Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas
The Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas showcase the rich film heritages of various countries across the globe. Each volume sets the agenda for what is now known as world cinema whilst challenging Hollywood’s lock on the popular and scholarly imagination. Whether exploring Spanish, German or Chinese film, or the broader traditions of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and Latin America the 20–25 newly commissioned essays comprising each volume include coverage of the dominant themes of canonical, controversial, and contemporary films; stars, directors, and writers; key influences; reception; and historiography and scholarship. Written in a sophisticated and authoritative style by leading experts they will appeal to an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers.
Published:
A Companion to German Cinema, edited by Terri Ginsberg & Andrea Mensch
A Companion to Chinese Cinema, edited by Yingjin Zhang
A Companion to East European Cinemas, edited by Anikó Imre
A Companion to Spanish Cinema, edited by Jo Labanyi & Tatjana Pavlović
A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, edited by Raphaëlle Moine, Hilary Radner, Alistair Fox & Michel Marie
A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, edited by Esther M.K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti, and Esther C.M. Yau
Edited by
Esther M. K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti, Gina Marchetti, and Esther C.M. Yau
This edition first published 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A companion to Hong Kong cinema / edited by Esther M.K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti, and Esther C.M. Yau.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
ISBN 978-0-470-65928-1 (cloth)
1. Motion pictures China–Hong Kong–History and criticism. 2. Documentary films–China–Hong Kong–History and criticism. I. Cheung, Esther M.K., editor. II. Marchetti, Gina, editor. III. Yau, Ching-Mei Esther, editor.
PN1993.5.H6C88 2015
791.43095125–dc23
2015004135
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Scene from 2046, directed by Wong Kar-Wai, 2004. Photo: Columbia / Block 2 / Jet Tone Films / The Kobal Collection / Shya, Wing
Dr. Esther Mee-kwan Cheung, a pioneering figure in the field of Hong Kong studies and an important force in research on Hong Kong film, literature, and cultural studies passed away on February 9, 2015.
This volume is dedicated to her memory.
Esther Cheung was actively involved in the editing of A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema from the very outset and remained an indispensable member of the editorial team. She wrote an important essay for Part I, “Critical Paradigms,” and took up the editorial work for the same part as well as for Part V, “Narratives and Aesthetics.”
Many months of editorial coordination and checking received assistant support through Esther Cheung’s generous sharing of research funds.
The volume has been enriched by Esther’s intellectual presence, wisdom, attentiveness, and generosity.
The editors thank the contributors and the commentators for their excellent work and their patience. We thank all those who helped to make this book possible: Jayne Fargnoli, and Julia Kirk of Wiley-Blackwell for their continuous support throughout this process. Luna Ngai has generously offered her expert help in collating the material, formatting the chapters, compiling the filmography, and keeping us all on schedule. We also wish to thank Man Man (Kasey) Wong, Sonya Wong, and Natalie Wong for their help at various stages of the production of this book.
Research support for portions of this volume come from General Research Fund (GRF) grants. Research for Parts I and V as well as Esther M.K. Cheung’s chapter in Part I was funded by the General Research Fund entitled “Creativity, Crisis and Everyday Life: Studies of Hong Kong Urban Cultural Texts” (HKU 743110H).
Research for sections of Esther C.M. Yau’s chapter was funded by the General Research Fund for the project entitled “Transformative Witnessing and Everyday Ethics: A Study of Cultural Memory in Chinese Films and Public Discourse.”
Research for Gina Marchetti’s chapter was funded by the General Research Fund for the project entitled, “Hong Kong Women Filmmakers: Sex, Politics and Cinema Aesthetics, 1997–2010.”
Ackbar Abbas is professor of comparative literature at UC Irvine, USA, and author of Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997).
Ian Aitken is a professor of film studies in the Academy of Film, School of Communications, Hong Kong Baptist University. His research interests lie in the fields of documentary film studies and realist film theory. He is the author of, amongst others, Hong Kong Documentary Film (co-author, 2014), Lukácsian Film Theory and Cinema (2012), Realist Film Theory and Cinema (2006), and Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (1990, 1992, 2013). He is also the editor of The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film (2013).
Gary Bettinson is Lecturer in Film Studies at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai (2015), editor of Directory of World Cinema: China Volume 1 (2012) and 2 (2014), and co-author of What is Film Theory? (2010).
