An essay originally written while an undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine, in April-May 1998. While I’ve taken most of my undergraduate work offline over the years, I still have a sneaking fondness for this one as the first real thing I wrote that linked film and urban planning.
Clara Law’s Autumn Moon (1992) looks at the relationship between a fifteen-year-old girl, Pui Wai, and a Japanese tourist, Tokio, who meet by chance in Hong Kong. While their friendship can be explained partly in terms of universal dynamics (the sexually experienced, jaded Tokio’s relation to Pui Wai’s innocence and idealism), such an analysis misses the significant role that location-specific dynamics play within the film. The characters are defined by their locations: obviously, in Pui Wai’s case, most of her personal problems relate to the ongoing and impending process of dislocation from her home, family and friends. Yet Tokio’s situation is also related to his chosen location: he explains that his traveling was in reaction to his feelings of disenchantment and boredom. Hong Kong therefore functions, on a simple, logical level, as both a cause (for Pui Wai) and symptom (for Tokio) of the protagonist’s emotional states. Yet the role of the Hong Kong environment is more complex than such a straightforward analysis suggests. The depiction of the architecture and environment of Hong Kong works on numerous levels: as a creative technique, as a vehicle for analytical observation, and as a thematic subject in itself. The city is foregrounded enough that Autumn Moon becomes a commentary on a particular urban dynamics in addition to its role as a character study.
Without wishing to overly simplify a text that draws its strength from its reluctance to settle for simple meanings or glib conclusions, Autumn Moon can be characterised broadly as the story of the (partial) rehabilitation of two people who, in differing ways, have become disconnected from those around them. Pui Wai’s immediate family leave for Canada in the film’s opening minutes, and we learn that her friends are steadily departing also. The early scenes between her and her grandmother establish that despite good intentions (shown when Pui Wai attempts to burn incense in the traditional manner), the age barrier between the two – with its attendant differences in values – limits the degree of emotional bonding between the pair. Tokio’s alienation is stronger still, since he has voluntarily separated himself from those around him. The early scene in his hotel room with one of an implied series of sexual partners (whose face we glimpse only briefly) suggests his inability to form lasting meaningful relationships. In this scene he is far more interested in playing with his camera than in interacting with the girl: Law cleverly mobilises the stereotype of the camera-toting Japanese tourist to suggest the extent of Tokio’s alienation. These two individuals’ mutual needs for companionship form the centre of the story.
This emotional disconnection forms the film’s starting point, and the space of Hong Kong becomes a tool that Law can use to depict it. It is a common strategy to signal detached, isolated mental states through the use of static imagery and selective framing. The scenes introducing Pui Wai demonstrate this strategy well. Pui Wai’s family are never shown clearly as they leave, and Pui Wai never shares the frame with them. This denies the audience any glimpse of Pui Wai’s interaction with her family (on first viewing, it is easy to forget we have ever seen her family at all) and conveys her alienation effectively. Yet it is not just the space around Pui Wai that is shown as empty. The entire city of Hong Kong seems deserted. In some cases, Law foregrounds this fact: emptiness becomes particularly potent in the case of the McDonald’s in which Pui Wai and Tokio dine. Not only is the emptiness particularly unusual in this location, but Pui Wai tells the story of her birthday parties in previous years so that the empty restaurant becomes a symbol for the departure of her circle of friends; Law’s camera lingers on the vacant tables as she speaks, creating a particularly charged emptiness. The strategy, however, is more insistent than this single example. Pui Wai and Tokio meet on a deserted waterfront, she talks to her boyfriend on an empty basketball court (they are framed against a featureless wall), goes with him to an improbably quiet beach, and so on. The shots of Hong Kong cityscapes throughout the film are either too distant (as with the shots across the harbor when Tokio and Pui Wai meet) or too selective (as with the shots of building facades) to portray any other people. Thus a city with an average density of forty thousand people per square mile(1) is portrayed as a virtual ghost town.
