cinematic hong kong of wong kar wai

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CINEMATIC HONG KONG OF WONG KAR-WAI

by

HAIHONG LI

ABSTRACT

In order to promote an understanding of the centrality of space and the intimate relationship

between space and identity in Wong Kar-wai’s films, this dissertation examines the director’sconstruction of cinematic space and the characters’ sense of who they are in relation to Hong

Kong in his six films Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love, 2046, As Tears Go by,

Chungking Express, and Fallen Angels . The investigation of Wong’s use of cinematic space

involves the analysis of his selection of location and strategic employment of the mise-en-scène,

camera angles, lenses, lighting, and music, which constitute his fictional world. It is my

assertion that Wong’s construction of Hong Kong in these films responds to the formation and

transformation of identity and showcases the impact of colonialism, modernization,

decolonization, globalization, and postmodern culture upon the lives of Hong Kong inhabitants.

INDEX WORDS: Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong, Cinematic space, Identity


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by

HAIHONG LI

B.A., Fu Zhou University, China, 2000

M.A., Truman State University, 2004

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2012


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© 2012

Haihong Li

All Rights Reserved


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by

HAIHONG LI

Major Professor: Hyangsoon Yi

Committee: Richard NeupertRonald BogueMasaki MoriKarim Traore

Electronic Version Approved:

Maureen GrassoDean of the Graduate SchoolThe University of GeorgiaMay 2012


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to extend my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Hyangsoon Yi, who helped me

develop research skills and understanding of the subject during the completion of the project.

This dissertation would not have been possible without her diligent work and encouragement. I

would also like to express my thanks to Professor Richard Neupert for his most insightful and

valuable comments, Professor Ronald Bogue for his warm support, and Professor Masaki Mori

and Professor Karim Traore for their patience and kindness.A special acknowledgment of mine goes to my family for their undivided support. I want

to thank my dearest Anna for her love and my parents for all of the sacrifices that they have

made for me. My husband Joe was so patient with my late nights, and I want to thank him for

believing in me from the beginning.

Lastly, I offer my regards and blessings to my editors, Jon Falsarella Dawson and Jessica

Taylor, for their best work.


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS........................................................................................................... iv

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1

2 THE LIMINAL SPACE— DAYS OF BEING WILD ...................................................45

3 IN THE MEMORY OF THE SHANGHAINESE COMMUNITY— IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE ...................................................................................................................67

4 THE DACADENT CITY— 2046 ................................................................................86

5 MAPPING MONGKOK— AS TEARS GO BY ..........................................................108

6 THE GLOBAL CITY— CHUNGKING EXPRESS ...................................................132

7 THE POSTMODERN CITY— FALLEN ANGELS ...................................................155

8 CONCLUSION.…………………………………………………………………….177

BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................188


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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

This study examines Wong’s films as cinematic responses to cultural crises and social

transformation that result from colonization, decolonization, and globalization of Hong Kong

through the analysis of the urban space in Wong’s six films, As Tears Go by (1988) , The Days of

Being Wild (1990) , Chungking Express (1994) , Fallen Angels (1995) , In the Mood for Love

(2000) , and 2046 (2004). This project presents fresh insights into the production of colonial and

postcolonial subjectivity and the formation of Hong Kong identity. Wong’s six films provide

various historical and cultural accounts that present a cinematic Hong Kong, which grows from

the colonial past into its current status as a global city. His films invoke multiple spatialitites and

temporalities while imagining the past, pondering the present, and anxiously anticipating the

unknown future. An investigation into the cinematic space and the characters’ relationships with

their surroundings in Wong Kar-wai’s films reveals how cinematic space embodies social

concerns and issues and how the filmmaker exploits the imagery. This analysis focuses on the

filmmaker’s construction of space, investigating how these films manifest transformations of

social reality that is essential to the building of local identity but hidden in an otherwise illegible

urban setting that is too complex to understand.

Cinematic space in Wong’s films requires close and sustained study because the

construction of urban Hong Kong is closely related to the development of local identity. In

Wong’s films, space has a critical role in shaping individual identity, determining who and what

the characters are and what their relations are. Accentuating the importance of space, Wong


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Kar-wai asserts, “I believe geographical accessibility is a deciding factor for human

relationships” ( Wong Kar-wai 88). Human geography is one of the director’s major concerns.

He exploits urban space as well as human relationships with their physical environment. His

stories are not only about where the characters are but also about how an urban setting shapes

characters and make them who they are. While space is essential in Wong’s films, reinventing

the urban landscape has always been Wong’s priority in filmmaking. When asked to evaluate

himself as a film director, Wong says: “I am an architect who doesn’t work on a blueprint”

(Chia). Urban space and the way human beings are embedded in their surroundings fascinate

him.Space is so important to the director that it comes before everything else in his

filmmaking. In his mind, characters’ social relationships and social practices are always

associated with, or even determined by, the kind of space they are in, and space is inscribed with

historical memory, societal transformation, and cultural difference. Wong reveals that he must

have a location before he can make up a story and decide what type of characters should be

involved in such a setting. Wong says:

the most important thing about the script is to know the place it takes place in. Because if

you know that, then you can decide what the characters do in this space. The space even

tells you who the characters are, why they’re there, and so on. Everything else just

comes bit by bit if you have a place in your mind. So I have to scout locations before I

even start writing. (Tirard 197)

For Wong, space produces characters and stories while also predetermining how the characters

react to the space and their spatial practice.


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A brief introduction to Wong and his critical reception is necessary before delving into a

broader discussion of space in his films. Wong is a controversial Hong Kong film director,

whose works are often found puzzling by some yet whole-heartedly celebrated by others. As one

of the filmmakers from the Second New Wave of Hong Kong cinema, Wong rose to

international fame through Happy Together (1997), a film regarding a homosexual couple’s

adventures in Buenos Aires, which won him the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival

in 1997. As a result, he has been invited to make a number of commercials for multinational

enterprises, such as BMW, Christian Dior, Lancôme, Lacoste, and Motorola, and he also made a

music video for American musician DJ Shadow’s “Six Days.” In 2006, he was the first Chinesedirector named president of the jury panel for the Cannes Film Festival, and his first American

movie, My Blueberry Nights (2007), starring Norah Jones, Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, and Natalie

Portman, made its debut the following year.

Critics have praised Wong for his stunning visual style, expressive lighting and colors,

cryptic shot composition, and skillful incorporation of elements from MTV and popular art. In

Wong Kar-wai , Stephen Teo points out the essential MTV elements in Wong’s films because of

the “hyped colours and baroque sets” as well as “the incessant and repetitive movement” (158).

Ken Dancyger notices Wong’s often fragmented and sometimes illogical narrative structures, his

subversion of traditional genres, and the inspiring incorporation of music in order to create

desired mood among the audience.

However, Wong is notorious for shooting films without finished scripts, his endless

improvisation, and obsession with exhausting every narrative possibility, all of which often result

in an exceedingly lengthy filmmaking process that risks falling far behind schedule . What’s


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more, although Wong’s works are usually considered art-house films and widely applauded,

most of them have been box office failures.

Critics have taken various approaches to Wong’s works. For instance, David Bordwell

focuses on the director’s creative choices in composing stories, which challenge and destabilize

conventional genres. Elizabeth Wright praises Wong for his stunning visual style, often credited

to Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle and Hong Kong art director William Chang.

Scholars such as Y Wong also look into the films’ postmodern features, such as parody and an

omnipresent sense of rootlessness in addition to his preoccupation with dates and numbers.

Some see Wong as a formalist in that he focuses more on film form than content, which mightimply that his narratives lack depth of meaning and complexity.

However, some applaud his film form by seeing it as a creative way to express feelings.

