Extraterritoriality Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media

VICTOR FAN EXTRATERRITORIALITY LOCATING HONG KONG CINEMA AND MEDIA

Extraterritoriality To Sabina Extraterritoriality Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media

Victor Fan Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

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Parts of the following articles and book chapters have been revised and incorporated in this book, with their publishers’ permission: ‘Cultural extraterritoriality: Intra-regional politics in contemporary Hong Kong Cinema,’ East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 1, no. 3 (September 2015), pp. 389–402. ‘Poetics of parapraxis and reeducation: The Hong Kong Cantonese cinema in the 1950s’, in The Poetics of Chinese Cinema, (eds) Gary Bettison and James Udden (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 167–83. ‘Extraterritorial cinema: Shanghai jazz and post-war Hong Kong Mandarin musicals’, The Soundtrack 6, nos. 1 and 2 (2014 [2015]), pp. 33–52.

Figure 3.2, a production still from the 1990 performance of Zuni Icosahedron’s Deep Structure of Chinese (Hong Kong) Cultures, is reproduced here with the permission of director Danny Yung.

The cover photo, a production still from Ziyou xing [A Family Tour, 2018], is reproduced here with the permission of director Ying Liang. Contents

List of Figures vi Acknowledgements viii Notes on Transliteration xi

On Extraterritoriality 1 1. What is Hong Kong Cinema? 36 2. Breaking the Wave 70 3. The Time it Takes for Time to End 111 4. Posthistoricity 157 5. The Age of Precarity 196 The Body of Extraterritoriality 238

Notes 268 Filmography and Videography 315 Index 323 vi extraterritoriality

4.1 Timmy stares directly at the camera while Xiaobei reads his nominal identity 188 4.2 Xiaobei and Zhang Lei look up to Timmy 188 Figures 4.3 Timmy looks back at Xiaobei 188 4.4 Timmy and Zhang Lei occupy the same liminal position 191 4.5 A proto-military image of fishing boats leaving the harbour 192 4.6 The sight of Timmy being executed 194 5.1 Joshua Wong in Lessons in Dissent 216 0.1–0.8 The ‘Night of Shanghai’ sequence in An All- 5.2 Intercepting an attempt to investigate a water-balloon Consuming Love 26–7 incident in Midnight in Mongkok 219 0.9 An All-Consuming Love: Zhijian throws a record of 5.3 P recounts her experience of being sexually harassed in Do Xiangmei’s song into the sea 29 You Hear Women Sing? 220 1.1 Verticalisation of the social dialectics in In the Face of 5.4 Original footage of the protests framed as memories in Demolition 64 Road Not Taken 224 1.2 Development of in-group solidarity 65 5.5 Fung tries to reach Lam in Civic Square 225 2.1 The opening sequence of The Arch 79 5.6–5.7 Two sides of Admiralty and two modes of temporality in 2.2 The Arch: mirroring-drifting enables the spectator to be Yellowing 228 sexually stimulated 82 5.8 An intimate interview of Edward Leung in Lost in the 2.3 In The Arch, desolation is sensed through the process of Fumes 235 mirroring-drifting 83 6.1 A bird’s-eye view of a worker labouring in a gigantic 2.4 The final montage of The Arch 84 machine in We the Workers 260 2.5 In ‘Miu Kam-fung’, one of Joe’s girlfriends waits for him 94 6.2 In A Family Tour, the film momentarily decentres Xiaolin 2.6 In ‘Miu Kam-fung’, Joe and his two lovers wait for their and Yang’s story 263 dinner under a pop art mural 95 2.7 Joe flips through a capitalist and communist magazine side-by-side 95 2.8 Joe and his friends swagger into a car dealer to test drive an Austin Princess 2220 96 2.9 In ‘The Boy from Vietnam’, Hing-nin performs cạo gaió on Man 103 2.10 In a night market, Chung spots a ghostly sex worker 106 2.11 Man’s penultimate dream sequence 107 3.1 Boat People: the affect of extraterritoriality 129 3.2 The central motif of Deep Structure of Chinese (Hong Kong) Cultures 146 3.3 The blindfolded young woman in May Fung, She Said Why Me 147 3.4–3.6 Ellen Pau’s Drained II 150 3.7 ‘Letter 1’ in Video Letters 1–3 152 3.8 The abstract spectre of Yam Kim-fai in Song of the Goddess 155 figures vii

4.1 Timmy stares directly at the camera while Xiaobei reads his nominal identity 188 4.2 Xiaobei and Zhang Lei look up to Timmy 188 4.3 Timmy looks back at Xiaobei 188 4.4 Timmy and Zhang Lei occupy the same liminal position 191 4.5 A proto-military image of fishing boats leaving the harbour 192 4.6 The sight of Timmy being executed 194 5.1 Joshua Wong in Lessons in Dissent 216 5.2 Intercepting an attempt to investigate a water-balloon incident in Midnight in Mongkok 219 5.3 P recounts her experience of being sexually harassed in Do You Hear Women Sing? 220 5.4 Original footage of the protests framed as memories in Road Not Taken 224 5.5 Fung tries to reach Lam in Civic Square 225 5.6–5.7 Two sides of Admiralty and two modes of temporality in Yellowing 228 5.8 An intimate interview of Edward Leung in Lost in the Fumes 235 6.1 A bird’s-eye view of a worker labouring in a gigantic machine in We the Workers 260 6.2 In A Family Tour, the film momentarily decentres Xiaolin and Yang’s story 263 viii extraterritoriality

circle and in academia. The most important people are James Mudge and Xie Jingjing at the Chinese Visual Festival (London) and the one and only Tony Rayns! Furthermore, I am extremely grateful to have Acknowledgements the opportunities to work with all past and current members of the Chinese Visual Festival team (Sylvia Zhan, Swani Ip, Matthew Hurst, Ciu Cen and Andrew Heskins, who also runs easternKicks.com), David Somerset from the British Film Institute, Roger Garcia from the Hong Kong International Film Festival, Yuni Hadi and Weijie Lai from the Revisiting memories – both lived and cinematic – from my childhood Singapore International Film Festival, my buddy from the University of and teenage years, an era during which Hong Kong went through some Southern California Aditya Assarat, and Hye-jung Jeon from the London of its most tumultuous trials and tribulations, was a painful experience. East Asian Film Festival. It is also wonderful to be pampered by all the Furthermore, to analyse how it feels to be a Hong Konger and why it is Nice Looking People of the Network of Asian Film Festival in Europe: so difficult to articulate those feelings required a level of self-honesty that Sonali Joshi from Day For Night (London), Kristina Aschenbrennerova was at times emotionally draining. I am therefore tremendously grateful from Art Film Fest (Košice), Nancy Fornoville from Camera Japan for many people who walked me through this extraordinary journey. (Rotterdam and Amsterdam), Jakub Królikowski from Five Flavours ‘Extraterritoriality’ as a concept was inspired by my many conversa- Film Festival (Warsaw) and Joshua Smith from the Japanese Avant-garde tions with my friend and mentor Thomas LaMarre, with whom I had the and Experimental Film Festival (London). Of course, I also want to thank privilege to work at McGill University from 2010 to 2012. Its intricacies the stunning-looking Julian Ross from the International Film Festival and complexities have been enriched over the years under the gener- Rotterdam, Davide Cazzaro from NANG and Sabrina Baracetti from the ous guidance of Thomas Elsaesser, the unconditional support of Dudley Far East Film Festival (Udine). Andrew and Haun Saussy, and the patience and encouragement from In the past eight years, the idea of ‘extraterritoriality’ has been devel- Chris Berry. Every word of this book, in truth, is indebted to the intel- oped, tested and defended in conferences and publications. I treasure the lectual companionship of my friend George Crosthwait. memories of my joyful time at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies I feel incredibly honoured that in the last eight years, many filmmakers, (SCMS) with Frederik Green, Wei Yang and Yanhong Zhu, with whom critics and scholars whose works I discuss in this book have put every I edited a special issue of East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, where confidence in my project. Some I have met in chance encounters, whose my discussion of Drug War was first published. I want to thank Robert works and words have left indelible traces on these pages. Others have Hyland for inviting me to give a keynote on extraterritoriality at the Bader become friends and kindred spirits. Six of them deserve special mentions: International Study Centre, Queen’s University, in 2013. I will never Gary Bettinson, Guo-Juin Hong, Earl Jackson, Jr, Jason McGrath, Luke forget my research seminar at the Department of Comparative Literature, Robinson and Kristof Van Den Troost. Their friendship and untiring University of Hong Kong, on 2 September 2014, shortly before the support have been crucial in every step in this project. In addition, I wish Umbrella Movement. This talk was made possible by my friends Aaron to thank Lo Wai-luk, Jessica Yeung, K. C. Lo, Eric Lau and his wife Magnon-Park and Gina Marchetti. Another memorable event was the Mary-Ellen Porto, Shu Kei, Po Fung, Mary Wong, Ben Wong, Johnnie Eleventh ACSS Conference in Macau, on 14–16 July 2014, hosted by To and his brother To Kei-chi, Gordon Lam Ka-tung and Candy Tong, Bettinson and another great mentor Tan See-Kam. I also want to thank Yu Yat-yiu, Danny Yung, Ellen Pau, Matthias Woo, Vicky Leung, Hera Bao Hongwei and Jeremy Taylor for inviting me to Nottingham to present Chan, David Chan, Kit Hung, Eva Man, Timmy Chen, Nora Lam, Chan my work on extraterritoriality on two occasions. I feel tremendously Tze-woon, Wen Hai, Lee Wai-shing, Tammy Cheung, Daniel Cheuk, blessed to know all of you. Cheung King-wai, Ying Liang, Wu Wenguang and Zhang Mengqi, Zhang After my seminar at HKU, Enoch Tam invited me to pen a written Zhen and Ying Qian. interview for his magazine Fleurs des lettres on extraterritoriality and These chance encounters and kinships have been made possible Agamben. One of my former PhD students, Lu Zhiqi, introduced me by many friends, cohorts and work partners both in the film festival to Li Yang from Dianying yishu [Film Art], where I published the first acknowledgements ix circle and in academia. The most important people are James Mudge and Xie Jingjing at the Chinese Visual Festival (London) and the one and only Tony Rayns! Furthermore, I am extremely grateful to have the opportunities to work with all past and current members of the Chinese Visual Festival team (Sylvia Zhan, Swani Ip, Matthew Hurst, Ciu Cen and Andrew Heskins, who also runs easternKicks.com), David Somerset from the British Film Institute, Roger Garcia from the Hong Kong International Film Festival, Yuni Hadi and Weijie Lai from the Singapore International Film Festival, my buddy from the University of Southern California Aditya Assarat, and Hye-jung Jeon from the London East Asian Film Festival. It is also wonderful to be pampered by all the Nice Looking People of the Network of Asian Film Festival in Europe: Sonali Joshi from Day For Night (London), Kristina Aschenbrennerova from Art Film Fest (Košice), Nancy Fornoville from Camera Japan (Rotterdam and Amsterdam), Jakub Królikowski from Five Flavours Film Festival (Warsaw) and Joshua Smith from the Japanese Avant-garde and Experimental Film Festival (London). Of course, I also want to thank the stunning-looking Julian Ross from the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Davide Cazzaro from NANG and Sabrina Baracetti from the Far East Film Festival (Udine). In the past eight years, the idea of ‘extraterritoriality’ has been developed, tested and defended in conferences and publications. I treasure the memories of my joyful time at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) with Frederik Green, Wei Yang and Yanhong Zhu, with whom I edited a special issue of East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, where my discussion of Drug War was first published. I want to thank Robert Hyland for inviting me to give a keynote on extraterritoriality at the Bader International Study Centre, Queen’s University, in 2013. I will never forget my research seminar at the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong, on 2 September 2014, shortly before the Umbrella Movement. This talk was made possible by my friends Aaron Magnon-Park and Gina Marchetti. Another memorable event was the Eleventh ACSS Conference in Macau, on 14–16 July 2014, hosted by Bettinson and another great mentor Tan See-Kam. I also want to thank Bao Hongwei and Jeremy Taylor for inviting me to Nottingham to present my work on extraterritoriality on two occasions. I feel tremendously blessed to know all of you. After my seminar at HKU, Enoch Tam invited me to pen a written interview for his magazine Fleurs des lettres on extraterritoriality and Agamben. One of my former PhD students, Lu Zhiqi, introduced me to Li Yang from Dianying yishu [Film Art], where I published the first x extraterritoriality

