'Chungking Express' (1994): National Identity

What makes Wong’s movies even more remarkable is that they come out of the Hong Kong film industry, which discourages such a sensorially seditious cinema. Although Hong Kong movies (like any other form of dominant cinema) carry their own potentially subversive subtexts, their primary function is to make a return on their investment by pleasing as large an audience as possible, as quickly as possible. Given the island’s economic evolution as a ruthlessly dog-eat-dog laissez-faire trade and manufacturing center, this movie-making environment (much like Hollywood’s) was never conducive to the development of “art” films. However, the frivolous quality of Hong Kong’s popular cinema is internally contradicted by another, more serious impulse: a desire to put forward and explore —however indirectly—a Chinese identity. The problems of such an identity, of course, became most acute in 1984, when the British government —which had wrested Hong Kong from the Chinese in 1841—agreed to return the colony to the People’s Republic of China in 1997. Poised between two “empires,” the British and the mainland Chinese, Hong Kong cinema has unavoidably become a textual field where crises of identity are implicitly set up and played out. As Stephen Teo explains:

Towards the late 80s, Hong Kong critics were already referring to a ‘post-1997’ sentiment. The best films at the time exerted a double impact: film-makers asserted their identity in terms of its difference from what they presented as China’s, but they at the same time attempted to come to terms with China. There was an inherent contradiction in wanting to be different and yet feeling a nationalist empathy with China, a tension which increasingly became the point of reference for identity questions. Although Hong Kong is not a country, its residents possessed a form of national identity increasingly identified as Chinese even though artists expressed their Chineseness in ways that were certainly different from the way artists in China negotiated theirs.

Cinematic expression of “national” identity was complicated by the colonial government’s passage of the 1987 Film Censorship Bill, a law that restricted “[motion] pictures which damage relationships with other countries”; filmmakers took this as a tacit reference to China in particular. Although it was later repealed, the censorship law heightened hand-over anxieties—as it simultaneously veiled their expression on the screen. Consequently, as numerous other critics have noted, the “1997 issue” became a vague, unspoken omnipresence that has permeated all of Hong Kong cinema since the early 1980s. The issue infuses even those movies that never explicitly acknowledge any uneasiness toward national identity, just as the Great Depression implicitly infused all Hollywood (and international) cinema of the 1930s. So, issues of nationalism in Hong Kong film are (to use an overworked phrase) always/already present.

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