including Camera Obscura, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Screen and Film History: An International Journal. He is the author of Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (2015). Besides his academic works, Fan is also a composer, theatre director and filmmaker.He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Victor Fan's website.Ann Hui, Shu Kei and Wong Chi are not modernists. Rather, they use the classical Hollywood paradigm to invite their viewers to live with characters who are reduced to a socio-politically deindividuated, desubjectivised, and deautonomised position. Giorgio Agamben calls such a position a bare life or homo sacer, a life identified by the rest of the community as an outsider, which can be kept alive, persecuted, ostracised, or even killed without breaking the communal law. Julia Kristeva calls such a life abject. The abject is part of me (the subject) that I eject. Facing the abject, I feel disgusted and am eager to objectify it. Yet, it has once been part of me and it has once formed––and still does––a relationship with me. In biological terms, bodily fluids such as vomit, phlegm, excrement, blood, and semen can be regarded by a subject as abject. In political terms, refugees, illegal immigrants, queers or even women are often perceived and treated by the larger community as such. Yet, becoming abject is not the end of all hopes. Instead, the abject figures in Hui’s works come to terms with their own extraterritorial positions and form alternative kinships with one another, thus suggesting that a new sense of agency can be generated from their state of deindividuation and desubjectivisation.The first paragraph cited here serves as a good window onto the key conceptual framework of my book and the second paragraph gives browsers a taste of the kind of cinematic and media works examined. In my monograph, I argue that as a geopolitical community, Hong Kong has been historically and socio-politically set up as a zone of exception. It is best seen as a liminal space doubly occupied by two conflicting sovereign authorities––China and the United Kingdom––which have exercised their political powers over its biopolitical lives, ironically, by abandoning them outside their respective territories. For these lives, political individuation, subjectivisation, and autonomisation are perpetually deferred. Hong Kongers are neither Chinese nor British, at once Chinese and British. Their state of double occupancy and double abandonment have therefore rendered them homines sacri or abject.
‘The Boy from Vietnam’, together with feature films Hu Yue de gushi [Wu Jyut dik gwusi or The Story of Woo Viet, 1981] and Touben nuhai [Tauban nouhoi or Boat People, 1982], are now known as Hui’s Vietnam trilogy. Hui’s trilogy was inspired by the influx of Vietnamese refugees (later renamed boatpeople) into Hong Kong between 1978 and 1989. After the Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, ethnic Chinese, especially middle-class families in the South, were increasingly targeted in the new government’s economic and political reforms. By 1978, many of them were sent to the New Economic Zones, remote areas where they were forced to clear landmines in order to cultivate the land. In May 1978, a large number of ethnic Chinese began to leave Vietnam by boat. Some of them reached Hong Kong directly or via Mainland China. Those who had relatives or were picked up at the sea by vessels registered in Hong Kong could apply for permanent residency. Otherwise, they would stay in refugee camps for resettlement in Europe or North America. On 11 June 1979, there were 51,400 Vietnamese refugees waiting for resettlement, and only 3,400 were successfully resettled. [footnotes omitted]
Under these conditions, Hong Kong cinema and media are therefore best understood as a public sphere, where complex and mutually contesting affects generated by their audience’s extraterritorial positions are negotiated. My book traces through the history of Hong Kong cinema and media (including television and video art) from 1967 (the Leftist Riots) to 2016 (the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement in 2014). It analyses how filmmakers and spectators have developed aesthetics and strategies to mediate their affective responses to their various modes of extraterritoriality. Page 99 is taken from a chapter on the television phase of the Hong Kong New Wave during the second half of the 1970s. In this chapter, I examine the experimental cinema of Tang Shu-hsuen and the televisual works by Patrick Tam/Ivy Ho and Ann Hui. I especially focus on how women filmmakers and screenwriters adopt different stylistic strategies in order to enable themselves, their female spectators and characters to speak as women without any interlocutors, a concern not only interested filmmakers in Hong Kong and elsewhere during the 1970s.
--Marshal Zeringue
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