Chinese-language introduction to my concept regarding Hong Kong- Mainland co-productions. I am extremely grateful for the invitations for me from Chan Hiu-man to contribute a piece on Shanghai jazz and its extraterritoriality in The Soundtrack, from Lisa Pitta and Tijana Mamula to write a chapter on dialect cinema and regional politics in New Reflections on Cinema and Linguistic Difference and from Bettinson and James Udden to work on a chapter about the classical Cantonese cinema in the 1950s in The Poetics of Chinese Cinema. These publications allowed me to concep- tualise ‘extraterritoriality’ in different historical contexts and with different levels of depth. Some of these works are incorporated into the chapters in this book. The idea of this book was germinated during the time I taught at McGill University from August 2010 to December 2012. I want to thank my friends and colleagues in Montréal, especially Grace Fong, Robin Yates, Yuriko Furuhata, Marc Steinberg and Brian Bergstrom. This monograph would not have been completed without the generous support and love from my colleagues at King’s College London, especially Sarah Cooper, Rosalind Galt, Mark Shiel, Mark Betz, Belén Vidal, Tom Brown, Jinhee Choi and Michele Pierson. I am tremendously grateful to be the recipient of the QR funds from the Department of Film Studies and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities Conference Grants over a number of years, which enabled me to host workshops and conferences where this little idea of mine could be further honed and developed. I feel very loved and indulged by my circle of friends and my family. Here, I would especially like to thank Archie Wolfman and Simon Hewitt for their untiring trust, support and encouragement. Most importantly, none of these pages would have come into being without my parents, Samuel Fan and Jackie Mak, my partner John Christiansen and my best mate Peter Restrick. And then, of course, there is always Scotty and my former feline com- panions, Pupazzo (2000–14) and Sabina (2003–15). notes on transliteration xi

Notes on Transliteration

On a day-to-day basis, Cantonese is the main spoken language (or some say, topolect) in Hong Kong. Yet, Putonghua (or Mandarin) is now the lingua franca among scholars, researchers and students who study Chinese- language materials. In this book, all film and literature titles and special terms in Cantonese will first appear in pinyin, followed by a Jyutping (Cantonese) transliteration and an English translation within parentheses. Historically, however, Mainland China during the Republican period (1911–49) and Hong Kong have used different transliteration systems under specific circumstances. Instead of re-transliterating all these names and terms into pinyin and Jyutping, I feel strongly that we respect the ways that individuals or communities have chosen their names to appear in English.

1. Names of all Hong Kongers, companies and geographical locations will appear in their official English names only. The transliterations of these names often follow the Hong Kong government Romanisation method. Cantonese terms with no Mandarin equivalents will appear in Jyutping only. 2. Some political institutions, organisations and persons in Mainland China and, later, Taiwan, had historically designated their own English names. For example, the Kuomintang (KMT; Nationalist Party) is an official nomination in English, not simply a transliteration. In the 1930s, for instance, the Lianhua dianying gongsi had an actual English name: United Photoplay Service (UPS). In their first appearances, I will use their pinyin names, followed by their official names in parentheses: for example, Cai Chusheng (Tsai Chu-sang). In their subsequent appearances, I will use only their historical spellings. 3. From 1906 to 1949, place names in Mainland China were transliter- ated with the Postal Map Romanisation (PMR) system. Some of these PMR names were used in British documents into the 1980s. These names will appear first in their pinyin transliterations followed by their PMR ones: for example, Guangzhou (Canton). In the rest of the text, xii extraterritoriality

the PMR versions will be used to refer to these places during the period 1906–49, whereas the pinyin versions will be used to refer to the same places after 1949. on extraterritoriality 1

On Extraterritoriality

This book is about a perturbation. What are Hong Kong cinema and media? Where do we locate them?1 This perturbation was wrestled with by filmmakers and critics as early as the 1930s. In 1937, on the brink of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), some cadres of the ruling Guomindang (Kuomintang, KMT or Nationalist Party) in Nanjing (Nanking) proposed to implement a ban on the fangyan dianying ( fongjin dinjing, topolect or regional-speech film), especially the Cantonese films produced in colonial Hong Kong.2 The rationale behind this ban betrayed Hong Kong’s peculiar juridical, socio-political and culturo-linguistic position in relation to the Republic of China (ROC) on the one hand, and the United Kingdom (UK) on the other. In the debate on this ban, the KMT cadres, together with the Shanghai studio executives who supported them, considered the Cantonese film made in Hong Kong a degenerate, vulgar and overly theatrical entertainment that failed to convey modern values both of the cinema and of society at large. It was therefore seen as a stumbling block to national unity, socio-political modernity and cultural and cinematic progress.3 In this sense, Hong Kong and its cinema were set aside as a socio-political and culturo-linguistic anomie outside the national terrain and cinema. Yet, KMT’s attempt to implement a ban on a cinema that had already been displaced outside its jurisdiction instantiated its zhuquan (sovereign authority) extraterritorially over a trading port and a cultural practice administered by Great Britain. As I shall demonstrate later, such a separation between sovereign authority and administrative right was set up by a system of treaties and conventions that designated Hong Kong as a mare liberum (free sea), over which Great Britain could exercise its zhiquan (administrative right) extraterritorially.4 In short, Hong Kong as a city, its film and media industries and the ordinary lives who lived in it were occupied by two mutually conflicting – but also mutually collaborating – sovereign authorities. They both sought to claim their political power over Hong Kong, curiously, by ostracising it to an extraterritorial position or even declaring its lives and cultures too unfit, degenerate and dispensable to be incorporated into their respective imperial or national bodies. Such a conundrum has since then been 2 extraterritoriality renewed and reconfigured, decade after decade, as new socio-political crises emerged. These crises have repeatedly put into question the individuality, subjectivity and autonomy (agency) of Hong Kongers. In response, filmmakers, artists, critics and spectators have continuously striven to locate Hong Kong cinema and media – a site where they can negotiate their conflicting political affects and opinions associated with their extraterritorial positions. Individuality, subjectivity and autonomy are three terms to which I will continually return in this book. On a day-to-day basis, these three ideas are often used interchangeably and taken for granted as a starting point of any investigation in the humanities. For example, I have a body (biological individuality), a thinking mind (psychic individuality) and a position in a given society (social individuality). I therefore come to believe that I have a self (subjectivity), which instantiates a difference between the others and me. I can therefore exercise my right to act and make decisions on affairs that affect me and my relationships with the others (autonomy and agency).5 As Gilbert Simondon (1924–89) argues, in modern Euro-American politics, these underlying assumptions are considered inalienable.6 A citizen in a nation-state is supposed to be an individual who constitutes a part of a fully individuated political community. This individual participates in this community as a political subject and thus can exercise their right to make decisions on affairs that affect them as an individual and on their relationships with other individual members of the polis.7 In the discourse of national and transnational cinemas, film and media scholars too hold on to their belief in these seemingly inviolable presup- positions, either consciously or inadvertently. In China, the quest for dianying minzuxing (cinema’s national characteristics), first proposed in the 1920s and 1930s by Shanghai filmmakers and critics, has been institutionalised since 1949 as a legitimate area of research in film and media studies and as a party-state policy.8 In Euro-American film studies, the concept of transnational cinema still presumes that fully individuated filmmakers, critics, spectators and political communities have their respective territories and boundaries, even though they have been inter- acting with one another intersubjectively. Such interactions actively rewrite their territorialities and put into question a cultural worker’s or spectator’s political autonomy and agency.9 Therefore, as Dudley Andrew argues, individuality, subjectivity and autonomy are still treated as the points de départ of a transnational investigation into the cinema, only that their boundaries and stabilities have been put into question by the cinematic experience.10 As Miriam Hansen proposes, cinema, historically on extraterritoriality 3 configured as a mass entertainment, can be regarded as a public sphere, where conflicting opinions and affects generated from these intersubjective interactions are exchanged, negotiated and rewritten.11 In Die deutsche Ideologie [The German Ideology, 1846], Karl Marx (1818– 83) and Friedrich Engels (1820–95) call individuality, subjectivity and autonomy (agency) collectively one’s sense-certainty.12 As a Hong Konger who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, I have never found that. I spent my childhood under the colonial administration of Murray MacLehose (1917–2000; in office 1971–82). During that time, I was educated to be a British subject in a predominantly ethnic-Chinese community called Hong Kong. Colonialism was performed by calling the Queen Her Majesty, seeing Great Britain, Western Europe and North America as the mecca of modernity and Enlightenment values, speaking and thinking in the English language as a sign of intellectual sophistication, and avoiding China – an alienating Communist neighbour – as a forbidden subject. All these underwent drastic transformations from 1979 to 1997, when the impending and fatal handover of the administrative right over Hong Kong from the UK to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on 30 June 1997 urged Hong Kongers to actively revise their relationships with China – as a concept, sovereign authority, political power and cultural formation. Moreover, Chapter 61 of the British Nationality Act of 1981 formally ostracised British citizens who were born in Hong Kong by taking away our (me included) right of abode in the UK.13 As Chan Ka-lok and Chu Lap argue, Hong Kong became a wuzhu zhi cheng (mouzyu zi sing or city without a self).14 Until now, if someone asked me, ‘Victor, are you Chinese?’ I would feel compelled to deny it, ‘No, I am not Chinese.’ I do so because China has never been part of my process of becoming an individual and becoming a subject. But then, if someone asked me, ‘Victor, are you a Hong Konger?’ I would feel compelled to qualify it, ‘Yes, but as a Hong Konger, I am also Chinese.’ In the United States, I would use the paradigm of identity politics by saying that I am of Chinese descent and call it a day. In the UK, where being Chinese and being British are not mutually exclusive, this statement calls forth a difference – that, as a Hong Konger, I am constantly interpellated by both China and Great Britain as a Chinese subject, even though I have never been individuated and fully acknowledged as such. I therefore have no autonomy and agency whatsoever in determining who I am as a political being.15 Each time I am being asked who I am or where it is that I come from, I always need to go through the agony of putting a label bestowed upon me under erasure. Understood in the sense Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) puts it, 4 extraterritoriality by effacing the label someone gives me and by foregrounding another one that the original seeks to efface, I make visible and tangible the difference that I constantly need to negotiate.16 Thomas Elsaesser, based on Derrida’s notion of erasure, argues that cinema is by definitiontoujours occupé (always occupied) by conflicting socio-political forces. No cinema is inherently national or transnational, local or regional; it is always doubly occupied.17 Hong Kong cinema and media are therefore always doubly or even multiply occupied by contesting socio-political forces, in-group loyalties, senses of belonging, linguistic formations and cultural values. But to say that is to risk suggesting that cinema and media are sites where pre- existing territorialities, boundaries and identities are tested and rewritten. The point is: as a Hong Konger, my life is not characterised by any sense-certainty. Rather, I am constantly in a state/non-state of sense- uncertainty: that my individuality, subjectivity and autonomy (agency) are always measured against pre-established territories as a difference. In this sense, I argue, Hong Kongers and Hong Kong cinema and media are always extraterritorial. My object of study is not how we can pin down our territoriality. Rather, I scrutinise how our extraterritoriality is constituted and how the cinema and media in turn constitute our socio-political extraterritoriality. Homi Bhabha has told us that deindividuated and depoliticised lives who have historically been colonised or are currently living under postcolonial conditions always occupy a difference.18 For example, what is meant by British-Chinese? This term, first and foremost, instantiates a nominal difference by means of an act of hyphenation. In addition, it refers to an assemblage of colonial and postcolonial discourses. Through these discourses, my socio-political, cultural, linguistic and economic positions are constantly measured against a set of pre-established relationships between the coloniser and the colonised. Bhabha calls this double- marked-ness, that is, the colonised other is not actually relegated to the margin.19 Rather, they are doubly marked by a difference between the centre and the margin. We can even extend this idea further by arguing that even a white working-class man from Leeds occupies, by default, a difference – between whiteness (neither the centre nor the margin; at once the centre and the margin) and the working class (lives relegated to the economic margin, although constituting the centre of a society’s production). As Giorgio Agamben argues, every human life is by default a difference, as each life is politicised as a member of a community. Each member subjects their life to the communal right to depoliticise them as nothing more than a bare or animal life. As a result, the community can manage, persecute or even execute this life without being answerable to on extraterritoriality 5 the law – as though both this life in question and the community at large were both extraterritorial.20 I shall return to these theoretical ruminations throughout the rest of this book. For the time being, I want to raise a question: Are all cinemas by default extraterritorial? My answer is: Yes, although as scholars and researchers, our belief in treating individuality, subjectivity and autonomy (agency) as our starting point in most of our theoretical and historiographical investigations blinds us to our respective extraterritorial positions. Yet, the uniqueness of Hong Kong, its cinema and media lies not only in their juridical, but also in their legal and cultural extrater- ritorialities. Thus, Hong Kong cinema makes it easier for us to grasp what cinema does and can do as an apparatus that mediates our extraterritoriali- ties. And by ‘apparatus’, I mean a set of institutions that participate in the establishment, stabilisation and corroboration of a political power: or, as Michel Foucault (1926–84) puts it, ‘a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge’.21 In the rest of this introduction, I first examine why the national/ transnational debate on Hong Kong cinema falls short of helping us understand the core of the socio-political perturbation it seeks to locate. I then expound the term ‘extraterritoriality’ from both theoretical and historical angles. With these in mind, I study the Mandarin musical Chang xiangsi [An All-Consuming Love, He Zhaozhang, 1947] as an example of an extraterritorial cinematic and musical experience. Finally, I introduce the specific topics and case studies I discuss in each chapter of this book.

