Cinema of Reindividuation and Cultural Extraterritoriality: ‘Chinese’ Dialect Cinemas and Regional Politics

摘要

“Chinese” cinemas, since the advent of sound, have been multilingual. Yet, we often use this term uncritically to describe our object of study, despite the fact that, as Rey Chow argues, it defines an epistemological space that has been historically configured by colonialism, Orientalism and nationalism. “Chinese cinemas” thus erases contesting linguistic, cultural, ethnic, racial, geopolitical and social values that circulate under the umbrella of “China,” “Chinese,” or “Chineseness.” Alternative terms such as Chinese language cinema and Sinophone cinema have been proposed and debated. However, most models assume a priori that the various topolects and languages used in Chinese cinemas are variations of a shared linguistic root. They have yet to fully examine how the relationship between a “dialect” and its Chineseness has been constructed historically in the cinema, understood as a public sphere––a space where contesting private opinions are shared, disseminated, exchanged and negotiated. In this chapter, I argue that dialect cinemas, as a form of cultural extraterritoriality, insist within Chinese cinemas as a potential force that resists the historical tendency to incorporate regional cinematic practices into a larger national imaginary. Rather, they engage themselves in a process of reindividuation by performing the failure of any state or institutional attempts to contain these linguistic practices within a national model. In the following pages, I first introduce the history of the Hong Kong Cantonese cinema and the critical debates around it. I then examine the theories that have been applied to this topic. Finally, I explicate my conceptual framework of extraterritoriality and use the film Duzhan (Dukzin/ Drug War, Johnnie To, 2013) as a case study of how contemporary Hong Kong multilingual films function as a cinema of reindividuation.