Vivian P.Y. Lee
History in Hong Kong cinema takes a myriad forms: from the recovery of marginal voices in docudramas and national allegory in martial arts films to postmodernist reconfigurations of temporality and affect and playful citations of period codes, the local cinema offers a rich repertoire of screen histories, or screen memories, for an investigation into the popular historical imagination, where “history” refers as much to the material reality of the past as to the experience of images from earlier times. The popular “recycling” of the past may well be a symptom of postmodernist culture: Fredric Jameson speaks of the “depthlessness” of mainstream nostalgia films and their potential to dehistoricize the past (Jameson 1998: 1–12). While Jameson’s critique of the American culture industry has global resonances, cinema remains a powerful means for the articulation and contestation of individual and collective memories. An examination of screen histories has to attend to the fluid and idiosyncratic quality of the cinematic medium, and inevitably brings forth the question of authenticity of the image and its relationship to the viewer’s affective and imaginative (dis)connections with the past, especially when memory is understood as “a process of becoming” subject to revision and alteration through contact with other memories, such as mediated memories in films and other “moving image texts” (McNeill 2010).
This chapter is concerned with Hong Kong’s screen memories as a form of “moving-image text.” The discussion is situated in the context of the city’s (post)colonial condition and the compressed cultural space where local history disappears into fragments of memories, anecdotes, sentiments, and images, and reappears in popular cultural texts. Instead of a loss of history, the “burden of history” is most disturbing when it becomes light, when it becomes slippery, fragmented, and hard to grasp. History in Hong Kong cinema therefore can be construed as a history of lightness, understood in the dual sense of “making light of” and “grappling with lightness.” The following discussion locates the city’s historical lightness in films made in a variety of styles and genres. Their diversity notwithstanding, these films demonstrate a close affiliation to the image culture of earlier decades, to the extent that past images and conventions become both the medium and the substance of the filmic representation. My analysis will consider the connection between screen memory and the visual codes and strategies that make it “visible,” and how this visibility gains weight as it engages with the “lightness” of its subject matter.
History is anything but light in the Chinese experience. Traditionally, history commanded significant epistemological authority as one of the three branches of knowledge (literature, history, and philosophy). Common expressions such as “lishi de zhongdan” (the burden of history) and “lishi de chenzhong” (the heavy weight of history) encapsulate the importance of shi in the Chinese cultural psyche.1 The burden of history is also felt in the works of Chinese filmmakers. China’s humiliating defeats by foreign invaders have been the substance of countless war movies, from portrayals of the Opium Wars in Lin Zexu (Zheng Junli, 1959) and Opium War (Xie Jin, 1997) to more complex reflections on violence and war trauma in Devils on the Doorstep (Jiang Wen, 1990) and City of Life and Death (Lu Chuan, 2009). This is yet to take into account the vibrant cinematic reflections on China’s recent and distant past concurrent with the “cultural self-reflection” movement in the 1980s, followed by the urban cinema of independent and underground filmmakers who turn their eyes on urban alienation and the spiritual vacuum underneath the façade of economic progress in the post-Tian’anmen era. The younger filmmakers’ vision of the “here and now” is infused with a sense of incredulity toward official history. Screen memories of a more personal nature, for example Lou Ye’s Summer Palace (2006), Huo Jianqi’s Postmen in the Mountains (1999), Jiang Wen’s In the Heat of the Sun (1994), Lu Xuechang’s The Making of Steel (1995), self-consciously intervene in the historical discourse of the state.
Chinese cinema, it seems, is ineluctably entwined with the narrative of the nation even at a time when economic globalization and transnational capital seem to have fostered a “post-national” world view.2 It is at this juncture that the diverging paths of Hong Kong’s screen memories contribute to critical reflection on the nature of cinematic remembrance and its nuanced articulations of self, cultural, and national identities. Still, it must be acknowledged that “China” has had a nuanced presence in Hong Kong cinema: the “imaginary China” in the wuxia films of the 1960s/1970s was succeeded by Tsui Hark’s fantasy-inflected national allegories, the modern jianghu (wuxai mythic world) in John Woo’s “crisis cinema” (Tony Williams 1997), and Johnnie To’s postmodern neo-noir gangland. Parallel to the action auteurs are a group of socially committed directors such as Ann Hui, Allen Fong, Yim Ho, and Fruit Chan, whose work reinvigorated the realist tradition with aesthetic refinement and contemporary relevance. While films such as Song of the Exile (Ann Hui, 1990), Father and Son (Allen Fong, 1982), Homecoming (Yim Ho, 1984), and Little Cheung (Fruit Chan, 1999) are not necessarily “history films,” individual acts of remembrance are cast against the larger fabric of collective memory. Quite apart from the preoccupation with the nation, Hong Kong’s screen memories tend to be more fragmented and diffused. Part of the reason is the problematic identification with the “nation” against the complex histories of colonialism and China’s nation-building since the late nineteenth-century. Another contributing factor is the “laissez faire” filmmaking environment where the market reigns supreme. Screen memories, to a large extent, reflect this condition of in-betweenness and fragmentation. In the popular cinematic imagination, history is as much about “what happened” as it is about stylistic choices, so much so that sometimes “style” becomes a means and a subject of historical representation.
Despite the proliferation of local screen memories, the “Hong Kong story” remains “difficult to tell” (Lui 2003: 206–218), and when such an attempt is made, more questions are asked than answered. The problem of narration has to do with the systemic suppression of a local cultural consciousness (Turner 2003) independent of the colonial–capitalist ideology of “progress” and the utilitarian pursuit of modernity. Economic growth and rising living standards since the late 1960s, says Matthew Turner, had led to the conflation of “identity” with a modern “way of life”:
The problem of self-image in a territory that will shortly cease to exist in its present form, of British “subjects” without nationality, the “compatriots” of a China which most have chosen to leave, seems to bring us back to earlier images of a dislocated, alienated society, a population of “residents and other persons” without an unique identity to protect, merely a capitalistic “way of life” to maintain. Such an image is a convenient expedient used to justify the political decision of Britain and China not to allow the Hong Kong people to speak for themselves
(Turner 2003: 48).
