“Urban cinema and the cultural identity of Hong Kong” is a chapter written by a local signature late writer Leung Ping Kwan in 2000, examining how the unique cultural identity of Hong Kong people construct and/or being shaped through local films from 1950s to 2000s. By using various cinematic languages and urban spaces as a spatial trope, movies usually render specific ideologies that are intertwined with social context.
“Leaving the Movie Theatre” in the lesson 1 describes a movie theatre as a heterotopia which can evoke audiences’ fantasy by the overall cinematic settings; likewise, this chapter discusses movies can shape our imagination to the city’s future. Adopting handover as a main timeline, an avant-garde science fiction movie “The wicked city” represents the unease of Hong Kong people. The enormous urban building, Bank of China, which is situated at Central and Western District is arranged as the home-base of the monsters. By shooting its exterior and interior through dim lightings and conflicting plots, Bank of China presented as an allegorical place for implying the handover might destruct the existing democratic systems.
This movie used urban spaces to evoke the social emotions allowed me to connect the current black comedy “A Guilty Conscience” which also contains political allegory. Through Montage and Mise-en-scène, the court is used to narrate the dystopian images of the city. Hong Kong directors tend to represent their thoughts of the city through films, advantageously developing their own culture that distinguish from Chinese culture as the writer believes.
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Ma Yin Lam 3036189008
Commendable cross-analysis of themes from two separate readings and reapplying these theories to your own selection of movies. These techniques of portrayal are common in moviemaking all around the world. How do you think they come to distinguish the culture of Hong Kong from Chinese (or any other cultures)?