Peter Brunette remarks, “His depth, and thus the real source of his power, can be found on the

surface” (xvi). Ackbar Abbas in his most influential book, Hong Kong: Culture and Politics of

Disappearance, an observation of Hong Kong in the moment of transfer from the British

colonial rule to its postcolonial era, argues that Wong Kar-wai as a Hong Kong filmmaker, far

from being apolitical and superficial, conveys the experience of disappearance by depicting

social changes and calling into question the visual (mis)representation of the Hong Kong. While

other scholars are drawn by the director’s fascinating blend of Chinese culture and Western

techniques, Stephen Teo, who writes extensively about Hong Kong cinema, seeks out Wong’s

local influences as well as his literary debts to writers from various nations.

Many previous analyses of Wong’s films have focused on the filmmaker’s obsession with

temporal experience through recurring close-ups of ticking clocks and wristwatches in addition

to expiration dates, deadlines, and specific dates from the past. Because of the filmmaker’s


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preoccupation with time, Tony Rayns describes Wong as “a poet of time” ( Sight and Sound 12),

while Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli call him “a psychologist of time.” This obsession

with time is interpreted by many as a response to political, social, and cultural transformations in

Hong Kong. Stephen Teo says that the ticking clock “is an obvious allusion to the 1997

syndrome” ( Hong Kong Cinema 195). Similarly, Peter Brunette explains, “the ticking clock, in

Wong’s films and the films of other directors, became a natural metaphor for all the fear and

anxiety attached to this change” (22).

However, other scholars oppose these readings. Bordwell, for instance, argues, “To treat

these lovelorn films as abstract allegories of Hong Kong’s historical situation risks losing sightof Wong Kar-wai’s naked appeal to our feelings about young romance, its characteristic

dilemmas, moods, and moves” (280). To him, Wong’s fundamental interests lie in love, loss,

and memory rather than serious political issues.

Despite this plethora of commentary, critics do not pay sufficient attention to Wong’s

vision of Hong Kong and his cinematic space. Ackbar Abbas is one of the few critics who

examine urban space in Hong Kong and its representation in film. He argues that the experience

of the period in Wong’s films is the experience of the negative. In his article “the Erotics of

Disappointment,” Abbas points out,

More than any other Hong Kong director, Wong conveys in his films a particularly

intense experience of the period as an experience of the negative; an experience of some

elusive and ambivalent cultural space that lies always just beyond our grasp, or just

beneath our articulations. (41)

For Abbas, Hong Kong in Wong’s films is “space of desire” (48) and “the secret of that city is

not power, but impotence” (48). Abbas’s discussion of Wong’s films set in the 1980s and


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onward remains a part of his larger project on Hong Kong culture. He shows that Wong’s three

films set in and after 1988 present a city that is marked by shared postmodern and postcolonial

characteristics.

While Abbas provides insights into Wong’s depiction of Hong Kong, Wong’s films show

the audience multiple urban spaces whose complexity clearly deserves a more thorough

investigation. More importantly, Abbas does not include Wong’s 1960s films in his discussion

of space and cultural identity of Hong Kong. This practice of leaving out the colonial past and

only concentrating on the present displays a lack of a strong sense of local history in previous

research on Hong Kong, which is problematic in any serious study of Hong Kong culture andlocal identity.

Wong’s 1960s nostalgia films are essential to the study of Hong Kong identity. The word

nostalgia, according to Fred Davis, means “remembrance of things past” (6). However, nostalgia

deals with not just the past but, most importantly, the present and even the future. It is indeed a

process of rewriting the past in contemporary culture by projecting the social consciousness onto

the representation. According to Davis, “nostalgia is one of the means—or, better, one of the

more readily accessible psychological lenses—we employ in the never ending work of

constructing, maintaining, and reconstructing our identities” (31). In the case of Hong Kong, as

the 1997 handover was approaching, Hong Kong residents faced the possibility of discontinuity

in their sense of who they were. The expression and experience of nostalgia helped them

reaffirm their sense of history by looking back and finding comforts in the bygone days among a

more familiar environment. Janelle Wilson suggests that the experience of nostalgia functions to

restore meaning and identity in life: “Nostalgia, in its ability to facilitate continuity of identity,

can help to provide a sanctuary of meaning—a place where one feels she knows herself; where


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identity has safe harbor” (10). Nostalgia restores the sense of identity by allowing us to escape

to the familiar and seek sanctuary from the past.

It is my argument that looking at Wong’s 1960s and 1990s films as two critical stages of

the formation of local identity because one cannot fully understand his construction of 1990s

Hong Kong without knowing his 1960s Hong Kong. In the book Hong Kong: the Anthropology

of a Chinese Metropolis , Grant Evans and Maria Tam point out the importance of the 1960’s:

“Hong Kong before the 1960’s was a transit lounge for good as well as of people, not the

ultimate place to settle in or to be identified with” (58). Many social transformations took place

in Hong Kong during the 1960s. These changes separated Hong Kong from the rest of China because, due to the economic development of Hong Kong, the local people no longer depended

on China for any guidance. Seeing the 1960s as the watershed in the history of postwar Hong

Kong, Wong Kar-wai says in an interview: “I am very fond of this period of Hong Kong. This is

a very special period. We started in 1962 and ended in 1972. It is ten years. The reason we

want to end in 1972 is because in the 1970s Hong Kong looked totally different. People, their

behavior, how they dress, how they look, how they eat, and how they live is extremely different

from 1962” (“On Film”). Concerning the formation of local identity, Tam continues, “For those

who could afford to among the first generation of local born, their search for a modern identity

thus took off in the 1970’s” (58). The 1990s is the decade when Hong Kong residents

confronted identity crisis at the dawn of retuning to mainland China. Facing the fast

disappearing colonial past, Hong Kong in the 1990s was characterized by a strong sense of

nostalgia, anxiety, and even fear.

With all these discussions in mind, one can see that more questions remain to be

answered. My analysis of Wong’s cinematic construction of Hong Kong is an attempt to answer


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some of the following questions: How does the director’s cinematic city problematize the

unsettling reality of contemporary Hong Kong? How do these films reflect the anxieties and fear

that result from the cultural and social situations besetting Hong Kong from the 1960s

onwards—the 1967 riots, the 1970s social reforms, the emergence of local identity, the ending of

colonial history, the1997 handover, and the adjustment of social relationships to the fast pace of

economic development? How do they investigate the disappearing cultural identity of Hong

Kong?

Space and Wong’s films

In “Space, Place, and Spectacle: the Crisis Cinema of John Woo,” Tony Williams argues

that John Woo’s films made after 1986 constitute a crisis-ridden apocalyptic cinema influenced

by geopolitical concerns, mainly the 1997 handover. Williams shows that the cinematic space in

Woo’s films exhibits an unprecedented sense of identity crisis. Tony Mitchell explores the

themes of diaspora and dislocation with emphasis on Hong Kong as a “space of transit” in

Autumn Moon (1996), a film directed by Clara Law, who was born in Macau but grew up in

Australia. Wong Kin Yuen investigates how Hong Kong inspires the futuristic cityscape in films

such as Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell , and argues that the future cities in these films share

the ambivalence, elusiveness, fragmentation, and decadence of Hong Kong, a colonial city that

heralds the future for contemporary capitalist cities in its predominant racial and cultural

differences.

In Abbas’s conceptualization of the new Hong Kong cinema, space plays a vital role.

Filmmakers such as Wong Kar-wai, Ann Hui, Stanely Kwan, Tsui Hark, and John Woo, he

asserts, all belong to the new Hong Kong cinema, which emerged amid the new political and


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cultural dilemmas stemming from British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s visit to China in

1982 for the purpose of discussing lease agreements with the Chinese government. Following

the idea of Gilles Deleuze that new cinematic images emerged as a response to historical change,

Abbas argues that the history of Hong Kong is implicated in topological and spatial relations:

One of the features of new Hong Kong cinema is its sensitivity to spatial issues, in other

words, to dislocations and discontinuities, and its adoption of spatial narratives both to

underline and to come to terms with these historical anachronisms and achronisms: space

as a means of reading the elusiveness of history. ( Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of

Disappearance 27)According to Abbas, people in Hong Kong try to stay detached from history to protect

themselves from the shocks of potential radical changes. However, history cannot be simply

ignored as it persists in the city space. A new approach toward understanding the city, Abbas

suggests, is to study Hong Kong history through spatial relations.