Giorgio Biancorosso is Associate Professor in Musicology at The University of Hong Kong, where he teaches courses on film music and sound, musical aesthetics, and opera. He has recently published “Songs of Delusion: Popular Music and the Aesthetics of the Self in Wong Kar-wai's Cinema” in Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers after MTV (2013) and “Memory and the Leitmotif in the Cinema” in Representation in Western Music (2013). His monograph Situated Listening: Music and the Representation of the Attention in the Cinema is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
Paul Bowman (Cardiff University) is the author of Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries (2015), Reading Rey Chow: Visuality, Postcoloniality, Ethnicity, Sexuality (2013), Beyond Bruce Lee: Chasing the Dragon through Film, Philosophy and Popular Culture (2013), Culture and the Media (2012), Theorizing Bruce Lee: Film-Fantasy-Fighting-Philosophy (2010), Deconstructing Popular Culture (2008), and Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Intervention (2007). He is editor of numerous books and journal issues, including Rancière and Film (2013), Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus (2011), The Rey Chow Reader (2010), and The Truth of Žižek (2006).
Evans Chan is a critic, playwright, and one of Hong Kong’s leading independent filmmakers. He has made four narrative features and eight documentaries, including To Liv(e), Journey to Beijing, Sorceress of the New Piano, and Datong: The Great Society. His latest documentary is The Name of the Rose: Writing Hong Kong. Chan has published three books of essays in Chinese, and is the editor/translator into Chinese of three books by Susan Sontag. His writings have appeared in Cinemaya, Asian Cinema, Film International, Postmodern Culture, Critique, and various anthologies. He is the librettist for the opera, Datong: The Chinese Utopia, premiered at the 2015 Hong Kong Arts Festival. Postcolonialism, Diaspora, and Alternative Histories, a critical anthology about Chan’s works, edited by Tony Williams, is forthcoming from the Hong Kong University Press.
Natalia Siu-hung Chan (Pseudonym: Lok Fung) is a poet, cultural critic, and has a Ph.D in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of California, San Diego, USA. She is also the guest anchor of the RTHK’s radio program of performing arts in Hong Kong. Research interests include cultural and film theory, gender studies, popular culture, performance studies, cross-dressing and fashion. Her recent publications in Chinese include Flying Coffin, which received the 9th Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature (Poetry) in 2007, and Butterfly of Forbidden Colors: The Artistic Image of Leslie Cheung, which received the Hong Kong Book Prize as well as “The Best Book of the Year” in 2008.
Stephen Ching-kiu Chan is Professor of Cultural Studies, Associate Vice President (Academic Affairs) and Registrar, and Director of Core Curriculum and General Education at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He is the co-editor of Contemporary East Asia Cities: New Cultural and Ideological Formations (2008), Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (2005), Hong Kong Un-Imagined: History, Culture and the Future (1997), and the editor of Cultural Imaginary and Ideology: Critical Essays in Contemporary Hong Kong Cultural Politics (1997). He has published journal articles in Cultural Studies and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and the chapter entitled “Film Education in Hong Kong: New Challenges and Opportunities” in The Education of the Filmmaker in Europe, Australia and Asia (2013).
Yun-chung Chen has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from UCLA, and is Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His current research interests include innovation studies, culture-creative industries, and neoliberal urban redevelopment. He has published in Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Journal of Development Studies, Journal of Economic Geography, China Review, China Information, International Journal of Technology and Globalization, Pacific Affairs etc., and in volumes like Neoliberalism and Global Cinema (2011) and Urban and Regional Development Trajectories in Contemporary Capitalism (2013).
Esther M.K. Cheung taught in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). Having chaired the Department from 2007 to 2014, she was Director of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures at HKU. Author of Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong (2009) and In Pursuit of Independent Visions in Hong Kong Cinema (2010), she was also editor and co-editor of several anthologies on Hong Kong film and literature including Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema (2004), Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Edge (2011) as well as City at the End of Time: Poems by Leung Ping-kwan (2012).
Kimburley Wing-yee Choi is Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong, where she teaches cultural studies, visual ethnography, and film history. She is currently conducting a visual ethnographic research project on the relationship between family play and class reproduction, and another on Tai Hang domestic space. She is the author of articles in Cultural Studies Review, Social Semiotics, and Urban Studies, and is the author of Remade in Hong Kong: How Hong Kong People Use Hong Kong Disneyland (2010), and the co-editor of World Film Locations: Hong Kong (2013).