Hong Kong Cinema as a Theoretical Problem In film studies, defining Hong Kong cinema has always been a precarious problem. In Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi [History of the development of Chinese cinema, 1963], Cheng Jihua, Li Shaobai and Xing Zuwen consider films produced in Hong Kong before 1949, regardless of the topolects they speak, as part of Chinese national cinema.22 Such a historical view is hardly surprising, as Cheng, Li and Xing were given instructions in the 1950s by Jiang Qing (Madam Mao Zedong, 1914–91), Director of Film in the Central Propaganda Department, to compile a two-volume study of the history of Chinese cinema to consolidate the role of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in the film industry. Nevertheless, given the interdepend- ent relationship between the Hong Kong and Shanghai film industries during the Republican period (1911–49), this historiographical position is not entirely a political fabrication. As I shall illustrate in chapter one, even Hong Kong film critics held such a historical view until 1966.23 6 extraterritoriality

In 1993, Stephen Crofts turned this position around by calling Hong Kong cinema a ‘national cinema’, one that ignored Hollywood as a glob- ally dominant cultural industry and institution. Crofts’ claim is based on Andrew Higson’s call in 1989 to define a national cinema not simply in terms of its geopolitical boundaries, but also its economic (productive), stylistic (textual) and cultural (consumptive) specificities in relation to Hollywood and other dominant cinemas in the region. For Crofts, in ‘Hong Kong, the national cinema outsells Hollywood by a factor of four to one’ and it ‘exports through East Asia, dominating the Taiwan market, for instance, and to Chinatown throughout the Western world’.24 Crofts’ argument can be corroborated by the economic performance of Hong Kong cinema since 1968. Yet, by the same token, Hong Kong cinema was more transnational than national. For example, in 1967, the year of the Leftist Riots (also known as the Confrontation), Hong Kong imported HK$14.37 million’s worth of films from abroad (primarily Hollywood) and exported only HK$7.14 million’s worth. Yet, in 1968, the ratio was changed to $10.94 m to $9.16 m. Most of these exports travelled across the globe to Singapore (24.2 per cent), the United States (18.5 per cent), Indonesia (12.9 per cent), Thailand (12.5 per cent) and Taiwan (7.5 percent).25 That year, there were ninety-seven registered cinemas in Hong Kong, of which eighty-eight were active and only seventeen were devoted to showing Hollywood films exclusively.26 In addition to the fact that the moguls of the two major Mandarin film studios, Run Run Shaw (1907–2014) of Shaw Brothers and Loke Wan Tho (1915–64) of Cathay, were from Singapore, and that the industry continued to attract filmmakers and actors from Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan and Southeast Asia, Hong Kong cinema was more transnational than national.27 Defining Hong Kong cinema’s specificity can be even more treacherous from a stylistic perspective. For instance, David Bordwell argues that even though Hong Kong directors have inherited filmmaking techniques and aesthetics from Shanghai cinema in the 1930s and 1940s, their style is best understood as an intensified version of classical Hollywood. For Bordwell, Hong Kong filmmakers know classical Hollywood so well that they systematically violate it, thus achieving a mutation. They do so by systematis- ing fast-paced editing with spatio-temporal discontinuity. As a result, the unity of a sequence is maintained not by a cause-and-effect chain in space, time and narrative, but by pure graphical energy and chaotic excitation.28 While this may be true for commercial Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s, we may not be able to say the same for the Hong Kong Cantonese films in the 1950s or experimental videos in the 1980s and 1990s, which do not follow any classical Hollywood principles of narration. on extraterritoriality 7

While agreeing with Bordwell that the Cantonese filmmakers in the 1950s, well-versed in the classical Hollywood system, consciously revised Hollywood’s narrational strategies, I point out elsewhere that their narrational devices owe a great deal to the aesthetics of the Yueju (Jyutkek or Cantonese theatre). According to the rules of the Cantonese theatre, a narrative is constructed out of a set of building blocks called ben (bun or act). Each act features a set of actors who are known for their special acting or singing skills. A xi (hei, film or play) is then divided into roughly eighteen acts that alternate between comedic, tragic and dramatic scenes and action sequences. The result is not a cause-and-effect chain driven by a single hero’s objective, but a series of events (or even in some cases, spec- tacles) where an ensemble of characters would undergo changes driven by a larger socio-political force.29 Understanding Hong Kong cinema by teasing out its economic or stylistic specificities can become a pure taxonomic exercise, where Hong Kong cinema fits into none of the pre-existing categories, or into all of them – but not quite comfortably. Alternative ways to classify Hong Kong cinema are based on how it serves as a public sphere. For instance, scholars including Law Wing-sang, Pang Laikwan and Wang Haizhou use the terms shenfen (sanfan or identity) and rentong (jingtung or identification). For them, Hong Kong spectators, through negotiating a series of historical crises, deeply question how they identify themselves as political subjects and how they differentiate themselves from their Chinese o/Other.30 The problem with this approach is that Hong Kong cinema is still implicitly treated as an individuated cultural formation, which, as Law argues, has its benti (buntai or core body), which is constantly in a state of crisis.31 Yet, by arguing that there is a pre-existing self that can form an intersubjective relationship with the o/Other, or to think of the existence of a core body, is to regard the search for Hong Kong cinema as an ontological investigation. Meanwhile, based on Ronald Robertson’s idea of the ‘glocal’ and Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s notion of globalisation as hybridisation, Zhang Yingjin argues that Hong Kong cinema is best understood as a glocal industry and cultural practice. For him, Hong Kong cinema has always been constructed out of exogenous factors that converge at the city. There, a population of diasporic migrants, networks of strangers and cultural brokers constantly generate heterogeneous discourses through inter- and intra-cultural translations. As a result, even though Hong Kong cinema is one of the many industries that have made up Chinese national cinema, it is posited at the interstices between the global and the local.32 Zhang’s proposal could have been a possible way to depart from the ontological approach of understanding Hong Kong cinema. Yet, Zhang holds on to 8 extraterritoriality the notion that Hong Kong subjectivity and identity are pre-constituted formations, and Hong Kong cinema has the power to problematise them. In so doing, Zhang still presumes that Hong Kong-ness – as part of Chineseness – is the ontological ground of Hong Kong cinema, albeit being highly unstable and contestable at any given historical moment. As Chris Berry argues, the ontological approach to a cinema – be that national, local, regional, global or glocal – often assumes that a film industry, cultural discourse or even political community has its own autonomy and agency. In other words, Hong Kong cinema is supposed to speak in its own terms and with its own consciousness. In his argument, Berry borrows Rey Chow’s understanding of the cinema as a mode of rewriting a political community’s subjectivity through two parallel processes: internalising external pressures (for example, in the case of China, internalising Orientalism) and externalising internal pressures (for example, by performing repressed desires and crises associated with the external pressures so as to appropriate them as their own and rewrite them).33 Based on Judith Butler’s understanding that what we call subjectivity is in fact externally inscribed onto a body (for example, a textual surface), and that the body actively performs – and reconfigures by performing – both the act of inscription and the forms and appearances it inscribes, Berry suggests that we see individual films as performances that actively inscribe a seemingly autonomous body onto the surface of a complex and contradic- tory process of subjectivisation. Such acts of inscription and performance always involve an ongoing rewriting of the interiority and exteriority of a cultural boundary.34 The cultural boundary and sense of ontological consistency of Hong Kong is, of course, constantly shaped and revised by its relationship with China. It is in this sense that Shih Shu-mei considers Hong Kong cinema as a Sinophone one in her revised version of the concept. For Shih, imperial China was as much a colonising as a colonised empire. Since the late Ming (1368–1644) dynasty, Chinese imperialism took the form of continental and settler colonialisms, that is, as waves of migrants left their homes from South China to settle down in Tibet, Mongolia, East Turkistan (Xinjiang), the Southeast Asian port cities or in urban Europe and North America. According to Shih, their sense of in-group loyalty and imaginary ontological coherence have come from their shared linguistic heritage and performance, which actively put pressure on other linguistic groups, discourses and practices in those cities or regions they have occupied. Under Euro-American colonisation, these groups developed their own social, cultural, linguistic and political consciousnesses, identities and subjectivities in association with China-proper as their home. Yet, by on extraterritoriality 9 the same token, they have also been put under the pressure of China and the Sinitic linguistic cultures.35 Therefore, Shih argues that Hong Kong cinema, with its linguistic multiplicity and cultural diversity, its strong association with the Mainland, and its position of being constantly under the various pressures of both the Mainland and the larger Sinitic linguistic sphere, is a prime example of Sinophone cinema. Berry’s and Shih’s understandings of Hong Kong cinema can be considered an ontogenetic approach. In this book, I do not intend to argue against them. Rather, I push their ideas further with my notion of extraterritoriality. In particular, I pay attention to two issues. First, in the process of becoming individuated, Hong Kong cinema negotiates, via the spectators’ sensoria, a set of perturbing social, cultural and political affects (immediate psychosomatic responses to external stimulations) generated from Hong Kong’s extraterritorial position. In this sense, Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality is the pre-condition under which China and the larger Sinitic culturo-linguistic sphere exert their pressures onto Hong Kong. It is via the spectators’ bodily stimulations and their psychosomatic impact that subjectivities are formed and inscribed onto the cinema’s textual surface. Second, extraterritoriality is not a historically stable condition. Rather, it has taken many forms since the 1930s, and these changes have also given rise to various stylistic strategies and understandings of what extraterritorial cinema is – and can be.

