The City in Flux: Toward an Urban Topology of Hong Kong Cinema

Whether appearing as a dramatic setting or as a “protagonist” in itself, Hong Kong’s urban space has inspired the imagination of filmmakers of different generations and artistic orientations. If architecture is the primary denominator of a city’s spatial identity,1 the cinema offers a repertoire of visual vocabularies through which this identity is articulated, contested, and transformed in time. “Space” here connotes both the diegetic configuration of setting and locale, and the non-diegetic realm of identity-making invoked by the cinematic medium. Space has also been used as a conceptual tool in critical discourse on the dynamics between the cinematic imagination and the urban space.2 Its long tradition of martial arts films and costume dramas notwithstanding, Hong Kong cinema displays an inherently urban quality that speaks through its subject matter, fictional personae, and the spatial aesthetics that have become an imprint of “Hong Kong-made films.” While critical attention to the relationship between the cinema and urban space tends to favor popular action films from the 1980s and afterward, filmmakers’ self-conscious engagement with the urban space can be traced further back. The black-and-white films of the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, frequently insert location shots at the beginning to authenticate the predominantly studio setting. The most commonly used scenes are panoramic views of high-rise buildings, motorways, rail stations, and different types of modern transportation. Mostly appearing in the credit sequence, these shots display an inner logic that amounts to a self-narrative of the city that varies from a critical self-distancing from the capitalist city in left-wing films to a celebratory embrace of capitalist modernity in right-wing films.3 The symbolic reinvention of the urban space as an experiential realm of identity-making, therefore, has been a leitmotif in Hong Kong films for a much longer time than it is commonly assumed.