Stephen Yiu-wai Chu is Professor and Director of Hong Kong Studies Programme, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, The University of Hong Kong. His research interests focus on Hong Kong culture, postcolonialism, and globalization. He has published more than 20 books, including the most recent Lost in Transition: Hong Kong Culture in the Age of China (2013). He has also published widely in journals of different academic disciplines such as literature, film, popular music, cultural policy, anthropology, sociology, and legal studies.
David Desser is Professor Emeritus of Cinema Studies, University of Illinois, USA. He is the author of The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa (1983) and Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema (1988); the editor of Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1997)and co-editor of The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity (2000), Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History (1992), and Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts of Cinema of China and Japan (1994). He has published numerous essays in scholarly collections and journals and did DVD commentary for the Criterion Edition of Tokyo Story and Seven Samurai. He is a former editor of Cinema Journal, and of The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema.
Steve Fore works in the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong, where he teaches in areas of animation studies, culture and technology studies, “new” and “old” media theory and history, surveillance studies, and documentary media. His current research is concerned with the ways in which animation artists have negotiated a relationship with the ongoing technological transformations of their creative form. In addition, he has written extensively on Hong Kong and Chinese cinema, including essays on Jackie Chan, Clara Law, and Chinese rock and roll movies.
Mike Ingham teaches drama, film, and literature in the English Department at Lingnan University. Film-related publications include Hong Kong – A Cultural and Literary History in the City of the Imagination series (2007), Johnnie To’s PTU in the New Hong Kong Cinema Series (2009), “Hong Kong Cinema and the Film Essay: A Matter of Perception” in Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier (2010), “History in the Making: Allegory, History, Fiction and Chow Yun-fat in the 1980s Hong Kong Films Hong Kong 1941 and Love in a Fallen City” in Screening the Past Vol. 24, Journal of History and Cinema (2009), “Twenty Years On: Hong Kong Dissident Documentarians and the Tiananmen Factor” in Studies in Documentary Film, Vol. 6, no. 1 and Hong Kong Documentary Film (with Ian Aitken, 2014).
Olivia Khoo is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University, Australia. She is the author of The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity (2007), co-author of Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (2013), and co-editor of Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures (2009), and of Sinophone Cinemas (2014).
Linda Chiu-han Lai is Associate Professor at the City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media (SCM). Published academically on Hong Kong and Chinese cinema, she is also a writer on contemporary and new media art. She is also a research-based interdisciplinary artist. Her experimental videography and installation works have been shown in key short film, documentary, and experimental film/video festivals in Europe, Asia, and USA. Her academic/artistic research focuses on historiography, visual ethnography, and media archaeology. At SCM, she teaches contemporary and media art, critical theory and socially engaged practices, videography, visual ethnography, and narrative experimentation. She co-edited World Film Location Hong Kong (2013).
Fiona Yuk-wa Law is a lecturer at the Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include Hong Kong cinema and cultural studies, Asian cinemas, global cinematic circulation, cinematic nostalgia, visual cultures, animal studies, affect and aesthetics. Her previous publications include a Chinese article on Center Stage and Rouge in In Critical Proximity: The Visual Memories of Stanley Kwan (2007) and an article on Chinese New Year films in the 1950s and 1960s in Journal of Chinese Cinemas (2010).
Vivian P.Y. Lee is Associate Professor at the City University of Hong Kong. She teaches and researches on Chinese and East Asian cinemas, visual cultures, critical theory, and Hong Kong culture. Her work on Chinese and East Asian cinemas has appeared in academic journals and anthologies. She is the author of Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: the Post-nostalgic Imagination (2009) and editor of East Asian Cinemas: Regional Flows and Global Transformations (2011).
Helen Hok-sze Leung is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University, Canada. She is the author of Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong (2008) and Farewell My Concubine: A Queer Film Classic (2010). She is a co-editor of the Queer Asia Book Series (Hong Kong UP) and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Chinese Cinemas (Intellect) and Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke UP).
Bliss Cua Lim is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine, USA. She is the author of Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic and Temporal Critique (2009). Her research and teaching center on cinematic and queer temporality, Philippine cinema, postcolonial feminist theory, and transnational horror and the fantastic. She is currently working on the crises of archival preservation in Philippine cinema.