What is Extraterritoriality? The concept of extraterritoriality was developed out of a pluralistic juridical history between Europe and Asia. As Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) argues, this concept was summarised by the writing of Francisco de Vitoria (circa 1483–1546), even though Vitoria predated the age of colonialism. During the fifteenth century, the Catholic Church defined Africa and the Americas as mare liberum (free sea) that lay beyond the jurisdiction of the Pope. It meant that such sea did not belong to this world and therefore could be freely acquired as colonies. These colonies were regarded as private properties of those European subjects who discovered them, not as terrains upon which monarchs could exercise the law of the land. Moreover, as properties that lay outside Papal control, they were also free of the law of God. In other words, a life that lived in a colony could kill and be killed by another life without committing homicide, an act that was punishable neither by the law nor by God.36 Such a concept of colonies, however, became problematic when it was applied to Asia. Since the sixteenth century, the Orient was seen as an 10 extraterritoriality empire, that is, a world order on its own. Nevertheless, in the eyes of European traders, missionaries and settlers, it exercised an unsystem- atic notion of law. An empire (including the Roman empire), unlike a nation-state (a concept that emerged in Europe toward the end of Vitoria’s lifetime), was a pluralistic system, which was maintained by internecine, inter-ethnic and inter-regional agreements that allowed the imperial authority to adjudicate on multiple and mutually contesting systems of law.37 A modern nation-state in Europe, as defined by Vitoria, regarded law as land-bound.38 For instance, a Venetian citizen who travelled to or lived in Rome had to observe the Papal law, whereas a Papal subject who broke the law in Rome would be considered free in Venice. In an empire, while some laws were land-bound, others were tied to the human subject. For instance, in the Ottoman empire (1299–1922 or 1923), Muslims, Jews and Christians would observe different laws within the same space.39 Therefore, when Europeans arrived and lived in the Ottoman, the Ming and the Qing (1644–1911) empires, they found themselves carrying their own laws outside their own lands. In other words, European laws were exercised in these empires extraterritorially. Modern European juridical scholars often found this concept confounding and pre-modern, even though this practice was actively exercised between the Christian and Jewish communities in Europe well into the twentieth century and was the primary root of the Shoah (1933 or 1941–5).40 It was also largely based on the Medieval – and a now revived – understanding of Islam as the foe of Christianity and its world order.41 Since the 1550s, Portuguese and, later, British and US merchants had accepted with different degrees of reluctance that they were legally bound by the codes of the Ming and Qing empires, which guaranteed these Euro-American subjects’ extraterritoriality. This was part of the reason why extraterritoriality was not regarded as an issue in the Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing; signed 29 August 1842). Nonetheless, on 3 July 1844, the Treaty of Wanghia (Wangxia), signed in Macau between the Qing empire and the United States, stipulated that US citizens were to enjoy extraterritorial privileges. The effect of this clause was to turn extraterritoriality from a right already provided for by the Qing code (comparable to a constitutional right) to a colonial privilege. This clause was then copied and provided for in all subsequent treaties between China and other European nation-states.42 In this light, from 1844 to 1895, the European and Chinese understandings of extraterritoriality were somewhat different.43 The Qing code was a mixture of fazhi (rule by the law of the land) and renzhi (judgement in accordance with the law of the political community to which a person belonged), on extraterritoriality 11 and hence subjects had the right to be judged in accordance with the laws of their respective communities, which overrode the law of the land where they actually resided. In a legal case involving a dispute between subjects of two different ethnicities, a huishen (mixed court) would be set up, presided by a Qing judge and accompanied by legal observers from the two respective communities. Therefore, the Zongli Yamen (Foreign Office) at first understood extraterritoriality as a huishen quan (right of being judged in a mixed court), not as a colonial privilege.44 In 1863, the Qing government even established the famous Shanghai Mixed Court, which dealt with legal processes between Chinese and Euro-American subjects. In the Sino- Japanese Friendship and Trade Treaty (13 September 1871), the Japanese delegates called the huishen quan enjoyed by the Qing subjects in Japan chigaihōgen (pronounced zhiwai faquan in Mandarin), borrowed in 1895 by the Qing officials to redefine the extraterritorial clause in the Treaty of Shimonoseki as a colonial privilege.45 At first glance, extraterritoriality might not be related to Hong Kong, especially since the UK has always claimed that Hong Kong was fully ceded to the British Crown by the Qing empire as a colony.46 However, as I will illustrate in chapter one, the three juridical documents in question – the Treaty of Nanking, the Convention of Peking (Beijing; 24 December 1860) and the Convention for the Extension of Hongkong (9 June 1898) – were all formulated with legal languages specific to the two empires’ respective understandings of extraterritoriality.47 In other words, Hong Kong has always been configured as an extraterritorial space, even though the terms of its extraterritorial status have been contested. This contributed to many disputes between the various Chinese authorities and their UK counterparts over two questions: (1) the zhuquan (sovereign authority), that is, the right to constitute the law of the land, over Hong Kong, which has always been in the hands of China; and (2) zhiquan (administrative right), that is, the right to exercise the law of the sea over the biological lives who resided in Hong Kong, which was ceded to the UK via these treaties.48 According to Kristof Van Den Troost, such a dispute surfaced as early as the 1900s when the power of the Qing court was in crisis.49 It was centre-staged in subsequent political crises in Hong Kong, including the 1967 Riots, the Sino-British negotiation over the future of Hong Kong (1978–84), the trade agreements between Hong Kong and Beijing after the handover in 1997 and the Umbrella Movement (2014). Each crisis triggered a transformative wave in Hong Kongers’ understanding of individuality, subjectivity and autonomy (agency). In response, new modes of cinematographic and media forms emerged so that filmmakers, artists and spectators could negotiate these values. 12 extraterritoriality

Extraterritoriality is not only a juridical, political and legal matter. It can also be understood culturally and linguistically. Historically, the Lingnan region – south of the Nanling mountains and north of Vietnam, which covered the Guangdong (Kwangtung)-Hong Kong region and the eastern part of Guangxi (Kwangsi) today – has been a hub of settlers who left other areas of China and Southeast Asia to escape from wars and political turmoil. These settlers have maintained and developed a set of cultural and political sensibilities and linguistic systems that have often been considered different from, or at times belligerent toward, their north- ern counterparts. In fact, during the Republican period, this region was governed by a semi-autonomous administration headed by Hu Hanmin (1897–1936) until his death.50 Some intellectuals and politicians during that time conceived of the Chinese nation not as a unified and coherent formation organised and managed by a central political party; rather, it was imagined to be a multifocal assemblage of political communities, with their own local linguistic and cultural specificities.51 As I will explicate in chapter one, in the 1930s and 1940s, linguistic and cultural extraterritori- alities were debated among intellectuals, politicians and filmmakers over the issues of fangyan ( fongjin or topolects, although more appropriately translated as regional-speech) cinemas and literatures. Also, it was from these debates that Hong Kong cinema as a public sphere extraterritorial to the larger national imagination of China was germinated. Such southern sensibilities, however, were in conflict with the nation- building policy promoted by both the KMT and the CPC. Between the 1930s and 1980s, a large number of workers, intellectuals, industrialists and businesspeople from Shanghai and other regions settled down in Hong Kong to escape from the Sino-Japanese conflicts (1931–45), the battles between the KMT and the CPC (1927–49) and the political upheaval within the PRC (1949–78). These people held mutually conflicting political opinions, social values and regional sensibilities, although they shared one thing in common: that their personal beliefs were not completely in accord with the official lines of both parties. For them, Hong Kong was a place where their extraterritorial positions could remain undeclared and undefined. Yet, to complicate matters, the progeny of these social groups, who grew up in Hong Kong between the 1950s and 1980s, were educated to identify China as their homeland on the one hand and maintained an affective distance from China on the other. This was especially true during the years from 1951 to 1978, when the Sino-British border was closed to regular visitors.52 In this light, not only was Hong Kong configured juridically and politically as an extraterritorial space, but also, people who lived in it instantiated a number of different extraterritorial positions. on extraterritoriality 13

Finally, I want to push further extraterritoriality from a historical aporia grounded in Hong Kong’s juridical, political, legal, cultural and linguistic positions, to a theoretical concept both specific to Hong Kong and applicable to a global context. In my historical review, we can observe that a biological – or in Foucault’s term, biopolitical – life that occupies an extraterritorial position is perpetually torn between conflicting socio-political and culturo-linguistic forces.53 These forces claim their authorities over this life, ironically, by ostracising it outside their respective territories. Such a mode of existence is characterised by this life’s sense-uncertainty, as it constantly tries to individuate itself out of a perpetual process of deindividuation, subjectivise itself out of a con- tinuous undertaking of desubjectivisation, and autonomise itself out of an active deprivation of its autonomy by the conflicting forces that tear it apart. If we take the extraterritorial position as a mode of existence, we can locate such a position as one being occupied by those biopolitical lives that have been at once occupied and ostracised by what Bhabha would call the unmarked dominant social group.54 These lives would include those of the working class, women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex+ (LGBTQI+). These groups have specific histories of socio- political struggles and cannot be conveniently reduced to one unified and coherent community. Yet, historically, in Hong Kong cinema, television and video art, their struggles for visibility have been interconnected. As I will demonstrate, between the late 1960s and mid-1970s, Hong Kong’s extraterritorial position was negotiated primarily via the working-class struggle for socio-political rights. Then, in the 1970s, it was increasingly associated with women within a predominantly male cultural industry. After that, LGBTQI+ bodies and voices became increasingly visible and audible within Hong Kong cinema and media’s larger struggle to make sense of the city’s extraterritorial status. As Agamben would argue, every biopolitical life is by default extraterritorial.55 In other words, as biological lives, we are all extraterritorial, only that we may not feel it. In this sense, not only cinemas and media made by and/or for marginalised communities are to be considered public spheres that negotiate the conflicting forces and affects that trap biopolitical lives at such a position, but also that cinema and media, by default, is an apparatus that negotiates these forces of extraterritoriality. 14 extraterritoriality