This strategy is too extensive, of course, to affect only Pui Wai. The sense of emptiness is also used to give a feel for Tokio’s attitude. In this case, however, the cityscapes work slightly differently, since Tokio is a tourist. The emptiness thus evokes not so much a sense of abandonment as of failure to connect. Tokio is not a Hong Kong native who has been abandoned by its residents: he is a visitor who has (with one exception) failed to find them. In Tokio’s case the images of the city are mediated through technology (his video camera). It is not always clearly signaled which images we can read as representing Tokio’s camera and which are Law’s, since the intentionally dull cinematography is often suggestive of video anyway(2).Yet it is the shots of building facades (marked by a tilting of the camera that suggests an amateur cameraman) that are most clearly identified with him, and these emphasise the monotonous, repetitive nature of Hong Kong architecture. This suggests that in his tourist’s quest, undertaken to escape monotony, he has found only more of the same. Such architecture also figures strongly in suggesting his emotional disconnection, as when he meets the friend of his first love in an outdoor café in front of an enormous, inhuman building. This shot is later repeated with the frame completely empty of people to indicate that the pair have both failed to make the promised second date.
There is no doubt that such imagery (combined with Law’s static camera, long takes, and spare use of shot / reverse shot configurations for dialogue) contribute a great deal to the film’s melancholic tone. Yet given such constant use of this motif, it is perhaps worth looking for a deeper meaning to the use of Hong Kong. The city is more than just an opportunistically employed symbol of the character’s moods: it assumes such prominence that it becomes a major feature of the film (images of the buildings are used under the opening credits, for example). The most obvious way that we can read this obsession with the urban is to see the city as implicated in creating the characters’ disaffected positions. Such a viewpoint places the film within a wide genre of anti-urban cultural products that react against the inhuman scale and architectural style of the modern (and modernist) city. Such backlashes have become increasingly prominent in both the field of urban geography and in the general community since the mid 1960s: if Autumn Moon is indeed making condemnation of the city into one of its central aims, it is certainly not alone.
The attack is not a unified one. Widely differing critiques of the city can be found being driven by an equally wide range of justifications: I will elaborate on only a couple of these strains of thought here. Yet first it is necessary to understand the conception of the city to which many of these critiques react. This is the modernist conception of the city, most vividly embodied in the work of Le Corbusier as expressed in his 1924 book The City of To-Morrow And Its Planning. It is Le Corbusier, more than anybody else, who is most responsible for the clean, straight lines and monolithic featurelessness of much twentieth century architecture. Such architecture (exactly the kind that Law fixates upon) de-emphasises the individual in favour of pursuing a grander social objective: as David Harvey points out, Le Corbusier’s work fits into the strain of modernist thinking that recasts houses as “machines for living in.”(3) The obsessive functionalism of such architecture and city planning understandably intensifies resistance to urban environments. Such a conception of the city might also seem to be of special relevance within Hong Kong, a definitive capitalist city in which such architecture has been particularly keenly embraced(4).
The most basic (and yet probably most influential) reactions to the modernist city are those driven by aesthetics: the dullness of the new is contrasted with an idealised image of rural or earlier urban forms, and the modern is found wanting. The definitive work of this kind is Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities(5). Jacobs’ analysis is a simple one, aimed at the lay reader, but her writing is extremely effective and persuasive. She emphasises the importance of diversity within cities, arguing that earlier, more natural approaches to planning created a more stimulating and vital urban environment than the rigidly functional modernist approach. Jacobs’ argument had enough resonance that it remains extremely influential today within property development circles(6), which are perpetually torn between the cost effectiveness of the modernist model and the need to create at least an appearance of diversity. These dynamics are most clearly acted out in suburbia, however: in an environment such as Hong Kong (in which new buildings are constantly required and space is at a premium) more purely modernist models are likely to hold ground.
It may be that Law is reacting in a simple Jacobian manner to the inevitable aesthetic impoverishment that follows. Certainly her camera catches what Jacobs terms the “Great Blight of Dullness.” Yet there are other, potentially more rewarding frames of reference in which we might interpret Law’s film. In academic circles, for example, the reaction to the modernist city did not, for the most part, follow Jacob’s line of argument (perhaps because it was too simple to represent a legitimate line of research). Instead, from the early seventies, neo-Marxist formulations came increasingly to the fore. David Harvey’s classic early expression of these ideas, Social Justice and the City(7), set the tone, emphasising the victimisation of individuals by the often regressive flows of capital that occurred in a market driven city. The essential point of Harvey’s analysis was that since the city tended to allocate resources and capital in an unjust manner, modernist ideas of planning that aimed simply to increase the efficiency of these flows (at the expense of other social goals) would have a disastrous effect. The so called “L.A. School” of urban planning(8) took up these ideas and (in parallel and sometimes in concert with Harvey) developed increasingly sophisticated models of the circuits of capital, applying neo-Marxist ideas to an ever wider range of urban phenomena(9).
