations). What remains, interestingly, is a form of new kinship. I hesitate to call it family values, as it is a form of kinship not based on Confucian or the party-state’s understanding of kinship, but a kinship between extraterritorialised lives. This kinship is instantiated at two key moments in the film that conclude the two gift exchanges. In the first instance, Xiaolin feels dizzy while the tour visits a duty-free store. She therefore takes a rest in a tour bus. Yang’s husband bribes the tour guide so that she will allow Yang some private time with her mother. On the tour bus, Yang confesses to Xiaolin that, at one point, she even wrote a huiguo shu (a letter confessing one’s political crime and regrets in hope of being treated leniently by the party-state). Xiaolin closes her eyes and asks Yang to read it to her. She then tells Yang that she learned how to write a confession at the age of ten and she had spent her lifetime writing them (for her father and her husband). Xiaolin smilingly tells Yang that, after all, Yang inherited her talents of writing political statements. Yang also comes to understand in this scene that Xiaolin gave her the recording in order to let her know exactly what a political interrogation is, especially since Mainland intervention is already present in Hong Kong. Later, Xiaolin is hospitalised after having fainted in a park. In her room, Yang and her husband suggest that Xiaolin go to Hong Kong with them. Xiaolin tells them that she xinling (takes this offer with her heart, but not in action). She understands that she would be safe in Hong Kong. However, the only way she could stop the police from harassing Yang and her husband is to return to Sichuan and put herself under party-state surveillance. Eventually, Yang stays behind in Kaohsiung to finish her work at a local film festival, while the tour guide forces Yang to return to

­

the b o dy o f e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y 265

Sichuan and be put under police and medical monitoring (the implication is that her hospital will let her die ‘naturally’ as an easy persecution). Yang’s husband accompanies Xiaolin to Sichuan, even though two of his friends (who also serve as Yang’s producer of her new film on the Umbrella Movement) have been arrested by Mainland police officers extraterritorially. He therefore surrenders all his personal information to Yang in case he is arrested during his visit to Sichuan. The end of A Family Tour demonstrates how extraterritorialised lives care for one another in the form of a new kinship (albeit built upon an actual family). It is through the act of caring for one another that a new mode of humanity emerges. Before Xiaolin is discharged from hospital, she manages to take a selfie with Yueyue, which serves not only as a photographic memory of a life that has yet to be fully interpellated by the party-state, but also as the only sign of being human in the entire film. Meanwhile, before Yang goes into a screening in which her film When Night Falls is shown (which is, again, Ying Liang’s own film), a journalist asks her if she considers herself Chinese or Hong Konger. She thinks for a second and replies, ‘Yixiangren.’ The term yixiangren means one who dwells in a place other than their homeland. Here, I would extend its meaning to: extraterritorial life. It refers not only to those people who actually migrated somewhere, but also those who are extraterritorialised at home, thus turning their home into an alienating space – life into an alienating existence.

Tale of a Stream and its Terrain Then, what is Hong Kong cinema? Where will it go from here? This book has been about the perturbation initiated by many generations of filmmakers’ and spectators’ attempts to define and locate Hong Kong cinema as a site where their extraterritorial positions can be negotiated. But perhaps Hong Kong cinema is the ongoing perturbation. It is the constant anxiety Hong Kongers feel about their extraterritorial positions that gives form to Hong Kong cinema as a creative praxis and a public sphere. It is their state of deindividuation, desubjectivisation and deautonomisation that generates sound and images that seek to mediate their conflicting affects. It is their being rendered as dispensable lives that are in fact indispensable for the constitution of those contesting sovereign authorities, political powers and culturo-linguistic forces that compel them to give their extraterritorial state a body, their absence presence. Hong Kong cinema – and media – did not come from somewhere, nor is it going anywhere. It is constituted and reconstituted from one ­temporal

266

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

point-instant to another, out of a perpetually changing assembly of interdependent relationships that give form to historically specific modes of perturbation. ‘Hong Kong cinema’ is a nomination, a name we give to those anxieties and crises associated with an ongoing attempt by Hong Kongers to make sense of their extraterritorial positions. The highly unique colonial and postcolonial conditions in Hong Kong have made its extraterritorial positions particularly precarious and tangible. But every human life is fundamentally politicised by an authority that seeks to territorialise it (by subsuming such life under its law). Yet, the authority does so by deterritorialising it (by turning it into a bare life that can be managed, persecuted and executed by the law). Moreover, every act of territorialisation is also an act of extraterritorialisation. For instance, when a ‘white’ identitarian ‘friend’ of mine claimed, ‘London is the home of the English people, whereas ethnic minorities are hosted here as guests’, his act of territorialisation is founded upon an active extraterritorialisation of ethnic minorities and himself. It is because in order for him to make a speech-act that authorises a territory as his, he must draw his authority above or beyond this territory. It is in this sense that there are many communities in the world and, therefore, many cinemas and media, which are constituted as artistic practices and public spheres that address their respective extraterritorial positions. For instance, Québec is a sovereign authority that is both posited within and extraterritorial to Canada. Or, to this date, the Republic of China (ROC) still claims sovereign authority over China at large, even though its power is instantiated mostly by its administrative right over Taiwan. The respective socio-political anxieties of these communities are strongly foregrounded and configured in the constitution of their cinemas as public spheres, their industrial organisations, and their filmmakers’ quest for aesthetics that could address their extraterritorial sensibilities. One may even say that cinemas that address spectatorial positions of queer, women and ethnic minorities are also artistic practices and cultural discourses that negotiate these spectators’ extraterritorial positions. Last but not least, Hollywood and other mainstream film industries in the world are in themselves extraterritorial. On the one hand, they speak from – and for – a territorial position. For example, it is undeniable that Hollywood cinema negotiates and, at times, advocates for, a set of values specific to US societies. On the other hand, Hollywood does so by claiming a position outside its national territory with the express purpose of appealing to a global audience. These nebulously defined global spectators then mediate their own set of mutually contesting affects and opinions by: (1) territorialising Hollywood’s extraterritorialised image; or (2) ­exercising

­

the b o dy o f e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y 267 their own territorial meditations in the United States as an extraterritorialised zone of exception. Claiming individuality, subjectivity and autonomy by saying, ‘I am’, is an affective matter. Such a claim is not grounded upon a rational and thorough understanding of how history, culture, language and politics function. On the one hand, this is why it is so easy to subscribe to populism and nationalism, because all territorial claims are based on affects, which are ultimately transient. On the other hand, to step aside from one’s extraterritorial position is simple. It requires only a speech-act: ‘Ngo hai Hoenggong jan’ (I am Hong Konger). As long as there is one single person who takes this step, there will be Hong Kong cinema. It is simple, romantic and irrational. It is populism. * * *

Cinema, the community of human beings who constitute it, and its history are like a stream. Not only is it a confluence of numerous brooks, rivulets and tributaries, but also an avalanche that is made up of mutually ­conflicting – and, sometimes, mutually caring – water particles. It is by the very force generated by their mutual contestations and negotiations, as well as their interdependencies and cares, that the stream takes its course, defining and nurturing the lives in it and the terrains that depend on its vitality. I am Hong Konger, not because I seek to territorialise Hong Kong for individuation, subjectivisation and autonomisation, but because there must be a way we can fully recognise extraterritoriality as the way it is. By letting it be, we may begin to find a way in which politics can be rendered inoperative, once and for all.

268

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Notes

On Extraterritoriality 1. In this book, the term ‘media’ refers primarily to television and video art. In chapter three, I will also discuss newspapers and magazines, radio and popular music. 2. For a summary, see Lee Fa, ‘Shang Jing qiangjiu Yue pian lizhan Hu yingshang jingguo’ [‘Soeng Ging cinggau Jyut pin likzin Wu jingsoeng ginggwo’ or The Nanking visit: How we fought against the Shanghai studio executives in order to save the Cantonese film], Ling xing [Ling Sing], no. 203 (1937): pp. 2–4. See also, Victor Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), pp. 157–62; Zhiwei Xiao, ‘Constructing a new national culture: Film censorship and the issues of Cantonese dialect, superstition, and sex in the  Nanjing decade’, in Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922– 1934, (ed.) Yingjin Zhang (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 184–90. 3. Fan, pp. 191–3; ‘Dianying qingjie yundong’ [Film cleansing movement], Diansheng zhoukan [Movietone] 4, no. 45 (no. 877; November 22, 1935): p. 1,015; Lee, pp. 3–4; Maausi, ‘Suowei dianying qingjie yundong’ [‘Sowai dinjing cinggit wandung’ or What is the film cleansing movement?], Youyou [Jaujau], no. 10 (15 November 1935): p. 9; Luofu, ‘Xianggang de dianying qingjie yundong’ [The film cleansing movement in Hong Kong], Lianhua huabao [UPS Pictorial] 6, no. 12 (16 January 1935): p. 25. 4. Henry Pottinger, Keying, Yilibu and Niu Jian, Treaty of Nanking, August 29, 1842 (Rectification exchanged at Hongkong, 26 June 1843), Article III, p. 2; James Bruce and Yixin, Convention of Peking (1860), 24 December 1860, Article VI, p. 4; Claude M. MacDonald, Li Hongzhang (Li Hungchang) and Xu Dingkui (Hsü Ting-k’uei), Convention for the Extension of Hongkong, 1898 (Signed at Peking, 9 June 1898), p. 1. For the concept of the free sea, see Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth: In the International Law of Jus Publicum Europæum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (2003; repr., New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2006 [1950]), pp. 101–25, 172–5 and 215–17; see also, Francisco de Vitoria, ‘On the Law of War’, in Political Writings, (trans and eds) Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 302–5.

­

no te s 269 5. This mode of thinking is often attributed to René Descartes, Discours de la méthode (Paris: Librairie classique d’Eugène Belin, 1861 [1637]), pp. 30–1. 6. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (1958; repr., Paris: Éditions Aubier, 2012), p. 1. 7. Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective: À la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastabilité (1989; repr., Paris: Éditions Aubier, 2007), pp. 173–246. 8. For examples from early film theory and criticism, see Hou Yao, Yingxi juben zuofa [Methods of writing a shadow play] (Shanghai: Taidong shuju, 1926), pp. 13–23; Yu Dafu, ‘Ruhe jiudu Zhongguo de dianying’ [How to save Chinese cinema, 1926], in Bainian Zhongguo dianying lilun wenxuan: 1897–2001 [Selected essays from a hundred years of Chinese film theory: 1897–2001], (ed.) Ding Yaping (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2002), pp. 1:18–21; see also, Lu Mengshu, ‘Minzu zhuyi yu Zhongguo dianying’ [Nationalism and Chinese cinema, 1927], in Ding (ed.), pp. 1:94–8. For more recent debates, see Li Shaobai, ‘Zhongguo minzuhua zai renshi’ [Understanding again the nationalisation of Chinese cinema, 1988], in Ding (ed.), pp. 2:309–36; see also, Wang Yichuan, ‘Woxing de haishi taxing de “Zhongguo’’’ [‘China’ as a subject or object, 1994], in Ding (ed.), pp. 2:427– 41. For national cinema as a party-state policy, see Zhao Shi, Zhongguo tese dianying fazhan daolu tansuo [Exploring an Approach to the Development of Film with Chinese Characteristics] (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2008). 9. Andrew Higson, ‘The limiting imagination of national cinema’, in Cinema and Nation, (eds) Matte Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 63–74. 10. Dudley Andrew, ‘An atlas of world cinema’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 45, no. 2 (Fall 2004): pp. 9–23. 11. See Miriam Hansen, ‘The mass production of the senses: Classical cinema as vernacular modernism’, Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999), pp. 59–77. In the article, Hansen borrows the term ‘public sphere’ from Jürgen Habermas, ‘The public sphere: An encyclopedia article (1964)’, (trans) Sara  Lennox and Frank Lennox, New German Critique, no. 3 (Autumn 1974): pp. 49–55. 12. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970 [1846]), p. 62. 13. Brian Fall, Call on the Prime Minister by Lord MacLehose, 23 July 1982; John Coles to Brian Fall, Future of Hong Kong, 28 July 1982; British Nationality Act 1981, 30 October 1981, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/1981/61, accessed 17 April 2018. 14. Chan Ka-lok and Chu Lap, Wuzhu zhi cheng: Xianggang dianying zhong de jiuqi huigui yu Gangren rentong [Mouzyu zi sing: Hoenggong dinjing zung dik gaucat wuigwai jyu Gongjan jingtung or A city without a self: The 1997 handover and Hong Konger identity in Hong Kong cinema] (Hong Kong:

270

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Cosmos Books, 2008). In this book, all translations from Chinese texts are mine unless otherwise stated. 15. I discuss this in Fan, ‘ Extraterritorial cinema: Shanghai jazz and post-war Hong Kong Mandarin musicals’, The Soundtrack 6, nos 1–2 (2015): p. 39; and ‘Cultural extraterritoriality: Intra-regional politics in contemporary Hong Kong cinema’, East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 1, no. 3 (2015): p. 398. 16. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Translator’s preface’, in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, (trans.) Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 [1967]), p. xiv; see also, Derrida, p. 62. 17. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Real location, fantasy space, performative place: Double occupancy and mutual interference in European cinema’, in European Film Theory, (ed.) Temenuga Trifonova (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 47–62. 18. Homi Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation’, in Nation and Narration, (ed.) Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 302. 19. Bhabha uses the word ‘Other’ to designate a marginalised social group that is projected by the hegemonic community and authority as the other. This is different from Lacanian psychoanalysis, according to which the Other is the Law of the Father or the law of the land, upon which the hegemonic community is built and constituted. 20. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, (trans.) Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005 [2003]). 21. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77, (trans) Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper, (ed.) Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 194–6. 22. Cheng Jihua, Li Shaobai, and Xing Zuwen, Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi [History of the development of Chinese cinema] (Beijing: Zhognguo dianying chubanshe, 1980 [1963]), in two volumes. 23. This is also the position taken by Stephen Teo in Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimension (London: BFI, 1997), pp. 1–84. 24. Stephen Crofts, ‘Reconceptualising national cinema/s’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14, no. 3 (1993): p. 50; Higson, ‘The concept of national cinema’, Screen 30, no. 4 (1989): pp. 36–7. 25. Leung Lai-kuen and Chan To-man, ‘Haiwai shichang yu Xianggang dianying fazhan guanxi (1950–1995)’ [‘Hoingoi sicoeng jyu Hoenggong dinjing faatzin gwaanhai (1950–1995)’ or The relationship between the development of Hong Kong cinema and its overseas market], in Guangying benfen wushi nian [Gwongjing banfan ngsap nin or Fifty years of spectacle of light and shadows] (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Urban Council, 1997), p. 141, quoted in Stephanie Chung, Xianggang yingshiye bainian [Hoenggong jingsijip baaknin or A hundred years of the Hong Kong film and television industries] (2004; repr., Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2007), pp. 28–9. 26. Special Branch of the Royal Hong Kong Police, Chinese Communist

­

no te s 271 Confrontation with Hong Kong government: Assessment of recent activities and future capabilities, 5 March 1968, p. 23; ‘Xianggang dianyingyuan’ [‘Hoenggong dinjingjyun’ or Hong Kong cinemas], Xianggang yingtan [Hoenggong jingtaan or Hong Kong film altar], nos 25–8 (January–April 1968): pp. 86–93, 59–61, 58–61 and 66–9, quoted in Chung, pp. 162–3. 27. See Higson, ‘The limiting imagination of national cinema’, pp. 63–74; see also, Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 2–3. 28. David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 29. Fan, ‘Poetics of parapraxis and reeducation: The Hong Kong Cantonese cinema in the 1950s’, in The Poetics of Chinese Cinema, (eds) Gary Bettison and James Udden (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 167–83. 30. Law Wing-sang, Zhimin wujiandao [Zikman mougaandou or Re-theorizing Colonial Power] (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 132–3; Pang Laikwan, Huanghun weiwan: Hou jiuqi Xianggang dianying [Wongfan meimaan: Hau gaucat Hoenggong dinjing or Sunset Not Yet: Post-1997 Hong Kong Cinema] (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2010); Wang Haizhou, Xianggang dianying yanjiu: Chengshi, lishi, shenfen [A study of Hong Kong cinema: City, history and identity] (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2010). 31. Law, p. 133. 32. Yingjin Zhang, Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 2002), pp. 258–61. Zhang borrows his framework from Ronald Robertson, ‘Glocalization: Timespace and homogeneity-heterogeneity’, in Global Modernities, (eds) Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Robertson (London: Sage, 1992), p. 30; and Jan Nederveen Pieterse, ‘Globalization as hybridization’, in Featherstone, Lash and Robertson (eds), p. 61. 33. Rey Chow, ‘On Chineseness as a theoretical problem’, in Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader, (eds) Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai and Brian Bernards (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 43–56; Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 34. Chris Berry, ‘If China can say no, can China make movies? Or, do movies make China? Rethinking national cinema and national agency’, boundary 2 25, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): pp. 129–50. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 163–80. 35. Shih, ‘Introduction: What is Sinophone studies?’, in Sinophone Studies, (eds) Shih, Tsai and Bernards, pp. 1–16; Shih, ‘Against diaspora: The Sinophone as places of cultural production’, in Shih, Tsai and Bernards (eds), pp. 25–42.

272

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

36. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, pp. 101–25, 172–5 and 215–17; Vitoria, ‘On the Law of War’, pp. 302–5. 37. Pär Kristoffer Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 15–38; Teemu Ruskola, Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 30–59. 38. Vitoria, ‘On the Law of War’, pp. 302–5. 39. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p. 216 n.3. 40. Cassel, Grounds of Judgment, pp. 39–62; Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews: Late Middle Ages and Era of European Expansion, 1200–1650, Volume 17: Byzantines, Mamelukes, and Maghribians (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 41. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, pp. 65 and 87. 42. Fan, ‘Extraterritorial cinema’, p. 38; Ruskola, Legal Orientalism, pp. 128–42. 43. Cassel, Grounds of Judgment, pp. 15–38. 44. Cassel, pp. 63–84. 45. Cassel, pp. 85–114. 46. Letter from A. R. Rushford to P. J. Williamson, 1898 Order and legality, 15 October 1981; Letter from Rushford to Mr Friar, Paper on the future of Hong Kong, 5 November 1981. 47. Pottinger, Keying, Yilibu and Niu, Treaty of Nanking, Article III, p. 2; Bruce and Yixin, Convention of Peking, Article VI, p. 4; MacDonald, Li, and Hsü, Convention for the Extension of Hongkong, 1898, p. 1. 48. This issue is also discussed in Lydia Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (2004; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 70–107. 49. Kristof Van Den Troost, ‘Hong Kong’s “illegal” censorship and the 1988 Censorship Law: The censorship of violence, or the violence of censorship?’, conference presentation at the Society of Cinema Studies, Toronto, ON, 17 March 2018. 50. ‘Guangzhou zhi dianying jiancha wenti’ [On film censorship in Canton], Movietone 4, no. 47 (22 November 1935): p. 1,017; Xiao, ‘Constructing a New National Culture’, pp. 187–90. 51. Sung Man-lei, ‘Huanan dianying yu Guangdong jingshen’ [‘Waanaam dingjing jyu Gwongdung zingsan’ or South China cinema and its Kwantung spirit], Yilin [Ngailam or Art Lane], no. 35 (1 August 1938): no page. 52. For a summary of immigration policies, patterns and social changes, see, for example, Siu-Yau Lee, Isabella F. S. Ng, and Kee-Lee Chou, ‘Exclusionary attitudes toward the allocation of welfare benefits to Chinese immigrants in  Hong Kong’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 25, no. 1 (2016): pp. 41–61. 53. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 1. La volonté de savoir (1976; repr., Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2002), p. 178.

­

no te s 273 54. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, p. 302. 55. Agamben, State of Exception. 56. André Bazin, ‘Théatre et cinéma’ [‘Theater and Cinema’, 1951], in Qu’est que le cinéma? (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1959), pp. 1:69–118. Bazin takes this idea from Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Imaginaire. Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1940), p. 44. 57. David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 18–28. 58. Fu Poshek, Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinema (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 126. 59. Chung, Hoenggong jingsijip baaknin, pp. 98–111. For a primary source, see Yihua huabao [Yee Hwa Pictorial] 8, no. 3 (1939–40). 60. ‘Huanan dianyingjie zhenzai hui shezhi zhi Zuihou guantou zai chongfeng diyixian zhi Nanyue gongzuo suxie’ [‘Waanaam dinjinggaai zanzoi wui sipzai zi Zuihau gwaantau zoi cungfung daijatsin zi Naamjyut gungzok cukse’ or At This Critical Juncture, a joint production by the South China Filmmakers’ War Relief Association: Notes from the frontline at the South China Studio], Nanyue [Naamjyut or South China] (1 September 1937), no. 2: p. 1; ‘Pumie shenguaipian! Pumie Hanjian!’ [‘Pokmit sangwaaipin! Pokmit Hongaan!’ or Eliminate the gods and demons film! Eliminate the traitors!], Ling Sing 8, no. 14 (15 August 1938): p. 1; ‘Wuhu! Shenguaipian’ [‘Wufu! Sangwaaipin’ or Alas! Gods and demons films!], Ling Sing 8, no. 14 (15 August 1938): pp. 2–3. 61. ‘Nanyang jinying Kangzhan xinwenpian’ [‘Naamyoeng gamjing Kongzin sanmanpin’ or Southeast Asia bans newsreels about Anti-Japanese War], Ling Sing 8, no. 5 (28 February 1938): p. 6; ‘Zhipianjia zenyang yingfu Xingjiapo jin Kangzhan pian shijian’ or [‘Zaipingaa zamjoeng jingfu Singgaabo gam Kongzin pin sigin’ or How film producers respond to the Singaporean ban on films about the Anti-Japanese War], Ling Sing 8, no. 5 (28 February 1938): p. 1. 62. Wu Pang, ‘Hu Peng you Kunming gui Gang’ [‘Wu Pang yau Kwanming gwai Gong’ or Wu Pang returned to Hong Kong from Kunming], Ling Sing, no. 241 (1946): p. 12. 63. Chung, Hoenggong jingsijip baaknin, pp. 126–32; ‘Fangwen Shao “Lao’er” Cunren’ [‘Fongman Siu “Louji” Cyunjan’ or An interview with Renme Shaw], Ling Sing, no. 235 (March 1946), p. 4. 64. Andrew Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 65. Fu Poshek, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 3–9. 66. Jones, Yellow Music, p. 6. 67. Tani Barlow (ed.), Formations of Colonial Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Jones, pp. 7–10.

274

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

68. Jones, pp. 41–52. 69. Jones, p. 42. 70. Jones, pp. 73–122. See also Chan Chi-keung, ‘Mingyue gewutuan yu bense pai yanjiu – Wang Renmei, Li Lili fangwen ji’ [‘Mingjyut gomoutyun jyu bunsik paai jingau – Wong Janmei, Lai Leilei fongman gei’ or Bright Moon Ensemble and method acting – An interview with Wang Renmei and Li Lili], Zhongguo dianying yanjiu [Zunggwok dinjing jingau or An Interdisciplinary Journal of Chinese Film Studies] (1980): pp. 1:129–30. 71. Chiang Kai-shek, Xin shenghuo yundong yaoyi [The principles of the New life movement] (1939; repr., Nanchang: Zhongguo Guomindang, Zhongyang zhixing weiyuan hui, Xunlian weiyuan hui, 1940), pp. 12–13, 32 and 56–58; Fan, ‘The cinema of Sun Yu: Ice cream for the eye . . . but with a homo sacer’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, no. 3 (2011): pp. 223–48; Hu Jubin, Projecting a Nation: Chinese National Cinema Before 1949 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003): pp. 87–8; Jones, pp. 90–101. 72. Jones, p. 93. 73. Jones, pp. 63–114. 74. Jones, pp. 1–20 and 84. 75. Jones, p. 122. 76. Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration, p. 1. 77. Fu, p. xv. Italics in the original. 78. ‘Diantong gongsi caiyuan shuo yaoyuan shouhuichengming zhi zhenxiang; Yuan Muzhi Sun Shiyi bumu Ma Dejian zuoyou weinan’ [The truth behind Denton’s decision on not to lay off its important employees; the fight between Yuan Muzhi and Sun Shiyi created a difficult situation for Ma Dejian], Movietone 4, no. 47 (22 November 1935): p. 1,020; ‘Diantong yingpian gongsi bei guafen’ [Dissolution of Denton], Movietone 5, no. 16 (24 April 1936): p. 388; Fu, pp. 1–10; ‘Lianhua daoyan: Wu Yonggang mimi jiaru Xinhua gongsi’ [UPS director Wu Yonggang joined Hsin Hwa in secret], Movietone 5, no. 16 (24 April 1936): p. 384; ‘Mingxing xuanchuanke quanti cizhi neimu’ [Behind the scenes of the collective resignation of Star’s publicity department], Movietone 5, no. 9 (6 March 1936): p. 208; Mitan, ‘Zhou Jianyun guilai Zheng Zhengqiu si; Mingxing gongsi caiyuan erbai yu ren’ [Zhou Jianyun returned after the death of Zheng Zhengqiu; Star laid off more than two hundred employees], Movietone 4, no. 33 (16 August 1935): p. 676; ‘Qiyue yiri qi, Mingxing gongsi da kuochong’ [Star expanded since 1 July], Movietone 5, no. 17 (1 May 1936): p. 404; ‘Shanghai de dianyingjie wang hechu qu?’ [Where should the Shanghai film industry go from here?], Art Lane, no. 30 (15 June, 1938): no page; ‘Shiwanyuan touzi chengli: Lianhua you Hua’an yingye gongsi jieshou guanxia’ [A hundred-thousand deal: Hwa An took over the executive board of UPS], Movietone 5, no. 31 (7 August 1936): p. 767; ‘Wu Bangfan jieganqiyi; Lianhua daju zhuchi yiren; Luo Mingyou tuirang xianneng; Tao Bosun zonglan quanquan’ [Wu Bangfan started a revolution; the executive board of UPS was completely

­

no te s 275 transformed; Lo Ming-yau withdrew and Tao Bosun usurped his power], Movietone 5, no. 2 (10 January 1936): p. 46. 79. Fu, Between Shanghai and Hong Kong, pp. 1–10 and 60. 80. Qu Chao, ‘Wanshi liufang’ [Eternity], Xin Yingtan [New film altar] 1, no. 2 (1942): p. 15. 81. Fu, Between Shanghai and Hong Kong, pp. 11–20; Li Yuan, ‘Chongqing guanzhong shaodiao Mulan congjun’ [The Chunking audience burnt the print of Mulan Joins the Army], Art Lane, no. 68 (16 February 1940): no page. 82. Fu, pp. 41–2 and 95–9; Junsheng, ‘Zhang Shankun fabiao tanhua’ [A talk by Chang San-kuen], Xin Yingtan 1, no. 4 (1943): p. 16; Qu, ‘Wanshi liufang’, p. 15. 83. Tsuiji Hisaichi, ‘Yige ganxiang’ [A thought], Xin yingtan 1, no. 2 (1942): p. 16. 84. Huang Tianzuo, ‘Zhongguo dianying wenhua jianshe yundong’ [The cultural construction movement of Chinese cinema], Xin yingtan 1, no. 3 (1943): pp. 17–18; Mingzhi, ‘You xuanzhan dao dianying’ [From the declaration of war to the cinema], Xin yingtan 1, no. 4 (1943): p. 17. 85. Tsuiji, ‘Dianying yu guojia xuanchuan’ [Cinema and national propaganda], chapter 2, (trans.) Xu Ziqiang, Xin yingtan 1, no. 6 (1943): p. 15. 86. Tsuiji, p. 15. 87. Jones, Yellow Music, pp. 33–53. 88. Michael Bourdaghs, ‘Japan’s Orient in song and dance’, in Sino-Japanese Transculturation: From the Late Nineteenth Century to the End of the Pacific War, (eds) Richard King, Cody Poulton and Katsuhiko Endo (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012): pp. 167–84. 89. Nakazono Eisuke, Hōrīchyuntsairai monogatari [The story of ‘When wilt thou return?’] (Tokyo: Nanatsumori shukan, 2012); Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, pp. 75–6. 90. Hong Kong Film Archive, ‘An All-Consuming Love’, Remarks, Hong Kong Film Archive Database, searchable from http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/ CE/CulturalService/HKFA/en_US/web/hkfa/facilitiesandservices/rc/ rc_cat.html, accessed 31 July 2014. 91. Conversation with Po Fung in August 2013. 92. Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 28–55. 93. Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 94. Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Cinema of Poetry’, (trans.) Bill Nichols from the French version, (trans) Marianne de Vettimo and Jacques Bontemps, in Movies and Methods, (ed.) Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 1:542–57. 95. Li Cheuk-to, ‘Chongxin jiantao “Xin dianying” ’ [‘Cungsan gimtou “San

276

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

dinjing” ’ or New cinema: A re-evaluation], in Xianggang dianying fengmao: 1975–1986 [Hoenggong dinjing fungmaau: 1975–1986 or Scenaries of Hong Kong cinema: 1975–1986], (ed.) Chiao Hsiung-p’ing (Taipei: China Times Publishing, 1987), pp. 369–70; Mary Wong, ‘Qiwu de shike: Tan Jiaming de chengzhang gushi’ [‘Kai’ng dik sihaak: Taam Gaaming dik singzoeng gusi’ or A moment of awakening: The Bildungsroman of Patrick Tam], in Yingmu xinchao: Tan Jiaming de dianshi yingpian [Nganmok sanciu: Taam Gaaming dik dinsi jingpin or The New Wave on the television screen: The television films of Patrick Tam], (ed.) Law Kar (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2008), p. 8. 96. MacDonald, Li and Hsü, Convention for the Extension of Hongkong, p. 1. 97. Peter Carrington to Prime Minister, Hong Kong: New Territories leases, 2 July 1979. 98. The Latin phrase Carpe diem was made popular by Dead Poets Society [dir. Peter Weir, 1989]. 99. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 5–27. 100. Ellen Pau, ‘Development of Hong Kong video art’, VText ( June 1997): p. 55. 101. Law Wing-sang, ‘Hong Kong undercover: An approach to “collaborative colonialism” ’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 9, no. 4 (2008): p. 527. 102. Yang Yuanying (ed.), Beijing Xianggang: Dianying hepai shinian huigu [Beijing, Hong Kong: A Ten Year Retrospect of Co-production] (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2012), pp. 10–24. 103. Mirana Szeto, ‘Sinophone libidinal economy in the age of neoliberalisation and Mainlandisation: Masculinities in Hong Kong SAR New Wave cinema’, in Sinophone Cinemas, (eds) Audrey Yue and Olivia Khoo (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 120–47. 104. Yang, (ed.), Beijing Xianggang, pp. 56–7.

