Cinemyths

重拾了香港影像的节律——形体在潮湿的大厦间的廊道里奔跑，在行径间隙的狭短光瀑里惊鸿一瞥身下世间，想象竭尽的灿烂里风干的繁华，然后个体迫于惯性又必须经历所念景观瞬息的凋亡。附着于先置运动的影像在若干“截断”中被编织。其它世界电影里很难再找到类似特征的地域成像。大陆的一些作品或许曾接近，但其中日光的持续往往更漫长。

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After a long absence of Hong Kong films on my watchlist, Made in Hong Kong has replenished my perception with the region’s endemic aesthetic rhythm.

In general, HK films released around the end of the second millennium always evoke a highly graphic image in my mind, and Chen Kuo has taken this tendency to an extreme. The image resembles a moving vignette, roughly revealing an entrapped figure running in the messy corridors of those massive, damp buildings. There is sunlight sporadically projecting its beam upon the figure’s front, an evanescent instant yet effulgent enough to illuminate the world beneath him when he dashes through. And every time he glimpses outward within the sunfall while running, streets look incandescent against the blue window’s suspended steel. And every time he refocuses on the cloudy window standing as one of many, the world and the light are gone. He returns to the afterworld that consists of dingy corridors. He resorts to imagining what has passed. He had begun this many times, and he never stops running. As such, without knowing permanence and destination, without knowing that a destination is just a treacherous measure of permanence, the fleeting prosperity, with all the sweat therein, always comes to sustain the end of his imagination, accompanied by the eidetic sunshine, the visceral sunshine, the breathless sunshine, the sunshine shining for death.

The HK films associated with that time used to design each of the glaring transiences as the epoché moments between which there was inundating desperation and anxiety. Interestingly, although many regions nowadays have had a surfeit of architecture, it’s almost impossible for me to regain the commensurate illusion from the rest of world cinema. Perhaps a few mainland Chinese images have ever conjured a similar figure in motion, but the sunfalls therein were much more lingering, and we’ve had a vision.

—— 2025.07.26