Even when Wong’s films, such as Ashes of Time (1994) and Happy Together (1997), are

not set in contemporary Hong Kong, they still reflect the concerns associated with it. The film

Ashes of Time is loosely based on the martial-arts novel The Eagle Shooting Heroes , written by

Hong Kong writer Louis Cha. The story takes place in the wild west of Middle China during the

13 th century. Although the film does not seem to have the least connection with Hong Kong,

many critics read it as an analysis of postmodern Hong Kong. For instance, Curtis Tsui

comments:

although the film is set during an undetermined medieval time period, many of its

narrative elements are decidedly ‘postmodern’, a social condition which cultural theorist


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Fredric Jameson argues is the central characteristic of late capitalism, in which moral

judgments are irrelevant or at least inoperative. (101)

The protagonist, deprived of love, becomes an assassin who makes his living by preying on

people’s hatred. Wong’s lack of moral judgment on this character draws attention to the impact

of consumer capitalism on cultural values and social relations. The desert, therefore, can be read

as a metaphor of Hong Kong in late capitalism since the desert and contemporary Hong Kong

seem to be characterized by the same wilderness and despair and both force residents to push

their limits in order to survive.

The same is true with Happy Together , which was released right before the handover in1997. The gay couple, Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-fai (Toney Leung), escapes

Hong Kong to start over in Buenos Aires. However, as they become stranded in the latter, their

relationship changes. Eventually, Lai has to return to Hong Kong alone. Throughout the film,

Buenos Aires remains alien and almost featureless to the Chinese characters. Wong explains,

“[ Happy Together ] was not about Buenos Aires, but was somehow more related to Hong Kong”

(Ong). An Argentinean story turns out to be a reflection on Hong Kong’s colonial past and

postcolonial future through exploring the themes of sexuality, masculinity, and identity.

Further, Wong is not the only one who is intrigued by the fantastic city landscape; Hong

Kong urban space is also a major concern of his cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who has

worked with Wong in six of his films. In an interview with CNN, Doyle says:

In my job you look for a response to the space—what we just went through or what we

live in—and as a person who is not of Chinese origin I think the point about why we

engage with a city is that we see it with different eyes and our need is to celebrate that.


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How do you respond to a city? You respond emotionally I think. (“Q&A: Christopher

Doyle”)

The cinematographer understands his filmmaking as a response to the everyday life in the city,

and his own relationship with the surrounding space contributes to his aesthetics. His gaze in

Wong Kar-wai’s films is an emotional and celebratory response to Hong Kong and brings

attention to his outsider status, which, instead of hindering his enjoyment of the city, provides

him with a fresh perspective on it.

Space and Theory

In recent years, architecture, city planning, and landscape design have enriched film

studies, a tendency invigorated by the trend of “spatial turn” (Warf 27). Scholars have focused

on space as an interpretive framework for understanding human existence and social relations.

In the 1960s, “spatial turn” swept across a wide range of disciplines, including both the social

sciences and humanities, corresponding to the fast processes of urbanization and globalization.

It represented a major shift in critical focus from temporality and chronology to spatiality and

geography. A few thinkers, such as Henry Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and Edward Soja, have

made convincing arguments that space matters.

Lefebvre and Foucault were the first to renounce the practice of privileging time over

space, an approach that they believe only led to the neglect of space. They brought attention to

the important role of space in global capitalism. According to Lefebvre, space is a social product

that is ideologically charged and culturally produced. Lefebvre argues that “ (Social) Space is a

(social) product … the space thus produced serves as a tool of thought and of action, that in

addition to being a means of production it is a means of control, and hence of domination, of


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power” (26). For Lefebvre, space is not passive, neutral, or a pre-existing given. On the

contrary, it is an on-going production of social relations that are active and constantly changing.

Lefebvre believes that space is a stage for the exercise of power. More importantly, according to

him, space is not only political but also ideological. While dominant ideologies influence the

social production of spatiality, space, in return, reinforces or shapes ideologies because

production of space is subject to human interventions and their perception of space ( Production

of Space ).

Michel Foucault is also deeply engaged in the discussion of space. He is especially

interested in the organization of space in realms of power and politics. Based on the examinationof the exclusion of the leper and the confinement of mental patients as well as criminals,

Foucault argues that space, such as prisons, hospitals, and asylums, is fueled with violent power

struggles. Acknowledging that power struggles are inscribed on space, Foucault points out:

A whole history remains to be written of spaces—which would at the same time be the

history of powers (both these terms in the plural)—from the great strategies of geo-

politics to the little tactics of the habitat, institutional architecture from the classroom to

the design of hospitals, passing via economic and political installations.

( Power/Knowledge 149)

By accentuating the important role of space in power relations, Foucault asserts that the

twentieth century is, above all, a time of space, an epoch in which people are defined precisely

through their relationship with spatiality.

Similarly, Edward Soja contends that in the last hundred years, historicism has unduly

privileged history over geography, which has caused the neglect of spatiality in critical theory.

To challenge this problematic attitude toward space, he encourages the development of spatial


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consciousness among intellectuals. He concludes, “We are becoming increasingly aware that we

are, and always have been, intrinsically spatial beings, active participants in the social

construction of our embracing spatialities” (1).

Fredric Jameson also writes extensively on space and on architectural discourse in

particular. In response to the alienated city and the lost sense of place described by Kevin Lynch

in The Image of the City , Jameson proposes “an aesthetic of cognitive mapping,” which seeks to

“endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system”

( Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 54). Jameson’s extensive

examination of the hyperspace of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angelesfunctions as an exemplary work of cognitive mapping of the hotel and the city outside.

Jameson’s observations on Taiwanese cinema are especially useful in my discussion of

Hong Kong urban space in Wong’s films. Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and

Space in the World System explores the representation and interpretation of space in mass media.

He provides examples of cinematic urban space in late capitalism and examines how cinematic

space allegorizes our sense of place as postmodern subjects. In “Remapping Taipei,” Jameson

focuses mainly on The Terrorizer (1986), a film by Edward Yang, who is a highly-acclaimed

director from the Taiwanese New Wave. Jameson’s article showcases the prevailing hybrid

identity constructed through the presentation of plurality of urban spaces. Yang is often

compared with Antonio Antonioni because of their common obsession with urban landscapes

and depictions of alienated life with an urban backdrop. By juxtaposing Yang’s film with others

such as Blow-up and Orphée , Jameson applauds Yang’s effective ways of using different types

of spaces to define contemporary Taipei.


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Through the examination of Yang’s Terrorizer , Jameson concludes that one exclusive

characteristic of the spatiality of this film is “the insistent relationship it establishes between the

individual space and the city as a whole” ( The Geopolitical Aesthetic 153). According to

Jameson, Terrorizer creates the urban space as sites of confinement from which the characters

are driven to escape. Although the male characters have access to public space and are therefore

spatially mobile, their female counterparts, such as the novelist and the Eurasian prostitute, are

imprisoned in apartments owned by men or in anonymous hotel rooms. For instance, the

dwelling space of the Eurasian girl, in which her mother locks her, suggests her identity in

society. Jameson explains, “It marks a peculiar intensity of ressentiment which is surely notunrelated to her socially marginal status and to the exclusion of half-breeds from traditional

Chinese society (as from most other traditional societies)” ( The Geopolitical Aesthetic 138). In

Yang’s cinematic Taipei, the individuals’ dwelling spaces, although often on the upper stories of

buildings, for Jameson, “function as cubicles that open onto the city and the street in one way or

another, and which are somehow incomplete and spatially parasitic upon it” (153). Reading the

national allegory into Yang’s multiple cinematic spaces from the traditional, the national, the

multinational, and the transnational, Jameson concludes that all “figure or embody the

unevenness or inequality of the world system” (154).