Chapter 1  What is Hong Kong Cinema? 1. Law, Re-theorizing Colonial Power, pp. 132–3. 2. See, for example, Pang, Sunset Not Yet; Wang, Xianggang dianying yanjiu; Esther Yau, ‘Border crossing: Mainland China’s presence in Hong Kong cinema’, in New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics, (eds) Nick Browne, Paul Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack and Yau (1994; repr., New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 180–201; Zhou Yingduan, ‘Xianggang huatan de Zhongguo fuhao he Xianggang lisan Huaren minzu zhuyi’ [The Chinese symbolism of Hong Kong painting and the diasporic nationalism of Hong Kong Chinese], Cultural Studies@Lingnan 39, no. 1 (2014): pp. 1–22. 3. I borrow my critical vocabulary in this sentence from Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective.

­

no te s 277 4. Vladimir Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (1902), (trans) Joe Fineberg and George Hanna (New York: The Lenin Internet Archive, 1999 [1902]), pp. 16–31. 5. Yiman Wang, Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood (Honolulu: University of Haiwai‘i Press, 2013), p. 2. 6. David Trench, Hong Kong: A review of principal developments, Governor of Hong Kong to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 15 December 1966, distributed by the Commonwealth Office in February 1967, p. 1. A comprehensive discussion of the 1967 Riots can be found in Gary Ka-wai Cheung, Hong Kong Watershed: The 1967 Riots (2009; repr., Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011); and in Robert Bickers and Ray Yep (eds), May Days in Hong Kong: Riot and Emergency in 1967 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009). An early book-length account of the 1967 Riots can be found in John Cooper, Colony in Conflict: The Hong Kong Disturbances May 1967–January 1968 (Hong Kong: Swindon Book Company, 1970). 7. Trench, Despatch no. 1164 to Herbert Brown, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 23 June 1967, pp. 1–2. 8. Trench, Inward telegram to the Commonwealth Office (The Secretary of State), nos 355–6, 18 March 1967. 9. Trench, Inward telegram to the Commonwealth Office (The Secretary of State), no. 548, 6 May 1967. The comparison with Macau is made in Inward telegram to the Commonwealth Office (The Secretary of State), no. 551, 6 May 1967. See also, MacDonald, Li and Hsü, Convention for the Extension of Hongkong, 1898, p. 1. 10. This incident is first mentioned in Trench, Inward telegram, no. 548. 11. Trench, Inward telegram to the Commonwealth Office (The Secretary of State), no. 557, 8 May 1967; no. 561, 9 May 1967; no. 583, 12 May 1967; and no. 589, 12 May 1967. 12. UK Chargé d’affaires in Beijing (Peking), Telegram to Foreign Office, no. 478, 15 May 1967. This labour dispute has been considered the official starting point of the Confrontation, a view first formalised in Trench’s report in Hong Kong 1967 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1968), p. 3. 13. Trench, Inward telegram to the Commonwealth Office (The Secretary of State), no. 677, 23 May 1967; Special Branch, Hong Kong Royal Police, Study of the future disposal of persons held under Emergency Detention Regulations either by departure from Hong Kong (‘return to China’) or release in the Colony, 20 June 1968, p. 1. 14. Detailed reports of these strikes, demonstrations and bombings can be found in a folder filed by 10 Downing Street titled Hong Kong political affairs (internal): General situation and policy, FCO21/192. This folder contains documents primarily from May to August 1967. See also, Hong Kong political affairs (internal): General situation and policy, FCO21/193. This folder contains documents up to February 1968. See, especially,

278

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Trench, Report to Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 18 February 1968. 15. See, Trench, Report, 18 February 1968, p. 4. 16. Trench, p. 4. 17. These documents are contained within a folder filed by the Ministry of Defence, titled Hong Kong Riots (May 1967), DEFE 25/300. 18. Trench, Report, 18 February 1968, p. 7. 19. Trench, Telegram no. 338, 16 March 1968; and James Murray, Deportation of film stars from Hong Kong, 22 March 1968. 20. Trench, Inward telegram, no. 355, p. 1. 21. Trench, Inward telegram, no. 356. 22. Bunny Carter, Letter to John Denson, Foreign Office, 31 March 1967. 23. Percy Cradock, Note to John Denson, Foreign Office, 5 April 1967. 24. Pottinger, Keying, Yilibu and Niu, Treaty of Nanking, Article III, p. 2. 25. Bruce and Yixin, Convention of Peking, Article VI, p. 4. 26. Cassel, Grounds of Judgment, pp. 15–62. Ruskola also discusses this in the context of US–China relationship in Legal Orientalism. 27. For a discussion of the development of the international law in relation to colonies, see Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, pp. 132, 172, 184 and 289. 28. MacDonald, Li and Hsü, Convention for the Extension of Hongkong, p. 1. 29. Lee, ‘Soeng Ging coenggau Jyutpin likzin Wu jingsoeng ginggwo’, pp. 2–4; Sung Kim-chiu, ‘Yuepian you sannian huanjin shuo’ [‘Jyutpin yau saamnin wungam syut’ or The ban against the Cantonese film may be postponed for another three years], Art Lane, no. 9 (July 1937): no page; Xiao, ‘Constructing a new national culture’, pp. 187–90. 30. Xiao, 90. 31. ‘Cai Chusheng Shen Xiling lai Gang’ [‘Coi Cosang Sam Sailing loi Gong’ or Tsai Chu-sang and Shen Xiling visit Hong Kong], Ling Sing 7, no. 28 (no. 215; 25 December 1937): p. 18; ‘Cai Chusheng xiansheng fangwen’ [‘Coi Cosang sinsaang fongman’ or An interview with Mr. Tsai Chu-sang], Ling Sing, no. 28 (no. 215; 25 December 1937): pp. 20–1; ‘Zenyang zucheng yizuo Huanan dianying de guofang baolei?’ [‘Zamjoeng zuksing jatzo Waanaam gwokfong bouleoi?’ or How to build a national cinematic fort to defend China?], Art Lane, no. 28 (15 April 1938): no page. 32. Maausi, ‘Sowai dinjing cinggit wandung’, p. 9; Chan Ching-po, ‘Dianying de benzhi’ [‘Dinjing dik bunzat’ or The essence of cinema], Tianxing dianying yuekan [Tinsing dinjing jyuthon or The Star Pictorial] 1, no. 1 (1 January 1936): p. 2; Luofu, ‘Xianggang de dianying qingjie yundong’, p. 25; ‘Dianying qingjie yundong’ [Film cleansing movement], Movietone 4, no. 45 (no. 877; 22 November 1935): p. 1,015. 33. ‘Waanaam dinjinggaai zanzoiwui sipzai zi Zeoihau gwaantau zoi daijatsin zi Naamjyut gongzok cukse’, p. 1.

­

no te s 279 34. Bingbing, ‘Guanyu Huanan dianying’ [‘Gwaan jyu Waanaam dinjing’ or On South China cinema], Huanan dianying [Waanaam dinjing or South China cinema], no. 3 (1944): p. 1. 35. ‘Yipi yingren fu Yue laojun’ [‘Jatpai jingjan fu Jyut lougwan’ or A group of filmmakers visited Canton to entertain the army], Guangyi dianying huabao [Gwongngai dinjing waabou or Kong Ngee Movie Pictorial] 2, no. 22 (1 February 1950): no page. 36. ‘Nanguo yingye gongsi diyipao: Zhujiang lei zhendong yingtan’ [‘Naamgwok jingjip gungsi daijatpaau: Zyugong leoi zandung jingtaan’ or The first cannon fire shot by the Nanguo Film Company: Dawn Must Come shocks the film industry], Yingtan banyuekan [Jingtaam bunjyuthon or Lee Theatre Gazette], no. 46 (1 January 1950): p. 4. 37. Kwok Ching-ning, ‘Lu Dun: Wo na shidai de yingxi’ [‘Lou Deon: Ngo naa sidoi dik jinghei’ or Lo Duen: The shadow play of my time], in Oral History Series 1: Hong Kong Here I Come, (ed.) Wong Ain-ling (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2000), pp. 120–33. 38. Wong Ain-ling (ed.), Oral History Series 2: An Age of Idealism – Great Wall and Feng Huang Days (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2001), pp. 40–2. 39. Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 76–82. 40. Man-Fung Yip, ‘Closely watched films: Surveillance and postwar Hong Kong leftist cinema’, in Surveillance in Asian Cinema: Under Eastern Eyes, (ed.) Karen Fong (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 33–59. 41. Zhou Chengren, ‘Glory be with Cantonese Films: Ng Cho-fan and Union Film’, (trans.) Tam King-fai, in One for All: The Union Film Spirit, (ed.) Grace Ng (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2011), pp. 9–18. 42. Fan, ‘Poetics of parapraxis and reeducation’, p. 174. 43. Zhao Weifang, Xianggang dianying chanye liubian [The Rheological History of Hong Kong’s Film Industry] (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2008), p. 72, table 1.7. 44. Zhao, 72; Grace Ng (ed.), One for All. 45. Special Branch, Chinese Communist Confrontation with Hong Kong government, p. 23. See also, Zhang Yan, Zai jiafeng zhong qiu shengcun [Studies on Hong Kong Leftist Films] (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2010), p. 55. 46. Trench, Inward telegram, no. 583, pp. 1–2. 47. Trench, Inward telegram, no. 589, p. 2. 48. Public Order Ordinance of 1967, Laws of Hong Kong, Chapter 245, Historical Laws of Hong Kong Online, http://oelawhk.lib.hku.hk/items/ show/2969, accessed 8 August 2016. 49. Trench, Addressed to Foreign Office telegram no. 479 of 15 May 1967; Addressed to Foreign Office telegram no. 478 of 15 May 1967. 50. Donald Hopson, Telegram no. 483, 15 May 1967.

280

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

51. Carter, Outward telegram from the Commonwealth Office (The Secretary of State), no. 919, 15 May 1967, p. 2. 52. Trench, Inward telegram to the Commonwealth Office (The Secretary of State), no. 617, 16 May 1967. 53. Trench, Report to the Minister of State, 17 May 1967, p. 1. 54. Trench, Inward telegram to the Commonwealth Office (The Secretary of State), no. 620, 17 May 1967. 55. Trench, Inward telegram to the Commonwealth Office (The Secretary of State), no. 632, 18 May 1967, p. 1. 56. Trench, Inward telegram to the Commonwealth Office (The Secretary of State), no. 650, 19 May 1967, p. 1. 57. Trench, Inward telegram to the Commonwealth Office (The Secretary of State), no. 655, 20 May 1967. 58. Trench, Inward telegram to the Commonwealth Office (The Secretary of State), no. 662, 22 May 1967, pp. 1–2. 59. See the documents in a folder filed by 10 Downing Street, titled Hong Kong political affairs (internal): General situation and policy, FCO 21/192. 60. Special Branch of the Royal Hong Kong Police, Comparative figures: 1967–68: Circulation of Communist newspapers, Appendix D, Chinese Communist Confrontation with Hong Kong government: Assessment of recent activities and future capabilities, 5 March 1968. 61. Trench, Telegram addressed to Commonwealth Office telegram no. 298 of 9 March 1968, p. 1. 62. Trench, Telegram no. 298. 63. Kam Ping-hing, ‘Zhongguo xindianying de qiwang’ [‘Zunggwok sandinjing dik keimong’ or My expectations on the new Chinese cinema], Zhongguo xuesheng zhoubao [Zunggwok hoksaang zaubou or Chinese Student Weekly], no. 794 (6 October 1967): p. 11. 64. Kam, p. 11. 65. Cheung Wai-hung, ‘Zhongguo shenfen de tansuo’ [‘Zunggwok sanfan dik taamsok’ or An exploration of Chinese identity], in 60 fengshang: Zhongguo xuesheng zhoubao yingping shinian [60 fungsoeng: Zunggwok hoksaang zaubou jingping sapnin or The 60s Style: Ten Years of Film Criticism in the Chinese Student Weekly] (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Critics Society, 2012), p. 152. 66. For a general discussion of this period, see, for example, Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). For an alternative view, see Susan Daruvala, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000). 67. Shek Kei, ‘Gangchan zuopai dianying ji qi xiao zichan jieji xing’ [‘Gongcaan zopaai dinjing kap kei siu zicaan gaaikap sing’ or The petit bourgeois sensibility in the Hong Kong leftwing film], Chinese Student Weekly, no. 740 (23 September 1966): p. 11.

­

no te s 281 68. Ku Yee, ‘Songhuajiang shang de kusheng’ [‘Cungfaagong soeng dik huksing’ or Crying in Along the Sungari River], in Chinese Student Weekly, no. 787 (18 August 1967), repr., in The 60s Style, (ed.) Law, pp. 179–80. 69. Lam Nin-tung, ‘You guoqing xiangqi de Hanyu dianying, fangyan dianying’ [‘Jau gwokhing soenghei dik Honjyu dinjing, fongjin dingjing’ or From national day to Chinese-language cinema, dialect cinema], Chinese Student Weekly, no. 899 (10 October 1969), p. 10. 70. Lam, ‘Wushi niandai yueyu pian yanjiu zhong de jige wenti’ [‘Ngsap nindoi jyutjyu pin jingau zung dik geigo mantai’ or Several questions on the study of Cantonese cinema in the 1950s], Da texie [Daai dakse or Close-up], no. 59 (9 June 1978): p. 2. 71. Lam, p. 2. Lam’s argument is based on Ching-wen, ‘Huanan fangyan wenxue yundong de xianzhuang he yiyi’ [‘Waannaam fongjin manhok wandung dik jinzong wo jiji’ or The current conditions and implications of the South China regional-speech literature movement, 1949], in Xianggang wenxue daxi: Pinglun juan er [Anthology of Hong Kong literature: Criticism part 2], (ed.) Lam Man-suk (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 2016), 2:282–92. 72. Lam, p. 3. Lam’s argument is based on Mao Dun, ‘Zaitan “fangyan wenxue” ’ [On ‘regional-speech literatures’ again], in Lam (ed.), 2:272–81. 73. Lam, p. 3. 74. Lam, p. 3. 75. Lam, p. 4. 76. Zong Baihua, Zhongguo meixue shi lunji [Collection of critical essays on the history of Chinese aesthetics] (Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 2000). 77. Lam, ‘Zhongguo dianying de kongjian yishi’ [‘Zunggwok dinjing dik hunggaan jisik’ or The spatial consciousness of Chinese cinema], An Interdisciplinary Journal of Chinese Film Studies (1983): pp. 1:58–85. Works cited from the Six dynasties include Guo Xi, ‘Linquan gaozhi: Shanshui xun’ [Positioning forests and streams: On mountains and rivers], in Hualun congkan [Aesthetic series], (ed.) An Lan (Beijing: Beijing renmin meishu chubanshe, 1962), pp. 1:19–23; Zong Bing, ‘Hua shanshui xu’ [On painting mountains and rivers], in An Lan (ed.), p. 1:1. I discuss this idea in detail in ‘Mirroring-drifting – Lam Lin-tung and film aesthetics’, Asian Cinema 27, no. 1 (April 2016): pp. 29–42. 78. Lam, ‘Ngsap nindoi jyutjyu pin jingau zung dik geigo mantai’, p. 4. 79. Mong Wan, Renhai leihen [Janhoi leoihan or Traces of tears in the human sea] (1930; repr., Hong Kong: Nantian chubanshe or Naamtin cheotbaanse, 1960). 80. Kong Tong, ‘Yueyupian de bujie yu gualong’ [‘Jyutjyupin dik pukgaai jyu gwaatlung’ or How Cantonese cinema goes to hell and cheats], in Lingxing ribao [Lingsing jatbou or Stage and movie stars daily] (7 December 1953), no page. 81. Lam, ‘Ngsap nindoi jyutjyu pin jingau zung dik geigo mantai’, p. 4.

282

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

82. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Film as system: Or how to step through an open door’, in The Persistence of Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 155–7. 83. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose (1929), (trans.) Benjamin Sher (1990; repr. Champaign, Il: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009 [1929]), pp. 22–30. 84. Law Kar, ‘Yueyu pian: Ganxiang, qiwang’ [‘Jyutjyu pin: Gamsoeng, keimong’ or Cantonese cinema: Thoughts and expectations], Close-up, no. 63 (18 August 1978): no page. 85. Law, no page. 86. Law, no page. 87. Law, no page.

Chapter 2  Breaking the Wave 1. This conversation took place in the summer of 2015, after a screening organised by Shu Kei at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts. 2. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. xxvii–xxxiii and 163–80. 3. Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus’, (trans.) Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (Winter 1974–5): pp. 39–47; Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen 16, no. 3 (October 1975): pp. 6–18. It is important to note that the concept of a cinematic ‘language’ is challenged by French film theorist Christian Metz, who argues that it is best understood not as a langue (language system), but as a langage (some form of language). For him, the smallest semiological unit in the cinema is already a syntagma, which means that the cinematic language does not go through any primary articulation (the combination of phonemes into a syntagma). See Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (1968), (trans.) Michael Taylor (1971; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 31–91. 4. The idea of ‘double inscription’ comes from Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, p. 302. 5. Li, ‘Cungsan gimtou “San dinjing” ’, p. 309. 6. Wong, ‘Kai’ng dik sihaak’, p. 8. 7. Pasolini, ‘Cinema of Poetry’, 1:542–57. 8. The idea that the studio as a whole, its executive and its key crew members are equally responsible as authors of Hollywood films is promoted by Thomas Schatz. See Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 1988); see also, Jerome Christensen, America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); J. D. Connor, The Studios After the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970–2010) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 9. See Editors of the Cahiers du cinéma, ‘John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln: A collective text by the Editors of Cahiers du cinéma’, Screen 13, no. 3 (1 October 1972): pp. 5–44.

­

no te s 283

10. Roland Barthes, ‘The death of the author’, in Image, Music, Text, (trans.) Stephen Heath (1977; repr., New York: The Noonday Press, 1988), pp. 142–8. 11. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 12. Iwasaki Akira, Eiga to shihon shugi [Cinema and capitalism] (Tokyo: Ōraisha, 1931), pp. 97–124, translated as ‘Xiandai dianying yu youchan jieji’ [Modern  cinema and the bourgeoisie], (trans.) Lu Xun, Mengya yuekan [Seeding monthly] 1, no. 3 (March 1930): pp. 1–33; Feng Wu (A Ying), ‘Lun Zhongguo dianying wenhua yundong’ [On the Chinese film culture movement], Mingxing yuebao [Star monthly] 1, no. 1 (1 May 1933): pp. 12–18; Wang Chenwu, ‘Zhongguo dianying zhi lu (shang)’ [The road of Chinese cinema: Part 1], Mingxing yuebao 1, no. 1 (1 May 1933): pp. 48–53; Xi Naifang (or Zheng Boqi), ‘Dianying zuiyan – bianxiang de dianying shi ping’ [A critique on cinema – or, a criticism on contemporary cinema], Mingxing yuebao 1, no. 1 (May 1, 1933): pp. 20–5; Zhang Shichuan, ‘Chuanshengtong li’ [From the loudspeaker, 1933], in Bainian Zhongguo dianying lilun wenxuan, (ed.) Ding, pp. 1:133–7; Zheng Zhengqiu, ‘Ruhe zoushang qianjin zhi lu’ [How to follow the progressive path?], Mingxing yuebao 1, no. 1 (May 1, 1933): pp. 28–30; Shen Xiling, ‘Zhongguo dianying zhi weiji yu xin lujing’ [The crisis and new path of Chinese cinema], Dianying yishu [Film art] 1, no. 1 (1932): pp. 1–2. For a detailed discussion, see Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, pp. 66–74. 13. Fan, 53. 14. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, (eds) Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 276–86. Spivak’s concept of the subaltern is based on Antonio Gramsci, ‘The Intellectuals’, in Selections  from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, (trans and eds) Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (1971; repr., London: ElecBook, 1999), p. 145. See also, Leon de Kock, ‘Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers Conference in South Africa’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 23, no. 3 ( July 1992): p. 45. 15. Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. xxvii–xxxiii and 163–80. 16. Cheuk Pak Tong, Hong Kong New Wave Cinema (Bristol: Intellect, 2008), p. 18. 17. See, for example, Shu Kei, ‘Zhang Guoming: Wushi zitong de tiancai???’ [‘Zoeng Gwokming: Mousi zitung dik tincoi???’ or Alex Cheung: A genius who doesn’t need a teacher???], Close-up, no. 48 (23 December 1977); Ma Kei, ‘Fangwen Shizishan xia de Fang Yuping’ [‘Fongman Sizisaan haa dik Fong Jukping’ or An interview with Allen Fong from Below the Lion Rock], Close-up, no. 33 (6 May 1977): pp. 36–7; Cheung Kam-mun, ‘Mai Dangxiong shi dazhangfu ma?’ [‘Mak Donghung si daaizoengfu maa?’ or Is

284

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Johnny Mak a great man?], Close-up, no. 38 (15 July 1977): pp. 18–21; Johnny Yan, ‘Wutaishan “qingxia” – Xu Ke fangwenji’ [‘Ngtoisaan “cinghap” – Ceoi Haak fongmangei’ or The ‘romantic hero’ of Broadcast Drive: An interview with Tsui Hark], Close-up, no. 62 (4 August 1978): pp. 26–8; Leung Kat-chiu, ‘Dinühua de maizuo shi kexi, haishi kebei? Wu Yusen bei shouluo shi caiqi, haishi yunqi?’ [‘Daineoifaa dik maaizo si hohei, waansi hobei? Ng Jyusam bei saulok si coihei, waansi wanhei?’ or Is the box-office success of Princess Chang Ping something to be celebrated or worried about? Is John Woo accepted by the audience because of his talent or his luck?], Huoniao diba [Foniyu daibaat or Phoenix No. 8], no. 8 (1 March 1976): pp. 4–5. 18. See, for example, Shu Kei, ‘Ping Zhang Guoming de liangbu zuopin: C.I.D. dijiuji yu “Kongzhe de niaolong”’ [‘Ping Zoeng Gwokming dik loengbou zokban: C.I.D. daigauzaap jyu “Hungzoek dik niyulung”’ or On two pieces by Alex Cheung: The ninth episode of C.I.D. and ‘Empty Cage’], Close-up, no. 41 (9 September 1977): pp. 30–1; Tony Rayns, ‘More “Female trouble” ’, m.s., published as ‘Wei nanxing er pai de Jingmei zai’ [Wai naamsing ji paak dik Leng muizai], (trans.) Fung Lai-chi, Dianying shuangzhoukan [Dinjing soengzauhon, Film Biweekly, later renamed City Entertainment Biweekly], no. 86 (1982): pp. 41–2. 19. Yu Kwai, ‘Lun dianying shang de xinchao pai’ [‘Leon dinjing soeng dik sanciu paai’ or On the cinematic new waves], Chinese Student Weekly, no. 527 (24 August 1962): p. 12. 20. For a discussion of this paradigm, see and compare Metz, Film Language, pp. 31–91; and David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 9–12. 21. Metz, ‘The Imaginary Signifier [Excerpts]’, (trans.) Ben Brewster, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, (ed.) Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986 [1975]), p. 259. 22. Metz, p. 259. 23. Metz, p. 259. 24. Yu, ‘Leon dinjing soeng dik sanciu paai’, p. 12. 25. Pasolini, ‘Cinema of Poetry’, pp. 1:543 and 548. 26. Pasolini, pp. 1:551–2. 27. Pasolini, pp. 1:551–2. 28. Wong Ting, ‘Qingsuan Long Gang’ [‘Cingsyun Lung Gong’ or Criticising Patrick Lung Kong], Chinese Student Weekly, no. 874 (18 April 1969): p. 11; Law Kar, ‘Lun Feinü zhengzhuan yu Long Gang’ [‘Leon Feineoi zingzyun jyu Lung Gong’ or On Teddy Girls and Patrick Lung Kong], Chinese Student Weekly, no. 872 (4 April 1969): p. 11. 29. Wong, p. 11; Law, p. 11; Lui Siu-hing and Leung Kat-chiu, ‘Tang Shuxuan tan dianying’ [‘Tong Syu-syun taam dinjing’ or On cinema by Tang Shushuen], Phoenix no. 8, no. 1 (1 August 1975): pp. 1–2. 30. May Fung, ‘Zizhu shidai – chuyan’ [‘Zizyu saidoi – cojin’ or The

­

no te s 285

i­ndependent era – A preliminary study], in i-Generations: Independent, Experimental and Alternative Creations from the 60s to Now, (ed.) Fung (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2001), p. 5; Sau Law, ‘ifva duli chengchuan shiwuzai’ [‘ifva duklaap singcyun sapng zoi’ or ifva: A city tradition over fifteen years], Artslink (November 2009), http://www.hkac.org. hk/tc/artslink.php?aid=29, accessed 17 January 2018; Eric Lau, ‘Shaqing zhihou’ [‘Saatcing zihau’ or After the wrap], Phoenix No. 8, no. 10 (1 May 1976): p. 6. 31. Fung, p. 5. 32. Leung Kat-chiu, ‘Guopian yingtan hujin zuixi: Tan Dongnuan yu Poxiao shifen’ [‘Gwokpin jingtaan fugam zuisik: Taam Dongnyun jyu Pohiu sifan’ or On the past and present of national cinema: On The Winter and At Dawn], Phoenix No. 8, no. 1 (1 August 1975): p. 3. 33. Leung, ‘Daineoifaa dik maaizo si hohei, waansi hobei?’, pp. 4–5. 34. Tang cited in Lui and Leung, ‘Tong Syu-syun taam dinjing’, p. 2. 35. Lui and Leung, p. 2. 36. The music used in the version of The Arch submitted by Tang to the Golden Horse Awards was considered temporary. Tang later replaced this soundtrack with an orchestral score, and she spoke openly against this temporary music on several occasions. For me, however, the music of this earlier version of The Arch is far more effective and in accord with the aesthetics of the image. 37. Lam, ‘Zunggwok dinjing dik hunggaan jisik’, pp. 64–6. 38. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, (trans.) Ma-belle L. Adison (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1992), p. 118, quoted and discussed in David Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (1997; repr., Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 124; see also, Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (1989; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001 [1985]), p. 98. 39. Guo, ‘Linquan gaozhi’, p. 1:19, quoted and discussed in Lam, ‘Zunggwok dinjing dik hunggaan jisik’, p. 77. 40. See, for example, Chen Chuanxi, Liuchao hualun yanjiu [A study of theories of painting from the Six Dynasties] (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 2015); see also, Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, pp. 153–4 and 163–9. 41. See Lo Shi-hin, Weishi fangyu [Introduction to Yogācāra Buddhism] (Hong Kong: The Dharmalakṣaṇa Buddhist Institute, 2008), pp. 63–5. 42. Lam, ‘Zunggwok dinjing dik hunggaan jisik’, p. 60; Baudry, ‘Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus’, pp. 39–47. 43. See the discussion by Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988). 44. Grace Fong, Wu Wenying and the Art of Southern Song Ci Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 105; Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, p. 135.

286

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

45. Habermas, ‘The public sphere’, pp. 49–55. 46. Law Kar and Frank Bren, ‘Into the turbulent sixties’, Hong Kong Cinema: A Cross-Cultural View (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2004), p. 165. 47. See Guidelines for the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Murray MacLehose, FCO 40/329, 1971; see also, Visits by Sir Murray MacLehose, Governor of Hong Kong, to the UK, FCO 40/1281, 1981. 48. Law and Bren, ‘Into the turbulent sixties’, p. 165. 49. Mary Wong, ‘Kai’ng dik sihaak’, p. 8. 50. Leung Ping-kwan, ‘Xianggang xiaoshuo yu Xifang wenxue guanxi’ [‘Hoenggong siusyut jyu Saifong manhok gwaanhai’ or The Hong Kong novel and Western literature], in Di de men [Dei dik mun or Gate of earth], Kwan Nam (Hong Kong: Ching Man Bookstore, 2001), p. 201, quoted in Wong, p. 8. 51. Chu Hark, Yingmu qianhou [Nganmok cinhau or In front of and behind the screen] (Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 1985); Chung, Hoenggong jingsijip baaknin, pp. 241–2; Zhang Zhendong and Li Chunwu, Xianggang guangbo dianshi fazhanshi [A history of the development of broadcast television] (Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo dianshi chubanshe, 1997), pp. 71–135. 52. The advertisement was posted by Shu Kei on the Facebook page of the Cantonese Cinema Study Association on 3 January 2018, https://www. facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10159825203520648&set=gm.2057049217 655336&type=3&theater&ifg=1, accessed 3 January 2018. 53. For a summary of the debate on postfeminism, see Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin Bradon, Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). 54. Michel Foucault, ‘The confession of the flesh’, in Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings, (trans) Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper, (ed.) Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 194–228. 55. Mong Tung, ‘Siqian ge rizi aochulai de Wang Mingquan’ [‘Seicin go jatzi ngouceotloi dik Wong Mingcyun’ or Lisa Wang: An actor created out of four thousand days of struggle], Close-up, no. 62 (4 August 1978), pp. 7–26; Wong Tak-ming, ‘Xinxing shi zenyang dansheng de?’ [‘Sansing si zamjoeng daansang dik?’ or How is a new star born?], Close-up, no. 45 (11 November 1977): pp. 2–4. For further references, see Chu, Nganmok cinhau; see also, Chung, Hoenggong jingsijip baaknin, p. 243. 56. Radio Television Hong Kong (ed.), Dianshi dui Xianggang dianying gongye ji wenhua zhi chongji yantaohui baogaoshu [Dinsi deoi Hoenggong dinjing gungjip kap manfaa zi chunggik jintouwui bougousyu or Report: Conference on the impact of television on the Hong Kong film industry and culture] (Hong Kong: Radio Television Hong Kong, 1985), p. 18; Chung, pp. 246–7. 57. Joseph Wong, Television News and Television Industry in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Communication Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1978), p. 3, quoted in Chung, p. 247.

