The Body of Extraterritoriality

This book’s conclusion revisits what extraterritoriality means and the historical journey of different generations of filmmakers and spectators who tried to work through this problem by creating, theorising, defining, and defending Hong Kong cinema, television, and media. The end of the previous chapter suggests that humanism is perhaps the answer to our political impasse. However, the mode of humanism that was widely promulgated by politicians and artists during and immediately after the Second World War (1939–45) had already failed and it turned out to be the beginning of the problematics that have produced the precarious milieu in which we live. This conclusion therefore proposes that we revisit what it means by being human while living with other human beings, by not re-territorialising any place or anybody, but by giving extraterritoriality a presence, a body. It argues that in Hong Kong, Mainland filmmakers who were exiled from their homeland use their films to explore and negotiate the means by which one can reclaim humanity.

Breaking the Wave

This chapter asks the question: Can women filmmakers, cinematic spectators, and televisual viewers speak from their doubly––sociopolitically and gendered––extraterritorialised position? It -historicises the theoretical discourse and film practice of the first phase (1968–78) of the Hong Kong New Wave from the perspectives of women filmmakers and critics. It also discusses three different ways by which women speak through the cinema and television as authors, all aiming to establish what Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75) would call a free indirect discourse. For independent filmmaker Tang Shu-hsuen, through unlearning Euro-American aesthetics and relearning medieval Chinese one from the perspective of modern women, a cinema specific to the extraterritorial position of a Hong Kong female spectator can be fostered. For screenwriter Joyce Chan and her collaborator director Patrick Tam, a free indirect discourse can only be achieved when the addresser-message-addressee mode of communication in commercial television is actively challenged. Finally, for director Ann Hui and screenwriter Shu Kei and Wong Chi, the classical Hollywood paradigm can be reconfigured to enable desubjectivised and abjectivised gay male characters to negotiate their traumas and desires in terms that are understandable by heterosexual and heteronormative viewers.

Posthistoricity

This chapter examines Hong Kong-Mainland co-productions made under the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA). CEPA facilitated the collaboration between Mainland Chinese investors and Hong Kong filmmakers to produce films that are supposed to cater to audiences in both regions. This triggered a renewed effort to individuate, subjectivise, and autonomise Hong Kong’s sociopolitical voice and position in these co-productions, which requires an active rewriting and re-understanding of extraterritoriality in the aftermath of the 1997 handover as a form of posthistoricity: (1) as a continual performance of a civic society that had already failed under global neoliberalism; (2) as an invocation of a new assembly of biopolitical lives that are eager to form a new civic society. This chapter first explicates the sociopolitical conditions and affects in Hong Kong after 1997. It then expounds how CEPA emerged out of a complex process of industrial transformation under neoliberalism between the 1990s and the early 2000s and how scholars evaluate the first ten years of Hong Kong-Mainland co-productions after CEPA. With such a background in mind, it scrutinises how Hong Kong filmmakers confront the crisis of authorship under CEPA in three registers––industrial, creative, and sociopolitical––with close attention to Johnnie To as a case study.

On Extraterritoriality

This introduction argues that Hong Kong cinema and media are best understood as a public sphere, where affects associated with Hong Kongers’ extraterritorial position of being doubly occupied and ostracised by contesting sociopolitical forces are being negotiated. It first examines why the national/transnational debate on Hong Kong cinema falls short of helping us understand the core of the sociopolitical perturbation it seeks to locate. It then expounds the term ‘extraterritoriality’ from both theoretical and historical angles. With these in mind, this chapter studies Mandarin musical Chang xiangsi [An All-Consuming Love, He Zhaozhang, 1947] as an example of an extraterritorial cinematic and musical experience. Finally, it introduces the specific topics and case studies discussed in each chapter of this book.

The Time it Takes for Time to End

This chapter is about how extraterritoriality was elevated from the level of spontaneous awareness to a fully formed political consciousness in the 1980s and 1990s under the uncertainty of the future of Hong Kong. It argues that the sociopolitical unpredictability, irresolution, and disquietude during this period created a milieu in which individuation, subjectivisation, and autonomisation were impossible, an environment constituted by a perpetual failure of becoming: the time it takes for time to end. This chapter offers a historical account of the Sino-British negotiation of the future of Hong Kong between 1979 and 1984. After that, it analyses how such a traumatic experience was actively negotiated by a kaleidoscopic media environment from both industrial and cultural perspectives. Eventually, it departs from most scholars’ tendency to focus on Hong Kong’s successful mainstream film and television industries by examining how artists responded to these relationships in video art. It scrutinises the works of artists from an organisation called Videotage, which further developed the experimental ethos of the women (and in the 1980s, lesbian and gay) filmmakers in an intersection of three modes of extraterritoriality: as Hong Kongers, as women, and as lesbians and gay men.

The Age of Precarity

This chapter is about the precarity of life and the image in the twenty-first century. Since 1 July 1997, Hong Kongers have found themselves increasingly caught in a posthistorical performance of the city’s juridical and economic extraterritoriality. This chapter first discusses what it means by precarity and how it has generated a sense of anguish among young people around the world. It also explicates how it is intertwined with local politics in Hong Kong, including the Umbrella Movement. Finally, it conducts analyses of documentaries made during and after the Movement. These documentaries are not made with the presupposition that what the spectators see on the screen must be an access to the truth. Rather, at an age when film, video, and media images are assumed to be mediated, manipulated, and fabricated, these documentarians offer their spectators texts that are constructed out of realities captured, re-narrated, and remediated from multiple perspectives. Their truth claims must then be contested and defended in the larger public discourse. Such a public discourse in turn makes visible that a set of problematics are embedded in the interstices in the debate between the political establishments and the hard-line supporters of political reforms.

What is Hong Kong Cinema?

This chapter is about the critical debate on what it meant by Hong Kong cinema after the 1967 Riots, and the historical context––both in the film industry and in politics––that shaped the contour and topos of this debate. In this discourse, the question ‘What is Hong Kong cinema?’ was never raised or addressed directly. Very often, it was asked under the disguise of finding out what Chinese cinema was. Film critics between 1966 and 1978 worked through this problem by understanding how Hong Kong left-wing Cantonese filmmakers in the 1950s grappled with this question, and the anxieties such question had generated, both narratively and stylistically. Through their retrospective investigation, these critics retroactively theorised how Hong Kong cinema gradually individuated itself from Chinese cinema out of its long history of being politically ostracised, linguistically marginalised, and culturally despised by their Mainland counterparts.