Space and Film

Film is a combination of spatial and temporal arts. As early as 1911, at the beginning of

film history, Riccioto Canudo announced in his manifesto “The Birth of a Sixth Art” that cinema

“will be a superb conciliation of the Rhythms of Space (the Plastic Arts) and the Rhythms of

Time (Music and Poetry)” (Abel 59). Similarly, Haig Khatchadourian in “Space and Time in


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Film” notes, “Space and time are primary organizing or structuring principles of a film; indeed,

in different ways space and/or time are organizing principles of all art, just as they provide the

basic framework of the world and of subjective reality” ( British Journal of Aesthetics ).

Although the division of spatial arts and temporal arts is somehow outdated and highly

controversial, it is indisputable that film is spatial.

Film as a cultural product is an object of interest for the study of space and spatialization.

Film is spatial the same way sculpture, architecture, and painting are. One of the most

fascinating attributes that distinguish film from other art forms is its ability to capture objects in

motion through spaces and therefore give spatial representation to movement. It creates spatialillusion on the screen that lures the audience into believing the world in which the stories are set.

In Cinema and the City, Mark Shiel illustrates the essential role that space plays in cinema: space

in reality helps the construction of cinematic space while films in return shape the space in

reality.

What is important to my discussion is Shiel’s conceptualization of two sets of

relationships between space and film: Space in films and films in space . The former, namely

filmic space or cinematic space, according to Shiel, includes “the space of the shot; the space of

the narrative setting; the geographical relationships of various settings in sequence in a film; the

mapping of a lived environment on film” (5). The latter primarily deals with film’s influences on

urban society, as well as its production, distribution, and marketing in certain locations.

Examining the cinematic space in Wong’s films is an investigation of space in films.

Space in films, or cinematic space, is what can fit into a three-dimensional scene with light and

shadow, and it constitutes the fictional world that lures the viewer into believing its reality,

which is largely influenced by elements such as mise-en-scène, camera angles, lenses, lighting,


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and music. This analysis of Wong’s cinematic space involves the investigation of all these

elements that constitute the filmmaker’s cinematic city.

By analyzing spatial representations, this study investigates what is not articulated in

Wong’s films: the desires muffled by conformism, social anxieties, and individual aspirations.

Analyzing Wong’s cinematic city helps to articulate this repressed desire, which is absent in the

grand narrative of the success story of Hong Kong. Drawing from his own immigrant

experience, the filmmaker reinvents the city and creates a very subjective version of Hong Kong.

Wong’s cinematic Hong Kong is more than a mere setting for action. Understanding the spatial

organization in his films helps to unravel what is hidden under the disguise of the characters’seemingly ambiguous attitudes toward their surroundings.

Wong’s cinematic space is important because it is not a neutral site. As a matter of fact,

it embodies ideologies. In “A Mapping of Cinematic Places: Icons, Ideology, and the Power of

(Mis)representation,” Jeff Hopkins explains the essential role of cinematic landscape, which

reflects ideologies as a product of culture, political system, and social customs:

The cinematic landscape is not […] a neutral place of entertainment or an objective

documentation or mirror of the ‘real,’ but an ideologically charged cultural creation

whereby meanings of place and society are made, legitimized, contested, and obscured.

Intervening in the production and consumption of the cinematic landscape will enable us

to question the power and ideology of representation, and the politics and problems of

interpretation. (47)

Hopkins contends that the cinematic space is not a neutral setting for stories but has its own

important role in deciphering the codes of contemporary cultures and ideologies.


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The cinematic landscape in Wong’s films expresses what is not said in the ostensibly

personal romances, which might appear to be apolitical. Spatial organization changes as a

response to the development of the identity of Hong Kong, which is interrelated with political

and economic issues and social transformations. The 1960s and the 1990s are two critical

periods in the developing local identity in Hong Kong. The sense of local identity among its

residents started to emerge in the late 1960s. As a result of the industrialization in the 1950s, the

economic development in Hong Kong during the 1960s helped it become one of the four Asian

Tigers along with Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea. Hong Kong’s economic success boosted

the local inhabitants’ confidence in the colonial system and further separated Hong Kong fromthe mainland China. In the 1990s, the approaching 1997 handover of Hong Kong threatened the

very existence of local identity, and many artistic representations of Hong Kong during this

decade showed great concerns about Hong Kong’s unpredictable political future.

City and film

Historically, film has been fascinated by urban space and city life. The Lumière brothers

filmed across Liverpool in 1897, the very second year after motion pictures made their first

appearance in public. Many audiences come to know cities through films before they have

contact with physical or material ones. Great filmmakers, such as Walter Ruttmann, Woody

Allen, and Hou Xiaoxian, are often associated with the cities they depicted in the films.

The cinematic city is never merely a backdrop for actions in that it changes the city and

our perception of it over the course of time. The relationship between cinema and city is best

illustrated by Walter Benjamin in his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction,”


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Our tavern and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad

stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film

and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now,

in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.

With the close-up, space extends; with slow motion, movement is extended. The

enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was

visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject.

( Illuminations 236)

Benjamin celebrates the power of motion picture, which changes our perception of urban spacethat is revealed or extended by the camera as well as our experience of the city. This new

technology at Benjamin’s time turns the passive and powerless urban residents into active

travelers and adventurers.

Jean Baudrillard is also fascinated by the nexus of cinema and city, and he notes that in

this media-laden postmodern world, media shapes our experience of reality and involves us more

deeply with an artificial world that simulates a lost reality. We are so preoccupied by the

simulacra that, to us, the simulations are no less real than the reality they simulate. Commenting

on the relationship between celluloid U.S. cities and those in reality, Baudrillard observes, “The

American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies. To grasp its secret, you should not,

then, begin with the city and move inwards towards the screen; you should begin with the screen

and move outwards towards the city” ( America 56). According to him, one first experiences an

American city through its cinematic representation. In other words, the representation of city

precedes the represented.


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The representation of Hong Kong in Wong’s films destabilizes and subverts the grand

narrative of this city. Instead of following the hegemonic representation of the city as a capitalist

success and economic miracle, Wong focuses on characters that are not included in the meta-

narrative of the success story. In “The Hi/stories of Hong Kong,” Esther M. K. Cheung argues

that histories of Hong Kong, framed by British historians such as Nigel Cameron, Alan Birch,

and Frank Welsh,

pay very little reference to various kinds of miseries produced by modernity

(exploitation, alienation, uneven development), not to mention the history of pre-colonial

and rural Hong Kong or the history of everyday life that embody many historicalanomalies about which the Hong Kong grant narrative cannot absorb and silence. (565)

In this context, Wong’s urban narratives attempt to rewrite Hong Kong’s history through

depicting everyday life, which is largely ignored by the British historians. In his cinematic Hong

Kong, Wong articulates the alienation, miseries, and the suppressed desires of the marginalized

characters. Rather than taking a god-like view of the city from an aerial level and seeing only

the economic success, Wong starts his story from down below and gives voice to the silenced

and the oppressed.

The filmmaker’s “down below” viewpoint depicts the urban experience of Hong Kong,

and the true knowledge of the place comes from the inside rather than the outside. Michel de

Certeau argues that looking down upon the city from a point high above transfigures the viewer:

“It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before

one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god” (92). According

to Certeau, in a text created from the ground-level:


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The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which

visibility begins. They walk—an elementary form of this experience of the city: they are

walkers, Wandersmänner , whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’

they are able to write without being able to read it. (93)

Wong Kar-wai’s perception is not distant and above but close and “down below.” Like Eileen

Chang, a Shanghainese woman writer in the 1940s, who devoted her writing to Shanghainese

urbanites’ everyday life, Wong gives priority to the politics of the everyday, however

insignificant and sentimental, instead of the grand narratives of nationalism or the rational. This

is where Wong starts his narratives of Hong Kong, the ground-level that concentrates onindividual characters’ everyday activities in the city.

Hong Kong as a City

Wong Kar-wai’s films exclusively concentrate on urban space. The construction of

cinematic space in his films is the construction of urban Hong Kong. The development of Hong

Kong as a city influenced and continues to influence the urban space of today.