­

no te s 287 58. For the development of early twentieth-century patriarchy in colonial trading ports in China, see, for example, Tze-lan D. Sang, The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). 59. Lau Tin-chi, Dianshi fengyun ershinian [Dinsi fungwan jisapnin or Twenty years of rain and storm in the television industry] (Hong Kong: Publications (Holdings) Ltd, 1993), pp. 2–13. 60. Conversation with Eric Lau at Solar Film/Video Productions, New York, 2001. 61. Chui Yeung, ‘Tantan dianshi de jige wenti’ [‘Taamtaam dinsi dik geigo mantai’ or On several questions of television], Close-up, no. 49 (6 January 1978), pp. 10–11. 62. Shu Kei, ‘Cong dianshi “jiaoyu” tandao dianshi daoyan’ [‘Cung dinsi “gaaujuk” taamdou dinsi doujin’ or From television ‘education’ to television directors], Close-up, no. 30 (25 March 1977): pp. 6–7. 63. This list is compiled under consultation with Shu Kei in a conversation we had at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts during the summer of 2015, and with David Chan at Videotage, Hong Kong, in January 2018. 64. Hoi Ning, ‘Shizishan xia fangwen Zhang Minyi’ [‘Sizisaan haa fongman Coeng Manji’ or An interview with Cheung Man-yee under the Lion Rock], Close-up, no. 26 (6 January 1977): pp. 41 and 43. 65. For a detailed discussion of this group of artists, see, Leung Ping-kwan, Xianggang wenxue yu dianying [Hoenggong manhok jyu dinjing or Hong Kong literature and cinema] (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Open University Press, 2012). 66. See, for example, Cheung Kam-mun, ‘Chen Yunwen fangwenji’ [‘Can Wanman fongmangei’ or An interview with Rosalind Chan], Close-up, no. 22 (November 1976): pp. 46–57; Shu Kei, ‘Tan Qi nüxing de Miao Jinfeng teji’ [‘Taam Cat neoising dik Miu Gamfung dakcap’ or On the ‘Miu Kamfung’ episode of Seven Women], Close-up, no. 24 (9 December 1976): p. 43; see also, Jimmy Ngai, ‘Wei Zhao’en fangwen Tan Jiaming’ [‘Ngai Siujan fongman  Taam Gaaming’ or An interview with Patrick Tam by Jimmy Ngai], Film Biweekly, no. 24 (1979): pp. 10–12. See Wong, ‘Kai’ng dik sihaak’, p. 12 n.1. 67. Wong, pp. 8–9. In addition to reviews and criticisms from the 1970s, see also, Law Kar, ‘Cong “Miao Jingfeng”, Aisha de yingxiang fenxi kan Tan Jiaming dui dianying yuyan de chuangxin ji qi deshi’ [‘Cung “Miu Kamfung,” Ngoisaat dik jingzoeng fansik hon Taam Gaaming deoi dinjing jyujin dik congsan kap kei daksat’ or An evaluation of Patrick Tam’s innovation in film language, based on an analysis of ‘Miu Kam-fung’ and Nomad], in Law Kar, Xianggang dianying xinlangchao: Ershi nian hou de huiguzhan [Hoenggong dinjing sanlongciu: Jisap ninhau dik wuiguzin or The Hong Kong New  Wave: A twentieth-anniversary retrospective] (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Provisional Urban Council, 1999), pp. 88–91; Mary Wong, ‘Tan

288

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Jiaming de tansuo: Ershi nian qian wei “xin nüxing” zaoxiang de changshi’ [‘Taam Gaaming dik taamsok: Jisap nin cin wai “san neoising” zouzoeng dik soengsi’ or An investigation into Patrick Tam: His attempt to create an image for ‘new women’ twenty years ago], in Law, pp. 94–100; see also, Alberto Pezzotta (ed.), Patrick Tam: From the Heart of the New Wave (Udine: Far East Film Festival, 2007). See Wong, ‘Kai’ng dik sihaak’, p. 12 n.1. 68. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, (trans) Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (1986; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001 [1983]), pp. 87–101. 69. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (1992; rep., New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 20–2. 70. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (trans.) Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998 [1995]), pp. 71–4. 71. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, (trans.) Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982 [1980]), pp. 1–2. 72. For a discussion of same-sex kinship, see Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 57–82. 73. Cheuk, Hong Kong New Wave Cinema, pp. 147 and 176. 74. Murray McLehose, Brief for call by the Governor of Hong Kong on the Prime Minister, 11 June 1979. 75. Li Cheuk-to, ‘Survival zui zhongyao’ [‘Survival zeoi zungjiu’ or The most important thing is survival], Film Biweekly, no. 96 (1983): p. 19; italicised words are originally in English. 76. Li Cheuk-to, ‘Zonglun Xu Anhua de sibu dianying (xia)’ [‘Zungleon Heoi Ngonwaa dik seibou dinjing (haa)’ or On four films by Ann Hui: Part 3], Film Biweekly, no. 98 (1983): p. 28. 77. Law Wai-ming, ‘Xieshi yu xuetou’ [‘Sesat jyu coettau’ or Describing reality and humour], Close-up, no. 40 (19 August 1977): p. 18. 78. Evans Chan, ‘Cong huaijiu zhi yan dao wugen zhi yuan: Sansi Xu Anhua’ [‘Cung waaigau zi jim dou mougan zi jyun: Saamsi Heoi Ngonwaa’ or From the nightmare of nostalgia to the desolation of rootlessness: Rethinking Ann Hui], Film Biweekly, no. 98 (1983): pp. 22–6 and 29. 79. Signmund Freud, ‘Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XX, (ed. and trans.) James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1959), p. 142 n.1; Jean Laplanche, ‘Notes on afterwardness’, Essays on Otherness, (ed.) John Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 260–5; Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, (trans.) Donald Nicolson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1988), pp. 465–73. See Fan, ‘The unanswered question of Forrest Gump’, Screen 49, no. 4 (Winter 2008): p. 451 n.2.

­

no te s 289 Chapter 3  The Time it Takes for Time to End

1. Some of the documents related to this negotiation have been released by Whitehall and stored at the National Archives at Kew under the title ‘The Future of Hong Kong’. 2. I make this point in response to Ackbar Abbas’ suggestion to analyse Hong Kong culture and politics as a process of becoming, an argument I will address later in this chapter. See Abbas, Hong Kong, p. 3. Here, he refers to Anthony King, Global Cities (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 38. 3. This concept is part of the philosophical debate on post-historicity. The idea is that the end of time is not a sensible event for human beings. Hence, in Europe, for instance, the Shoah could be regarded as the end of time (European history), after which European civilisation and democracy have merely been a performance that perpetuates our illusion of life and humanity. See Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, (trans.) Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004 [2002]). 4. See Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, p. 22. 5. Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, (trans.) Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005 [2000]), pp. 59–87. 6. See, ‘Luying taiqi jianjie’ [‘Lukjing taaikei gaangaai’ or An introduction to Videotage], VText (June 1997): p. 118. 7. Lo Shi-hin, Cheng weishi lun jiangji [Vijñaptimātratāsiddhi: A Lecture] (Hong Kong: The Dharmalakshana Buddhist Institute, 2015), pp. 83–4. 8. This understanding of affect is proposed in Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective; it is then later adopted by Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1. L’Anti-Œdipe (1972/3; repr., Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 2012); and Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1. Mille plateaux (1980; repr., Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 2004). 9. See Freud, ‘Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety’, p. 142 n.1; Laplanche, ‘Notes on afterwardness’, pp. 260–5; Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Pyschoanalysis, pp. 465–73. 10. This is what Alison Landsbeg calls ‘prosthetic memory’; see Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 20–1. 11. For a discussion of this subject, see, for example, Elasesser, ‘Subject positions, speaking positions: From Holocaust and Heimat to Shoah and Schindler’s List’, in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, (ed.) Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge 1996), pp. 145–83; Landsberg; Sobchack, ‘Introduction: History happens’, in Sobchack (ed.), pp. 1–16. 12. Cited in Zhang Huiling, ‘1979 nian san yue ershijiu ri Deng Xiaoping zai Beijing huijian Xianggang Zongdu Mai Lihao’ [29 March 1979: Deng Xiaoping met with Hong Kong Governor Murray MacLehose in Beijing],

290

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

News of the Communist Party of China, 29 March 2010, http://cpc. people.com.cn/GB/64162/64165/77585/78774/5490047.html, accessed 15 April 2018. 13. See the folder titled ‘Visit of Sir Murray MacLehose, Governor of Hong Kong, to China, March–April 1979’ at the National Archives. 14. Cradock, New Territories leases, Telegram no. 826, 24 September 1979. 15. Carrington to Prime Minister, Hong Kong: New Territories leases. 16. Since the minutes of the meetings during the negotiation are still classified, it is impossible to verify the exact change of position. According to the account of historian Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, based on her access to US sources, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the UK reached an agreement as late as April 1984. See, Tucker, China Confidential: American Diplomats and Sino–American Relations since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 353 and 386–7. 17. Letter from A. R. Rushford to P. J. Williamson, 1898 Order and legality, 15 October 1981; Letter from Rushford to Mr Friar, Paper on the future of Hong Kong, 5 November 1981. 18. Richard D. Clift to Thatcher, Future of Hong Kong: Implications for Falkland Islands and Gibraltar, 23 November 1981. 19. Brian Fall, Call on the Prime Minister by Lord MacLehose, 23 July 1982; John Coles to Brian Fall, Future of Hong Kong, 28 July 1982; British Nationality Act 1981, 30 October 1981, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/1981/61, accessed 17 April 2018. 20. Alan Donald, to MacLehose, Telegram no. 832, 29 October 1981. 21. Donald to Clift and Davies, John Keswick’s visit to China – Chinese short of cash may lead to a 100-year settlement with Hong Kong as a deposit, 27 October 1981. 22. Cited in Murray MacLehose, New Territories leases, Telegram no. 1343, 27 September 1979; Carrington to Prime Minister, Hong Kong: New Territories leases, 9 October 1979. 23. Cradock, New Territories leases, Telegram no. 827, 24 September 1979. 24. Chris Patten, Record of a discussion between the Prime Minister and Premier Hua Guofeng at 10 Downing Street on 1 November 1979 at 1600 Hours, 5 November 1979, pp. 3 and 9. 25. Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (London: Hutchinson, 1990), pp. 653–9. 26. Spence, p. 667. 27. MacLehose, The future paper, 23 October 1981. 28. Cradock, The future of Hong Kong, 9 October 1981, p. 3. 29. Spence, The Search for Modern China, p. 673. 30. Hu Ju-ren, ‘Feasibility of the proposal of “Hong Kong to be administered by Hong Kong People” ’, (trans.) K. C. Walker, circular, Far Eastern Section,

­

no te s 291 Research Department, 26 January 1983, originally published in Pai Shing Semi-monthly (1 January 1983), p. 3. 31. Richard Clift, Report on the future of Hong Kong based on the opinions of the Reform Club, 24 November 1981, with Reform Club’s Proposal on Hong Kong Future. 32. Letter from Pao Yue-kong to Thatcher, 13 August 1982. 33. Press statement for issue after the PM’s lunch with the Governor of Hong Kong and 5 Unofficial members of the Executive and the Legislative Councils on Wednesday, 8 September 1982. 34. Letter from Lawrence Kadoorie to Thatcher, 31 December 1982. 35. Edward Youde, Telegram no. 104, 21 January 1983. 36. Sze Yuen Chung, Xianggang huigui licheng: Zhong Shiyuan huiyi lu [Hoenggong wuigwai likcing: Zung Sijyun wuijik luk or Hong Kong’s road of return: Memoir of Sze Yuen Chung] (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001), p. 238. 37. Abbas, Hong Kong, p. 27. 38. Abbas, p. 5. 39. Abbas, p. 25. 40. Elsaesser, ‘Subject positions, speaking positions: From Holocaust to Heimat to Shoah and Schindler’s List’, p. 146. 41. This information was found through the Newspaper Society of Hong Kong. 42. For a study of the fukan in Chinese-language newspapers during the Republican period, see, for example, Xiaoqun Xu, Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Individualism in Modern China: The Chenbao Fukan and the New Culture Ear, 1918–1928 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014). 43. Ronald Shi, ‘Ben Gang dianshi zazhi zonghe bijiao yanjiu’ [‘Bun Gong dinsi zaapzi zunghap beigaau jingau’ or A comparative study of Hong Kong television magazines], Close-up, no. 43 (7 October 1977): pp. 2–5. 44. Zhai Haoran, Guang yu ying de jiti huiyi [Collective memories of light and shadows], in two volumes (2011; repr. Hong Kong: Ming Pao Weekly, 2012). 45. Zhai, 1:158–9. 46. Mong Tung, ‘Seicin go jatzi ngouceotloi dik Wong Mingcyun’, pp. 7–26; Wong, ‘Sansing si zamjoeng daansang dik?’, pp. 2–4. For further references, see Chu, Nganmok cinhau; see also, Chung, Hoenggong jingsijip baaknin, p. 243. 47. Lau, Dinsi fungwan jisapnin, pp. 26–38, quoted and discussed in Chung, pp. 321 and 323. 48. Zhang and Li, Xianggang guangbo dianshi fazhanshi, pp. 71–135, quoted and discussed in Chung, p. 315. 49. Lau, Dinsi fungwan jisapnin, pp. 1–18; see also, Chung, pp. 314–17. 50. Chung, pp. 314–17; Lau, pp. 1–18; Johnnie To in Conversation with Victor Fan, China Exchange, London, London East Asian Film Festival, 30 November 2016.

292

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

51. Chung, pp. 315 and 317. 52. Chung, p. 318. 53. Johnnie To in Conversation with Victor Fan, 30 November 2016. 54. In Conversation with Gordon Lam Ka Tung, hosted by Victor Fan, King’s College London, 19 November 2017. 55. Shek Kei, ‘Thoughts on Chinese opera and the Cantonese opera film’, in The 11th Hong Kong International Film Festival: Cantonese Opera Film Retrospective, (trans.) Stephen Teo, (ed.) Angela Tong (1987; repr., Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2003), p. 14. 56. Jean Ma, Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. 71–102. 57. James Wong, The rise and decline of Cantopop, PhD thesis, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 2003, p. 93. Here, he refers to Ng Chun-hung, ‘Xunzhao Xianggang bentu zhuyi’ [‘Camzaau Hoenggong buntou zyuji’ or In search of Hong Kong localism], in Yuedu Xianggang puji wenhua: 1970–2000 [ Jyutduk Hoenggong poukap manfaa: 1970–2000 or Reading Hong Kong popular culture: 1970–2000] (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 92. 58. Wong, pp. 96–100. 59. Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 85–120. 60. Wong, The rise and decline of Cantopop, p. 158. 61. Theodor Adorno (with the assistance of George Simpson), ‘On popular music: I. The musical material’, in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science (New York: Institute of Social Research, 1941), pp. 9:17–48; see also, Wong, p. 9. 62. Leung Ping-kwan, ‘Zai yasu zhijian sikao Xianggang de wenhua shenfen’ [‘Zoi ngaazuk zigaan sihaau Hoenggong dik manfaa sanfan’ or Thinking about Hong Kong cultural identity between elegant and vernacular culture], in Xianggang wenhua yu shehui [Hoenggong manfaa jyu sewui or Hong Kong culture and society], (ed.) Dai Sin-yuk (Hong Kong: Center of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1995), p. 121; see Wong, p. 9. 63. Alfred Ng, Letter from Alfred Ng to Wang Zanxian, 26 June 1982, in the Sun Sing Collection, Museum of Chinese in America, New York City; Fan, ‘New York Chinatown theatres under the Hong Kong circuit system’, Film History 22, no. 1 (2010): p. 112. 64. Law Tat-chun, ‘Lianzheng fengbao shi tiancai yihuo baichi’ [‘Limzing fungbou si tincoi jikwaak baakci’ or Is Anti-Corruption an act of genius or idiot], Phoenix No. 8, no. 3 (1 October 1975): p. 4. 65. Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong, pp. 69–70. 66. Chung, Hoenggong jingsijip baaknin, pp. 330–46. This package-deal system was initiated in Hollywood. See Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), pp.

­

no te s 293

65–189; see also, Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980–1989 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 1–141. 67. This information can be found at the Hong Kong Film Archive Database. However, I also benefited from my conversations with film critic Tony Rayns through these years. 68. Evans Chan, ‘Cung hwaaigau zi jim dou mougan zi jyun: Saamsi Heoi Ngonwaa’, p. 22. For the rest of the debate, see Kam Ping-hing, ‘Touben nuhai’ [‘Tauban nouhoi’ or Boat People], Film Biweekly, no. 96 (1983): p. 24; see also, Li Cheuk-to, ‘Zhonglun Xu Anhua de sibu dianying (xia)’, pp. 27–9. 69. Wong, ‘Kai’ng dik sihaak: Taam Gaaming dik singcoeng gusi’, p. 8. 70. Chung, Hoenggong jingsijip baaknin, pp. 296–303. 71. Chung, p. 301. 72. Ng, Letter from Alfred Ng to Wang Zanxian; Fan, ‘New York Chinatown theatres under the Hong Kong circuit system’, p. 112. 73. Box-office receipts, 1986–8, Sun Sing Collection; Fan, p. 114. 74. Robert Tam, Note, 18 August 1993, Sun Sing Collection; Fan, p. 111. 75. ‘Generic’ list of monthly expenses for the Sun Sing Theatre in 1982, compiled by Barry Koh in 1985, Sun Sing Collection; Fan, p. 111. 76. Conversation with Clifton Ko, East Winds Film Festival, Coventry, UK, 2 November 2014. 77. Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong. 78. Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 141 and 181. 79. Chan and Chu, Moujyu zi sing, pp. 44–208. 80. Edward Lam, Dialogue with the audience after the performance of Jiaowo ruhe ai sige bu aiwo de nanren [Gaaungo jyuho ngoi seigo bat ngoingo dik naamjan or How to Love a Man Who Doesn’t Love Me], Zuni Icosahedron, Hong Kong, September 1989. 81. Conversation with Clifton Ko. 82. Nancy Tong, Letter from Nancy Tong to Sun Sing, 25 September 1986, Sun Sing Collection. 83. Box-office receipts of blockbusters released by Golden Princess, 1989–91 and Golden Harvest, 1991–3, in Sun Sing Collection; Fan, ‘New York Chinatown theatres under the Hong Kong circuit system’, pp. 118–19. 84. Johnnie To in Conversation with Victor Fan. 85. Conversation with Edward Lam; emphasis in the original. 86. Yung and I had this conversation numerous times, especially when I set up my own theatre company in Hong Kong, Post [ET]2!, in 1992. 87. This information is based on my personal interactions with Yung and the numerous publicity materials from Zuni. For an academic study of Zuni, see Rossella Ferari, Pop Goes the Avant-garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

294

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

88. ‘1986–1997 programmes of Videotage’, VText (1997): p. 121. 89. See, for example, Ellen Pau, ‘Development of Hong Kong video art’, VText (1997): pp. 54–7. 90. ‘1986–1997 programmes of Videotage’, p. 122. 91. Pau, ‘Development of Hong Kong video art’, pp. 54–5. 92. Pau, p. 55. 93. Pau, p. 56. See also, Christine Lok, ‘The cultural identity: An artist’s “viewpoint” ’, VText (1997): pp. 58–9. 94. Pau, p. 56. 95. Yau Ching, ‘Wo nege wo’ [‘Ngo nigo ngo’ or Me, this me], VText (1997): pp. 38–9. 96. Grace Ng, ‘Jianli Yazhou yingixang’ [‘Ginlaap Ngaazau jingzoeng’ or Establish the Asian image], VText (1997): pp. 40–1; italics in the original. 97. Marina Grzinic, ‘The characteristics of the video electronic media condition in Slovenia and ex-Yugoslavia territory’, VText (1997): pp. 44–5. 98. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Methods of montage’, in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, (ed. and trans.) Jay Leyda (1949; repr., San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), pp. 72–83. 99. Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 158; Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, p. 70. 100. Yung and I discussed this concept substantially during 2015 and 2016. 101. I was seventeen years old and I eventually saw a recording of the performance in the 1990s. 102. Liao Pengfei, ‘Sheng dun zumiao zhongjian Shunjimiao ji’ [On the rebuilding of the ancestral temple into Shunji Temple under the auspices of the Emperor], in Baitang Li shi zongpu [Registry of the Li family from Baitang] (Putian: Baitang Li shi zupu xiubian lishihui, 2002), Zhong (Loyalty) section. 103. Antiquities and Monuments Office, Leisure and Cultural Services Department, ‘Renovation project for Tin Hau Temple in Causeway Bay’, Hong Kong, September 2003, p. 2. 104. Tsai Hsiang-hui, ‘Mazu xinyang de eryuan jiazhi’ [The binary values of the Mazu faith], in Kongda renmin xuebao [ Journal of Literature and Arts of the National Open University of Taiwan], no. 16 (December 2007): pp. 57–78. 105. ‘Ren Jianhui tuozhu Bai Xuexian; Chen Pi Zhengqiu jiuzhong zhiji’ [‘Jam Gimfai tozyu Baak Syutsin; Can Pei zingkau zauzung zigei’ or Yam Kim-fai holds hands with Bak Shuet-sin; Chan Pei seeks a drinking buddy], Lingxing ribao [Ling sing jatbou or Ling Sing Daily] (7 July 1949): p. 1. 106. Conversation with Lo Wai-luk, Hong Kong, Summer, 2016.

Chapter 4  Posthistoricity 1. Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea of a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view’, (trans.) Lewis White Beck, in Kant, On History, (ed.) Beck (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1963 [1784]), pp. 11–26.

­

no te s 295 2. One of the most famous ruminations was offered by Walter Benjamin in ‘The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility: Second version,’ (trans) Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, (eds) Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006 [1936]), pp. 3:101–33. 3. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, (trans.) William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977 [1954]). 4. For a summary of this problem, see Agamben, The Open. 5. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, (ed.) Allan Bloom, (trans.) James H. Nicols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 158–9. 6. Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. 7. Yang (ed.), Beijing Xianggang, pp. 10–24. 8. For a summary of the debate, see, for example, Szeto, ‘Sinophone libidinal  economy in the age of neoliberalisation and Mainlandisation’, pp. 120–47. 9. Governments of the People’s Republic of China and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, ‘Annex two: Supplements and amendments II to the Mainland’s specific commitments on liberalization of trade in services for Hong Kong’ (aka CEPA III), Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement, 18 October 2005, pp. 5–6. 10. In Conversation with Gordon Lam Ka Tung; Johnnie To in Conversation with Victor Fan; Seminar with Chapman To and Derek Chiu, Far East Film Festival 2018, Udine, 28 April 2018. 11. Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the People’s Republic of China, Joint Declaration of the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the People’s Republic of China on the Question of Hong Kong, 19 December 1984, http://www.cmab.gov.hk/en/ issues/jd2.htm, accessed 26 June 2018. 12. Alvin Lum, ‘Government rewrites history of Hong Kong’s 1997 h ­ andover, one inconvenient phrase at a time’, South China Morning Post, 1 May 2018, http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/2144200/government-rewriting-history-hong-kong-one-inconvenient, accessed 26 June 2018. 13. Pottinger, Keying, Yilibu and Niu, Treaty of Nanking. 14. Liu, The Clash of Empires, pp. 25–30 and 75–81; Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, pp. 101–25, 172–5 and 215–17; Vitoria, ‘On the Law of War’, pp. 302–5. 15. Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the People’s Republic of China, Joint Declaration. 16. For the Chinese-language version of the Joint Declaration, see http://www. cmab.gov.hk/tc/issues/jd2.htm, accessed 26 June 2018.

296

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

17. Hu, ‘Feasibility of the proposal of “Hong Kong to be administered by Hong Kong People” ’, pp. 3–4. 18. Hu, p. 4. 19. Zhu Shuyuan and Zhao Jing, ‘Zhongguo tese shehui zhuyi: Gainian yanbian yu neixian shenghua’ [Socialism with Chinese characteristics: Conceptual transformation and transcendence of its contents], Zhongguo Gongchandang xinwenwang [Communist Party of China], 16 January 2013, http://theory.people.com.cn/n/2013/0116/c49157-20216946.html, accessed 26 June 2018. 20. McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, pp. 28–55. 21. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, pp. 172-84 and 231–3. 22. Compare, for example, Letters Patent and Royal Instructions to the Governor of Hong Kong together with Standing Orders of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, 1931 and Letters Patent and Royal Instructions to the Governor of Hong Kong (Amended to February 1969). 23. Ian Scott, Political Change and the Crisis of Legitimacy in Hong Kong (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989), p. 144. 24. Government of Hong Kong, Green Paper: The Further Development of Representative Government in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Government Printer, July 1984). 25. Eva Liu and S. Y. Yue, Political Development in Hong Kong Since the 1980s (Hong Kong: Research and Library Services Division, Legislative Council Secretariat, September 1996), pp. 3–4; Ming Sing, Hong Kong’s Tortuous Democratization: A Comparative Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 123–42. 26. Ming, Hong Kong’s Tortuous Democratization, p. 155. 27. Ming, p. 160. 28. Electoral Affairs Commission, Report on the 2004 Legislative Council Election, Submitted to Tung Chee Hwa, the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region of the People’s Republic of China, 11 December 2004. 29. Law Wing-sang, ‘Hong Kong undercover’, p. 527. 30. Kwai Cheung Lo and Laikwan Pang, ‘Hong Kong: Ten years after colonialism’, Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 4 (2007): p. 350. 31. Government of the People’s Republic of China, ‘Annex I: Method for the selection of the chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’, The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of  the People’s Republic of China, 4 April 1990, amended on 28 August 2010, http://www.basiclaw.gov.hk/en/basiclawtext/annex_1.html, accessed 31 October 2016. 32. See, for example, Lai Kwong-tak, ‘Lihuankuanglan: Kaiming pai xuanhui xin yicheng’ [‘Likwaan kwonglaan: Hoiming paai syunwai san jicing’ or Turning the tide: More open-minded electoral college constituents proposed new discursive procedures], in Ming Pao, 5 October 2016,

­

no te s 297

http://news.mingpao.com/ins/instantnews/web_tc/article/20161005/ s00022/1475628713123, accessed 31 October 2016; Nam San, ‘Xianggang teshou xuanju: Dineng shangren zhi Gang, qiaoxiang mori sangzhong’ [‘Hoenggong taksau syungeoi: Dainang soengjan zi Gong, haauhoeng mutjat songzung’ or Hong Kong chief executive election: retarded businessmen governs Hong Kong, peeling the funeral bell of the apocalypse], in Nanshan suibi [Nam San ceoibat] (17 September 2011), https://nanshan​ chans.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/香港特首選舉：低能商人治港，敲 響未日喪鐘/, accessed 31 October 2016. 33. The negative evaluation of Tung Chee Hwa has been famously summaried  by a satirical essay written in classical Chinese by Lam Pui-lei, ‘Jianhua zhi luan’ [‘Ginwaa zi lyun’ or The Chee Hwa rebellion], in The Parcville, October 2010, http://www.theparcville.net/forum/index. php?topic=4080.0;wap2, accessed 1 November 2016. 34. Julia Hollingsworth, Chris Lau and Stuart Lau, ‘Donald Tsang guilty of misconduct in office, making him first Hong Kong leader convicted in  criminal trial’, South China Morning Post, 17 February 2017, https:// www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-crime/article/2071852/donaldtsang-guilty-misconduct-office-making-him-first-hong, accessed 5 July 2018. 35. C. Y. Leung appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 2012, with the caption ‘Can Hong Kong Trust This Man?’; see, Zoher Abdolcarim, ‘Alone on the hill’, Time, 9 July 2012, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2118319,00.html?pcd=pw-w, accessed 1 November 2016. 36. See Y. C. Jao, The Asian Financial Crisis and the Ordeal of Hong Kong (Westport: Quorum Books, 2001). 37. Government of the People’s Republic of China, Article 23, The Basic Law of the Hong Kong, http://www.basiclaw.gov.hk/en/basiclawtext/chapter_2. html, accessed 1 November 2016; see also, Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor, Article 23 (2003) http://goo.gl/WtGx0n, accessed 15 August 2015. 38. See, for example, Francis L. F. Lee and Joseph M. Chan, Media, Social Mobilization, and Mass Protests in Post-Colonial Hong Kong: The Power of a Critical Event (London: Routledge, 2011). 39. Chu Liu Yiu, ‘Interpretation and review of the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’, Journal of Chinese Law, no. 2 (1988): p. 49; Trevor Morris, ‘Some problems regarding the power of constitutional interpretation under Article 158 of the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’, Hong Kong Law Journal, no. 21 (1991): p. 87. 40. See, for example, Roger H. M. Cheng, ‘Moral education in Hong Kong: Confucian-parental, Christian-religious and liberal-civic influences’, Journal of Moral Education 33, no. 4 (2004): pp. 533–51; see also, Thomas

