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Introduction Notes Introduction 1. Many critics have used this term to describe the anxious anticipation of the future and the concomitant nostalgia for a reality soon to be lost in Hong Kong films in the 1980s and 1990s. See, for example, Ackbar Abbas (1997), Hong Kong: Culture and Politics of Disappearance; Nick Browne (1994), ‘Introduction’, New Chinese Cinemas; Esther Yau (1994), ‘Border Crossing: Mainland China’s Presence in Hong Kong Cinema’, Nick Browne, ed., New Chinese Cinemas, pp. 180–201. 2. See Arjun Appadurai (1996), Modernity at Large; and Morley and Robins (1995), Spaces of Identity. 3. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (2006), ‘General Introduction: What Is Transnational Cinema?’ Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader,p.4. 4. Ibid., pp. 3–4. 5. Andrew Higson (2000), ‘The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema’, Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds., Cinema and Nation, pp. 63–74; see also Susan Hayward (2000) in the same volume, pp. 88–102. 6. Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar (2006), China on Screen, p. 14. 7. Ibid., p. 7. 8. See Linda Chiu-han Lai (2001), ‘Films and Enigmatization: Nostalgia, Non- sense, and Remembering’, At Full speed; Rey Chow (2001), ‘A Souvenir of Love’, Esther Yau, ed., At Full speed, Chapters 9 and 10. 9. See Eric Kit-wai Ma (2001), ‘Re-Advertising Hong Kong: Nostalgia Industry and Popular History’, Positions 9:1, pp. 131–159. 10. Mike Featherstone (1991), Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Chapter 1. 11. Fredric Jameson (1998), ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, The Cul- tural Turn, pp. 1–12. 12. Mike Featherstone, for example, notices a tendency towards ‘totalizing the- ory’ in the neo-Marxist works of Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. In film stud- ies, some scholars have expressed the need for an adjustment to Jameson’s dismissive treatment of nostalgia. 13. Abbas (1997), pp. 21, 15. 14. Shelly Kraicer (2005), ‘Tracking the Elusive Wong Kar-wai’, Cineaste: Special Focus on Wong Kar-wai, Fall, pp. 14–15. 15. Stanely Kwan and Wong Kar-wai are often called the ‘second wave’; see Stephen Teo (1997), Hong Kong Cinema, pp. 184–203. 16. Vera Dika (2003), Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film,p.18. 17. Natalia Siu Hung Chan (2000), ‘Rewriting History: Hong Kong Nostalgia Cin- ema and Its Social Practice’, Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong, p. 269. 18. Ingeborg Hoesterey (2001), Pastiche p. x. 19. Ibid., p. 9. 20. Rey Chow (2004), p. 215. 218 Notes 219 21. Ibid., p. 214. 22. Ibid., p. 224. 23. Linda Chiu-han Lai (2001), p. 232. 24. In fact, ‘old Shanghai’ and ‘old Hong Kong’ can be regarded as two sides of the same coin, as Shanghai has been widely taken as a precedent for Hong Kong due to the two cities’ shared experience of colonialism. This nostal- gic yearning for ‘lost history’ explains why a host of films and television programmes set in 1930s Shanghai sprang up during the late 1980s and 1990s. 25. Abbas (1997), pp. 14–15. 26. In the last few years a number of critical studies devoted to on Hong Kong’s commercial cinema have been published, for example David Bord- well (2000), Planet Hong Kong; Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Li, and Stephen Ching-kiu Chan, eds. (2005), Hong Kong Connections; Stephen Teo (2007), Director in Action; Leon Hunt (2003), Kung Fu Cult Masters. 27. Darrell William Davis and Yueh-yu Emilie Yeh (2008), East Asian Screen Industries, pp. 39–43. 1 Post-nostalgia: In the Mood for Love and 2046 1. Tony Ryan (1995), ‘Poet of Time’, Sound and Vision (September), 5:9, pp. 12–16. 2. Among these are Jean-Marc Lalanne, David Martinez, Ackbar Abbas, and Jimmy Ngai (1997), Wong Kar-wai; Peter Brunette (2005), Wong Kar-wai; Stephen Teo (2005a), Wong Kar-wai; and Jeremy Tambling (2003), Wong Kar- wai’s Happy Together. The popular English film journal, Cineaste, published a special issue on Wong in Fall 2005. 3. Brunette (2005), p. xiii; Abbas (1997), pp. 48–62. 4. In his book, Teo puts forward an original thesis on the intimate connections between Wong’s film aesthetic, especially the themes of love and memory and narrative structure, and the works of his favourite authors such as Jin Yong, Liu Yichang, and Manuel Puig. See Teo (2005a). 5. Kraicer (2005), ‘Tracking the Elusive Wong Kar-wai’, Cineaste: A Special Focus on Wong Kar-wai, Fall, pp. 14–15. 6. Ibid. 7. Abbas (1997), p. 4. 8. Teo (2005a), pp. 134–135. 9. Wong’s distortion of the gangster film conventions in As Tears Go By is discussed in Abbas (1997), pp. 35–36. 10. See Michelle Tsung-yi Huang (2004), Walking Between Slums and Skyscrappers, pp. 49–56. 