What is city? The origin of the English word “city” can be traced back to the Latin word

civitas , which translates Aristotle’s polis, referring to a city “in the sense of a city-state, a self-

governing political unit comprising one city and its surrounding territory” ( The Defender of the

Peace xlii). From the definition, it is obvious that autonomy is one defining characteristic of the

city.

However, in Chinese, the word “city” has different implications. The word for “city” in

Chinese is chengshi. It is made of two characters: cheng , meaning “walled city,” and shi , which

means “market.” It suggests two major functions of city: first, to protect its residents from


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outsiders; second, to trade. Nevertheless, as the word has evolved, it has taken on new meanings.

Yingjin Zhang explains the changing meaning of the Chinese concept of city,

Shi has become disassociated from the concept of market and is now increasingly

associated with a large city or metropolis ( dushi or duhui ), particularly treaty ports and

commercial manufacturing centers such as Shanghai or Guangzhou (Canton), where

industry and trade seem to matter more than politics and culture in the modern era. ( The

City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film 7)

In this sense, Hong Kong, like Shanghai, is also a city for its significant role in industry and trade

rather than politics and culture. In terms of its administrative system, Hong Kong has been asemi-autonomous city-state since 1841. It was first under the control of the British and then

became a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China after 1997.

Hong Kong is what Robert Redfield and Milton B. Singer called “a heterogenetic city.”

It is not a place that carries on an old culture and an old order but “a place of conflict of differing

traditions, a center of heresy, heterodoxy and dissent, of interruption and destruction of ancient

tradition, of rootlessness and anomie” (58). Located in the frontier between the East and the

West, Hong Kong had remained a “barren rock,” a remote place of wilderness for exiles, and a

small fishing village until 1842, when it was ceded to the British as the Crown Colony. It

eventually turned into a colonial port city, and its economy heavily depended on its role as a

trading port in the British Empire. Unlike most Western cities, which came into being as a

direct result of the Industrial Revolution, the development of technology, and the migration of

rural populations to urban areas, the urbanization of Hong Kong, like many other Asian cities,

cannot be separated from the history of colonization. Deprived of political decision-making,


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Hong Kong focused on the development of its economy, and, by the 1970s, it had transformed

into a city of entrepreneurs.

In terms of its political system, Hong Kong is a city-state because the residents share

Chinese cultural identity and form a political entity under one unitary system of government.

Hong Kong comprises 235 islands and one small peninsula from Mainland China including four

major sectors: Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, the New Territories, and the Outlying Islands. As a

city-state, Hong Kong, like Singapore, enjoyed semi-autonomous status as a Crown Colony

between 1841 and 1997. After 1997, it became a Special Administrative Region (SAR), like

Macao, under the rule of the People’s Republic of China. Hong Kong residents refer themselvesas “ shimin, ” which in Chinese means “city people,” in the recognition of themselves as the

people of Hong Kong in terms of civic identity. This marks them as different from the majority

of Chinese in China, who identify themselves as “Chinese.”

Hong Kong presents too many issues at once, and there is no easy way to conceptualize it

as a city. First of all, it is a trading port, a former British colony, a former Asian tiger, a

commercial center, a global city, a postmodern city, a world financial center. Further, it is one of

the most densely populated places in the world with a mixture of Chinese traditions and Western

influence. Hong Kong became one of the two SARs of China under the principle of “one

country, two systems.” This policy for Hong Kong is to have one China but allow Hong Kong to

enjoy its own capitalist economic and political systems for fifty years after the 1997 turnover.

Although Hong Kong is not completely independent politically, it now enjoys a high degree of

autonomy in internal affairs and keeps its own delegation in international organizations,

including the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum, the Financial Action Task Force, the

Olympic Games, and the World Trade Organization under the name of “Hong Kong, China.”


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Hong Kong cinema and local identity

In this dissertation, identity refers to who Wong’s characters are in relation to Hong

Kong, the British colonizers, and the Republic of China. My interpretation of these characters’

identity is based on the observation of their experiences in Wong’s cinematic Hong Kong in the

1960s, 1980s, and 1990s. As identity is determined by gender, class, and culture, among others,

it has different implications for different people. For instance, the first-generation Chinese

immigrants in the lower spectrum of Hong Kong society, with lower income and no Western

education background, are more inclined to hold on to their roots in mainland China and cling toa Chinese identity. In contrast, those who are born and bred in the colony, receive Western

education with higher income and more prestigious occupations, tend to resist the Chinese

identity and claim themselves to be Hong Kongnese. Although it is impossible for Wong’s

characters to represent every Hong Kong resident’s struggle with local identity, there is no doubt

that his fictional accounts offer an insight into the actual struggle with local identity in Hong

Kong.

Since Wong Kar-wai films are part of the cinema of Hong Kong and the question of

identity was not raised by him alone, it is important to know how films about Hong Kong in

general tackle the issues of local identity. Hong Kong cinema, whether commercial or art-house,

as a cultural product has displayed great concerns for local identity, the distinctive sense of

which did not come to public attention until the 1970s. Regarding the important relationship

between Hong Kong cinema and the notion of identity, Teo in “Local and Global Identity:

Whither Hong Kong Cinema?” observes: “if I were to choose one word to characterize Hong

Kong cinema, I would choose Identity. To my mind, Hong Kong cinema is obsessed with the


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notion of identity. It is a cinema that constantly asks of Hong Kong people, Who Am I?” Teo

gives the example of Jackie Chan’s film Who Am I (1998), a story about a policeman who loses

his memory, and he has to find out his own identity in time before he is killed. Another good

example is the trilogy of Infernal Affairs (2002-2003) directed by Wai-keung Lau and Alan Mak .

These three films tell one story about an undercover policeman infiltrating the triads and

identifying a mole planted by the same triads’ head in the police department. Crisis of identity

arises as two moles strive to maintain control: the undercover policeman loses his identity as a

cop and tries to get it back while the mole, promoted to a high position in the police department,

fights to be a real cop.Abbas contends that new Hong Kong cinema emerged during the 1980s as a result of a

stronger demand for local identity. He observes, “[n]ow faced with the uncomfortable

possibility of an alien identity about to be imposed on it from China, Hong Kong is experiencing

a kind of last-minute collective search for a more definite identity” ( Hong Kong: Culture and

Politics of Disappearance 4). Influenced by Hong Kong’s unique geohistorical situations and

the formation of local identity, the new Hong Kong cinema addresses the anxieties and

complexity of political issues through visual images on the screen.

The formation of Hong Kong identity cannot be easily traced since identity is not fixed

but malleable and forever changing. Many scholars believe that the gradual emergence of local

identity in Hong Kong started in the 1960s, a decade in which Hong Kong, plagued by riots and

natural disasters, witnessed a shift in the discourse of identity from a refugee mentality to a

different self-perception as Hong Kong became a permanent settlement. After Hong Kong’s

economy took off and became one of the four Asian Tigers in the 1970s, the colonial

government gradually tightened up regulations on Chinese immigration, and, as a result, Hong


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Kong was further disconnected from mainland China. Cantonese, the vernacular language of

Hong Kong, took the place of Mandarin and became popular in the mass media. The popularity

of Cantonese contributed to the formation of a local identity. Before the 1970s, local art works

were more preoccupied with the national past and anti-Japanese narrative than anything else.

After the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989, citizens of Hong Kong became anxious, or even

fearful, toward the approaching deadline, anticipating the end of freedoms and wealth and

suddenly felt the urge to look back to their most recent colonial past.

The confusion over identity resulted from the unique and complex history of the city.