Kwai-cheung Lo is a Professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, and Director of Creative and Professional Writing Program at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of Excess and Masculinity in Asian Cultural Productions (2010) and Chinese Face / Off: The Transnational Popular Culture of Hong Kong (2005). Also a creative writer in Chinese language, his Chinese publications include short stories, poems, interviews, play scripts, cultural and literary criticisms. Currently he is working on a book manuscript of ethnic minority cinema in China, and a research project on Asianism.
Sheldon Lu is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis, USA. He is the author of numerous publications, including From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative (1994), China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (2001), Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Chinese Literature and Visual Culture (2007). He is the editor of Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (1997), co-editor of Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (2005), co-editor of Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge (2009).
Gina Marchetti works at the University of Hong Kong. Her books include Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (1993), Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s InfernaL Affairs The Trilogy (2007), From Tian’anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens (2006), and The Chinese Diaspora on American Screens: Race, Sex, and Cinema (2012). She has co-edited Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and the New Global Cinema (2007), Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity and Diaspora (2009), and, most recently, Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier (2011).
Shu-mei Shih is the Hon-yin and Suet-fong Chan Professor of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. She is the author of The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (2001) and Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (2007), and the co-editor of Minor Transnationalism (2005), The Creolization of Theory (2011), and Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (2013).
Kin-Yan Szeto, Ph.D. (Northwestern University) is Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at Appalachian State University, USA, and is the author of The Martial Arts Cinema of the Chinese Diaspora: Ang Lee, John Woo, and Jackie Chan in Hollywood (2011). Her publications have appeared in Oxford Bibliographies, Routledge Advances in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Dance Chronicle, Jump Cut, and elsewhere. Szeto serves on the Executive Board for the Congress on Research in Dance. In addition to her scholarly work, Szeto is a theater director and choreographer.
Mirana May Szeto has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA and is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong. She writes on critical theory, cinema, literature, coloniality, cultural politics and policy in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan. She publishes in journals like Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2006), Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies (2009), Journal of Chinese Cinemas (2012), and volumes like Neoliberalism and Global Cinema (2011), Hong Kong Screenscapes (2011), Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (2013), Sinophone Cinemas (2014). Her book project is on Hong Kong SAR New Wave Cinema in the Age of Mainlandization.
Marco Wan is Associate Professor of Law and Honorary Associate Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. He has published extensively on law and visuality in Asia.
Tony Williams is Professor and Area Head of Film Studies in the Department of English of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, USA. He is a frequent contributor to Asian Cinema and is currently editing a collection of essays on the writer-critic-director Evans Chan for Hong Kong University Press as well as working on second editions of Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (1996) and Larry Cohen: Radical; Allegories of an American Filmmaker (1997).
Ain-ling Wong is a film critic and researcher. Previously Head of Film Programming at Hong Kong Arts Centre (1987–1990), Programmer of Asian Cinema at Hong Kong International Film Festival (1990–1996), and Research Officer at Hong Kong Film Archive (2001–2009). She is the author of Xi Yuan (2000) and Meng Yu Shuo Meng (2012), and editor of Fei Mu – Poet Director (1998), The Cathay Story (2002), The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study (2003), The Hong Kong / Guangdong Film Connection (2005), The Glorious Modernity of Kong Ngee (2006), Zhu Shilin: A Filmmaker of His Times (2009), and Fei Mu’s Confucius (2010), among others.
Cindy Hing-yuk Wong is Professor of Communications at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, USA. Her areas of research include film festivals, Hong Kong cinema culture and practices, diasporic media. Her book, Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen (2011), offers the first comprehensive overview of the global festival world. She is the co-author of Global Hong Kong and the co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture; she has published in Asian Cinema, American Anthropologist and contributed chapters to Chinese TV, Hong Kong Films, Hollywood and the New Global Cinema, TV China.
Esther C.M. Yau teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She has published essays in The Cinema Journal, Film Quarterly, The Oxford History of World Cinema, Discourse, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Wide Angle, Dangdai Dianying, Jintian, and World Cinema. She has recently published in Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier (2011) and Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity and Diaspora (2009). She has co-edited “Asia/Pacific: a Spectral Surface” – a special issue of positions: Asia critique. She is the editor of At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World (2001) and co-editor of New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics (1994).
Audrey Yue is Associate Professor in Screen and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her publications include Sinophone Cinema (2014), Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Diasporas (2013), Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures (2012), and Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile (2010).