Critical literature on Hong Kong politics and culture has shown how the two realms are entwined in everyday life. Since the change of sovereignty in 1997, this entwinement has intensified and further complicated the attempt to conceptualize the “local” in the postcolonial present. Turner concludes his article with the conjecture that “lifestyle” might well be conceived as a site of resistance where a local cultural consciousness would emerge in the circumscribed sphere of identity politics (Turner 2003: 50). Thomas Wong, writing for the same volume, ponders with less reassurance:
the Hong Kong consciousness is a contested terrain, with the powerful trying to impose narratives, and the powerless responding with mocking cynicism
(Wong 2003: 247).
In a highly compressed political and cultural environment where “culture” and “identity” are collapsed into “lifestyle,” these questions are especially illuminating, for they point toward the elusiveness of the city as a historical subject shrouded in official myths and political clichés, such as “the Hong Kong success story” endorsed by both the British and Chinese governments.3 These dilemmas are materially embedded in the spatial design of what Janet Ng (2009) calls the “paradigm city,” where “the state inculcates a particular civic aesthetic among Hong Kong’s population that corresponds to the capitalist as well as nationalist ideologies” (Ng 2009: 3). Ng’s critique of the city’s rigorously regulated institutional spaces reveals an underlying logic of physical and cognitive control that limits agency and manipulate users’ consciousness. We shall see that, in attempting to tell the “Hong Kong story,” filmmakers find themselves engrossed in the same ideological cul-de-sac. In response, they resort to a variety of strategies to circumscribe the inherent inadequacies of this compromised position vis-à-vis the larger contexts of the colonial past and the postcolonial present.
To Zygmunt Bauman (2000), “lightness” exemplifies the experience of modernity, which has been a process of “liquefaction,” of making everything light, mobile, and shapeless. Human subjectivity and agency, too, become “fluid” in the ever-increasing velocity of technology (Bauman 2000: 9–10). Bauman’s critique does not directly deal with cinema and memory, but his idea of modernity as “liquefaction” helps to illuminate the condition of lightness in screen memories, for lightness is construed as both a predicament, something like an imposed condition, and a critical sensitivity that seeks to grapple with this predicament.4 This argument can be adapted, with some qualification, to a study of screen memories in (post)colonial Hong Kong as a reaction to its historical lightness: after one and a half centuries of British rule, its experience of modernity has been a function of the colonial ideology that defined its public governance and cultural politics. In Hong Kong, “liquefaction” results from a mechanism of peripheralization, where local agency obtains carefully monitored autonomy in public affairs and economic-political participation under colonial rule. It is what Law Wing-sang (2009) calls “collaborative colonialism”: it is a function of the so-called “indirect rule,” which operated by co-opting local elites to conduct affairs concerning the locals to ensure the stability of British rule while maintaining a façade of “freedom and liberty” within the realm of the laissez faire economy. Relegated to the periphery, the locals enjoyed a limited degree of reciprocity in practical transactions. The quiescent colonial subject therefore could share the dividends of economic prosperity as long as they were kept at a distance from things that truly mattered, such as democracy, social equality, and voting rights after 1997. This schizophrenic split between economic progress and systemic political peripheralization has not disappeared since the change of sovereignty: it has been internalized and reinvented by the new HKSAR government under “one country, two systems.”
Not that the locals are forbidden to look after their own affairs, but they are systemically frustrated when they want to do it differently, that is, as a counter-hegemonic majority. Turner’s “lifestyle-as-identity” thus finds a nuanced echo in Ackbar Abbas’s note on decadence:
Historical imagination… gets replaced by speculation on the property or stock markets, or by an obsession with fashion or consumerism. If you cannot choose you political leaders, at least you can choose your own clothes
(Abbas 1997: 5).
Or images. Decadence, too, is a symptom of lightness: it is a gesture of irrelevance and irreverence, the “cult of the ephemeral” (Abbas 1997: 9) – where self-determination has been overruled.
A profitable way to start a discussion on irrelevance/irreverence is to briefly revisit the culture of “mo lei tau,” a term originally used to describe the “nonsense” film style of Stephen Chow, Hong Kong’s “King of Comedy.” Chow’s status as an iconic screen comedian hinges upon a clever manipulation of the “local” and the means through which he communicates his “local identity” to a broadening base of regional and international audiences. His irreverent appropriation of the conventions, acting style, personas, and linguistic register of Cantonese films from the 1950s to the 1970s combines both nostalgia and a no-holds-barred transgressive spirit that is central to his popular appeal. Chow’s later endeavors, for instance Shaolin Soccer (2001) and Kung Fu Hustle (2004), have played down the context-specific in-jokes, and citations from Bruce Lee and the kung fu film conventions are tactfully honed in a film narrative that exploits the intertextual knowledge of film audiences in a more transnational context. Arguably, Chow’s comedy exhibits a postmodernist hybridity and playfulness that routinely turns its own nostalgia into a target of appropriation and parody. This said, however, Chow’s affective connection to the visual culture of the past runs deeper than a postmodernist fascination with surfaces, for his films also pays homage to popular martial arts heroes. This kind of historical inscription captures the absurdity of humanity that Chow and his screen fellows personify. It is also a function of Chow’s idiosyncratic rewriting of Hong Kong’s cinematic history, in which the “local” is subject to contending ideological and cultural constructions. In Chow’s cinema, the local is a transmutation of hybrid sources: from the Cantonese classics of Ng Chor-fan (see below) and Bruce Lee to James Bond, Walt Disney cartoons, Japanese manga and, closer to home, Jin Yong’s martial arts novels. The ease with which Chow, a self-made director with no formal film school training, can effectively exploit the chemistry between local and foreign sources with little regard to authenticity, or even intellectual property, says volumes about Hong Kong’s cultural history, if not the narration of this history, and why the local is always elusive. Yet, underlying all this “nonsense” is a fascination with the images of the past, and filmmaking can be seen as the director’s means to engage in a dialogue with those images that have left an indelible mark on the budding artistic consciousness of his childhood self. Instead of history per se, Chow is more interested in a visual “reinhabitation” of a mediated past – a reinvention of “style” through displacement and recontextualization.
