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 a scholar of film and media history and theory, with specializations in Asian cinema, gender, sexuality, sound studies, and moving image art. Her books include Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema; Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema; and Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography. She serves on the editorial board of Film Quarterly and is coeditor of the book series Music, Sound, and Media at the University of California Press.

From 2006 to 2023 she taught at Stanford University, where she was the Victoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art and the Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute.

Her recent book At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators received a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Book Grant and was shortlisted for the 2023 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards. For more of her writing, see jeanma.xyz.

Respondents are Jixin Jia, a PhD Student at the Cinema Studies Insitute, and Jiaqi Wang, a PhD Student at the Department of East Asian Studies.