298

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Kwan Choi Tse, ‘Remaking Chinese identity: Hegemonic struggles over national education in post-colonial Hong Kong’, International Studies in Sociology of Education 17, no. 3 (2007): pp. 231–48. 41. Zhang, Studies on Hong Kong Leftist Films, p. 29. 42. Yang (ed.), Beijing Xianggang, p. 5. 43. Zhang Yan, ‘Yindu de chengli yu kaikuo’ [The establishment of SilMetropole and its expansion], in Yindu liushi: 1950–2010 [Sixty years of SilMetropole: 1950­–2010], (ed.) Sil-Metropole (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2010), p. 334. 44. Yang (ed.), Beijing Xianggang, pp. 5–6. 45. Chan Ching-wai, ‘96 piaofang zongjie’ [Box-office receipts, 1996], in Zhongguo dianying nianjian: 1997 [China film yearbook, 1997] (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying nianjianshe, 1997), quoted in Yang (ed.), p. 11. 46. R. G. Broadhurst and K. W. Lee, ‘The transformation of triad “dark” societies in Hong Kong: The impact of law enforcement, and socio-economic and political change’, Security Challenges 5, no. 4 (2009): pp. 1–38. 47. Fan, ‘New York Chinatown theatres under the Hong Kong circuit system’, p. 111. The original sources include Agreement between Century Motion Picture (International) Co. Ltd and the Wing Scope Company, 6 April 1982, Sun Sing Collection; Zhou Zeming, ‘Changyou Mei Jia jianwen’ [Travelogue of a leisure trip to America and Canada], source and date unknown, Sun Sing Collection; Interview of a friend of one of Sung Sing’s ex-owners, name undisclosed for security reason, September 2005; the address book (1987) in the Sun Sing Collection, which contains the names and addresses of the seventeen theatres, restaurants and independent local exhibitors, including Zhongmei (Washington, DC), Holiday Production Inc. (Rockville, MD), Bing Wong Restaurant (Minneapolis), Pagoda Palace (San Francisco), Sing Lee (Los Angeles), World Theater (San Francisco), Monterey Theatre (Los Angeles), Pagoda Theater (Boston), Golden Cinema (Houston), Mountain View (CA), Mr S. Y. Chen (Smyrna, GA), Hunan Palace (TX), Mr Ping-Ki Au (Deerfield Beach, FL), China Gate Restaurant (Scottsdale, AZ), Pagoda Restaurant (St Louis, Missouri), Victory Theater (Plano, TX), Tony Wong (Seattle); see also ‘Distribution 1984’ (Sun Sing Collection) for the box-office receipts. 48. Fan, p. 112. 49. Justin Wyatt, ‘Independents, packaging, and inflationary pressure in 1980s Hollywood’, in Prince, A New Pot of Gold, pp. 142–59. 50. Fan, ‘New York Chinatown theatres under the Hong Kong circuit system’, p. 114; Box-office receipts, 1986–8, Sun Sing Collection. 51. For an evaluation of D&B as a ‘clean’ and artistic production company, see Zhai, Guang yu ying de jiti huiyi, pp. 2:52–9. 52. Chan Ching-wai, ‘Xianggang dianying gongye jiegou ji shichang fenxi’ [‘Hoenggong dinjing gungjip gitkau kap sicoeng fansik’ or An analysis of

­

no te s 299

the Hong Kong film industry’s structure and market] (Hong Kong: City Entertainment Press, 2000), pp. 644–53, quoted in Chung, Hoenggong dinsijip baaknin, p. 338. 53. Box-office receipts of blockbusters released by Golden Princess, 1989– 93, Sun Sing Collection; Box-office receipts of blockbusters released by Newport, 1989–93; quoted in Fan, ‘New York Chinatown Theatres under the Hong Kong circuit system’, pp. 118–20. 54. Chung, Hoenggong jingsijip baaknin, pp. 348–52 and 383–8. 55. Nga To, ‘Jinyue dianying shichang chouyun canwu, exing xunhuan jiangyou bajiu nanguan’ [‘Gamjyut dinjing sicoeng sauwan caammou, ngoksing ceongwaan zoengjau baatgau naangwaan’ or The film market has been shrouded by rainclouds and misery in the past few months; with such a vicious cycle, there will be a difficult hurdle in 1989], Jiacai [Gaacoi] (3 December 1988), pp. 12–13, quoted in Chung, pp. 352–3. 56. Chung, p. 354. 57. Victor Fan, ‘Performing nationality: The fifth generation as an “American” transnational cinema’, in American and Chinese-Language Cinemas: Examining Cultural Flows, (eds) Lisa Funnell and Man-Fung Yip (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 189–203. 58. Zhao Shi, ‘Zujian Zhongguo dianying jituan gongsi, tuijin guoyou dianying qiye gaige chuangxin’ [Organise and build the China Film Group; advance the creative reform of the national film corporations, 1998], in Zhongguo tese dianying fazhan daolu tansuo, (ed.) Zhao, pp. 22–5. I discuss the 9550 project in ‘Poetics of failure: Performing humanism in the Chinese blockbuster’, in Screening China’s Soft Power: Promoting China’s Rise through Cinema, (eds) Paola Voci and Hui Luo (New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 60. 59. Zhao Shi, ‘Jiji tuijin jituanhua, yuanxian zhi gaige yu shuzihua chuangxin’ [Actively promote corporatisation, circuit-system reform and digital creations], in Zhao (ed.), pp. 57–66; Fan, p. 60. 60. Xia Yan has never mentioned anything about main melody. Nonetheless, his ideas on screenwriting have been regarded as a blueprint of the main melody film. See, ‘Juzuo shang de jige wenti’ [Several questions on writing a screenplay, 1947], in Xia Yan, Yingping yu julun [Film criticism and dramatic theory], (ed.) Chen Jian (Hangzhou: Zhejiang daxue chubanshe, 2009); ‘Xie dianying juben de jige wenti’ [Several questions on writing a screenplay, 1958], in Bainian Zhongguo dianying lilun wenxuan, (ed.) Ding, pp. 1:446–73. Zhao Shi, ‘Xia Yan shi 20 shiji Zhongguo dianying de yimian qizhi’ [Xia Yan was a flagship of twentieth-century Chinese cinema], in Zhao (ed.), pp. 407–10. 61. Rao Shuguang, Zhongguo dianying shichang fazhang shi [History of the development of the Chinese film market] (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2009), pp. 448–54; Fan, ‘Poetics of failure’, p. 60. 62. Yu Yonghui, ‘Rang wenyijie yongyuan chengwei xuanchuan Mao Zedong

300

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

sixiang de zhendi’ [Let the cultural sphere become a position from which the ideas of Mao Zedong can be propagated], Wenhui bao, 23 May 1968. 63. Zhao, ‘Xia Yan shi 20 shiji Zhongguo dianying de yimian qizhi’, pp. 407–10. 64. Lü Yidu, ‘Goujian hexie shehui yu Zhongguo dianying fazhan chuyi’ [On constructing a harmonious society and the development of Chinese cinema], in Zhongguo dianying xin bainian: Hezuo yu fazhang [A new century of Chinese cinema: co-production and development], (ed.) China Film Producers’ Association (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2006), pp. 27–31. For the concept of socialist harmonious society, see, ‘Minzhu fazhi, gongping zhengyi, chengxin youai, chongman huoli, anding youxu, ren yu ziran hexie xiangchu’ [Democratic rule of law, fairness and justice, honesty and fraternity, energy and liveliness, stability and order, and the harmonious coexistence between human and nature], People. com.cn, People’s Daily, 12 October 2006, http://www.people.com.cn/ GB/32306/54155/57487/4913154.html, accessed 25 August 2015; see also, ‘Shiliujie Zhongquanhui kaimu; zhuozhong yanjiu goujian hexie shehui wenti’ [The Sixteenth Central Committee of the CCP opened: On the construction of a harmonious society], People.com.cn, People’s Daily, 8 October 2006, http://theory.people.com.cn/GB/40557/44459/44461/4890703.html, accessed 25 August 2015; Fan, ‘Poetics of failure’, p. 61. 65. Zhongguo dianying xin bainian: hezuo yu fazhang [A new century of Chinese cinema: Co-production and development], (ed.) China Film Producers’ Association (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2006); Zhao Tingyang, ‘Rethinking Empire from the Chinese Concept “All-underHeaven” (Tianxia),’ in China Orders the World: Normative Soft Power and Foreign Policy, (eds) William Callahan and Elena Barabantseva (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2011), pp. 21–36; Fan, pp. 59 and 61. 66. Governments of the People’s Republic of China and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, ‘Annex 4: Specific commitments on liberalization of trade in services’, Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement, 29 June and 23 September 2003, pp. 18–19. 67. Conversation with Ben Wong, The Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong, 24 September 2016. 68. Governments of the People’s Republic of China and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, ‘Annex two: Supplements and amendments II to the Mainland’s specific commitments on liberalization of trade in services for Hong Kong’ (aka CEPA III), Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement, 18 October 2005, pp. 5–6. 69. Yang, (ed.), Beijing Xianggang, pp. 20–1. 70. Mirana Szeto and Yun-chung Chen, ‘To work or not to work: The dilemma of Hong Kong film labor in the Age of Mainlandization’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 55 (2003), http://ejumpcut.org/

­

no te s 301 archive/jc55.2013/SzetoChenHongKong/text.html, accessed 26 October 2016. 71. Szeto, ‘Hong Kong cinema in the age of neoliberalization and Mainlandization: Hong Kong SAR New Wave as a cinema of anxiety’, in A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, (eds) Esther Cheung, Gina Marchetti and Esther Yau (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), pp. 89–155; Toby Miller, Nitin Covil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell and Ting Wang, Global Hollywood 2 (London: BFI and Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 72. Yang (ed.), Beijing Xianggang, pp. 51–6. 73. Chan and Chu, Mouzyu zi sing, pp. 12–16; Wang, Chengshi, lishi, shenfen; Pang, Wongfan meimaan, pp. 5–6. 74. Laplanche, ‘Notes on Afterwardness’, pp. 260–5; Fan, ‘The unanswered question of Forrest Gump’, pp. 450–1. 75. Wang, Chengshi, lishi, shenfen. 76. Long Tin, Hou jiuqi yu Xianggang dianying [Hau gaucat jyu Hoenggong dinjing or Post-1997 and Hong Kong cinema] (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Critics Association, 2003), quoted in Wang. 77. Szeto, ‘Hong Kong cinema in the age of neoliberalization and Mainlandization’, p. 101. 78. Yang (ed.), Beijing Xianggang, pp. 51–6. 79. Yang (ed.), pp. 56–7. 80. Yang (ed.), pp. 56–7. 81. Yang (ed.), p. 54. 82. Johnnie To in Conversation with Victor Fan. 83. Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), ‘Film and entertainment industry in Hong Kong’, 15 March 2018, pp. 1–3. 84. ‘It’s fade out for Hong Kong’s film industry as China moves into the spotlight’, South China Morning Post, 28 July 2017, https://www.scmp.com/ business/article/2104540/its-fade-out-hong-kongs-film-industry-chinamo​v​es-spotlight, accessed 7 July 2018. 85. Stephen Follows, ‘How many films are released each year?’, Stephen Follows: Film Data and Education, 14 August 2017, https://stephenfollows.com/ how-many-films-are-released-each-year/, accessed 7 July 2018. 86. Ruby Cheung, ‘Involuntarily transnational film distribution: Hong Kong’s documentary films in the twenty-first century’ conference presentation, Network of European Cinema and Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 28 June 2018. 87. HKTDC, ‘Film and entertainment industry in Hong Kong’, p. 2. 88. Conversation with Ben Wong; In Conversation with Gordon Lam Ka Tung. 89. Miller, Covil, McMurria, Maxwell and Wang, Global Hollywood 2, pp. 126–40. 90. Seminar with Johnnie To, Far East Film Festival 18, Udine, April 2016. 91. Seminar with Johnnie To. 92. Johnnie To in Conversation with Victor Fan.

302

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

93. In Conversation with Gordon Lam Ka Tung; my emphasis. 94. Bordwell discusses To in the second edition of Planet Hong Kong (Madison: Irving Way Institute Press, 2010), pp. 251–64. 95. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1, pp. 102–22. 96. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, pp. 158–9. 97. Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong, second edition, pp. 251–2. 98. Esther Cheung, ‘The urban maze: Crisis and topography in Hong Kong cinema’, in A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, (eds) Cheung, Marchetti and Yau, pp. 58–61. 99. Conversation with Tony Rayns, International Film Festival Rotterdam, February 2018. 100. Pang, Wongfan meimaan, p. 92; emphasis in the original. 101. Paul Grainge, Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 43. 102. Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 169. 103. William Brown suggested this reading of ideological suture to me in the Post Olympics Chinese Cinema Symposium, Bader International Study Center, Queens University, East Sussex, 10 December 2013. 104. Conversation with George Crosthwait on 9 November 2016; Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1, pp. 329–39. 105. Elsaesser, Hollywood heute. Geschichte, Gender und Nation im postklassischen Kino. (Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2009), pp. 191–2; Fan, ‘The unanswered question of Forrest Gump’, p. 459. 106. Johnnie To in Conversation with Victor Fan. 107. I wish to thank Mark Gallagher for pushing further my original reading of this scene. 108. Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 1–2. 109. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 178. 110. See, for example, Abbas, ‘Wong Kar-wai’s cinema of repetition’, in A Companion to Wong Kar-wai, (ed.) Martha P. Nochimson (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), pp. 135–52; Yiu-wai Chu, ‘Toward a new Hong Kong cinema: Beyond Mainland–Hong Kong co-productions’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, no. 2 (2015): pp. 111–24; see also, Wikanda Promkhuntong, ‘Wong Kar-wai: “Cultural hybrid”, celebrity endorsement and star-auteur branding’, Celebrity Studies 5, no. 3 (2014): pp. 348–53.

Chapter 5  The Age of Precarity 1. As I shall explicate later, this is a central question grappled with by Butler in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. 2. Butler, pp. 15–16; see also, Michel Feher, ‘Self-appreciation; Or, the aspiration of human capital’, Public Culture 21, no. 1 (2009): pp. 21–41. 3. Law, ‘Hong Kong undercover’, p. 527. 4. See, Government of the People’s Republic of China, The Basic Law of

­

no te s 303 the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. 5. Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on Issues Relating to the selection of the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region by universal suffrage and on the method for forming the Legislative Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in the year 2016, adopted at the Tenth Session of the Standing Committee of the Twelfth National People’s Congress on 31 August 2014, p. 3. 6. Jeffie Lam and Tony Cheung, ‘The boycott begins: Thousands of students stage classroom walkout over Beijing’s electoral reform plan’, South China Morning Post, 22 September 2014, https://www.scmp.com/news/hongkong/article/1597934/boycott-begins-thousands-students-stage-class​ room-walkout-over, accessed 14 July 2018. 7. For a discussion of Mainland DV filmmaking, see, for example, Mathew David Johnson, ‘“A scene beyond our line of sight”: Wu Wenguang and new documentary cinema’s politics of independence’, in From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China, (eds) Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006), pp. 65–70; see also, Luke Robinson, Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 21–4. For a discussion about Hong Kong, see Wong Chi-fai, ‘Feng Binghui tan shuma jishu yu chuangzuo de hudong guanxi’ [‘Wong Zifai taam soumaa geiseoit jyu congzok dik wudung gwaanhai’ or On the interactive relationship between digital technology and creativity by Fung Bing-fai], VText ( June 1997): pp. 98–101. 8. Tammy Cheung visited Chinese Visual Festival in May 2013. I met Lee Waishing in Hong Kong in the summer of 2017. 9. See ‘Our team’ in CNEX, updated in 2011, http://www.cnex.org.hk/cnex_ all.php?id=6, accessed 22 July 2018; CNEX is a partner of Chinese Visual Festival. See also, ‘About Visible Record’, in Visible Record, http://www. visiblerecord.com/en/content/about-visible-record, accessed 22 July 2018. 10. I learned this from my years of working at the Chinese Visual Festival. Also, I discussed this with Eva Man, Chair of Film Academy, Hong Kong Baptist University, London, 19 June 2018. 11. Cheung, ‘Involuntarily transnational film distribution.’ 12. Visible Record, ‘About Visible Record.’ 13. See Al Au, ‘Yong feilin qu sha yitiao chulu: Tan Ying yi zhi’ [‘Jung feilam heoi saat jattiu ceoitlou: Taam Jing ji zi’ or Let us use film to create a path: On Ying E Chi], VText (June 1997): pp. 102–3; ifva, ‘About us’, ifva: Hong Kong Arts Center, ongoing, http://www.ifva.com/?p=53&lang=en, accessed 22 July 2018. 14. Conversation with Tammy Cheung, Starbucks, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, summer 2014.

304

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

15. Conversation between Tammy Cheung and Wu Wuna, Chinese Visual Festival, Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s College London, May 2013. 16. I saw the film at the Far East Film Festival, Udine and Five Flavours Film Festival, Warsaw that year. 17. Conversation with one of the producers in Thailand, Aditya Assarat, Far East Film Festival 20, Udine, April 2018. 18. The film was shown on 26 June 2014. 19. Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival, ‘Award Winners of the 11th Taiwan International Documentary Festival Revealed: A Cambodian Spring wins International Competition’, 12 May 2018, http://www.tidf.org. tw/en/news/64738, accessed 23 July 2018. 20. Jessie Lau and Sidney Leung, ‘Ten Years wins Best Film: 35th annual Hong Kong Film Awards winners’, South China Morning Post, 3 April 2016, https:// www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/education-commu​nity/article/1933179/ ten-years-wins-best-film-35th-annual-hong-kong, accessed 22 July 2018. 21. The information was circulated in Far East Film Festival 20, Udine. 22. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 7 and 41. 23. Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, pp. 15–16. 24. Paul Farmer, Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader, (ed.) Haun Saussy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 25. Research Office, Legislative Council Secretariat, Challenges of Manpower Adjustment in Hong Kong, in Research Brief, no. 4 ( June 2016), pp. 8–14. 26. Road Not Taken, dir. and prod. Nora Lam, OutFocus Productions, Hong Kong, 2016, HD video, colour, 76 mins. 27. Historically, the Pro-establishment camp was called the political left because of its affiliation with the CPC, whereas the Pro-democracy camp was called the political right because of its former association with the colonial government. 28. Government of the People’s Republic of China, ‘Annex II: Method for the formation of the Legislative Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and its voting procedures’, in The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, 4 April 1990, http://www.basiclaw.gov.hk/en/basiclaw​text/annex_2.html, accessed 19 July 2018; Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, Proclamation of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (Eleventh National People’s Congress) No. 15, (trans.) Department of Justice, Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Beijing, 28 August 2010; Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, Amendment to Annex II to the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China concerning the method for the formation of the Legislative Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and its voting procedures, (trans.) Department of Justice, Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Beijing, 28 August 2010.

­

no te s 305 29. Government of the People’s Republic of China, ‘Annex I’, The Basic Law. 30. Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2016: Election Results for the U.S. President, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives (Washington, DC: Federal Election Commission, December 2017), p. 5. 31. House of Commons, General Election 2017: Results and Analysis (London: House of Commons Library, 2017), p. 54. 32. Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, pp. 26–51; see also, Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 175–247. 33. Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2016, p. 5. 34. Time staff, ‘Here’s Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech’, Time, 16 June 2015, http://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announce​ ment-speech/, accessed 20 July 2018. 35. Thomas Chatterton Williams, ‘The French origins of “You will not replace us”: The European thinkers behind the white-nationalist rallying cry’, The New Yorker, 4 December 2017, archived https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2017/12/04/the-french-origins-of-you-will-not-replace-us, accessed 20 July 2018. 36. Renaud Camus, Le Grand remplacement. Introduction au remplacisme global (Plieux: Chez l’auteur, 2016). For further references, see Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, Manifesto for a European Renaissance (London: Arktos, 2012); see also, Benoist, View from the Right: A Critical Anthology of Contemporary Ideas. Volume 1: Heritage and Foundation (London: Arktos, 2017). 37. Olga V. Solovieva, Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018), pp. 205–54. 38. ‘Xianshi tuanjie liliang zhichi zhengqu minzhu ziyou quanqiu erbaiwan Huaren dayouxing shengyuan xueyun Xianggang chuang yibaiwushiwanren youxing jilu’ [‘Hinsi tyungit likloeng zici zangceoi manzyu zijau cyunkau jibaakmaan Waajan daaijauhang singjyun Hokwan Hoenggong cong jatbaakngsapmaanjan jauhang geiluk’ or To demonstrate the power of our unity in our support of those who fight for democracy and freedom; two million people of Chinese descent around the world marched to show their support for the student movement; Hong Kongers broke our records by having 1.5 million participants], Huaqiao ribao [Wah Kiu Yat Po], 29 May 1989, p. 1. 39. Ng Kang-chung, Tony Cheung, Kimmy Chung, Emily Tsang and Cat Schuknecht, ‘Tiananmen vigil draws lowest turnout since 2008’, South China Morning Post, 4 June 2017, https://www.scmp.com/news/hongkong/politics/article/2096846/sorrowful-atmosphere-victoria-park-hong​ kongers-gather-annual, accessed 20 July 2018. 40. For references to these marches, see the ‘July 1 march’ portal in South China Morning Post, ongoingly updated, https://www.scmp.com/topics/ july 1-march, accessed 20 July 2018.

306

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

41. ‘Hong Kong: Democracy rally “draws” 510,000 protesters’, BBC News, 2 July 2014, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-28102644, accessed 20 July 2018. 42. Hong Kong SAR Police, Public order event statistics, in Hong Kong Police Force, last updated July 2018, https://www.police.gov.hk/ppp_ en/09_sta​tistics/poes.html, accessed 20 July 2018. The data from 2005 to 2014 are cited in Lee and Chan, Media and Protest Logics in the Digital Era, p. 27. 43. Lee and Chan, pp. 28–31. 44. The People’s Republic of China, Article 45, The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, 4 April 1990, http://www.basiclaw.gov.hk/en/basiclawtext/chapter_4.html, accessed 25 July 2018. 45. Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, The SixMonthly Report on Hong Kong: July 1 to December 31, 2014, Parliament, Westminster, February 2015, p. 5. 46. Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, p. 3. 47. Lam and Cheung, ‘The boycott begins’. 48. Lin Yi, ‘Fencing off Civic Square enrages Hong Kongers’, The Epoch Times, 23 July 2014, https://www.theepochtimes.com/fencing-off-civic-squareenrages-hong-kongers_811619.html, accessed 25 July 2018. 49. Elizabeth Barber and Charlie Campbell, ‘Pro-democracy students storm government square in Hong Kong’, Time, 27 September 2014, http://time. com/3434099/protest-arrested-hong-kong-democracy-students-occupycentral/, accessed 18 July 2018. 50. Kong Tsung-gan, Umbrella: A Political Tale from Hong Kong (United States [no specific location]: Pema Press, 2017), pp. 40–1. 51. Their names are undisclosed for privacy reasons. 52. Tania Branigan, ‘Tens of thousands join pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong’, The Guardian, 28 September 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2014/sep/28/hong-kong-occupy-central-teargas-police-elec​torallimits, 22 July 2018. 53. ‘Police used minimum force’, Law and Order, Information Services Department, Hong Kong, 29 September 2014, http://www.news.gov. hk/en/categories/law_order/html/2014/09/20140929_153954.shtml, accessed 14 July 2018. 54. A summary of the events that took place between the evening of September 28, 2014 and the morning of the 29th can be seen in ‘Occupy Central – The first night: Full report as events unfolded’, South China Morning Post, 28–29 September 2015, https://www.scmp.com/article/1603331/live-tear-gasfired-protesters-students-demand-cy-leungs-resignation, accessed 14 July 2018. 55. ‘Police used minimum force.’

­

no te s 307

56. See the cover of Time, 1 October 2014, http://time.com/3453736/hongkong-stands-up/, accessed 14 July 2018. 57. Kong, Umbrella, pp. 222–31. 58. Lizzie Dearden, ‘Hong Kong protests: Occupy movement could be the most polite demonstration ever’, The Independent, 29 September 2014, https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/hong-kong-protests-occupymo​vement-could-be-the-most-polite-demonstration-ever-9761849.html, accessed 25 July 2018; Chris Buckley and Austin Ramzy, ‘Hong Kong protests are leaderless but orderly’, The New York Times, 30 September 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/01/world/asia/in-hong-kong-cleanand-polite-but-a-protest-nonetheless.html, accessed 25 July 2018. 59. Staff reporters, ‘Leung Chun-ying refuses to quit but offers talks with students’, South China Morning Post, 3 October 2014, https://www.scmp. com/news/hong-kong/article/1608471/leung-chun-ying-refuses-quitoffers-talks-students, accessed 25 July 2018. 60. Katy Lee, ‘Hong Kong protesters call off talks after coming under assault from pro-Beijing crowds’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 October 2014, https://www.smh.com.au/world/hong-kong-protesters-call-off-talksafter-coming-under-assault-from-probeijing-crowds-20141004-10q6q2. html, accessed 25 July 2018. 61. Elizabeth Barber, ‘Hong Kong student protesters call for huge rally after government scraps talks’, Time, 9 October 2014, http://time.com/3484740/ occupy-central-hong-kong-government-student-talks-canceled/, accessed 25 July 2018. 62. The Professional Commons and Hong Kong In-Media, 2014–2015 Report on Police Violence in the Umbrella Movement, State Violence Database Project, Hong Kong, 2016. 63. The Professional Commons and Hong Kong In-Media, 2014–2015 Report on Police Violence in the Umbrella Movement. 64. ‘Occupy Central – The debate: Full coverage of student-government talks’, South China Morning Post, 21 October 2014, https://www.scmp.com/ news/hong-kong/article/1621141/live-hong-kong-students-prepare-me​ et-​gov​ernment-officials-democracy, 25 July 2018. 65. Kong, Umbrella, pp. 368–410. 66. Staff reporters, ‘Hong Kong reform package rejected as pro-Beijing camp walk out in “miscommunication” ’, South China Morning Post, 18 June 2015, https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/1823398/ hong-kong-political-reform-package-voted-down-legco-leaving, accessed 25 July 2018. 67. Ying-ho Kwong, ‘The growth of “localism” in Hong Kong: A new path for democracy movement?’, China Perspectives, no. 3 (2016): pp. 64–7. 68. Austin Ramzy, ‘Protesters and police clash at Lunar New Year festivities in  Hong Kong’, The New York Times, 8 February 2016, https://www.

308

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

nytimes.com/2016/02/09/world/asia/protesters-and-police-clash-atlunar-new-year-festivities-in-hong-kong.html, accessed 25 July 2018. 69. Ben Pang, ‘Independence advocate Edward Leung Tin-kei disqualified from September’s Legislative Council elections’, Young Post, 2 August 2016, https://yp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/104026/independ​enceadvocate-edward-leung-tin-kei-disqualified-september’s, accessed 25 July 2018; link no longer extant. 70. Tom Phillips, ‘Rebel Hong Kong politicians defy China at chaotic swearingin ceremony’, The Guardian, 12 October 2016, https://www.theguardian. com/world/2016/oct/12/hong-kong-pro-democracy-oath-snub-china, accessed 25 July 2018. 71. Michael Forsythe, ‘Hong Kong Court bars 2 Pro-independence politicians from office’, The New York Times, 15 November 2016, https://www. nytimes.com/2016/11/16/world/asia/china-hong-kong-sixtus-leung-yau -wai-ching-oath.html, accessed 25 July 2018. 72. Karen Cheung, ‘Localist Edward Leung sentenced to six years in jail over Mong Kok unrest participation’, Hong Kong Free Press, 11 June 2018, https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/06/11/localist-edward-leungsentenced-six-years-jail-mong-kok-unrest-participation/, accessed 25 July 2018. 73. See, for example, Brian Winston, ‘The documentary film as scientific inscription’, in Theorizing Documentary, (ed.) Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 37–57. 74. See Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, (trans.) Kevin O’Brien, (ed.) Anette Michaelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 75. See John Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, (ed.) Forsyth Hardy (Berkeley: University of California, 1966); Iain Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (New York: Routledge, 1990); Jean Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography, (trans.) Steven Feld (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); D. A. Pennebaker, D. A. Pennebaker: Interviews, (eds) Keith Beattie and Trent Griffiths (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015). 76. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 225–64. 77. Bazin, ‘Ontologie de l’image photographique’ [‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’, 1945], in Qu’est que le cinéma? (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1958), p. 1:14. This idea is based on Sartre, L’Imaginaire, p. 44. 78. Trinh Minh-ha, ‘The totalizing quest for meaning’, in Theorizing Documentary, (ed.) Renov, pp. 90–107. 79. ‘Guowuyuan fayanren Yuan Mu juxing jizhe zhaodaihui: Jielu fangeming baoluan zhenxiang’ [Spokesperson of State Council Yuan Mu hosted press conference: Revealed the truth of anti-revolutionary riots], Renmin ribao [People’s Daily], 6 June 1989, pp. 1–2.

