Hong Kong
One Way Street on a Turntable
Review by Sunny Oh.
In her experimental documentary One Way Street on a Turntable, Anson Mak explores the places near her home, Mei Foo Sun Cheun, one of the most densely populated areas not only in Hong Kong but in the world.
Anson Mak mixes clips from 1960s and 1970s British Hong Kong Government films with black and white Super 8 footage of herself in her neighbourhood. Both sources concentrate on the shapes of space and the movement of people around these places: crisscrossing escalators carrying people up and down, hundreds of apartments projecting upward with people milling below, broad vistas with people funneled into sidewalks. Against this backdrop, Anson watches alone.
Onto the various images, Anson adds quotations from German cultural critic Walter Benjamin, her own writings, and an audio thicket of voices and sounds all painstakingly cited. One Way Street on a Turntable offers an audio-visual mash-up of the busy streets of Hong Kong.
One Way Street on a Turntable
Anson Mak | Hong Kong | 2006 | 74min
Mon. Oct. 1 | 1:30pm | Empire Granville Theatre
Thur. Oct. 4 | 7:00pm | Pacific Cinematheque
Comments
A great review of this movie also appeared in the Globe & Mail, which makes an interesting urban design/architecture case for watching films like this, to get a sense of what Vancouver could be like in the future.
Posted by: Karen | October 28, 2007 12:50 PM