Postmodern Representations and Reflections in Hong Kong Urban Cinema: A Study on the Works of Heiward Mak Hei-Yan

Abstract

In the new millennium, a discontinuity of postmodern elements began to surface in Hong Kong commercial films. However, young director Heiward Mak Hei-yan integrated postmodern elements into her works, which are primarily urban films, inheriting and developing the postmodern tradition of Hong Kong cinema. She does this primarily by shaping marginal urban landscapes and crowds, capturing the less noticed aspects of Hong Kong city, and demonstrating the anti-grand narrative characteristic of postmodernism. By establishing a postmodern perspective on love, she breaks and "rebels" against traditional romance films, not just merely glorifying the myth of love, but emphasizing the questioning of the eternal view of modern love. Simultaneously, she illustrates the dilemmas of postmodern alienation to portray the contemporary postmodern mentality and cultural symptoms of Hong Kong people in this unique geographical location. Her urban films reflect her positive thinking about urban romance, life, and mental state in a postmodern context, providing the possibility of parallelism between commerciality and postmodernism, and offering insights for the development of Hong Kong cinema.