­

no te s 309 80. ‘Guowuyuan fayanren Yuan Mu juxing jizhe zhaodaihui: Jielu fangeming baoluan zhenxiang’, p. 2. 81. For a discussion of this issue, see, for example, Adam Gabbat, ‘How Trump’s “fake news” gave authoritarian leaders a new weapon’, The Guardian, 25 January 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/25/howtrumps-fake-news-gave-authoritarian-leaders-a-new-weapon, accessed 29 July 2018. 82. The footage can be found in ‘Hong Kong’s TVB television station airs video of alleged police beating Occupy Central supporter’, South China Morning Post, 17 October 2014, https://www.scmp.com/video/hongkong/1616887/hong-kongs-tvb-television-station-airs-video-alleged-poli​ ce-beating-occupy, accessed 27 July 2018. 83. The recording is included in a collective documentary edited by Kempton Lam, Umbrella Revolution: History as Mirror Reflection, ideas Vacuum, 4 October 2015, posted on YouTube on 17 May 2016, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=fcvZrQiWBR0, accessed 20 July 2018. 84. Chris Lau, ‘Hong Kong court rules Ken Tsang arrest footage admissible as evidence in assault trial’, South China Morning Post, 28 June 2016, https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-crime/article/1982619/ hong-kong-court-rules-ken-tsang-arrest-footage-admissible, 27 June 2018. 85. For instance, it was a major debate after the screening of Umbrella Movement documentaries during the Chinese Visual Festival in May 2016. 86. Dai Jinhua, Yinxing shuxie: 90 niandai de Zhongguo wenhua yanjiu [Invisible writing: Chinese cultural studies in the 1990s] (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1999), p. 291, quoted in Robinson, Independent Chinese Documentary, p. 29. 87. Robinson, p. 29. In this passage, Robinson cites Wu Wenguang, ‘Xianchang: He jilu fangshi youguan de shu’ [Xianchang: A book about documentary], in Xianchang [Document 1], (ed.) Wu Wenguang (Tianjin: Tianjin shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2000), p. 274; Qiu Zhijie, ‘Xuyan: Zhongyaode shi xianchang’ [Preface: The scene is what’s important], in Zhongyaode shi xianchang [The scene is what’s important] (Beijing: Renmin daxue chubanshe, 2003), p. 2; Wu Wenguang, Jingtou xiang ziji de yanjing yiyang [The camera is like my eye] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2001), p. 215; Zhang Zhen, ‘Rebel without a cause? China’s new urban generation and postsocialist filmmaking’, in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, (ed.) Zhang Zhen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 20. 88. See Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (London: BFI, 1995). 89. Conversation with Tammy Cheung. 90. Kong, Umbrella, p. 2; Louisa Kim, The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

310

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

91. His writing can be found on his author page at the Hong Kong Free Press, ongoing, https://www.hongkongfp.com/author/ktg/, accessed 29 July 2018. 92. Conversation with Matthew Torne, De Hems Dutch Bar, Chinatown, London, 18 November 2014. 93. ‘National education subject to be delayed’, South China Morning Post, 26 January 2012, https://www.scmp.com/article/990926/national-educa​tionsubject-be-delayed, accessed 29 July 2018. 94. See ‘Screenings’, in Lessons in Dissent, updated in 2015, http://www.les​ sonsindissentmovie.com/screenings.html, accessed 26 July 2018. 95. See ‘Buy the DVD’ in Lessons in Dissent, updated in 2015, http://www. lessonsindissentmovie.com/buy-dvd.html, accessed 26 July 2018; ‘Watch online’ in Lessons in Dissent, updated in 2015, http://www.lessonsindis​sentmovie.com/watch-online.html, accessed 26 July 2018. 96. Cheung, ‘Involuntarily transnational film distribution’. 97. Sartre, L’Imaginaire, p. 44. 98. Sartre, p. 44. 99. Q&A session after ‘Umbrella Through the Lens’ screening, Chinese Visual Festival, Lucas Lecture Theatre, King’s College London, 16 May 2016. 100. Sartre, p. 44. 101. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 44; Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, (trans.) Arthur Mitchell (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1998 [1907]); Matter and Memory, (trans) N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (1988; repr., New York: Zone Books, 2002 [1910]). 102. Deleuze, p. 44; Bergson. 103. This film is available online in Lianain Films, 18 January 2015, http:// www.lianainfilms.com/2015/01/hong-kong-occupy-central/, accessed 18 July 2018. James Leong re-edited the first part of the programme into Umbrella Diaries: The First Umbrella [2018]. 104. A rough cut of this film was shown on 16 May 2016 at the Chinese Visual Festival. See the programme note of the screening. 105. Lam, Umbrella Revolution. 106. The transcript and video recording of the meeting can be accessed in ‘Oral evidence: The UK’s relations with Hong Kong: 30 years after the Joint Declaration’, HC 649, Parliament, Westminster, Tuesday, 16 December  2014, http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeee​ vidence.svc/evidencedocument/foreign-affairs-committee/the-uks-relat​ ions-with-hong-kong-30-years-after-the-joint-declaration/oral/16816. html, accessed 29 July 2018. 107. Robert Frost, ‘The Road Not Taken’, in Frost, Mountain Interval (1916; repr., New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1931), pp. 8–9. 108. These objectives can be found on their website, ongoing, https://www. demosisto.hk, accessed 28 July 2018. 109. Kwong, ‘The growth of “localism” in Hong Kong’, pp. 64–7. 110. Q&A after the Umbrella movement screening, 16 May 2016.

­

no te s 311

111. Ho Wing-ning, ‘Luanshi beiwang zhenjing Riben pingshen’ [‘Can Ziwun zanging Jatbun pingsam’ or Chan Tze-woon shocked the Japanese jury], Apple Daily, 25 October 2017, https://hk.entertainment.appledaily.com/ entertainment/daily/article/20171025/20193267, accessed 29 July 2018. 112. For the full letter, see, Albert Chen, ‘Albert Chen’s letter to his students (in Chinese)’, in HKU Legal Scholarship Blog, 25 October 2014, http:// researchblog.law.hku.hk/2014/10/albert-chens-letter-to-his-students-in. html, accessed 28 July 2018. 113. This English translation is based largely on the English subtitles of the film. 114. The concept of the purloined letter comes from Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on “The purloined letter” ’, (trans.) Jeffrey Mehlman, in The Purloined Poe, (eds) John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 28–54 and 270–83. 115. Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, (trans.) George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985 [1922]), pp. 7, 10 and 12–13. 116. See Yiu-chung Wong, ‘Localism in Hong Kong: Its origins, develop ment and prospect’, Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal 3, no. 2 ( July–August 2017): 617–55. 117. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; repr., London: Verso, 2006). 118. Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (Paris: Presses-Pocket, 1992 [1882]). 119. Horace Chin, Xianggang chengbang lun [Hoenggong singbong leon or On Hong Kong as a city-state] (Hong Kong: Enrich Culture, 2011). 120. Chin; see also, Hong Kong University Student Union (eds), Xianggang minzu lun [Hoenggong manzuk leon or On Hong Kong as a nation-state] (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Student Union, 2014). 121. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); see also, Negri, Reflections on Empire, (trans.) Ed Emery (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), pp. 20–1.

The Body of Extraterritoriality 1. I borrow the term ‘floating island’ from Chan Tze-woon’s Yellowing. 2. See, Yin Shun, Zhongguan lunsong jiangji [Lectures on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā] (1952; repr., Taipei: Zhengwen chubanshe, 2014). 3. Spivak, ‘Translator’s preface’, p. xiv; see also, Derrida, p. 62. 4. Agamben, The Man Without Content, (trans.) George Albert (Stanford: Stanford University, 1999 [1994]). 5. Lam, ‘Jau gwokhing soenghei dik Honjyu dinjing, fongjin dingjing’, p. 10. 6. This section and the next contain summaries of the introduction and the previous chapters. For references, please refer to those sections in this book.

312

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

7. Shih, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–16; Shih, ‘Against diaspora’, pp. 25–42. 8. Pasolini, ‘Cinema of Poetry’, 1:542–57. 9. Abbas, Hong Kong, pp. 5–27. 10. This problem was discussed by Japanese filmmaker Itami Mansaku (1900– 46). See Itami, Itami Mansaku essei-shū [Collected essays of Itami Mansaku], (ed.) Öe Kenzaburo (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1971). 11. Ōshima Nagisa, Écrits (1956–1978). Dissolution et jaillissement, (trans.) JeanPaul Le Pape (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). 12. Hirano Kyōko, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: The Japanese Cinema under American Occupation, 1945–1952 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1992). Two of the most famous examples are Nijū-shi no Hitomi [Twenty-Four Eyes, 1952] by Kinoshita Keisuke (1992–8), which tells the story of schoolteacher Ōishi Hisako (Takamine Hideko, 1924–2010), who develops a strong bond with her twelve first-grade pupils during the first year of her teaching in 1928. But as she revisits these students in 1946, she finds their dreams, physical bodies and lives have been shattered by the wars. Meanwhile, in Biruma no tategoto [The Burmese Harp, 1956] by Ichikawa Kon (1915–2008), Japanese private Mizushima (Yasui Shōjī, 1928–2014) is a harp player whose music brings his brigade and their British counterparts together to sing ‘Home! Sweet Home!’ when the two sides are at the verge of confrontation. After the Pacific War (1941–5), he becomes a Buddhist priest. As he stumbles across fields of bodies of Japanese soldiers, he vows to travel across the country to bury all Japanese victims. 13. Evans Chan, ‘Cung hwaaigau zi jim dou mougan zi jyun’, pp. 22–6 and 29. 14. Wang Hui, ‘Zhengzhi yu daode jiqi zhihuan de mimi: Xie Jin dianying fenxi’ [Politics, ethics and the secret of their interchangeability: An analysis of Xie Jin’s cinema], in Bainian Zhongguo dianying lilun wenxuan, (ed.) Ding, 2:353–78. 15. McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, pp. 28–55. 16. ‘Minzhu fazhi, gongping zhengyi, chengxin youai, chongman huoli, anding youxu, ren yu ziran hexie xiangchu’; ‘Shiliujie Zhongquanhui kaimu; zhuozhong yanjiu goujian hexie shehui wenti’; Fan, ‘Poetics of failure’, p. 59. 17. Zhao, ‘Rethinking empire from the Chinese concept “All-under-Heaven” (Tianxia)’, pp. 22–30. See also, Fan, p. 59. 18. Yan Xuetong, ‘Xunzi’s thoughts on international politics and their implications’, in China Orders the World, (ed.) Callahan and Barabantseva, pp. 54–90. See also, Fan, p. 59. 19. Xunzi: The Complete Text, (trans.) Eric Hutton (2014; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 248. 20. Agamben, Homo Sacer. 21. See Agamben, The Open; Arendt, The Human Condition. 22. See Andrew Mitchell and Peter Trawny (eds), Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: Responses to Anti-Semitism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

­

no te s 313

23. Tomonobu Imamichi, In Search of Wisdom: One Philosopher’s Journey, (trans.) Mary Foster (Tokyo: International House of Japan, 2004). 24. Lo, Cheng weishi lun jiangji, pp. 83–4. 25. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein unde Zeit, (trans) John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1962 [1926]), pp. 82–3. 26. Lo Shi-hin, Weishi fangyu [Introduction to Yogācāra Buddhism] (Hong Kong: The Dharmalaks.an.a Buddhist Institute, 2008), pp. 128–31. 27. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, (trans) William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 92–144; discussed in Agamben, The Open, pp. 57–62. 28. Tomonobu, In Search of Wisdom. See also, Fok To-fui, Liuzu tanjing [The platform sutra of the Sixth Patriarch] (Hong Kong: The Dharmashtiti Press, 2015). 29. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 22–78. 30. Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, pp. 24–65. 31. Yang Bojun, Lunyu yizhu [The Analects with modern translations and annotations] (1958; repr., Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2010), p. 164, §15.24. 32. Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux; Agamben, The Open, pp. 90–2. 33. Ying Liang, ‘Yu dianying wuguan, yu ziyou xiangguan’ [Not related to the cinema; it is related to freedom], 14 May 2012, https://www.facebook. com/photo.php?fbid=10150768282276642&set=a.10150292506671642.323 636.667186641&type=1&theater, accessed 10 April 2018. I discuss this in ‘Rebuilding humanity: Gaze of the exile and Chinese independent cinema’, in Global East Asian Cinema: Abjection and Agency, (ed.) Seung-hoon Jeong, Studies in the Humanities 44, nos 1–2 and 45, nos 1–2 (2017–18): pp. 159–60. 34. Ying, ‘Yu dianying wuguan’. 35. Alex W. Palmer, ‘The case of Hong Kong’s missing booksellers’, The New York Times Magazine, 3 April 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/ magazine/the-case-of-hong-kongs-missing-booksellers.html, accessed 4 August 2018. 36. Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (2000; repr., London: Granta Books, 2001), p. 176. 37. Zeng Jinyan, ‘Daodu: Dang women tanlun duli dianying shi women tanlun shenme’ [Foreword: When we discuss independent cinema, what do we really discuss?], in Wen Hai, Fangzhu de ningshi, p. 15; emphasis in the original. 38. Wen Hai, ‘Determined break – The aftermath’, (trans.) Victor Fan, unpublished presentation at ‘The future of Chinese independent cinema’ workshop, 4 May 2016, Chinese Visual Festival, London.

314

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

39. Wen Hai, ‘Determined break’, also quoted in Fan, ‘Rebuilding humanity’, pp. 156–7. 40. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, (trans.) Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 [1975]), pp. 16–27.

­

f il mo gr a p hy a nd v ide o g r a p h y 315

Filmography and Videography

Commercially Produced Feature Films * In Cantonese, originally shot on 35mm (colour) and produced in Hong Kong, unless otherwise stated. Au, Jevons, Frank Hui and Vicky Wong. Shuda zhaofeng [Syudaai ziufung or Trivisa]. Prods Johnnie To and Yau Nai-hoi. Media Asia Films, Milkyway Image and Hairun Pictures, with Beijing, 2016. D-Cinema. 97 minutes. Au, Jevons, Chow Kwun-wai, Ng Ka-leung, Wong Fei-pang and Kwok Zune. Shinian [Sapnin or Ten Years]. Prods Au, Frankie Chan, Andrew Choi, Andrew Kwan and Ng. Ten Years Studio, 109G Studio and Four Parts Production, 2015. D-Cinema. 104 minutes. Bu, Wancang. Mulan congjun [Hua Mo-lan or Mulan Joins the Army]. Mandarin. Prod. Chang San-kuen. Hsin Hwa, Shanghai, 1939. (B&W). 90 minutes (DVD). Chan, Gordan. Taoxue weilong 2 [Touhok wailing 2 or Fight Back to School 2]. Prod. Wong Jing. Win’s Movie Production, 1992. 101 minutes. Chan, Pei, Chiu Shu-sun, Ko Lei-hen, Lee Chi-ching, Nam Hoi Sap Sam Long and So Yee. Zuihou guantou [Zeoihau gwaantau or At this Critical Juncture]. Prods Chan, Chuk Ching-yin, Lo Duen, Ma Si-tsang, Sit Kok-sin and Tang Xiaodan. Huanan dianyingjie zhenzai xiehui (Waanaam dinjinggaai zanzoi hipwui or South China association of war relief), 1938. (B&W). Print lost. Chan, Peter. Toumingzhuang [Taumingzong or The Warlords]. Prods Chan and Andre Morgan. Media Asia Films, China Film Group and Morgan & Chan Films, with Beijing, 2007. 126 minutes. ——. Shiyue weicheng [Sapjyut waising or Bodyguards and Assassins]. Prods Chan and Huang Jianxin. We Pictures, Cinema Popular and Polybona Films, with Beijing, 2009. 139 minutes. Chang, Hsin-yen. Shaolinsi [The Shaolin Temple]. Mandarin. Prod. Liu Yat-yuen. Chung Yuen, 1982. 95 minutes. Chen, Kaige. Bawang bieji [Farewell My Concubine]. Mandarin. Prod. Hsü Feng. Beijing Film Studio, China Film Co-production Corporation, Maverick Picture Company and Tomson Films, with Beijing and Beverly Hills, 1993. 171 minutes. Cheung, Alex. Dianzhi bingbing [Dimzi bingbing or Cops and Robbers]. Prod. Teddy Robin. Pearl City, 1979. 95 minutes.

316

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Cheung, Mabel. Qiutian de tonghua [Cautin dik tungwaa or The Autumn’s Tale]. Prod. John Sham. D&B, 1987. 98 minutes. Chin, Chien. Jiajia huhu [Gaagaa wuwu or Mutual Understanding]. Prod. Chan Man. Sun Luen, 1954. (B&W). 123 minutes (VHS). Ching, Tony. Qiannü youhun [Sinneoi jauwan or A Chinese Ghost Story]. Prod. Tsui Hark. Cinema City, 1987. 96 minutes. Fang, Peilin. Sanxing banyue [Stars Moving Around the Moon]. Mandarin. Prod. Chang San-kuen. Yee Hwa, Shanghai, 1937. (B&W). 90 minutes. Print status unknown. Fung, Fung. Xilu Xiang [Sailou Coeng; The Kid]. Prod. Leung Biu. Datong, 1950. (B&W). 98 minutes. Godard, Jean-Luc. La Chinoise. French. Anouchka Films, Athos Films, Parc Film, Productions de la Guéville and Simar Films, Paris, 1967. 96 minutes. ——. Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle [Two or Three Things I Know about Her]. French. Prods Anatole Dauman and Raoul Lévy. Anouchka Films, Argos-Film, Les Films du Carrosse and Parc Film, Paris, 1967. 87 minutes (DVD). ——. Le Mépris [Contempt]. French, English, German and Italian. Prods Georges de Beauregard and Carlo Ponti. Compagnia Cinematografica Champion, Les Films Concordia and Rome Paris Films, Rome and Paris. 101 minutes. ——. Pierrot le fou. French. Prod. Georges de Beauregard. Films Georges de Beauregard, Paris, 1965. 111 minutes. ——. Week-End. French. Ascot Cineraid, Cinecidi, Comaico, Films Copernic and Lira Films, Paris and Rome, 1967. 106 minutes. He, Zhaozhang. Chang xiangsi [An All-Consuming Love]. Mandarin. Prod. Tse Bing-kwun. Huaxing, 1947. (B&W). 92 minutes (VHS). Heung, Jimmy and Wong Jing. Zhizun wushang [Zizyun mousoeng or Casino Raiders]. Prod. Heung. Win’s Movie Production, 1989. 125 minutes (DVD). Hui, Ann. Hu Yue de gushi [Wu Jyut dik gwusi or The Story of Woo Viet]. Prod. Teddy Robin. Pearl City, 1981. 92 minutes. ——. Touben nuhai [Tauban nouhoi or Boat People]. With Japanese. Prod. Hsia Moon. Blue Bird Motion Picture, 1982. 106 minutes. Hui, Michael. Guima shuangxing [Gwaimaa soengsing or Games Gamblers Play]. Prod. Raymond Chow. Golden Harvest, 1974. 109 minutes. ——. Tiancai yu baichi [Tincoi jyu baakci or The Last Message]. Prod. Raymond Chow. Golden Harvest, 1975. 98 minutes. Jin, Shan. Songhuajiang shang [Along the Sungari River]. Mandarin. Prod. Yuan Muzhi. Changchun Film Studio, Changchun, 1947. (B&W). 140 minutes. Ko, Clifton. Ji tong ya jiang [Gai tung ngaap gong or Chicken and Duck Talk]. Prod. Ronny Yu. Hui’s, 1988. 97 minutes. Lam, Dante. Honghai xingdong [Operation Red Sea]. Mandarin. Prod. Yu Dong. Bona Film Group, Emperor Motion Pictures, Film Fireworks Production and Star Dream Studio Media, with Beijing, 2018. IMAX 3D DMR. 142 minutes.

­

f il mo gr a p hy a nd v ide o g r a p h y 317 Lam, Ringo. Longhu fengyun [Lungfu fungwan or City on Fire]. Prod. Carl Mak. Cinema City, 1987. 123 minutes (DVD). Lau, Andrew and Alan Mak. Wujiandao [Mougaandou or Infernal Affairs]. Prod. Lau. Media Asia, 2002. 101 minutes. Lee, Sun-fung. Li Houzhu [Lei Hauzyu or Tragedy of the Poet King]. Prod. Pak Suet-sin. Sin Fung Ming Motion Picture, 1964. 133 minutes. Lee, Tit. Huoku youlan [Fowat yaulaan or Father Is Back]. Prod. Ng Cho-fan. Wah Luen, 1961. (B&W). 112 minutes. ——. Weilou chunxiao [Ngailau ceonhiu or In the Face of Demolition]. Prod. Chan Man. Union, 1953. (B&W). 121 minutes. Li, Han-hsiang. Chuilian tingzheng [Reign Behind a Curtain]. Mandarin. Prod. Zhao Wei. New Kwun Lun and China Film Co-production Corporation, with Beijing, 1983. 102 minutes. ——. Dongnuan [The Winter]. Mandarin. Prod. Wang Baolun. Grand Motion Picture, Taipei, 1969. 95 minutes (DVD). ——. Huoshao Yuanmingyuan [The Burning of the Imperial Palace]. Mandarin. Prod. Zhao Wei. New Kwun Lun and China Film Co-production Corporation, with Beijing, 1983. 88 minutes. ——. Poxiao shifen [At Dawn]. Mandarin. Prod. Wang Baolun. Grand Motion Picture, Taipei, 1968. 92 minutes (VHS). Lo, Duen. Cihen mianmian wu jueqi [Cihan minmin moujyutkei or Everlasting Regret]. Prod. Cheung Ying. Daqun, 1948. (B&W). 110 minutes (VHS). ——. Shihao fengbo [Saphou fungbo or Typhoon Signal No. 10]. Prod. Liu Yatyuen. Sun Luen, 1959. (B&W). 103 minutes (VHS). Lucas, George. Star Wars (franchise). LucasFilm, San Francisco, 1977–present. Lung, Kong Patrick. Boyin wangzi [Bojam wongzi or Prince of Broadcasters]. Prod. Ho Kian-ngiap. Sun Ngee, 1966. (B&W). 118 minutes (VHS). ——. Feinü zhengzhuan [Feineoi zingzyun or Teddy Girls]. Prod. Lee Kia-in. Sun Ngee, 1969. 112 minutes (VHS). ——. Yingxiong bense [ Jinghung bunsik or The Story of a Discharged Prisoner]. Prod. Ho Kian-ngiap. Sun Ngee, 1967. (B&W). 118 minutes. Ng, Wui. Baijia zai [Baaigaa zai or The Prodigal Son]. Prod. Chan Man. Sun Luen, 1952. (B&W). 108 minutes (VHS). ——. Leiyu [Leoijyu or Thunderstorm]. Prod. Au Ming-kai. Overseas Chinese Films, 1957. (B&W). 116 minutes (VCD). Schlesinger, John. Midnight Cowboy. English. Prod. Jerome Hellman. Jerome Hellman Productions and Florin Productions. New York and Los Angeles, 1969. 113 minutes. Siu, Stanley. Xiexi tangrenjie [Hyutsai tongjangaai or New York Chinatown]. Prod. Rover Tang. Wing-Scope, 1982. 90 minutes (VHS). Tam, Patrick. Aisha [Ngoisaat or Love Massacre]. Prod. Patrick Lung Kong. David & David, 1981. 88 minutes (HD). ——. Liehuo qingchun [Litfo cingceon or Nomad ]. With Japanese. Prod. Jeff Lau. Century Motion Picture, 1982. 87 minutes (DVD).

318

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

——. Mingjian [Minggim or The Sword]. Prod. Raymond Chow. Golden Harvest, 1980. 94 minutes (DVD). Tanaka, Shiego. Hong Kong kōryaku [Xianggang gonglue, Hoenggong gungloek, or Invasion of Hong Kong]. With Japanese. Prod. Nagata Masaichi. Daiei, Kyoto, 1942. (B&W). Only ten minutes of the print survive. To, Johnnie. Baxing baoxi [Baatsing bouhei or Eighth Happiness]. Prod. Raymond Wong. Cinema City, 1988. 91 minutes. ——. Duzhan [Dukzin or Drug War]. With Mandarin. Prods To and Wai Ka-fai. Beijing Huarun Pictures and Milkyway Image, with Beijing, 2013. DCP. 106 minutes. ——. Zhenxin yingxiong [Zansam jinghung or A Hero Never Dies]. Prods To and Wai. Milkyway Image and Film City, 1998. 86 minutes. ——. Zhizun wushang II zhi Yongba tianxia [Zizyun mousoeng II zi Wingbaa tinhaa or Casino Raiders II ]. Prod. Jimmy Heung. Win’s Movie Productions and Paka Hill Productions, 1991. 91 minutes. To, Johnnie and Wai Ka-fai. Quanzhi shashou [Cyunzik saatsau or Fulltime Killer]. With Mandarin, English and Japanese. Prods Andy Lau, To and Wai. Teamwork Motion Pictures and Milkyway Image, 2001. 102 minutes. ——. Shentan [Santaam or Mad Detective]. Prods To and Wai. Milkyway Image and One Hundred Years of Film, 2007. 89 minutes. Tsai, Chu-sang. Gudao tiantang [Orphan Island Paradise]. Mandarin. Prod. Luo Jingyu. The Grandland Motion Picture Corporation, 1939. (B&W). 100 minutes (VHS). Tsang, Eric. Zuijia paidang [Zeoigaai paakdong or Aces Go Places]. Prods Carl Mak and Dean Shek. Cinema City, 1982. 93 minutes. Tsui, Hark. Daoma dan [Doumaa daan or Peking Opera Blues]. Prod. Tsui. Film Workshop, 1986. 117 minutes. Tsui, Hark, Yuen Bun and Sammo Hung. Huang Feihong [Wong Fei-hung or Once Upon a Time in China] (series). With Mandarin. Prods Raymond Chow, Ng See-Yuen, Dick Tso and Tsui. Golden Harvest and Film Workshop, 1991–7. 657 minutes. Weir, Peter. Dead Poets Society. English. Prods Steven Haft, Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas. Touchstone Pictures and Silver Screen Partners IV, Burbank, CA, 1989. 128 minutes. Wong, Jing. Du shen [Dou san or God of Gamblers]. Prod. Jimmy Heung. Win’s Movie Production, 1989. 126 minutes. ——. Jingzhuang zhuinüzai [Zingzong zeoineoizai or The Romancing Star]. Prod. Cheung Kwok-chung. Movie Impact, 1987. 102 minutes. ——. Luding ji [Lukding gei or Royal Tramp]. Prod. Jimmy Heung. Win’s Movie Production, 1992. 110 minutes. Wong, Kar-wai. Afei zhengzhuan [Afei zingzyun or Days of Being Wild ]. With Shanghainese. Prod. Alan Tang. In-Gear Film Production, 1990. 90 minutes. Wong, Wai-yat. Zhujiang lei [Zyugong leoi or Dawn Must Come]. Prod. Tsai Chusang. Nanguo Film Company, 1950. (B&W). 109 minutes (VHS).

­

f il mo gr a p hy a nd v ide o g r a p h y 319

Woo, John. Chibi [Cekbik or Red Cliff]. Mandarin. Prods Terence Chang, Han Sanping and Woo. Beijing Film Studio, China Film Group and Lion Rock Productions, with Beijing, 2008–9. 288 minutes. ——. Dinühua [Daineoifaa or Princess Chang Ping]. Prod. Louis Sit. Golden Phoenix, 1976. 102 minutes (VHS). ——. Yingxiong bense [  Jinghung bunsik or A Better Tomorrow]. Prod. Tsui Hark. Cinema City, 1986. 95 minutes. ——. Yingxiong bense II [  Jinghung bunsik II or A Better Tomorrow II ]. Prod. Tsui Hark. Cinema City and Film Workshop, 1986. 104 minutes. Yim, Ho. Sishui liunian [Ciseoi launin or Homecoming]. Prod. Hsia Moon. Blue Bird Motion Picture, 1984. 120 minutes. Zhang, Yimou. Dahong denglong gaogaogua [Raise the Red Lantern]. Mandarin. Prods Chiu Fu-sheng, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Zhang Wenze. China Film Co-Production Corporation, Century Communications, ERA International, and Salon Films, with Taipei and Beijing, 1991. 125 minutes. ——. Yingxiong [Hero]. Mandarin. Prods Zhang Weiping and Jiang Zhiqiang. Beijing New Picture Film, China Film Co-production Corporation, Elite Group Entertainment, Sil-Metropole and Zhang Yimou Studio, with Beijing, 2002. 107 minutes.

Independent Films and Videos *In colour, unless otherwise stated. Ai, Weiwei. Human Flow. English. Prods Ai, Heino Deckert and Yap Chin-chin. AC Films and Participant Media, Perth and Los Angeles, 2017. D-Cinema. 140 minutes. Ai, Xiaoming. Jiabiangou jishi [  Jiabiangou Elegy]. Mandarin. Prod. Ai. Beijing, 2017. HD. 210 minutes. Chan, Evans. Raise the Umbrella. English and Cantonese. Prod. Chan. Hong Kong, 2016. HD. 119 minutes. Chan, Nate. Do You Hear the Women Sing? Cantonese. Prod. Chan. Hong Kong Christian Council Gender Justice Group, Hong Kong. HD. 28 minutes. Chan, Tze-woon. Luanshi beiwang [Lyunsai beimong or Yellowing]. Cantonese. Prods Chan and Peter Yam. Hong Kong. HD. 127 minutes. Chiu, Derek. Zhongying jie yihao [Zungjing gaai jathou or No. 1 Chung Ying Street]. Prod. Chiu. Boundary Film Production, Hong Kong, 2017. D-Cinema (B&W). 120 minutes. Fung, May. She Said Why Me. Silent. Videotage, Hong Kong, 1989. Original format unknown. 8 minutes (HD). Fung, Richard. Orientations. English. Toronto, 1986. Betacam. 56 minutes (DVD). ——. Re:Orientations. English. Toronto, 2016. HD. 68 minutes. Guo, Xizhi. Gongchang qingnian [Factory Youth]. Cantonese, Hakka and Mandarin. Prod. Guo. Guangzhou, 2016. HD. 196 minutes.