11. Long Tin (2004), ‘Hou bajiu yu Wong Kar-wai dianying’ (Post-89 and the film work of Wong Kar-wai) Poon Kwok-ling and Bono Lee, eds., Wong Kar-wai de yinghua shijie (The Film World of Wong Kar-wai), pp. 6–10. 12. For a critical survey of nostalgic film and culture in Hong Kong in the 1990s, see Daisy Sheung-yuen Ng (2000), ‘The Cultural Politics of Nostal- gia in Contemporary Hong Kong Film and Memoir’, Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University. Critical studies on individual films can be found in Linda 220 Notes Chiu-han Lai (2001); Rey Chow (2001); and Natalia Siu Hung Chan (2000) and Luo Feng (1995). 13. Urban comedies and youth films were the mainstay of Cantonese cinema in the mid- to late 1960s, and were the breeding ground for super-idols. For a historical review and critical analysis, see Kar Law, ed. (1996), The Restless Breed; Tin Long (2007a), 2006 Hong Kong Cinema Retrospective. 14. For a detailed analysis of these nostalgic films and their predecessors, see Luo Feng (1995), ‘Historical Memory and Historical Amnesia: The Form and Content of Nostalgic Films’, pp. 60–75. 15. The effect of the ‘China Factor’ on the Hong Kong New Wave is discussed in Li Cheuk-to (1994), ‘The Return of the Father: Hong Kong New Wave and Its Chinese Context in the 1980s’, Nick Browne, ed., New Chinese Cinemas, pp. 160–179. 16. Brunette (2005), pp. 100–101. 17. Teo (2005a), p. 119. 18. Ibid., p. 118. 19. Luo Feng (2004) ‘Ruhua meijuan—lun Huayang nianhua de niandai jiyi yu lianwu qingjie’ (Memory of Bygone Eras and Fetishism in In the Mood for Love), Pun and Lee, eds., The Film World of Wong Kar-wai, p. 132. 20. See Matthew Turner (2003), ‘60s/90s: Dissolving the People’, Pun Ngai and Yee Lai-man, eds., Narrating Hong Kong Culture and Identity; Gordon Matthews (2003), ‘Heunggongyahn: On the Past, Present, and Future of Hong Kong Identity (an extract)’, Pun Ngai and Yee Lai-man, eds., Narrating Hong Kong Culture and Identity. In the same volume, Lui (2003) offers a more criti- cal analysis of the so-called ‘Hong Kong Identity’, noting its feeble roots in economic and material comfort. See Lui’s article in Pun and Yee eds., pp. 206–218. 21. Helen F. Siu (2003), ‘Hong Kong: Cultural Kaleidoscope on a World Land- scape’, pp. 126–127. 22. This ‘glorious modernity’ of the 1960s is best represented in the films of Kong Ngee Productions. For a discussion on the influence of the 1960s on later films, see Wong Ain-ling (2006), ‘Preface’, The Glorious Modernity of Kong Ngee, pp. 16–21. 23. Teo (2005a), p. 117. 24. Wong Kar-wai speaking at a press conference at Cannes, quoted in Brunette (2005), p. 103. 25. This constitutes part of the so-called ‘China factor’ in Hong Kong films. Another dimension of this cultural nostalgia is seen in the reinvention of traditional China in wuxia (swordsplay) films by King Hu and Chang Cheh. 26. Wong Kar-wai’s foreword to Duidao (photo collection), quoted in Feng/ Chan (2004), p. 132. 27. Stephen Teo perceives a luring ‘potentiality’ for another love story in the last scene of Days of Being Wild; Another critic associates this inconclusiveness with the technique of ‘liubai’ (empty space) in traditional Chinese aesthet- ics. See Ching-siu Tong (2004), ‘Bashi niandai de liushi niandai wenhua xiangxiang—you huo shi A fei zhengzhuan de jiyi waiyan celue’ (The Six- ties in the Cultural Imagination of the Eighties: Or the Strategy of Extended Memory in Days of Being Wild). In The Film World of Wong Kar-wai, Pun and Lee, eds., pp. 45–47. Notes 221 28. Rey Chow (2007), ‘The Everyday in The Road Home and In the Mood for Love: From the Legacy of Socialism to the Potency of Yuan’, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films,p.73. 29. Pam Cook (2005), ‘Rethinking Nostalgia: In the Mood for Love and Far from Heaven’, Screening the Past, pp. 1–22. 30. Feng (2004), p. 136. 31. Chow (2007), pp. 74–75. 32. Ibid., p. 80. 33. Brunette (2005), p. 89. 34. According to Abbas, ‘reverse hallucination’ is ‘not seeing what is there’, ‘an inability to read what is given to view’, as opposed to hallucination, ‘seeing what is not there’. Reverse hallucination is an effect of the déjà desparu that characterizes Hong Kong culture in the 1990s. See Abbas (1997), pp. 25–26. 35. Referring to the camera’s fondness of showing the characters midsection, Brunette (2005) observes that Wong’s camera plays with the viewer’s desire ‘always to see more’, p. 90. 36. Teo (2005a), p. 3; Abbas (1997), pp. 48–62. 37. Dika (2003), p. 18. 38. Those who attended the premiere at Cannes recall the haphazard editing and the out-of-proportion soundtrack. See Brunette (2005), pp. 101–107; and Amy Taubin (2005), ‘The Long Good-bye’, Film Comment (July–August), p.
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