Modernity as Crisis: Goeng Si and Vampires in Hong Kong Cinema (translation into Russian)

This article is a translation of a chapter from the collective monograph Draculas, vampires, and other undead forms: essays on gender, race, and culture, edited by John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart (2009, Scarecrow Press). The author analyzes the question of how Hong Kong cinema responds to the complex situation of Hong Kong's transition from its status as a British territory on loan to a special territory with extended autonomy within the PRC. As a marker pointing to the crisis development of this process, the Chinese people's particular ideas about the so-called “goeng si” (“jumping corpses”) were chosen. These revived corpses move in a peculiar jumping way, due to which they received this name. According to the author, in the images of these creatures, as well as in the cinematic vampires that have become an integral part of films made by Hong Kong studios, all the contradictions of the cultural and political situation in Hong Kong are manifested as in a mirror. Despite the fact that Hong Kong was able to actively oppose the global cinema represented by Hollywood, it had to adjust to the global cinematic trends in which vampires played an important role. All of this led to a certain hybridity of images that combined both Western and Chinese traits.

Mass Camp in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema

This chapter considers Hong Kong’s particular socio-historical context since the 1960s, which has been imperative to the diffusion of a local mass camp impulse characterized by a self-conscious, often parodic attitude toward the artifice of conventions, particularly those associated with art, gender behavior, and media representation. It then investigates the particular ways in which mass camp has at once informed and been informed by Hong Kong mainstream cinema from the 1970s onward. A crucial point made throughout lies in the intimate relationship between mass camp and the proliferating gender parody of contemporary Hong Kong cinema, culminating in films of the early 1990s (e.g. Swordsman II). This process, importantly, has also been coupled with the critical articulation of camp discourse since the mid-to-late 1970s.