Search Results

This chapter explores dissemination in the context of Hong Kong cinema and in particular it looks at two films made back-to-back by award-winning independent director Fruit Chan, Little Cheung, and Durian Durian. Little Cheung as the final installment of Chan's “Handover Trilogy” is of interest for its disseminatory take on Hong Kong as Chan highlights both the hidden heterogeneity of the territory with his attention to marginalized ethnic groups such as the Filipinas and South Asians amid the dominant Cantonese-speaking locals and the homogeneity that nonetheless holds these diverse communities together. Little Cheung balances centripetal and centrifugal forces at work within Hong Kong, revealing differences and divisions but also using the tropes of money and friendship to act as bridges between fragmented groups. Chan's next film after Little Cheung and Durian Durian, though the beginning of a different trilogy, can be usefully seen as developing the ideas of fragmentary nationhood explored in its predecessor.

This chapter examines the surreal and ghostly elements in Fruit Chan's films. Hong Kong in Chan's “Handover Trilogy” is frequented by surreal, ghostly intrusions of various kinds. They are the allegorization of recalcitrant elements of the past that resist erasure. The surreal in Chan's films evokes the heavy weight of melancholic sentiment in “The Swan” and reminds us of the ambiguous status of the ghostly subjects. As ghosts always return with a story to tell, the ghostly subjects in Chan's films stubbornly persist in the space of the present that does not want them.

This chapter explores Chan's realist mode in the traditions of Chinese-language cinemas. There are many modes of realism and Chan's case illustrates this concept clearly. His concern for underprivileged people and social injustice brings him close to this realist tradition. His so-called “Handover Trilogy” and his later films such as Durian Durian and Hollywood Hong Kong embody certain basic traits: the story of ordinary people, the theme of marginality, on-location shooting, jerky hand-held camerawork, frequent use of objective point of view camera, and the casting of non-professional actors. All these characteristics have led critics to conclude that he belongs safely to the tradition of social realism and that the Hong Kong through his lens is a “real” one.