Disappearing Acts: Reassessing Hong Kong’s Cinema of Nostalgia

 

In her most recent film Elegies (2023), Ann Hui documents Hong Kong’s poetry through several of its leading lights. Although the film focuses on living poets, its English-language title points to a poetic form defined by loss and retrospection. In exploring Hui’s mobilization of elegy as that which connects poetry and cinema, this talk develops a critical reassessment of the role of nostalgia in the cinema of Hong Kong – as a persistent thematic thread, an orientation to history, and a condition of reception both locally and abroad. At once evoking and breaking from a structure of feeling that links the colonial and post-handover periods, Hui’s cinematic elegy sets into clear contrast the double edges of nostalgia as both an obstruction to and source of historical insight.

 

 

Jean Ma is the Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-ying Professor in the Arts at the University of Hong Kong. Her books include Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema; Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography; and Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema. She is the coeditor of “Music, Sound, and Media,” a book series at the University of California Press. Her recent monograph At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators (available in an open-source digital edition) was a finalist for the 2023 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards and the 2023 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize.  

 

Jixin Jia is a PhD Student at the Cinema Studies Insitute, University of Toronto.

 

Jiaqi Wang is a PhD Student at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto.

 

Elizabeth Wijaya (Chair) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies and in the Cinema Studies Insititute, University of Toronto. She is the Director of the Southeas Asia Seminar Series and the Interim-Director of the Dr David Chu Speaker Series, Asian Institute. Wijaya works at the intersection of cinema, philosophy, and area studies.