Extraterritorial Cinema and Media? This is a treacherous question. A satisfactory answer must await several other book-length discussions. The reason is that in order to call a cinema or media an extraterritorial entity, we need to ask if the cinematographic image and the cinematic experience are ontologically or ontogenetically extraterritorial. For example, I need to ask whether the cinematographic image, whose existence is called forth by the spectator’s mind as an image consciousness based on a set of conditions captured by the camera at the time when the photographed being or object was existent, is by default extraterritorial.56 I plan to discuss this as part of my next monograph. At this juncture, I hesitate to coin the term extraterritorial cinema or media without understanding this term’s edges and limitations. Socio-politically speaking, cinema and other related media are by default an extraterritorial apparatus. Nonetheless, there is not a single mode of extraterritorial cinema or merely one aesthetic strategy developed for the purpose of negotiating the filmmakers’, artists’ and spectators’ extraterritorial positions. From a socio-political and culturo-linguistic perspective, an extra territorial cinema or media can be tentatively understood as: a cinema or media environment that actively negotiates a set of mutually conflicting socio-political forces and affects that catch a biopolitical life at an extraterritorial position – and, at times, offers potential solutions to render these forces inoperative. Such an understanding of extraterritorial cinema and media does not always necessitate a line of investigation that would lead us back to the question of cinema ontology or ontogenesis. It nonetheless begs for another question: Is there such a thing as an extraterritorial aesthetic? My answer is: There is not one extraterritorial aesthetic, but multiple ones. In the history of Hong Kong cinema and media, different social groups that occupied different modes of extraterritorial existence came up with their own poetics and narrational strategies to negotiate their respective biopolitical positions. No filmmakers or artists consciously produce an extraterritorial film, television programme or video. Rather, different filmmakers and artists, with various degrees of awareness of their own extraterritorial positions, use film, television and video as creative opportunities to speak. Likewise, no spectators consciously read a film or video as extraterritorial (unless they have read some of my previous articles or attended my lectures on this subject matter). But then, this is not simply a matter of one’s political unconscious, as Hong Kongers do not repress their psychological struggles over their deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised positions, and await the cinema, television and video art to release and mediate on extraterritoriality 15 them. Rather, the traumatic pain, agony and discomfort of our day-to-day extraterritorial experiences are affective. When I spoke to filmmakers, scholars and audience members in Hong Kong who told me that they found the concept of extraterritoriality useful, they all agreed that such agonising je ne sais quoi has always been there. Like an itch that is seated in the deep structure of our skin, we actively seek opportunities in a public sphere like the cinema to scratch it – either by creative images that can mediate it or by reading a film text that can help us relieve such an agony. Historically, therefore, some filmmakers and artists have been more conscious of seeking narrational strategies or aesthetics that may stand apart, yet continue to form a relationship with, dominant modes of narration – be that classical Hollywood or mainstream Hong Kong studio films of a specific period. As I discuss in chapter one, in the 1950s, Cantonese filmmakers, who were aware of the classical Hollywood style of filmmaking, deliberately chose to tell a story in a way that would actively disrupt the classical Hollywood understanding of verisimilitude. In chapter two, I demonstrate that between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s, while some filmmakers adopted modernist approaches to make visible the cinema as an ideological apparatus, others followed and rewrote the classical Hollywood codes to put into question the authority to see and desire by the heterosexual male. This book traces these efforts to experiment with new aesthetics and narrational strategies in an attempt to grasp, make sense of and mediate the affective agony of being in an extraterritorial position. But as David James argues, these efforts do not need to be oppositional to the hegemonic mode of narration, for being oppositional requires a filmmaker or spectator to seek a relationship with the hegemony in the first place.57 Today, the Beijing government sees any effort of claiming Hong Kong cinema as an autonomous entity as oppositional. Thus, making a Hong Kong film (broadly defined) is automatically considered oppositional in the eyes of the national discourse. In Hong Kong, the use of the cinema as a public sphere to mediate contesting political ideas and affects associated with extraterritoriality can be traced back to the 1930s and 1940s. Let us study an example. From 1945 to 1949, a large number of Mandarin musicals were financed by Shanghai film studios and produced in Hong Kong, directed and performed by émigrés from the Shanghai industry during the Sino-Japanese War, and originally targeted an audience of Shanghai expatriates who used to watch Mandarin-speaking films during the 1930s.58 Despite the fact that they were made in Mandarin, these films were exceptionally popular among the Cantonese-speaking cinemagoers in Hong Kong partly because they were made with a higher budget and production value than their Cantonese 16 extraterritoriality counterparts, and they represent the splendour of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan life or the extravagance of historical subject matters.59 Historically, the Cantonese film industry was nearly destroyed during the Pacific War (1941–5), and the immediate post-war Cantonese audience turned to Mandarin cinema for entertainment. From 1937 to 1942, Cantonese filmmakers, under the leadership of Sit Kok-sin (1904–56), Ma Si-tsang (1900–64), Lo Duen (1911–2000) and Shanghai-based Cai Chusheng (Tsai Chu-sang, 1906–68), promoted the Huanan guofang dianying (Waanaam gwokfong dinjing or South China national defence cinema), yet they could hardly compete with the Mandarin folk tale films, musicals and historical dramas in the box office.60 By 1938, Southeast Asian regions, including Singapore, Malaya, and Indonesia – the largest overseas markets of the Cantonese cinema – banned political films that could upset the Japanese military in fear of provoking an invasion.61 During the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong (1941–5), many Cantonese filmmakers went to the rural areas of Kwangtung and Kwangsi, where they directed or performed anti-Japanese plays; thus Cantonese film production came to a halt during those years.62 Immediately after the War, Mandarin cinema continued to dominate the Hong Kong industry and the Southeast Asian market, until Cantonese cinema flourished again at the beginning of the 1950s.63 The Mandarin musicals produced in Hong Kong between 1945 and 1949 were not entirely the same as their Hollywood counterparts from MGM and Warner Brothers. Rather, they were dramatic films with musical numbers that could be marketed independently on radio and as records. These films tend to use a mode of jazz once popular in Shanghai during the 1930s, which combines the rhythm and harmonic structure of American jazz, alongside melodies of Chinese and Japanese folk songs.64 This type of jazz could be seen as a product and mediator of Shanghai’s semicolonial modernity and its social, cultural and political plurality during the 1930s. It was then revised after the Sino-Japanese War for the purpose of renegotiating its spectators’ and filmmakers’ conflicting political loyalties and repressed memories. Understanding the intricate relationship between Shanghai jazz and the wartime memories of Shanghai and Hong Kong in the 1940s therefore requires a thorough rethinking of how this extraterritorial musical mode addresses the spectators’ extraterritorial consciousness. From 1945 to 1949, Mandarin cinema in Hong Kong and its filmmakers went through an ideologically confusing and politically embarrassing period. Studio executives including Zhang Shichuan (1889–1953 or 1890–1954) and Zhou Jianyun (1893–1967) from the former Mingxing on extraterritoriality 17 dianying gongsi (Star Motion Picture Company) restructured their busi- nesses based on those Sino-Japanese relations and financial infrastructure established from 1937 to 1942. In fact, during the Sino-Japanese War, many individual producers, directors, critics and actors worked for companies funded to different degrees by Japanese sources.65 For the Shanghai expatriates who watched the films produced by these filmmakers after the Sino-Japanese War, their conflicting political affiliations and identities between being Shanghainese (or, historically, Shanghailanders) and Hong Kongers, wilful colonised subjects and responsible patriots, and nationalists and socialists required a mode of mediation and reconfiguration that could both justify their political ambivalence during the War and address their inside–outside relationship with the larger national imagination. In such a politically ambiguous environment, Shanghai jazz, also known as shidai qu (music of the time) and nicknamed huangse yinyue (yellow or erotic music) – in itself a culturally and politically hybrid art and entertainment – was mobilised in the cinema as an instrument that negotiated these socio-political forces and affects.66 In his book Yellow Music [2001], Andrew Jones argues that Shanghai jazz was a site where the delicate, interrelated, yet antagonistic relationship between two modes of modernity was negotiated. In one register, Shanghai jazz could be considered a form of colonial modernity, that is, a modernity that was neither completely imported nor home grown, ahead of nor behind European modernity, but was specific to the semicolonial experience, cultural plurality and historical layered-ness of Shanghai in the 1930s. In this sense, Shanghai jazz did not systematically hybridise the boundaries and relationships between Western (colonial and modern) and Chinese (colonised and para-modern) music. Rather, it emerged out of a vernacular negotiation of those desires for and anxieties about the fluidity of these boundaries and definitions.67 Such a process of public negotiation, however, went against a more top–down attempt by the KMT and the Republican academia to construct a national culture, ironically, by grafting European aesthetics and high culture onto what intellectuals and ideologues would consider Chinese music, that is, a form of music that was a priori deemed, in the coloniser’s eyes, inferior and uncivilised.68 Shanghai jazz, in this sense, both addressed and exceeded the cultural and geopolitical territories that engendered it. Jones attributes the emergence of this mode of extraterritorial music to the works of composer Li Jinhui (1891–1967). At about the May Fourth period (circa 1919–23), Peking intellectuals believed that Chinese music was degenerate, as it seemed to lack the harmonic structure, equal temperament, formal unity and notational standard that characterised 18 extraterritoriality

European symphonic music. Academic music reform at the time therefore meant Europeanisation. For example, composer Liu Tianhua (1895– 1932) established the Guoyue gaijin she (Society for the Improvement of National Music) and employed nineteenth-century European harmonic and melodic paradigm in his compositions.69 Contrary to this trend, Li studied Chinese folk and theatrical music. In 1920, he established the Mingyue (Bright Moon) ensemble, which featured athletically fit, modern and healthy schoolgirls, including his daughter Li Minghui (1909–2003), who performed patriotic children operas onstage. These children operas consist of musical numbers that emphasise melody over harmony, simplicity over theoretical complexity. According to Li’s daughter Wang Renmei (1914–87), performed by young girls who wore athletic outfits that accentuated their youthful beauty and health, these patriotic children songs were quickly condemned by many people as degenerate and immoral.70 Nonetheless, according to Jones, despite such public outcry, the popularity of Li Jinhui’s children operas continued to grow. When the ideologues of the KMT proposed the Xin shenghuo yundong (New Life Movement) by the end of the 1920s – a social movement that tried to instil a national consciousness in the individual sentient bodies by suggesting a set of proto-Confucian values that aimed at regulating, educat- ing and managing biological lives – the sexually attractive, athletically fit, but morally reserved young woman was seen as the ideal of urban China’s xin nüxing (new women or femininity).71 In 1929, the Bright Moon troupe was stranded in Singapore because of their lack of funds. Li Jinhui began to write popular romantic songs that hybridised Chinese music, jazz and Japanese melodies and sold them to radio and record companies.72 In the 1930s, he became the most popular songwriter and film composer in Shanghai. His students included Wang Renmei, Nie Er (George Njal, 1912–35) and Zhou Xuan (Chow Hsüan, 1920–57).73 Despite or because of its popularity, Li Jinhui’s yellow music was decried equally by both the KMT and CPC musicians, including his own student Njal. Li Jinhui’s mode of Shanghai jazz neither deliberately Europeanised Chinese music, nor consciously Sinicised American jazz. As Jones argues, Chinese music, once performed with the bodies of knowledge, techniques and sonic preconceptions of European music, must be considered a culturally hybridised form produced under the colonial conditions of urban China. Likewise, American jazz, supposedly an African-American musical style, was still considered in the beginning of the twentieth century in Shanghai, New York, Paris and London as an exception from the norm on extraterritoriality 19 of European music.74 In other words, both Chinese music and jazz were understood in Shanghai as musical forms that stood outside European modernity; yet because of their being posited as the imaginary frontier of Western modernity, they both signified a mode of modernity far more avant-garde and modern(ist) than academic European music.75 Li’s yellow music therefore openly enjoys and celebrates the pleasure of colonial modernity in a space that is extraterritorial to both European and Chinese cultures, thus challenging the imaginary consistency of territory-bound cultural jurisdiction. The use of the term extraterritoriality is especially pertinent in our analysis here. It was because the Sino-Japanese War and its immediate aftermath was precisely the historical period during which extraterritoriality, as a shared experience between Shanghai and Hong Kong, emerged. As Fu Poshek points out, while the Chinese quarters of Shanghai were occupied by the Japanese military as early as 1937, the French Concession and the International Settlement in Shanghai remained in the hands of the Europeans and Americans until 1942, often called the gudao (solitary island).76 The film and cultural industries of Shanghai moved into these two areas, where they continued to produce and finance film productions, but would channel their funds to Hong Kong and conduct their principal photography and postproduction there. For some, the solitary island and the former British colony were the last extraterritorial havens where one could still make and see films that promoted Chinese patriotism (even though explicit anti-Japanese messages were banned in these areas in fear of Japanese retaliation). For others, these extraterritorial spaces were seen as ‘lands of lawlessness’ where politicians, bankers, gangsters, spies, intellectuals and cultural producers of conflicting political affiliations, or individuals who were ambivalent about their political loyalties, could find ways to work with one another, and renegotiate their socio-political and cultural boundaries. As Fu argues:

[M]any writers chose to live a reclusive life as a means of harmonizing the conflicting demands between private and public morality. They saw in passivity a symbolic voice of protest, a way toward ‘dignified survival’ that saved one’s skin without sacrificing much of one’s ideals. The few who resisted slighted personal concerns and championed the notion of moral integrity in the heroic tradition of loyalism in order to mobilize a revolt against compromise. In their minds, though not always in their actions, collective interests transcended the private realm. At the same time, there were many literary collaborators seeking to assuage their moral guilt over betrayal. They emphasized the banality of human needs; they portrayed themselves as human ‘anachronisms’ who clung to an existence totally at odds with the present, represent- ing their feeling of alienation in nostalgia.77 20 extraterritoriality

After the War, early postcolonial Shanghai and colonial Hong Kong continued to provide extraterritorial spaces for these filmmakers to foster new relationships and to rewrite and rethink why they remained politically ambivalent or multifarious during what other people would consider a national crisis.