320

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Han, Guang. Wangming [Outside the Great Wall]. Mandarin. Prod. Tetsujiro Yamagami. Japan, 2010. HD. 133 minutes. Ho, Fan. Xizuo zhi yi [Zaapzok zi jat or Assignment, Part One]. Silent. Hong Kong, 1969. 16mm (B&W). 39 minutes (VHS). Kwan Pun-leung. Project No. 9046. Cantonese. Videotage, Hong Kong, 1990. S-VHS. 8 minutes. Lam, Nora. Dihou tiangao [Deihau tingou or Lost in the Fumes]. Cantonese. Prods Vincent Chui and Peter Yam. OutFocus Productions, Hong Kong. HD. 93 minutes. ——. Wangjiao heiye [Wonggok haakye or Midnight in Mongkok]. Cantonese. Prod. Lam. Campus TV, Hong Kong University Students’ Union, Hong Kong, 2014. HD. 20 minutes. Lam, Nora and Samuel Wong. Weijing zhi lu [Meiging zi lou or Road Not Taken]. Cantonese. OutFocus Productions, Hong Kong, 2016. HD. 76 minutes. Law, Kar. Qishi [Hatsik or Beggar]. Silent. Hong Kong, 1970. 16mm (B&W). 10 minutes (Digibeta). ——. Quanxian [Cyunsin or Entirely]. Silent. Hong Kong, 1969. 16mm (B&W). 10 minutes (VHS). Ma, Li. Chou [Inmates]. Mandarin and topolects. Prod. Ma. Ma Li Studio, Hong Kong. DCP (colour and B&W). 287 minutes. Nguyen, Tan Hoang. Seven Steps to Sticky Heaven. English. United States, 1996. VHS. 24 minutes. Pau, Ellen. Drained II. Music only. Videotage, Hong Kong, 1989. V8 and Betamax. 6 minutes. ——. Song of the Goddess. Music only. Videotage, Hong Kong, 1992. Original format unknown. 7 minutes (HD). Pau, Ellen, Wong Chi-fai and Yau Ching. Here’s Looking at You Kid. Cantonese. Videotage, Hong Kong, 1990. Original format unknown. 5 minutes (HD). Rong, Guangrong. Haizi bujupa siwang dan haipa mogui [Children are not Afraid of Death, Children are Afraid of Ghosts]. Prods Chen Hua and Ambra Corinti. Zajia Lab, Beijing, 2017. HD. 85 minutes. Shek, Kei. Sijie [Seigit or Dead Knot]. Silent. Hong Kong, 1969. 16mm (B&W). 16 minutes (VHS). Tang, Shu-hsuen. Dong furen [The Arch]. Mandarin. Prod. Tang. Film Dynasty, Hong Kong, 1970. 35mm (B&W). 90 minutes (Digibeta). ——. Zaijian Zhongguo [China Behind ]. Mandarin. Prod. Chen Kuo-liang and Shao Hsin-ming. Hong Kong, 1974. Released D&B Films, 1987. 35mm. 110 minutes (VHS). Torne, Matthew. Weigoucheng [Meigaucing or Lessons in Dissent]. Cantonese. Prod. Wong-Li Ping-kong. Torne Films, Hong Kong, 2014. HD. 97 minutes. Wang, Jiuliang. Suliao wangguo [Plastic China]. Mandarin. Prod. Chang Chaowei. CNEX, Beijing, 2016. HD. 82 minutes. Wen Hai (Huang). Wo’men [We]. Mandarin and topolects. Prod. Wen Hai. Guangzhou and Hong Kong, 2008. HD. 102 minutes.

­

f il mo gr a p hy a nd v ide o g r a p h y 321

——. Xiongnian zhi pan [We the Workers]. Mandarin and topolects. Prods Louisa Wei and Zeng Jinyan. Hong Kong, 2017. HD. 174 minutes. Xu, Xing. Changjiang [A Yangtze Landscape]. Mandarin and topolects. Prods Xu Feixue, Lu Zhixin and Zhang Jun. Beijing, 2017. HD (B&W). 156 minutes. Yau, Ching. Suet-sin’s Sisters. Music only. Videotage, Hong Kong, 1999. DV. 8 minutes (HD). ——. Video Letters 1–3. Cantonese. Videotage, Hong Kong, 1994. U-matic. 12 minutes (HD). Ying, Liang. Mama de kougong [I Have Nothing to Say]. Mandarin. Prod. Tseng Wen-chen. 25 Minutes Film Studio, Protocol and Shine Pictures, Kaohsiung and Hong Kong, 2017. HD (B&W). 107 minutes. ——. Wo haiyou hua yao shuo [When Night Falls]. Mandarin. Prods Peng Shan and Xu Qianchun. Jeonju International Film Festival, Hong Kong with Jeonju, 2012. HD. 70 minutes. ——. Ziyou xing [A Family Tour]. Mandarin. Prods Jeremy Chua and Tseng Wenchen. 90 Minutes Film Studio, Protocol and Shine Pictures, Kaohsiung and Hong Kong, 2018. HD. 107 minutes. Yung, Danny and Jim Shum. Videotable. Cantonese. Videotage, Hong Kong, 1984. Betamax. 10 minutes. Zhao, Liang. Beixi moshou [Behemoth]. Mandarin and topolects. Prod. Sylvie Blum. Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, Paris and Beijing, 2015. DCP. 95 minutes.

Television *In Cantonese, originally shot on 16mm (U-matic; colour) and produced in Hong Kong, unless otherwise stated. Chung, King-fai (prod.). Da zhangfu [Daai zoengfu or Big Men]. Rediffusion (RTV), premiered 1 July 1977. 8 episodes. 45 minutes each. Hui, Ann (dir.). ‘Laike’ [‘Loihaak’ or ‘The Boy from Vietnam’]. Shizishan xia [Sizisaan haa or Below the Lion Rock]. With Vietnamese. Prod. Cheung Manyee. Radio-Television Hong Kong, 1978. 46 minutes. Kam, Kwok-leung (prod.). Lunliu zhuan [Leonlau zyun or Five Easy Pieces]. Television Broadcast (TVB), 1980. 22 episodes. 45 minutes each. Lau, Fong-gong (prod.). Beidouxing [Bakdousing or The Bigger Dipper]. TVB, premiered 2 November 1976. 14 episodes. 30 minutes each. ——. Nianqing ren [Nincing jan or Young Generation]. TVB, premiered 18 October 1977. 11 episodes. 49 minutes each. ——. Xiao renwu [Siu janmat or Ordinary People]. TVB, premiered 1 November 1977. 8 episodes. 45 minutes each. Lee, Lynn and James Leong. Hong Kong: Occupy Central. English and Cantonese. Al Jazeera, Qatar, October 2014–January 2015. HD. 75 minutes. Lee, Siu-hung and Tsui Siu-ming (prods). Dadi enqing [Daaidei jancing or Fatherland]. RTV, 1980. 90 episodes. 45 minutes each.

322

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Liang (Chow), Selina (prod.). C.I.D. TVB, premiered 29 April 1976. 15 episodes. 52 minutes each. ——. Qunxing pu [Kwansing pou or Superstars]. TVB, premiered 10 March 1975. 15 episodes. 24 minutes each. Mak, Johnny and Siu Sang (prods). Tiancan bian [Tincaam bin or Reincarnated]. RTV, premiered 9 July 1979. 60 episodes. 45 minutes each. Tam, Patrick (dir.). ‘Miu Kam-fung.’ Qi nüxing [Cat neoising or Seven Women]. Prod. Wang Tianlin. TVB, series premiered 2 November 1976. 52 minutes. Tsui, Hark (dir.). Jindao qingxia [Gamdou cinghap or Golden Blade]. Prod. Selina Liang. Commercial Television, premiered 2 July 1978. 9 episodes. 26 minutes each. ——. Xiadao fengliu [Hapdou funglau or It Takes a Thief  ]. Prod. Johnny Mak. RTV, premiered 1 September 1979. 8 episodes. 45 minutes each. Wang, Tianlin (dir.). Tixiao yinyuan [Taisiu janjyun or The Fatal Irony]. Prod. Chung King-fai. TVB, 1974. 25 episodes. 45 minutes each. Wang, Tianlin (prod.). Chu Liuxiang [Cho Lauhoeng or Chor Lau Heung]. TVB, Hong Kong, premiered 3 September 1979. 65 episodes. 45 minutes each. Woo, Matthias (dir. and prod.). Donggong xigong [Dunggung saigung or East Wing West Wing]. Zuni Icosahedron, premiered Asia Television, 26 February 2011. HD. 13 episodes. 60 minutes each.

­

inde x 323

Index

Abbas, Ackbar, 32, 121–2 disappearance, 33, 122, 126, 156, 244 Academy Awards, 77 Act Up, 114; see also lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex+ (LGBTQI+) administrative right or power (zhiquan), 1, 11, 42, 116–17, 160, 162, 241; see also sovereign authority (zhuquan) Adorno, Theodor, 127 affect(s) and affectivity (qinggan), and affective, 2, 9, 14, 55, 94, 98, 101–2, 108, 111–12, 127, 137, 159–60, 172, 175, 180, 182, 184, 197, 204, 218, 238, 240, 245, 247, 267 affections, 115, 149, 151 affiliation, 179 intensities, 121 environment or milieu, 33, 128 power, 246 structure and structure of feeling, 115, 164, 171 Agamben, Giorgio bare life or homo sacer, 4–5, 30, 51, 99, 102, 104–5, 138, 189–91, 193–5, 239, 250–1, 256; see also Foucault, Michel: biopolitics; life (lives; as a theoretical concept) homo homini lupus, 234, 250 law, 5, 189–90 productive desubjectivisation, 253 remainder, 239 state (or zone) of exception, 34, 120, 160, 162–3, 195, 233, 235, 238, 240–1, 245, 267 AIDS, 139 Ai, Weiwei, 257 Human Flow, 257 Ai, Xiaoming, 257 Jiabiangou jishi [Jiabiangoug Elegy], 257 Al Jazeera English, 222; see also Lee, Lynn and James Leong

Anderson, Benedict, 234 Anderson, Lindsay, 76 Andrew, Dudley, 2 Arab Spring, 257 Araki, Gregg, 139 Arendt, Hannah, 202–3, 251–2 Asian diaspora, 138–9, 152 Asian financial crisis, 166 Atlantic City, 168 Au, Jevons, Frank Hui, and Vicky Wong; see also To, Johnnie; Yau, Nai-hoi Shuda zhaofeng [Syudaai ziufung or Trivisa], 181 Au, Johnny, 135, 136 Austin Princess 2220, 94 Australia, 113, 123 authorship and auteurism, 34, 58, 73, 109, 133, 178, 222 creative, 34, 72–3, 159, 178–81, 245 female, 70, 242 industrial, 34, 72, 159, 178, 245 interlocution, 72, 175 sociopolitical, 34, 159, 178–9, 181–4, 245 Auyueng, San, 57 baauzou (rent contractor), 46, 63–4 Bai, Guang, 44, 145 Baixing banyuekan [Pai Shing Semimonthly], 162; see also Hu, Ju-ren Bak, Shuet-sin, 154–5; see also Yam, Kimfai Jyuho suk hai; baak jim kei san (How shall I redeem you from death, alas; I shall surrender my life a hundred times), 154, 156 Bausch, Pina 114 Bazin, André ‘Ontologie de l’image photographique’ [‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’], 210

324

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Beatles, The, 124 ‘Drive My Car’, Rubber Soul, 94, 96 Beethoven, Ludwig van Symphony No. 5, 93–4 Bei, Dao and Bei Ling, 258 Jintian [Today!], 258 Qingxiang [Tendency], 258 Bei Lin, 22; see also jazz: Shanghai Beijing Independent Film Festival at Songzhuang, 257 Beijing (Peking), 11, 40, 43, 45, 57, 111, 115, 117, 136, 14546, 161, 164, 254 Consensus, 165 Convention of, 11, 41 government or Central People’s Government (CPG), 15, 33, 39–40, 49, 118, 135, 165–6, 175, 194, 196, 201, 205, 224, 231, 233–4, 236, 244; see also Communist Party of China (CPC); People’s Republic of China (PRC) intellectuals, 17 Bergson, Henri, 80; see also Deleuze, Gilles automatic or habitual recognition, 221 attentive recognition, 221–2; see also memory (memories): attentive Matière et mémoire [Matter and Memory], 221 sensory-motor schema, 80, 186 Berlinale, 114 Berry, Chris, 8–9, 212 Betamax, 149 Bhabha, Homi double-markedness, 4 unmarked dominant social group, 13 Bildungsroman, 67, 91, 106, 109 Blockbuster, 170 Bologna, Università di, 56 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 93 Boots vanity hood hairdryer, 93 Bordwell, David deadline narration, 132 Hong Kong cinema as a variation of Hollywood, 6–7, 127, 131 old-school paradigm and Johnnie To, 181–3 Bourdieu, Pierre habitus, 256 Boston, 235 Bowie, David, 114, 125 Bren, Frank, 85–6

British Nationality Act of 1981, 3, 117, 121 Dependent Territories, 117, 137 British New Wave, 76, 90 Reisz, Karel, 76 Richardson, Tony, 76 Brown, George, 41, 49–50 Brown, William, 184 Bu, Wancang, 20 Mulan congjun [Hua Mo-lan or Mulan Joins the Army], 20–1 Buddhism buyi buyi (neither the same nor different), 57 Chan (Zen), 252 Madhyamaka (Middle Way), 57 Nāgārjuna, 239 vedanās (affects), 112 vijñapati (consciousness), 112 Yogācāra, 59, 80, 112, 251–3; ālayaconsciousness, 251–3; bījas (seeds), 252 Bulwark, commando ship, 50 Butler, Judith gender and subjectivity as inscriptions and performance, 8, 70, 87, 91, 138, 242 dispensable lives, 30, 32–3, 199–200, 202–3, 229, 235, 245–6, 253, 254, 259–60, 265 neoliberalism as a fantasy, 199–200 performativity and assembly, 158–9, 184, 202–5, 232, 246, 252–3 precarity, 33, 35, 51–2, 68, 196, 199, 203, 232, 235, 237–8, 242, 245–6, 249, 260 caacaanteng (tea restaurants), 87 Cahiers du cinéma, 58, 73 Canada, 52, 113, 139, 168, 266 Calgary, 222 Québec, 266 Cantonese cinema (films), 1, 42–4, 85, 151, 240 ban on, 1, 43, 57, 240 classical, 6, 15, 31, 52, 56, 57–60, 67–9, 79, 243 dianying qingjie yundong (dingjing cinggit wandung or film cleansing movement), 44, 57, 240 fangyan dianying (fongjin dinjing, topolet, or regional-speech film), 1, 12, 38, 43, 56, 240 filmmakers during the Japanese occupation, 16, 44

­

inde x 325 Huanan guofang dianying (Waanaam gwokfong dinjing or South China National-defence Cinema), 43 industry, 16, 43, 47, 75, 88, 127, 133 left-wing Cantonese cinema and filmmakers, 37, 45–7, 55, 69, 167, 242 petit urbanite films, 45–6, 77 under CEPA, 174 Cantonese theatre (Yueju or Jyutkek), 7, 124, 131, 154 bun (acts), 131 siusang (baritone), 154 zingjan faadaan (prima donna), 154 Cantopop and Cantonese music, 50, 121–2, 124–6, 151, 244–5 cao gió, 102–3 ˙ capitalism, 46, 62, 67, 72, 88–9, 96, 113, 160, 162, 165, 167, 242 anti-capitalism, 46 state-directed, 177 carpe diem, 32, 114, 244 Carrington, Peter, 116–18 Carter, Bunny, 41, 49 Cathay (film studio), 56 Causeway Bay Bookstore, 256 censorship, 37, 48–9, 52, 132, 171, 173, 179–80, 245 Central, 39, 50, 148, 154 Chater Road, 204 Gator Marsh, 154 Lan Kwai Fong, 60 Queen’s Road, 148, 153 War Memorial, 148 Century (film production), 168–9, 171 Chan, Chan-wan, 57 Chan, Ching-wai, 167–8 Chan, Danny, 114, 125 Chan, Evans, 100, 128 on Xie Jin, 248 Raise the Umbrella, 222 Chan, Fruit, 133 Chang, Chaowei, Ruby Chen, and Ben Tsiang CNEX, 197 Chang Cheng (Great Wall) Motion Picture Enterprise, 40, 45, 48, 128, 167 Chang, Hsin-yen Shaolinsi [The Shaolin Temple], 167 Chan, Gordon Taoxue weilong 2 [Touhok wailung 2 or Fight Back to School 2], 170 Chang, San-Kuen (Zhang Shankun), 20–1 Chan, Jackie, 128, 132

Chan, Joseph M. and Francis L. F. Lee, 204 Chan, Joyce, 31, 71, 90–1, 109, 243; see also Tam, Patrick Chan, Ka-lok and Chu Lap, 132 wuzhu zhi cheng (mouzyu zi sing or city without a self), 3 Chan, Kin-man, 205 Chan, Kwan-chiu, 43 Chan, Kwoon-chung, 90 Chan, Nancy (Chen Yushang), 21 Chan, Nate Do You Hear the Women Sing?, 35, 219–21, 246; Cheung, Ka-man, 219; Ho, Valerie, 221; Ip, Josephine, 219; Kani, 220; Leung, Yvonne, 219, 222; P, 219–20; Sit, Donna, 219; Tam, Ka-ying, 219 Chan, Pei, 44 Chan, Peter Shiyue weicheng [Sapjyut waising or Bodyguards and Assassins], 176 Toumingzhuang [Taumingzong or The Warlords], 177 Chan, Tze-woon Luanshi beiwang [Lyunsai beimong or Yellowing], 35, 227–33, 246; Albert Chen’s letter in Xianggang jiashu [Hoenggong gaasyu or Hong Kong Letter], 230; Rachel’s letter to Albert Chen, 230–2 Chargé d’affaires Office of the PRC in London, 40 of the UK in Beijing, 40–1, 49 Cheang, Shu Lea, 139 Cheng, Adam, 123 Cheng, Chi-hung, 136 Chengdu, 145 Chen, Gexin, 25; see also jazz: Shanghai ‘Ye Shanghai’ [Night of Shanghai], 25–8 Cheng, Jihua, Li Shaobai, and Xing Zuwen Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi [History of the development of Chinese cinema], 5, 57 Chen, Kaige Bawang bieji [Farewell My Concubine], 171 Chen, Timmy, 70 Chen, Yun-chung, 174–5 Cheuk, Daniel, 197 Cheuk, Pak-tong, 73

326

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Cheung, Alex, 73 Dianzhi bingbing [Dimzi bingbing or Cops and Robbers], 128 Cheung, Eddie, 193 Cheung, Esther cinematic nostalgia, 183 Cheung, Jacky, 125 Cheung, Kam-mun, 91 Cheung, King-wai Beautiful Productions, 197 Cheung, Leslie, 114, 124–5, 132 ‘Monica’, 125 Cheung, Mabel Qiutian de tonghua [Cautin dik tungwa or The Autumn’s Tale], 133 Cheung, Man-yee, 71, 90 Cheung, Ruby, 178, 215 Cheung, Tammy, 197, 213 Visible Record, 197 Cheung, Wai-hung, 53–4 Cheung, Ying, 44–5, 61 Chiang, Kai-shek, 49 Chiao, Roy, 78 China and Hong Kong Department of the Foreign Office, 41 China as the o/Other, 7, 42, 132 China, Bank of, 50 China Independent Film Festival (Nanjing), 257 Chinatown, 6, 168 China Travel Service, 51 Chin, Chien Jiajia huhu [Gaagaa wuwu or Mutual Understanding], 58 Chinese independent films and filmmakers, 197–8, 213, 261 benshen (basic quality), 212 shezhiren (producer), 212 xianchang, 212–13, 218, 258–9 Chinese University of Hong Kong, 88 New Asia College, 56 Chinese Visual Festival (CVF), 30, 181, 217, 257 Chinese Writers Association, 179 Ching, Tony Qiannü youhun [Sinneoi jauwan or A Chinese Ghost Story], 131 Ching-wen (Chung Ching-wen), 57 Chiu, Derek Zhongying jie yihao [Zungjing gaai jathou or No. 1 Chung Ying Street], 198 Chiu, Fu-sheng, 170 Chiu, Shu-sun, 43–4

Choi, Jimmy, 76, 198 Chow, Hsuan Hilda, 78 Chow, Hsüan (Zhou Xuan), 18, 21–5 Chow, Raymond, 128 Golden Harvest, 128, 130, 133 Chow, Rey, 8; see also Berry, Chris Chow, Stephen, 124, 133, 170 mouleitou (nonsensical), 170 Chow, Yun-fat, 124, 132–3 Chu, Hark, 86 Chui, Yeung, 89 Chuk, Ching-yin, 43–4 Chung, Cherrie, 133s Chung, Kai-man, 87 Chung, Stephanie, 86, 123, 170 Chu, Yiu-ming, 205 ciné clubs, 33, 71 8mm dianyinghui (8mm dinjingwui or 8mm Film Club), 76 Dayinghui (Daaijingwui or Great ciné club), 76 Film Guard Association, 76 Hong Kong Community College Students’ Union, 76 Phoenix Ciné Club, 75–7, 112, 134–5 Puji dianyingshe (Poukap dinjingse or Common Film Society), 76 Qingyinghui (Cingjingwui or Youth Ciné Club), 76 Xianggang dianyinghui (Hoenggong dinjingwui or Hong Kong Film Association, 76 Cinema and Media Studies, Society of, 139 cinema (movie theater), 6, 47 cinema’s national characteristics (dianying minzuxing), 2 City University of New York (CUNY), 197 Clift, Richard D., 117 Coca-Cola, 93–4 Cold War, 68 colonialism and postcolonialism, 4, 20, 58, 67, 83, 89, 129, 130, 138, 157–8, 172, 176, 242, 244, 262, 266 and modernity, 17, 28, 31, 54, 85, 92, 203 anti-colonialism in Hong Kong, 30, 164 anti-colonialism under the Japanese Empire, 21, 25 architecture, 107 authority, 30

­

inde x 327 colonial capitalism, 86, 89, 242 experience, 28 in music, 23 settler colonialism, 8 theory, 4 Columbia University, 134 Commercial Radio II (FM 90.3), 114 Commercial Television (CTV), 88, 122–23 Jindao qingxia [Gamdou cinghap or Golden Blade], 90 Communist International Internationale, 96–7 Communist Party of China (CPC), 5, 12, 40, 45, 47–8, 97, 113, 116, 119–20, 163, 172–3, 176, 231–2, 241–2, 248, 254, 258, 264 conflict with the KMT and the Civil War, 12, 44 party-state, 2, 163, 165, 171, 180, 193–5, 201, 213, 245, 249, 254, 264–5 shehui zhuyi hexie shehui (a socialist harmonious society), 172, 249–50, 257, 264 Sixteenth Central Committee, 172, 249 Yan’an (Yenan), 20, 241 computer-generated image (CGI), 172 Concession, French and International Settlement collaborationism, 24–5, 27 gewu shengping (peace and prosperity with song and dance), 26 gudao (solitary island), 19–21, 241 Confucianism, 250, 264 neo-, 88, 250 Confucius Lunyu [Analects], 253 consciousness general concept, 8 political consciousness, 8, 111–12, 126, 176, 243 consumerism, 31, 85–6, 88, 90, 92, 97–8, 109, 243–4 Coppola, Francis Ford, 183 core body (benti or buntai, benxing, bunsing, or selfnature, or zhuti xing or zhutai sing) and ontology, 7–8, 69, 135, 152, 240, 252 ontological consistency, 8, 36, 101, 175, 195, 214, 238, 243, 249 of the image, 14 of Hong Kong cinema, 36, 53 Coventry, 131 Cradock, Percy, 41, 116–19

critical point of convergence, 37 Crofts, Stephen Hong Kong cinema as a national cinema, 6 Cross-Harbour Tunnel, 93 Crosthwait, George, 185 Cultural Centre, Hong Kong, Studio Theatre, 143 Cultural Revolution, 40, 48, 77, 118–19, 143, 172, 248, 254 Gang of Four, 119, 248 Red Guards, 40, 48 tuchu (stand out), 172 zhongzi wu (dances in the shape of the character zhong), 143 Dai, Jinhua, 212 Da texie [Daai dakse or Close-up], 53, 56–7, 73, 88, 100, 122, 128, 242 Daunt, Timoty, 117 Dawan qu (Greater Bay area), 233 Deleuze, Gilles, 80, 141; see also Bergson, Henri affection-image, 99, 181 Cinéma 2. L’image temps [Cinema 2: The Time-Image], 221 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari becoming animal, 253 minor literature/cinema, 258 schizophrenia, 151, 176–7, 184–5 territorialisation, deterritorialisation, reterritorialisation, 101, 104, 194, 233, 234, 239, 266 Democracy University, 135 Democratic Party, 164 Deng, Xiaoping, 32, 116–19, 120–1, 163 gaige kaifang (reform and open), 119, 254 special economic zones, 119 southern tour, 249 Zhongguo tese shehui zhuyi (socialism with Chinese characteristics), 162–3 deportation of Shu Shi and left-wing filmmakers in 1951, 45 of Shih Hui and Fu Ch’i in 1968, 40, 48, 51 Derrida, Jacques différance, 239 speech-acts, 30, 37, 48, 50–2, 189, 242, 257 under erasure, 3–4, 235 dialectics, 60, 62–4, 67, 132, 172, 216, 259

328

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Diansheng zhoukan [Movietone], 44 Dianying shuangzhoukan [Dinjing soengzauhon, Film Biweekly, City Entertainment Biweekly], 100, 128 Dickson Poon, 133 D&B, 133, 169 difference (structural), 3–4, 36, 38, 60, 85, 160, 165 district boards, 163, 201 documentaries authenticity, 212, 230 falsity claim, 209, 230 reality and credulity, 230 truth claim, 35, 199, 209, 214, 246 Donald, Alan E., 117–18 Dong, Keyi, 59 Du, Yuesheng, 20 Eisenstein, Sergei, 141 Elsaesser, Thomas double occupancy (double abandonment), 4, 38, 45, 51, 110, 128, 146, 158, 185, 195, 238 failure of performance and parapraxis, 46, 67, 92, 111, 159, 166, 182, 185, 194, 197, 223, 237, 242, 247 trauma, 115, 122 user manual, 62 erru muran (jijyu mukjim or immersing themselves in what they heard and saw), 53 Executive Council (Exco), 40, 120, 163 exile (fangzhu), 45, 255–57 as an extraterritorial position, 253–65 Extension of Hongkong, Convention for the, 11, 32, 39, 41–2, 117 extraterritoriality (extraterritorial) aesthetics, 14, 109 and colonialism, 1, 9–11, 48, 52, 160, 195, 240–1 as a concept, 42, 138, 160–1, 197, 238–40 as a culturo-linguistic concept, 12, 14–15, 54 as a myth, 195 as an affect, 15, 35, 115, 129–30, 143, 177, 182, 239; of failure, 32, 45 as an awareness or consciousness, 16, 25, 28, 32, 54, 112, 126 as a political affect, 38 as a political crisis, 32 as a political unconscious, 14

as a position, condition, or status, 30–3, 37–8, 41, 45–6, 48, 52, 60, 68, 71, 72–3, 80, 83, 85, 87, 99–100, 106, 110–12, 114, 116, 121, 126, 128, 137, 151, 159, 162, 177, 195, 197, 237, 241–3, 246, 262, 265–7 as a pure affect, 141 as a theoretical concept, 4–5, 9, 13, 36 authority, 47, 193 chigaihōgen (zhiwai faquan), 11 cinema, media, and popular culture, 5, 14–15, 21–2, 24, 28, 44–5, 47, 57, 78, 132–3, 158, 174 community, 160 consumption, 98 economic, 196 end of, 233–7 extraterritorialisation, 189, 191, 194, 233, 243, 264–6 fazhi (rule by the law of the land) and renzhi (judgment in accordance with the law of the political community to which a person belong), 10–11 gender and sexual, 33, 71, 83, 100, 106, 139, 243–4 huishen (mixed court) and huishen quan (right of being judged in a mixed court), 11, 41, 161, 241 juridical or political positions, 2, 12, 14–15, 49, 51, 60, 196, 233, 237, 244 music and musical, 16, 19–20, 26, 125 neoliberal, 34, 159–66, 165–6, 235 physical and psychic, 102 political, 33, 100, 160, 241 pre-extraterritorial, 108 relations, 53 rights, 32, 42, 48, 51 sensibility, 34, 123, 128, 184 Shanghai Mixed Court, 11 spaces and sites, 20, 28, 49–50, 121, 156, 158, 163, 242 time, 121 trans-extraterritorial, 138, 140 US, 20 faicing, 201 Fang, Peilin, 20; see also jazz: ‘Heri jun zai lai’ [When wilt thou return?] Sanxing banyue [Stars Moving Around the Moon], 22–3 Fanon, Franz, 203