The link between such ideas and Autumn Moon might not be immediately apparent: Law’s film certainly does not present any overt neo-Marxist attitude. The relevance becomes clearer, however, when we consider the shift that occurred within this movement through the 1980s and into the 1990s. In this period these neo-Marxist writers followed many other theorists in other fields and gradually shifted towards a more postmodern formulation (Harvey had moved on to The Condition of Postmodernity by 1990). The continuity can be found in the idea of Post-Fordist flexible accumulation. Harvey notes that by the sixties, the established mode of modern capitalism (Fordism) was in crisis due to the difficulty of reacting to change given the limitations imposed once capital had been invested in a particular location. Harvey argues that from the early seventies, capitalist societies shifted into Post-Fordism, a mode that emphasised flexible accumulation of capital. This mode is characterised (and made possible) by a wide range of technical innovations and social reforms: new communication technologies, more flexible labour processes, new markets and industries, and new patterns of consumption(10). Instead of the monolithic investment of capital at individual sites (such as the classic Fordist factory), investment switches quickly between localities in unpredictable fashion. Rather than tracking the negative effects of flows of capital within one society, theorists using this model note the ever more frenzied flows between different regions that occurs on a global scale.
This shift from a national to global emphasis occurs as power shifts from the nation-State to transnational corporations that possess much greater flexibility in shifting capital between regions(11). Arjun Appadurai conceives of the resulting cultural flow as occurring across five types of “landscape:” ethnoscapes, composed of shifting people; technoscapes, in which technology is shared and exchanged; finanscapes, in which capital flows; mediascapes, in which images and information cross borders; and ideoscapes, in which political ideas are circulated(12). This conception makes somewhat clearer a point also implicit in Harvey’s argument: it is not simply capital that flows from region to region. If it were, then the effects of globalisation upon Hong Kong would be (for the moment at least) unambiguously positive. As Ackbar Abbas notes, Hong Kong’s status as a colonial city has prepared it well for its role as a global city(13), and its prosperity bears out the strong favouritism shown the city by flows within the finanscapes. However, such a fortuitous result in one sphere does not guarantee an even exchange in others. It is often noted, for example, that certain cultures (particularly American culture) tend to dominate the mediascapes and therefore the ideoscapes. New broadcasting and communication technologies create a new environment for uneven cultural exchange, with an Americanised global culture obliterating the local.
Here, then, we see a point at which these theories might at last be brought convincingly back to Autumn Moon. Law explicitly raises such issues when Tokio wishes to eat. Even the request becomes a signifier of cultural obliteration: he must ask Pui Wai in English, since this has become the new Esperanto for the globalised world (and it is English speaking countries to which most of Pui Wai’s friends and family will emigrate). As with most tourists, it is the distinctively local that Tokio comes to find, but Pui Wai fails to reward him, taking him instead to McDonald’s. I have already noted the importance of this restaurant in signaling the departure of her friends, but the austere restaurant also functions as a critique of the globalised culture. McDonald’s is a classic example of the kind of transnational corporation that facilitates inter-cultural flows and therefore cultural homogenisation. Tokio has grasped this, and makes the commentary explicit when he notes that McDonald’s food tastes the same everywhere, and lists the many different places that it is available. The genuine home cooking of Pui Wai’s grandmother is far more satisfactory, but Pui Wai has no idea of how to prepare it herself. The upcoming abandonment of Granny is thus tragic at a cultural level as well as a purely personal one.
