Poetics of Parapraxis and Reeducation: The Hong Kong Cantonese Cinema in the 1950s

Abstract

For many people, the pleasure of watching a Hong Kong Cantonese film in the 1950s requires a taste for a set of stylistic traits that are distinct from classical Hollywood cinema. In this chapter, Fan argues that there is a poetics specific to the Hong Kong Cantonese cinema in the 1950s. Such poetics serves to negotiate a set of conflicting sociopolitical values via a form of parapraxis (Freudian slip). With Weilou chunxiao [Ngailau ceonhiu or In the Face of Demolition, Lee Tit, 1953] as a case study, Fan proposes that the Cantonese cinema in the 1950s performs the failure of the leftwing intellectuals to perform in a colonial space where they had no active sociopolitical agency, and their collective failure to even consider returning "home" and reconstruct the "national" space. These films offer narratives in which intellectuals are reeducated and reintegrated into the masses, thus offering the spectators a "second chance" to rehearse the possibility of having a political agency to activate social change.