Wartime Extraterritorial Film Industries Historically, after an industry-wide recession in 1935 and wartime destruc- tion in 1937, including the bombing of the two major studios in Shanghai, Star and Lianhua dianying gongsi (United Photoplay Service or UPS), Shanghai cinema was rebuilt with unprecedented vibrancy in 1938.78 The most powerful studio executive of the time was Zhang Shankun (Chang San-kuen, 1905–57), a businessman who established the Xinhua dianying gongsi (Hsin Hwa Film Company) in 1934. As an investor, he was well connected with politicians from the KMT, the Japanese military and the de facto ‘governor’ of Shanghai – gang leader Du Yuesheng (1888–1951). As Fu explains, Chang’s business operated out of the international concessions of Shanghai under the protection of US extraterritoriality. He consolidated financial investments from Japanese businesspeople and Chinese- American merchants, as well as opium money from the two rival political parties, which were laundered through Du’s drug-trafficking network (including the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Company or HSBC). With this money, Chang carried out his productions in Hong Kong. Filmmakers who decided not to follow the KMT to Chongqing (Chungking) or the CPC to Yan’an (Yenan), including Bu Wancang (1903–74), Zhu Shilin (1899–1967), Ma-Xu Weibang (1905–61), Li Pingqian (1902–84), Tu Guangqi (1914–80), Fang Peilin (1908–48), Wang Yin (1911–88) and Yue Feng (1909–99), stayed in Shanghai.79 Under the Japanese-friendly political censorship in the concessions, these directors and actors turned to the historical epic, melodrama, musical film and gods and demons film to work through an assemblage of conflicting political affiliations and beliefs.80 The resulting cinema, produced for the expressed purpose of appeal- ing to an audience with contesting and ambivalent socio-political beliefs, conveys layers of texts that transcend any single juridical and cultural jurisdiction. For example, in 1939, Chang produced Mulan congjun [Hua Mo-lan or Mulan Joins the Army, Bu Wancang], an adaptation of a popular folktale about a young woman, Hua Mulan (412–502), who joins the army in place of her ailing father and is sent to the frontier to fight against foreign invaders. In one register, the film can be read as an alle- gory of a young woman who fights against foreign (Japanese) invasion. In on extraterritoriality 21 another register, Chang worked closely with Japanese producer Kawakita Nagamasa (1903–81), who believed that the Shanghai film industry should be encouraged to make patriotic films to inculcate the spectators with the Japanese military’s notion of anti-(Euro-American)-colonialism. According to such a belief, Japan did not invade China; rather, it merely helped the Chinese people expel their European colonisers and stay on its path toward nationhood under the auspices of the Japanese Empire. In fact, when the film was shown in Chungking, an angry mob sabotaged the screening and burned the print in public.81 Chinese cinema was further extraterritorialised after the Japanese military invaded the international settlements. In 1942, the Nanking col- laborative government (1940–5) and the Japanese military consolidated the Shanghai film industry into the Zhonghua dianying gongsi (United China Film Corporation), largely founded upon the infrastructure of Hsin Hwa. Most filmmakers and talents who remained in Shanghai worked for the company, including Chow Hsüan, Chen Yunshang (Nancy Chan, 1921–2016), Lü Yukun (1921–2004), Yan Jun (Yen Chun, 1917–80) and Shu Shi (1916–2015).82 The studio published a monthly magazine called Xin Yingtan [New film altar], which promoted theoretical discourses on the cinema and national film policy. The editor of the magazine was producer Tsuiji Hisaichi (1914–81), who invited Chinese filmmakers and critics to reconvene debates on the reconstruction of Chinese national cinema as an anti-capitalist, anti-feudal and anti-imperialist cultural discourse.83 Yet, Chinese nationalism and patriotism would be promoted in the cinema as an extraterritorial consciousness and Japanese militarist ideology would provide an extraterritorial space for the Chinese audience to renegotiate their relationships with it.84 Wartime and post-war extraterritorial cinemas can be distinguished from each other in terms of their visual and musical styles. Visually, Tsuiji disliked Soviet montage, a style adopted by many left-wing Chinese filmmakers from 1932 to 1937. In his own writing, Tsuiji maintains that film scholars should adopt a realist notion of cinema:

An excellent work of cinema can fully blend and combine its themes, thoughts, performances, techniques, and all its other elements into a unified body. In this process of combination, [the cinematographic work] would have the effect of eliminating all those elements common between the cinema and other art forms, in order to uncover the purest and most specific essence in the cinematographic image. What we can discover, in the end, is something that we can call the ‘manifestation of the cinema-itself.’ Here, I do not hesitate to use the word ‘manifestation.’ It is because the cinema neither ‘illustrates’ nor ‘describes.’ Rather, it manifests in accordance with the methods and ideas of its author.85 22 extraterritoriality

He furthers:

The cinema can completely visualise a character’s appearance and personality by means of a single shot, which, [in a novel,] would have required thousands of words to illustrate . . . But cinematographic manifestation is a rearrangement of reality in accordance with the author’s will. In other words, reality, which is in itself unintended and purposeless, can be given an intention and a purpose by means of cinematographic manifestation . . . Such a process of cinematographic perfection and reconstruction allows the spectators to approach reality again; it enables them to receive an image of ‘life-itself manifested’.86

One specific feature about wartime Chinese cinema is its penchant to employ long takes, deep staging and elaborately choreographed camera movements to maintain the spatio-temporal continuity of the filmic reality, and to preserve the presence of the performer and the unity of their performance. After the War, as a reaction against this aesthetic, filmmakers began to replace this paradigm with a mixture of long takes and montage more akin to the classical Hollywood style of narration. Meanwhile, the Shanghai pop music industry had been dominated by Japanese investments throughout the 1930s, with Pathé Orient, the largest gramophone company in Shanghai, being merged with the Nipponophone Company.87 As Michael Bourdaghs points out, during the War, Japanese composer Hattori Ryōichi (1907–93) introduced exotic Chinese shidai qu melodic features into Japanese jazz, with lyrics configuring the colonised other as a vehicle that negotiated the Japanese listeners’ own anxieties about militarism.88 A major characteristic of the music of this time is the extensive use of melodic and harmonic features imagined to be Chinese: parallel fifths and octaves, unresolved dissonance, and ascending or descending melodic sequences without proper returns. Such Sinicised Japanese jazz was ironically (re-)introduced to China, with songs such as ‘Shoshu no yoru’ [Night of Soochow], ‘Yelai xiang’ [Chinese violet] and ‘Heri jun zai lai?’ [When wilt thou return?], which employ romantic lyrics that may suggest both wilful submission to Japanese occupation and Chinese nationalism. For example, ‘When wilt thou return?’ was first sung by Chow Hsüan in the 1937 romantic comedy Sanxing banyue [Stars Moving Around the Moon, Fang Peilin], produced by the Yee Hwa Film Company. The song sheet published by Pathé Orient that year attributed the composition to Bei Lin and the arrangement to Yan Ru. In his study of its historical background, Nakazono Eisuke (1920–2002) argues that the song was originally composed by Liu Xue’an (1905–85) and the lyrics were written by screenwriter Huang Jiamo (1919–2004).89 Huang was one of the on extraterritoriality 23 editors of film magazine Xiandai dianying [Modern Screen]. He advo- cated a form of phenomenological film criticism called ruanxing dianying lilun (soft film theory), criticising the Marxist filmmakers and critics for turning their films into yishi lun (talks of consciousness) and geming kouhao (revolutionary slogans). Stars Moving Around the Moon, together with many romantic comedies, gods and demons films and historical epics produced from 1937 to 1942, was criticised for its indifference toward the national crisis, and was therefore accused of being collaborationist. In 1939, director Tsai Chu-sang appropriated this song as a patriotic one in his national defence film Gudao tiantang [Orphan Island Paradise, 1939], although, a year later, Japanese-Manchurian movie star Li Xianglan (Ri Koran, screen name of Yamaguchi Yoshiko, 1920–2014) sang a cover version of this song and popularised it among the Japanese audience both in China and Japan. “When wilt thou return?” is a tango. In the 1937 version, Chow Hsüan was only accompanied by an accordion, and the range of the song was limited to those pitches playable by the instrument (B -1 to D1). While the accordion accompaniment provided the harmony and rhythm idiomatic of the tango, the melody is composed in the Chinese pentatonic scale 1 2 3 5 6

(in B ). Yet in the melody, there are frequent octave drops between D1  and D0, a feature highly unusual in any indigenous Chinese composition, but was seen in the music of Hattori as an imagined characteristic of Chinese music. The octave drop, sung with a slight glissando, makes the voice sound more submissive, exotic and erotic, thus making the song and the voice a feminised and Orientalised object of fascination. The stylistic hybridity of the music, I argue, generated conflicting sensations in a listener’s sensorium: an enjoyment of cosmopolitan modernity (tango), a nostalgia for indigenous Chinese sound (pentatonic scale), an objectifica- tion of this Chinese sound as a Japanese colonial fetish (octave drop and feminisation of the voice) and, for a Japanese listener, a transference of this exotic Chinese nostalgia for its past to the Japanese longing for home and homecoming. Meanwhile, the lyrics, supposedly sung by a young dance hostess to her Chinese-American intellectual lover, are also politically ambiguous. Out of the context of the 1937 film, the second person pronounjun (thou) can be interpreted as a KMT or Japanese soldier, or even the KMT or Japanese military government. In the lyrics, the young woman pours wine and offers food for jun, persuading him to put his worries aside, enjoy himself for the night, and go in peace with no hope that they will see each other again. In the final stanza, the hostess sings: 24 extraterritoriality

Stop singing the variations on the theme of Yangguan. Hit our white-jade glasses with gusto. Let me keep offering thee words of comfort. Let me firmly pat thy chest.

In lines 1 and 2, the word Yangguan (a fortified mountain pass that guarded the western frontier during Han [206 bce–220 ce] and Tang [618–907] dynasties) and white-jade glasses frequently appeared in the songxing (farewell) genre of the Tang poetry. During the 1930s, the word guan (fortress) signified the Manchuria–China divide. Thus, the song invoked a picture of a KMT soldier going off to guanwai (Manchuria) to fight against the Japanese, or vice versa. And the eroticism in lines 3 and 4 had the effect of imprinting this sensation of sorrow and longing into the sentient body of the listener, who either imagined themself in the position of jun (who goes off to fight the war on either side) or of the hostess (who stays on the home front and submits herself to jun). It is in this sense that the song is both formally and politically extraterritorial.