Hong Kong, in her transformation from a small fishing village to a modern-day internationalfinancial center, has changed hands and gone through countless trials. In the late eighteenth

century, when European Imperialism reached the East, China, a self-sufficient agricultural

country with very limited needs to import from the outside, gained large amounts of silver from

Europe. In order to stop the trade deficit, British merchants smuggled opium into China against

Chinese law, which led to two opium wars from 1839 to 1842 and from 1856 to 1860. Already

corrupt and weak, in addition to being poorly equipped, the Chinese forces sent out by the Qing

government were quickly defeated in both wars. As a result, the Chinese government was forced

to accept the notorious Treaty of Nanking, which stipulated that the Chinese had to open

additional ports for trade to Britain. This treaty also demanded the cession of Hong Kong to

Britain for one hundred and fifty five years and twenty-one million silver dollars paid to Britain

in compensation for the expenses of the wars and the opium that the Chinese had confiscated and

destroyed. During the Second World War, without adequate naval or air backup, the British

surrendered to the Japanese. As a result of this surrender, the Imperial Japanese administration

ruled Hong Kong for more than three years. In 1982, Margaret Thatcher visited China and


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signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration with Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang from the PRC in

1984. This ended more than 150 years of British colonial rule in Hong Kong and transferred it

to the Chinese government.

Hong Kong did not have its own voice in deciding its own fate from the very beginning

of colonial history. Between China and the Britain, Hong Kong is an object, a prize possession,

a negotiating chip in the two nations’ contest for power. It was rendered without agency in the

process of colonization. Aimé Césaire and Robin D.G. Kelly in their book Discourse on

Colonialism point out that the dehumanizing nature of colonialism othered the colonized and

made them “an instrument of production” (177) to serve imperial expansion. Hong Kong, asmerely an instrument deprived of any participation in politics, lost not only its independence but

also its agency. According to Albert Memmi, the colonized was “neither responsible nor guilty

nor skeptical, for he is out of the game. He is in no way a subject of history any more…always

as an object. He has forgotten how to participate actively in history and no longer even asks to

do so” (158). Colonial subjects became things that did not have control over their own fates.

Although many Hong Kong Chinese had identified with their ancestors in mainland

China, the city witnessed a shift in their political allegiance from the prevailing nationalism to a

third identity over the last fifty years. This shift has largely been due to Hong Kong emerging as

a melting pot of Eastern and Western influences. The Chinese identity seems distant and

strange, especially among the younger generations who receive Western education and whose

favorite places are cafes and McDonalds. Instead, they identify themselves as Hong Kong

Chinese instead of simply Chinese or British.

Nevertheless, although Hong Kong survived colonial rule and managed to prosper in the

colonial era, the colonized never fully identified with the colonizer. In Rey Chow’s words, “the


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Chinese never emotionally consented to British colonialism. For 155 years, they had refused to

forget that Hong Kong was a Chinese city” (“Hong Kong in Hong Kong Watching the

‘Handover’ from the U.S.A.” 307). For instance, in Hong Kong, English has become important

next to Cantonese in not only classrooms but also residents’ daily lives. The popularity of the

English language contributes tremendously to the construction of the local cultural identity.

However, the use of English, the language of the ruling class, is often associated with the

privileged, the colonizer, and the master. A native writer of Hong Kong, Leung Pin-kwan,

recalls his early experience with this language: “English is valued as an asset in business, it is

essential in the service professions, yet I am not interested in business English, and I amuncomfortable watching programs on Hong Kong television teaching English only as ‘service

English’” (Bolton 200). As the colonial language, English reflects a racial hierarchy, shaping

people’s perception of themselves as well as the world and changing indigenous cultures.

Those who identified themselves as Hong Kong Chinese felt betrayed when the British

denied their right to democracy until 1994. The political reform, which brought to the about-to-

be-decolonized Hong Kong by the leaving British colonial ruler, was more of a questionable

parting gift. The colonial British government, represented by the last governor Patten,

introduced democracy in the last few years right before the turnover. This last-minute action led

Mark Roberti to point out, “it was not until Britain had formally agreed to return Hong Kong to

China that the Hong Kong government began introducing democratic reforms. China had every

right to feel tricked. Democracy, it seemed, was good for Hong Kong only when the British

were no longer running it” (305).

However, the Hong Kong citizens’ identification with Chineseness is not unproblematic

either. Before the reformation conducted by the colonial administration in the 1970s, people in


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Hong Kong were nostalgic about their national past and preoccupied with the possible reunion

with the Chinese mainland. In Hong Kong Cinema: Coloniser, Motherland and Self , Yingchi

Chu explores the development of Hong Kong cinema from the colonial time to the postcolonial

era. He argues that Hong Kong films before 1956 are an integral part of Chinese national

cinema. In the 1950s, because Cold War started and Western forces boycotted the mainland,

Hong Kong cinema turned from a national cinema to a diasporic cinema. It gradually lost China

as its center of attention and turned to the overseas Chinese for new markets. In addition to the

disconnection that already existed because of years of separation, the event of Tiananmen Square

in 1989 further distanced residents of Hong Kong from China and stopped them from identifyingthemselves as Chinese. They were now afraid that Hong Kong would soon become a part of

China, ruled by a communist regime. Yash P. Ghai remarks,

It is an identity of ambiguity, traditional and yet modern, which, for example, has been

nourished on the freedoms of Western liberalism but does not fully accommodate it

within its mind set, or is suspicious of communist china yet hurries to make peace with

(even to placate) it—perhaps because it is founded on the morality of commerce. (33)

Torn between British and Chinese, the East and the West, colonial and local, traditional and

modern, Hong Kong locals articulated their desire for a localized and hyphenated identity.

The notion of Hong Kong identity in the city’s transition period involves an articulation

of the indigenist desire, an active political defiance against the grand narratives of both Britain

and China. In Staging Hong Kong, Rozanna Lilley states, “To speak of ‘Hong Kong identity’

was an active articulation, a violent gesture, which attempted to compel recognition of the

existence of Hong Kong people, an existence too often viewed as inert and apathetic by other

players on the political scene” (284). Given this, it is not surprising that the films of Wong Kar-


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wai primarily deal with the issues of identity. He is part of the younger generation in Hong

Kong who lived through this dynamic social transformation. Although Wong’s films involve the

past and loss, they observe the world around them from the perspective of a new generation, like

the filmmaker himself, who was raised and educated in Hong Kong. The older generation’s

nostalgia for the old country is forever lost to the young. To them, the home that their parents

dream of returning to is no more than a dream. Therefore, in Wong’s trilogy, Shanghai, his own

birthplace which he left at five, is only a vague memory or perhaps an imaginary place that he

conjured up from the memory of the older generation.

Wong’s Cinematic Hong Kong

This analysis of Wong’s films is composed of two groups, each of which contains three

chapters. In the first group, the three chapters focus on the modern, colonial, and diasporic space

through examining Wong’s 1960s films: Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love and 2046.

The three chapters in the second group concentrate on the postmodern and postcolonial urban

space in Wong’s 1990s films: As Tears Go by, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels .

The construction of the cinematic city in the 1960s differs from that in the 1990s films.

Wong’s version of Hong Kong during the1960s, dominated by diasporic identity, shows the

characters mostly confined to their private dwelling places, dark and enclosed claustrophobic

spaces. The configuration of space and time unique to Hong Kong revolves around the motifs of

transition, ephemerality, and an absence of local identity. The settings are temporary places for

residence, and forever-moving trains surround the refugee mentality that dominated the city

during the 1960s. The majority of the residents viewed Hong Kong as a stepping stone to

somewhere else. To them, the city is a place that is full of possibilities and often provokes


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questions starting with “what if.” All these produce an illusion of a drifting world forever in

motion. Wong’s films set in the 1960s present a liminal identity that is embodied by Yuddy in

Days of Being Wild and Chow Muyun in the film In the Mood for Love and 2046 . As Yuddy

imagines Philippines, instead of mainland China, as his place of origin, other characters in Days

of Being Wild are too caught up in their lives to engage in any discussions about their identities.

Similarly, Chow experiences the dispersal of the Shanghainese community in In the Mood for

Love and eventually moves to the anonymous and temporary hotel room in 2046 . In these films,

the exterior landscape is simply neglected as there is a noticeable lack of traditional establishing

shots from outside to show the location of the narratives. Although the trilogy takes place inHong Kong, there are rarely shots of any landmarks in the city. As a result, Hong Kong itself

does not seem important. These films’ privileging the interior over the exterior space omits the

location of these works and further accentuates the diasporic identity.