Chow is not alone among his contemporaries in revisiting old styles and conventions. Jeffrey Lau’s 92 Legendary La Rose Noire (1992) kicked off a new cycle of nostalgia films in the 1990s. Encouraged by the critical and box-office success of this film, Lau went on to make Rose, Rose, I Love You (1993) and Black Rose II (1997). The prototype, The Black Rose (Chor Yuen, 1965), is a popular spy-action film with an all-star cast: Nam Hung and Connie Chan Po-chu play the Black Roses, and Patrick Tse Yin the young detective who eventually falls in love with Connie Chan’s character.5 What makes La Rose Noire an interesting example of the nostalgia film cycle is that, its playful engagements with the original aside, the film constructs explicit analogies to the star culture of the period, casting Tony Leung Kar-fai in the role of the detective whose prototype is not Patrick Tse, but another 1960s teenage heartthrob Lui Kei, Connie Chan’s sweetheart on and off screen. In Lau’s rendition, the younger Black Rose is played by another 1960s superstar, Fung Bo-bo, who began acting as a child actor in black-and-white movies in the 1950s. An advanced amnesiac, she regresses into her childhood self and, in an ingenious character pun, turns into a parody of herself – Fung Bo-bo the child actor. The film’s main action amounts to a time travel in disguise, and the “adventure” of the younger characters in the mysterious mansion of the Roses is dotted with hilarious moments, including a dangerous passage through a dudgeon equipped with motion-sensing weapons, a typical device in 1950s Cantonese martial arts films. Other nostalgic adornments include several song-and-dance numbers reminiscent of the qingchun gewupian (youth musical) of the period. The archaic visual and character design is further enhanced by a sound track reminiscent of 1950s martial arts and detective genre films.
In 1993, Peter Chan and Li Chi-ngai released He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father. In this film, time travel is a plot device that motivates the reconciliation between father and son, past and present. The film also casts Tony Leung Kar-fai as the central character whose prototype is another Cantonese cinema legend, Ng Chor-fan, who is best-known for playing fatherly characters embracing the Confucian virtues of loyalty, generosity, and righteousness. (Ng was associated with the left-wing cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. He plays the philanthropic principal of an orphanage in The Kid [Feng Feng, 1950], which showcases Bruce Lee as an orphan controlled by a group of petty criminals.) The protagonist Chor Fan (Tony Leung Kar-fai) is Ng’s incarnation, who lives by the motto “all for the greater good” (ren ren wei wo, wo wei ren ren). The film’s Chinese title directly borrows from a 1960s hit, The Odd Couple (Nanxiong nandi) (Chun Kim, 1960), but the story goes much deeper into the ethos of the working class film in the 1950s. Local audiences familiar with black-and-white Cantonese films – or even their modern parodies, whether in the theater or on television – can immediately recognize the source: the “social problem” films of Ng Chor-fan’s generation. More than coincidentally, this outdated teaching finds a new spokesperson in the character of Old Kong, the diehard leftist, in a more recent “reunification” film, Mr. Cinema (Samson Chiu Leung-chun, 2007, discussed below).
In reinventing a bygone era of communal bonding and class solidarity, the directors throw in abundant references not so much to the historical reality of the time but to its film culture. Like La Rose Noire, He Ain’t Heavy displays a hotchpotch of generic allusions, name/character puns, and playful citations of memorable images from the film culture of the 1950s and 1960s. This kind of intertextuality is a recurrent feature of the nostalgia films since the 1990s. The extensive use of intertextual play is no doubt a feature of postmodernism, but this alone does not adequately explain the prevalence of this indulgence in a wide range of films and genres. Arguably, the films are more concerned with recreating/reinhabiting the cinematic time-space in order to rediscover its contemporary relevance and significance: what the present generation has casually dismissed as ridiculous and old-fashioned is precisely the cultural memory being recalled and reclaimed. What does this “simulacrum of a simulacrum” say about the relationship between nostalgia and the historical experience/imagination of the city? To what extent is it a response to the anxiety over loss of memory and identity during, and after, the political transition? The “reconfiguration of the idols of the 1950s and 1960s cinema,” says Natalia Chan (2000), “signifies the collective consciousness and the social memory of the people of Hong Kong. It is a nostalgia that points to the introspection of the past, the anxiety of the present, and the uncertainty of the future,” one that “awakens the sense of social belonging as well as the search for cultural identity” (Chan 2000: 269).
This understanding of nostalgia’s social value seems to have guided the Hong Kong Film Archive’s publication projects. An example of immediate interest is the volume The Glamorous Modernity of Kong Ngee (2006). In his chapter on the film culture of the 1950s and 1960s, Yung Sai-sing, uses “imagined modernity” to refer to the Kong Ngee studio’s urban films. At a time when the local film scene was dominated by the glamorous Mandarin features of the Shaw Brothers and MP&GI, Kong Ngee was able to find inroads into the young audience market with its Cantonese productions. Kong Ngee was also the home base of teen idols Connie Chan, Lui Kei, Patrick Tse, Nam Hung, and Linda Kar Ling. From the romantic comedy and “odd couple” genre to the noir-inflected spy movies, Yung delineates how Kong Ngee’s urban cinema was a major purveyor of the haute couture and urban lifestyle of the time that many ordinary folks could not yet afford. According to the editor, Kong Ngee’s films are distinguished by their “urban touch” and a “distinctively middle class flavor [that] made its mark on Hong Kong cinema” (Wong 2006: 16–18). To Yung, the “Kong Ngee style” is “part and parcel of a middle-class fantasy promised by a flourishing economy” (Yung 2006: 28, added emphasis). The lure of the “middle-class fantasy,” it seems, is also central to the nostalgic imagination of the present, which embraces this “fantasy” as a collective historical experience. Rather than pursuing verisimilitude, the nostalgia films of the 1990s articulate the past–present relationship in a filmic medium that relies on pastiche, theatricality, and a seemingly ahistorical and decadent indulgence in pre-existing codes, themes, and images. Hoesterey’s study of pastiche argues that, from “postmodern pastiche” to “a dialogical mode… of cultural production,” cinematic nostalgia can be deployed as a self-reflexive mode of historical representation (Hoesterey 2001: x). In the films noted above, the invocation of symbolic signs of “the good old days” invites further reflection on the “conditions of possibility” that have shaped the city’s encounter with modernity (be it late-imperial British or twenty-first-century Chinese) and the popular imagination of/reaction to this encounter.
