The City, the woman and other space: Modern Domesticity and Architecture in 1960s Hong Kong Cinema

Abstract

This paper traces an assemblage of urban interior spaces inhabited by the female protagonist in two particular genres in Hong Kong film of the 1960s—the melodrama and the noir-thriller set in working class and high-society Hong Kong respectively. Released amid the city’s modernization and industrialization, and narrated through a sequence of actual locations and full-size sets, the films ostensibly masked the geopolitical tensions that culminated in the riots of 1967. Yet the two genres, one depicting the aspirations of the working class and the other personifies the need for the upper class to do good for the society in the female vigilante, foreground the increasing inequality produced by the city’s modernization and situate a genealogy of cosmopolitan Hong Kong within Cold War regional exigencies. The city undergoing construction was revealed through glimpses from the interior, painted backdrops, panoramic sweeps and modern building types—the house, the apartment building, the factory, the hospital, the carpark, the highway, etc. The working class woman typified a figure of modernization whose spaces in the city was largely defined by her home and workspace. The high society vigilante, was inherently a transnational figure adept at traversing the modern house interior, the bold, technological spaces of the “global sixties” as well as the streets and dark back alleys. Considered alongside contemporaneous depiction of the city’s modern architecture and interior, the woman and her other spaces—performing as the counterpart to the real Hong Kong—were mobilized in the construction of an aspirational Hong Kong identity.