An All-Consuming Love An All-Consuming Love was produced by Zhou Jianyun, featuring two wartime film stars, Shu Shi and Chow Hsüan. Zhou originally offered the directing position to Zhang Shichuan, but Zhang was summoned to Shanghai to be tried for treason. After that, He Zhaozhang was hired to finish the film.90 As film historian Po Fung argues, post-war Hong Kong Mandarin cinema directed by filmmakers who had once fostered relationships with Japanese investors during the War can often be read as their autobiographical allegories.91 In this film, intellectual Gao Zhijian (Shu Shi) is the best friend of Hou Xinming (Liang Fu) and his wife Li Xiangmei (Chow Hsüen). After the Japanese occupation of the concessions, Xinming went to the front and Zhijian stayed in Shanghai to teach. Xiangmei is a music student, but in order to earn a living, she works for a Chinese collaborationist in a nightclub. Zhijian finds her unpatriotic and he establishes a tutorial school where he secretly promotes patriotic messages. Eventually, Zhijian is arrested by the Japanese intelligence, and Xiangmei uses her connections to the collaborationist network to save Zhijian. Zhijian finally recognises the hardship Xiangmei needs to endure. They both think that Xinming has been killed. When they are about to confess their romantic feelings toward each other, victory is declared and Xinming, who lost his arms, also returns from the front. Xiangmei reunites with her maimed on extraterritoriality 25 husband and Zhijian leaves Shanghai to Hong Kong, with unspeakable regret and sexual frustration. Far from being apologetic, the film can be read as a letter to those who accused people like Zhang Shichuan, Zhou Jianyun, or even Shu Shi and Chow Hsüan, who stayed in Shanghai during the War and worked with the collaborationists in order to survive. Through the personal trajectory of Zhijian, the film offers an alternative version of historical memory – albeit retroactively and retrospectively constructed – that cultural producers in wartime Shanghai fought against the Japanese on their own terms. And they did so by relying on the complex, highly conflated and mutually dependent Chinese and Japanese intelligence networks. Likewise, Xiangmei’s collaborationism is implicitly excused by her insist- ence on singing the Li School of Shanghai jazz, romantic songs with highly patriotic and anti-capitalist lyrics. However, those spectators who lived through this wartime experience would know that these patriotic songs were permitted in the Shanghai nightclubs with their nationalistic messages framed within the anti-colonial agenda of the Japanese military. In other words, these songs had the effect of recalling, renewing, rehears- ing and reconfiguring the film spectators’ wartime memories and their extraterritorial relationships with both the nation and the enemy. They did so by reintroducing and rewriting the sensorial memories associated with them. Yet, there existed a discrepancy between these spectators’ organic memory and understanding of wartime politics and the prosthetic memory that the film offered. The result, I argue, was not a direct replacement of the organic memory with the prosthetic one. Rather, both versions of the memory existed as two contesting aspects of the extraterritorial consciousness of those Shanghai expatriates in Hong Kong: these viewers’ genuine desire to collaborate with the Japanese authority in order to ensure their survival and capitalistic pleasure on the one hand, and their nationalistic conscience on the other. These contesting political affects are actively negotiated in the film’s musical numbers. A particular feature of all these numbers, composed by Chen Gexin (1914–61), deliberately eliminated all the Japanese exotic melodic and harmonic elements, and their style harks back to the 1930s Li School of Shanghai jazz. In addition, the numbers themselves are also shot in montage rather than découpage, thus recalling the mid- to late- 1930s editing style in Shanghai cinema. The most popular number in An All-Consuming Love is ‘Ye Shanghai’ [Night of Shanghai]. The music is in the A-B-A ternary form and it uses a pentatonic scale idiomatic of both Chinese music and jazz with half-tone variations and subdominant modulations. Melodically, the song begins 26 extraterritoriality

Figures 0.1–0.8 The ‘Night of Shanghai’ sequence in An All-Consuming Love. in the zhenggong wu diao (pentatonic mode in the key of G) with E as the tonic (1=G: 6. , 1, 2, 3, 5). After the first two phrases, Chen replaces a high 3 by a high 4 to signal a modulation to chezi liu diao (pentatonic mode in the key of C) with G as the tonic (1=C: 5. , 6. , 1, 2, 3). In the B section, the baseline stays within the chezi liu diao (1. , 3, 5, 6, 1, 6, 5, 6), while the melody alternates between 1 and the half step 7. to create an ambiguous modal variation between the two keys. Eventually, the song returns to its A section, but ends unexpectedly in 1=C. Chen further surprises the listeners by opening the song and starting each section with a tonally ambiguous diminished seventh chord and chromatic ornaments. In other words, this song provides a sensorial experience that stays both within and exceeds the spectators’ cultural boundaries and understandings, with constant surprises and variations that navigate along the liminal space between Chinese music and American jazz, modern and para-modern elements, as well as colonial and national sensibilities. In terms of political messages and visual elements, the A section praises the cosmopolitan nightlife in Shanghai, which ends with the idiom gewu shengping (peace and prosperity with song and dance), a phrase often used in nightlife magazines during the War to indicate how well the Japanese military had maintained the prosperity of Shanghai. In this section, the film photographs Xiangmei’s performance onstage from a frontal camera on extraterritoriality 27

angle: first, in an establishing long shot from a high angle (Figure 0.1) and then in a medium shot (Figure 0.2) that dollies back to a full-bodied long shot (Figure 0.3). This opening sequence therefore presents Xiangmei’s performance as a performance, thus making visible the self-reflexivity of this musical number and its socio-cultural intervention. In the A section refrain, the film stays on a medium-to-three-quarter shot of a group of dance hostesses accompanying their male clients on the dance floor (Figure 0.4). During this section, the lyrics convey the idea that, although these hostesses seem to enjoy themselves, they are there only because they need to put food onto their tables. After that, in the B section, the song critiques such nightlife and pleasure as superficial and wasteful performances put on by individuals who had no choice but to maintain Shanghai’s beautiful façade. This section therefore reinstates the film’s prosthetic memory, which those spectators who once fostered relationships with the collaborationist authorities did so involuntarily for their individual survival and the continuation of Shanghai’s cosmopolitanism. Here, the film first cuts to a close-up of four hands holding wine glasses (Figure 0.5). It then cuts to a medium shot of an older (albeit the lyrics call him ‘youthful’) man and a young hostess. As the hostess offers him a drink, he takes a sip and begins to cough (Figure 0.6), thus suggesting that both the women and men in 28 extraterritoriality the nightclub simply put on excessive performances at the expense of their health. Then, the film cuts to the opening high-angle long shot of the nightclub (Figure 0.7), where Xiangmei sings about how everybody, after having sought their pleasure, would eventually go home with their ‘hearts following the spinning wheels of the motor cars’, thus suggesting the purposelessness of such capitalistic night life and the numbing effects of colonial modernity. Eventually, the film cuts to a medium close-up of Xiangmei (Figure 0.8), who urges the audience to start a new life. On the one hand, this ending re-educates the audience in the light of KMT’s New Life Movement. On the other hand, it encourages the spectators to forget their conflicting political affiliations and affects and to move on with their new post-war political existence. Both the ‘old life’ that this musical number and the film at large try to rewrite and erase were in fact both a product and a symptom of the filmmakers’ and spectators’ extraterritorial consciousness: their standing at the liminal space between the inside and outside of the larger national imagination and their celebration and discomfort of occupying an extraterritorial space. Yet, this film never reintegrates the Shanghai expatriates or returned expatriates into the national. Rather, the use of jazz in this film as a hybrid musical form directly re-instils the spectators’ extraterritorial consciousness into their sentient bodies. It does so through a combination of visual montage and a musical form that both excites the spectators’ sensoria and recalls their traumatic memories and senses of guilt, while suggesting new meanings and justifications to their politically ambivalent positions. Interestingly, by the end of the film, Xiangmei reunites with her maimed husband, who fights for a nation that does not seem to understand or appreciate the complexity of her desire and colonial experiences. The ending of the film features Zhijian throwing a record of Xiangmei’s song into the sea of Hong Kong, thus suggesting his ultimate refusal to rearticulate his colonial experience in national terms (Figure 0.9). In other words, the new life that Zhijian develops will still be framed within extraterritorial terms and can only be addressed and understood as such in Hong Kong as an extraterritorial space.

Extraterritoriality in Hong Kong Cinema The following chapters are arranged in a chronological order, although they are not meant to provide a historically linear account of Hong Kong cinema and media’s extraterritoriality. Rather, they are best understood as five case studies that illustrate how different generations of filmmakers, television directors and writers, and video artists configured and negoti- on extraterritoriality 29

Figure 0.9 In An All-Consuming Love, Zhijian throws a record of Xiangmei’s song into the sea of Hong Kong. ated the contesting socio-political forces and affects that constituted their extraterritorial sense-uncertainty. Collectively, these five case studies can also be seen as five different nodes on a journey. This journey was bookmarked by two mass movements in Hong Kong: the Leftist Riots in 1967 and the Umbrella Movement in 2014. These two movements were distinct in their political opinions. The Leftist Riots, as its name suggests, stemmed from the political left (Maoism), while the Umbrella Movement was initiated from a socio- political milieu in which the distinction between the political right and the political left had already collapsed. In 1967, the beginning of this book’s journey, filmmakers and artists tried to make sense of a je ne sais quoi about the invisibility of their bodies, the effacement of their voices, and the precarity and dispensability of their lives under Hong Kong’s extraterritorial position: one that was torn between two sovereign authorities that sought to claim their power over these lives via political violence. In the course of this journey, this je ne sais quoi became increasingly tangible, definable and irritable, as Hong Kongers found themselves perpetually deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised under the extraterritoriality of the city and their lives. Toward the end of this journey, global neoliberalism – or as Jason McGrath would call it, global post-socialism (a worldwide economic state in which socialism has been perceived as being already failed) – has systematically deprived middle- and working-class 30 extraterritoriality

Hong Kongers of their means to subsist.92 Yet, it makes survival an ethical responsibility of these bare and dispensable lives.93 A young generation of filmmakers and spectators find themselves in a position where the only way to survive is to foster new inter-human relationships that are based on mutual-individuation, mutual-subjectivisation and mutual- autonomisation. For them, film and video give their extraterritorial position, which has rendered their lives invisible and dispensable, a body that matters. In each chapter, I first explicate the socio-political, industrial and/or cultural histories of a key event that set in motion an intellectual debate on the definition of Hong Kong cinema or media, the debates between filmmakers and critics of the time, and how cinema and media were configured to negotiate the traumatic affects of the event. My discussion is based on materials I collected and studied over a number of years from the Hong Kong Film Archive (Hong Kong), the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) (New York, USA), the National Archives (Kew, UK), Videotage (Hong Kong) and the Chinese Visual Festival (CVF London, UK). I also had the opportunity to speak to filmmakers and artists through my work with CVF, the London East Asian Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival (London) and my visits to the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Far East Film Festival (Udine, Italy). My historical contextualisation then enables me to conduct close readings of individual films, television programmes and video art works and to unpack and push further extraterritoriality as a theoretical concept. In chapter one, I start my discussion with the Leftist Riots in 1967, a large-scale anti-colonial social movement that traumatised its support- ers, critics and bystanders. In these protests and demonstrations, both the colonial authority and its revolutionary counterpart exercised acts of violence in order to instantiate their power, under which Hong Kongers were deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised. They were banished to a position that was juridically, socially and culturally outside these sovereign terrains proper, thus generating what I call an inchoate or spontaneous awareness of Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality. During the unrest, the colonial government feared not the actual fights and blood- shed on the street, but the affective power of the media as an instantiation of the absence of PRC’s sovereign authority over Hong Kong. Such a media-phobic discourse made Hong Kong film critics and intellectuals realise that cinema and film criticism were more thantalks. Rather, they were speech-acts that gave Hong Kong’s extraterritorial position a body. Such a realisation inspired these critics to ruminate on the meaning of Chinese cinema and question the assumption that films produced in Hong on extraterritoriality 31