This mode of cinematic history-writing, however, cannot easily extract itself from the clichéd representations of Hong Kong as a modern city of humble origins, and one that revels in an “imagined modernity” of lifestyle and media products where a more critical intervention into the fissures and disjunctions of this brand of modernity is needed. Given that Hong Kong’s experience of the modern is entwined with the history of colonialism, and that the postcolonial decade has seen not the end but a mutation of the city’s peripherality from “collaborative colonialism” to what I would call the “motherland dependency syndrome,” cultural memory, too, has to negotiate with not one but multiple hegemonic discourses. The local’s openness to multiple inflections may obscure the critical potential of the concept itself. It is in this light that we now turn to a different set of images in Wong Kar-wai’s films, in which lightness defines a condition of being that is both unbearable and desirable at the same time. The obsession with surfaces, sometimes, is more complex that it seems.
Needless to say, Wong Kar-wai’s cinematic journeys into the 1960s are made on multiple inflections. Both Stephen Teo (2005: 5–8, 13) and Ackbar Abbas (1997: 49–50) have commented on the influence of popular film genres and TV production on Wong’s work. Wong’s films also draw upon motifs and quotations from a broad geocultural spectrum of literary, musical, and visual artworks. As Hong Kong’s homegrown auteur, Wong speaks to the peculiar lineage of the “local” culture and its perplexing historical anchorage. It might sound far-fetched to juxtapose the intertextual density of Wong’s films with those of Stephen Chow’s, but it is in their glaring differences that one discovers important connections between intertextuality and Hong Kong’s screen memories. My concern here is less about which sources/texts are referenced than the density and self-reflexivity of intertextual referencing, and questions about effect and purpose. Here I would like to focus on his self-reflexive engagement with the “imagined modernity” of the urban cinema of the 1960s and the kind of “imagined heritage” that emerges from his deconstructive reworking of the themes and motifs of the past. The notion of “heritage” is invoked here not in the ordinary sense of consensual history but as a provocation: Wong’s films intensify the viewer’s nostalgic identification with images and objects from the past to such an extent that “pastness” becomes an effect of fabrication, that is, an interactive performance between viewer and camera.
It must be noted that Wong’s 1960s is constructed from a plethora of visual, audio, and textual codes from that era, and not all of them are “indigenous” in a strict sense: Days of Being Wild (Ah Fei zhengzhuan) (1990) borrows both the title and the “look” (including characters, set design and mood) of the voguish, James Dean-style young rebel (“ah fei” in Cantonese) film and subsequently absorbed into the local ah fei genre; both In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004) draw upon the romantic melodrama in the wenyi tradition of the 1950s and 1960s (Teo, 2005: 3), while 2046 features science fiction elements in its metafictional frame. The narrative structure, as Teo notes, betrays the stylistic influence of Latin American literature, the work of Manuel Puig in particular (Teo, 2005: 4–5), although the explicit literary references are drawn from Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang’s The Drunkard (Jiu tu) and Intersections (Dui Dao). Wong’s directorial imprint is unmistakable throughout the trilogy: in addition to resonances in mood, characterization, and motifs, there is also a sense of thematic progression that links Lesley Cheung’s Yuddie (the young rebel) to his two successors, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) the reticent and reserved lover in Mood, who subsequently evolved into Chow Mo-wan the dandy and womanizer in 2046, the same man and yet a different persona after the heartbreaking romance with So Lai-chen (Maggie Cheung) in Mood. Upon closer examination, the three films exhibit a circularity more intriguing than a linear progression. The later Chow Mo-wan in 2046 looks like a more mature self of Yuddie and the nameless young dandy (also played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai) whose role is confined to the final scene in Days of Being Wild, while the Chow Mo-wan in Mood occupies a “middle ground” that he himself later abandons.
What eventually brings these characters together is a self-denying impulse that seems to contradict their apparent self-indulgence: Yuddie is unable to commit to any serious relationship because of his oedipal obsession with the “mother” (which is further split into his adopted and biological mothers). Chow Mo-wan in Mood is consumed by his passion for another forbidden target, So Lai-chen, a married woman who finds consolation in Chow’s company when they discover (and later playact) the affair between their spouses. Rejected by his biological mother in the Philippines, Yuddie gets himself into a brawl with the local gangsters and dies of a serious injury on a train. Chow, in a more sober manner, chooses to bury his secret in a tree hole on a visit to the Angkor Wat. In a rhythmically composed scene, Chow’s memories – not to be overheard by the audience – are absorbed into the ruins of Angkor. To both Yuddie and Chow, time has frozen at the moment of loss: Yuddie insists on the precise date, hour, and minute when he meets So Lai-chen (also played by Maggie Cheung) for the first time, while Chow holds on to an unspeakable secret buried in timeless ruins. Interestingly, despite Yuddie’s and Chow’s pretention to forget, time past remains a spectral presence in the film narrative, refusing to be buried in time or silenced by death: Yuddie finds an incarnate in the nameless young dandy in the enigmatic ending shot, while Chow turns into a mature version of Yuddie (and his former self) in 2046, no less haunted by memories of “So Lai-chen,” a name and a face that seem to resist change, and time, throughout the trilogy.6 As the trilogy develops, “So Lai-chen” splits and multiplies further in 2046, respectively played by Gong Li (a femme fatale character), Maggie Cheung (the conflicted woman from Mood), and Maggie Cheung in a cameo shot of a cyborg on the express train to the imaginary “2046,” a destination in Chow Mo-wan’s science fiction where one can recover past memories.