In Wong’s films set in and after 1980s, male characters, outlaws and policemen alike,

show more confidence in their relationships with their surroundings. They are more often seen

in outdoor public spaces, chasing each other in the urban space in attempts to take control of the

territory. These characters show strong connections with Hong Kong. For instance, Wah and

Fly in As Tears Go by show their roots in rural Hong Kong, while Cop #223 in Chungking

Express and the killer in Fallen Angel both reveal that they have been educated in Hong Kong.

The cinematic space of the 1960s articulates a strong diasporic identity that was

predominant among displaced Chinese emigrants. The Shanghainese community is one of these

huaqiao (overseas Chinese) groups. From this perspective, Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for

Love, and 2046 deemphasize Hong Kong since the emigrants are still too involved in their past to

see the host city. The camera eye aligns itself with the perspective of these emigrants and


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presents a Hong Kong that is obscured by Shanghai. In these films, no establishing shots are

ever used to locate the setting of Hong Kong. The city merely exists as a backdrop and is rarely

mentioned.

However, Wong’s films set in the 1980s and 1990s express a distinct Hong Kong

identity. In contrast to the ambivalent imageries in the films set in the 1960s, the cityscape in

Wong’s films set in the 1980s and 1990s is unmistakably Hong Kong. Establishing shots

highlight the landscape of the city, distinctive buildings, familiar streets, crowds, and foreign

residents. Characters are more active and more aggressive. They start running around in public

domain, not afraid of being seen in the streets as they fight for control. These characters deviatefrom the relatively passive characters in the 1960s films who are never sure of their own places

or fates, avoid crowds, and hide inside their apartments. Also, the 1960s films rarely show

characters embedded in a family structure to suggest their homelessness and rootlessness,

whereas characters in the 1980s and 1990s films often reveal their family connections. For

instance, Ngor is Wah’s cousin in as Tears Go by . Faye is her boss’s cousin in Chungking

Express. The mute lives with his father in Fallen Angels . In terms of soundtrack, Wong uses

Western music almost exclusively in the 1960s films, yet he utilizes Cantonese songs and

traditional operas alluding to Chinese heritage in his 1980s and 1990s films. Also, in films set in

the 1960s, characters are often seen in temporary dwellings, such as hotel rooms and residential

buildings, from which they soon move; in films from the 1980s and 1990s, characters often have

their own apartments, living in a relatively stable environment.

The cinematic Hong Kong in the 1960s is configured through controlled visual images,

such as fetishized shots of female bodies, to conjure up an ordered world, from the perspective of

the male characters, who are powerless subjects and exilic outsiders. These elements manifest


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throughout In the Mood for Love as Su Lizhen, a woman who is trapped in her marriage with an

unfaithful husband, is always seen in her stunningly beautiful cheongsam . No matter where she

goes, she dresses up for the voyeuristic camera eye. The tight dress, on one hand, effectively

enhances the actress’ sexy figure; on the other, it restricts her movements and reinforces order

and discipline as they are defined from the male perspectives. The fact that the art director,

William Chang, was in charge of clothing design for this film further suggests that men literally

control women’s look. In an interview, Maggie Cheung recalls her experience with cheongsam ,

saying: “It was difficult at first. I wasn’t used to it. [The dress] was tight. When you turn your

head, you’d feel strangled. The high heels, the hairstyle took four hours. It was hard” (Camhi).Order is eventually restored as Su Lizhen refrains from fulfilling her desires in order to act in

accordance with the responsibilities of a traditional Chinese wife.

This need for control is absent in the 1980s and 1990s films as the female characters are

financially independent and do not dress for men. They work as a flight attendant, a helper in

restaurants, and a killer’s partner. Ngor in As Tears Go by is seen in plain clothing. Faye

doesn’t even look feminine in Chungking Express: she is a tomboy with short hair who always

wears shirts and long pants. Although the female agent in Fallen Angels wears black stockings,

low-cut dresses, and mini skirts, she is more dangerous than seductive. Her gothic look is

associated with destruction and death. She scouts murder spots for the killer. Therefore,

whenever she goes to work, death follows. Also, the scene of her masturbating in the killer’s bed

further excludes men from her world and suggests her identity as a self-sufficient woman, one

who seeks pleasure independently of relationships with men.

Despite all the dissimilarities, the imageries of Hong Kong in Wong’s films set in the

1960s, 1980s, and 1990s share common features. For instance, both groups of films register a


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strong sense of transiency, the dominant theme of the “moment,” which often accompanies a

character’s loneliness and desire to belong as a result of the place’s complex relation with the

motherland, the British colonial administration, and the self. This quality of transiency,

inscribed in the characters’ displacement and disorientation, reverberates with Hong Kong’s

colonial history and the impending postcolonial era. The cinematic space also embodies the

residents’ lack of a strong sense of local history in addition to their confusion, fear, and anxiety

toward the uncertain present and the unpredictable future. Projected onto the cinematic space,

these fears and anxieties are manifested through an overall unsettling feel associated with the

setting.This poignant sense of transiency is a reflection of Hong Kong as a city of immigrants

where large numbers of migrants congregate, a place characterized by the trajectory of border

crossings. The phrase “borrowed place—borrowed time,” first used by writer Han Suyin in

“Hong Kong’s Ten-Year Miracle” published in Life in 1959 and later adopted by Australian

writer Richard Joseph Hughes (1906-1984) in Hong Kong: Borrowed Place, Borrowed Time

published in 1968, is the most quoted phrase to describe life in Hong Kong. Under the colonial,

postcolonial, and postmodern condition, the residents’ refugee and immigrant mentality

produced a strong sense of contingency, temporality, transiency, and ephemerality, which

contribute greatly to the experience of Hong Kong.

Wong’s films define and redefine the idea of home as the characters never cease

struggling against their fates, and they only wait to be relocated again. The resulting inner

restlessness is externalized as the characters frequently cross national borders, or escape from

mountain to desert, from inner Hong Kong to outer, or onto some future train. Unlike other

travelers who search for thrills in the exotic world, these protagonists escape there to find solace.


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For instance, Chow Muyun from In the Mood for Love has to travel to Angkor Wat to find a hole

in an ancient wall to voice his secrets and pain. Their travel is a flight, and life to them is

divided into different brief stops from which they must soon depart. In some ways, they are not

too different from the legless bird in Days of Being Wild that never stops flying until it is dead.

They voluntarily banish themselves to the foreign and unknown, cut off all the bonds with the

familiar, vent their secrets to a hole, and pretend to move on, yet they are incapable of settling

down comfortably anywhere else.

The imagery of Wong’s cityscape resonates with the nature of Hong Kong itself and

accordingly provides ephemeral and often uncertain narratives. The recurring temporary spaces,such as the tight quarters in In the Mood for Love, the basement in Days of Being Wild , the hotel

rooms in 2046 and Chungking Express, and the back seats of cabs in Happy Together , In the

Mood for Love, and 2046, support the theme of constant motion and sweeping changes. In his

study of Hong Kong in the postcolonial era, Abbas observes:

Hong Kong has up to quite recently been a city of transients. Much of the population was

made up of refugees or expatriates who thought of Hong Kong as a temporary stop, no

matter how long they stayed. The sense of the temporary is very strong, even if it can be

entirely counter factual. The city is not so much a place as a space of transit. It has

always been, and will perhaps always be, a port in the most literal sense—a doorway, a

point in between –even though the nature of the port has changed. A port city that used

to be located at the intersections of different times or speeds. ( Hong Kong: Culture and

the Politics of Disappearance 4)

Abbas’s observation accurately captures the essence of Hong Kong, which is populated with

people who are always from somewhere else, and they are ready to move again to seek stability


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and prosperity in life. In this sense, Hong Kong is a gateway that, for some, signifies possibility,

opportunity, and adventure, but for others, the city may entail chaos and uncertainty.