Pui Wai, however, argues vehemently against Tokio’s observation. This suggests two things: firstly it indicates that Pui Wai might have some instinctive understanding that the endangerment of the local threatens individuals’ identities, and wishes to resist this. However, it also indicates that Law realises that models of cultural homogenisation cannot be too simplistic. Appadurai, for example, is careful to point out that homogenisation is occurring simultaneously with cultural heterogenisation(14). Thus cultural products that arrive within a society are re-interpreted and customised in unusual and unpredictable ways. This does not eliminate the cultural intruder, but it does potentially alter it substantially, and provides some means of resistance for the receiving culture. Appadurai admits that such indigenising processes are still poorly understood, but they must at least be considered. Pui Wai is therefore making an important point when she notes that this McDonald’s is “different:” she’s establishing that individual experiences can still make the apparently transnational unique.
Postmodernist discussions generally recognise the importance of such processes: certainly, a conception of the world as gradually moving towards a single unified culture could not be further from postmodernist thought. Rather, postmodernism stresses the chaotic interaction of many different cultures. Returning to urban planning, the emphasis is upon “organic” models that make the city a “collage” of different spaces, uses, and groups(15). Thus the desire to rigidly and schematically sketch out separate zones for different land uses is replaced by a policy that advocates mixing land uses as much as practically possible (an impulse often tied up with Jane Jacobs’ ideas and packaged as a return to the style of older cities). Similarly, postmodernist architecture emphasises eclectic mixes and stylistic quotations, much as the postmodernist cinema increasingly freely quotes old genres and films made available on television and video. As Harvey points out, such architecture causes the city’s built form to increasingly resemble media images(16). This is quite separate from the mission of modernism, which used its plain forms as a way of avoiding historical reference and thereby (in theory) articulating what was constant and unchanging(17).
The shift from modernism to postmodernism does little to eliminate the alienating effects of urbanity, however: at the end of the day, it is simply the character of alienation that changes. Instead of the barren quality of the modernist urban environment, the post-modernist version creates such an overload of stimulus that individuals may lose a coherent sense of identity within the maelstrom(18). Interestingly, though, this is not the situation that Law seems to depict. There are signs of the technology that facilitates the postmodern excess of stimuli (Tokio’s video camera, Pui Wai’s computer and karaoke machine) but the vision of the city that Law presents is constructed instead from images of modernist architecture. Abbas confirms that there are many elements of the postmodern within Hong Kong’s urban form: notably, the reworking and preservation of older (colonial) buildings, the juxtaposition of widely varying styles, and a cluttered hyperdensity(19). Law, however, mostly chooses to ignore these. Perhaps this is due to the problems of visually representing the alienating effect of postmodern cities. After all, modernist forms instantly present themselves as barren and uninviting, but the postmodern – devoted as it is to creating an instant, surface-level gratification – presents itself considerably better. Cinema is not a medium well suited to highly conceptual analyses: it works at the level of the image, and thus filmic depictions of postmodern architecture would be hard to present in a way that undercut the subject’s honestly presented kitsch. Pictures of postmodern Hong Kong would seem simply vibrant and exciting, if occasionally tacky.
One final point suggested by Appadurai’s discussion of cultural heterogenisation is worth making. This is that it is possible to get carried away by the meta-narratives of international flows and cultural imperialism and ignore the importance of local circumstance. (One of postmodernism’s defining features is its resistance to meta-narratives(20), and this is probably one of its healthier impulses). Hong Kong is more than simply one of the premier capitalist cities, after all. It is also one of the last colonial cities, and in fact essentially came into being under colonialism(21). Thus, while arguments about the threat to local identity and the alienating effects of the environment do have relevance, they must be filtered through the additional awareness that Hong Kong (not quite Chinese, but not British either) has its own unique problems in articulating a local identity. We must therefore at least consider a reading that looks not at global capitalism so much as the concern at finding a distinctive Hong Kong culture before it is obliterated(22). The blank walls and repetitive architecture then suggest a space that has been historically devoid of a distinctive and easily identifiable culture, and which faces the doubt of an uncertain future: whatever it was that Hong Kong was for Pui Wai, it is disappearing.