Character overlap creates thematic and narrative interreferentiality, hence layers of possible meaning. Instead of a straightforward linear progression, the films are connected through a constellation of visual, textual, and sound motifs that gives rise to the structural circularity mentioned above. Compared to the nostalgia films discussed above, Wong’s nostalgic universe exhibits a more complex intertextuality that goes beyond adapting and embracing old forms. The extensive use of intertextual references from local and foreign sources is complemented by a more intense circulation of motifs and images within the trilogy. Instead of creating convenient knock-offs, intertextual density, or intertextual intensity in Wong’s case, is a vehicle for philosophical reflection on time and history, so much so that the nostalgic becomes a means and a subject of critique. As it were, Wong’s nostalgic reconstruction of the past is less referential than self-referential, in the sense that the 1960s emerges as a highly distilled image of images, thus amounting to a form of nostalgic (self-)parody. This understanding of nostalgia encourages a more complex reading of Wong’s films not as “nostalgia films” per se, hence a vehicle of desire, but a self-conscious engagement with nostalgia as both text and desire.7 This is most obvious in Wong’s meticulous attention to the “look” of the films: Days of Being Wild visually recalls the youth culture of the 1960s, especially the ah fei figure in popular cinema and music, which in turn is a translation of American pop culture. The extravagant display of the female body draped in body-hugging cheongsams and “sam fu” (white top and black pants, standard uniform for domestic servants) in Mood and 2046, on the other hand, is a hyperbolic representation of conventional dress codes that were slowly going out of fashion toward the late 1960s to give way to Western-style fashion apropos to Hong Kong’s emerging modern outlook.8
Visually, the exquisitely tailored cheongsams and other “period objects” – cramped interior spaces, old-style cafes, streetlamps, taxi-cabs, the songs of Nat King Cole and Zhou Xuan, and a profusion of personal accessories – create a sensory overload, which is further magnified by the frequent use of close-ups and medium close-ups. The cinematography also favors skewed camera angles to draw attention to the presence of the peeping/eavesdropping camera. By obstructing the viewer’s gaze, the camera intensifies and frustrates the viewer’s desire to see what should be there but remains “unseen.” In 2046, visual imbalance is more pronounced. The camera frequently violates eye-line matches and the conventional shot–reverse-shot composition. A shot may show characters in the extreme left or right, speaking to someone out of field, followed by a cut to reveal a reversed spatial orientation. Wong’s camera not only announces its presence in, but also its interference with, the process of signification: the 1960s as historical reality is overtaken by the 1960s as artifice, and artifice, in turn, becomes the ultimate “signified” in the films.
When taken as a whole, the trilogy might be Wong’s personal chronicle of the “most memorable images” of the decade, if not the director’s tribute to the image culture of the 1960s. But one is prompted to ask: several decades later, what is the relevance of the imagined modernity of the 1960s to the arguably postmodern present? What common threads exist between the young rebel in Days of Being Wild and the wenyi-style lovers in Mood and 2046? All three films have been interpreted as allegories of Hong Kong’s colonial past and its anxieties over the city’s future. No doubt Wong’s obsession with material signs of the past bespeaks an intense nostalgia for lost time (Teo 2005: 119; Luo 2004: 132). The visual techniques noted above also suggest that the filmic image is carefully choreographed to create a tantalizing spectacle of the decade. What the films offer, therefore, is less a realistic representation than an affective recollection of iconic images of a bygone era. While nostalgic art generally relies on artifice to create an idealized version of the past, Wong’s use of artifice – close-ups, skewed perspectives, visual imbalance, and violation of conventional shot compositions – has a denaturalizing effect that turns nostalgia, and the nostalgic persona engrossed in it, into a subject of inquiry. From Days of Being Wild to In the Mood for Love and 2046, Wong’s camera relentlessly traces the characters’ movement through densely decorated interiors filled by everyday objects, so much so that the characters, with their meticulous make-up and period costumes, become embedded in the material, antiquated filmic universe, an imaginative space transformed before our eyes into a figure of history – the past in performance. McNeill (2010) has pointed out how film, as “artificial memory,” plays a crucial part in the construction of shared social memory in the modern world (McNeill 2010: 31). This interactive formation of cultural memory is at the centre of the nostalgic image in Wong’s films: instead of claiming authenticity, the stylized topography of the 1960s is a highly mediated form of “artificial memory” that speaks more to the act of recollection of past images in the present than the past as it was. The extravagantly coded screen memory of the 1960s, therefore, is an interrogation of the consciousness of the present: the sense of loss and bereavement that haunts the films’ nostalgic personas takes allegory one step further by questioning the authenticity of the “lost object” of nostalgia itself, that is, Hong Kong’s “younger self” five decades back. The glamour, decadence, and romantic passion that funnel through the camera lenses, it follows, are the work of affect in the present.
Wong’s way of “looking back” is both constructive and deconstructive in the sense that memory of the past is always a process of construction in the present, hence the “presentness” of time past at the moment of its recall. This leads us back to our earlier question about cinema and “imagined heritage,” a question that cuts through the films discussed in this chapter. While the discourse of heritage (as consensual history) has been held suspect due to its institutional affiliation, the concept of heritage has been theorized as a complex representation of contending cultural, social, and political interests of the present. This understanding of heritage opens the field to contending interpretations and (de)constructions of heritage that challenge dominant discourses of identity and history. Cinema, as well as television and other digital media, has become a “theatre of memory” where “popular history” gains precedence over traditional forms of historiography (Samuel 1994: 3–17). If, as Stuart Hall suggests, heritage as representation should be opened up to include the “heritageless” such as the work of minority artists in the West (Hall 2007: 93–98), the “imagined modernity” in the urban cinema of the 1960s has to be seen within the complex history of British colonialism in Hong Kong and the city’s truncated relationship with mainland China since 1949, if not for the simple reason that Hong Kong’s “modernity” has always existed in a doubly negotiated form.