In the 1980s and 1990s, there is still a strong sense of exile lingering on as the city

became again unsettled by political concerns. Justin Clemens and Dominic Pettman observe that

the city “ has been cut loose from its previous colonial moorings, and now floats uncannily

between the political grids that link Chinese and British history” (131). The sentiments of lone

characters alienated from the mainstream combined with the free-floating feelings typical in the

postmodern era torment Wong’s characters during the transition from Britain’s last colonial city

to a global city. The director was again plunged into another world of turmoil due to thehandover. Urban space in Wong’s films set in the 1980s and 1990s continues to be ruled by

uncertainty and is subject to disruption of violence. The sense of rootlessness is only more

prominent through Wong’s representation of spaces that are defined by a lack of history and

identity such as the non-place in Chungking Express . The prevailing symptoms of amnesia and

schizophrenia among the characters in Fallen Angels further question the traditional notions of

subjectivity and paint a bleak picture of contemporary Hong Kong.

The construction of such a cinematic space is inspired by both the past as well as the

present Hong Kong. The sentiments among Hong Kongers were complicated and the attitude

toward nationalism and the colonial government ambiguous. Ever since the Qing government

ceded Hong Kong to Great Britain, anti-colonial sentiment had been strong among Chinese in

Hong Kong. Many films and works of literature never stopped displaying their longing for

China and their desires to be reunited with the mainland. The Star Ferry riots in 1966, induced

by the raise of ferry fares, pressed the colonial administration to make changes. As a result of

the anti-government riots, the colonial rulers were forced to change their attitudes and adopt


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indirect rule in Hong Kong. The credibility of the Chinese government became severely

damaged because of the negative image of the Communists, formed by two incidents: the 1967

disturbance of Hong Kong and the Tiananmen incident of 1989. Gradually, due to economic

success and steady social development, a local identity emerged among the younger generations

in Hong Kong, which replaced the older generations’ imagining of the national Chinese

community.

The impact of present political relations, social conditions, and cultural issues on Wong’s

nostalgic films and works from the 1990s should not be overlooked. In his 1960s films, the

reinvention of the past is closely related to the political situation in Hong Kong during the 1990s.In addition to the approaching handover and the strong sentiment of the Fin de Siecle , Hong

Kong also developed at an incredibly fast rate, which caused a rapid disappearance of the things

that people used to know. As part of the search for a local identity, heritage preservation

suddenly became important. Many films follow this trend in the cinema of Hong Kong, such as

Wong Kar-wai’s trilogy, Stanley Kwan’s Rouge , Ann Hui’s Song of Exile, Peter Chan’s He ain’t

Heavy, he is My Brother , and Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle . All these films, while being

attempts to recall the past by a fusion of past images, actually reflect on the present situations.

One photo of Wong Kar-wai on the cover of Wong Kar-wai , a collection of articles on

Wong’s films edited by Jean-Marc Lalanne, best demonstrates the kind of diasporic quality in

Wong’s 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s films. In the photo with an overexposed orange color that

indicates a nostalgic overtone, the filmmaker, dressed in black, is sitting in a small room with

minimal furniture, reminiscent of all the sleazy hotel rooms in his films: an iron bed on his left, a

peeled dark-red chair on the right. Wong is seated in front of a bed stand with his eyes covered

by a pair of dark sunglasses. In the picture, the room is an enclosed space without a window or a


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door. The only thing that reminds one of the outside world and distinguishes the place from a

prison is the painting of a beacon hanging on the wall few inches above the filmmaker’s head.

Wong, partly confined and partly protected by this small enclosed space, presses his palms

together and hides a large portion of his face behind them as if he is meditating or praying or

whispering. His gesture reminds one of Chow Muyun from In the Mood for Love. Near the end

of the film, Chow whispers into his cupped hands as he reveals his secrets into a hole in Angkor

Wat.

Wong’s early experiences of dislocation and alienation result in certain pattern of spatial

organization in his films set in the 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s. When asked why geographicalfactors play such an important role in his films, Wong replies: “For some time, I was totally

alienated, and it was like the biggest nightmare of my life. It might not be conscious, but

certainly I have an intense feeling for geographical upheavals” (Lalanne 88). Wong Kar-wai’s

works belong to what Hamid Naficy defines as “accented cinema,” which refers to films that

respond to exilic experience with double voices: one articulates cinematic traditions and the

other reflects diasporic traditions. Naficy’s concept of accented cinema is similar to “mulatto” or

“mulatta,” terms used by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to refer to black texts which have two voices:

one utilizes Romance and Germanic languages and literary tradition, while the other articulates a

strong black vernacular tradition. As a way of distinguishing accented cinema from the

mainstream cinema, Nacify states, “if the classical cinema has generally required that

components of style, such as mise-en-scène, filming, and editing, produce a realistic rendition of

the world, the exilic accent must be sought in the manner in which realism is, if not subverted, at

least inflected differently” (22). The cinematic city in Wong’s films is a subjective experience,

in which realism is altered to create a new actuality that reflects an exilic subjectivity. The


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filmmaker translates his personal experience of diaspora into films by writing the observations in

his childhood as a new immigrant in Hong Kong onto the filmic narratives.

To divide films according to time, it is necessary to know that there are generally two

conceptions of time in cinema: the time in which the film was made and the time within the

fictional world of the film. Acknowledging the effects of the historical context on film’s form

and content when it is made, critics such as Stephen Teo and Peter Brunette arrange their

discussions of Wong’s films around chronological order. However, this study examines his

films based on the time period in which they are set, i.e., the fictional time. My study will

follow this sequence: Days of Being Wild (1990), In the Mood for Love (2002), 2046 (2004), AsTears Go by (1989) , Chungking Express (1995), and Fallen Angels (1996). With this kind of

arrangement, my analysis aims to unfold an account of the main historical development of Hong

Kong.

This approach of dividing the six films into two groups is based on the filmmaker’s own

idea of grouping his films. Wong’s films set in the 1960s are three parts of one story, and

Chungking Express and Fallen Angels belong to one unit. In an interview, when asked why he

didn’t make a sequel to Days of Being Wild, Wong answers, “I think I made it already… In the

Mood for Love and 2046 basically, to me, is like the second part of that dream” (Schwartz).

Therefore, when these films are viewed together, one big story is discernible. As a matter of fact,

Chow Muyun from In the Mood for Love and 2046 is also seen in the last scene in Days of Being

Wild. This individual links the three films, which show a clear development of the character.

Likewise, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels are also meant to be one part of a story. Wong

says:


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Chungking Express and Fallen Angels are one film that should be three hours long. I

always think these two films should be seen together as a double bill… Chungking

Express and Fallen Angels together are the bright and dark of Hong Kong. I see the films

as inter-reversible. (Ong)

Similar to two sides of a coin, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels represents two sides of

Hong Kong. As Chungking Express shows the audience the bright side of the city, Fallen Angels

attends to the dark side. Seeing the possibility of grouping As Tears Go by , Chungking Express

and Fallen Angels as one unity, Lalanne says: “ Fallen Angels can at once be thought of as one of

the episodes intended for Chungking Express and as a possible follows-up to As Tears Go By ”(9).

Further, the look of Hong Kong is consistent throughout Wong’s 1960s films, although

every individual film explores a different aspect of the city. The same is true with Wong’s

contemporary films. There are different kinds of consistency in the use of music, mise-en-scène,

spatial arrangement, and visual styles that structure the two groups and create different

impressions of the same city. These disparate depictions of Hong Kong in these two groups

delineate changes in the characters’ attitude toward the city and the progression of their cultural

identities. Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love, and 2046 offer a glimpse at an expatriate’s

life in Hong Kong of the 1960s. As Tears Go by, Chungking Express, and Fallen Angels provide

a view of the image of the city different from those depicted in the first group by offering a

portrait of contemporary Hong Kong as already affected by the signing of Joint Declaration in a

global and postmodern era.

The first part of the dissertation examines the theme of diaspora by investigating spatial

arrangements in Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love, and 2046 . To explore the diasporic

cinematic hong kong of wong kar wai

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