Yingjin Zhang is Professor of Chinese Studies and Chair of the Department of Literature at University of California, San Diego, USA and Visiting Chair Professor of Humanities at Shanghai Jiaotong University, China. His English books include The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (1996), Encyclopedia of Chinese Film (1998), China in a Polycentric World (1998), Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai (1999), Screening China (2002), Chinese National Cinema (2004), From Underground to Independent (2006), Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (2010), Chinese Film Stars (2010), A Companion to Chinese Cinema (2012), Liangyou, Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis (2013), New Chinese-Language Documentaries (2015), and A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature (2015).
This landmark Companion to Hong Kong Cinema is a genuinely collaborative effort, building on and extending the critical and scholarly work done in the past two decades. One of its chief collaborators is the city itself. Hong Kong cinema we might say grew out of an attempt to engage with and respond to the city’s complex and paradoxical history. Or we might say the exact opposite: that it grew out of an attempt to ignore and forget an all-too-pressing history by providing distraction and simple entertainment. In either case, the city remains an elusive presence whose effects we can feel even before we understand their causes.
The editors of this volume aptly remind us that the history of Hong Kong cinema dates back to at least 1909. This reminder is important if only to free us from the illusion that the Hong Kong cinema began fully formed with Stanley Kwan, Ann Hui, and Wong Kar-wai. Nevertheless, a critical history would have to address both continuities and breaks. When these filmmakers emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, Hong Kong cinema was in the process of transforming itself from a local cinema with at best a regional distribution, to a transnational cinema viewed and applauded in many other parts of the world. The puzzle that we are still trying to unravel, and that this volume addresses in a variety of ways, is how this transformation came about.
One partial answer is to see the transformation of the Hong Kong cinema as part of a larger spatial transformation, of which the 1997 handover is itself an instance: an important but not determinate instance. Thus it could be argued that the Hong Kong cinema became transnational not by abandoning the space of the local but by dislocating it and showing implicitly that the local does not have a local habitation and a name. Dislocation means that we cannot feel home at home; home loses its specificity, but by the same token homelessness loses its pathos. It is Hong Kong cinema’s evocation of this sense of dislocation that elicits an immediate intuitive response in New York, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, or Beirut. The recent trend noted by some contributors towards the co-production of “Hong Kong films” can be regarded, too, as yet another exemplification of spatial dislocation. (We saw this earlier in mainland cinema when Chen Kaige could no longer rely on state sponsorship after Tian’anmen to make films like Yellow Earth, and started making co-produced blockbusters like Farewell My Concubine.) Co-production suggests that the identity of Hong Kong or Hong Kong cinema is not some kind of platonic essence, but is made out of changing spatial contradictions and differences.
These spatial changes, unlike a special date, are not immediately visible or intelligible. They are first registered in however inchoate a form on the affective level – provided we understand affect not just as a synonym for emotion, but rather as emotion-without-a-name, or as emotion that we do not yet or no longer understand, and all the more intense for that. Affect is something different from “a structure of feeling” because it is the seemingly arbitrary manifestation of affect that points us towards the perception that the structures themselves are changing. It is not weird psychology but skewed space that produces strange affects, which can take the form of anomalous behavior, or the eruption of the monstrous in the everyday, or the making of dumplings out of human placenta. Affect does not obey the law of genre. We are already seeing in the current Hong Kong cinema a tentative fusion of what is usually regarded as two opposed genres, the documentary and the horror film. Can we expect to see in future the documentary as horror film, the horror film as documentary?
To track the space of Hong Kong cinema particularly after 1997, the Companion enlists the aid of theory, in a spirit not unlike Yeats who wrote that “in dreams begin responsibilities.” Responsible theory is not the same as critical pieties that sound radical and correct. When we denounce “colonialism” in Hong Kong, as we still need to do, we should remember that we are dealing not with the imperialist version but with a mutant form, an “X-Colonialism” that has developed a kind of immunity to the usual remedies and critiques leveled at it. Theory therefore needs new terms and frameworks, but it also needs to be inflected by memory: not memory as perfect recall or as the past caught in a freeze frame, but memory as the relation between fragments of the past, or as something important that we only half remember. As Godard has shown in Histoire(s) du Cinema, it is not history that explains cinema, but cinema that makes history legible. This Companion gives us reason to believe that the Hong Kong cinema in the years to come will be equal to the task.