AREA COMPETENCIAS CAPACIDADES INDICADORES

The way through which Hong Kong cinema has established its reputation would render this study of self representation in films less convincing, if I do not take into consideration Hong Kong’s interrelationship with the grand Chinese narrative and other possible influences that Hong Kong exchanges with nations/cultures from afar. As a result of Hong Kong lacking a cultural/national centrality, on the one hand, Hong Kong films embody the legacy of traditional Chinese culture; yet on the other hand, there have already been many considerable transformations in the social- cultural values attributable to Hong Kong’s international experiences. Many strict adherents of Chinese values thus regard Hong Kong films as representing a group of people who are at the periphery of the authentic (and by inference, more superior), sinocentric, Chinese imagined community.60 For them, Hong Kong films are of low cultural/national value. I will discuss further on this view in section 3 in Chapter 1. Yet in other respects, such as acceptance of new

ideas, Hong Kong films are presumably more advanced. An identification with Self and the

Other then unavoidably sets in when we juxtapose Hong Kong and ‘China’ in our discussions.

However, who really is Self and who is the Other? An important characteristic in Derrida’s ideas that provokes our thinking and enriches the theoretical considerations in this study is the sceptical stance he posits in facing an assumed ‘centre’ that could be at odds with a field of supplementations of the ‘sign’ as the other part of such a structure.61 One implication of this is that the difference between something that is supposed to be crucial (Self) and its counterpart (the

Other) is ambiguous. Very often, the absolute demarcation between the two items is a result of the act of rigidity, which Derrida terms as ‘violence’.62 The ideas of ‘centre’ and ‘sign’, in my arguments in this thesis, can be studied together with Derrida’s another idea of ‘différance’ (entailing the action of differing and deferring in meaning construction, as in a piece of text).63 Although ‘différance’ originated from literary criticism, it becomes evident that this idea is applicable to other areas of concern when we explain or describe something via the characteristics of other items / ideas / entities and so on. For example, Self would become the ‘dominant’ if it is compared to the Other, while the Other would become self-ized if it positions itself in terms of another ‘other’ (which may or may not be the original Self in this case). Meaning constructions through ‘différance’ could debatably linger on and be postponed forever. These ideas will be helpful when I establish my case for Hong Kongers’ situational, diasporic consciousness,64 and transformed ‘Chineseness’ in Chapter 1, where I will demonstrate that both concepts do not fasten to one, fixed cultural/national centrality.

Acknowledging the presence and the importance of nations in a transnational world, Bhabha turns our attention towards the boundaries in between nation-states. These are the spheres where anything like identities, cultures, values, politics and so forth are negotiable, and where

transnational occurrences begin. Bhabha terms such ‘in-between space’ as the ‘Third Space’. A thorough understanding of what is going on in the ‘in-between space’ would help us appreciate the truly transnational cultures / values / era / state that happen there. As a former British Crown colony situated on the periphery of China’s geographical boundary, Hong Kong in every sense can be pertinently referred to as an exemplar of the ‘Third Space’ between nation-states. Hong Kongers are poised to explore their hybrid identification and unlimited possibilities of their subjectivities in facing the dominant cultures. Yet in terms of post-colonialism, Hong Kongers have a past much vaguer than their present precisely because they have a problematic history with regard to their real ‘origin’. Their history did not go along the current social, cultural, and political trajectory of communist China, whose rule over Hong Kong is compared by Chow to imperialism and hinted by Abbas as colonialism changing form.65 It is also worth considering how long this particular situation of Hong Kong would persist, given that the Handover has been influencing Hong Kong for over twenty years.

Hall brings to us his interpretation of identity construction by drawing on his Jamaican experience and cinematic representation of identity in new ‘Caribbean cinema’. He puts it explicitly that ‘cultural identity […] is a matter of “becoming” as well as of “being”. It belongs to the future as much as to the past’.66 In between these two states of existence, Hall directs our attention to the process of self-transformation that is constantly going on. Rather than metamorphose out of a void, identity is continuously reinvented and the alteration has to be contextualized in terms of history. This view is also applicable to the case of Hong Kongers. Moreover, Hong Kong’s specificities may in turn bring forth other variables, such as the people’s hesitant self-understanding that emerged during the course of self-modification.

