Hong Kong can be a very confusing place. It has the past British colonial history but also an ever-growing Chinese influence. Indeed the city can be considered as stateless as this inter-national, para-sitic place has a strange blend of the East and West that cannot be found anywhere else. Perhaps is it this uncertainty in our identity that is in our core of our culture. The sense of uncertain and anxiety is amplified in many Hong Kong films for the 80s and 90s. The 80s and the 90s are often descripted as the “Golden Age” of Hong Kong, especially for the film industry. Emotions and feelings in an unstable situation are definitely great ingredients for film making and writing. They were fully expressed in those films for example ChungKing Express, the renowned film featuring the shooting style that is full of fast motions, sort of like the “hypereal” and “televisual” city suggested in the text. This does not represent the full cityscape but definitely represent an significant part of the the minds of the people in the city.
Wilson Chan – 3035821685
It is great that you used ChungKing Express as an example. One of the significant scenes of the film is located at the mid-level escalators and around Lan Kwai Fong in Central, which Abbas mentioned as examples of “erotic spaces of pleasure and encounter, the heterotopic spaces of contestation, the liminal spaces of transition and change” (1997, 86). Is it possible to relate those scenes or even the movie with reference to what he wrote in the text?