This book examines how Hong Kong filmmakers, spectators and critics wrestled with a perturbation: What is Hong Kong cinema? Framed between the Leftist Riots (1967) and the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement (2014), this book scrutinises the interdependent relationship between cinema and politics by rethinking how Hong Kong cinema has been historically in-formed by dispossession and exclusion, rather than identity and belonging. It traces how Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality has been framed: in its position of being doubly occupied and doubly abandoned by contesting juridical, political, linguis ... More

This book examines how Hong Kong filmmakers, spectators and critics wrestled with a perturbation: What is Hong Kong cinema? Framed between the Leftist Riots (1967) and the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement (2014), this book scrutinises the interdependent relationship between cinema and politics by rethinking how Hong Kong cinema has been historically in-formed by dispossession and exclusion, rather than identity and belonging. It traces how Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality has been framed: in its position of being doubly occupied and doubly abandoned by contesting juridical, political, linguistic and cultural forces. It argues that filmmakers and spectators actively define and reconfigure Hong Kong cinema and media by fostering them as a public sphere, where contesting affects associated with these political lives’ shifting extraterritorial conditions and positions can be negotiated. Based on a combination of archival research, industrial studies, textual analysis and media and political philosophies, Extraterritoriality studies how creative works in mainstream cinema, independent films, television, video artworks and documentaries – especially those by marginalised artists – actively rewrite and reconfigure the way Hong Kong cinema and media are defined and located. These stylistically and political diverse works and practices seek – in their respective manners – to foster new ways to live with Hong Kongers’ double occupancy and double ostracisation that constantly deindividuate, desubjectivise, and deautonomise them, and how they can survive in their constant state of exception.