Jean Ma: What Comes After Disappearance?

'What Comes After Disappearance? Ann Hui at the End of Hong Kong Cinema'

The idea of disappearance has played a central role in accounts of late twentieth-century Hong Kong cinema since the 1997 publication of Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance by Ackbar Abbas. In theorizing disappearance as a structure of feeling, perception, and historical consciousness specific to the handover period, Abbas set forth a compelling (and highly influential) formulation of Hong Kong cultural identity as coming into its own only at a point of imminent vanishing. The paradoxical sense of a déjà disparu finds expression in Hong Kong cinema and the work of its most lauded directors, including Ann Hui, according to Abbas. This talk revisits the thesis of the déjà disparu to reevaluate its critical utility after the anticipated handover and from the vantage point of a new chapter in Hong Kong’s long history of disappearances. It discusses Hui’s recent documentary Elegies (2023) as a film that reflects on the question of what comes after disappearance, exploring how this question relates to the elegy as a poetic form defined by loss and retrospection.

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Professor Jean Ma

Jean Ma is the Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-ying Professor in the Arts at the University of Hong Kong. Her books include Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema; Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography; and Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema. Other writings have been published in Camera Obscura, Criticism, Film Quarterly, Grey Room, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and October. She is a coeditor of “Music, Sound, and Media,” a book series at the University of California Press. Her recent monograph At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators (available in an open-source digital edition) was a finalist for the 2023 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards and the 2023 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize. For more of her writing, see jeanma.xyz.