Evidently, Comrade Hoover & Lisa Stokes made sense of Bhabha:
***** from _City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema_ (NY: Verso, 1999)
In raising questions about what constitutes a Hong Kong film, the sci-fi comedy _Laser Man_ (1986) may approach indigenization. With a Hong Kong prodecer (Tsui Hark), Chinese-American director/leading actor (Peter Wong), African-American cinematographer (Ernest Dickerson), Japanese composer/performer (Ryuichi Sakamoto), racially mixed international cast (including Americans Maryann Urbano and Joan Copeland, Japanese-Americans Marc Hayashi, and Hong Kongers Tony Leung Ka-fai and Sally Yeh), and New York City location, the film crossbreeds but does not cannibalize. As Homi Bhabha points out, 'cultures are never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic in relation of Self to Other.' Moreover, in what Uma Magal calls 'reverse angle' of global cinema, Hollywood movies have been appropriating from Hong Kong.' Directors show close-ups, made famous by the likes of John Woo and Ringo Lam, of speeding bullets, and stunt actors imitate the physical martial arts moves of Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Quentin Tarantino lifts the final segment of Lam's _City on Fire_ (1987) for his own _Reservoir Dogs_, while Robert Rodriguez mimics the gunplay scenes of Woo's _The Killer_ (1989) in _Desperado_.
The finest of the best-known Hong Kong cinema crafts evocative stories rooted in character and exploits nuts-and-bolts filmmaking through rapidly changing camera angles, collision editing for action sequences, and changing film speeds to visualize narratives. While the movies' frenetic pacing has been identified with an apocalyptic sense about 1997, their characteristic rhythms draw on Cantonese and Peking Opera's sense of timing and pause. Coupled with Western influences on directors like John Woo and Tsui Hark, Hong Kong filmmakers have interpreted film language in a unique way, much as the territory's spoken Cantonese is sprinkled with Mandarin, English, and sundry other sounds, producing and reflecting a hybrid that Ackbar Abbas calls 'postcoloniality that precedes decolonization.'...
...Filmmakers often utilize dislocation and displacement, as well as irony and metaphor, which allows deflection in light of the Film Censorship Authority's willingness to axe movies that focus on 'social rebels with anarchist tendencies' or films that 'damage good relations with other territories.' Their films have considered the former colony's triadic past -- the axis by which Hong Kong, China, and Great Britain are linked -- as a way to understand current circumstances. They have looked for an identifiable Hong Kong present in a contradictory manner that recalls what Michel Pecheux calls 'identification' (accepting the sanctioned discourse), 'counter-identification' (attempting to modify the sanctioned discourse), and 'disidentification' (resisting the sanctioned discourse). And they have used yesterday and today to express concern for Hong Kong's future after 1997....
In various ways Hong Kong cinema is revealed to be 'crisis cinema,' one that finds itself in a historic conjuncture where new patterns of language, time and space, place and identity, and meaning itself, are emerging. _Days of Being Wild_ express anxiety through its use of mirrors and clocks. _Sixty Million Dollar Man_ alludes to Hong Kong film industry problems and Hollywood's growing popularity, _Mary from Beijing_ (1992) grapples with the handover directly and indirectly, interpolating economic development, international trade, gender role, social class, vernacular, East-West, and Hong Kong-China themes.
The Hong Kong movie industry reflects the crisis of Hong Kong itself: on the one hand, the 'on the fly' nuts-and-bolts approach indicates an early stage of capital, 'reproduced' by the territory's vast pirating operations of tapes, records, videos and films; on the other hand, the emphasis on film as commodity epitomizes late capital and its cultural logic. Similarly, the movie worlds themselves mirror early and late capitalist cultural conditions as they assimilate and narratively maneuver between both worlds....The oft-noted penchant that both Hong Kong movie business and Hong Kong movie fans have for escapism may, in some measure, affirm Horkheimer and Adorno's depiction of the culture industry....But the Hong Kong perspective is of a 'city on fire,' representing not only the illumination of images on a screen but also a world burning with anxiety and confusion, and best imagined as icon Chow Yun-fat burning a counterfeit $100 bill in _A Better Tomorrow_ [Yoshie: this picture is used on the book cover]. (34-7) *****
Yoshie