| This dissertation focuses on examining how the Hong Kong cinema explores the postcolonial condition of the city in relation to its return to China in 1997, a post-scenario inevitably tantalizing the anxiety of what Hong Kong is.; Through the use of political means and state power, the Chinese Communist government would like to incorporate the hybrid city of Hong Kong into a seemingly unitary cultural space of "motherland" or "Chineseness." The colony, however, has attempted to resist this inscription and tried to contest an identity of its own through the cinematic enunciation.; In border crossing films, people from mainland China are discursively situated as the female whose body can be controlled, and as the other whose differences can be patronized for the local audiences' gazes. At the same time, Hong Kongers strive to derive an identity precisely from the otherness of the Mainlanders.; In re-presenting an old Hong Kong society, be it the thirties, the 1960s or the 1970s, nostalgic films participate in the local population's desire to define Hong Kong subjectivity through narratives of bourgeois romantic love, cultural disappearance, and family romance.; Romantic hero films map the imminent uncertainty that Hong Kong envisages into the representation of space and place, epitomized by male subjectivity in crisis. Through spectacular violence, mutilation, and death, romantic hero films enunciate the felt crisis of the historical viewing subjects.; Through the colorful depiction of big time criminals from the past, the Big Timers consolidate the survival myth of get-rich-quick and legitimize the mentality of utilitarianism that came to prevail in the post June 4th (Tiananmen incident) period.; Cageman is a much different film from the typical profit crazed films of Hong Kong film industry. It gives expressions to the marginalized people, demystifies the dominant social order, and exposes a Third World nation within the capitalist Hong Kong nation-space.; The collective attempt to define a more definite self image of Hong-Kong-ness through the cinematic apparatus does not lead to a discursive homogeneous Hong Kong subjectivity. Instead, the new Hong Kong subjectivity is experienced as state of instability. |
