Blue, as in ‘Melancholy’: Blue Island and Sinophone Performativity

Chan Tze-woon’s Blue Island (2022) marks a break with the immediate post-2019 Hong Kong documentaries that focused on the on-the-ground experience of the protests.

Professor Chris Berry will talk about his paper which argues that Chan’s film enacts a melancholic engagement with Hong Kong’s complex Sinophone history. The film deploys what Nichols calls the ‘performative mode’ of documentary, where the filmmaker’s intervention is foregrounded.

The paper traces and analyses how the film documents its own bringing together of Hong Kongers who have fought for local agency and democracy in different periods, not only against Beijing but also against the British colonial government, has them re-enact each other’s roles in those events, and meet outside the re-enactments. In this way, the film hooks the present into the past, refusing to mourn and let go, but instead producing a melancholic insistence on contemplation and questioning of Hong Kong’s history and what it means for Hong Kongers to exert agency.

Furthermore, by entangling Hong Kong’s struggles with both the British and Beijing, its performative mode becomes Sinophone, not just in the general sense of using Sinitic languages, but also in the more specific sense originally proposed by Shih Shu-mei of understanding how what I call the ‘Sinosphere’ from the peripheries and their engagement with the imperial. 

About the speaker

Chris Berry is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. His academic research is grounded in work on audio-visual media of the Sinosphere. Books include: Cinema and the National: China on Screen; Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: the Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution; Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities; Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation; Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture; Public Space, Media Space; The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record; and Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology, and Social Space. 

Chair: Dr Xiaoning Lu, SOAS Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Registration

This event is open to the public and free to attend, however registration is required. 

Please note that this seminar is taking place on campus and will not be recorded or live-streamed.

Organiser

• SOAS China Institute

Contact

• Email: sci@soas.ac.uk

Image credit: Manson Yim via Unsplash