Part IIa: Popularizing
Hong Kong: Film
1.
Popular culture and film
1.1.
High culture/ low culture?
1.2. Popular culture is not a reflection of a
“culture”. Instead, it engages in
making cultures.
1.3.
Popular culture: a metonym and metaphor
The narrative is a fiction about the reality, a set
of signifiers referring to an imagined world relating to the real world in a
subtle way. In this relating
process, the signifiers function in two different ways. A signifier can act as a metonym or a
metaphor.
A metaphor is an implicit or explicit
comparison between signs.轉喻
A metonym is an association of terms. One sign is associated with another of
which it signifies either a part, the whole, one of its functions or
attributes, or a related concept. 換喻
2.
Film: industrial product, narrative and space
2.1. Movie: narratives with different material bases
2.2. Cutting: Narrative movement of a movie is
triggered mainly not by verbal signs or scripts. Cutting enables us to get the
totality from the separated spectacles, from spectacle to more or less the
sense of entering a virtual world.
The movie narrative continuously sutures the fragments or plots of the
story.
2.3. Frame框架:
It is the major characteristic of movie while fiction does not impose a very
clear frame on the narrative. It
limits our viewpoint and attracts our attention to a certain point (also
excludes others).
2.4. Screen螢幕:
This narrative movement creates a space, or turns the screen as a physical
space into a place for characters interact and appeals to a presumed spectator
or connects the fantasized world with the viewing subject in a subtle way.
3.
Exporting “Hong Kong”: local movie as an international
“cult”
3.3.
Wong Kar-wai and Chan Guo are more popular in the
international film festivals than in local box office.
3.4.
“Hong Kong” is a theme for outsiders rather than
insiders
4.
Wong Kar-wai (花樣年華)
4.3.
Hong Kong’s 1960s
4.4.
Simple story, complicated plots and details
4.5.
Plot I: dialectic groups
4.6.
Plot II: role-playingàcategorical
cast
4.7.
Plot III: a place for “leaving”
4.8.
Urban space and costume as “still object” for desire可欲對象
4.9.
Hong Kong: a fading and an exotic(異國情調)
city in the past
4.10.
Love story as a metonym as well as a metaphor: a
fading love storyàa
fading “Hong Kong (culture or aura)”
5.
Chan Guo (細路祥)
5.3.
Hong Kong: a contemporary culture
5.4.
A story about 1997---A story about 祥仔---A
story about 祥哥
5.5.
Plot I: stories about 祥仔
5.6.
Plot II: a story about 阿芬
5.7.
Plot III: a story about Filipino maid
5.8.
Plot IV: handover as a background or an overwhelming
shadow?
5.9.
Urban space as a background or a “lived” environment:
a metonym of Hong Kong and its mobility
5.10.
A story beneath the money world, a story in Yau Ma
Tei
5.11.
祥仔’s childhood as a metaphor: the
personal growth of a child à a city in transition
6.
“Hong Kong”: a narrative about nostalgia, change and
transformation
6.3.
Hong Kong’s past as a desired and consumed object
6.4.
Hong Kong space as a simulated living environment