Wong’s tribute to the 1960s complicates the route of memory and its referent by insisting on the artificiality of this “lived history” whose materiality depends on its being “virtual,” that is, a modern experience of images that may or may not be materially concrete, but nonetheless remains an integral part of the popular imagination. This, perhaps, is the clue to Hong Kong’s cultural memory – a memory of what has been imaged as real. If, following Stuart Hall, heritage is the work of representation, Wong’s films, being “representations of representations,” have translated Hong Kong’s “imagined modernity” into a virtual archive of “imagined heritage.” Its virtuality is a form of lightness that Wong tries to capture and comes to terms with: the passage of time, hence the vulnerability and futility of human agency in the process, is communicated through the mesmerizing imagery of the Angkor ruins, a timeless presence brought into being by the wreckage of time. A seeming reversal occurs in Chow Mo-wan’s science fiction, “2046,” which promises the recovery of memory in a “future” that defies the imagination: it is a destination that no one has ever returned from. Symbolically, “2046” is a pun on Hong Kong’s political future – the timeframe “1997– 2007” that promises Hong Kong’s lifestyle “will remain unchanged for fifty years” (wushi nian bubian 五十年不變, a famous dictum of ex-PRC Chairman Deng Xiaoping when referring to Chinese policy toward Hong Kong after 1997). Importantly, Deng’s dictum refers, once again, to lifestyle: “horse-racing and dancing as usual” (ma zhao pao, wu zhao tiao馬照跑,舞照跳), rather than the more pressing concerns such as human rights and democracy. In this sense “no change” reveals an inhibitive logic of counter-progress under the guise of a political promise. Once again we are reminded of the distortions and deprivations in the city’s historical encounter with modernity – a top-down, watered-down, product of colonial or state power. Hong Kong’s historical lightness – its fragmented discourse of identity and the systemic denial of political agency – is behind Wong’s political pun.9
Taken as a whole, the trilogy is less about promises than betrayals and forgetfulness: if Yuddie is a metaphor for Hong Kong’s “illegitimate” roots, he is also the victim of successive betrayals by his real and adopted mothers. Yuddie’s death is a denial of change, for any hope for the future eventually dissipates in his rejection of this possibility. Refusal, however, leads not to finality but inconclusiveness, hence the serial quality of the trilogy: Yuddie’s subjectivity dissolves into a mirror image of his alter-ego; Chow Mo-wan’s failed romances with So Lai-chen and her incarnations in Mood and 2046 continue this seriality by which the films also question the nostalgic impulse to resist time. Wong’s cinematic reflection on nostalgia therefore goes beyond the nostalgic to question the nature of nostalgia, and by embracing one’s memory of the past as artifice (a “serialized” act of reconstruction, idealization, and performance), Wong offers a new critical perspective on the historicity of memory-as-artefact. The “imagined heritage” in Wong’s films, therefore, is subversive as long as it is also self-subversive. Wong’s “new practice of the image” (Abbas 1997: 36) in these films amount to a new “practice of memory” sustained by an ironic consciousness of the fissures between memory and its material referent, hence the performativity of memory itself. Wong’s tactic, thus, is to grapple with memory’s lightness through an affectionate reinterpretation of its fleeting images.
A more recent phenomenon in Hong Kong cinema is what I would call the “local heritage film.” This kind of film presents an interesting opportunity to examine the valorization of collective memory (jiti jiyi集體記憶) in the local cinema and the mutual inflection of cinematic and social articulations of a predominant strain of local history. Different from both the playful and nonchalant intertextual free-quoting found in nostalgic comedies in the 1990s and the more self-reflexive and complex renditions of personal memories in the New Wave and post-New Wave art films, the “local heritage film” celebrates a popular version of collective memory through the invocation of the so-called “Hong Kong Spirit.” In short, the “Hong Kong Spirit” is a shorthand used by the mainstream media to refer to the typical Hong Konger, that is, the enterprising, energetic, resilient, and upwardly mobile everyman. The interest of the local heritage film lies in the entanglement between cinematic representations and the politics of collective memory and local heritage, which seems to have accelerated in the post-handover era. Indeed, the politicizing of “collective memory” from below problematizes the discourse of national identity and patriotism that has infiltrated the mass media and public communication channels since 1997. As Carolyn Cartier argues, the post-handover decade has seen a widening base for conservation activism to develop into a kind of public “performance art” that actively intervenes in the political economy of urban renewal, which she sees as “a process that ultimately eviscerates places of people’s experience and local memory.” (Cartier 2010: 27)
As far as the cinema is concerned, between 2007 and 2010, a number of films have been hailed as “films for the local people.” (Note that the Hong Kong film industry has been preoccupied with co-productions with mainland China in the last ten years or so, delivering historical epics and martial arts blockbusters targeted at mainland audiences.) These “new local films” include two Shaw Brother productions, Turning Point (a.k.a. Laughing Gor: the Movie, Herman Yau, 2009) and 72 Tenants of Prosperity (Eric Tsang, 2010), Mr. Cinema (Samson Chiu, 2007), a “reunification film” commissioned by the local branch of a China-based studio, Sil-Metropole, Echoes of the Rainbow (2009), a popular art film by Alex Law, and Gallants (Derek Kwok and Clement Cheng, 2010), a self-parodic kung fu retro after Kung Fu Hustle. The success of 72 Tenants increased the confidence of filmmakers in making “Hong Kong films” for the Hong Kong people. Not all these films are concerned with heritage and urban conservation, but in different ways they all celebrate the “Hong Kong Spirit” and the “Hong Kong Story” as the very basis to redefine Hong Kongers’ collective identity. While 72 Tenants is a parodic present-day sequel to a 1970s Shaw production, The House of 72 Tenants (Chor Yuen, 1973) – itself an adaptation of a Shanghai film of the same title in the 1940s – Mr. Cinema tells the story of Hong Kong from the perspective of a leftist. In both films the “Hong Kong spirit” stands out as the most treasured asset of the city despite the conflicting values and beliefs of the fictional characters. 72 Tenants opens with a direct quotation from the alley community of the original film, followed by a time-travel-like one-shot transition to the present: Sai Yeung Choi Street, Mongkok, one of the most popular shopping districts in Hong Kong. We soon realize that this film is actually not a remake, but a sequel to the original, for the main characters in the original film have now become middle-aged parents and rival shop-owners. Mr. Cinema, on the other hand, tells the life-story of a die-hard leftist, Old Kong (Anthony Wong), who finally comes to realize he has been betrayed by his times. The melodramatic narrative is filled with comic moments when Kong’s son takes the centre stage, trying every means to undercut his father’s beliefs in search of his “first bucket of gold” in mainland China in the 1980s. These “local films for local people” are warmly received by critics despite their uneven cinematic accomplishments. (Elley 2007; Mudge 2010) They also have generated online and media discussion about “Hong Kong virtues,” which the filmmakers as well as the main cast publicly endorsed.10
Echoes, Mr. Cinema, and 72 Tenants are generally regarded as cinematic incarnations of the “Hong Kong Spirit,” the common understanding of which resonates with the clichéd “Hong Kong success story” that used to appear in official campaigns to promote the city under British colonial rule. Such a success story has also demonstrated a high degree of consistency from the colonial times to the present. If the commercial opportunism of the Chinese New Year film and the political correctness of the reunion film are symptomatic of the economic and political conditions of cultural production nowadays, this grand narrative has also infiltrated the sentimental time-journey of Echoes, albeit in a different artistic register. Written and directed by Alex Law, the film is a fictionalized recollection of Law’s childhood memories seen through the eyes of its child protagonist, Big Ears. In numerous press interviews and public forums, Law and producer Mabel Cheung speak of their own nostalgia for a bygone age of innocence and compassion, qualities that seem to be missing in both the lived reality and the cultural imagination of the present:
At the centre of Echoes of the Rainbow is [compassion]… Since the turn of the century Hong Kong cinema has been full of emotional excess and violence for the sake of visual excitement. Little room is left for compassion and affection… now that this film has become [a part of ] Hong Kong’s collective memory, [the audience] know that… we all have lived through difficult times. Why can’t we hold on to this Hong Kong spirit to face the challenges at the present?
