Hong Kong and Berlin: Alternative Scopic Regimes

Abstract

This essay is an analysis of Yau Nai-Hoi's film Eye in the Sky, a detective thriller set in present-day Hong Kong. Because the author viewed the film while attending the Berlin film festival, the essay focuses on the differential ways in which the two global cities manage their separation from their pasts. Berlin, now a unified national capital after a significant political reorientation, is full of large corporate and government buildings as well as large consumption emporiums in places that were once quite different. Hong Kong has also undergone a significant political reorientation and now embodies much of its past culture within its new corporate and consumption-oriented architecture. While engaging with the crime drama, which is the dominant film narrative within Eye in the Sky, the essay also analyses cultural governance—the ways in which contemporary Berlin manages the issue of Germanness and Hong Kong the issue of Chineseness.

Este ensayo es un análisis de la película “Eye in the Sky” de Yau Nai-Hoy, una novela detectivesca situada en Hong Kong actual. Debido a que el autor vio la película mientras concurría al festival de cine en Berlín, el ensayo se enfoca en las diferentes maneras en que las dos ciudades globales manejan su separación de sus pasados. Berlín, ahora una capital nacional unificada después de una reorientación política significante, está llena tanto de edificios corporativos y gubernamentales, como de grandes emporios de consumo, en lugares que fueron muy diferentes anteriormente. Hong Kong también ha sufrido una reorientación política significante y ahora incorpora mucha de su cultura pasada dentro de su nueva arquitectura de orientación corporativa y de consumo. A la vez que participa con el drama del crimen, el cual es la narrativa dominante dentro de Eye on the Sky, el ensayo también analiza el control cultural—las formas en las cuales Berlín contemporánea maneja la cuestión de su carácter germánico y Hong Kong su carácter chino.

Keywords:

• architecture
• Berlin
• cinema
• cultural governance
• Hong Kong

Notes

This is a reduced version of my article, Shapiro (2008).

The time images in Yau's film are not simply the indirect aspects of time that result from what Deleuze refers to as ‘action-images’; see Deleuze (1986); there are often direct time images or ‘chronosigns’ in the film, which derive from the mode of time-consciousness created by the camera's director-imposed mode of narration; see Deleuze (1989).

In Peter Taylor's analysis of key the key services provided by ‘world cities’ in the age of globalization, Hong Kong scores very high (below only New York and London) when total services scores on accountancy, banking/finance, and law are summed (2000, p. 21).

The quotation is from Walter Benjamin's Notebook P of his Paris project. I have taken the passage from Samuel Weber's discussion of Benjamin's Paris (Weber, 2003, pp. 22–3).