Between land and memory: the post-urban gaze of Hong Kong independent cinema

Abstract

Many scholars and viewers consider Hong Kong films excellent examples of “urban cinema”: they represent not only urban spaces but also a distinctly urban epistemology through their style and organization. The effect of this focus on urban Hong Kong, however, is to render any alternative formulation of Hong Kong identity invisible. Many Hong Kong independent films produced in the past few years attempt to critique the commercial film industry’s narrow focus on Hong Kong’s urban identity. The alternative offered by these independent films represents a poetic departure, which allows for connection and reflection, and highlights the interrelationship of nature and culture in cosmopolitan cities such as Hong Kong. This chapter will focus on two female independent filmmakers, Tsang Tsui-shan and Lai Yan-chi, and their works on land and memory in the context of today’s Hong Kong. A strong sense of self-reflection characterizes both of their works. This self-reflection is strengthened by the films’ visual portrayal of the opposition of the urban and the rural, of stagnation and movement. While Tsang’s Big Blue Lake (2011) is evidence of the recent return to nature and the countryside in Hong Kong cinema through telling a story of going home; Lai’s two films, 1+1 (2010) and N+N (2014), reflects on Hong Kong as a city that is constantly under destruction and reconstruction. Building on Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of “contact zone”, I argue the liminal spaces of these films — in the spaces between the mainstream and the independent, urban and nature, and the visual and the acoustic— offers a productive site where nature can trigger different imaginaries and possibilities. In their refusal to present stark dichotomies, these three films open up the possibility of dialogue between the city and country, symbolized in the reparation of relationships with land and with the past. The “Ecological Contact Zone” represented in these films suggests that the shift from the urban to the rural world does not necessarily romanticize the natural landscape, uphold the binary opposition between the city and the country, or condemn the cityscape out of hand. Rather, the return—the idea of going home or returning to the land —suggests a turning or shifting of perspectives and positions in relation to things and places.