Hong Kong films, in my opinion, help capture these variables through the directors’ eyes and cameras. They project images to tell the story of Hong Kong and its people from various angles. The ideas of Derrida, Bhabha and Hall thus open up a discourse that inspires us to reconsider the case of Hong Kongers’ identity quest (vis-à-vis Hong Kong’s interactions with various interrelating nations / cultures during Hong Kong’s sovereignty transition), and its corresponding filmic images. The experiences of Ang, Chow, Abbas, and Naficy further stimulate our thinking about Hong Kong’s bearings between globalization and localism, particularly during the period covered in this study.67

Ang was born in Indonesia and later educated and settled in the West. As an ethnic Chinese, she nonetheless neither speaks nor writes Chinese. This gives her considerable trouble in accepting an unequivocal relationship with ‘China’ and its grand cultural narrative. What she concludes from her Chinese diasporic experience is that the ‘Chineseness’ of ethnic Chinese people nowadays should be flexibly interpreted in order to assert one’s special value in this world.

Similarly, we can find in Chow’s ideas such a doubtful attitude towards absolute Chinese ideals. Chow was born and grew up in Hong Kong and received her undergraduate degree from the University of Hong Kong in the British colonial era. She was later awarded her PhD by Stanford University and is now residing and teaching in the USA. Clearly influenced by post-structuralist and post-colonialist concepts, Chow cites her previous life in Hong Kong as an endeavour named ‘tactics of intervention’ – a non-violent technique for occupying one’s place in between different (predominantly British and Chinese) cultures. Chow recognizes Hong Kongers’ diasporic conditions but dismisses absolute compliance to one’s ethnicity and ethnic ideals without caring for one’s own merits.

Ang and Chow thus encourage us to look at Hong Kongers’ existential situations through their ever-changing, Chinese diasporic consciousness. Such an observation will help me deliver later on in this thesis the alternative readings of film to those of previous film research that tends to stabilize the perception of Hong Kongers and their sense of being in specific dimensions.

Abbas, who lived in Hong Kong and taught at the University of Hong Kong for years, highlights his specific view on Hong Kong culture. He argues that things emerge and disappear so quickly in this society that one may only notice their occurrences after they are gone (‘déjà disparu’),68 and sometimes one may even fail to see what is there (‘reverse hallucination’).69 Abbas terms such complex circumstances as ‘the politics of disappearance’. Suggesting counteractions against such situations and inviting people to think and act outside the limitation of Hong Kong’s post-coloniality, Abbas contends that one can make a pre-emptive move by first ‘disappearing’ and then ‘re-appearing’ in a striking manner. According to Abbas, many Hong Kong filmmakers have already consciously made such a move in their films by continuously adding in new elements to give them a competitive edge in the global marketplace.70 It is in this sense that Abbas offers some concrete examples from the Hong Kong film industry to help materialize Chow’s claim of ‘tactics of intervention’, when we study the way in which one maintains one’s significance in an ever-changing world.

Iranian-born American film scholar Naficy formulates the concept of ‘accented cinema’, which is literally a cinema speaking with an ‘accent’. Naficy’s idea is based mainly on the diasporic/exilic experiences of filmmakers who are of Iranian and Middle-eastern descent living in the West. Naficy’s notion inspires us to consider studying many contemporary Hong Kong films from the angle of ‘accented cinema’. Apparently, Hong Kong cinema and ‘accented cinema’ are completely different entities, as the former is made by and about Hong Kong people while the

latter is based mainly on the experiences of diasporic/exilic filmmakers from the Middle East. Yet, due to their desire for survival (Hong Kong cinema for commercial survival and ‘accented cinema’ for geopolitical survival), unexpected similarities can be found in their film styles in terms of the sense of dislocation, modes of production, visual styles, characters and characterization, themes and narrative structures.

Naficy finds a link in Hui’s Song of the Exile (which will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2 in this thesis) when he writes about the journeying experiences of the protagonists. As an expert in Chinese films, Gina Marchetti also associates contemporary Chinese films (including those from Hong Kong) with ‘accented cinema’ in her anthology From Tian’anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989-1997 (2006).71 However, neither of the two scholars goes too far to examine the possible ‘accentedness’ in Hong Kong cinema. Inspired by their initial discussions, this study will be the first to look closely into a corpus of Hong Kong films made since 1982 from the angle of films that ‘speak’ with an ‘accent’ (Chapter 1).

The theoretical ideas and experiences of these theorists / cultural critics thus inspire us to reconsider Hong Kongers’ identity quest and its cinematic manifestations. Moreover, I trust that these notions can help my own analysis to strike a balance between Western film theories/cultural paradigms and an Asian frame of mind when I study Hong Kong films in the hope that my study can take advantage of the research opportunities opened up by the existing Hong Kong cinema scholarship.