(Epoch Times 2010 [my translation].)
Primarily a story about family hardships and tribulations overcome by resilience and perseverance, Law’s film is a sincere effort to revive this “Hong Kong spirit.” The cinematography and set design effectively reconstruct the impoverished working-class community which, despite its lack of means, proudly stands out as a cozy, colorful, and dignified home for the ordinary folks. Cinematically transformed, the dilapidated neighborhood of the historic Wing Lee Street comes to signify the core values of the Hong Kong people, a reminder of shared origins that Hong Kongers can identify with. Winning the Silver Bear prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2010 greatly increased the social impact of the film. International exposure provided much needed fuel to a local conservation campaign against the demolition of the vernacular buildings in Wing Lee Street, for which producer Mabel Cheung had made repeated public appeals. The heated public debate that followed pressured the government to abandon its original blueprint in favor of complete preservation. Insofar as heritage is the work of representation and a form of social memory, the cinema performs certain “heritage functions” in fostering the collective memory of the local people. In the case of Echoes, the “Hong Kong story” is not too different from the dominant discourse: the collective memory represented in the film projects a distilled image of the 1960s, a decade shaped by the repercussions of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the Cultural Revolution. On the home front, public security and social stability were challenged by political activism, widespread police corruption, and mass riots. The scanty references to class difference, police graft, emigration of the well-to-do and the disturbances in China are structured within a self-contained narrative of family bonding and romance, an idealized world that borders on the idyllic, by which I refer as much to the artistically touched-up version of Wing Lee Street as to the desire of its creator for a “complete preservation” of childhood dream/memory. As a result, the film, as much as the vernacular neighborhood being “preserved” through cinematic re-visualization, becomes a monument kept in a pristine condition, a warped zone buttressed by crafted images, the nostalgic sound track of the Monkeys’ “We’ll Be Dancing on the Moon,” and atmospheric props to authenticate a particular (if not consensual) vision of the past.
The meticulous effort to obtain verisimilitude in Echoes approximates Wong Kar-wai’s 1960s trilogy in the use of artifice, but here artifice is less a subject of critical (self-) reflection than a self-authenticating tool. Law’s film is also indebted to the Cantonese melodrama in its portrayal of working-class life, communal bonding, teenage romance, and filial love and piety. The desire to recoup the working class ethos out-proportions the director’s artistic finesse in the final scene: Mrs. Law and the now grown-up Big Ears visit the graves of Mr. Law and Desmond. As mother and son slowly walk away from the graveyard, the camera pulls back to reveal a rainbow arching across a clear blue sky. Chinese audiences will not miss the allusion to the old saying: yu guo tian qing (the sky will clear up after the rain). The rainbow, a visual rhyme with the film’s title, symbolizes the transcendence of youth and innocence, ideal qualities personified by Desmond, a good-to-a-fault character whose premature death from leukemia brings the film to its emotional climax. More than coincidentally, Desmond has composed a song before his death, also titled “Echoes of the Rainbow.” As a symbol of hope, atonement, and love, the rainbow literally, and visually, bridges the past and the present. Having Aarif Lee play both Desmond and the grown-up Big Ears doubly inscribes this message in the film narrative. In short, narrative closure is achieved through a unity of theme, characterization, and symbolism in an affectionately nostalgic tale of loss redemption.
Screen histories in Hong Kong cinema go beyond what is outlined above. Due to limited space this chapter has left out other equally deserving examples. In closing, I would like to go one step beyond the “Hong Kong story” to explore the diasporic vision in a recent independent film, Evans Chan’s Datong: the Great Society (2011). Chan, an established writer, director, and film critic based in New York, is well-known for his unyielding “indie” spirit in making films that actively demand the audience to be intellectually, culturally, and artistically engaged. Datong, premiered in a select circuit of art house venues in Hong Kong and North America in late 2011, has triggered tremendous critical interest worldwide. The subject of this film is the legendary life of the late-Qing philosopher and political reformer, Kang Youwei. Consistent with Chan’s interest in exploring the meaning of China and Chineseness through the diasporic connections between persons, times, and places, the film recasts Kang as a liberal-minded Chinese scholar between cultures, his patriotism informed by both the Confucian ideal of datong (“great unity,” or “great society” in Chan’s translation) and a budding globalism inspired by his travels to Europe (especially Sweden, his second home in exile). In Chan’s film, the exilic is further dramatized in adapted scenes from August Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1901), a structural device to enable one of the most prominent public figures in modern Chinese history to reveal his intimate thoughts and feelings in the first person. Datong has a visual and structural complexity that cannot be fully addressed here. The following discussion will highlight the nuanced articulations of Kang’s diasporic identity and its contemporary resonances.
Chan’s portrayal of Kang departs from conventional historical representations, which tend to treat him as a once-influential political reformer who faded into oblivion after the failure of the One Hundred Days Reform. Kang’s advocacy for a European-style constitutional monarchy was soon eclipsed by Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary thought that eventually brought down the Qing dynasty. Datong was initially passed over by Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards and the Hong Kong International Film Festival. Ironically, it has been enthusiastically received in the academic circle as an original and thought-provoking film about the predicament of modern Chinese intellectuals, if not China at large.11 In the film, Kang (Liu Kai-chi) and his daughter, Kang Tongbi (Lindzay Chan), become interlocutors in Strindberg’s play. Their dramatized performances are woven into the first-person narrative of Chiang Ching, a present-day contemporary dance choreographer based in Sweden. These three interlocking voices mobilize the inquiry into the life and career of Kang in what Chan calls a “docudrama.”
