Figures of Hope and the Filmic Imaginary of Jianghu in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2163720 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stephen Ching-Kiu Chan (0000-0002-8861-3922, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2001 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 3-4 |
| Pages | 486-514 |
| Publication date | 2001-07-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cultural Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0950-2386 • E-ISSN: 1466-4348 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/095023800110046678 |
| OpenAlex | W2108042753 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 14 |
| References cited | 4 |
Through an extensive allegorical reading of films, this paper attempts to capture a certain cultural form of imagination in Hong Kong during the transitional period leading up to the historical handover of power in 1997. Dwelling on the world of signification conjured up through what I call the jianghu filmic imaginary, the analysis focuses on the ideological and utopian impulses registered in relation to a whole emotional complex of anxiety, bewilderment and despair in the works of some highly creative local filmmakers of the genre: Ching Siu-Tong, Ann Hui, Tsui Hark and Wong Kar-Wai. The study draws theoretically from Castoriadis's notion of the social imaginary and Bloch's aesthetics of hope, to focus on the textual and contextual re-constructions of a number of very unconventional martial arts swordplay (wuxia) films made in Hong Kong in the last two decades: namely, Tsui's Butterfly Murders (1979), Hui's Romance of Book and Sword (1987), Ching/Tsui's Swordsman II (1992), and Wong's Ashes of Time (1994). By identifying the ideological and affective moments in the filmic imaginary, I want to trace what has been left in a ruined culture for utopian longings, and point to the presence/absence of 'hope' as the cultural imagination for an unknown and unknowable future (beyond 1997). It is my contention that an understanding of that peculiar form of popular imaginary at the unusual juncture of Hong Kong's history can begin with a critical attempt to cope with this subtle practice of hope, so as to recognize (or reject) it as mediation in the process of our collective cultural crisis, anticipation and identification
Aesthetics · Art · Ideology · Literature · Movie theater · Politics · Popular culture · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Romance · Sociology · The arts · The Imaginary · Visual arts · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Psychology
More than Dismemberment
Creativity and Its Discontents
Translating Chinese identity crisis in and beyond jianghu
Landscape and/in ethnonational concepts in Chinese
Wuxia Cinema and Ethnic Minorities in China
Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture
Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture
Intersecting Anglicization and Sinicization
Untamed Jianghu or Emerging Profession
Mythic frontiers and nationalism
Rappers as Knights-Errant
Narratives in film title translation
Jianghu flow’
Unsettling Potentialities
| Citations per year | 0.67 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2005 - 2026 (22) |
| Highly cited | No |