­

inde x 329 fanyou yundong (anti-rightist movement), 45, 248 Lushan Conference, 254; see also Li, Rui Far East Film Festival (Udine), 30, 179, 181, 198 Farmer, Paul, 200 fascism, 39 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 140 feminism consumerist, 71, 85, 87 extraterritorial, 85, 87–8, 90, 92, 109, 243 postfeminism, 87 Feng Huang (Phoenix) Motion Picture, 45, 167 fifth-generation directors, 170 Finney, Albert, 76 Five Flavours Film Festival (Warsaw), 181, 198 Fong, Allen, 73, 76 Fong, Grace, 82 Fonoroff, Paul, 52 Ford Pinto, 93 Fotomax, 170 Foucault, Michel apparatus (and dispositif), 5, 14–15, 74, 83, 87, 89–90, 110, 157, 178, 193, 247 biopolitics, 13–14, 32, 34, 35, 135, 143–4, 157–9, 193–6, 200, 220, 223, 230, 234–5, 239, 241–2, 245; see also life (lives; as a theoretical concept) Fresh Wave Short Film Competition, 181, 197 Freud, Sigmund complex, 175 Nachträglichkeit, 101–2 pre-genital, 102 scopophilia, 31 Frontier Closed Area Order, 45 Frost, Robert ‘The road not taken’, 223 Fu, Ch’i, 40, 48, 51 Fujian, 119 Fu, Kung-mong, 57 Fung, Fung Xilu Xiang [Sailou Coeng or The Kid], 59 Fung, May, 33, 76, 135–6, 244 She Said Why Me, 147–9 Fung, Richard Orientations, 139 Re:Orientations, 139 Fu, Poshek, 19–20

Future of Hong Kong, 1997 (handover), 3, 115, 120–1, 159–60, 243 as zhuquan yijiao (handover of sovereignty), 160 Joint Declaration, 32, 113, 120–1, 159, 161, 163, 233 one country, two-systems, 165, 229–31 Sino-British negotiation, 11, 32, 112, 115–21, 241 Gao, Xinjian, 258 Garcia, Roger, 181 genre, 45 Germany, 135 Godard, Jean-Luc, 31, 91, 98, 243; see also Tam, Patrick Chinoise, 91, 96 Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle [Two or Three Things I Know about Her], 91 Mépris, Le [Contempt], 91–2 Pierrot le fou, 91 Week-end, 91 Goethe Institut Hong Kong, 135 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 93 Golden Horse Awards, 77 Golden Princess, 130–1, 169–70 Cinema City, 130–1, 133, 169–70 Golden Cinema City, 170 Gordon’s Film International, 130–1 Kowloon Motor Bus Company (1933), 130 gongming (resonate), 172 Gong, Zhe, 261 Government House (Hong Kong), 49–50 Grainge, Paul, 184 Gramsci, Antonio, 73 Grand Motion Picture, 76 Grandview Studio, 43 Green Paper: The Further Development of Representative Government in Hong Kong, 163 Grierson, John, 209 Grzinic, Marina on Slovenian and former Yugoslavian video arts, 139–40 Guangdong (Kwangtung), 12, 123, 12526, 174, 256 and Guangxi (Kwangsi), 12, 16, 38, 126 Guangzhou (Canton), 113, 117, 125–6, 145, 233, 240, 258 Lingnan region and culture, 12, 38, 43, 46 guan (observe), 59

330

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Guardian, The, 206 Gu Long (Xiong Yaohua), 123 Guo, Xizhi Gongchang qingnian [Factory Youth], 257 Guomindang (Kuomintang, KMT, or Nationalist Party), 1, 12, 45 and cinema, 20, 43, 47, 167, 170, 240–1 and music, 17–18 Chongqing (Chungking), 20–1, 43, 241 conflict with the CPC and the Civil War, 12, 44 Xin shenghuo yundong (New Life Movement), 18, 28 guoyu (national language), 57 guoyu dianying (gwokjyu dinjing or national-language cinema), 56, 239–40 guqin, 79 Habermas, Jürgen; see also Hansen, Miriam public sphere, 2–3, 12–13, 15, 34, 54, 85, 126, 158, 209, 221, 238, 241–2, 246, 253, 265 Hainan Island, 167 Haiti, 200 Ha, Jin, 258 Handover Day marches, 204 Han dynasty, 38, 253 Han, Guang Wangming [Outside the Great Wall], 257–8 Hansen, Miriam; see also Habermas, Jürgen vernacular modernism, 57–8, 169 Haowai [Houngoi or City Magazine], 90–1, 114, 135 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, 234 Hart, Judith, 41 Harvey, David, 199; see also neoliberalism Hattori, Ryōichi, 22–3; see also jazz Heidegger, Martin; see also Buddhism; Tomonobu, Imamichi Dasein, 251–4 Schwarze Hefte [Black Notebooks], 251 heterosexuality (heterosexual) female, 81 heteronormativity (heteronormative language), 70, 72, 87, 109–10, 151–2, 243 male and masculinity, 15, 70–1, 73, 106 Heung, Charles and Jimmy Heung, 169 Heung Yee Kuk, 201

He, Zhaozhang Chang xiangsi [An All-Consuming Love], 5, 24–9, 242 high culture, 114 Hirano, Kyōko, 247 Ho, Denise, 222 hoenghaa (hometown), 46, 63 Ho, Eugene, 136 Ho, Fan Xizuo zhi yi [Zaapzok zi jat or Assignment, Part One], 76 Ho, Ivy, 71 Hollywood as a dominant cinema, 6 classical, 6–7, 15, 32, 58, 60–1, 66, 72, 74, 88, 99, 110, 127, 131, 179, 247 studios and industry, 16, 122, 128, 133, 169, 174, 266–7 Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, 255, 261 Hong Kong Arts Centre, 134–5, 142, 198, 214 Hong Kong Arts Development Council, 19, 181 Hong Kong Baptist College (University), 56 Film Academy, 197 Hong Kong Economic Journal, 135 Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS), 196, 205–8, 224 Hong Kong Film Archive, 30 Hong Kong Film Awards, 198 Hong Kong Free Press, 213–14 Hong Kong independent films and filmmakers, 198, 222, 237–8 documentaries, 33–5, 155, 199, 210, 212, 230, 237–8, 246 Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF), 30, 56, 198, 214 Creative Visions, 181 Retrospective of Cantonese Cinema of the 1950s, 56 Hong Kong Island, 161, 241 Hong Kong, Japanese Occupation of, 16 Hong Kong-Mainland co-productions, 34, 158–9, 167–84, 197 9550 Project, 171 China Film Co-Production Corporation (CFCC), 167, 171 Closer Economic Partnership Arrangements (CEPA), 11, 34, 158–60, 167, 171–85, 245; Annex Two (CEPA III), 174; Annex Four, 173

­

inde x 331 ‘Guowai yingpian shuru zhanxing banfa’ (Temporary methods of importing films from outside the country), 167 ‘Jinkou dianying guanli banfa’ (Methods of management over film importation), 167 Mainlandisation, 34, 174–5 ‘Memorandum of the meeting about the questions related to the studies of television’, 171 ‘Yao jingti zuo; yao fangzhi you’ (Alert themselves against the left; prevent themselves from leaning toward the right), 167 Hong Kong New Wave, 31, 33, 36, 53, 70–1, 73–6, 85, 110, 123, 128, 130, 198 Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Company (HSBC), 20 Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), 178 Hong Kong, University of, 217, 222–3 Hong Kong University Students’ Union (HKUSU), Campus TV, 217, 219, 222, 233 Ho, Pia, 135 Hopson, Donald, 49 Hsia, Moon, 71, 128, 167 Bluebird Movie Enterprise, 128 Hua, Guofeng, 119 Huanan guofang dianying (Waanaam gwokfong dinjing or South China national defense cinema), 16 Huang, Jiamo, 22–3 geming kouhao (revolutionary slogans), 23 Ruanxing dianying lilun (soft film theory), 23 yishi lun (talks of consciousness), 23 Xiandai dianying [Modern Screen], 23 Huang, Yi, 187 Hu, Hanmin, 12, 38 Hui, Ann, 70–2, 90, 136 Hu Yue de gushi [Wu Jyut dik gwusi or The Story of Woo Viet], 99, 128 ‘Laike’ [‘Loihaak’ or ‘The Boy from Vietnam’], 31–2, 90, 99–110, 243 Touben nuhai [Tauban nouhoi or Boat People], 99–100, 128–30 Hui, Michael Guima shuangxing [Gwaimaa soengsing or Games Gamblers Play], 127–8

Tiancai yu baichi [Tincoi jyu baakci or The Last Message], 127–8 ‘Tieta lingyun’ [‘Tittaap lingwan’ or A tower that rides on clouds], 125 huiguo shu (confession letter), 264 Hu, Jia, 257 Hu, Ju-ren, 120, 162; see also Baixing banyuekan [Pai Shing Semi-monthly] human, humanity, and humanism, 35, 100, 105, 189, 190, 195, 237–9, 247–53 and animality, 185, 187, 190, 195, 239, 247 Huoniao diba [Foniyu daibaat or Phoenix No. 8], 73, 76 identitariens, 203 Benoist, Alain de, 203 Camus, Renaud; Le Grand remplacement [The great replacement], 203 identity politics, 3 identity (shenfen) and identification (rengtong), 4, 7–8, 36, 132, 139–40, 164, 185–6, 190 cinematic, 74, 132–3 image, cinematographic, 14; see also core body (benti or buntai) and ontology: of the image; ontogenesis image consciousness, 14, 128 media and mediated, 151, 196, 199, 211, 237 photographic, 49, 78, 101–2, 209–10 reality and truth, 197, 210, 221 televisual and video, 149, 211, 245 Incubator for Film and Visual Media in Asia (ifva), 198 Independent, The Lizzie Dearden, 207 individuality, subjectivity (zhuguan xing or zyugwun sing) and autonomy (agency), 2–5, 8–9, 11, 36, 38, 46, 48, 52, 67–70, 72–3, 74, 86, 88, 92, 99, 106, 108, 110, 115, 120, 124, 126, 130, 138, 153–4, 164, 170, 172, 175–7, 185, 189, 195, 199, 202, 226, 233, 236, 238, 244, 267 autonomisation, deautonomisation and reautonomisation, 13, 14, 29, 32–3, 35–6, 53, 70, 73, 99, 101, 109–12, 121, 126–7, 138, 147, 159, 165–6, 184, 197, 201–2, 226, 233, 237, 242– 3, 251, 256, 258, 265, 267 individuation, pre-individuation, deindividuation and reindividuation,

332

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

individuality, subjectivity (zhuguan xing or zyugwun sing) and autonomy (agency) (cont.) 13–14, 29, 32–3, 35–7, 42, 53, 69–70, 73, 99, 101, 109–12, 120, 126–7, 138, 147, 159, 165–6, 184, 197, 201–2, 222, 226, 233, 237, 242–3, 251, 256, 258, 265, 267 inter-individuality, intersubjectivity and inter-autonomy, 2, 31, 35, 109, 115, 197, 205, 213, 216, 218, 229, 232–3, 237, 243, 246, 260 mutual-individuation, mutualsubjectivisation and mutualautonomisation, 30, 32 subjectivity and subjectivisation (preindividuation, desubjectivisation and resubjectivication), 8, 13–14, 29, 33–7, 53, 69–70, 72–3, 92, 99, 101, 109–12, 120, 126–7, 138, 147, 159, 165–6, 184, 197, 201–2, 222, 226, 233–4, 237, 242–3, 251, 256, 258, 265, 267 Information Services Department, 206 ink wash painting, 78–9, 138 International Art Critics Association, 135 Jaguar E-Type convertible, 92, 98 Jakobson, Roman, 89 James, David, 15 Japan, 38, 113, 128, 135, 253 cinema, 247–8 pop culture, 114, 125 US Occupation, 247 Japan 87 Video Television Festival, Spiral, 135 Jarman, Derek, 114 jazz American, 16, 125, 133 chezi liu diao (pentatonic mode in the key of C), 26 ‘Heri jun zai lai’ [When wilt thou return?], 22–3 huangse yinyue (yellow or erotic music), 17–19 Japanese, 22, 25 Pathé Orient and the Nipponophone Company, 22 pentatonic scale, 25, 125 Shanghai, 16–18, 22, 28, 125, 145 shidai qu (music of the time), 17, 22, 124–5 ‘Shoshu no yoru’ [Night of Soochow], 22

‘Yelai xiang’ [Chinese violet], 22–4 Zhenggong wu diao (pentatonic mode in the key of G), 26 Jeonju Film Festival, 255 Jo, Ji-hoon, 255 Jia, Zhitan, 257 Jiang, Qing, 5 jiaohuan (restore), 161 Jiaolong (Chinese Naval Special Forces unit), 173 jing (milieu, perception, or image), 59, 126 jingpin chuangzuo (quality creations), 171 Jinri Xianggang [Gamjat Hoenggong or Hong Kong today], 151 Johnson, James, 41 Jones, Andrew Yellow Music, 17–18 see also jazz: Shanghai Juchang [Theatre Quarterly], 53 jyunsin or cinema circuit, 128, 169 Kadoorie, Lawrence 120 Kam, Ping-hing, 52–3, 76, 128, 136 ‘Zhongguo xindianying de qiwang’ [‘Zunggwok sandinjing dik keimong’ or My expectations on the new Chinese cinema], 52–3 Kaneshiro, Takeshi, 177 Kant, Immanuel ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’ [‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’], 157 Kaohsiung, 261–2, 264–5 Kawakita, Nagamasa, 21 Kennedy, John F. assassination of, 115 Keswick, John, 118 Keung, Philip, 193 Kikkawa, Kōji, 125 kinship, alternative, 32, 102, 104–5, 110, 264–5 Ko, Clifton, 131, 133 Ji tong ya jiang [Gai tung ngaap gong or Chicken and Duck Talk], 131 Ko, Lei-hen, 43–4 Ko, Lo-chuen, 63 Koichi, Iwabuchi, 125 Kojève, Alexandre, 158, 181, 184 Kong, Tsung-gan, 206 Koo, Joseph, 125 Koo, Louis, 185

­

inde x 333 Korean War, 247 Ko Shing Theatre, 154 Kowloon, 51, 161 Peninsula, 41, 42, 241 Walled City of, 39, 42, 241 KPS Video Express, 180 Kristeva, Julia abject, 99, 101–2, 104–6, 108, 110, 152–2, 190 Kung, Chiu-hsia, 44 Kunqu, 124, 143 yi zhuo er yi (one table two chairs), 143 Kurosawa, Akira, 183 Ku, Yee ‘Songhuajiang shang de kusheng’ [‘Cungfaagong soeng dik husking’ or Crying in Along the Sungari River], 55 Kwan, Nam Di de men [Dei dik mun], 86 Kwan, Pun-leung, 33, 244 Project No. 9046, 143–6 Kwok, Aaron, 125 Kwong, Linda, 136 Kwong, Ying-ho, 208 Lacan, Jacques death drive and drive creature, 36, 187, 191, 250 Father’s authority, 36 frustration of frustration, 145–6 gaze of the Other, 36, 108, 187, 189, 243 lack and desire, 154 Law of the Father, 36 mirror stage, 152 objet petit a, 176 Other, 36, 139, 147 phallic mother, 108 purloined letter, 232 Real, 99, 111 suture, 184–5, 187 Lai, Cheuk-cheuk, 65 Lai Chi Kwok Amusement Park (Lai Yuen), 87 Lai, Leon, 124–5 Lam, Bun, 40 Lam, Carrie, 165, 207–8 Lam, Dante Honghai xingdong [Operation Red Sea], 173 Lam, Edward, 133–4, 145 Lam, George, 129

Lam, Gordon, 124, 158, 178–81, 193 Lam, Kempton Umbrella Revolution: History as Mirror Reflection, 222 Lam, Lei, 53 Lam, Nin-tung, 53, 56, 76, 136 jingyou (gengjayu, mirroring-drifting, or mirroring-journeying), 59, 79–80, 82–3 pingyuan (distance on the surface), shenyuan (distance in depth), and gaoyuan (distance in height), 80 ‘Wushi niandai yueyu pian yanjiu Zhong de jige wenti’ [‘Ngsap nindoi jyutjyu pin jingau zung dik geigo mantai’ or Several questions on the study of Cantonese cinema in the 1950s], 56–60 ‘You guoqing xiangqi de Hanyu dianying, fangyan dianying’ [‘Jau gwokhing soenghei dik Honjyu dinjing, fongjin dingjing’ or From national day to Chinese-language cinema, dialect cinema], 56, 239–40 Lam, Nora, 217, 222, 246 and Samuel Wong, Weijing zhi lu [Meiging zi lou or Road Not Taken], 35, 222–7, 246; Fung, Billy, 222–7; Hui, Popsy, 201, 222–3, 226 Dihou tiangao [Deihau tingou or Lost in the Fumes], 35, 198, 235–7, 247 Wangjiao heiye [Wonggok haakye or Midnight in Mongkok], 35, 217–19, 226 Lam, Ringo, 124 Longhu fengyun [Lungfu fungwan or City on Fire], 131 Lam, Suet, 191, 193 Landsberg, Alison, 115 Lang, Sandra, 125 languages (langages), 71, 109 speech (parole), 71 Laplanche, Jean après coup (afterwardness), 101–2 Lau, Andrew and Alan Mak Wujiandao [Mougaandou or Infernal Affairs], 183 Lau, Andy, 124–5 Lau, Eric, 76, 88–9 Lau, Sean, 180 Lauper, Cyndi, 114 Lau, Siu-lai, 209 Lau, Tin-chi, 88, 123

334

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

law and lawlessness, 185, 187, 189–91, 193, 195 common (of the sea), 42 European international, 42, 117, 161, 163 maritime law, 163 of the land (lex terrae), 41, 49, 51, 135, 163, 193, 195, 256, 259, 266 Law, Kar, 53, 75–6, 85–6, 91, 136 Qishi [Hatsik or Beggar], 76 Quanxian [Cyunsin or Entirely], 76 ‘Yueyu pian: Ganxiang, qiwang’ [‘Jyutjyu pin: gamsoeng, keimong’ or Cantonese cinema: Thoughts and expectations], 68–9 Law, Nathan, 209 Law, Tat-chun, 127 Law, Wai-ming, 100 Law, Wing-sang, 7, 36, 164, 196 collaborative colonialism, 164 League of Social Democrats, 209 Lee, Bruce, 127 Lee, Chi-ching, 44 Lee, Fa, 43 Lee, Lynn and James Leong Hong Kong: Occupy Central, 222 Lee, Ming-yuk, 68 Lee, Sun-fung Li Houzhu [Lei Hauzyu or Tragedy of the Poet King], 154–5 Lee, Waise, 132 Lee, Wai-shing, 197 Lee, Tit, 59, 60 Huoku youlan [Fowat yaulaan or Father is Back], 58–9 Weilou chunxiao [Ngailau ceonhiu or In the Face of Demolition], 31, 58, 60–7 Lee, Yuet-ching, 63 leftist presses (in Hong Kong), 39–40, 51 Huashang bao [Waasoeng bou or The Chinese business journal] ‘Wutai yu yinmu’ [‘Moutoi jyu nganmok’ or Stage and screen], 58 New Evening Post, 39 Ta Kung Pao, 39; ‘Yingju’ [‘Jingkek’ or Film and drama], 58 Wen Wei Po, 39, 48, 50–1; ‘Yingju zhoukan’ [‘Jingkek zauhon’ or Film and drama weekly], 58; Xinqi bao [Singkei bou or The weekly]; ‘Yingju

zhendi’ [‘Jingkek zandei’ or Film and drama base], 58 Leftist Riots (Confrontation), 6, 11, 29–30, 36–41, 47–9, 51–2, 68, 85–6, 161, 241–2 bombs, 51 de-escalation, 40 detention and detainees, 51 Hong Kong Artificial Flower Works, 39 seditions, 37, 47–52, 68, 166 Sha Tau Kok (incident), 40 Legislative Council (LegCo), 41, 120, 163–4, 205, 208, 226–7 election, 113, 163–4, 201 functional constituencies, 163–4, 201 Provisional Legislative Council (PLC), 164 Research Office of, 200–1 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex+ (LGBTQI+), 13, 33, 99, 138–40, 155, 203, 222, 244, 266 activism, 155 filmmakers and videomakers, 112, 135, 138, 144, 147, 151–2, 154, 244 tongzhi (tungzi or comrade), 139 Lenin, Vladimir spontaneous awareness or consciousness, 30, 37–8, 60, 67–8, 111, 243 Letters Patent and Royal Instructions to the Governor of Hong Kong, 163 Leung, Chun-ying (C. Y. Leung), 165, 205, 207–8 Leung, Edward, 208–9, 23537 hawkers incident, 208 sentencing of, 209 Leung, Kat-chiu, 76 on Li Han-hsiang, 76–7 Leung, Kwok-hung (Long Hair), 205–6, 209 Leung, Ping-kwan, 86, 91, 127 Leung, Sixtus, 208–9, 236 Leung, Tony, 124 Liang (Chow), Selina, 71, 122 Lianhua dianying gongsi (United Photoplay Service or UPS), 20, 43 Lianhua huabao [UPS Pictorial], 44 Liao, Chengzhi, 45, 119, 162 Liao, Yiwu, 258 Li, Cheuk-to, 31, 71, 100, 128, 198 Li, Chunwu, 86, 123 life (lives; as a theoretical concept), 1, 4–5, 9, 11, 29, 32, 34–5, 102, 106, 196–7,

­

inde x 335

213, 230, 235, 241, 245, 262, 264–6; see also Agamben, Giorgio: bare life depoliticised, 118, 138–9, 144 Li, Han-hsiang Chuilian tingzheng [Reign Behind a Curtain], 167 Dongnuan [The Winter], 76–7 Huoshao Yuanmingyuan [The Burning of the Imperial Palace], 167 Poxiao shifen [At Dawn], 76 Li, Jet, 167 Li, Jinhui, 17–18 Mingyue (Bright Moon) ensemble, 18 school, 25 Li, Keqiang, 233 Li, Lilian, 71 Lim, Louisa The People’s Republic of Amnesia, 21 Li, Minghui, 18 Lingxing [Ling Sing], 43 Lingxing ribao [Ling sing jatbou or Ling sing daily], 154 Lin, Yutang ‘Zhenjie fang’ [Arch of feminine virtue], 78 Li, Pingqian, 20 Li, Rui, 254, 258 literature Cantonese, 60, 86 dialect, 57 Liu, Lydia, 160 Liu, Qiong, 44 Liu, Tianhua Guoyue gaijin she (Society for the Improvement of National Music), 18 Liu, Yat-yuen, 45, 167 Liu, Xue’an, 22; see also jazz Li, Xianglan (Ri Koran or Yamaguchi Yoshiko), 23 Li, Ying (a) 2H, 258 Li, Ying (b), 78 local and regional cinema; see also national cinema; transnational cinema Hong Kong as, 8, 169 Local Government Act of 1972, 163 localism, 126, 137, 201, 204, 208, 222, 223–4, 233–7, 247 Chin, Horace, 233; Xianggang chengbang lun [Hoenggong singbong leon or On Hong Kong being a city-state], 233–4 Demosistō, 209, 223

disqualification of legislators, 208–9, 236 Hong Kong Indigenous, 208, 223–4 Hong Kong independence, 208, 223 New Territories East by-election, 208, 236 Xianggang minzu lun [Hoenggong manzuk leon], 233 Youngspiration, 208 Locarno Film Festival, 261 Lo, Da-yu ‘Huanghou dadao dong’ [‘Wonghau daaidou dung’ or Queen’s Road East], 153 Lo, Duen, 16, 44–5, 62–3 Cihen mianmian wu jueqi [Cihan minmin moujyutkei or Everlasting Regret], 44 Shihao fengbo [Saphou fungbo or Typhoon Signal No. 10], 58 loengcaa pou (herbal tea shops), 87 Lo, Hoi-pang, 192–3 Lo, Kwai-cheung, 164 London, 40, 100 London East Asian Film Festival, 30 London Film Festival, 198 Lo, Neo, 135 Long Tin, 175 Lo, Wai-luk, 154 Lo Wu, 40, 51 Lotus, The, 124 loudspeaker, 47, 50–1 Lu, Lisa, 78 Lu, Xun (pseudonym of Zhou Shuren), 72, 87 Lü, Yidu, 172 Lü, Yukun, 21 Lucas, George Star Wars, 114 Lui, Siu-hing, 76 Lung, Kong Patrick, 75 Boyin wangzi [Bojam wongzi or Prince of Broadcasters, 75] Feinü zhengzhuan [Feineoi zingzyun or Teddy Girls], 76 Yingxiong bense [Jinghung bunsik or The Story of a Discharged Prisoner, 76] Luo, Gang, 43 Luo, Guibo, 49 Luo, Mingyuo (Lo Ming-yau), 43 MacArthur, Douglas, 247 Macau, 10, 36, 38–9, 105, 167, 233–4 Carvalho, José Manuel de Sousa e Faro Nobre de, 39

336

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Macau (cont.) Leal Senado, 39 Motim 1–2–3, 39 scenario, 41, 48–9 MacLehose, Murray, 3, 85–6, 115–17, 119, 121, 163 Madonna, 114, 126 Magritte, René La trahison des images, 153 Maine, 203 Ma, Jean, 124 Ma, Jian, 258 Ma, Li Chou [Inmates], 257 Mak, Chi-hang, 136 Mak, Johnny, 73, 123 Mak, Karl, 130 Manchuria, 24 Mandarin cinema, 16, 24, 43–4, 77, 87 left-wing, 45, 47, 51, 55, 167 musical, 5, 15–16, 124 songs, 125 Mandarin, Peking, 57 and nationalism, 58 Man Sau, 78 Mao Dun (Shen Yanbing), 58 Huanan dazhong yu (Waanaam daaizung jyu or Cantonese language of the masses), 58 Mao, Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), 254 badges, 51–2 Maoism and anti-Maoism, 29, 47, 165, 248 Quotations from Chair Mao or the Red Book, 49–51 mare liberum (free sea), 1, 9, 11, 117, 121, 160, 163, 165, 238, 241 margin and centre, 4 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich Die deutsche Ideologie [The German Ideology], 3 sense-certainty, 3 sense-uncertainty, 13, 29, 121, 132, 153 Ma, Si-tsang, 16, 43 Ma-Xu, Weibang, 20 May Fourth period, 17, 54–5 McGrath, Jason post-socialism, 29, 163, 166, 176–7, 249 renwen jingshen (spirit of humanity), 249 zhongji jiazhi (ultimate values), zhongji guanhuai (ultimate concerns), or hexin jiazhi (core values), 249 MCL Kornhill Cinema, Tai Koo, 214

McLuhan, Marshall, 89 media and media environment, 37, 47–52, 89, 111, 121, 127, 135, 136–7, 140, 152, 156, 158, 196, 204, 207, 211, 224–5, 234, 238, 240–1, 244, 265–6 double mediation, 145 social media, 137, 197, 207–8, 220; Facebook and Twitter, 211, 255; iTunes and YouTube, 214; Skype, 262–3; wanghong (social media stars), 179 memory (memories) archive of, 213, 221–2 as semiotic units, 101 attentive, 221–2, 224, 227, 229–30 local, 198 mediated, 146 organic versus prosthetic (inscribed), 25, 27, 158, 215 personal, 112 televisual, 145 traumatic, 28, 101, 109, 156 wartime, 25, 247 Meng, Lang, 258 Metroplex Cinema, Kowloon Bay, 214 Metz, Christian, 74 Miao, Cora, 129 Michigan, University of, Ann Arbor, 137, 154 Miller, Toby global Hollywood, 175 runaway productions, 179 Mingbao zhoukan [Mingbou zauhon or Ming Pao Weekly], 122 Ming dynasty (or empire), 8, 10, 57, 241 Mingxing dianying gongsi (Star Motion Picture Company), 16–17, 20, 43 Ministry of Defence (UK), 40 Miramax, 171–2 mise en scène, 58 Mitra, Subrata and Chi Ho Che, 71, 80–1, 83, 85 Miu, Kam-fung, 91–9, 109 Mobil, 97 Mo, Comyn, 136 modernism, 15, 31, 54, 71, 90–1, 97, 99 Mong Tung, 88 Mong Wan (Cheung Man-bing) Renhai leihen [Janhoi leoihan or Trace of tears in a human sea], 60–1 montage, 31, 83–5, 140–1, 227, 229–30, 243, 260 Mostra Internazionale d’Arte

­

inde x 337

Cinematografica della Biennale di Venezia, 253 Motion Picture and General Investment (MP & GI), 87 Mui, Anita, 114, 124–6 Mui, Yee, 63 mungwun (door-keeping god), 63 Munich, 114 Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), 30 music, popular, 33 Muybridge, Eadweard, 149, 209 Nai, An, 261 Nakazono, Eisuke, 22; see also jazz Nam Hoi Sap Sam Long, 44 Nanguo Film Company, 44 Nanjing (Nanking), 1, 43, 58, 123, 257 Treaty of, 10–11, 41; ceded to (geiyu), 41, 241 nation and colonialism, 10, 67, 117 and individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy, 2, 37 and modernity and cosmopolitanism, 1, 3, 10, 27–8, 122s as a polis or community, 2, 12, 45, 160, 256, 258 Chinese nation and nationalism, 12, 15, 21–5, 28, 48, 97, 161–2, 164, 172, 176, 192 Chinese (national) cinema (Zhongguo dianying or Zunggwok dinjing), 5, 7, 30–1, 36–8, 42, 52–3, 56–7, 68, 77–8, 239, 243 Hong Kong cinema as, 6 Mainland Chinese media corporations, 169 national cinema, 6, 239; Chinese (national) cinema (Zhongguo dianying or Zunggwok dinjing), 5, 7, 30–1, 36–8, 42, 52–3, 56–7, 68, 77–8, 239, 243; Hong Kong cinema as a, 6; Mainland Chinese media corporations, 169; see also local and regional cinema; transnational cinema national criminal law, 194 national crisis, 20 national culture and Chinese music, 17–19 national unity and territorial integrity, 161 National Archives, 30, 116

