Relocalising Hong Kong Cinema

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Notes

1 ‘Motherland' was originally rendered ‘Mainland' (neidi) in Mandarin Chinese. This slogan was adopted by pro-establishment politicians and media after ex-Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa's public and policy speeches between 2003 and 2004. In the 2004 document, he used ‘leveraging on the Mainland, engaging ourselves globally' as a strategic direction in the post-SARS years. ‘Mainland' was subsequently replaced by ‘Motherland' (zuguo) by official media and leading figures of the pro-China camp. Recently this slogan is adapted by the New People's Party as ‘beikao shijie, mianxiang zuguo' (leveraging on the world [global economy], engaging ourselves with the Motherland) <http://www.npp.org.hk/zh-hk/node/6773>.

2 A more detailed discussion on the politics of local horror films including Midnight After and Juno Mak's Rigor Mortis (2015) is offered in an essay by Lee (‘Ghostly Returns’).

3 The intensity of political tensions and controversies surrounding the term ‘local' has been escalating since the Umbrella Movement, a 79-day long mass demonstration against the curtailment of democratic political reforms between September and December 2014, when tens of thousands of protestors set up camps across broad sections of Hong Kong's busiest commercial areas that led to a virtual shut down of the city for nearly three months. During and in the aftermath of the protest, the ‘local' as a self-empowering concept was widely debated on social media and was later absorbed into the agendas of new political parties and activist groups with pro-independence inclinations. The ‘local' thus feeds into the rhetoric of a new wave of ‘localism' especially among the younger generation who openly advocate ‘local autonomy' and in more extreme cases ‘Hong Kong independence'.

4 The term ‘New Hong Kong Cinema' was used by Ackbar Abbas to refer to the works of the Hong Kong New Wave directors such as Ann Hui, Allen Fong, Yim Ho, Tsui Hark, and what Stephen Teo calls the ‘second wave' including Wong Kar-wai, Stanley Kwan, Alex Law, and Mabel Cheung (see Abbas (1997); and Teo (1997).

5 SARS is an atypical pneumonia that ravaged the Guangdong Province in 2002 before it reached Hong Kong in March 2003. Between March and early June, a total of 1,750 cases had been identified and 286 people died of the disease (Lee). The epidemic triggered a severe economic recession when property prices plunged to historic lows. The avalanching public health and economic crises were believed to be a catalyst for the massive turnout (approx. 500,000 according to an official estimate) at a public demonstration against the proposed anti-subversion law on 1 July 2003.

6 Tony Williams uses ‘crisis cinema' to encapsulate the spatial and cultural imagination of John Woo's action films in the 1980s and 1990s. Two decades later, Esther Cheung uses ‘crisis cinema' as a ‘critical paradigm' in her discussion of post-millennium Hong Kong films.

7 ‘Despite assurances of a “Hong Kong ruled by Hong Kong people,” in formal documents the People's Republic assumes that there is no such thing as a “people” of Hong Kong, and indeed the Joint Declaration describes the population in neutral, neutralising terms such as “inhabitants” or “residents,” while local culture is rendered merely as “lifestyle” … ' (Turner 39, original emphasis).

8 The concept of ‘national cinema' came under critical spotlight in Western academia during the 1980s. Andrew Higson's ‘The Concept of National Cinema' (1989), for instance, unveils and problematises the complicity between a national canon, nationhood, and national (film) culture embedded in the concept of national cinema. Other approaches to national cinema – whether as textual or industrial practices – have been proposed and debated by film scholars. See, for example, Alan Williams, Film and Nationalism. The concept also enters Chinese cinema scholarship at the turn of the millennium, for instance Zhang Yingjin's Chinese National Cinema (2004) and Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation.

9 As Walter Mignolo argues, coloniality's legacy lies in its more enduring forms of political, economic, technological and epistemological control, or what he calls the ‘colonial matrix of power’ that has defined the modern world order since the 1500s.

10 A more detailed discussion of this film and Pang's work can be found in Pang Ho-cheung (2015).

11 See, for instance, Laikwan Pang.

12 Ten Years is a low-budget independent film and the initiative of new directors active in the local independent film scene (Jevons Au, Ka-leung Ng, Kwun-wai Chow, Fei-pang Wong, Zune Kwok). The project was conceived before the Umbrella Movement, but the political crises and scandals arising from a failed political reform and a general apprehension of the systemic erosion of freedom of expression endow this ‘futuristic' film with an uncanny immediacy, which explains its unexpected commercial and critical success.