By now the discussion has given us a range of models through which we might read the final sequences of the film, in which Tokio and Pui Wai visit a deserted fishing village during the mid-autumn festival. If we read the representation of space as a way of presenting the inner lives of the characters, then this sequence effectively suggests that both Tokio and Pui Wai have, through their friendship, found some degree of emotional contentment and reconnection. The fishing village is an inviting, human space and the cinematography during this sequence and the subsequent fireworks display is by far the warmest in the film. Yet insofar as the fishing village is more inviting than the Hong Kong environment it also represents a critique of modern Hong Kong. It is an inviting space (the kind of photogenic space a tourist such as Tokio might wish to see) but it is also a dead space, abandoned by the new generation. Pui Wai notes the town is empty because the young have left and the old died: this reference to the intended abandonment of her Grandmother by her family highlights the harshness of modern society. The causes of such emotional disconnection can then be attributed variously to the regressive effects of capital flows, the homogenising power of cultural exchange, or the alienating effects of modernist or postmodernist environments. Or perhaps the scene simply represents a reference to Hong Kong’s pre-colonial past, a miraculous discovery of the missing culture that has somehow retained a physical presence within the concrete and glass city.
Such complex varieties of signification (themselves not exhaustive) suggest the complexity of Law’s use of space. However, the links between identity and the cinematic presentation of urban space are inherently difficult to sort out. This is doubly so when talking of Hong Kong, which is quite literally a highly contested space. There are many different frameworks in which Law’s film might be understood, and it seems possible that such complexity might be figured as one of the subtle themes of the film. Law cannot provide a detailed explanation of the concepts she touches upon, but she can highlight the fact that in Hong Kong what might elsewhere seem remote, obscure theoretical buzzwords (colonialism, postcolonialism, modernism, postmodernism, post-Fordism) take on an urgent everyday relevance. Law’s characters have little hope of coming to grips with these complex forces, and ultimately their vulnerability within their environment suggests their bewilderment in the face of such problems. The confused situation of the protagonists of Autumn Moon cannot be oversimplified, because their disconnectedness results from a unique and complex set of circumstances.
Some of the ideas in this essay are further developed in my essay “Chung King Express, Happy Together, and Postmodern Space.“
Notes
1. Abbas, Ackbar, 1997, Hong Kong: Culture of the Politics of Disappearance, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p.81. (Back)
2. On a number of occasions, in fact, Law deliberately creates this confusion. An example is the introduction to the discussion of love by the river, in which we are at first unaware that we are seeing Tokio’s camera view. (Back)
3. Harvey, David, 1990, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge, pp. 31-32. (Back)
4. Abbas, 1997, op. cit., p. 12. Later, Abbas terms such buildings as “Anonymous” and notes that they constitute the bulk of the city’s built form (p. 82). (Back)
5. Jacobs, Jane, 1961, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, New York. (Back)
6. It is also of great concern still within academic circles. David Harvey, for example, devotes a significant portion of The Condition of Postmodernity to it, for example. See Harvey, 1990, op.cit., chapter 4 (esp. pp. 71-77.) (Back)
7. Harvey, David, 1973, Social Justice and the City, Edward Arnold, London. See especially chapter 2. (Back)
8. For a brief description see Davis, Mike, 1990, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Random House, New York, p. 84. (Back)
9. The neo-Marxist phase of the L.A. School’s work is most definitively summarised in the anthology Dear & Scott (eds), 1981, Urbanization and Urban Planning in Capitalist Society, Methuen, London & New York. (Back)
10. Harvey, 1990, op. cit. p. 147. (Back)
11. Miyoshi Masao, 1996, “A Borderless World: From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation State,” in Wilson & Dissanayake (eds), 1996, Global / Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, Duke University Press, pp. 86-89. (Back)
12. Appadurai, Arjun, 1994, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Williams & Chrismen (eds), 1994, Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, Columbia University Press, pp. 328-330. (Back)
13. Abbas, 1997, op. cit., p. 3. (Back)
14. Appadurai, op. cit., p. 328. (Back)
15. Harvey, 1990, op. cit., p. 40. (Back)
16. Ibid, p.55. (Back)
17. However, modernist and postmodernist architecture may at times closely resemble each other, since modernist forms will be amongst those appropriated by postmodernism. Collins, Jim, 1995, Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age, Routledge, New York & London, chapter 4. (Back)
18. Ibid, p. 31. (Back)
19. Abbas, 1997, op. cit., chapter 4. (Back)
20. Harvey, 1990, op. cit., p. 9. (Back)
21. Abbas, 1997, .op. cit., p. 2. (Back)
22. Ibid., pp. 6-7. (Back)