A noteworthy element of the dramatized part of the docudrama is the mix of English and Chinese dialogues in the conversations between Kang and his daughter. Although Kang the “liberal-minded patriarch” occupies the centre stage, Tongbi steals the spotlight by the proud assertion that she was “the first woman to travel from China to the West.” Indeed, she was also the first Asian to graduate from the Barnard College of Columbia University. Well versed in English, Tongbi played an instrumental role in supporting her father’s cause during Kang’s exile in Europe, and later became a pioneer in the women’s rights movement in China. Lindzay Chan, the lead actress in Evans Chan’s early work To Liv(e) (1992), is elegantly dressed in traditional Indian sarongs as she (speaking in English) engages in a dialogue with her father (speaking in Cantonese), who looks back, and downwards as if from Heaven, on his “previous” life. Chan’s film has been applauded by filmmakers, critics, and scholars as an original, provocative, and postmodern rendition of the biography of Kang. By foregrounding the transformative power of Kang’s travels in Europe and his intellectual and emotional connections to Sweden, the film is deeply informed by Chan’s diasporic vision and aesthetics in its intellectual ruminations on China at the crossroads between reform and revolution, nationalism and internationalism, and no less China’s still continuing project of modernity.
At a post-screening forum held at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in December 2011, Chan was asked whether Kang in the film represented an “alternative path” for China’s modern nation-building at the turn of the century. In reply, Chan said the political realities of the time had precluded such an alternative. In another in-depth interview with Peter Zarrow (Chan and Zarrow 2011), Chan gives a more illuminating reply:
If my film has shown a perspective in which the boundary between reform and revolution has been blurred, it’s because the perspective of dissidence has come to the fore through the filter of time. The question has become – how to effect political change?… Liu Xiaobo has been compared by some Chinese commentators to Liang [Qiqiao] (and Kang)… But the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize is still serving a long prison sentence, most likely because of his advocacy of reform.
Chan’s intellectual rumination takes him deeper into the lesser-known aspects of Kang’s life and modern Chinese intellectual history as a whole. Throughout the film there is a consistent effort to recast Kang in a longer continuum of the Chinese intellectual diaspora. This is most apparent in the role of Chiang Ching as the narrator in the present. As Mette Hjort notes, “(Chiang Ching’s) life story is well worth telling”… because of “the deep cultural connections that exist between her and Kang Youwei across a turbulent century” (quoted in Chan and Zarrow 2011).
When watching the film, my attention was drawn to Chan’s emphasis on the appeal of the West to the intellectuals and how their diasporic identities relate to Chan’s experience as an artist and intellectual. Through Chan’s lens Kang emerges as a transnational cosmopolitan intellectual whose vision of the Great Society – a utopia where men and women are completely liberated from the conventions of marriage and sexual norms – was far ahead of his times, despite the fact that Kang also confesses to having concubines. If the East–West cultural dynamic is captured symbolically in the bilingual conversations between father and daughter in Strindberg’s play, the episodes in Sweden, including contemporary scenes where Chiang Ching takes us through her own journey of migration, seem to underscore the centrality of exile and migration to the intellectual/artistic maturity and fulfilment of the Chinese subject rejected and persecuted by his/her peers at home. Kang’s conflicted feelings of homesickness toward China, it seems, is premised upon his deep appreciation of, and affection for, Sweden, which appears in the film as the closest approximation of datong. (The film’s Chinese title, “Datong: Kang Youwei in Sweden” [Datong: Kang Youwei zai Ruidian], makes explicit the centrality of exile and displacement in this docudrama.)
In foregrounding Kang as a diasporic intellectual and an admirer of Western models of the modern state, Datong has presented not only an extremely complex and modernized version Kang’s life-story, but also, through its central character, an allegory of the contemporary Chinese “border intellectual.” In this projected fictionalized world stage, Chan himself is also a fitting persona to continue the “dream play” of Kang and the successive generations of diasporic intellectuals. In Chan’s film, Chinese history is framed in the cross-cultural and trans-temporal drama of A Dream Play where historical figures are brought back to re-enact their legendary lives. In a different way, Chan, not unlike Wong Kar-wai, is aware of the performative nature of historical memory, especially when rendered in the cinematic medium. As a docudrama set at a critical juncture in modern Chinese history, Datong has folded in the contradictions and predicaments of a Hong Kong filmmaker trying to make sense of and come to terms with his own diasporic pedigree vis-à-vis China, and his own Chineseness, in and through the luminal figure of Kang Youwei, an exemplary diasporic and cosmopolitan Chinese intellectual in early twentieth-century China. Chan’s weariness over Han ethnocentrism today gives credence to this conjecture: “One important debate I try to retrieve was the one between the reformers and the revolutionaries over the necessity of a civic-based, versus an ethnicity-based, nationhood for the new nation-state, the forgetting of which has haunted China to this date” (Chan and Zarrow 2011).
Datong is a different kind of screen history in Hong Kong cinema. The film bears the imprint of a self-reflexive consciousness in dialogue with its own existential condition. From casting, subject matter, dialogue, structure, and style, Chan has made a statement on modern Chinese history as well as his own intellectual and artistic upbringing that has shaped his vision of China and Chineseness. Chan’s aesthetics may come across as elitist, but the interest in intertextuality and performativity calls History into question, a trait shared by other “Hong Kong” films discussed above. Instead of returning to local roots, Chan’s film revisits an important intellectual and political debate since the turn of the twentieth-century that eventually determined the course of modern Chinese history in the next one hundred years. As a “Hong Kong film,” Datong is not entirely a “local film for the local people,” but underneath its globalism is a perplexed Chineseness characteristic of many local films. While history in this film is by no means light, Datong concludes with a note of lyrical transcendence, when Kang Youwei and Kang Tongbi resume their roles in A Dream Play as if they have ascended to a higher level of consciousness. Chan might have intended this as a tactic of “lightness,” a philosophical counter-thought to Hong Kong cinema’s historical lightness.