Kong were to be unproblematically called as such. In this debate, these writers pay special attention to the Cantonese cinema produced in Hong Kong in the 1950s as an artistic practice both integral to and outside – that is, extraterritorial to – Chinese cinema, thus suggesting that new filmmakers and critics should redefine and reconfigure a cinema specific to Hong Kong spectators. In this chapter, I analyse Weilou chunxiao [Ngailau ceonhiu or In the Face of Demolition, Lee Tit, 1953] to illustrate this spontaneous awareness of Hong Kong cinema’s extraterritoriality. In chapter two, I study how a renewed understanding of Hong Kong cinema inspired young filmmakers and television directors and screenwriters, especially women, to foster new ways in which they could speak with their spectators inter-individually, intersubjectively and inter- autonomously. They are interested in configuring a film language known by filmmaker and scholar Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75) as a free-indirect discourse, that is, a film image in which the director, spectators and characters appear to one another and speak together intersubjectively.94 From 1968 to 1978, these filmmakers, television directors and writers sought to make sense of their extraterritorial positions in politics, gender and, to a lesser extent, sexuality, a movement popularly known today as the modernist – or as Li Cheuk-to argues, the only true – phase of the Hong Kong New Wave.95 In this chapter, I examine three different experi- mentations in this movement. First, filmmaker Tang Shu-hsuen, in her feature debut Dong furen [The Arch, 1970], consciously unlearns the Euro-American cinematic paradigm by borrowing aesthetics and narrational strategies from the Six Dynasties (220 or 222–589). However, by the end of the film, she uses the technique of montage to deconstruct both cinematic languages and make tangible that the imaginary dichotomy between (Chinese) tradition and (Euro-American) modernity has always been constructed upon – and made visible by – extraterritorialising women as dispensable bodies outside heteronormativity. Meanwhile, in the ‘Miu Kam-fung’ episode of Qi nüxing [Cat neois- ing or Seven Women, 1976], director Patrick Tam and screenwriter Joyce Chan appropriate the modernist paradigm of the films by Jean-Luc Godard. Such a transplantation is best understood not as an imitation, but a reconfiguration. In the programme, viewers are implicated in a scopo- philic structure wherein the signifiers and signifieds in a consumerist society are dissociated from each other. As a result, consumption – including consumption of individual and collective traumas and China as a commodity packaged and marketed through the lens of Euro-American modernism – was completely detached from its ethical implications and moral consequences. Then, in ‘Laike’ [‘Loihaak’ or ‘The Boy from 32 extraterritoriality

Vietnam’, 1978], director Ann Hui and screenwriters Shu Kei and Wong Chi reconfigure the classical Hollywood narrational paradigm to mediate the affects of failure among three men. These men foster alternative kinships out of their shared state of deindividuation, desubjectivisation and deautonomisation by Vietnam, the PRC and the United States. From 1978 to 1997, extraterritoriality was no longer a spontaneous awareness. Rather, it was felt, on a day-to-day basis, as a political crisis. This crisis was triggered by the Sino-British negotiation on the future of Hong Kong, as the New Territories, the region north of the Kowloon Peninsula leased by the Qing court to the UK under the Convention for the Extension of Hongkong (9 June 1898), was due in 1997.96 The negotiation became a six-year diplomatic deadlock. The PRC insisted that China had always had sovereign authority over Hong Kong as a whole, and that on 30 June 1997, the UK had the obligation to transfer its administrative right over the city to the PRC. Meanwhile, the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013; in office 1979–90) wilfullly ignored advice from experienced diplomats and insisted that the UK extend its extraterritorial rights over Hong Kong by means of a unilateral Order in Council.97 The two governments signed the Joint Declaration in December 1984 to set aside Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) with its capitalist system kept intact. Nevertheless, the idea that the city was to be grafted onto a renewed extraterritorial position in a diplomatic process wherein its biopolitical lives had no right of participation sent a strong message to most Hong Kongers: their lives were dispensable. The date 30 June 1997 was therefore seen by many Hong Kongers as an expiration date. Meanwhile, the transitional period from 1984 to 1997 was regarded as the time it took for time to end, during which one must seize the day – carpe diem.98 In this light, the 1980s and 1990s were not only an extraterritorial crisis characterised by a totalising sense of deindividuation, desubjectivisation and deautonomisation, but also a wilful failure to acknowledge the advent and progression of this crisis. This crisis was then renewed on 4 June 1989 by the Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing, as Hong Kongers came to realise that the Beijing government under Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) was determined to liberalise the economy (albeit under the CPC’s supervision) while tightening the party-state’s control over its biopolitical lives’ socio-political freedom. In film studies, many critical works have been written on the impact of this socio-political perturbation on mainstream cinema. As Ackbar Abbas argues, Hong Kong’s cityscape, its urban architecture, spatial layout, cinema, media and cultural productions were configured as a transient, on extraterritoriality 33 volatile, yet perpetually self-generating environment of confusing and exciting actions and events. These events appeared and disappeared before one could grasp and feel them.99 In this chapter, I first push further this line of investigation by re-evaluating the industrial conditions, cultural practices and affective milieu of Hong Kong cinema, television, newspapers and magazines, and popular music. I then turn to video artists who were associated with two interconnected organisations: Zuni Icosahedron and Videotage. The earliest members of Videotage included Danny Yung, Kwan Pun-leung, Ellen Pau, Yau Ching and May Fung. They used to make films in ciné clubs during the 1970s and considered themselves part of the New Wave.100 During the 1980s, they continued to make experimental videos when feature filmmaking became increasingly commercialised. Meanwhile, they were also part of a global movement, in which artists around the world who found themselves at their respective extraterritorialised positions turned to video art to reclaim their bodies, voices and subjectivities. These Hong Kong artists saw their extraterritorial position as a tripartite one: (1) as Hong Kongers (political extraterritoriality); (2) as women or lives who actively questioned their genders (gender extraterritoriality); and (3) as LGBTQI+ lives (sexual extraterritoriality). On 1 July 1997, time ended, only we did not feel it. In this sense, Hong Kong entered the era of posthistoricity: the perpetual performance of a juridical, socio-political and economic system in order to sustain the time it took for time to end as though nothing had happened. Such a performance has continued to banish Hong Kong to an extraterritorial position. Not only that those lives who inhabit the city are deindividuated, desubjectivised and deautonomised, but also that their lives have become increasingly precarious and unlivable – or in the eyes of the political authority: dispensable. Before the establishment of the SAR, the business oligarchy that governed Hong Kong transferred their loyalty from the British colonial government to the Beijing government. Legislatively and administratively, the infrastructure of the juridico-political institutions from the colonial period remained intact, while, economically, Hong Kong was swiftly transformed into the world’s most deregulated economy that guaranteed the political power of the oligarchy and integrated its financial system into the larger national economy under PRC supervision.101 Chapters four and five address how cinema and media negotiate the conflicting political affects and opinions in two different, but overlapping, spheres: (1) com- mercially produced (or more popularly speaking, mainstream) cinema; and (2) independent documentaries. 34 extraterritoriality

In 2003, the Beijing government signed the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) with the SARs of Hong Kong and Macau. This arrangement allows Hong Kong–Mainland co-productions to acquire domestic status in the Mainland, thus enabling investors to maximise their capital from both regions in pre-production and release their films in both markets.102 For Hong Kong critics and scholars, these co-productions, which cater to two different cultural sensibilities and socio-political experiences on the one hand, and fulfil the censorship requirements of the PRC on the other, are regarded as symptoms of Hong Kong’s Mainlandisation.103 Meanwhile, Mainland scholars lament that these films fail to suture the ideological differences between the two communities.104 What is at stake in this debate on CEPA is authorship. In chapter four, I first analyse the socio-political conditions and affects in Hong Kong after 1997, which I shall call neoliberal extraterritoriality. Then, I explicate a complex process of industrial transformation under neoliberalism between the 1990s and the early 2000s, which eventually led to the signing of CEPA. I then expound how scholars from both Hong Kong and the Mainland evaluate the first ten years of the Hong Kong–Mainland co-productions made under this arrangement. It is within this context that I study ways in which Hong Kong filmmakers confront the crisis of authorship under CEPA in three registers – industrial, creative and socio-political. I use Johnnie To as a case study and conduct a close analysis of Duzhan [Dukzin or Drug War, 2013], a film regarded by Hong Kong spectators as the first of its type, which uses the Mainland socio-political and aesthetic paradigm to address Hong Kongers’ extraterritorial sensibil- ity and posthistorical conditions. A book about Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality cannot end without a discussion of the aftereffect of the Umbrella Movement in 2014 on the cinema and media. Civil disobedience is an act by which a desubjectivised life can potentially take control of their own desubjectivisation. Yet, as a new socio-political structure emerges, a new set of differences will inevita- bly appear and reengage this life in another biopolitical state of exception. In chapter five, I first discuss how Hong Kong’s posthistorical conditions under neoliberalism and global post-socialism posited its biopolitical lives, especially those of young people, in a precarious position. I also explicate how documentary filmmaking in Hong Kong since 2000 has configured a new public sphere where conflicting political opinions and affects on such precarity can be negotiated. After a brief summary of the Umbrella Movement, I conduct an analysis of a number of documentaries made during and after the Movement, on extraterritoriality 35 including Matthew Torne’s Weigoucheng [Meigaucing or Lessons in Dissent, 2014], Nora Lam’s Wangjiao heiye [Wonggok haakye or Midnight in Mongkok, 2014], Nate Chan’s Do You Hear the Women Sing? [2014], Lam and Samuel Wong’s Weijing zhi lu [Meiging zi lou or Road Not Taken, 2016], Chan Tze-woon’s Luanshi beiwang [Lyunsai beimong or Yellowing, 2016] and Lam’s Dihou tiangao [Deihau tingou or Lost in the Fumes, 2017]. In the age of precarity, documentarians and spectators no longer presume that what they see on the screen must be an access to the truth. Rather, at an age when film, video and media images are assumed to be mediated, manipulated and fabricated, these documentaries serve as texts that are constructed out of realities captured, re-narrated and remediated from multiple perspectives. Their truth claims must then be contested and defended in the larger public discourse. Such a public discourse in turn makes visible that a set of problematics is embedded in the interstices of the debate between the political establishments and the hard-line support- ers of political reforms.

The Body of Extraterritoriality The study of extraterritoriality and how the cinema negotiates those conflicting forces and agonising affects that actively deindividuate, desubjectivise and deautonomise a biopolitical life should not be an end in itself. The question is: What solution can we imagine? In the conclusion of this book, I discuss the works of Mainland directors Wen Hai (aka Huang Wenhai) and Ying Liang, who have been in exile in Hong Kong in recent years. These two directors actively use documentaries and fiction films to re-examine one idea: there must be a way precisely in the cinema where imaginary solutions can be proposed and rehearsed in which these forces and affects can be rendered inoperative. It does not mean that the biopolitical life in question can then be reindividuated, resubjectivised and reau- tonomised. Rather, territoriality and boundaries, which incarcerate human imagination of how we come to know ourselves and our relationships with others, can be tentatively suspended. In other words, there must be a way that humanity can be reinvented and restored in the face of socio-political and economic precarity. We can then let life be, releasing it from the cage of individuation/deindividuation, subjectivisation/desubjectivisation, and autonomisation/deautonomisation once and for all.