National Socialism (Nazism), 157, 251 Nederveen Pieterse globalisation as hybridisation, 7; see also Robertson, Ronald: glocal; Zhang, Yingjin: Hong Kong cinema as glocal cinema neoliberalism, 29, 34, 159–60, 163, 166, 173, 176, 197, 199–203, 205, 209, 211, 226, 228–9, 234–5, 237–8, 249 deregulation (liberalisation), economic, 33, 160, 163, 245 post-socialism, 32, 34, 163, 245 New China News Agency (NCNA; Xinhua News Agency), 39–40, 45, 51, 167 New Orleans, 129 Newport, 133 newspapers and magazines, 33, 47, 48–9 baatgwaa zaapzi (gossip magazines), 122 fukan (fuhon or daily supplements), 122 Hong Kong popular, 121–2 New Territories, 42, 111, 113, 116–17, 161, 163, 201, 208 New York, 114, 131, 133, 145, 155 Harlem, 200 Manhattan, 114, 200 New York Times, The Chris Buckley and Austin Ramzy, 207 New York University, 133 Ng, Alfred Angie International Ltd, 127 Ngai, Jimmy, 91 Ng, Berg, 193 Ng, Cho-fan, 45, 61 Ng, Grace, 138 Nguyen, Tan Hoang, 139 Seven Steps to Sticky Heaven, 139 Ng, Wui Baijia zai [Baaigaa zai or The Prodigal Son], 45 Leiyu [Leoijyu or Thunderstorm], 59 Njal, George (Nie Er), 18 nón lá (conical leaf hat), 100 Northern Electric, 93, 97 Occupy War Street, 222 ontogenesis, 9, 14, 37, 69, 240 Opium War, 137 Orientalism as a colonial and postcolonial discourse and practice, 8, 9–10, 137 in music, 23, 125 Ōshima, Nagisa, 247

338

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Ottoman empire, 10 Oxford, 214 Pacific War, 16, 241–2 paifang (arch), 78 Pak, Yin, 45 Pang, Laikwan, 7, 164, 183 Pao, Yue-kong, 120 Parkes, Harry Smith, 41 Pasolini, Pier Paolo ‘Il cinema di poesia’ [‘Cinema of poetry’], free-indirect discourse, and im-sign, 31, 71, 75, 78, 85, 98, 101, 110, 243 Patten, Chris, 163–4 Pau, Ellen, 33, 135–7, 149–51, 244 Diversion [Loengtau ng dou ngon], 151 Drained II, 149–51 Here’s Looking at You Kid (with Wong Chi-fai and Yau Ching), 151 Song of the Goddess, 155 Pearl River, 123 Peng, Dehuai, 254 Pennebaker, D. A. Direct Cinema, 209 People’s Daily, 40, 49 People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 44, 210–11 People’s Republic of China (PRC), 3, 30, 32, 34, 37–8, 45, 48, 52, 105, 111, 113, 116, 118–19, 126, 137, 158–61, 165, 167, 177, 191, 194, 196, 201, 207, 213–14, 222–4, 229–30, 241–5, 248–9, 254, 256–7, 261–2, 266; see also Communist Party of China (CPC) and music, 18 Constitution, 161–3, 258 Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, 119, 167 People’s Congress (NPC), 162, 166, 232; Standing Committee (NPCSC), 120, 196, 205, 207–8, 236, 246 political turmoil, 12 Qincheng Prison, 254 State Council, 171 Two Chinas, 39 performance and self-reflexivity, 26–8, 33, 92–9, 106, 109, 136, 140, 157, 182, 184, 190–1, 195–6, 210, 212 Performing Arts, Council for, 136 Pet Shop Boys, 114

pipa, 81–2, 84 Po, Fung, 24 Polanski, Roman, 100 politics (concept), 52, 144, 195, 267 gender and sexual politics, 149 body politics, and social politics, 140 Polytechnic (University), Hong Kong, 68 Portugal colonialism, 10, 39; see also Macau Lisbon, 39 posthistoricity, 33–4, 157–9, 178, 182, 185, 195–6, 245 postmodernism, 138 Praunheim, Rosa von, 140 Prince Charles Cinema, 214–15 Pro-Beijing or Pro-establishment, 164, 196, 201, 207, 208, 234–5 Pro-democracy, 163–5, 201, 204, 206–8, 222, 224 Protestantism, 88 Proust, Marcel À la recherche du temps perdu [Remembrance of Things Past], 229 Public Order Ordinance, 49–52 Pun, Tak-shu, 135 Putonghua (common language), 57, 173 Qing dynasty (or empire), 10–11, 32, 41, 57, 120, 123, 137, 160–1, 176, 177, 241 code, 42, 161, 241 Taiping Rebellion, 177 Zongli Yamen (Foreign Office), 11 qishan pa’e (heisin paa’ngok or bullies the kind and fears the bigger bullies), 66 Qiu, Zhijie, 212 radio, 89, 118, 244 and Mandarin musicals, 16; see also Mandarin cinema: musical Radio Hong Kong and Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), 88 Shizi shanxia [Sizi saanhaa or Below the Lion Rock], 90, 231 Rankin, John, 41 Rayns, Tony, 74, 183 Realism and reality, 55, 100 records and Mandarin musicals, 16; see also Mandarin cinema: musical Rediffusion (RTV) and Asia Television (ATV), 86–8, 123, 126, 137 Chiu Te Ken, 123

­

inde x 339 Da zhangfu [Daai zoengfu or Big Men], 90 Dadi enqing [Daaidei jancing or Fatherland], 123 David Syme & Co., 123 Qianfan bingju [Cinfaan binggeoi or Raising a thousand sails together], 123 rivalry with TVB, 123–4 Tiancan bian [Tincaam bin or Reincarnated], 123 Reform Club, 120 refugee, 68, 99, 101, 104 setau (snakehead), 101 Renaissance, 80–1, 85 Renan, Earnest ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’ [‘What is a nation?’], 234 Republic of China (ROC), 1, 43, 52 Republican period, 5, 12, 55–6, 123 revisionism and anti-revisionism, 47, 93, 97 Robertson, Ronald glocal, 7; see also Nederveen Pieterse: globalisation as hybridisation; Zhang, Yingjin: Hong Kong cinema as glocal cinema Robin, Teddy, 130 Pearl City, 128 Teddy Robin and the Playboys, 124 Robinson, Luke, 212–13 Rong, Guangrong Haizi bujupa siwang dan haipa mogui [Children are not Afraid of Death, Children are Afraid of Ghosts], 257 Rotterdam, International Film Festival (IFFR), 30, 198, 258, 261 Rosen, Philip, 209 Rouch, Jean, 209 Royal Hong Kong Police, 40, 51 Special Branch, 40, 47 Rushford, A. R., 116–17 Ryerson University, 139 Said, Edward, 256 Saijō, Hideki, 125 Sam, David, 135 San Francisco, 43, 123, 145, 240 Sartre, Jean-Paul analogon, 215 protentionality, 215, 221, 223, 227 retentionality, 221, 223 Sau Law, 76

Schlesinger, John Midnight Cowboy, 103 Schmitt, Carl, 9, 233 Scholarism, 166, 196, 204–7, 209, 223–4 Joshua Wong, 166, 205, 215–16 Moral and National Education (MNE), 166, 204, 214–16 Scorsese, Martin, 183 Screen, 73 Second World War, 157, 239 Sei cingam (Four Princesses; Wong Chorwing, So Kit-yin, Lisa Wang, and Huen Siu-ha), 87 semicolonialism, 58 and modernity, 16–17, 19, 23 September 11th, 115 Seventeen Years Period, 171 Shanghai, 145, 166, 233, 255 Shanghai studio or film industries, 1, 5, 15–16, 43, 55, 68, 72, 123, 240 Marxist film theory, 72 recession (1935), 20 Tianma Film Studio, 248 destruction (1937), 20 rebuild (1938), 20 wartime, 21–2 Shaw Brothers, 75, 88, 122, 125, 128 Shaw, Runje, 43 Shaw, Runrun, 122 Shek, Dean, 130 Shek, Kei, 53–5, 68, 124 ‘Gangchan zuopai dianying ji qi xiao zichan jieji xing’ [‘Gongcaan zopai dinjing kap kei siu zicaan gaaikap sing’ or The petit bourgeois sensibility in the Hong Kongproduced left-wing film], 54–5 Shijie [Seigit or Dead Knot], 76 Shen, Xiling, 43 Shenzhen (Xin’an or Hsin-an), 42, 233 Sheung Shui, 51 Shih, Hui, 40, 48, 51 Shih, Shu-mei Sinophone, 8–9, 240 Shi, Mengqi, 129 Shklovsky, Viktor narrative retardation, 67 Shoah, 10, 115, 157 shouhui [recover], 161 Shimonoseki, Treaty of, 11, 241 Shinian [Sapnin or Ten Years], 198 Shu, Kei, 32, 70–1, 73, 87, 89, 91, 99–110, 133, 243

340

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Shum, Jim, 135 Shu, Shi, 21, 24–5, 44–5 Siao, Josephine, 71 signifiers and signifieds, 31, 86, 90–9, 153, 243 Simondon, Gilbert, 2 metastability, 37 Sino-British border, 12 Sino-Japanese Friendship Trade Treaty, 11 Sino-Japanese War, 1, 15–17, 19, 43, 46, 57, 145, 240–1 Sit, Kok-sin, 16, 44 Situ, Huimin, 43 siudiu (small tunes), 124–5 Siu, Stanley Xiexi tangrenjie [Hyutsai tongjangaai or New York Chinatown], 168–9 Six Dynasties, 31, 59, 80–1, 83, 85, 243s Sobchack, Vivian, 115 socialism, 45, 140, 162, 167, 258 Solovieva, Olga, 203 corpus Christi, 203 Song dynasty, 82–3 So, Sau-chung, 39 South Asia, 38 South China Morning Post, 160, 204 Southeast Asia, 12, 38, 44, 119, 125–6, 147, 240 as a market, 16, 43, 128, 170 banning anti-Japanese films, 16 Singapore, 6, 16, 18, 43, 114, 120 Southern California, University of, 77 sovereign authority (zhuquan), 1, 3, 11, 29–30, 32, 37–9, 51, 60, 68, 70, 86, 116–17, 120, 135, 146, 158, 160–3, 193, 195, 211, 242, 245, 250–1, 265–6; see also administrative right (zhiquan) Argentine sovereignty, 117 Chinese sovereignty, 39, 48, 51, 116–17, 120, 162, 189, 239, 241, 244, 256 de facto, 39, 41–3, 116 de jure (power), 45 huifu xingshi zhuquan (resuming the exercise of sovereignty), 161 political power, 3, 37, 52 So, Yee, 44 Special Administrative Region (SAR), 32–4, 113, 137, 159–63, 173, 204, 238, 241, 245 Basic Law, 166, 208, 224, 229, 236; Article 23, 166, 204; Article 45, 20; interpretation of, 166

Chief Executive, 136, 164–5, 181, 194, 196, 205, 246; Electoral College, 165, 231, 246; heixiang zuoye (haaksoeng zokjip or black box operations), 165 Inception Day March, 166 Spielberg, Steven, 183 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty subaltern, 73, 110 Star Ferry, 39, 148, 151 State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT), 171–2, 174, 180 Publicity Department of the PRC, 180 substitute, 46, 86, 88, 204 Sun, Honglei, 185 Sun, Jinglu, 44 Sun Luen Film Company, 45, 167 Sun Po Kong (incident), 48 Sun Sing Theatre, 131, 168–9 Barry Koh, 131 Sun, Yat-sen, 176 symbolic transference, 102, 106, 108 reversal, 106, 108 Szeto, Mirana, 174–6 Tai, Benny, 205–6 Tai Chung Pou, 60 Taipei Film Festival, 198 Taiwan, 38, 114, 126, 131, 135, 147, 153, 167–8, 170, 172, 218, 234, 237, 253, 258, 261, 264, 266 as a market, 6, 128 fundraisers, 170–1 independent films and filmmakers, 198 relationship with China, 119–20 Ten Major Construction Projects, 119 Taiwan International Film Festival, 198, 235 Tam, Alan, 114, 125–6 Tam, Patrick, 71, 76, 91, 109 Aisha [Ngoisaat or Love Massacre], 91 Liehuo qingchun [Litfo cingceon or Nomad], 91 Mingjian [Minggim or The Sword], 91 ‘Miu Kam-fung’, Qi nüxing [Cat neoising or Seven Women], 31, 90–9, 109, 243 Tam, Roman, 124, 126 Tanaka, Shiego Hong Kong kōryaku [Xianggang gonglue, Hoenggong gungloek, or Invasion of Hong Kong], 44

­

inde x 341 Tang, Alan, 168–9 Wing Scope Company, 168–6 Tang, Shu-hsuen, 71, 75–85, 109 Dong furen [The Arch], 31, 77–85, 242 Zaijian Zhongguo [China Behind], 77 Tang, Xiaodan, 44 Tat Ming Pair ‘Aisha’ [‘Ngoisaat’ or Love murder], 149, 151 Anthony Wong, 149, 222 ‘Dengzhuo ni huilai’ [Waiting for your return], 145 television, 33, 85–110, 109–10, 112, 118, 121–4, 126, 135–7, 140, 144–5, 160, 238, 241, 244 addresser-addressee, 71, 89, 109 cable, 86–8 dramas and programmes, 114 instrument of education, 89 New Wave, 71, 85–110, 222 producers and professionals, 71, 222 sets, 88, 113 terrestrial (broadcast), 87–8 viewers, 70, 243 Television Broadcast (TVB), 88, 90, 122–6 Beidouxing [Bakdousing or The Bigger Dipper], 90 Capital Artists, 124–5 C.I.D., 90 Chu Liuxiang [Cho Lauhoeng or Chor Lau Heung], 123 Jade, 88 Lam Ka-yu’s footage of Ken Tsang (Civic Party), 211–12 Nianqing ren [Nincing jan or Young Generation], 90 Qi nüxing [Cat neoising or Seven Women], 90 Qunxing pu [Kwansing pou or Superstars], 90 rivalry with RTV/ATV, 123–4 star system, 122 Tixiao yinyuan [Taisiu janjyun or The Fatal Irony], 125 TVB International Chinese New Talent Singing Championship, 124 Xiao renwu [Siu janmat or Ordinary People], 90 Teng, Teresa, 126 Tham, Xinyue, 263

Thatcher, Margaret, 32, 116–17, 120–1, 244 visit to Beijing, 120 Third World, 200 Three Kingdoms, 177 Tiananmen Square Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, 204 June-Fourth Vigil at Victoria Park, 166, 204 March in support of strikers and protesters, Hong Kong, 114, 204 protests and hunger strikes, 135, 144–5, 222 Tiananmen crackdown, 32, 111, 114, 132, 135, 143–6, 164, 166, 204, 210, 232, 249 Yuan Mu and Zhang Gong’s statement, 210–11 Tianjin (Tientsin), 43 tianxia (all that under heaven), 172, 249 Tianxing dianying yuekan [Tinsing dinjing jyuthon or Star Pictorial], 43 Tianyi (Unique) Studio, 43 Ti Lung, 132 Time it (takes) took for time to end, the (kairos), 32, 33, 105, 111, 114, 121, 156, 166, 244–5 Tin Hau (Lin Mazu), 147–8 Tin Hau Temple, 147–9 To, Chapman, 158 To, Johnnie, 91, 124, 133, 158–9, 178–94, 245 Baxing baoxi [Baatsing bouhei or Eighth Happiness], 131 Duzhan [Dukzin or Drug War], 34, 159, 182, 184–94, 245 Lunliu zhuan [Leonlau zyun or Five Easy Pieces], 123 Milkyway Image, 124, 178, 181, 183, 185 Quanzhi shashou [Cyunzik saatsau or Fulltime Killer], 183 Shentan [Santaam or Mad Detective], 180–1 Shiwan huoji [Sapmann fogap or Lifeline], 183 Zhenxin yingxiong [Zansam jinghung or A Hero Never Dies], 183 Zhizun wushang II zhi Yongba tianxia [Ziayun mousoeng II zi Wingbaa tinhaa or Casino Raiders II], 183

342

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

Tomonobu, Imamichi, 251–3 Tomson International Distribution, 171 Torne, Matthew, 246 Weigoucheng [Meigaucing or Lessons in Dissent], 35, 214–16 Toronto, 139, 145 Toyota, 94 transnational cinema, 2, 6, 167, 215, 239; see also local and regional cinema; national cinema trauma (traumatic) affects, 30, 55, 75, 94, 101, 112, 121, 238 complex, 175 core, 101 disavowal, 102 event or moment, 101, 115, 230 experience, 108, 112, 115, 156 extraterritoriality as a, 15 origin, 102 see also memory (memories) Trench, David, 39–41, 48–51 Trinh, Minh-ha, 210 Triumph Stags, 94 Troost, Kristof Van Den, 11 Trump, Donald, 203, 211 Tsai, Chu-sang (Cai Chusheng), 16, 23, 43–4 Gudao tiantang [Orphan Island Paradise], 23 Tsai, Sung-lin Scholar Film, 170 Tsang, Donald, 165 Tsang, Eric, 130 Zuijia paidang [Zeoigaai paakdong or Aces Go Places], 130 Tse, Yin Patrick, 76 Tsi, Lo-lin, 61 Tsim Sha Tsui, 39, 204 Train Terminus, 109 Tsui, Hark, 73, 123, 130, 132, 136 Daoma dan [Doumaa daan or Peking Opera Blues], 131 Huang Feihong [Wong Fei-hung or Once Upon a Time in China] series, 183 Xiadao fengliu [Hapdou funglau or It Takes a Theif], 123 Tsuiji, Hisaichi cinematographic manifestation, 21–2 Tucker, Nancy Bernkopf, 116 Tu, Guangqi, 20 Tung, Chee-hwa, 137, 164–5

Umbrella Movement (Revolution or Occupy Movement), 29, 34, 159, 165–6, 196–237, 242, 246, 260–1, 265 31-August decision, 205, 207–8 Admiralty, 206–8, 217, 220, 224, 227–8, 230, 246; Connaught Road, 261; Johnston Road, 225 blue ribbons, 207, 211 Causeway Bay, 147, 206, 208, 246 CITIC Plaza, 231 Civic Square, 205, 225–6, 231 civil disobedience, 34 clearance, 208, 230 events and aftermath, 205–9 invasion of Mong Kok, 207 Lung Wo Road, 211, 225, 227 meeting between HKFS and Carrie Lam, 208 Mong Kok, 206–8, 211, 217, 219–21, 226, 230, 236–7, 246 Occupy Central in Love and Peace (OCLP), 205 Pro-establishment legislators’ walkout, 208 Tamar Garden, 205, 227, 231 teargas, 206, 227 Time Magazine (International) cover and Hannah Beach’s article, 206 yellow ribbons, 207, 215 Union Film Enterprise, 45–7, 69, 123 Janjan waingo, ngowai janjan (All for One; One for All!), 61, 65, 67 United Kingdom (UK) and Great Britain (British), 1, 3, 37–8, 42, 48, 111, 113, 116–18, 120–1, 135, 138, 158, 160–1, 163, 196, 215, 238, 241, 244, 261 British-Chinese and British-Hong Konger, 4, 215 colonialism and colonial government, 10–11, 33, 38–9, 41–2, 45, 47–9, 51, 85, 116, 118–19, 137–8, 153, 160, 163–4, 166, 175, 229, 241–2, 244–5 Commonwealth, 117–18 Conservative party or government, 32, 113, 116, 118, 163, 244 Crown 160 decolonisation of Hong Kong, 39, 41, 164 Downing Street, 117, 119 England, 144 Falkland Islands, 117

­

inde x 343 Gibraltar, 117 Labour Party, 85, 209 Order in Council, 32, 116–17 Parliament, 113, 116, 223; House of Commons, 41 rock music and popular culture, 50, 87, 114, 124–5, 145 taipan, 118 Whitehall, 39–41, 48–9, 116–17, 120 United States, 248–9, 267 Alt-Right movement, 203 as a market, 6, 43, 168–9 colonialism and imperialism, 10, 48–9, 137 Congress, 119 diplomatic relationship with the PRC, 119 Electoral College, 203 Federal Election Commission of the, 202 film, popular culture and television, 87–9, 113–14, 124–5, 171–2, 178, 197 Republican and Democratic Parties, 203, 211 Vietnam War, 32, 103–5, 107, 115, 130, 243 Urban Council, 144 Vancouver, 145 Vertov, Dziga kino-eye and kino-pravda, 209 Victoria Harbour, 42 video art, 33, 127, 134–56, 151, 153, 229, 238, 245 commercial, 170 experimental videos, 6 super-8 and video-8, 136 VHS, 126, 140, 170 Video Power, 136 Videotage, 30, 33, 112, 114, 134–56, 244 Alternative Film and Video Festival, 134 Vietnam, 32, 90, 104–5, 129–30, 243 New Economic Zones, 99 Saigon, 99, 107, 129 Viola, Bill 114 violence gang, 218 gendered and sexual, 220 juridical and/or political, 30, 48, 86, 110, 138–9, 144, 200, 233, 235, 242 revolutionary, 30, 48, 50–1, 235

Vitoria, Francisco de, 9–10, 160 Voight, Jon, 103 Wagner, Richard leitmotif, 93, 171–2 Wah Kiu Yat Po [Chinese overseas daily], 204 waiguo shili (foreign powers), 254 Wai, Ka-fai, 181 Wan Chai, 206 Wang, Haizhou, 7, 175 Wang, Hui, 248–9 Wanghia (Wangxia), Treaty of, 10 Wang, Jiuliang Suliao wangguo [Plastic China], 257 Wang, Libo, 257 Wang, Renmei, 18, 44 Wang, Shuo, 249 Wang, Tianlin, 123 Wang, Yiman, 38 region-specific collective consciousness, 38 Wang, Yin, 20, 44 Wang, Ying-hsiang Long Shong, Dragon Crown, and Te Pao, 170 Wang, Yunlong, 257 Wanjiu Yueypian lianhe xiehui (Waangau Jyutpin lyunhap hipwui or United Association for Rescuing the Cantonese Cinema), 43 Warhol, Andy, 140 Warring States period, 172, 253 Weir, Peter Dead Poet Society, 114 Welles, Orson The Lady from Shanghai, 180 Wenders, Wim, 114 Wen Hai (Huang Wenhai), 35, 253–61 Fangzhu de ningshi [Gaze of exiles], 257 Wo’men [We], 253–4 Xiongnian zhi pan [We the Workers], 257–61 wenyi (literary and romantic), 76 wenzi (manzi or written language), 56 white and whiteness, 4, 139 Williams, Thomas Chatterton, 203 Wilson, Don, 169 Wilson, Harold, 39 Win’s Movie Production, 169–70 Winston, Brian, 209 women, 13, 31, 73, 266 and colonialism, 87

344

e x t r a t e r r ito r i a l i t y

women (cont.) filmmakers and artists, 70–1, 73, 78, 109, 112, 243 workers, 259 xin nüxing (new women or femininity), 18 Wong, Ain-ling, 71, 76 Wong, Ben, 173, 178–9 Wong, Chi, 32, 72, 90, 99–110, 243 Wong, Chi-fai, 135–6, 151 Wong, Cho-shan, 61 Wong, James, 124–5 Wong, Jing Du shen [Dou san or God of Gamblers], 170 Jingzhuang zhuinüzai [Zingzong zeoineoizai or The Romancing Star], 169 Luding ji [Lukding gei or Royal Tramp], 170 Zhizun wushang [Zizyun mousoeng or Casino Raiders, co-directed with Jinny Heung], 170 Wong, Joseph, 88 Wong, Kar-wai, 91, 124, 133, 168, 194 Afei zhengzhuan [Afei zingzyun or Days of Being Wild], 169 Yidai zongshi [The Grandmaster], 194 Wong, Man-lei Mary, 45 Wong, Mary, 71, 86, 91 Wong, Melvin, 169 Wong, Paul, 139 Wong, Raymond, 130 Wong, Siu-pong, 197 Wong, Tak-ming, 88 Wong, Ting, 75–6 Wong, Wai-yat Zhujiang lei [Zyugong leoi or Dawn Must Come], 44 Wong, Yank, 136 Woo, John, 73, 76, 130, 132 Chibi [Chekbik or Red Cliff], 177 Dinühua [Daineoifaa or Princess Chang Ping], 77 Yingxiong bense [Jinghung bunsik or A Better Tomorrow], 132 Woo, Matthias Donggong xigong [Dunggung saigung or East Wing West Wing], 137 Yingxiong bense II [Jinghung bunsik II or A Better Tomorrow II], 183 working class, 13, 29, 58, 62, 68, 73, 88, 90, 97, 165, 176, 200, 254

World Trade Organisation (WTO), 171 Wu, Pang, 45 wuxia, 172 Wyatt, Justin, 169 package-deal system, 169–71 Wynners, The, 124 Xianggang xin dianying gongzuozhe (Hoenggong san dinjing gungzokze or new Hong Kong film workers), 53 xiaokang (small middle-class), 263 Xia, Yan, 171 Xie, Jin Muma ren [The Herdsman], 248 Tianyunshan chuanqi [Legend of Tianyuan Mountain], 248 xieyi (sketching ideation) and xieshi (describing reality), 80 Xinhua dianying gongsi (Hsin Hwa Film Company), 20–1 xinling (takes this offer with her heart), 264 xin or xinshi (mind or consciousness), 59, 79–80 jing yuan yu xin (an image being initiated by the mind), 80 xin yuan yu jing (the image initiates the mind), 80 Xin wenxue yundong (New literary movement), 57 Xin Yingtan [New film altar], 21 xiqu dianying (heikuk dinjing or opera film), 77 Xi, Zhongxun, 162 Xu, Xiaoqun, 122 Xu, Xin Changjiang [A Yangtze Landscape], 257 Xunzi Xunzi, 250 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival Shinsuke Ogawa Award, 227 Yam, Kim-fai, 154–5; see also Bak, Shuetsin Yang, Hansheng, 44 Yang, Lian, 258 Yangtze Film, 56 Yang, Yuanying ideological suture, 34, 176–7, 184, 195 Yan, Ru, 22; see also jazz Yan, Xuetong, 250 Yan, Zhexi, 145

­

inde x 345 Yau, Ching, 33, 135, 137, 151–4, 155, 244 Suet-sin’s Sisters, 155 Video Letters 1–3, 152–4 ‘Wo nege wo’ [‘Ngo nigo Ngo’ or Me, this me], 137–9 Yau, Nai-hoi, 181 Yau, Wai-ching, 208–9 Ye, Jianying, 120 Yen, Chun (Yan Jun), 21, 44 yihui (ideate), 80 Yilin [Ngailam or Art Lane], 43 Yim, Ho Sishui liunian [Ciseoi launin or Homecoming], 128 Ying E Chi, 197 Ying, Liang, 35, 253–6 Mama de kougong [I Have Nothing to Say], 261 Peng, Shan, 255 Wo haiyou hua yao shuo [When Night Falls], 255, 261, 265 Zigong, Sichuan, 255, 261, 264 Ziyou xing [A Family Tour], 261–5 Yiu, Chung-yin, 209 yixiangren, 265 Youde, Edward, 117, 120 you (drift or journey), 59, 79 Youyou [Jaujau], 43 Yuan dynasty, 82–3 Yue, Feng, 20 Yu, Kwai ‘Lun dianying shang de xinchaopai’ [‘Leon dinjing soeng dik sanciu paai’ or On the cinematic new wave], 74 Yu, Ling, 44 YunFest, 257 Yung, Danny, 33, 114, 134–46, 149, 181, 244 ‘China is a big garden’, 144–5 Deep Structure of Chinese (Hong Kong) Culture, 143–6 Romance of the Rock, 149 Videotable (with Jim Shum), 140–3 Yunnan (Yünnan), 77 yuyan (jyujin or speeches), 56 Zeng, Jinyan, 254, 257 Zen, Rachel, 71, 90 Zhai, Haoran, 122 Zhang, Shichuan, 16, 25

Zhang, Yimou Dahong denglong gaogaogua [Raise the Red Lantern], 171 Yingxiong [Hero], 172 Zhang, Yingjin Chinese national cinema, 7–8 Hong Kong cinema as glocal cinema, 7–8, 239; see also Nederveen Pieterse: globalisation as hybridisation; Robertson, Ronald: glocal Zhang, Zhen, 212 Zhang, Zhengdong, 86, 123 Zhao, Liang Beixi moshou [Behemoth], 257 Zhao, Shi, 172 Zhao, Tingyang, 249 Zhao, Ziyang, 119 Zhongguo xuesheng zhoubao [Zunggwok hoksaang zaubou or Chinese Student Weekly], 52–4, 58, 73, 76, 91, 242 ‘Dianying quan’ [‘Dingjing hyun’ or Cinema sphere], 53 Zhonghua dianying gongsi (United China Film Corporation), 21, 44 Zhongwen dianying (Zungman dinjing or Chinese-language cinema), 56, 239 zhongxin (zungsam, centre, or loyalty), 141–3 Zhongyang dianying jiancha weiyuanhui (Central Film Censorship Committee), 43 Zhongyang dianying shezhichang (Central Film Studio) and Central Pictures Corporations, 43, 170 Zhou dynasty, 249–50 Zhou, Enlai, 40 Zhou, Guangming, 44 Zhou, Jianyun, 16, 24–5, 43 zhuanye dianying (zyunjip dinjing or professional cinema), 53 Zhu, Shilin, 20 zhuxuanlü (main melody) films, 171–3 san hao (three goods), 171 Zong, Baihua, 59 Zuihou guantou [Zeoihau gwaantau or At this Critical Juncture], 44 Zuni Icosahedron (Jinnian or Zeonnim), 33, 114, 133–5, 144, 149, 244